Page 5 of Take You

“Yes baby, I love it. Give me more, faster, harder. I love the way you’re hitting the back of my throat, but take it easy, I need it long and hard.”

“I want to come down your throat, you fine fucking bitch.”

“Oh, I want that too, baby, so much. But I want you to ride my mouth first, while I fuck my hand until I come. Let’s take it slow, so we have more fun.”

“Slow...”

“Yeah, just like that, fuck my mouth slowly, so I choke on your thick, veiny dick...”

I managed to carry on like that for another forty minutes, before “Garry” finally lost it, and came “down my throat.” I logged off and brought my bioengineering paper back up on the screen. It had to be turned in the next day, and although I needed the money, I secretly hoped that Garry would be my last call for the night so that I could focus on it. It was late—already past midnight—and I was a little over halfway through writing it.

It was only midway through the third week of the semester, and between work and school, I’d had what felt like barely eight hours’ sleep the entire time. I was lucky that I didn’t need as much rest as many people did, but still, the situation didn’t feel sustainable in the long term, and this was before my true study workload had kicked in.

There was no way I could carry on that way when that happened, but at that point in time, I couldn’t see any other option, if I wanted to eat, pay rent, and actually complete my degree. I was beginning to think that I’d made a huge mistake in thinking any of it could work.

This was starting to seem like one of those, “Here are three things, you can only have two of them at the same time,” Venn diagram memes. Like I could work and therefore have money to live, but I couldn’t also get all my schoolwork done, and actually get enough sleep. Or I could get my schoolwork done, and sleep, but I couldn’t therefore earn enough money to eat and pay rent.

It was a lose-lose situation, no matter how I looked at it, but losing simply wasn’t an option. I’d come way too far, and lost too much, to give up now. If that meant surviving on zero sleep, and a diet of energy drinks, because I needed the caffeine, but that was all I could afford, then so be it. I’d survived worse, so I knew I could make this work, someway, somehow.

As it was, I woke up having just about completed my assignment, but clearly having passed out at my desk right after adding the final period. I knew this, because not only had I come to with my head on the keyboard, and drool crusted to the side of my mouth—and on the trackpad—but when I looked at my document, I’d somehow “typed” hundreds of pages of alphabet soup with my forehead.

Then when I went to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and noticed that I had the imprint of the keys squashed into my skin. I’d been able to remove the extraneous letters from the assignment with a simple undo, but sadly there was no such function that would take care of my face. I jumped in the shower and hoped that the steam would be enough to ‘uncrease’ me. I was hot. As in, a hot mess.

I climbed out of the shower and submitted my work, after checking it through one last time, before dashing to campus like the devil was on my tail. I made it to class just in time. Professor Richards was a stickler for timing, both in turning in papers and in our physical attendance. Anyone who signed into the class even thirty seconds late received a penalty. Three of those, and we’d lose a course credit, which I absolutely couldn’t afford.

I slid into a seat at the back of the packed lecture theater, and tried my best to stay awake. Prof. Richards’s droning voice did nothing to blow the cobwebs from my brain, so I brought up the roster for the adult phone line to plan what other shifts I was going to take on for the rest of the week.

I wanted to lock in pretty much every night during the peak time from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m., and I was also going to try some daytime shifts. I knew they were never as busy as night shifts, but I figured I could work on my assignments between clients, and hopefully at least make a little extra cash with whatever calls came in.

“Ring-a-Ring-a Rosie, the fat kid loves calzone.” The sound boomed from the AV system, drowning out not only Richards, but everyone and everything else, including the thoughts that had previously occupied my mind. The room had erupted into chaos, and as I looked to the front of the room, I could totally see why. The ear-splittingly loud sound was accompanied on screen by old-school, movie-style vision, which perfectly matched the demented ‘horror movie at the funfair’ music, and creepy-little-kid-style voice. “A bullet. A shotgun. One falls down. Dead.”

The music became increasingly erratic, as did the action in the room as people scurried around trying to work out what the fuck was going on. Meanwhile, Richards simultaneously tried to call everyone to order, while also attempting to stop the sound and vision.

As he yelled and jabbed at his computer, he failed spectacularly at both, even after removing the portable storage drive from the side of the laptop, then slamming it closed before unplugging it from the system. Nothing worked.

It was fast becoming clear that wherever the rogue content was coming from, Richards had no control over it, and whoever had planted it had wanted that way. Unlike the vast majority of people in the room, I sat motionless, transfixed to the screen. I stared at the dizzying collage of images—press cuttings, social media posts, screenshots of text conversations, a photograph of a headstone with the dates of birth and death clearly visible, a takeout pizza menu with the words “Eat yourself to death” scrawled on it, a summer camp brochure, an obituary in a newspaper, the order of service from a funeral with the same dates as the tombstone, redacted snippets from what looked like a police report… all flashing across the screen in a dizzying loop.

Everything had the specifics blanked out—names and faces in the press articles, the branding on the pizza menu, the name on the tombstone...yet somehow, it all seemed gnawingly and achingly familiar. It was only when an image that hadn’t previously appeared bounced into view that awareness started to dawn.

Rather than rotating away, this photo stayed on-screen, shaking, spinning and vibrating vigorously. Frenetic as it was, I couldn’t mistake the face or the name circled below. Tabitha Rose Arden.

“Ring-a-Ring-a Rosie, the fat kids love calzone. A bullet. A shotgun. One falls down. Dead.”

I grabbed my laptop and scrambled out of my chair, eternally grateful that I’d chosen to sit at the back of the lecture hall as usual. It made it way easier to bolt from the room, hopefully unnoticed amid all the chaos. I didn’t see the guy coming toward me in the hall until it was too late. In fact, in truth, I didn’t see him until after it was too late, and I was hurtling off my feet one way, while my bag and computer spiraled out of my grasp in different directions. While I flew through the air, I followed my laptop’s arc as it swooshed into orbit.

As the contents of my bag breached the open zipper and rained down on me like debris in an earthquake, I screamed out, but like a movie disaster sequence, everything felt like it was going in slo-mo, and my voice seemed muffled and distorted. Of course, my cries did nothing to alter the trajectory of the device as it spun farther away from me, like an Olympic gymnast performing an award-winning somersault.

I landed with a thud, moments before the laptop did the same, though the sound was more of a metallic crunch, and I swore to God, part of my soul died. I was at the feet of the one element of the collision that hadn’t ended up in the air, and I didn’t dare to look up to see who owned the wall of muscle that so easily withstood that kind of impact.

In the event, I didn’t need to, as the mountain came to Mohammed.

“Umm... Shit, are you okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. I mean I saw you, but by the time I’d registered what was going on, it was too late to stop. Here, let me... Are you okay?”

He was hurriedly picking up my stuff, and shoving it haphazardly into my backpack. I watched him mutely, unable to say a word, until my silence must have rattled him, as he stopped what he was doing, and looked back to me.

“Oh, my bad. I didn’t even wait for you to answer. Are you hurt? Can you stand?”

Chapter 4

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