Chapter 2: Bambi Blossoms at the Bar
The whiskey wasn’t working.
It burned a familiar, mediocre path down Derek’s throat, but it did nothing to dilute the cold, squirreling sensation in his chest. The hotel bar was a cave of low light and softer conversations, a stark contrast to the glaring stage. He hunched over his glass, tracing a finger through the condensation ring. Logic. He needed to apply logic. There had to be a rational explanation for what happened. He’d been suggestible, tired, caught off guard by the crowd pressure. It was a combination of social compliance and a clever magician’s tricks. That’s all. He nodded to himself, the motion tight. That’s all it was.
“Rough day?”
The voice, smooth and knowing, slithered into his ear just as the stool beside him creaked. He didn’t need to look. The scent of her perfume—something expensive and cold—wrapped around him.
“What do you want, Simone?” He kept his eyes on his glass. “Come to gloat?”
“Gloat?” She signaled the bartender, a two-fingered wave. “No. I come to the bar to drink. Like any other… skeptic.” The word was a velvet-wrapped dart. “I thought you’d be halfway home by now, writing a furious blog post about the collective delusion you witnessed.”
He finally looked at her. The amber light caught the platinum in her hair, made her gray eyes look like chips of fogged glass. She was smiling that faint, infuriating smile. The bartender, a young guy with a sleeve of tattoos, approached.
“Gin martini. Extra dry. And,” she said, her gaze flicking to Derek’s nearly empty glass, “another of whatever my friend here is having. He looks like he needs it.”
“I’m not your friend,” Derek muttered.
“Of course not.” She settled onto the stool, crossing her legs. The black fabric of her trousers stretched taut. “You’re the man of logic. Friendships are probably just chemical reactions you haven’t bothered to deconstruct yet.”
The bartender returned with her martini and a fresh whiskey for Derek. As he set the glasses down, Simone leaned forward slightly, as if to admire the olive speared in her drink. Her lips were close to Derek’s ear.
“A fascinating specimen, though,” she murmured, her voice dropping to a theatrical, confidential whisper. “So rigid. So sure. Like a little crystal figurine. So easy to… shatter.”
She pulled back, taking a slow sip. Derek’s knuckles were white around his new glass. He wanted to throw the whiskey in her face. He wanted to run. He wanted to prove her wrong so badly he could taste it, metallic and sour.
“You didn’t shatter anything,” he forced out, his voice low and tight. “You parlor-tricked a guy who didn’t get enough sleep. Big deal.”
“Mmm.” She swirled her martini. “Tell that to your hand stuck on your head. Tell it to the number seven.”
Humiliation, fresh and scalding, washed over him. He gulped the whiskey, needing the fire.
“You know,” Simone said, her tone conversational again, as if discussing the weather, “the mind is such a beautiful, fragile ecosystem. Planting one little idea is like introducing a new, aggressive species. It just… takes over. Blots everything else out.” She looked at him directly, her eyes holding his. “It’s like watching a forest get choked by kudzu. Or a pristine meadow get overrun by one specific, silly little flower.”
She paused, letting the ambient noise of the bar—the clink of ice, the murmur of a sports game on a distant TV—fill the space.
“A daisy, perhaps.” She took another sip. “No. Too plain. Something… showier. A blossom with no purpose but to be pretty and pliable.” She pretended to think, tapping a polished nail against her glass. Then she smiled, a flash of genuine, malicious delight. “A Bambi Blossom.”
The words landed.
They were just sounds. Nonsense. A stupid, florid phrase.
For Derek, the universe fractured.
A white-hot lance of pure, unthought sensation stabbed up his spine and exploded behind his eyes. His body locked, every muscle seizing in a rigid spasm for one endless, suffocating second. The bar, the noise, Simone’s face—it all pixelated, dissolved into static.
Then the release. A warm, syrupy flood poured into the void the static left behind. It filled his limbs, his chest, his throat. His posture melted. The defiant hunch of his shoulders softened, then rolled back, pushing his chest forward. His hips shifted on the stool, one leg extending, the knee bending. A hand fluttered up to his own throat, fingers tracing a delicate line along his Adam’s apple before sliding down to splay over the flat, muscular plane of his pectoral.
A sigh slipped from his lips, high and breathy.
“Oh… wow,” the sigh became a word. The voice was not his. It was a helium-light, aspirated thing, all air and vowels. “That feels, like, so much better.”
Simone watched, her martini frozen halfway to her lips. Her professional curiosity was a cool, analytical layer over her deep, thrumming amusement.
Derek—or what was now puppeteering his body—looked down at his hand on his chest. The fingers kneaded the firm muscle. A giggle bubbled out, a tinny, ridiculous sound. “Mmm, somebody’s been naughty and skipped chest day,” he pouted, the voice dripping with a ditzy sensuality. “Gotta keep these puppies perky, you know?”
He slid off the stool. The movement was a clumsy parody of grace, all swaying hips and exaggerated steps. The simple act of standing was transformed into a performance. He smoothed his hands down the front of his plain grey t-shirt as if it were a cocktail dress, cupping where he believed his breasts to be, giving them a little jiggle.
His gaze, wide and vacantly inviting, scanned the bar. It landed on a man three stools down—a fortysomething in a rumpled business suit, staring at his phone with a drained expression.
Bambi blinked, long and slow. A smile, all glossy lips and empty charm, spread across Derek’s face.
“Uh-oh,” Simone whispered to herself, the thrill of it icy in her veins. “There we go.”
Bambi sauntered over, the click of Derek’s climbing shoes on the wooden floor sounding absurdly loud. He stopped too close to the businessman, invading his personal space with the oblivious confidence of the deeply hypnotized.
“Hiiiii,” Bambi breathed.
The man looked up, startled. He saw a lean, confused-looking young man standing in a strange, hip-cocked pose, batting his eyelashes.
“Can I… help you?” the businessman asked, his voice wary.
“I was just thinking,” Bambi said, leaning in closer. Derek’s breathy voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper that wasn’t quiet at all. “A big, strong man like you looks sooo lonely over here all by yourself.” A finger, tipped with a bitten nail, traced a line down the man’s suit sleeve. “And a girl like me… well, I just get so needy when I see a man who looks like he knows how to take charge.”
The businessman’s eyes darted from Derek’s face to Simone, who offered a slight, bemused shrug as if to say, Don’t look at me.
“I think you’ve had too much to drink, pal,” the man said, trying to slide his arm away.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Bambi giggled, the sound like breaking glass. The hand on the man’s arm tightened. “I’m not drunk. I’m just… horny.” The word was said with a childish relish, a dirty secret shared. “And you look like you’ve got a real big… stress problem. I’m amazing at relieving stress.”
Bambi stepped forward, pressing Derek’s body against the man’s side. The businessman flinched, but didn’t push him away. The confusion on his face was being slowly eroded by something else—a predatory, opportunistic gleam. Here was something bizarre, yes, but also vulnerable and aggressively, bizarrely offering itself.
“Is that right?” the man said, his voice dropping, getting into it.
“Mmhmm,” Bambi murmured, nuzzling against the man’s shoulder. “I just wanna be used. You know? Like a dumb little fucktoy. Make all the big, smart thoughts go away.” Derek’s hand slid from the man’s arm to his thigh, gripping it. “I bet you fuck so good. All that… authority.”
The man glanced around. The bar was not empty, but their corner was shadowed. Simone was a silent statue, watching. The bartender was at the far end. The man’s own arousal, mingled with a deep, cynical curiosity, won out. He stood up, his body shielding Bambi from most of the room.
“Maybe we should… continue this somewhere more private,” he muttered, his hand coming to rest on the small of Derek’s back.
“Yes! God, yes,” Bambi gasped, as if it were the most romantic proposition ever uttered. “Take me. I’m yours.”
Simone watched them go, the businessman leading a willingly stumbling, giggling Derek toward the men’s restroom at the back of the bar. She finished her martini, the gin tasting like victory. The plan had been to observe the trigger’s initial activation, a private little show. This… this was beyond her hopes. It was a perfect, devastating collision of her artifice and a stranger’s base opportunism.
She left a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, enough to cover the drinks and her silence, and walked out into the night. Her work was done. The rest was just consequences.
Inside the restroom, which reeked of industrial cleaner and stale urine, the businessman checked the stalls. Empty. He locked the main door.
Bambi was already pawing at him. “Hurry, hurry,” the breathy voice pleaded. “I’m so empty. Fill me up, daddy.”
The man, his face flushed with a mixture of disgust and intense excitement, fumbled with his belt. “Yeah, okay. Okay, quiet down.” He pushed Derek back against the cold tiles of the wall next to the paper towel dispenser. “How do you want it?”
“Just fuck me,” Bambi whined, hands scrambling to pull down Derek’s own jeans and briefs. “Fuck my dumb bitch brains out. I don’t deserve anything nice.”
The businessman didn’t need more encouragement. He spat into his hand, slicking himself roughly. He didn’t ask about protection. He didn’t care. This was a transaction with a phantom. He gripped Derek’s hip hard enough to bruise and shoved inside with one brutal thrust.
A sharp, ragged cry tore from Derek’s throat—not Bambi’s giggle, but a guttural sound of pure, shocked violation. But the persona swallowed it instantly, retconning the pain into pleasure.
“Oh FUCK!” Bambi screamed, the voice echoing obscenely off the tiles. “Yes! Yes! It’s so big! Stretch my tight little cunt! Make me your slut!”
The businessman grunted, hammering into him, driven by a mix of rough arousal and the power trip of the situation. One of his hands clamped over Derek’s mouth to muffle the screaming babble.
“You like that, you crazy whore?” he snarled, his breath hot and sour against Derek’s ear.
“I love it! I’m just a hole! A dumb, hungry hole! Fuck me!”
The sex was fast, brutal, and mechanical. It was the raw, explicit act of domination over something presented as less than human. The man used him with a clinical roughness, chasing his own release against the body of a stranger who begged for degradation in a screeching falsetto. The sounds were filthy, a symphony of slapping skin, choked grunts, and Bambi’s hysterical, praising shrieks that dissolved into incoherent sobs of “thank you, thank you, thank you.”
It was over in minutes.
The businessman pulled out, shoved himself back into his pants, and buckled his belt without looking back. He unlocked the door and was gone, leaving the stink of sweat and sex in his wake.
Derek slumped against the wall, jeans and briefs around his ankles, trembling violently. The warm, syrupy presence in his mind began to recede, like a tide pulling back from a devastated shore.
And everything it had been holding back came flooding in.
The sensation of cold tiles. The raw, burning ache in his body. The taste of bile in his throat. The memory—not a dream, not a haze, but crystal clear, horrifyingly high-definition—of every single second.
He remembered the feel of the man’s hands. The smell of his breath. The pain of the penetration. The sound of his own voice, that terrifying, breathy squeal, begging for more, thanking him.
He remembered it all.
A dry heave wracked his frame. He crumpled to the filthy restroom floor, pulling his clothes up with shaking, impotent hands. He curled into a ball, his forehead pressing against the grimy base of the toilet. No tears came. Just a silent, widening void of horror that swallowed every other part of him—the skeptic, the engineer, the climber, the man.
He was gone. Only the violation remained, and the echoing, childish phrase that had caused it.
Bambi, blossom.
Somewhere in the void, a new, terrified thought formed: it could happen again. At any time. Anywhere.
The hum of the bar’s ventilation was the only sound. It sounded like laughter.