Chapter 8: Whiskey & Wombs
The dive bar’s air clung to Angela’s skin, a palpable film of nicotine and hopelessness. She watched the ice melt in her third whiskey, the liquid a cheap amber that tasted like regret. Michelle’s story about the gynecologist had ended minutes ago, but the imagery—the cold stirrups, the speculative glint in the doctor’s eye, the way she’d spread for him right there on the paper-lined table after he’d pronounced her “surprisingly resilient”—still hung between them like a toxic mist.
“Fuck health,” Michelle had sneered, licking salt from the rim of her margarita glass. “I’m a walking STD test with legs. Results come back negative, they get a reward. Comes back positive…” She’d shrugged, a sharp, bird-like motion. “Well, that’s a story for them to tell.”
Natasha had cackled then, that wet, hollow sound that always made Angela’s scalp prickle. “You’re an artist, babe. A performance artist of the cervix.”
Angela had shifted in the sticky booth, her thighs pressing together. Her mind, trained in deconstructing patriarchal texts, scrambled for a framework. Reclamation of the clinical gaze? A subversion of the medical-industrial complex’s authority? But the theories felt like tissue paper against the raw, ugly truth of Michelle’s actions. It wasn’t subversion. It was erasure. A deliberate, frantic scratching at her own insides.
“It’s not liberation if the cage is your own body,” Angela said now, the words coming out more brittle than she intended.
Michelle turned those flat, dark eyes on her. “Spare me the thesis, Angela. You think I don’t know what I am?” She took a long drag of Natasha’s cigarette. “I’m a void. A nice, tight, warm void. Men pour themselves in, they feel big for a minute, they leave. The void stays. It doesn’t get liberated. It just… stays.”
Angela hadn’t ever studied void whores like this but over drinks after work she learns. The learning isn’t in books. It’s in the way Natasha’s fingers, stubby and adorned with cheap rings, trace the water rings on the table as she describes, in a monotone, letting the entire defensive line of a community college football team use her in a storage closet. “One after the other. No wipes, no breaks. Just reload and fire.” It’s in the clinical detail Michelle uses to describe the specific burn of a particular strain of chlamydia, and how she didn’t get it treated for a month because she liked the fever-dreams it gave her.
A man approached their table, drawn by the frequency they emitted. He was broad in the shoulders, with the deliberate, empty calm of a bouncer. His gaze swept over Angela’s skeptical posture, dismissed it, and landed on Michelle’s exposed collarbone.
“You ladies celebrating?” he asked, his voice a low rumble.
“We’re philosophizing,” Natasha said, her smile not reaching her eyes. “About holes and what fills them.”
The man’s lips quirked. He understood the language. Michelle slid out of the booth without a word, taking his hand. Angela watched them move towards the hall that led to the bathrooms, a silent, transactional procession. Natasha lit another cigarette, her gaze following them with a kind of hungry vacancy.
“She’ll let him fuck her raw in the filthy stall,” Natasha stated, not speculated. “He’ll probably come in her ass. She prefers that lately. Says it feels more like being emptied.”
Angela’s mouth was dry. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, alive thing trapped in her chest. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you want to know,” Natasha said, blowing smoke straight up. “You need to know. You write your threads about ‘agency’ and ‘autonomous pleasure’ but you’ve never looked into the fucking abyss. It’s not pleasure, professor. It’s anesthesia.”
From down the hall, a sharp, rhythmic banging started, metal against tile. Angela flinched with each impact. Natasha’s hand drifted under the table, into her own lap. Her breathing shallowed.
Angela couldn’t stop herself. She stood, her legs unsteady, and walked toward the sound. The hall was narrow, walls painted a grimy green. The men’s room door was propped open with a wet floor sign.
She saw them.
Michelle was bent over the sink, her sundress shoved up around her waist, her small hands white-knuckling the porcelain basin. The man stood behind her, his jeans and boxers around his thick thighs, one massive hand tangled in her short brown hair, pulling her head back. His other hand gripped the swell of her hip, his fingers digging into her flesh. He was slamming into her with a brutal, piston-like efficiency, his balls slapping wetly against her with every deep, grunting thrust.
“Fuck, you’re a tight little hole,” the man growled, his voice thick with effort.
Michelle’s face in the mirror was slack, empty. Her eyes were open but they saw nothing. A thin strand of saliva connected her lip to the chrome faucet. “Give it,” she mumbled, the words distorted. “Give me that fucking load. Paint it.”
“You want this dirty shit in you?”
“Yes. Yes. Do it, daddy. Ruin me.”
The man’s rhythm fractured, became jagged, frantic. His hips stuttered and he drove himself in to the hilt, his body locking as a guttural roar tore from his throat. Angela saw the tense, violent shudder that racked him. He held himself there, pulsing, for what seemed like an eternity, his face a mask of grotesque ecstasy. Michelle’s body accepted it, her own muscles fluttering in a weak, reflexive clench around him. A low, whimpering moan escaped her, but it sounded like pain, not pleasure.
He pulled out with a slick, obscene sound, and a trickle of white, viscous fluid immediately began to seep down the inside of Michelle’s thigh. He didn’t look at her. He turned, zipped himself up, and walked past Angela in the hallway without a glance, adjusting his belt.
Michelle stayed bent over the sink, breathing heavily. Slowly, she pushed herself upright. In the mirror, her eyes met Angela’s horrified stare. A smile, wide and terrible and utterly vacant, spread across Michelle’s face. She reached between her legs, gathered the leaking mess on two fingers, and brought them to her lips, sucking them clean.
“See?” Michelle said, the word a hollow sigh. “The void is quiet now. For a little while.”
Angela stumbled back to the booth. Natasha was gone, a twenty and a smear of lipstick on a napkin left in her place. The banging in the pipes had stopped. The bar’s dull roar seemed to rush in to fill the new silence, but it couldn’t touch the deeper, more profound silence Angela had just witnessed. It was a silence that lived inside a person. A silence bought with filth and degradation and a complete, utter surrender.
Her feminist rhetoric lay in ashes. Her theories were worthless. This wasn’t a text to be deconstructed. It was a wound, deep and fetid, and it was grinning at her from a bathroom mirror. She was worried Michelle might carry another baby. Her body is so tiny, and another giant black man's baby is not what Angela thinks she should do. She goes on a rant about contraception, how plan B isn't a surgical abortion and Michelle just laughs.
Michelle’s laugh was a sharp, derisive bark that cut through Angela’s shaky monologue about responsible sexuality and pharmacological interventions. “Plan B?” Michelle repeated, sliding back into the booth with a fresh dampness between her thighs. “Angela, honey, that’s for tourists. That’s for girls who get surprised.”
Natasha returned then, her voluptuous figure swaying, a fresh vodka cranberry in her hand. She caught the tail end of the conversation as she sat, the vinyl sighing beneath her weight. “Surprised by what?” she asked, her voice a bored drawl.
“By a positive test,” Angela said, her voice tight. “By a consequence.”
“Consequence.” Natasha tasted the word, then smirked. “It’s not a consequence if it’s the whole fucking point.” She took a long sip, her eyes glazing over with a familiar emptiness. “You skip the pills, you skip the rubbers, you just let it happen. It’s easier. Cleaner, in a way. No plastic, no chemicals, just… biology.”
Michelle nodded, leaning forward, her D-cups pressing against the table’s edge. “Exactly. You fuck raw, you feel that cream pie sloshing inside you where it belongs. If you get a bit bloated a few weeks later, if your tits get sore, then you know. You just know. Time to see the OB for a scrape. It’s a system.”
“It’s a horrific system,” Angela whispered, but her protest was weak, drowned by the lurid fascination coiling in her gut.
Natasha giggled, a low, raspy sound. “My system’s a little slower. I’m built… thicker.” She patted her soft, scarred belly. “Things hide in here. I don’t find out first trimester always. Sometimes it’s the second before I clue in. By then you can feel it fluttering.” She said it like describing a minor gas pain. “Makes the cleanup more of a procedure. But whatever. They get it all.”
Angela stared, her academic frameworks collapsing into dust. This was beyond trauma, beyond pathology. This was a ritual.
“You talk about it like a dental cleaning,” Angela said.
“It is,” Michelle said, her eyes dark and flat. “Just a different kind of plaque.” She signaled the waiter for another round, her movements efficient, robotic. “All the talking, the theory, the ‘reclaiming’—it’s just noise. The only thing that isn’t noise is the cock. The raw, pounding cock and the load it leaves behind. That’s real. That’s the only thing that shuts the noise off.”
Natasha nodded in agreement, her hand once again drifting beneath the table. Angela could see the subtle shift of her wrist, the faint tremor in her elbow. She was touching herself right there in the booth, surrounded by the smell of stale beer and Michelle’s recent sex.
“The noise always comes back, though,” Natasha murmured, her breath hitching slightly. “That’s the bitch of it. Comes back louder. So you need another load. And another. A deeper one, a dirtier one. You need it to punch through you, to hit the back of the fucking theater.”
Angela could not move. She was trapped, bearing witness. Michelle’s phone buzzed on the sticky table. She glanced at it, that terrible, vacant smile returning.
“Speaking of,” Michelle purred. “It’s Jason. Point guard. Says he’s got two teammates with no plans.” She looked at Natasha, then at Angela. “You coming? You can watch. You can take notes for your dissertation.”
The invitation was a challenge, a gauntlet thrown into the space between Angela’s theory and her throbbing, traitorous body. She felt a hot trickle of her own arousal seep into her underwear, a visceral, shameful response to the graphic horror they described. She opened her mouth, but no sound, scholarly or otherwise, came out.
Natasha stood, pulling a compact from her purse. She examined her face in the tiny mirror, dabbing at smudged eyeliner. “I’m in,” she said, her voice dead. “My place. They like the sofa. Leather’s easy to wipe down.”
Michelle was already texting back, her thumbs flying. Angela watched them, these two women she worked beside, filed motions with, shared lunches with. They were planets orbiting a dark sun, their gravity a terrible, compelling pull.
“I…” Angela began.
“Save it,” Michelle said, not looking up from her phone. “Your body’s louder than your mouth right now, professor. We can all smell it on you.”
They left her there with the tab and the melting ice. Angela sat in the silence they left behind, which wasn’t silence at all but a roar of her own pulse and the echo of Michelle’s cackle. She fumbled for her wallet, her hands unsteady. The dive bar’s darkness felt suffocating, yet the thought of her own empty apartment, with its shelves of feminist texts, felt infinitely worse.
Her phone glowed in her hand. She opened a rideshare app, her destination hovering between her home address and the one Michelle had just rattled off to Natasha. The cursor blinked, a tiny, judgmental eye. She thought of leather, easy to wipe down. She thought of raw, pounding cock, the only thing that wasn’t noise.
Her finger trembled.
Then it tapped.