Chapter 1: Pizza Delivery Extravaganza: No Tip Needed
Bob blinked awake to the smell of pepperoni and worn wood. His cheek was pressed against something grainy, his arm numb. He lifted his head. A pizza box, warm and slightly damp, sat squarely on his lap. He was on a porch.
“What?”
The word came out as a dry croak. He didn’t remember ordering pizza. He didn’t remember this porch, either. It was huge, flanked by white columns that reached up into a purpling evening sky. The door in front of him was mahogany, with a brass knocker shaped like a satyr’s head.
Music thumped from inside, a bass-heavy rhythm that vibrated the planks beneath him. Laughter, sharp and shrieking, cut through it.
Before he could stand, the door swung inward.
“Ooooh, it’s here!” The voice was a slurred cheer.
Five women filled the doorway, a wall of perfume, alcohol, and synthetic fabric. They were dressed in what Bob’s brain could only categorize as ‘Halloween costume drunk.’ Fishnet stockings, lace teddies, a fireman’s hat worn over curlers. The ringleader, a platinum blonde with lipstick smeared beyond the borders of her lips, swayed forward. Her leopard-print wrap dress was knotted in a way that defied physics.
She squinted at him. “You’re new. Cute. Kinda twiggy.” Her breath was a cocktail of vodka and mint.
“I, uh, I think there’s a mistake,” Bob managed, holding up the pizza box like a shield. “This just… appeared.”
“So did my ex-husband’s bankruptcy,” cackled a redhead in a too-tight nurse’s costume. She popped the cork on a bottle of champagne. Foam geysered over Bob’s shoes.
The blonde, whose name tag—pinned crookedly to her dress—read ‘Hi, I’m CHASTITY!’, leaned down. Her décolletage yawned open, an alarming valley of powdered cleavage. She grabbed a fistful of his messy brown hair. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but her grip was possessively firm.
“We’ve got nnno munnney,” she slurred, her face inches from his. Her eyes were unfocused galaxies of blue eyeshadow. “But we gotta pay the pizza guy. It’s policy.”
“Policy?” Bob echoed.
“House policy,” the redhead nurse confirmed, taking a swig from the bottle. “C’mon in, twiggy. We’ll work it out.”
He was hauled inside by a chorus of giggles. The foyer was cavernous, a monument to bad taste. A chandelier dripping with fake crystals cast glittering light over a white shag carpet. The music was louder here, pulsating.
Chastity shoved him down onto a velveteen sofa that smelled of smoke and regret. The pizza box was tossed aside, forgotten. The women closed in, a perfumed siege.
“Alright, who’s got the tally sheet?” a brunette in a ripped schoolgirl plaid asked.
“I do!” A woman with aggressively sprayed hair wrestled a notepad from her corset. “Last time we did… standard tip plus… oh, we gotta catch up. He’s behind.”
“I’m behind?” Bob asked, his voice squeaking. “I just got here.”
“Semantics,” Chastity said, dropping to her knees on the shag carpet. Her hands went to his belt buckle. “We’ll start with the basics. Consider it… a down payment.”
Consider it… a down payment.”
What followed was not sex. It was an assembly line, a carnival ride that had snapped off its tracks. Bob was less a participant and more of a municipal utility, a public works project being urgently maintained by a very enthusiastic, very drunk crew.
Chastity’s head bobbed with a piston-like rhythm that defied both human biology and the laws of friction. A wet, hollow shlupp-shlupp-shlupp sound filled the air, syncopated with the thumping bass from the stereo. She came up for air, grinning, lipstick now a russet smear around her mouth. “Gotta getcha nice n’ slick for the girls, pizza boy,” she slurred, before diving back down.
The redhead nurse, who introduced herself as Bambi by dumping her champagne onto Bob’s chest and licking it off, mounted his face. The world became a hot, suffocating landscape of lace and musk. “Tell me I’m a better caregiver than that home-wrecking triage bitch!” she moaned, grinding against him. Bob’s muffled sounds of distress were taken as enthusiastic affirmation.
He was rolled over. Cool air, then a shocking, wet probing at a place no one had ever shown the slightest interest in. He yelped.
“Just a lil’ rim job, sweetie,” purred the schoolgirl, her voice raspy from cigarettes. “Gets the engine revvin’.” Her tongue seemed preternaturally long and diligent.
They used him in shifts. A tit-fuck from a woman named Darla who claimed to be a champion butter sculptor; her breasts, slicked with what smelled like olive oil, swallowed him in a warm, crushing void. “My ex-husband couldn’t even handle one of these,” she sighed, shaking her head, her immense cleavage jiggling hypnotically. “Pathetic.”
He was kissed endlessly, sloppily, by mouths that tasted of cigarettes, pinot grigio, and stale breath mints. Lipstick coated his cheeks, his chin, his neck in a waxy, psychedelic graffiti. A woman wearing only a chef’s apron and a meat thermometer behind her ear sat on his lap, riding him with a screeching, bouncing fervor while detailing the passive-aggressive note her husband had left about the laundry.
“And he used too much fabric softener! The towels lost all absorbency!” she wailed, bucking wildly.
The room swam. Time dissolved into a sticky, slurping, moaning collage. Bodies piled onto him, a squirming, sweating monument to midlife crisis. A hand would groped him here, a mouth would latch on there. The soundtrack was a cacophony of gasped obscenities, exaggerated moans, and the slick, repetitive slap of flesh on flesh.
“Yeah, take it, you skinny little nobody!”
“Who’s your mommy? Huh? Who’s your mommy?”
“He’s gonna pop! Get the commemorative dish towel!”
His own release, when it finally, inevitably happened, was less an orgasm and more a system failure. A full-body spasm of exhausted relief. It was met with a round of drunken applause and another uncorking of champagne, this one aimed provocatively, stinging his spent skin.
Slowly, one by one, the women peeled away, staggering off to presumably pass out in other rooms. The music cut out. A deafening silence rang in his ears, broken only by a few final giggles and a distant snore.
Bob lay wrecked on the stained velveteen, a used tube of human glue. Every part of him ached or tingled or felt vaguely damp. He stared at the glittering chandelier, his mind a perfect, pristine blank.
Somehow, he dragged himself upright. He found his pants, pulled them on with trembling hands over his sticky, bruised body. He stumbled out the mahogany door, across the enormous porch, and into the cool night. There was no path, no sidewalk. He just walked until the mansion’s lights faded behind him.
He woke up in a simple room. Plain white walls. A single bed with a grey blanket. Morning light filtered through a blinds. He was clean. He was in a pair of soft cotton pajamas. The pizza box, the perfume, the lipstick—all gone. It felt like a memory from someone else’s life, a bizarre, filthy dream.
His body hummed with a profound and total fatigue. A bone-deep tiredness that made thinking impossible. With a groan, he rolled over, pulled the grey blanket over his head, and went back to sleep.