Chapter 4: Chapter 4
She was awoken at 1:30 AM by the dull thump of bass against her bedroom wall, coming from the next suite over.
The sound was a physical presence, a deep, resonant whump-whump-whump that vibrated the headboard against the wall. Nel sat up in bed, listening to the bass thumping through the plaster like a mechanical heartbeat. A sliver of lurid, pulsing blue light leaked from around the edges of the connecting door.
“Honestly,” she muttered into the dark. Whatever the occasion was, it apparently called for a party loud enough to register on seismographs.
She considered her options.
She could call the concierge and complain. Julian’s successor would dispatch Security, who would knock with grim efficiency and shut it down. That was the Maplewood-approved solution. Quiet, orderly, bloodless.
She could go back to bed and put a pillow over her head. Endure.
Instead, she smiled. The smile felt savage in the dark. A thrilling, familiar heat began to stir in her chest, cutting through the fog of sleep and the lingering, pleasant soreness from her shopping expedition.
“Well,” she said to the darkness around her, her voice a dry rasp. “If you can’t beat ’em… shock ‘em.”
A moment later, wearing nothing but her short little sheer baby-blue nightie, she slipped into her heeled house slippers. The marabou trim tickled her ankles. She padded to the suite’s refrigerator. The interior light glared, illuminating the leftover club sandwich and a single, untouched bottle of champagne from the previous night’s room service. The bottle looked perfectly serviceable, beaded with condensation.
Nel tucked it under her arm like a quarterback. She caught her reflection in the black glass of the microwave door: a silver-haired phantom in a wisp of blue, holding a weapon of celebration. She gave herself a satisfied nod.
“Let’s go meet the neighbors.”
Striding practically naked down the hall, Nel let her sagging breasts and the faint, tender ache of her bruised vulva lead the way to what was, no doubt, more trouble. The carpet was cool and dense under her slippers. The bass grew from a thump to a tangible punch of air with each step. It was even louder in front of the door—Suite 1412—a solid wall of sound that made her breastbone buzz. She had to really pound the wood with the heel of her hand to even be noticed.
The music cut off mid-thump.
Silence, sudden and shocking, flooded the hallway. Then voices, muffled shuffling. The door was flung open.
The light and smell hit her simultaneously. Blinding overhead fixtures instead of ambient glow. The sour-sweet funk of spilled beer, boy-sweat, and fast-food grease. A half-dozen young men were frozen in various states of arrest: one holding a game controller, two hovering over a line of shot glasses on the coffee table, another peering into the minibar. They were all in their early twenties, dressed in uniform variations of concert t-shirts, baggy shorts, and the glossy, shell-shocked exhaustion of a big night out. Fraternity brothers, clearly. The room was a disaster of pizza boxes, crushed cans, and discarded footwear.
The one at the door was big, with a broad, friendly face now slack with confusion. His eyes did the journey: up to her face, down the sheer blue nylon barely containing her, over the champagne bottle, and back to her face. His brain visibly short-circuited.
“Uh,” he said.
“Hi,” Nel said, her voice cheerful and clear. “I’m from next door. I heard you were having a party and realized I’d forgotten to bring my offering.” She hoisted the bottle. “A housewarming gift. Or a suite-warming gift. Is the host here, or is this a democratic anarcho-syndicate?”
Another guy, lankier with wire-rimmed glasses, detached himself from the couch. “Whoa. Hey. Sorry, are we being too loud? We just got back from the Metallithrax show and, uh…” His explanation died as he fully processed the vision in the doorway.
“The music was audible,” Nel conceded, stepping past the door-blocker without waiting for an invitation. The room temperature was at least ten degrees warmer. She felt every male eye stick to her like flypaper. She leaned into it, letting the slippers click on the parquet as she surveyed the wreckage. “I’m Nel. Which one of you fine citizens is responsible for this magnificent chaos?”
A shorter guy with a goatee found his voice first. “That’d be Jason. He booked the suite. He’s in the can.”
As if on cue, a toilet flushed. A door off the living area opened and a young man emerged, zipping his jeans. He had the weary authority of the one who’d put the deposit on the credit card. “Who killed the music—oh.”
Jason stopped. He looked at his friends, who gestured helplessly toward Nel. He looked at her.
She walked right up to him, extending the champagne. “Jason. A pleasure. I’m your neighbor, Nel. You have exceptional taste in volume. I brought libations.”
He took the bottle automatically, his fingers closing around the cold neck. “You… you’re not from the hotel.”
“Perceptive. No, I’m from the realm of ‘trying to sleep.’ But then I thought, sleep is for the weak and the dead. You boys look very alive.” She turned a slow circle, taking in the suite. It was a mirror image of hers, but trashed. “Metallithrax, you said? How was the mosh pit? Any concussions? Lost fillings?”
The big one at the door finally closed it, sealing them in. “It was insane,” he blurted. “Dude, this guy’s nose just… exploded. It was like a tomato.”
“Graphic,” Nel said, approvingly. She drifted to the coffee table, picked up a discarded beer can, and set it neatly inside a pizza box. “So you’re fueling the afterglow. Admirable. But your soundtrack needs work. That bass line was about as subtle as a heart attack.” She fixed Jason with a look. “You have the aux cord, I presume? Or is this a Bluetooth oligarchy?”
Jason, still holding the champagne like a holy relic, gestured to a phone dock on the mantel. “It’s, uh, plugged in there.”
“May I?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She glided over, her nightie swirling around her thighs. She scooped up the phone. The lock screen was a photo of the group, arms around each other, red-eyed and grinning. “Password?”
They looked at each other. A silent conference. The one with glasses shrugged. “It’s 6969.”
“Original,” Nel deadpanned. She tapped it in. The music app opened to a generic playlist titled “BRO JAMS.” She snorted, scrolling. Her fingernails, still painted that deep violet from two nights ago, tapped rapidly.
She found what she was looking for. A few taps, and the speakers filled the room clearly with the wailing guitars, and throbbing bass of Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast."
"A little something from my generation," she hollered over the noise and grinned.
The guy with glasses winced at the sudden screeching guitars, but the big one by the door started air-drumming with frantic glee. Nel’s grin widened as the room’s energy pivoted toward her, the new bass line vibrating the empty glasses on the table.
Nel’s grin widened as the room’s energy pivoted toward her, the new bass line vibrating the empty glasses on the table. She took a long, theatrical swig from the champagne bottle, the bubbles sharp and cold, then lowered it like a mic as the vocals kicked in.
Her hips began a slow, deliberate roll against the rhythm, the sheer blue nylon sliding over her skin as she moved. She shimmied her shoulders, making the marabou on her slippers tremble, and pointed the bottle’s neck at the guy with glasses as she lip-synced a raw-throated scream.
“Holy shit, she knows all the words,” the big one breathed, his air-drumming forgotten.
Jason just stared, the unopened bottle damp in his hand, his jaw adrift somewhere near his collarbone.
Jason just stared, the unopened bottle damp in his hand, his jaw adrift somewhere near his collarbone. The raw-throated vocals snarled from the speakers, a demonic counterpoint to the woman’s liquid hip-sway in the center of their trash-strewn suite. She was a ghost from a different century, wrapped in a blue haze, commandeering their hangout.
“You just gonna hold that, or are we drinking it?” Nel shouted over the twin-guitar harmony, pointing at the bottle.
“Right. Yeah. Sorry.” Jason fumbled for the foil, his thick fingers clumsy. The cork popped with a muted thwump, spraying a little foam over his knuckles. He handed it back to her, a sacrament.
She took a long, glugging pull, the line of her throat working. She passed it to the big guy, who grinned like he’d been handed Excalibur. “To exploded noses!” he bellowed, and chugged.
The lanky one with glasses, whose name was Derek, found himself leaning against the wall, just watching her. The way she moved wasn’t performative, not exactly. It was like she was listening to a secret rhythm inside the song, one only her bones could hear. The marabou on her slippers shivered with each stomp.
“You’re not, like, a crazy person, are you?” Derek asked, the words out before he could filter them. The other guys froze, except for the music.
Nel stopped mid-spin, fixing him with a look that was all amused intelligence. “Define crazy. I paid two beautiful strangers to ruin me night before last. I bribed a concierge. I’m currently in a room with six men young enough to be my grandchildren, wearing essentially Saran Wrap.” She took the bottle back from the big guy. “I’m not crazy. I’m consecutive.”
The big guy, Tyler, barked a laugh. “Consecutive? What does that even mean?”
“It means one sensible decision after another leads to a very quiet grave.” The song was ending. She scooped up the phone again, her fingers a swift blur. “My turn to dee-jay. You need education.”
A new sound ripped through the room. Not metal. It was all snarling, distorted saxophone, a locomotive rhythm section, and a voice that sounded like gravel and broken glass. The guys winced at the cacophony.
“What the hell is this?” Jason yelled over the din.
“This is the future,” Nel shot back, her body now convulsing to a different, jagged groove. “This is Iggy Pop. 1977. This is the sound of giving zero fucks.” She stalked over to Derek, invading his personal space. The smell of her—champagne, cold cream, something fiercely clean—cut through the boy-stink. “Why are you against the wall? The wall’s not paying your tuition.”
He pushed off, a defensive smirk on his face. “I’m observing. It’s anthropological.”
“Bullshit. You’re judging. You think I’m a pathetic spectacle.” She didn’t sound angry. She sounded fascinated, like he was a curious insect. The music pounded around them. “Your buddies are just horny and confused. You’re the intellectual. You’re mapping the decline of Western civilization onto my ass.”
Derek felt his face burn. She’d nailed it. “It’s just… unexpected.”
“Everything worth a damn is.” She turned her back on him, addressing the room. “Your music is a product. A safe, angry, pre-packaged product. This,” she gestured at the screaming stereo, “is a wild animal. It bites.” She threw herself back into the noise, a deliberate, angular dance that was more combat than celebration.
The other guys were mesmerized. Tyler was attempting to mosh with an armchair. Jason just kept drinking, his eyes glazed. Nel was a fever dream they’d all catch.
She danced until a sheen of sweat made the blue nylon cling to the small of her back, to the tops of her thighs. The tender ache from her escapade with the mechanics flared, a bright, familiar pain she welcomed like an old friend. This was different. This was her chaos. Her terms.
When the song crashed to its end, she was breathless. The sudden silence rang in their ears. She walked to the phone, unplugged it with a decisive yank. The quiet was absolute, heavy.
“Lesson over,” she said, her chest rising and falling. She looked at each of them, her gaze lingering on Derek. “The world is full of soft, quiet places for you to fall asleep. This isn’t one of them.”
Derek found his voice again. “What do you want?”
Nel paused. She half-turned, the profile of her face sharp in the ugly overhead light. A faint purple bruise, the size of a thumbprint, was visible just above the neckline of her nightie. “Tonight? I wanted to not be bored. Mission accomplished,” she said.
"But," she continued before anyone could comment on that, "the bigger question, is: what do you boys want?”
The sudden sheepish looks on six youthful faces and the way they averted their eyes told Nel everything she already suspected. Perhaps even intended.
The silence after her question was thick enough to taste, all spilled beer and adolescent anticipation. She let it hang, watching their faces flush, their eyes dart from her to each other and back to the sheer blue veil clinging to her sweat-damped skin.
Derek cleared his throat, the intellectual veneer cracking. “I think… we’re all thinking the same thing right now.”
“Then don’t think,” Nel said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp. “Do something about it.” Tyler, the big one, moved first, a clumsy bear-lunge driven by pure hormonal imperative. His hands were on her hips, rough and eager, pulling her against him. She could feel the rigid outline of his erection through his shorts, a blunt pressure against her stomach. “Fuck yeah,” he groaned into her hair, his breath hot and beery.
“Oh!" Nel laughed merrily. "So it's to be a free-for-all. is it?”Her blue eyes sparked with mischief as she kicked off her slippers and pulled her nightie up out of Tyler's grasp and over her head to toss it aside.
Completely nude now, Nel looked around at the other five. "Okay, now it's a free-for-all," she declared. "Have at me boys!"
The room erupted into a clumsy, grabbing scramble of hands and hungry mouths. Tyler’s thick fingers dug into the soft flesh of her ass as another guy—Jason—fumbled a sweaty palm over her left breast, his thumb roughly circling her nipple. "Christ, she's actually doing this," someone panted, the words muffled against her shoulder blade.
Nel gasped as Derek, the intellectual, dropped to his knees before her, his glasses askew, and without ceremony buried his face between her legs. His tongue was a flat, insistent pressure against her bruised vulva, licking with the frantic, graceless enthusiasm of a teenager deciphering a myth. "Eat that old cunt, man," Tyler grunted, his own hand working the fly of his shorts, his other arm locking around Nel's waist to keep her upright.
The sensation was a jarring collision: the raw, tender ache from her paid-for night with the mechanics now being mashed by a stranger's stubbled chin and sloppy tongue. Derek’s fingers hooked into her, stretching her, his mouth sucking at her clit with wet, noisy pulls. "You taste like fucking champagne," he groaned into her, the vibration a bright, shocking thread in the cacophony of grunts and rustling fabric.
Jason guided his cock, thick and ruddy, toward her mouth, the bulbous head tapping against her lips. She opened, taking him in, the salt-skin taste of him flooding her senses as he pushed deeper, hitting the back of her throat. She gagged, tears springing to her eyes, but he held her head, his hips already thrusting in short, sharp jabs. "Yeah, suck it, grandma," he breathed, his voice tight.
Another set of hands, belonging to a quiet one she hadn't noticed before, groped at her hanging breasts, pinching her nipples hard enough to make her yelp around the cock in her mouth. The pain was sharp and clarifying, a bright anchor in the storm of their use. Tyler, now free of his shorts, nudged his erection against Derek’s cheek, vying for position. "My turn, fuck off," he said, shoving his friend aside.
Derek fell back, wiping his mouth, his eyes wide and dark as Tyler positioned his blunt tip at her entrance. He shoved inside her with one grinding, inexorable push, filling the sore, slippery channel Leo had punished just days before. "Tighter than I fucking thought," Tyler grunted, his hands vise-like on her hips as he began to piston into her with a steady, deep rhythm.
Nel’s world narrowed to the competing invasions: the cock sawing in and out of her cunt, the other plunging past her lips, the hands mauling her skin. It was too much, a glorious and degrading overload that erased every quiet year at Maplewood. She was a nexus of pure, animal function. Jason came first, with a choked shout, spilling his cum hot and bitter down her throat.
She swallowed convulsively as he pulled out, gasping for air, her chin slick. Tyler’s pace grew frantic, his balls slapping against her. "Gonna breed this old bitch," he snarled, his composure shredding.
Just as his body locked, Nel’s eyes, watering and blurred, met Derek’s over Tyler’s heaving shoulder. He was watching, his hand frantically working his own cock, his gaze not hungry but horrified and utterly captivated.
Tyler finished with a final, grinding shove, his release a hot flood inside her that mingled with the lingering soreness from Leo’s paid-for visit. As he pulled out, gasping, the quiet one—Mark, she heard someone say—was already there, his narrow cock prodding at her wet, used entrance. “My turn,” he muttered, not meeting her eyes, and she guided him in with a hand that was not tender.
She took him, feeling the distinct, thinner shape of him moving where Tyler’s thicker impression still lingered. Derek finally approached, his own erection in hand, his face pale. “You’re a fucking wreck,” he whispered, but he was pushing Jason’s spent cock aside to smear his own against her lips.
She opened her mouth, tasting salt and iron, and took him deep, her throat working around him as Mark fucked her with quick, nervous thrusts from behind. The remaining two, whose names she never caught, waited their turn with jostling impatience, one kneading her breast roughly while the other watched, slack-jawed.
When Mark shuddered and spilled, Derek withdrew from her mouth, his cock glistening with her saliva. “On the floor,” she managed to rasp, her voice wrecked, and she slid down the front of him, positioning herself on her knees on the pizza-greasy carpet.
She took the next one in her mouth, her jaw aching, while Derek entered her from behind, his earlier horror replaced by a grim, focused rhythm. The last boy stood before her, and she reached up to guide him into her other hand, her fist moving briskly over his shaft as she was fucked from two directions, used in all her holes, a vessel being filled and emptied simultaneously.
She took them all, every inch, every shuddering climax, until the room smelled only of sex and sweat and spilled beer, and the boys lay scattered around her like fallen toys.
"Now that was fun," Nel laughed, stretching languorously. "I guess some things are like riding a bike!"
The boys were a tangle of limp limbs and stunned silence, their breathing the loudest sound in the room. Nel pushed herself up from the greasy carpet, her knees protesting, various fluids trickling down her inner thighs. She surveyed the wreckage of them with a kind of clinical detachment, her own pulse a steady, satisfied drum in her ears.
"Anyone got a cigarette?" she asked, her voice raspy from use.
Derek, pale and hollow-eyed, fumbled a crumpled pack from his shorts. He lit one for her with trembling hands, the flame dancing. She took a deep drag, the smoke cutting through the stench of sex and boy, and looked at the purple bruise on Jason’s shoulder where she’d bitten him. "You’ll want ice for that," she said, exhaling.
She looked to where her nightie was wedged under the armchair and her slippers were God-knew-where. "Right," she announced to the room. "I’m borrowing your shower." She began walking naked into the suite’s bathroom when Mark piped up.
"We should all go up to the hot tub on the roof to watch the sunrise!"