Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Lenore didn't want to make a scene, even though these two definitely did. She didn't want to validate a world where Kate Toynbee didn't exist. Kate of Papa John's.

She knew she had photos of her in her phone and looked for one for way too long. "Do you have nudes?" Jill blared, snatching it up from her hands, swiping around, before her attention skipped to Becky rolling down her window to holler at some guys. At first Jill thought she was leaning outside to hurl and held her hair so hard Becky shrieked in pain in the middle of the words 'big black cock'. The phone fell somewhere in the darkness of the car along with the lollipop Becky was sucking on, an unworn stiletto, wrapped tampons and they leaned down and looked and fought and laughed and brayed and the cab driver had to tell them to calm down and Lenore wasn't drunk enough for that shit.

They danced on the curb, all the way up to their apartment, poked and pushed Lenore and smothered her with their hands just like earlier.

She was the first naked.

She was the only one naked.

They had laid her out on a bed and overwhelmed her from head to toe. They had retrieved all their finesse and concentration. While Lenore was losing her mind. It felt so good she could have blacked out. They caressed her absolutely everywhere, with oil and their sweetest craft. Lenore became nothing but skin. So much and so long she didn't realize she had a tongue in her mouth and a finger in her pussy.

They turned so brash she writhed with lust, opened her eyes. They called her their slut. Their clothes were stuck to their skin, all she could caress was the metal or plastic parts of their pants, their bras, the plastic in their hair, the watch on their wrists.

She had reached the moment where they would both eat her out at the same time.

A sensation normal women would never experience.

And she tried not to think about Kate when it happened.

She saw their heads disappear.

And here it was. Their mouths took her whole.

It felt as good as she had imagined but not as enjoyable. Because...

They lifted her leg up and went deeper. Pleasure bounced anywhere she chose to, their two tongues were imperative about that. And it was just her pussy and ass. On top of that, their four hands were still at it, hitting all the right spots, nipples, soles, tailbone, all the time so ubiquitously.

Then why did they pretend they had invited Kate?

A finger settled on her anus. Lenore whimpered and shriveled away. Only a few inches.

A knuckle went in. Then another.

"No," she finally let out.

A hand grabbed her hip and pulled and she then had a whole finger up her ass. It felt like nothing at all. The lips around her clit felt like sugary fire.

The finger slid in and out and it burned. She wailed a second No, twisted herself free and rolled off the bed, away from finger and tongues, back to her feet, facing the two girls.

There was a pause. Insanely silent for three sluts who were fucking like sluts.

Or maybe it was only Lenore. The other two were smiling. Not like when you're having sex.

Becky was grinning.

Jill was grinning.

They were staring.

Not staring back. Staring.

They stared at her the whole time. They didn't need to look to know what was up.

Jill had shit on her finger.

Jill kept her grin the whole time when Jill lifted that soiled finger up to her mouth and sucked it clean.

At that point, Lenore had already started to pick up her clothes from the floor but it was out of shame and disgust. She backed away out of terror only when the mouth let go of the finger and inside she didn't see the fleshy red of a human being and didn't hear the slick of human saliva and the languorous moan of a human throat. She glimpsed the blueish glint of an insect, mandibles wriggling, gurgling behind a lipsticked toothless smile.

She ran for her life and her sanity, putting her clothes on in the stairs, crying at the horror now behind her. She ran for many blocks into the night.

It was the night September had chosen to announce winter. It was cold. It would get in her clothes, like they were wet. She barely felt it, fear was colder.

Cabs didn't stop for her until she had washed the tears and the dread off her face. She would have to wait for her apartment to cry again.

Which she did. A lot. Especially when she found out she had soiled her underwear.

She was already in the shower, so neither tears nor shit made any difference.

She didn't stay long because she wanted--she needed to hear Kate.

Squatting on the bath mat, with a towel as her only protection, she looked for her name in her contacts.

Didn't find it.

These maniacs deleted it.

Her hair dripped water onto the phone screen.

She ran to her laptop in the bedroom and looked for her number. It was in a text file somewhere.

Kate Toynbee.

She did exist.

Her photo folder. Her Instagram. She had to be in there.

The movement of the cursor was interrupted by a memory: the selfie from lunchbreak.

Lenore opened the picture, this time it took only a few taps.

She wailed in shock.

It was herself, Lena, in Papa John's, alone.

She zoomed in, zoomed out. And then she hesitated...but swiped to another picture.

Another.

Another.

Another. Another.

Everybody was missing. Photoshopped out.

She opened Instagram. She opened her folders. She opened a dozen jpegs fullscreen on her laptop and on all of them she was alone. Blurry crowds and anonymous bystanders didn't count. She was alone. And when even she was not in the picture, it was just a background, a landscape, empty chairs, selfies taken by no one.

Lenore was alone in her apartment going insane, waking the neighbors with her cries.

It took her a long time to "accept" the situation and fight the raspy panic off her chest and only when she could she took her phone and called her parents.

Who didn't answer.

Tristyn.

No, Kate.

No response. No voicemail.

Tristyn.

"Pick up! PICK UUUUUUP! Please!"

Josh Durrell maybe.

No.

Lenore broke her voice. She called a dozen other contacts, friends and relatives, all a screaming absence on her laptop. None of them answered. Each failure furthered down the madness.

Brian.

All her pictures of him were on an external drive.

She wouldn't look at them. No.

His name was still in her contacts and it made her cry more than ever.

The next one was Brian's mom.

It would be her last try.

She hesitated.

She tapped Call and tried to handle her crazy voice during the series of tunes.

It connected straight to voicemail.

Hearing the woman's voice was better than nothing. And it was better than confronting the woman herself.

But of course Brian's mom called back not a minute later.

*Lena?*

"Hi, Mrs. Reed, I--"

*What time is it? What do you want?*

"I... I just..."

*Yes?*

"I thought... I found some more stuff from Brian and I thought--"

*I told you you can keep it. Is that why you're calling me?*

"I'm sorr--"

*It's three o'clock in the morning, WHY ARE YOU CALLING?*

Lenore opened her mouth and no sound came out. The woman sighed, audibly sat up in her bed.

*Look. Lena. We did everything right, ok?* She paused, thought out her words. *We told each other over and over how we knew what we were going through. I think I made it clear that I would never hold you responsible for what he did. But please, can you accept now that I don't know you?* Her voice didn't falter. Actually it sounded even stronger as she said, *We met at his funeral for Pete's sake! He never even told me your last name.*

"I'm sorry I--"

*Lena, I don't know what you're going through anymore. No, actually I think I know. And it's not good. And you have to move on. It... It was horrible what he did to us, it was unfair, and it wasn't your fault. So please, just try to get better. Try not to make the same mistake he made. I want to see you as the person who soothed his pain a little before he took his life. But I don't want to hear from you again. Can you do that? Can you understand what it means to do that?*

Lena disabled her microphone so Mrs. Reed wouldn't hear her sobbing.

*I know you put yourself on mute, Lena, but listen to me. I can't help you anymore. I don't know you. And you can't help me either. So please move on. There's nothing wrong with moving on. I'm his mother and I'm asking you. Move on. Get help. You can even hate him for what he did. Just do something. Life is long. Life is very long. People who tell you otherwise they have something to sell. Now I'm gonna hang up, ok? You can keep what you found or you can throw it away, I don't know. But I want you to stop calling. Please.*

They exchanged a few more words, awkward and useless but necessary to the end of any conversation, and then the strongest woman Lenore had ever met hung up. And Lenore was back to her life. The picture on her laptop screen didn't show loneliness anymore. Just herself and Josh Durrell and his wife Monica posing in front of the Hollywood sign.

She was not alone. She had at least twenty phone calls incoming soon. One of them Kate, back inside the selfie.

She had the box.

It was on the bed. Waiting.

There was a post-it note on top, left unfolded so she would read it whether she liked it or not.

NOW WE KNOW EVERYBODY YOU KNOW. THANKS.

Fright seized her so tight she could not scream it out through her damaged vocal cords.

She crawled into a corner of the bedroom, stuck her back to it. There was no one behind her, there could be no one.

But there was a coven of witches at Deep Green. And she had let them in.

And the box, the one thing that had helped her know what to do these last few days had become her one problem.

Burn it.

She could burn it.

She thought.

But a box endlessly full of papers would also burn endlessly. And make hell on earth, literally.

I HAD A FRIEND WHO REALIZED YOU CAN'T BURN ANYTHING WHEN YOU LIVE IN A CITY. HE HAD NO FIREPLACE, NOTHING. FIRE DETECTORS EVERYWHERE. SO HE WENT TO SKIDROW AND FOUND A BRAZIER AND HE GOT SHANKED.

Untape it completely could be worse.

Empty it then?

NO STORY. CONTINUAL RED HERRINGS.

She reached out a hand. That's all she had to do. Her reading frenzy which had been euphoria so far turned to panic. Lenore read handfuls, several at the same time. She read to try to understand. She read because it was her only dialog tonight.

I KNOW A STORY THAT IS NOT ABOUT WITCHES. IT WOULD BE COOL IF YOU USED IT.

A talk with the enemy.

STICK TO YA YOU PATHETIC BITCH. AT LEAST YOU COULD MAKE MONEY FROM IT.

One-sided.

THEY MADE A SEQUEL OF YOUR PARENT'S SEX TAPE. IT'S A SNUFF FILM.

And if she didn't know the origin, she knew the intent.

OLAUS FLAVIUS WAS BURNED AT THE STAKE WITH HIS OWN BOOKS, YOU KNOW?

Because it was slowly slipping.

I HOPE THIS SHIT GETS YOU IN TROUBLE

Slipping toward the only language that gets one's full attention.

WE'LL BURN YOUR HORSES. WE'LL HANG YOU DOGS.

The only thing one always underestimates.

WITCHES HATE SNITCHES GET STITCHES

Violence.

YOU KNOW WHAT'S WORSE THAN A GUN? A KNIFE.

Lenore punched the box away, physically feeling the difference between a clean bullet in the chest and the coldness and the slowness of a blade cutting the skin of the inside of your elbow, of your belly, meeting the veins, the nerves, the drag when slicing through the fat and the give once it has reached the organs, a papercut times one billion across your eyelids and your eyeball, your guts in your hands as you watch the ceiling fade to red and dark.

A grotesquely large buttplug tumbled down from the box.

It gave Lenore the senseless energy to go for her dildo and try to smash it to pieces.

Its material stained her fingers like marzipan melting down, leaving a purple color. Somehow it gave her all the more energy to grab it tighter and break it in half against the corner of the desk. Lenore was growling in rage, hit after hit.

The softening dildo slipped and Lena howled with pain. She had cut her hand.

Something had sliced through the palm. She looked at the sextoy: a razor blade was peeking from the melted surface.

All this time it had been waiting. For her.

Lenore used her panic to get dressed and leave her apartment.

She would leave everything behind. The box, her story, her job... A new woman she would be.

She bled on her driving wheel, on her phone. Kate never answered.

She drove to her place and Kate Toynbee wasn't there. It was a new name on the doorbell.

No window lit up as she called and called. No muffled sound of ringtone came through the glass.

And it didn't scare her. Somehow Lenore knew it wasn't a supernatural part of her night. She was only disappointed. Kate didn't live here anymore. Her friend didn't tell her about it.

*****

And since she couldn't spend the rest of the night in the street, she crawled back in the corner of her bedroom and waited for the end.

*****

Saturday (three days)

The ringtone could never wake her up in normal times. It was just an annoying input to her sleeping brain which could be dealt with later. This morning, as her phone chimed and vibrated in her lap, she didn't have to get up, she didn't have to properly awaken. Lenore raised her head and knew it was Kate without looking at the screen.

Her back hurt, bent into the shape of the corner. Her knees hurt. Her neck hurt. Her mind was numb.

She had cried enough last night that she could sound somewhat okay on the phone.

*I turned off my phone. It says you called me 46 times. What's wrong?*

"I need to see you."

*What's wrong?*

"Please, come. I don't wanna cry on the phone."

*Say no more.*

It was 9:14am. Quickly showered and clothed, Lenore put a band-aid on her hand and took on cleaning up the place in a way so full of bitterness it was actually satisfying: she shoved everything into the box. Papers, food, her clothes from last night, the buttplug. The dildo. She raised it to her eyes and took a last look at the razor blade in the daylight.

"God damn all of you," she murmured.

She pushed the toy down into the chasm.

Everything felt clean again, in appearance at least. Only was missing the smell of coffee and as the pot started to fill up in the kitchen, she got some duct tape to close the box.

What will she tell Kate? If she tried to show her the threats, would they be changed back to some harmless stories, making her look like a fool?

She took one sheet. Just one, a last one, just to be sure.

HELLO MY BABY, HELLO MY HONEY, HELLO MY RAGTIME GAL

She didn't get the reference but understood what it was gonna be like. So she did shut the box.

After a few shakes, the sound of the garbage inside disappeared among the ruffle of paper and then there was the doorbell. Five seconds later, she was in her friend's arms.

Kate, who smelled like sweat.

"I was at the gym when I called," she apologized.

"It's ok." It was better than Jill's perfume and Becky's alcohol breath.

"Mind if I use your shower?"

"Sure, go ahead. I have to do the dishes. And my bed. And whatever." Lenore almost threw in, I love you.

Hours later, she woke up on the couch, dishes and bed still undone, Kate clean in her dirty clothes sitting next to her, looking at her with patient concern.

It was 14:36pm. The cups of coffee on the table were long cold but Lenore chugged hers down.

She tried to sigh out all her anguish and then tried one of the many ways to begin:

"Are you alright?"

Kate had not expected this one. "Yes. O-Of course. It's me who should ask you th--"

"No one um..."

"What?"

Lenore didn't want to scare her by asking her if she had been followed by... By what exactly?

"What happened to your hand?" Kate asked.

"I...cut myself cooking."

"Are you gonna tell me what's wrong?"

Lenore took a deep breath. Time for the half-truths. "Why didn't you show up last night?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Becky didn't call you?"

"No. She told you she did?"

"Yes."

Kate frowned. "I was home. Stop hanging out with this psycho and her friend."

"I won't, believe me."

"Why? They did something to you?"

"No, that's not what I meant."

"What did they do to you? What happened to your hand?"

"I cut myself! And...I think... I think they're fighting over me."

Now Kate's eyebrows went incredulous, one up, one down. "Oh..."

"Yeah, they had a huge fight last night. And apparently they were both hitting on me and it's turning everything to shit at work. And... I don't want to go on Monday."

"And that's why you're feeling bad? Cause two hot girls have a ladyboner over you?"

"No, I'm scared they're gonna go after you."

Kate faltered slightly. "Why would they do that?"

"Because..."

Time to lie.

"...Because I'm in love with you, Kate."

"No you're not!" Kate had put a little mocking inflection in her voice and she had glints in her eyes, but it lasted about four seconds. The corners of her mouth bent downward, her eyes tore up. She fought against cries with all her might and it exploded anyway.

She rushed into Lenore's arms, into her neck, bawling and crying:

"Don't tell me that, Lena! Don't tell me that if you don't mean it."

Lenore didn't expect this reaction. She could have never expected to see the limits of Kate's resilience. She held her friend very tight. Because in fact she didn't really know if she did mean it.

The next logical step would have been for them to kiss.

They didn't. Lenore looked at Kate in the eye, grave, and told her:

"I want you to move in here. You pack all your stuff and you move in and you're my girlfriend now."

Kate wiped her puffy eyes. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"They can't hurt us if we're together."

"What?"

"Or do you want me to move to your place?"

"No, I..."

"Do you love me, Kate?"

This was the weirdest moment of Kate's young life.

She spluttered, "I... I love you so much I'm scared," and lowered her eyes.

Lenore was thinking as fast as she could. "You're so scared you let me friendzone you?"

The eyes rose back. "Yeah..." And an embarrassed smile appeared.

This time they kissed. Lenore initiated.

And it was awful. Their lips clumsy and hard as stone, as though they had never kissed before. Never kissed women.

"You stay here tonight," Lenore affirmed.

"Of course."

"Do you want me to help you go get some of your stuff?"

"No, we're staying here, it's ok, I don't wanna do that today."

They realized they were still arm in arm, knee against knee. They stood up and stepped back from each other, nervous, flushed.

"We take all the time necessary," Lenore said. "I'm in love with you and we'll sort this out."

"Lena, it's not love, it's the fucking witness protection program!"

"No..."

She raised her voice: "You go talk to them on Monday. Or I'll do."

Lenore did too: "Alright, alright, I will. Are you hungry?"

Kate shouted: "I'm starving!"

They ordered sushi. They ate in almost complete silence.

It was a huge mess in Lenore's head.

She might be dead on Monday, for all she knew.

It was one of the many reasons for her next move.

*****

Lenore reached out and grabbed the hem of Kate's sweatshirt.

She pulled.

"What are you doing?"