maybeElse

“I'm glad you're broken too.”

The murmured words linger in her ears just like the sticky sweat covering both their bodies, its wet horny smell slowly fading into a memory of itself as the little room's littler AC unit struggled to catch up with the heat. The room smells like sex, like her body and theirs, like all the gasps and touches and shuddering moments of release they'd filled each other with all through the movie murmuring its background noise from her laptop's little speakers and long past its end—

The room smells like everything their words do not.

“Uh, what? I'm not broken.”

Their body shifts against hers, her thigh rubbing between their legs and their elbow digging into her side as they bring themselves up to look her in the eye, their breath filling her nostrils with the smell of stale cum and musky sweat and lingering kisses and only the faintest trace of the energy drinks they'd both been chugging all day.

“You don't know?”

”... no?”

“Dear,” they say, a faint liberty for someone who she only met earlier that day to take, no matter how thoroughly they've explored each others' bodies—no matter that it's hardly been any time at all since their tongue was as far up her ass as they could manage as she came again and again into their eager hands, “no one who enjoys sex like that isn't at least a bit broken. Besides, I saw the way you flinched when people shouted at the park.”

“I just don't like shouting, okay? And plenty of people like weird sex.”

“Mmm, plenty of people are broken. There's no shame in it. I'm just glad you are; it would be shame if someone so hot wasn't.”

“I mean, sure, but I'm not. I'm perfectly fine.”

It takes a few moments for her to untangle herself from them, but she does, breaking the fragile skin contact that she'd been so desperate for ever since she saw them (ever since they approached her, with a confidence and joy that was nearly as alien to her as their attraction that would have been obvious even if they hadn't made it abundantly clear with their words and their body and the feeling of them inside her, thrusting and thrusting as she shook and screamed and finally fell limp)—

Her clothes are scattered, and they don't try to disguise the way they're looking at her as she hunts around for them. A sweat-stained shirt, a pair of ragged jeans, the newly torn fishnets that had peaked through the holes so beautifully, her panties wadded up and too damp to wear.

“Mind if I use your shower? I'm a bit, uh,”

“Sure, it's just down the hall,” they idly wave at the door. “Use whatever towels you want.”

The bathroom is small and filthy; there'd hardly enough room for the single shower stall, the toilet, and the sink, even without all the places on the floor that she doesn't want to step on and the way the walls look moist even before she turns the water on. It's the sort of bathroom she's seen far too many time recently, maybe a closet converted by an uncaring landlord, the sort of place where she wouldn't be able to resist if someone snuck in and pinned her to the wall ...

Though her aching body is too satisfied to really indulge thoughts like that, especially after whatever just happened, and the warm water feels like heaven on her skin. She lingers beneath the spray until the room's walls are practically seeping with condensation and the steam billows out to fill every nook and cranny, long past the point of getting clean, long past the point where the sad towels hanging raggedly by the door grow too wet to dry her skin—

A knock disturbs her reverie; their voice drifting in through a crack in the door.

“Hey, uh, I'm sorry if that was too much. I just, I'm glad I met you. I'm glad we like the same sort of sex. I'd like to get to know you better. That's all.”

She should have left when she started to feel weird. Shouldn't have bothered showering, no matter how sticky she felt—her clothing will betray her either way, and a clean body slipping into filthy fabric somehow always manages to feel worse than filth on sticky sweat. And how should she reply to that, really? How should she respond? What's the normal thing to do?

They're too human. Too much like something she could never be.

”... yeah, sure. Order some food and I'll forget about it.”

She can practically feel their happiness, even through the door; it fills up the steamy little bathroom like trembling rhododendrons and red carnations and corpse-borne lilies, fills the room with all the scents the little sliver of soap resting just outside the shower couldn't offer—

“Of course! What do you like?”

“Pizza? Or burgers. Something cheap and trashy. Oh, and can you find me a towel? The ones in here are, uh,” she trails off. She's sure they know.

“Yeah, sure! Give me a sec.”

Their presence recedes, but that bright happy smell remains as she slumps against the wall uncaring of how greasy and wrong it feels against her back. Fuck, she thinks, what I am getting myself into this time ...