The Best of Us is Not All of Us Ch. 01

Author's Note - Hey. I just wanted to let you guys know that this story is still basically porn. If that's what you're looking for, just do a word search for "cock," "tumescent," or "mariachi band." That should get you there in jig time.

The other thing I wanted to say is that this story has two happy endings, and no, I don't mean the professional massage kind. The first one occurs in the middle, and if you stop there, it's pretty positive. Maybe too easy, but a happy ending nonetheless.

The second comes later, and it isn't as easy. I'm not trying to claim it's a harrowing read that bares the emptiness inside humanity or anything. It's still porn, remember? I just want people to know. I know I have a tendency to give people what I want for myself. And sometimes, I just want to know if all this shit is going to be worth it. I like happy endings that come after shitty times. I have to believe that shitty things eventually lead to less shitty things if you just keep going.

Anyway, dear reader. There's a happy ending. Just keep going.

Promise.

* * *

Sarah loved her voice. She hated everything else, but her voice was golden. She did voice acting and while she managed to play minor roles in a couple of games, anime, and cartoon dubs, most of her prolific work involved adult titles. She had played desperate horny housewives, seductive teachers, and villainous vamps. If she wasn't so cripplingly shy, she'd probably have a good singing voice too.

She hated everything else, and in her mind, for good reason. She was tall and skinny but not in a model way, more like a scrawny and wrung out way, but for some reason, with a perpetual tummy bump. She felt hard pressed to describe the rest of herself. She had a face, and the sum of its parts were incredibly average. Her eyes were blue, but apparently not very functional. She had terrible vision, necessitating thick glasses. She had boobs. They were on her chest. She had hay-colored hair that seemed perpetually dry, and frizzled easily. She felt like a misguided Halloween costume from the line of "Sexy Scarecrows."

But her voice...

"You have failed, Bryn of Laria, your husband's soul is mine!" her voice was a sensual growl, smiling with malicious triumph. She was behind her DM screen, an impromptu fortress of three-ring binders. "Forever trapped away from you even in death - never to feast and drink within the halls of the Horned King."

"You fiend!" her friend Eve shouted. "I'll... I'll find a way. You haven't beaten us yet."

"My character sheaths her battle axe and puts an arm around Bryn, whispering," and here, Jade cleared her throat and used her best barbarian voice, "it'll be okay, Bryn. I promise we won't stop until we do."

"Okay..." Alex raised a hand slightly, and they all waited as she thought about her next act. "Okay. Umm, I want to start sneaking behind the sorceress..."

"Sure thing, I like your blood thirstiness" Sarah said, "but, let me finish monologuing and then we can get this show on the road. Ahem, dark necrotic energies swirl around her as she begins walking away from you towards the open nether gate. She turns around, walking backwards as she continues..."

Sarah stood up, her voice rising to barely constrained condescending megalomaniacal glee, "I see you little rogue, do you think I could be stopped by a sharp edge and some sideways walking! You'll never take the Amulet of Hirothar as long as I draw breath. Goodbye my little Widow Warrior, it will be a pity when I have to kill you. Your anguish lightens my days." Pause. Arrogant smirk. "Ha ha ha ha..." Sarah drew her head back and turned away from her group. "HA HA HA!" Deep breath. "MWAHAHAHA!"

She turned around quickly, her fingers in one hand facing up and coming together to a point. "And scene."

Her friends grinned at each other, giving her an appreciative round of golf claps. "We'll have to skip this next week since you're going on a trip for spring break, right Al?"

"Um. Yeah. Um, sorry guys," Alex said, her head down. "My family's going to Korea to see their grandma, I mean, my grandma, my mom's mom, and I'm going to go too, umm. I've never met her."

"Sounds like it'll be fun," Sarah said. "It's no problem. I need to do some extra studying over the week anyway."

"Psssh." Eve rolled her eyes and then continued rolling them. "Pssssssh! Whatever. You sleep through every class and ace every exam."

"Only in CS," Sarah said. "I have Spanish and fucking Biology too."

This time her friend Jade chimed in. "Oh Sarah, there's plenty of videos online about fucking biology if you look."

Sarah smiled nervously at this, but covered it up by speaking in her best nature documentary voice, "Observe how the oversized glans of the Pizza Boy begin to expand as the Housewife digitally and orally stimulates his testicles."

This got a laugh, and Jade proceeded to say, "I would kill to see the Bangtan Boys."

"Yeah, right," Eve said. "They're just hanging out at the airport when you get in."

"I know they're like super famous or whatever. But you'll be in the same country."

"Um, I think... um, that mostly we'll just be seeing family," Alex said. "I'm not really into, um, Korean guys."

"Whaaat?!" Jade stood up, on the verge of her own dramatic proclamations. "They're so very pretty. I just want to... pet them."

She pantomimed the motion of stroking luscious Asian boy band hair as she leered into space. "Plus," Jade continued. "Asian guys go crazy for white women."

"Umm..." Alex said. "That's not... really relevant to me."

"Just saying," Jade continued smoothly, her hand now sweeping across in one motion, "that I would build myself an Asian boy harem. And they would dance for my pleasure. And cook for me. Massage me as a squad. Oh! Play LoL with me, and..."

"It's almost a shame you can barely talk to boys," Sarah said.

"Hey! You wanna take this outside,?" Jade said, rotating her clenched fists in the manner of an old timey boxer.

"Aren't there like... bears outside?" Sarah replied. "Okay, look! Love you guys, but I gotta get to bed! Take the snacks, I don't like leftovers and goooo!"

After the dice were cleaned up, the hugs were exchanged, and the snacks were doled out, Sarah shut the door to her dorm room. The last thing she heard was her friend Jade saying something along the lines of, "... and Thailand has tom-dees and ladyboys that I would give my left tit to..."

She smiled with a shake of her head. She loved her friends, and while it took some work and many failures, she loved herself too. Mostly.

But in these moments, when her friends left and she was in her room with its Full Metal Alchemist and Nier: Automata posters on the wall, her Steven Universe figurines on her desk, and non-six-sided dice strewn about, she felt a pang of something and wasn't sure what it was.

She loved being a nerd, but that wasn't why she did it. She just did. Even if she didn't live in a time where the biggest movies of the year were Marvel films, and she couldn't disseminate Steve / Bucky slash fiction onto Tumblr where a legion of fans devoured it, she'd still be strange. It was a great time to be strange - nerd culture was just culture now.

And celebrating it with her friends in a space like this, accepted, safe, and loved, she should be happy. And she was. Mostly.

Sarah realized she had been scratching the outside of her arm with her fingernails, gouging them into herself, leaving faint pink welts on her skin. She shook her head and dropped her arm.

Things were good, she told herself. And this was the best of all timelines. She believed it and wished it actually made her feel better.

* * *

Sarah sat by herself in the dining hall, also known as The Slop by its students, since it was Loppe Hall. She had a grilled cheese and fries on a plate nearby as she drank Diet Mountain Dew. She was going through the reading for biology when she was aware of someone approaching her.

She ignored it until the figure stopped at her table. She looked up.

The letterman jacket was open and she could see the t-shirt underneath strained around his muscles. He wasn't overly built, just very fit. She could see his toned torso led up to broad shoulders and tapered down to his flat stomach. He was part of the wrestling team according to his jacket. He had dark hair cut short so that it stuck up by itself, dark brown eyes below well-defined eyebrows, and blemish free olive skin. He had a cute smile, shy and friendly, and mysteriously, he seemed to have intended to come up to her table to talk to her.

"Can I help you?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Excuse me, sorry to bother you, but you're in my bio class, right?"

Realization dawned on her and she nodded. "Oh."

"I missed class on Monday and..."

"Yup yup," she said. "What's your email? I can send you my notes."

He squirmed a bit and said. "Umm, send it to... Samantha Vines Lover, Vines, like with an N. At Jmail.com."

Her eyes shot open, her fingers slowed and she looked up. "Is that a reference to Samantha Vines from the Riskworld novels?"

"Ha ha, yeah, I... got the email address when I was younger. My mom was a huge fan, so I read them too."

"I..." she looked around conspiratorially, and while no one was paying attention, the dining room was full at this time of day. "Can I show you something?"

"Sure."

She pulled the neck of her t-shirt down and to one side. She then bent over slightly, showing off a tattoo on her upper left chest of a stylized police badge that had two hippos and an owl over a river with a cross that had a weird loopy part. The badge said, "A.M.C.W. 177."

"Oh, umm..." he smiled nervously. "Is that... from Riskworld?"

Her face reddened and she coughed. She fixed her shirt and shook her head. "Sorry about that. Didn't mean to get weird on you."

"No, I'm sorry!" he said, seemingly genuinely apologetically. "I remember the stories and stuff, and I really do like them. It's just been a while, and I didn't remember the badge number. I didn't connect it right away."

"No no," she shook her head, "it's fine. I'm kind of a geek. As if you couldn't tell," she gestured to herself.

She looked down at her laptop again, "anyway. If you ever miss class again just let me know."

He was still staring at her with guilt written all over his face. She found this irritating. He cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. Look, I really appreciate you opening up to me about something you find important enough to tattoo onto your body. I mean it."

She narrowed her eyes at him. She couldn't find anything but forthright honesty in his dark eyes. "You don't have to apologize for not being interested and you don't have to apologize for my feelings on it, because there wasn't any harm there. I am totally used to me being too obsessed with stuff, and I'm totally used to not, like... ranting about things no one cares about. It's not a big deal."

He looked uncertain, and he looked down. "Is that... a Dungeons and Dragons book?"

Anger burned in Sarah as she followed his gaze, and tried to radiate as much ice as possible. "Yup. Another one of those dorky things that dorky people do. In our mothers' basements in the dead of night, covered in Cheeto dust and drowning in Mountain Dew. Is there anything else you want?"

His smile weakened and melted as she talked self-deprecatingly of one of her favorite things to do every week.

"I, umm..."

It occurred to Sarah that this jock was actually nervous talking to her. She was often in her own head enough to have escape plans in case of bear attacks, or if there was a poison cloud nearby, or even if her left leg suddenly decided to just stop working. A hot boy was nervous while trying to socialize with her, and there were no contingency plans for such a situation in her mind.

As a geek girl who was often the only vaguely female-shaped thing in male-dominated geek spaces, she had been approached by many, many suitors. She had dated lots of them too. Nervousness or awkwardness was not unusual in those cases.

This young man, with his perfect teeth, strong jawline, and yoked out bod was sitting here, nervously making small talk with her. About Riskworld and D&D.

"I used to play it when I was a kid with my mom," he coughed and his smile resumed at full wattage. "And I played it with my friends in middle school, but I gave it up."

"How come?" She asked, despite herself.

"Well," he shrugged, looking down, "my mom used to DM for us, and... I mean. At this point, my dad got me into sports and stuff. Then I was 'too cool' to be doing that sort of thing anymore. Say... do you..."

"To be fair, you probably are," Sarah said.

His smile froze for a second, and then he laughed lightly. "Right. Anyway, thanks for the notes. I'll see you in class?"

Sarah waved him off, "yup yup."

She finished eating, went to class, studied, bought a bag of chips, ate the bag of chips, and took a nap. Sarah went to another class, hung out at the pond, and then went home. She watched some Netflix, ate some leftovers, and went to bed.

Exactly nineteen hours, thirty-two minutes later, Sarah sat bolt upright in bed and shouted at her cat, Ifrit, who was on her feet. "WHAT THE FUCK DID I DO?!"

Ifrit, stared at her, and then looked away, like a spurned Victorian lover - all stoicism and weariness. The unspoken words that he found himself unwilling to even bother with were, "oh, I think you know what you did."

She reached over to the nightstand and got her phone She opened up the email she had sent him that contained her notes and stared at the screen, before deciding on typing in:

oh hey if you wanna dnd sometime with us, let me know. One of us our players will be gone next week if you wanna do a one shot. heres my number if this is easier for ya

Sarah was the type of person who removed punctuation in an effort to appear more casual in emails and text messages. Truthfully, everytime she made an intentional grammatical error, it made her a little more empty inside.

She sent it and nodded with a job well-done.

She checked the time. It was 4:11 in the morning. Not a time when perfectly normal healthy people sent e-mails.

"WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING?! Is this going to look weird? Shit! What if his phone is turned on and it wakes him up?"

Ifrit licked his butthole scornfully, as if to imply that her words and petty concerns were more foul than his task at hand.

"You're no help at all," she said. "Besides..."

She shook her head, getting rid of a silly thought and went back to bed.

* * *

Dear Sarah,

Thanks for the invitation! I definitely would love to get into your game and roll some dice! Let me know what time, where, and if you want me to bring anything!

J

She looked at his email and stared at it. Perfect punctuation and complete sentences.

"Is this what love feels like?" she asked Ifrit.

Ignoring her and without remorse, he pushed her bowl of cereal onto the floor. In the early morning light, his face seemed somehow more beautiful, augmented by callous cruelty and disdain. Perhaps she loved him because he was honest in a world where people obfuscated with polite lies.

"Aww, bad kitty!" She said, giving him cat treats.

* * *

"So who's this random guy you invited?" This was Jade, who was setting up the card table in the middle of Sarah's dorm room.

"Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's fine, but..." Eve trailed off, holding a grocery bag of snacks.

"I know," Sarah said.

And it was hard to phrase exactly what it was that Sarah knew. What they all knew.

They've all been the only woman in the group before, and it's not like the guys they played with were bad people. They were just guys, but that didn't mean guys were bad exactly. It just meant that...

It meant that when they put together an all girls D&D group, it was different. It'd been nice.

There was a knock at the door as the table and then the chairs were added. The computer chair was swiveled over from her desk to be her DM chair, and three folding chairs were set-up, taken from their usual hiding spot in the tiny closet.

Jade walked over to the door and opened it.

"Hey!" Jay waved. "I'm Jay. I..."

Jade shut the door. She turned around as if rotating on a wheel.

"What the fuck, Jade?! Let him in!" Sarah said, wide-eyed.

"That's Jay?" Jade asked.

"Yes!"

She nodded. "Could you ask him if we could touch his abs?"

"Holy fuck, Jade! You... how many times have guys asked to touch your boobs?" Sarah asked.

"Was he that hot?" This was Eve, who munched on a baby carrot.

Jade's head nodded emphatically. "Open a window, Sarah, it's going to get humid in here." She said, fanning her crotch region.

"First, gross. Second," Sarah said, "I actually think he might be a decent guy. Not just nice, but... "

"Please," Eve said. "You don't know anything about him. Pretty people have that effect though. Just being decent makes them amazing people."

Sarah sighed. "Open the door or get out of the way."

Jade turned around and opened the door. "Hey! Sorry, Sarah was in the nude still, so she was changing."

"Jade!"

"Yup," Jade went on. "You know girls. Just hanging around comparing boob sizes, firmness, and perkiness."

"Right," Jay nodded. "It's the same in the lockers. Constant sword fights and casual handies. It's good for relieving the stress from the matches."

Jade's eyes went wide. "Really?" She practically drooled at the thought.

"Yeah, the coach has us line up, and you just jerk the guys next to you," he said, standing upright and spreading his arms, moving them as if he was operating a pair of skis with a limited range of motion.

"R... really?"

He laughed and smiled, and Sarah waved him in. "Come on in, no more tits, just crits."

"That's... when you roll a 20 on a d20," Eve said.

"Yeah, I know," Jay said, but in a pleasant way with a smile.

Eve went red in the face. "Ohmigod, I just nerdsplained to you."

"It's okay! I probably look like a neanderthal dragging my club into here, but I actually have dice. I actually just bought them today."

"I thought you played before?" Sarah asked.

"I... threw it all away," he said, and the smile looked a little strained.

Was that a fib? Was there more to that? Sarah hated how she was so suspicious of Jay.

"What are we doing tonight?" asked Eve.

"Well, I figure since we have a new person with us, we could do a one shot," Sarah said, walking towards the door. "And since he hasn't played in a while, I was thinking just an easy romp through some-"

She turned off the lights.

Suddenly, her voice boomed out in the dark, a demonic roar as she turned on her phone's flashlight to illuminate her face from below.

"FOOLS! Your travels have taken you to the ends of the world, and the ENDS OF YOUR SANITY! Every shadow hides either your paranoid fantasies, or perhaps hides an ACTUAL DEMON TRYING TO FUCK YOUR SOUL! You have stumbled upon the WOMB OF ANNIHILATION! Terrifying eldritch abominations will FEAST ON YOUR BRAINS! And should you avoid the welcome release of death, FIENDISH TRAPS WILL DRAIN YOU OF YOUR CEREBRAL SPINAL FLUID!"

Sarah was walking back to the table as she delivered her monologue, and she paused as she awkwardly fiddled with her laptop. There was a peal of thunder from her laptop speakers, diminished by the tinny quality to the sound.

"You're already DAMNED! Salvation is a lie!"

Jade and Eve clapped appreciatively, and Jay joined in when he saw this. Eve broke the silence by asking, "wait, did you, uh, say the, uh, 'Womb' of Annihilation?"

"I did, but I was hoping you guys wouldn't notice," Sarah said. "I had a really good flow there, you know?"

"Oh," Jay said, "so we're not actually going to be going inside a womb that annihilates?"

"Not on a first date anyway, big boy," Jade said, slugging him in the shoulder lightly. "I can show you some other time."