Chapter 5: The Aftermath
The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of the ghost of their moans, the echo of the headboard thumping the wall, the memory of her whispered pleas. It pressed in on them, a physical weight. Katy was statue-still, her knuckles bone-white where she clutched the robe shut. Greg could only stare, his mind a skidding record of every touch, every word, every impossibly intimate detail.
He saw her blue eyes, so familiar, now tracking the same horrific memories.
With a jerky, mechanical motion, Katy lunged for the nightstand. She fumbled the lighter, the plastic click-click-click too loud. She finally got the joint lit, took a drag so deep her cheeks hollowed, and held the smoke in her lungs until they must have burned. She exhaled a thick, grey plume that writhed in the lava lamp’s glow.
Wordlessly, she held it out to him, arm stiff, her gaze fixed on a stain on the carpet.
Greg took it. His fingers brushed hers. They both flinched. He put the paper to his lips, the act feeling profane. The smoke was harsh, a scratch in his raw throat. It didn’t help. It just made the room swim, layering a chemical haze over the catastrophe.
“I can feel it,” she said, her voice oddly flat, detached. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring straight ahead at the peeling floral wallpaper. “Leaking out of me. Your… you know. I can feel it.” She swallowed audibly. “It’s making me want to puke.”
Greg said nothing. What was there to say? Sorry was a ludicrous speck of dust in the face of this.
“I was gonna ask you,” she continued, the words coming in a monotone stream, as if confessing to a crime. “After. Once we caught our breath. I was gonna say we should… do it the other way. Normal. Just to feel what that was like after… that.” A short, sharp sound escaped her, not a laugh. A puncture. “Jesus. My pussy. I was gonna ask my cousin to fuck my pussy.”
“Katy—”
“Don’t.” The flatness cracked, revealing a sliver of sheer panic. “Just don’t say my name right now. Okay? Please.”
He nodded, exhaling smoke. The ‘okay’ died in his throat.
They passed the joint back and forth in a funeral rhythm. The familiar ritual was absurd, a tiny life raft on a sea of poison. With each drag, the initial shock began to mutate, hardening into a jagged, practical horror.
“It was the molly,” Greg said finally, the words tasting like ash. “We were both rolling. You said it yourself. It makes you…” He gestured weakly with the joint, “…want things. Feel things.”
“It makes you horny,” Katy corrected, her tone shifting from detached to brutally precise. She finally turned her head, and her eyes were gleaming with a bitter clarity. “It doesn’t pick your target for you. It doesn’t make you not recognize your own family.” She shook her head, the blonde hair swaying. “I looked right at you. I talked to you. I let you… I asked you…” She trailed off, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “We were masked. The hood. The light was shit. You sounded different. Deeper, or something.”
“I was trying to sound… cool. Not like me,” Greg admitted, the pathetic truth laid bare.
“And I was a fucking cat,” she muttered into her hands. She lowered them, looking exhausted. “This is so messed up. This is Lifetime-movie, family-intervention, moved-to-separate-states messed up.”
“No one has to know.” The sentence leapt out of him, impulsive, instinctive for a problem he couldn’t possibly solve. “It was a costume party. We were masked. We were high. It was a… a mistake. A huge, fucked-up, chemical mistake. We just… we lock it in a box and we throw the box into the ocean.”
Katy stared at him for a long moment. A cynical, knowing smile twisted her lips. It was an expression he’d seen her use on guys she thought were full of shit. Now it was for him. “A box. Right.” She shifted slightly on the bed and winced, a tiny, fleeting spasm of discomfort that flushed her cheeks with fresh humiliation. “My body isn’t a box, Greg. It’s a crime scene.”
The imagery was so stark it stunned him silent.
She took the joint from his motionless fingers, her touch avoiding contact. “But you’re not wrong,” she sighed, the anger draining away into a deep, unsettling resignation. “What’s the alternative? Tell our parents? ‘Hey Aunt Linda, great party, your son totally wrecked my ass?’” She barked a real laugh this time, harsh and sour. “Yeah. No. So we blame the molly. We officially blame the drugs. We were out of our minds. We were different people. End of story.”
“Is it?” he asked quietly.
“It has to be,” she said, and it sounded like a command, to him and to herself. She took one last drag and stabbed the roach out in an empty soda can on the floor with more force than necessary. “It’s the only story that doesn’t mean we’re monsters.”
The finality in her voice was brittle. They sat in the new silence, the truth boxed up in ugly, flimsy packaging. The smell of burnt paper and weed tried to cover the scent of sex, but failed. It just mixed with it, creating the signature perfume of their disaster.
Downstairs, a door slammed. Muffled voices called out goodbyes. The party was truly over. The normal world was reasserting itself, minute by minute, and they were here, stranded on this Island of the Fucked.
Katy stood up, tightening the robe’s belt into a fierce knot. “I’m going to shower. For about six hours.” She didn’t look at him as she walked to the door. Her hand paused on the knob. Her shoulders were tense. “You should… be gone. When I get out. Crash on the couch if you have to. I don’t care. Just not in here.”
Then she was gone, the door clicking shut softly behind her, leaving him alone with the molten, blasphemous light and the terrible, lingering warmth of the bed.