Chapter 17: Little CaesarDeep breath:

  Mud between toes, branches scratch bare ankles and the sound of waves pping the shore. Heady st of wet soil, night air, a musky perfume of ripened nature. A wind rushes past; heart pounding; taste of blood? Running: towards or away something fotten? So long ago, quiing childhood memories along the dark snake curves of a moonlit river. Tears maybe, for the path is blurred and shadowed. I trip. Falling. Skinned knee. g—deep howls of pain far beyond that of childhood bruises.

  My God: this weakness be mine? Pathetic.

  These memories, are they real? Are they even mine? For a moment, these fleeting remembrances seem real, subjectivities masquerading as truth—but they might be as real as remembered photographs taken by someone else and adopted as one’s own experience.

  Fuck me, I’m drunk. The room is spinning and dipping, and this vertiginous trifuge blends my memories in together with those of dy.

  Another deep breath. Dan’s st. Again.

  The groan of bamboo. A shiver of wind through branches.

  Smell of oak. Musk and the thick, moist ground bung between fingers as, croug in a ditch behind trees, the falling rain fell in a steady patter against leaves. My breath came in short, shallos, steaming in the cold air. She k nearby, her eyes wide and wild, grin feral. Half-naked, our bodies were caked and streaked with mud, and the long parallel gouges ay back burned with wonderful iy. Her breasts hung heavily. They glowed red where I’d bit and grappled and threw her face-first to the ground. Her ass rising to meet my thrust. Muffled cry, ecstatic, furious and violent. Rising and falling together in the mud and afterwards, as the steadily falling water slowly washed us and I was left intoxicated, she drew close and said,

  “Again?”

  With lips puckered for ic effeto an airy kiss, I pressed closed to Dan. He held his pho arm’s length, ready for another shot. And his st, the cologne he wore—did he sp this on for me when he went for a piss?--subtle but up close intense in its masity, dragged me bato the ditd the bamboo forest a me . . . dazed.

  How else to expin what happened ?

  Dan turowards me in anticipation. We were . . . so close. I sat on his p, eyes wide. Lips slightly parted and breath caught in my throat. The moment hung heavily between us as I wrestled with my own past, caught between memories and lies and a I felt powerless to prevent. He leaowards me. His lips pressed up against mine. God, that st--it overwhelmed me. Heavy eyelids drifted shut. My mouth parted involuntarily. His fingers curled into the flesh of my upper arm. At his touch I released a soft moan that faintly echoed the past, lost in half-fotten passions; our tongues met, danced areated; he pulled away. The fleetiion endured all too briefly, and I savoured the fotten kiss until it faded. I slowly opened my eyes.

  Grinning, Dan showed me the photo.

  The young girl seemed all too pliant. She was all too pretty, and too real. Reality came crashing back. The sofa, the alcove, the cocktail--my fifth? sixth? drink of the night--his hand had been on my knee for the st hour. What time is it? His thumb kept stroking my leg, sliding smoothly across those stogs. Drunk, I hadn’t pulled away. His touch pyed with the cy edging that tickled my thigh.

  We talked. About . . . nothing, really. He told me about himself. I listened, and ughed. Fluttered eyelids, licked my lips. He went for another drink. I touched up my makeup. The rest of the bar felt distant as I waited. I felt hot a ashamedly pleased that my skimpy outfit offered at least some cooling from the stifling bar air. Without Dan around all sorts of insecurities came crowding in. What was I doioo many people! A few wild looks about, suddenly remembering Jeff. A giggle; I could imagine what he was seeing; would he jack off whe home, thinking of me?

  Then Dan was back, with drinks. A drunken cheer! A text message—he had a look—cleared it—flipped the phone over and with a grin, pulled me closer for a photo. His arm, heavy ay shoulders, reminding me of another man months ago, and the strength there drew me close too easily. He pulled out his phone and pulled me onto his p and I submitted to his pull unthinkingly and cheek-to-cheek we smiled into the camera, and I breathed in, and. . . .

  The memory of his touy arm still seared the skin and I felt painfully aroused.

  For a moment rage and denial, disgust and hatred, longing and sadness coursed through me, filtered through the blurry lens of beer and wine and pills, in a paralyzing swell of overwhelmiion. I struggled to cope with the flig and alluriions this boy had awakened withihat kiss—a kiss; God, it’d been so long since I’d felt a kiss, closeness of any kind to someone. A few fused moments with Harry; angry, plicated grapples with K a lifetime ago… was that all? It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t fug enough for a was a rare week indeed in which David Sanders did not get id . . . and yeah, dy Belmy damn well hadn’t had—and wasn’t going to see any--a since waking up over a month ago. Jerking off was beginning to wear thin and I yearned for some kind of intimaething—to ease the pain.

  Through the booze and the pill I felt ho—couldn’t lie to myself—I felt a sudden profound sense of not only loneliness, but also of disappoi. A lifetime of isotion should strengthen a person to solitude, right? How fug hard had my childhood been? Abandoned by everyone I khe only woman I’d ever loved torn away—a year devoured by the streets—years of meaningless retionships—eve friends taken away over time—and most retly . . . fuck, a life erased and the most painful of isotions forced uporapped not just by circumstances but by my very body; surely all that should’ve made me immuo this—this goddamn ag loneliness?

  But if I was truly, brutally ho with myself . . . God, I craved another kiss, and the sense of a lingering human touy arm.

  It was the booze. And the pill. And the hormones, and whatever those bastards at the ic left in my head, and in my blood. Exhaustion and weeks of pying the role forced onto me. Everything I’d done, hadn’t it been to lose myself in this role? And so I had. Even if only briefly. If it felt so. . . God, whatever it felt like, it was too much to deal with right now.

  Wasn’t the kiss just proof that dy was all the more real? A performance for Jeff, right? That was a good thing, right, what I wanted, what I needed?

  No. What I needed was . . . was a good, solid fuck: to bend some bitch over an office desk, to smack her ass, to shove my cock so far dowhroat she gagged on it, to—fuck! Fuck!

  Instead, as I slowly found my breath and untangled myself from the plex web of emotions that bouer that single kiss, I realized that the odds of me getting it on with any damned woman retty fug slim. It wasn’t fair. This loneliness . . . God, this soul-numbing, pathetic, crushing aloneness . . . it wasn’t going away. Not any time soon. Not as long as I was dy. Maybe not ever.

  And then I felt it—no, not now!—first, the unmistakable poke of his growing hardness under my skirted bum and then, hot and heavy—tears, and a sob that threateo tear me apart.

  Dan was watg me. His grin faded. Momentary hurt, theing annoyance, and then finally a sweetly ed look crossed his face: “Hey, you okay?”

  I tried to nod but couldn’t.

  “Hey, listen, I’m sorry, I. . . .”

  Fleetingly, I felt sorry for him being stuck with such a basket case of a bitch of a date this night. But I also knew why he was being so nice. What he really wanted: me. And the thought of actually getting picked up by a colleague--and what would be expected--God, his hands roaming all over me, groping, kneading, his tongue pressing into my mouth, and his cock, fuck, yeah, I knew where he wao shove that thing I could feel growih my ass, I wahe same thing, a girl on her knees with his fiwining through my hair, trolling, and the thought made my skin crawl and my stomach twist painfully.

  “I thought. . . .”

  With a wave of my hand I cut him off. “It’s not--”

  Suddenly caught between these extremes, I didn’t know whether to cry or to throw up. I squeezed my eyes shut against the tears, but then the room seemed to spin and lurch to the side. I opened my eyes and swallowed an unpleasant-tasting burp. I wao tell him that everything was okay and that I wasn’t angry but all that came out was a slurred, “s’nice,” and a sickly grin. “Feel . . . sick.”

  He smiled wanly. “I have that effe girls.”

  “B’back!” I managed, g a hand over my mouth before fleeing to the toilet.

  It was a small miracle that there wasn’t a queue. Once again I found myself rushing for a stall. Even as I reached the toilet, though, I knew I wasn’t going to be sick. The moment had passed nearly as quickly as it came. Any memory of the st of the bamboo forest and of that overwhelming mase assault on my senses was dispelled by the onsught of aic ser, stale perfume, musty undergarments, piss and shit.

  Instead, I found myself sitting on the , fa hands, breathing deeply and struggling to trol myself. My stomach twisted and turned like a small animal caught in the jaws of a trap.

  I’d just kissed a man. Another man. And this time, it wasn’t a game. I wasn’t wearing a e, I wasn’t pying pretend, I wasn’t sitting with some rock star I’d idolized since my teenaged years. I was dy. dy: the pretty young girl w in the offices of Volumina Iional. New. I. Fresh meat.

  And these feelings . . . the way my body reacted . . . I could feel my cock’s desperate yearning, the hot throb of pain made manageable only by the numbing shield of drunkenness. Dan’s touch still burned my arm, my thigh, and I felt . . . something neleasant in pces where I’d never felt pleasure before, and. . . .

  Finally, it came: first, a loud, terrible, drunken sob, embarrassing and plete, that wracked my entire body. Then briefly: tears and a plete colpse into these emotions that so easily and ofteook me these days. And then the vomit. With a final twist my stomach lurched and I uhe night’s food and drink into the por throne.

  It didn’t take very long. I threw up three more times, two heavy, spattering sprays and the st one more of a ky burp, bringing up a half-digested lump of pill, and almost immediately I felt… ‘better’, if still very far away from ‘fine’. A few more heavy, shuddering breaths and I regained enough posure to wipe my eyes clear with the bay hand and sit bay haunches. My hand was streaked with mascara. Tiny splinters of silver eyeshadow sparkled there. The bloips of my hair were wet with sid my throat burned.

  There was a kno the stall door. “You okay in there?”

  My faintly mewled response was barely audible. Knowing my breakdorobably been overheard by half the girls in this fug bar nearly seumbling into another g jag. My humiliatio plete; could it get worse than this? After a few seds during which I struggled but failed to raise my voice above a pathetic squeak to tell the person outside the stall to go away, the door opened.

  It was the woman from before, the strangely familiar, tall one from the line for the toilet. She swept the fall of long back hair over her shoulder in a gesture that da the edge of familiarity. She repeated her own moment of puzzled reition, quickly repced by a look of mixed amusement and disgust. “Fuck me,” she said, not unkindly, “look at you.” Her nose wrinkled in distaste at the smell as she reached down to help. “All better?”

  I gave her both thumbs up.

  With her help, I found my unsteady feet and she led me to the sink and ter to survey the damage. God, I looked like shit. Bloodshot eyes stared from a pasty face. Even under soft bathroom lighting I looked half-dead, and my mascara ran in heavy, bck streaks down my face. I couldn’t go back out there looking like this!

  What the hell would Dan think?

  Why the fuck should I care what Dan thinks?

  “Poor thing,” the girl said.

  I gave a tentative poke at the thing in the mirror. I turned lost, pleading eyes to the woman. “Help?”

  Her smile, though a touch desding, seemed friendly enough. “You were sitting with that guy, right, off in the er, the oh the suit and trainers?” She squinted with an effort of remembering. “Dan?” Not uanding how she knew his name, but not quite trusting myself to speak yet, I nodded weakly. “I’ll get y. Tell him you’ll be a few minutes. Help you put yourself back together.”

  And off she went before I could even ask her name, leaving me propped up by the ter, wobbly in heels, to the unfortable ption of the girl in the mirror. What a pathetic spe. What the hell led me to this? It suddenly seemed as though I could barely remember the man I once was, as though his name had been wiped from my memory, as though he never existed.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and suddenly found something else lurkih all the angst and fear and burgeoning madness. It proved irresistible: when I opened my eyes and once again beheld the silly girl in the mirror, her panda-bear eyes and snotty nose, her sloppy grin and smeared lipstick, and the ridiculous, sexy clothes she—that I—wore, an irrepressible ugh bubbled to the surface. Colpsing against the ter in a fit of giggles, all the horrible shame and loneliness simply drained away. When I finally dared to look myself in the mirrain, my red-faced, teary-eyed expressio me off in another round of breath-stealing ughter.

  It was to this near-manic se that my helper returned.

  “You seem better,” she said, handing me my purse.

  I gri her through tears of ughter. “Oh, fuck yeah.”

  “Crazy night?”

  My head wobbled in a drunken nod. “God yes,” I said, fumbling around in my bag for something to repair my face with. I stared bnkly at the mascara in my hand. The idea that this little tube of bck gunk could somehow repair my appearand set things straight seemed ludicrous. Turning helpless eyes to the girl, I uttered another feeble, “help?”

  She ughed. “You’re really out of it, huh?”

  Her grip was surprisingly strong, but her touch gentle. She pulled out some wet-wipes I didn’t even know I had in my bag ao work. There was something strangely pelling about submitting to this woman’s touch as she quickly went about repairing my makeup. With enviably fident strokes she took oask of ing up the worst of the damage. I submitted to her instrus easily as she wiped away my streaked and ruined makeup, undoing in a few moments my hour-long painstaking efforts from earlier this evening.

  She rooted deeper into the bag, pulled out a tube, and smeared a little guh my eye, spreading it with her thumb. “Let’s hide these blotches, shall we?” She held my iher hand, steading my face as she worked.

  Iween all the intense work, I mao slur out a question. “You know Dan?”

  She chuckled as she flicked open aube. “Yeah. I’ve seen you around before, too.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t sound half as drunk as I did, and I envied her self-trol at the moment. “I’m with the marketing and advertising people... you know, a floor up from V.I.?”

  I raised and lowered a shoulder.

  “Well, you’re new.” She ughed. “Wets around.”

  What kind of word, I wondered, and how far? After tonight, was I the new office cock-tease? The secretarial slut? The bubble of manic happiness burst; instead, a horrible sinking feeling dragged my already weak stomach down to around my delicately heeled feet. I sagged, slightly, and the aused to grab me by the shoulder. “Hey, steady there,” she said. “You still with me?”

  My thin smile was waxen and unpersuasive.

  “We’re almost done here,” she said. “Just a touch-up around the eyes; think you manage your lipstick?”

  I gave a weak thumbs up.

  “We’ll get you back out there. You say bye to Dan. I’ll bundle you into a taxi. You’ll be better in the m.”

  She was wrong, of course. I’d still be dy in the m: I’d still have this weak, rail-thin body; I’d still have tits. I’d still be trapped in this unwanted existence living somebody else’s life, a female life, stared at and ogled, looked down at and patronised, swaddled in skirts and lost in lingerie, powerless—

  “Don’t you fug dare,” the woman fixing my face growled. “I’m not doing this so you go and fuck it up again.” Her firm grip on my pulled me forcefully out of my introspe.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  She shrugged and threw her hair back with a flick of her head, unsciously reag back to tuck errant strands of her long bck hair behind her left ear. “Because we’ve all been there, honey.” Her eyes went momentarily distant. “Young, lost and fucked up because of some guy.” She focused on me again. “Now shut up and stop distrag me. You don’t want to lose an eye.”

  With deft, precise strokes, she started her final repairs. A little pencil work along the eyebrow, a little colour along the eye lid. Had I not been so bedraggled, drunk and exhausted, there could’ve been something almost seductive about her soft but firm touch, the gerokes across the sensitive skin of cheek and eye.

  I felt suddenly acutely aware of her closeness. I sighed, suddenly exhausted, and leaned slightly closer. She reached for my hand, and the mascara I still held there. And her eyes stared intensely into mine as our fiips met. And there was suddenly something more to her look: curiosity, but also fusion. Her dark, hazel eyes widened slightly with something akin tnition. There was a heavy pause, a sense of sudden isotion amongst the bustle of the woman’s toilet, as we stared into each other.

  “Um.” Her ha mind to tuck her hair back behind her left ear again, the gesture agly familiar. “I think we’re done here.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, and then the word, a name, suddenly tumbled out. “Jules.” I giggled and reached up, gently stroking the bay fingers across her cheek. “My little Caesar.”

  “What did you say?” she said. She flinched back from my toud grabbed me by the wrist. She pulled me close and held me firm.

  “Hey,” I excimed, staring dumbly at her hand. “Ow!”

  But her grip didn’t rex. She stared intensely at me in disbelief.

  “David?” she said.

  Author's Notes:

  This was the final chapter written during the initial run from 2006-2007. I ran out of steam and the story remained unfinished, with the protagonist curled up on the floor in a bathroom stall with his ex-girlfriend standing over him.

  When I stopped writing, I thought I was taking a short break. Instead, I wouldn't pick stant up again for nearly fifteen years.

  During that time, I barely wrote anything at all. There were signifit life ges that kept me from writing. At least, that was my excuse. At first, I thought about stant frequently, and then less so over time. I made a few desultory efforts at revising some of it—those edits surprisingly stuck—but eventually the story felt dead. During this period, I tried my hand at a few night courses and wrote a few short stories, but that was it through to 2022.

  I'd started writing stant for the writing practice. Previously, I’d written and published a det amount of fanfi under a different name, and some of it was well-received, but I really struggled to finish anything. So, one of my main targets in writing stant was to see if I could bring the project to clusion. Clearly, I failed at that. But in another way, it was a success. I think. Looking back at it now, there's a clear differeweeyle and quality of writing of chapter one and where I stopped. (Whether it’s an improvement is open to debate, but I think it’s better.) Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to capitalize on that practid improvement. stant was left to nguish.

  Fortunately, something ged. I'll write about that in the chapter's author's notes.

  Meanwhile, if you're impatient to read on (or want to read a longer ramble as to how I came back to writing) you find everything avaible on Patreon: patreon./fakeminsk, as well as fanart and a few side projects.

  And of course, ents and feedback are always appreciated!