• Previous part (33)
• Next part (35)

---

“Oh, there it is,” Jacqueline murmurs; I only noticed it because today I’m getting paid to obsess over my coworker.

She reaches into her silver pen holder and pulls out a pineapple yellow tube of lip balm. As she unscrews the berry red cap, she pouts in anticipation, and the sight of those lips, plump and inviting, make me a bit woozy.

The tube squirts a gob of balm onto Jacqueline’s index finger. She draws a line across her upper lip, coating its vertical ridges with the waxy paste.

A small shiver runs down my spine. How much fun it would be to lick those lips, taste them, suckle upon their softness, and bite them until they were raw and bleeding into my mouth. I’d swallow it all down like wine, to fill myself up on it forever. I’m nothing but an empty vessel without will nor purpose other than getting congested with Jacqueline’s essence, the only energy that can sustain me through this nightmare inside a rotting corpse.

I’ve been holding my breath for a few seconds. As I strain my eyes to peek at Jacqueline, I feel like a little girl who’s spying on her sexy mom as she fixes herself up, except that my coworker is far more attractive than my mother ever was, and I don’t have to fear getting beaten up. I picture Jacqueline smearing off the excess balm from her bottom lip to rub some onto each of her erect nipples, stroking them tenderly until they turn shiny. But instead she has frozen except for her flaring nostrils, which seem to be sniffling some troubling scent. She arches an eyebrow as she stares down in suspicion at the tube in her hand.

The hairs on my nape stand up, and a sudden burst of adrenaline in my bloodstream makes me tremble. I return my attention to the Python functions I’ve been neglecting, but Jacqueline’s focused gaze is already warming my right eyeball.

An itch worsens in my crotch. This time it signals nervous pee, and it offers me the opportunity to escape to the bathroom. My legs feel weak as I rise to my feet. I head to the entrance as confidently as I can muster, but once I’ve closed the door behind me, although I’m overcome with a wave of dizziness, I manage to run down the hallway and into the ladies bathroom.

The bright fluorescent light blinds me. As I blink repeatedly, I realize that a figure is washing her hands at the sink. I slip into one of the stalls and I lock it with me inside. After I sit on the toilet seat, I squeeze my hands between my thighs. A thin sheen of sweat has lubricated my skin from head to toe. I keep straining, holding back my urine.

When the stranger finally leaves, I pull down my panties, let out a deep breath and allow myself to release a hot stream of piss into the watery abyss. I can’t shit, though. My bowels are clogged with the past, and now, when I need them to expel some of the pent up tension and frustration, they refuse to open for me.

I release a few more spurts, then I slowly lower my forehead to my knees. I take in the stench of urine. The soothing flow of fluids seeps into me like the tide of an ocean into an ocean liner.

How did I get here again, in this dark and empty place, without any hope to find the way back to the world where the sun shines to warm my skin, to make everything seem better than it is? My brain has been invaded by a parasite that feeds on sorrow and pain, my mind is a vast desert with nothing living upon its barren soil except an alien creature that wants me dead, and my skin feels cold like a sheet of ice on a frozen lake. I don’t know if I should bother trying to fight against it, but the only way I’ve ever been able to crawl out of this dark void has been to visualize its outer surface and then tear it into little pieces. In other words, to masturbate. My clitoris aches in the dark, it tingles as the acid tears flow down between the rocks in my internal crevasses.

But the invader has grown fat and swollen from digesting my despair, and I can feel the first stirrings of hunger creeping through its flesh as it grows impatient for more. My tormentor is thirsting to tear more holes, deeper ones. If only I had a gun, like I’ve thought a million times, it would only take one clean shot to blow my brains out, but I remain gunless, so I’m just going to sit inside myself until I die.

Once I stagger out of the stall, I approach the sink to splash my face with cold water. I rest my hands on the cast polymer sink as I stare at the beast in the mirror. I wonder if I’m still me.

Jacqueline already knows that I defiled one of her possessions. In that afternoon, during the blessed solitude of my overtime hours at the office, I failed to retain a memory about where I had stashed the lip balm after I was done with it, and my brain neglected to consider that there could be consequences. I had sought relief that would shoo away the sirens that whisper seductively inside my ears every time I walk along a tall bridge, every time I stare as the train covers the tracks in its approach, every time I feel the lights from an oncoming truck bathing my cursed frame. I play with fire hoping to burn myself alive.

The bathroom door swings open, and I find myself looking up at Jacqueline’s lovely, French visage. Her cobalt gaze tethers me as she pushes the door closed. I fight against a powerful urge to shrink to a whimpering heap in front of the sink.

“You’ve been struggling to concentrate, haven’t you?” she asks with that voice that always reminds me of honey: a soothing, delicious sound. “I’m distracting you.”

I dry my face with a paper towel, mostly in an attempt to calm down.

“It’s not your fault that I wish we had spent the whole morning naked in your bed.”

A soft smile spreads across Jacqueline’s lips, revealing her pearly teeth. Her tongue flicks out to lick a corner of her mouth. She steps towards me. The heat emanating from her body begins to warm mine, and her scent fills the air around us: shampoo mixed with the faint odor of soap and sweat, and on top of it, a perfume that smells of citrus fruits, sandalwood and musk.

I’m getting dizzier as if tipsy. The itch that has grown so deep and dark now pricks into me like an agonizing mosquito bite. I can barely wait until I feel her soft skin pressed against mine, welcome her breath in my mouth, taste her saliva and her sweat. Only then everything will make sense again.

Jacqueline brushes my earlobe with her mouth. Her breath is hot and wet.

“Let’s go inside,” she whispers.

She pushes my shoulders gently towards an open stall. As soon as we both stand inside of it, Jacqueline closes the door behind us with her foot, then barely turns to lock it.

She lifts my chin with her thumb and leans down so her silky hair tickles my cheeks, the tips of our noses touch and her lips hover above mine. My heart is racing like a rabbit in heat, and a warm tingle is spreading through my belly. The more I gaze into her cobalt blue eyes, that are glowing like embers, the wetter I get. I yearn for those blue flames to burn me to ashes from the inside out, melting me into nothing more than charred flesh and a few bone fragments.

Jacqueline, you sexy motherfucker, you magnificent creature of divine beauty. More than flesh and bone, she’s fire and lightning in a thousand dazzling forms. I know how those plump pink lips would feel against mine: I’ve been tasting an echo of them all morning long. But I’ll always need them again and again. I’d love it if she could just open her mouth wide enough to let my whole self slip inside.

As I stand on my tiptoes, I force our tongues to meet each other. Soon enough Jacqueline’s warmth seizes me like a fever. I wrap my arms around her waist and press my body flush against her. We are standing inside an opaque bubble that has isolated us from the outside world, and I wouldn’t mind dying here, in the arms of my better half.

When her tongue leaves my mouth, the sudden emptiness makes my anxiety shoot up. I follow that wet muscular organ to capture it again, but Jacqueline stops me by cupping my face with both hands. The nearby noises return to my ears. A sink faucet is running.

I’m having a hard time holding my breath, but in a few seconds the intruder’s footsteps leave the bathroom. Jacqueline narrows her eyes as she smirks at me.

“Do you, by any chance, have any clue why my lip balm smells like your pussy?”

I gasp.

“Did you put it there when I wasn’t looking?” she insists.

My cheeks heat up, my heart flutters in panic. I place both my hands between us.

“Th-that’s absolutely not what I would do with that particular item. Why would you say that?”

“You’re getting paler. Please, calm down.”

Jacqueline puts the heel of her palm over my heart, which sends warm ripples through my torso. I consider averting my gaze, but I can’t, nor should, lie my way out of this one. I lower my head as a drop of sweat rolls down my spine.

“You already know. Of course you do. I… kind of rubbed your lip balm against my clit until I came.”

Jacqueline inhales and holds the air in. This is it, she has realized how repulsive I am, and regrets having shared her juices with me. She’s going to throw me out into the cold so I die alone in this barren wasteland where only misery dwells.

I consider explaining to Jacqueline that each of my orgasms is as important to me as my next breath of air, but she guffaws explosively, spraying my face with saliva. I draw my head back, stunned. As the wet feeling of a dozen droplets of saliva clinging to my face solidifies, my lips turn up in a smile. Although I had violated my goddess’ lip balm, she still deigns to bless me with her holy liquids. The sheer magnanimity of her act almost breaks me into two or possibly more fragments.

As Jacqueline’s laugh dies off, she dries the tears from her eyes, which are twinkling mischievously.

“You dirty slut. At least clean it afterwards!”

Her joyous tone has reheated my heart, but she deserves an apology.

“Please accept my sincere sincerest apologies for using your sacred item in this sinful manner.”

She giggles.

“You just need to be better controlled about the stuff that comes into contact with your pussy.”

“We hadn’t even fucked yet, but I was alone and horny, and… I guess my frustration got the best of me. I promise I’ll take great care with your cosmetics from now on.”

“Well, did it provide a good orgasm? Did your hips gyrate with passion?”

I nod enthusiastically.

“I almost went crazy for a moment.”

“More than usual, you mean?”

Coming from some other human being, a direct reference to my brittle state of mind would have felt like a poisoned dagger digging into my flesh, but uttered by my queen, it brings me relief, even though today was going to become another day when my sanity slips out from underneath my feet and plunges me into a bottomless pit. How could I not love Jacqueline, the woman who has saved my life, who helps this critter of low moral stature fly across a vast universe? She, whom my mind yearns to serve and worship. She who sees through every layer of my black soul. Jacqueline is a rainbow pouring from heaven into the mud of my heart. She knows how fucked up I’ve become, yet she approaches me willingly.

I catch myself staring in awe.

“Even crazier,” I say in a low voice.

Jacqueline chuckles. She leans in to kiss my forehead, but she stops midway.

“Oh, I showered your cute face in spit. Sorry, baby.”

I want to drop my face between Jacqueline’s thighs and dole out orgasms to her, the way some restaurants deliver soups to the tables of patrons who eat and are eaten alive.

“Yeah, shower my guilt-ridden face with dropplets of warm spunk,” I mumble hoarsely.

“You keep putting dangerous images in my head.”

Jacqueline fetches a long piece of toilet paper, folds it, and takes her time wiping my face lovingly. A strange sense of bliss assaults my body and mind. Jacqueline isn’t just washing away spit or blood or other bodily fluids: she’s cleansing me like an angel, washing the dirt, grime, and ugliness out of me.

When she finishes, she bunches up the toilet paper and throws it in the waste bin.

“Terrible as it is, Leire, we have to return to reality.” Jacqueline sighs. “I would hate it if our boss got mad at you because I’ve kidnapped your mind.”

“That’d be incredibly difficult to prove in any court,” I mutter.

My flesh tingles from the residual warmth. As I float out of a rosy cloud, the bathroom door swings closed, and Jacqueline’s footsteps pitter-patter away from me. Once I exit this mundane shrine where anyone is welcome to squeeze out their bodily sins, an excited squirm burns my legs as I skip through the hallway in pursue of a trail of perfume and pheromones that only the goddess herself leaves.

---

The Lip Balm Incident happened back in mid November, in part 18 of this peculiar tale, what feels like ages ago.

These last couple of weeks I’ve struggled to get anything done even at work. Every effort feels unbearable. Long gone seem the days of my youth back in May of last year; during that single month, blissfully unemployed as I was, I wrote most of the draft of my beloved previous novel, ‘My Own Desert Places’.

I write for fun, to escape from a life I don’t want; because the process had done little else than annoy me recently, some days I barely opened the document and worked on a couple of sentences before I gave up. Years ago I hoped to become a professional author eventually, so I pushed myself until I ended up hating the very notion of writing. There’s no point for me to suffer in such a way anymore. I’ll keep doing this until it ceases being fun, then I’ll move on to something else.

In any case, it’s been two weeks with barely any motivation, lacking energy, feeling disoriented, being assaulted by random flashbacks of everything that has gone wrong in my life, avoiding people’s gazes, and thinking of how nice it would be if I disappeared. So I’m probably depressed. In a few more days or weeks I’ll return to feeling like a little bitch because I didn’t exit through the emergency door like I wanted to, and instead I’ll have to keep tolerating the (at the very least) low level torture of being myself.

Anyway, the act of writing has to compete with a far more competent form of escapism: gaming. This month is looking like the strongest for me gaming-wise in a long time regarding what comes out: Crusader Kings 3’s long-awaited expansion, Total War: Warhammer III, and two huge Wabbajack mod compilations: ‘Life in the Ruins’ for Fallout 4, and ‘Somnium’ for Enderal. As I was finishing up this part of my ongoing novel, I was aching to give up and just load up Fallout 4 so I can tear through a bunch of raiders and steal some turpentine. So if I disappear again, I might be busy trying to avoid my eldest son from murdering my heir, at the same time I pay off the blackmail from those that have discovered that I’m sleeping with my daughters. Or I might actually be dead.

I’ve also been listening to Weezer almost exclusively, for whatever reason. Some of their recent albums are quite cool, like this song I like.