Leave Us Alone

"You didn't mess with the coffee, did you?"

"No. The whole thing happened right near my house, so that would have been really damn dumb. I just got wrapped up in a half-hour conversation with this dope, where it was clear that... even if he was being nice, he just had... so many beliefs that I don't respect. But now I'm apologizing, so I have to act like it's all OK. It wasn't like it was anti-futa stuff or anything. This guy probably didn't know anything about futa but... it just made me regret going back. No, it made me regret losing my temper and even acknowledging this dimwit's life at all.

"At the shop I used to work at, I used to try to make conversation with the customers. And that's where you learn that most of the people in the world are absolute MORONS. And they are SO SURE they've got everything figured out, which is why they're buying the Malt-O-Meal cereal in the bags, or lottery tickets. You ever hear people talking on the bus? They've got it ALL figured out, despite the fact that they don't even have CARS. I'm not going to act like I know a lot of stuff, but... I know what I don't know."

"So... you'd say you're a bit of a misanthrope."

"That's like saying I'm a bit of a crocodile-o-phobe after I got my foot eaten. MOST people are fine, but every so often, you get someone who will essentially FORCE you get into an argument and make a big deal out of it. It's been said before... not like I discovered this, but it's true that the people who hassle you at jobs like that are mostly people in their forties who can't control any aspect of their life except spreading misery. You can do everything right and they still go off. It's like finding a landmine in the garden.

"One time, I was crossing the street and he stopped and honked the horn at me. Politely, I should stress. It was at the intersection where I'd cross to get a soda at the Wawa. I waved to him... and after that day, I took a longer route and crossed the street somewhere else... just to lessen the chances that he and I would ever be reaching that intersection at the same time... ever again.

"I know that was irrational, but I just don't want to be part of that community... of that society. One that breeds contemptible idiots like him like moss, but apparently has no place for a futa. I don't want to go to work and pretend that I am interested in helping them find the cheap dish soap or field their complaints about something getting bagged wrong. I would rather be *completely* alone. This is just as close as I can get.

"That's why I don't bother with the Walk anymore, and why I'm not aroused by public nudity. I've SEEN the public, and I want nothing to do with them. Not even sex. If I never had to deal with strangers again, but I also never got laid, it would absolutely be worth it.

"I said sloth was my sin. Really... it's wrath. I commit sloth so I don't commit wrath. And I don't like being angry. But the whole world is bullshit and I can barely stand it. So I stay in my room, stay off the Internet as much as I can... and I play games. It's the only way I can survive. I only return to society to go to the dentist and... occasionally, get a spicy chicken sandwich."

Blake rolled to one side and turned the egg timer off. She stood, approached Lena and wrapped her arms around her in a tight embrace.

"Lena... what happened to you... it was--"

"Real life?" Lena interrupted.

"It was abuse." Blake stressed. "It's trauma, and it's OK to have moments like that. You should talk to someone."

"Who? Nobody here talks. We all just pave over our problems with sex."

"Talk to Rosie. She was a psychiatrist or something."

"I don't think she'll do it for free."

"Of course she will. This whole house is based on people doing what they're good at for everyone else."

"The only thing I'm good at is games."

"Maybe it'll come up someday." Blake said. "But it's fine. You're here because you're a fellow sister futa, and all our sisters are welcome. You don't need to contribute to earn your place. It's already here."

Blake released Lena and stepped back into the sun. She spun in place. "How do I look? Am I nice and tan?"

Lena didn't notice any difference in her complexion. Maybe it was too short a period to make a difference, or maybe it was hard to notice an all-over tan.

"Blake... you're just as lovely as the day we first met."

Blake laughed and pulled Lena in for a long kiss.

"This has been fun."

"It has, yeah."

"Thank you so much for sharing that with me."

"I'm glad to let it go."

They stepped back into the quiet, empty house.

"Maybe for dinner, we'll get some spicy chicken sandwiches delivered."

"That's actually not allowed." Lena pointed out. "No direct deliveries to the house. It would draw too much attention. If we need something from Amazon, we send it to an Amazon locker at the Whole Foods in Santa Fe."

"I was mostly kidding, but I also guess I didn't know that rule."

"Well, yeah, it seems obvious to me. 'Let's deliver Wendy's to that haunted house!' The best case scenario is the driver just eats it when he thinks it's a prank call."

"I hope we've got something around for dinner..."

---

It wasn't dinnertime yet, but Blake's comment made Lena look through the cabinets to plan for that eventuality. There were plenty of boxes of cereal still left around, even some that weren't opened. For the most part, unless someone really disliked all the available open cereals, it was better to eat up one of the open boxes before starting a new one. This wasn't technically a 'rule,' and a box of cereal could sometimes be opened and emptied in the same morning, so there was very little chance of it actually going stale.

Lena looked at the upper cabinets for anything more interesting than a bowl of dry cereal. There was some cans of soup, some dry ramen... all stuff that had to be heated to be consumed. (Well, perhaps not. Her youngest brother would eat dry ramen like a Kit Kat bar and get little curled pieces of freeze-dried noodle all around his desk. She never figured out what he was trying to prove.)

At the back of a high cabinet, just barely in reach of her on the stepstool, she found a tin of snack almonds. She was excited until she opened the plastic lid... and found nothing but rolled-up cash. This alarmed her, and she quickly pressed the lid back in place.

"What'd you find?" Blake came over.

Lena silently removed the lid again and showed her the contents.

"Whoa. How much is that?"

"I don't know. I didn't take it out." Lena replaced the lid again. "It's not mine to mess with."

"Wasn't this a Simpsons thing?" Blake said. "'$20? I wanted a peanut!' Something like that."

"Yeah, I've seen that one." Lena said. "It reminds me of that Saturday Night Live sketch where they keep hiding their gun near other stuff their child was looking for anyway, like Christmas presents and stuff. Like... WHY would you hide money in a food container? We all need to eat."

"If it was a can of artichoke hearts, you probably would have left it right where it was."

"Yeah... maybe it's a deliberate honeypot. Someone leaves that there deliberately to entice and catch a thief."

Blake's interpretation was less conspiratorial. "Or maybe it's just the communal food budget."

"That's also possible." Lena put the can back.

Blake briefly considered the colorful boxes of cereal lining the nearby cabinet's interior, wondering sort of prizes might be inside...

"Do you think anyone else has something hidden in this house?"

"Maybe, but... where would they hide it where someone else wouldn't stumble on it? I don't know if anyone has their own little... zone the way that I do. If I grew up with a Game Boy Advance instead of a SNES, I'd probably move around a bit more."

"Yeah, you could play on the first floor, where it's cooler."

"It's also... louder, most of the time. In my little room, there's only one mattress, so usually only two... or three people doing it in there."

"I won't claim that the bed is mine and mine alone, but... it's the only real bed in the house, so it's the only place I can be tied to a bed."

"Anything hidden up there?"

"Not by me. I've never bothered to look."

"Let's look." Lena said. "What else are we going to do with an empty house?"

Blake had some suggestions, especially what they could do with an empty bed, but Lena was not receptive.

---

The nude pair returned to the bedroom where Lena had first unearthed the cute, hung blonde pixie: her bedroom.

"Where do you think people would hide something in here?" Lena went to the nightstand and opened up one of the drawers. Inside was a plastic cylinder of dozens of zip-ties and a stout pair of scissors. They might have started their life as kitchen shears.

"Those are mine." Blake grinned.

"You had a pair of scissors right here?"

"I didn't ASK you to free me. I asked you to feed me. Or fuck me. You could've done both at once, if you really thought about it..."

Lena closed the first drawer and opened the second one. Nothing inside this one, other than an uncapped pen that had probably sat there for years.

"Come on..." Blake moved over to the bed. "Everyone knows where people hide stuff they don't want anyone to see."

Blake hoisted the mattress up from the box spring.

There was nothing hidden between them.

"What, you looking for old Playboys?" Lena sneered. "Surely, those would get moved or found when someone changes the sheets, right?"

"Who lifts the entire mattress when they change the sheets?" Blake lowered it again. "I never did."

"The only place I ever hid stuff was my hard drive." Lena said. "Thank goodness laptops getting passwords became the standard. Even my parents never went that far."

Blake got down onto the floor, expecting to find one of those treadmills that folded to be stowed underneath the bed. Instead, she found a long, flat box. She pulled it up from the floor and set it on the end of the bed, bowing the mattress under its weight.

"What's that?" Lena asked.

Blake sneezed, smothering it within the crook of her elbow.

"Dust?"

"This is one of the only times I miss wearing a shirt."

She left to wash her elbow.

Upon her return, Lena hadn't yet opened the box, not wanting to ruin the dramatic reveal. She had summoned her microfiber towel that she used to clean the glass screen on her CRT to lift off the remaining dust, consigning the towel to the laundry heap of socks in her room.

They opened the box.

It was filled with vintage Playboys.

"Holy shit, I was kidding about finding dirty magazines."

Each of them took one of the magazines from the top of the pile. They were in good condition, considering they were decades old. Each magazine was filled with lovely photographs of nude women. Soft focus to minimize minor blemishes, warm colors emphasizing the tanned skin tone, most of the women not even entirely nude, but instead splaying apart robes or draped in chiffon. Every one, without exception, had a thick patch of public hair worthy of the word "beaver."

Blake and Lena each selected a magazine from the stack and flipped it open. The book fell open to a page of a nude woman, as if it had been creased to stay open to a 'favorite' page.

"Wow, you don't see boobies shaped like that anymore." Blake pointed to a partially nude model and her elongated 'torpedo' breasts.

"Hey, I'd take 'em, if they were offered."

"I'm fine with mine. That shape looks better in a bra."

"Makes you wonder what shape will be popular later."

"Yeah, we'll get square breasts like those square watermelons from Japan."

They continued 'reading.'

"I'm so glad I don't need to shave anything..." Lena said.

"Could you imagine? It's bad enough when Maggie's in there shaving the sides of her mohawk and dying her hair."

"Maggie dyes her hair?"

Blake started for a moment, as if she'd let some cat out of the bag. She regained her sense a second later. "Of course she does. We've all seen her in there doing it, getting the sink all black. That's not her secret."

"What's her normal hair color?"

"I don't know. It's always dyed."

Silence, but for the fluttering of slightly stiff glossy pages.

"There's a LOT of ads for cigarettes."

"Yeah... apparently, Camel's 'real taste' satisfies longer." Lena shook her head. The words 'longer' and 'satisfies' should apply to her, not those nasty things.

"I'm SO glad none of us really smoke."

"It's too expensive a habit to keep up out here. And nobody wants to kiss a smoker mouth but another smoker."

They flipped through some more pages.

"Should a gentlemen offer a Tiparillo to a violinist?" Lena read the ad aloud, and then added her own commentary. "I don't know, but I wouldn't offer one to the bassoonist, because the surgeon general wouldn't recommend that someone who uses their lungs to make money, that's for sure."

Blake kept flipping through her magazine. "Is Tiparillo a cigarette?"

"Looks like a mini-cigar."

"Oh, my god, this is like fifty percent ads!" Blake cried, flipping more frantically.

"So is Vogue, when you get right down to it. Or Game Informer."

Lena looked for a feature that wasn't in those magazines. She opened the magazine to its center, where the staple was visible.

"Centerfold's missing from this one."

Blake quickly flipped to the middle of her magazine. "Mine, too. Those must have been ripped out years and years ago."

Flip, flip. There was a surprising amount of cheeky nudity tucked among the old-fashioned ads. It might have stimulated back in the seventies, but today...

"Wow, this is... boring." Lena closed her mag to inspect the back cover.

"I guess seeing acres of naked flesh every day has really desensitized me."

"Yeah, and none of them have dicks."

"Well, all the people who still read these mags... might be a bit old-fashioned. They probably aren't looking for futa nudity."

Flip, flip. Lena gazed at the real-life nudity across from her. Both she and Blake were flaccid.

"This doesn't work for me." She said. "The ads were at least interesting."

Blake closed the magazine gently. "We should take it to the nearest gas station and try to get a refund."

"We could probably make more selling them on eBay."

"I doubt it's worth the hassle. Besides, maybe this DOES belong to one of us. Maybe someone's into retro porn."

Blake put the magazine back into the box. Lena brought the box back to the floor and pushed it back under the bed, in roughly the same spot where she had found it. As she pushed it, Blake heard something clatter beneath the bed. Metal on metal, surely not a noise that came from the cardboard box. Blake squatted down to look at what made the noise.

Lena got back to her feet just in time to see Blake rise back to her height. Now she was holding a wooden pole, about three feet long, with a hook on the end of it.

She squinted at the device. "Are we going fishing? What's that for?"

Blake looked out into space with sudden realization. "I think I know."

She went out into the hall right outside the bedroom and looked at the ceiling. There was a white rectangle of ceiling surrounded by trim with a single ring hanging from one edge. Without hesitation, Blake put the hook into the ring and pulled the section of ceiling down, revealing a metal ladder on the underside. She pulled down the ladder, unfolding it until the rubber feet at the bottom landed perfectly onto two slightly faded sections of the flooring.

Lena had noticed that thing in the ceiling before, and had maybe even felt the little dips in the floor as she slid around in her socks. But seeing this all come together into what was essentially a secret passage stunned her. She really didn't think this house held any more secrets after so long.

Blake looked over to Lena for support. "Is there a rule about not going up there?"

"None that I've ever heard."

They both stood at the foot of the ladder, staring into the dark portal above them.

"Are you at all afraid of going up there?" Lena asked.

"What, are we going to find chopped up bodies up there?"

"Well, we just found that vintage porn sitting under the bed. Maybe some of us are hiding something else up here."

"Or maybe these things just sat under that bed for decades and we're the first to see them since those things were new."

"Well, may as well look up here while there's nobody here to tell us not to."

Lena took grip of the ladder's rungs and brought one foot onto the lowest rung.

She stopped.

"Having second thoughts?"

"This is more... rickety than I expected." She stepped back down. "We also might want to put on our shoes, in case there are nails or something else sharp up there."

"Ugh, I need to find socks, too..."

Blake searched a dresser for a clean pair to put between her and her old shoes. If this dresser was on the first floor, it would almost certainly already be out of the house to make room for more sex. But even with so many hands, getting this thing down the narrow stairs sounded like a pain. Someone would sooner just take it down the stairs in pieces after chopping it up with a saw. But in this seldom used bedroom... it was just another relic from the house's former life.

Her feet now thoroughly protected from any upturned nails, Lena made the slow ascent up the stairs... during which Blake enjoyed the view of Lena's undercarriage. Once Lena had reached the attic, Blake climbed up.

The peak of the room was about seven feet above their heads, sloping at a strong angle until either of them, short as they were, would still have to duck to stand at the edges of the attic. The flat walls perpendicular to the roof both had a single window that let the desert sunlight in, making it surprisingly bright in here, the dust swirling around the sunbeam like glitter.

One half of the attic was mostly reused cardboard boxes, mostly deeply creased and with faded print. They were likely from before the era of commercial storage boxes. The other half of the attic was a rudimentary living space: a basic bed frame with mattress and sheets, a nightstand with a lamp and a small bookshelf. A privacy screen stretched out from the end of the bed.

Blake stood at the end of the bed. She couldn't decide if it was a new or old feature of the house. It looked similar to 'her' bed.

"Looks like you don't have the only bed in the house after all." Lena mused.

"Could this have been someone's bedroom at some point?"

"Maybe. But what if the ladder's up? Can you get it back down if it's up?"

"I don't know. Don't try it. Just thinking about being stuck up here makes me feel claustrophobic."

"YOU, claustrophobic?" Lena said incredulously. "Miss Tie-Me-Up?"

"There's a world of difference between being snug and being trapped."

Lena opened one of the dusty boxes and looked inside. "It's full of plates."

Blake looked over her shoulder. This was way less exciting than the last box they opened, but not every box could be filled with pornography. "Do you think that was... left here? From whoever had this house before us?"

"Probably." Lena pointed to the rim on the plate at the top of the stack. It was decorated with red, orange and amber-colored semicircles. "This design is super 70's."

"That would indicate that this house is at least that old, right?"

"I never said the house wasn't that old. But someone could have brought these in here later. This looks like the original box. It's so old, I wouldn't trust it to hold the weight of these plates anymore."

Lena folded the box closed again. In the corner, there was a piece of furniture that horrified her, folded flat against the wall.

"My God... a crib." She said.

Its presence didn't seem to bother Blake in the same way. "How'd they get it up here?"

Lena lifted the frame with two hands. "It's not very heavy. I just can't believe someone tried raising a baby out here, so far from civilization."