0 comments/ 8928 views/ 1 favorites K's Costume Ch. 01 By: justtheone 1. An Effed-Up Dream K had friggin' Miley Cyrus in her head, of all damn things. Couldn't shake it off. That stupid Wrecking Ball song. Actually not the song itself so much as the trashy sleazy silly video she made that everybody freaked out over—well, for five minutes, anyhow. And God, that nonsense was like at least a year old already, wasn't it? Or two? The world had moved on, or should have, and forgotten all about it. But at the moment it was stuck in K's brain, super bad. An endless loop. Thing is, let's try to be fair ... it wasn't exactly a terrible song. It worked like pop songs are supposed to. Way it was performed and put together, it pushed the buttons they're supposed to push. And the damn video, too. Sure, it was a trashy stunt, more than anything else. On that level, it had certainly accomplished its principal goals, stirring up trivial "controversy" and an accompanying sales boost. All these young wholesome Disney stars charge to the opposite extreme, soon as they get old enough. They can't resist it, one right after the other. Disney's bs fundamentally programs them for it. Pents these adolescents up until they can't stand it anymore and they explode out of harness. The whole system's meant to manufacture good healthy role models, or it pretends to, and in the end, over and over, they spit out exactly the reverse. It's pretty damn twisted. Worst of all, behind the scenes, you know a bunch of evil sons of bitches are making ginormous shitwads of money off it, both sides of the process. Building them up and then cutting them loose to tear themselves down. And the whole time, each of these chicks are thinking their proving something. Making some necessary statement about personal freedom of expression and so on. A vast ugly exploitative con, from start to finish. That's what it really boils down to. The central image of the song and, more explicitly, in the video, was actually a pretty strong metaphor. The bitch was on to something there. Yeah, ok, it was a goofy image—the naked teenage pop star riding a wrecking ball like a tire swing, or a rodeo bull—but that didn't take away the fact that it was compelling and that there was real heat in it, as well as a significant tangible degree of genuine emotional and even dare-one-say spiritual truth. 'Cause yeah, love/lust is like that. Love/lust really feels that way. A giddy goofy dangerous ride, just like the video illustrates and symbolizes. You really feel exposed like that, clinging to this huge heavy powerful force that's carrying you along in dizzy swoops and circles through the air, smashing the whole world apart around you, and it's equally awesome and scary at the same time. You feel powerful and powerless. You feel proud and arrogant, and you feel embarrassed and anxious. You're both a goddess and a slave, in the exact same moment, through the whole experience. A living contradiction. That's love and lust—especially when those two separate feelings get tangled together and you can't tell the difference between them. Miley hadn't come up with that shit herself, no way. Some other fucker must have, like the video director or whoever wrote the song for her. Now maybe that was wrong—maybe K was just being bitchy, thinking this way. But K wouldn't bet any money on that, not a dime or a nickel. The idea, at the root of it, was simply too good. K couldn't seriously believe anyone like Miley friggin' Cyrus would come up with that shit all by herself. Sorry but no. Night before, she had a dream with that video in it—or rather, with herself in the video. It hadn't been an exact replication, but the overall gist had been there. The key bits. First she'd been in an amusement park with a bunch of friends, which was more or less a true memory from high school she'd been reliving, and then it all turned into a crazy video game, which if she remembered right, they had started out playing in the amusement park, in an arcade—that part wasn't something she or her friends had done or would ever really do in real life, they weren't video-game type people, but there was one time she took a younger cousin to another amusement park for his birthday and that was all the stupid dorky fat retard wanted to do the entire time, and to hell with the rest of the rides, so that memory must been where the game-playing came from—and then of course pretty soon it changed again so she was actually in the game all the sudden, not just controlling it and watching it happen but living the thing. The video game world and the amusement park had blended together ... A huge sprawling scary castle with rollercoasters jumbled through it. Or actually, it was more like the castle had been made of the rollercoasters. She hadn't been riding on the coasters. The trains or whatever you were supposed to call them were evil and full of monsters and chasing her, trying to run her down. It got pretty terrifying. She had been swinging around through the whole mess on big chains. Which then eventually turned into wrecking balls. So there you go. After that, for a spell, she wasn't swinging around trying to dodge and escape the evil trains anymore, jumping like Tarzan from chain to chain, but trying to steer her swings to hit the cars and kill them as they zoomed by, and to knock over the rest of the mountainous castle-tracks caging her in while she was at it. She turned into the aggressor. For a while this was real good fun. Then it changed and it got scary again. As most of the castle tracks were destroyed, and dust clouds were rising up all over the place, a bunch of big fires started, and then there was lava all the sudden beneath her. The dust became smoke. And then, for a bonus, she realized she was naked. Didn't even have on work boots like Miley got to keep. And it was mortifying. She nearly wet herself. Maybe if she had, she would have woke herself up. K had to constantly kick her feet up to prevent her bare toes from touching the lava—the surface had rose too high, too close. Harder she kicked, the more it made the wrecking ball swing, which made the chain grind against her bare body and her crotch. Real hard, and scorching hot. The surrounding flames had heated up the metal. Then the steaming, glowing chain, and the ball she was sitting on, both started vibrating too. And they were rusty and started crumbling as they shook, flaking away more and more in her hands and between her thighs, shrinking and weakening. The chain was obviously going to break any second, or the ball would shatter, whichever came first. Any second she knew she was going to get dropped into the lava ... She was absolutely terrified. Screaming for help and knowing it wasn't gonna do any good, nobody was gonna show up to save her. Tried standing up on the ball and climbing the chain before it gave out. Extremely tough and scary. Her feet kept slipping. The ball had shrunk too much and its surface had got too flaky, and her feet were too sweaty. And then soon as she finally managed to make a tiny bit of progress, the whole damn thing dropped off the end of the chain! Second she got her feet planted properly and straightened herself up. Wham! Happened so sudden and startling she couldn't even scream when it fell away. She didn't fall with it—kept hold of the semi-molten chain with her arms and with her legs too. It burned her, but not as bad as a semi-molten chain really would have in real life. And after that she found she wasn't strong enough to pull herself any higher, and the chain was still vibrating more and more and continuing to flake and thin out and stretch and crumble. Making squeals and screeches and scratchy chattering sounds. While inevitably the buzzing narrow coiled red-hot length of it was mashed between her clenched thighs directly against her pussy and her clit ... Harder she clung to the chain, the deeper it was forced into her cleft. She had kept jerking up against it and then slipping right back down. Mashing her parts on the chain like she was humping it—like she was doing it deliberately. But she wasn't! It was just she couldn't do anything else. Had to keep trying to climb-the only chance to escape and save herself. Couldn't help how it felt—that was just a side effect. Sheer friction. Out of her control. It had made her weep, though, and it made her moan. It felt exactly like fucking someone, or getting fucked. It shouldn't have—but it did. She dangled there naked and fucked the chain and the chain fucked her, and she wept and moaned and got closer and closer to a humiliating unstoppable orgasm. And now all the monsters from those evil roller coaster trains earlier, they reappeared all around her, hundreds of them. The smoke had cleared to reveal a stadium surrounding her, with monsters in every seat. Grinning at her and panting and masturbating as they watched her. Huge hairy hands stroking huge green and purple monster cocks. Hundreds of them all pointing at her from every side, like dragon heads, like cannons. Every single one getting ready to spurt at her, closer and closer. She knew it would happen as soon as the chain made her orgasm. That would bring on all of theirs. All together. She felt so dirty and ashamed and desperate and eager for it. Didn't happen. She hadn't come. Woke up before she could. Always happened to her, when she had a sex dream. Not that it happened very often. Whenever one did, once in the proverbial blue moon, she always woke up before it finished. A weird mix of relief and frustation. Would have to attend to the matter by hand, before she could go back to sleep. She had tried to come up with a different scenario, as she went to work—something more palatable, something less wacko. Hadn't succeeded. The other nasty images wouldn't surrender and dissipate until she gave in to them. More than a little disturbing. Your own brain shouldn't be able to do shit like that to you, subconsciously or otherwise. It shouldn't want to. But sometimes it does, God knows why. Doesn't make sense, but it happens. Sometimes crazy wacko shit like that is the only shit that'll get us off, when we need to get off. Everything else stops working 'til the wacko shit has had its way and run its course and wrung you out and exhausted your system. Couldn't get the job done with just her fingers, like normally. Ended up having to fish the vibrator out of her nightstand drawer. She hardly ever used the thing—always afraid her roommates would hear the noise. And as good as it felt when you first used it, toys like that tended to overstimulate and tire out her parts pretty quick. She had another dildo that was less aggressive. That night, though, the buzzing power-tool was a necessity, whether her roommates heard it or not. Under her blankets and with a pillow too, over her middle, for extra pressure as well as muffling, she clenched it lengthwise along the outside of her passage, in imitation of the chain in her dream. Bingo. She hadn't needed to move it or push it inside, after she switched it on. Just let it lay there and do its thing. Driving her out of her mind. The buzz wasn't too audible under the pile she'd made. She'd yelled, though, at the very end, when the climax exploded down there. Just for a second but real loud. It was one of those times where you just had to. Or her head would have burst. Nobody ever said anything to her about it, thank heavens, but she knew she woke at least one of her roommates up, 'cause she'd heard footsteps pattering in the hallway and the toilet flush in the bathroom, a few minutes later. Pretty damn mortifying. K's Costume Ch. 02 This is a quick transitional segment, not a standalone episode. 2. An Effed-Up Situation What was behind all this, there was no mystery to it. Zero. K was real worked up over a guy and she wasn't happy about it. Guy had her seriously hot and bothered, in the good way and in bad ways, and in good ways that were also bad. She wasn't used to these sorts of feelings and she wasn't handling them very well. Whole business was frankly pissing her off. She was pissed at the guy and she was pissed at herself. It was too much to have to deal with. She had a hundred other things going on in her life that she wanted to concentrate her energy on. This silly thing with this guy was an inconvenient and unwelcome distraction from all that other more important longterm business. She wanted to stop thinking about him all the time. She wanted to stop seeing him. Only reason she hadn't was because she also felt a constant urge, or even a need, to see him every goddamn day. She didn't give in to that feeling, she wasn't that far gone yet. K only let herself meet up with him once a week or so, hoping the intensity would die down on both sides. So far this plan wasn't working any good. He wasn't cooling off and neither was she. Most of the whole summer she'd been gone, on her big trip out of the country. Didn't expect the relationship to pick up again after she got back. They'd only been messing around a couple weeks before it was time for her to go. Nothing serious, mostly. No commitments had been made. She hadn't wanted that and he'd understood. No hard feelings on either side, thankfully. It hadn't been a tough goodbye like she was afraid he'd make it, when the crucial moment rolled up. He'd behaved himself real good. No big desperate clingy declarations, no tears. One last nice hug and a quick kiss and a grin that was only a tiny bit sad, and that was that. Fully expected by the time she'd returned, he'd have met somebody new and pretty much forgot about her, or at least moved on, his interest focused on this new person, whoever she'd turn out to be. She figured it was bound to happen whether he expected it to or wanted it to or not. Way of the world. Resistance was futile. And as for herself, she had imagined her own interest in him would have steadily faded out at the same time. She would have—had had, in fact—various new exciting adventures of that sort during her trip. Nothing incredibly major or life-changing had ended up going down—and she hadn't been looking for anything that extreme, either—but there had been a good number of memorable meetings and events and experiments. Mostly little funny flirty moments, but a couple that were bigger deals than that, and got more serious. Just a bit bigger, and only a little more serious, but still bigger and seriouser, and nice. Good memories. It had been a good trip. Pretty much just about exactly what she hoped it would be when she planned the whole thing and started saving up for it. Then she came back and saw the guy again. And it didn't feel like she thought it would. And he still looked at her in the same way he had when she left. That other hypothetical girl she had imagined, and also sort of banked on, well, such a bitch never rolled up. Total no show. So Graham's feelings were unchanged. Nothing had happened to him in the past three months to change them. Nor did he make the obvious mistake she was more-or-less fully prepared for in this circumstance, where he would assume they'd immediately hook up again. Thus providing her with a sensible justification for blowing him off on the spot. He didn't give her that. It was a little infuriating. He just looked at her exactly like he used to do when she first got to know the guy. The look that said: "Hey I like you. What do you think about that?" The look that made her melt inside. Only a little—let's not get carried away—but more than she wanted it to. More than she was prepared for. It wasn't supposed to keep doing that same shit to her. Not after those three adventurous months. Should have completely cleared him from her system. Only somehow it hadn't. Now she had to figure out what to do about it. And it wasn't just her own needs and feeling that had to be considered. That was the scariest aspect, and the most obnoxious. 'Cause it was pretty new for her. Graham's needs and feelings had to be considered too. Graham's needs and feelings had become, or at least were becoming, important to her. Genuinely. Had to face that. What a giant inconvenient pain in her ass. Thus far, since she'd got back, they'd only had a couple lunches together, and another couple coffee shop dates. Good talks but never of the "serious" sort. Never getting nitty-gritty into things between the two of them and what they were doing together, or going to do—they were leaving all that stuff alone as long as possible, the whole subject. Nebulous, was the word. One time, things went further again than conversation. Just like the previous iteration of their relationship. Yet this new time had been very different than the preceding occurrence. It had a different evolution, and ended up at a whole different order of magnitude. She was still kind of unhappy about it. But unhappiest most simply because of that fact—the fact she was unhappy in the first place, more than for any other reason she might be able to come up with, because it probably wasn't fair that she'd got unhappy at all—neither to Graham nor to herself. Only part of her—a big noisy insistent part—still wasn't ready to let herself start accepting and enjoying this business. And possibly it never fucking would. If she was falling in love, or if she'd fallen already, she didn't want to be. She just didn't. Not like this, not this strong. Only it's not the kind of shit you can control. It's a sickness is what it is, more than anything else. The way it takes you over. And when you get sick, all you can do is sweat it out. You can bitch and moan all you like—it's not gonna stop you being sick. K's Costume Ch. 03 3. An Effed-Up Party She brought him to a Halloween party that wasn't a real Halloween party because it wasn't on Halloween. Closest holiday at that point was actually Valentine's, and it still had another week or so to come. Her friend Sydney was throwing it. She was calling it a "masquerade". Or at least she wanted to—nobody else would play along. Far as K could see it was just a fancier old name for a Halloween party, anyway, and she couldn't decide if she thought it was cooler of Sydney to try to use the other word since the date was wrong, or if instead that just seemed pointless and pretentious. Kind of thing you went back and forth over. K was always a pretty literal-minded person, and she could acknowledge that sometimes this was a little bit of a flaw. It could make her a stick-in-the-mud about things. Why not call it a costume party? Sydney had blanched when K suggested this. It lacked something, evidently; a certain flair. Most everybody's costumes ended up being regular obvious Halloween stuff. A lot of that was only the result of what was available in the one or two shops in town you could buy cool costumes this time of the year. All they had—at least all they had that was affordable—was standard leftover Halloween shit, Dracula capes and pointy witch hats. You could get fancier monster masks and some good outfits from big movies like Star Wars and so on, but those things all cost a fortune. Then when they got to Sydney's place, the décor also turned out completely Halloween—cotton cobwebs, plastic pumpkins and skulls, and Christmas lights in Halloween colors like orange and purple. K later found out this wasn't how Sydney had planned it to look, she'd had much more elaborate ideas, mentioning a scene in an old eighties movie K's never seen called Labyrinth; then her roommates had done it all before she got home from work, using the Halloween stuff they already had in boxes in their basement. Sydney decided to roll with things since too much had been put up by the time she got there. So in the end it really was an all-out Halloween party in early friggin' February. And since it was for grownup's—well, a bunch of twentysomethings, which almost but not entirely qualifies, the world being what it is—it turned into what Halloween-parties-for-grownup's almost always become. Which is to say, a hook-up party. All parties are hook-up parties, on some level. It's only a question of how blatant that side of things is able or allowed to get, which obviously more than any other factor depends on how much alcohol the attendees are able or allowed to consume ... Halloween costumes provide an extra boost, 'cause it's always easier to be brave with a mask on. With everybody both drunk and disguised, the scene can get real crazy. From there, the next question is whether we're talking good crazy or bad crazy. That's very tough to predict. Many, many other factors come into the equation at this stage. Like: how many people have showed up, and how well do they all happen to know each other in ordinary life, and how much as a general rule do they all like each other—or don't they? Turned out this particular get-together brought in much bigger numbers than K was expecting. And most of these people weren't people she knew very good. Few of them were absolute strangers, but few of them were real friends, either. Not close friends. People she'd just met once or twice. Enough to know their faces but without being sure about most of their names. Usually Halloween costumes don't hide folks' identities, unless it's somebody you don't know anyhow. It was different at Sydney's party and that was a pretty weird feeling. She'd look at a guy or a girl and not be sure who the fuck they were because their costumes. But at the same time she'd have specific ideas about them, and what they were like, or a few different possible competing theories. So it wasn't like meeting brand new people. It was a weirder feeling than that. Unfamiliar familiarity. Like, some dude would say something that was quite funny if it was coming from who she thought it was, but if she was wrong and it was really somebody else, that would have changed her reaction. It would make the joke just mean. Except she never found out for sure which it was. Or the exact reverse could happen. Somebody would say something sounding super-shitty that probably wasn't intended to come off that way, if she'd recognized the speaker—except she hadn't. He could have been any one of four different candidates. K had known Sydney a fairly long time. Four or five years. Yet she'd never hung out with her much. They had a bunch of classes together and studied together a whole lot with a few other girls whenever exam time rolled around. Sydney had often invited her to parties and things before and K had never ended up going to one until this time. She also had the habit of telling lots of crazy stories about herself, many of which were quite a bit off-color, so to speak. She seemed to be the sort of person who needed to show off and liked messing with people, trying to shock them. K never took Sydney's tales very seriously. Now it was looking like there might have been a lot less bullshit in those stories than K used to believe. Bringing Graham to this scene, unprepared, was regrettable. He would get the wrong idea. He would think she was making statements about herself and what she wanted out of their relationship that she hadn't meant to make. Not tonight, anyhow. Not like this. Not so boldly. And yet telling him she wanted to split would send other messages to him, immediately ... She didn't want to commit herself to those statements either. They'd seem equally too strong. Too much of a shutdown. K wasn't a prude. When she took a guy out, she wanted to wow him. She wanted to be an adventurous and exciting date. Only now Sydney's party was turning into something quite a good ways more adventurous and exciting than she'd bargained for. "Shit," Graham said. She was glad to hear him say that, and in the tone he had said it in. It was exactly the same thing she was thinking. It was about the only thing there was to say in a situation like this. "Yeah," she said, "Shit." He took her hand and squeezed it. She didn't let him keep holding it, but she did give him a nice squeeze back before pulling loose. K was dressed as a witch. She certainly wasn't the only one attending; she could see at least another four or five. Her costume was the least trashy of the bunch. In fact the dress was her own, all she'd purchased at the costume shop that day was her pointy broad-brimmed witch hat. She'd decided she could put together the rest of her outfit with things from her closet that would look much better—and a hundred time less trashy—than the shit the store was offering. Her dress was one she wore fairly often, a simple black pullover sweaterdress with big decorative buttons down the front that didn't do anything but look fun. It had slightly over-long sleeves that partly covered her hands, while the skirt part was quite dangerously short. Tonight she'd matched it with loud striped leggings that didn't really match the dress at all—but worked very well as part of an eye-catching Halloween costume. They were purple and green and yellow. Actually they were rather hideous and she had no idea what possessed her to buy the things, unless it had been some strange premonition. She'd never worn them before that night and would probably never wear them again. Not in real life, anyway. Maybe if she got fed up with everything and decided to join a circus. As for shoes, she just used some old scuffed-up black work shoes with clunky thick soles. They fit a little tight, and on their own they weren't exactly the perfect pick for witchy looking shoes, but in combination with the rest of her things, they looked fine. Effectively serviceable if not awesome. She'd come close to going full-out hag. Wanted to buy a green plastic nose with warts on it, and a ratty old lady wig. Graham talked her out of it. He wanted her to be a hot witch. Kind of a copout, in her opinion. Not properly witchy enough. And definitely overdone, too. As was proven immediately when they got here and walked in the door ... Still, since he'd asked her, and asked real nicely when he did ... that put another slant on it. Clichés become clichés for a reason. He wanted her to be a hot witch and she had turned out pretty darn hot, hadn't she? Hell yeah. The hat, the slinky dress, the ridiculous leggings. It was the sort of outfit you were afraid you'd feel silly in, when you put it on. In fact she had felt silly at first—until she got to see the look on Graham's face, when he saw her in this shit. That changed the game. Instantly. Graham was going as a werewolf. It was pretty simple. He'd just put on a suit and tie, with a wolf mask. It was a good mask, though. Crude but in a cool way. It was interesting. Made out of shiny gold paper, a simple face mask that fitted over his head with an elastic band. He'd put it together himself with cut-up paper plates and tape. It was simple and yet it wasn't—the way he'd layered the jagged pieces to shape the snout and the brow and the ears. He was an artistic dude. It wasn't at all realistic, of course, but it wasn't meant to be. It was symbolic or expressionistic. And in a weird way, when you looked at it, the thing did a better job of making you think you were looking at a werewolf than if it had been one of those fancy rubber masks with big snarly teeth. A mask like that makes you just think: "Heh, cool mask." Since Graham's was so weird and subtle, it made you stop and wonder. It got under your skin. Or at least it did that to K. She'd sort of forget it was a mask. It fit really good around his eyes. Sort of seemed to enlarge them, also. When he was looking at her through the damn thing, and when he'd blink, it really felt like that was his actual face. Creepy but still cool. It had this wry thoughtful expression. No, it really didn't have a proper expression at all. Christ, he made the damn thing in ten minutes out of fucking paper plates from Target! K just kept projecting bullshit from her own subconscious on to it. That was the genius of it, wasn't it? The fact it made her keep doing that. Over and over. Just before she drove them over to Sydney's, K had a last inspiration. A final addition to Graham's costume. The idea was to link them together better, thematically. So she stopped at a pet store and bought a dog collar and a leash and made him put them on. "This makes you my personal pet monster," she announced, "I've captured you with my magic powers. But you're not quite tame, understand? What the hell good would a tame werewolf be anyhow? Why would I bother with that shit?" Graham had shrugged and then threw his head back and howled. It had been a pretty damn good werewolf howl. "Owwwoooohhh!" ********* They shared an armchair in a corner of the living room. Sydney's house was one of those where the living room and the dining room and the kitchen didn't have dividing walls between them. The whole downstairs was pretty much one big super-room, where you'd normally use clusters of different kinds of furniture to distinguish which section was which. Like in a loft. Open plan, wasn't that what it was called? It had some closets along the side and a half-bath and the staircase up and down. Two staircases, actually, sideways to take up less space and so one could run under the other. There was more party going on both upstairs and down in the basement but K and Graham never saw those parts. There was quite enough to see right here where they were at. Sydney and her roommates didn't have a dining room table, or if they did they'd moved it out of here. So the super-room currently had two separate living room clusters, four or five couches and chairs of several varieties arranged in two wide squares, with extra cushions and pillows scattered on the floor in the middle of both. K and Graham's chair wasn't part of either square. It had been, but they'd scooted it back into this corner, between a tall floor lamp and a potted jungle plant that had been decorated with fake cobwebs and twinkling lights inside tiny plastic ghosts. Having the lamp and the plant on either side of them gave them a slight sense of being sheltered that was comforting. Didn't hide them from everyone else, but did establish a bit of a boundary zone around them. K had perched herself on the left armrest of the chair so Graham could sit in the chair properly. She'd slipped her shoes off and swiveled her feet around to brace them on his knees. He hadn't immediately started fondling and fiddling with them, which rather surprised her. The TV was an enormous flatscreen mounted real high on the wall. It was showing some ridiculously gory old cannibal movie and absolutely no one was paying any attention to it, except K a little bit. The sound was turned off. Or maybe it wasn't and you just couldn't hear it over the music that was blasting. Techno raver shit with the bass shaking the building. You know: UNCHA-UNCHA-UNCHA-UNCHA. K and Graham weren't the only people not participating in the, um ... shenanigans. There were at least half a dozen others, or probably more like eight or nine. But they were all congregating over in the kitchen part of the super-room, the far side of the furniture squares, and keeping their backs to the rest, not spectating. They were concentrating instead on drinking and stuffing their faces with chips and candy. Well, that wasn't quite fair—they were also having conversations, laughing at each other's jokes, basically being normal people at a normal party ... they'd established a separate and more ordinary kind of party of their own over there. K and Graham seemed to be the only voyeurs, currently, on this side of things. Involved (and implicated, and complicit) in the shenanigans as observers, but not joining in, down-and-dirty. She kept waiting for Graham to ask her if they could leave, or if she wanted to get closer and join in more ... She couldn't predict which way it was gonna go, when he spoke up. If he ever did. He might be waiting just as anxiously for her to ask one of those questions, instead. To do that, though, she would have to decide which direction she wanted to go. And she couldn't. She felt pulled both ways. Half of her couldn't wait to get the fuck out of here, but only that one half. The other half kept telling it not to be such a pathetic chickenshit pussy and loosen the hell up and live life while it was right here in front of her, before she got too old and too ugly and croaked. If Graham had said he was freaking out and wanted to split, she wouldn't have argued. And she wouldn't have held it against him later on. At least she was pretty sure she wouldn't have. But Graham didn't say anything. Whether he was freaking out or not, he was leaving the entire question all up to her. Which really sucked. Too much pressure. Yet to be fair, to be honest, she would have resented it just as much if he didn't do that. She wouldn't have resisted, whatever he suggested—but she would have resented him all the same, under the surface. It sucked to have it all on her shoulders, yet she didn't want him taking total charge of things either. She was still the one holding the leash, after all. She was the one that bought the damn thing and buckled it on his neck. She'd picked her role for the evening, and that was the role of the boss. Except when you take charge of running things and calling the shots, then you gotta run things and call some damn shots. That's how the part's intended to be played. Well, she had. For now, they were gonna sit here and watch everybody else and wait a while, soaking in the atmosphere. It wasn't the bravest or most aggressive call she could have made, but it was a call, nonetheless. They'd taken a position—this chair, this corner. Out there on the couches, and on the floor, things hadn't got extremely crazy yet. Fifteen or twenty people, none of them pushing too far beyond PG-13 territory. Many vampire kids on two couches slobbering on each other's necks and smearing their makeup, while a zombie group on the neighboring square did pretty much the same thing ... A girl in a Pocahontas costume was riding a cowboy on the floor, and doing it at a full gallop. It was still the kind of fuck you could have shown on network television without anybody fussing or flinching nowadays, since they'd left their costumes on; her fringed skirt was covering all the special objectionable bits. You couldn't even hear them moaning because of the stupid raver music, cranked so goddamn high. UNCHA-UNCHA-UNCHA-UNCHA. For fuck's sake. Behind them was a trio that started to stir up K more than the rest had managed to do. It was another of the hot trashy witch girls with two mummy guys. Both black and muscular under their white bandages, which they were unwrapping from themselves and then using to tie up the witch. She wasn't putting up much of a fight. The guys wore only tight black jockeys under their wrappings—it looked at first like they didn't have any undies on at all. And the funniest bit was just after K saw how the black shorts had fooled her, and she said to herself "Oh ok they're not really naked"—that was when one of the guys slid his shorts off and took them into NC-17 territory, charging right past R without a breath. 'Cause whoa boy, there was his cock, and it was fully erect. The real deal, raring to go. And soon as he'd popped that out, the other guy popped out his. Jesus. Couple of billy clubs. Riot police. K only saw the nightsticks for a second or two, 'cause then they made them disappear again. One went in the witch's mouth and the other got busy out of sight behind the girl's upraised bottom. Watching two handsome black athletes (well, she assumed they were athletes, the pair were certainly cut like they were) go to town together on a girl that didn't happen to look much different than K herself, this "tableau" or whatever you might want to call it would have been enough on its own to get K's burners simmering ... and then they'd tossed on the additional factor of tying the dumb girl up like that first with their wrappings. K wasn't exactly huge on bondage and that whole extreme side of the sexual spectrum, but things of that nature did intrigue her, now and again. And more so than they used to, since she got to know Graham, thanks to the little funny power games they'd experimented with together. Having enjoyed those, it begged the question of how much further she might eventually be able to go down that sort of road ... She could see the girl's eyes rolling back in her head. The mummies were definitely taking her places. Places K felt pretty sure she'd like to get to visit, given the opportunity. She felt a chill trickle of sweat escape her armpit and race down her ribcage. Shit. Her perspiration level had just overwhelmed the seal of her deodorant. She knew she'd put plenty on. As personal indicators go, that's a biggie. A hard one to play down. Graham put a hand on her back and slid it up and down, softly. It wasn't meant to drive her crazy, and normally it wouldn't have. Conditions were no longer normal. It was like he flipped a big lever built into her spine, or one of those plunger things they use to set off bombs. She didn't jump off the armrest like a scalded cat, but only because of extreme effort on her part, tensing all her muscles to keep still. Then while she was still holding her breath and waiting for her pulse to slow back down, Sydney came up to them, leading another girl. Sydney had the girl on a leash like K had Graham, except the girl's was looped around her wrists in front of her instead of on her throat. Sydney was dressed in a leopard-spotted bikini, with sandals and a necklace of animal teeth. A jungle girl costume. She looked pretty hot in it. K didn't think she could pull off an outfit like that. Not with the confidence Sydney was projecting as she strutted forward. K's Costume Ch. 03 The other girl was named Carrie, if K remembered right. She wasn't strutting. Her approach was a mincing pigeon-toed shuffle. K had heard some bizarre things about her (mostly from Sydney). Same with Sydney's stories about herself, K hadn't believed them. Tonight, again, demanded reevaluation of that stance. Carrie's costume was a safari hat—what were they called, a pitch helmet or no, a pith helmet. And that was essentially all there was to it. Just the dorky tan hat, and hiking boots with brown socks pulled up to her knees. Otherwise—in all the ways that counted—she was prancing around bare naked. With her hands tied. Her cheeks and her freckled shoulders were very pink, and her eyes were bugged out. Her mouth was pinched in a prim little frown and her nostrils kept twitching like a rabbit's. She looked a lot like Christina Ricci. It was hard to judge her expression—K couldn't decide if the girl was petrified and trying to act like she wasn't, or loving this and trying to pretend like she was petrified. K also found she couldn't stop looking at the girl's gazonga's, and down further at her bush. It was embarrassing but Jesus—when they were just hanging out right there in front of you, you couldn't help staring, whether you wanted to or not. Plus there was the fact her tits were gigantic, at least in proportion to the rest of her. Blam!Blam! straight in your face! Made K a little envious, and then mad at herself for feeling that way. They were extremely sweaty, too, both covered with like a hundred shimmering fat beads of moisture. Or maybe somebody spilled a drink on her chest, or she'd spilled one on herself. He bush was huge too. Well, not out of control. But full. A bushy bush. We ain't used to seeing them like that anymore, most of the time. It's shocking when somebody violates the contemporary fashion. Most of us don't dare. The safari hat sort of connected with Sydney's jungle getup, if only in an out-of-date and actually mildly offensive kind of way. Like she was an explorer and Sydney was a native. Not PC, for sure. If they weren't both white girls, and hot, one of the black people in the room would have got pissed at them—or should have if they were paying attention. A joke's a joke, sure. But there are good jokes and there are bad jokes and there are shitty mean jokes that are actually just plain insults, not jokes at all. "I captured this trespasser," Sydney announced, "And now she is my slave." "Is she?" said K, just to have something to say. "She is not very obedient," Sydney went on, "Not yet. Something must be done about it. Will you lend me your werewolf, for the purpose?" "What for?" As if it wasn't obvious. Sydney just smiled, shrugged, and made vague incomprehensible gestures with her free hand. Except they weren't really incomprehensible. "No," said K, tightening her grip on Graham's leash, "This werewolf is mine. All mine." "But you're not doing anything with him," said Sydney, "It seems like a waste. Let us play with him for a spell. We won't hurt him. You're welcome to play too, if you're up for it." From the heat she could feel in her cheeks, K imagined her face must have turned redder than Carrie's. And she had to swallow a couple times before she could speak again. "No thank you," she said, "Not just now." Sydney made a pouting face, and so did Carrie. "Oh come on. Pwetty pwease? Look how pwetty she is. Don't you think she's pwetty?" Carrie twirled around on her toes—at least as far as the leash would allow her—and wiggled her bottom at them. Sydney swatted it. "Oooh!" exclaimed Carrie. "Oh my!" "Please just ... just go away," said K, "Let us be." They did. With a sigh, Sydney led Carrie to the vampire couches ... who accepted her offering with alacrity. Less than a minute later, Carrie was getting vigorously screwed by three Dracula's at once, as Sydney bounced herself on top of a fourth on a separate chair in the reverse cowgirl position, so she and Carrie could keep their eyes fixed on each other. Like everything they were doing, or having done to them, was only happening between themselves. "Are you mad at me for saying no?" K whispered to Graham, without looking at him. "No," he said. She didn't believe him. "Those bitches are hot. Don't pretend you don't think so." "You're hotter, my dear." She snorted. "Sure I am." "You are. Much." "You still would have fucked them if I let you, wouldn't you? You still wanted to." She shifted one of her feet to nudge his crotch. Just as expected, she felt him bulging under his pants. He grabbed her ankle. Didn't push her foot away but didn't move it further on top of his cock either. He just held it in that spot, with the side of her heel just barely pressing on the head. She could feel the heat of it through his pants and through her leggings, and she could feel it pulsing—or at least she imagined she could feel those things. Her foot absorbed the waves of heat and vibration and passed them along up the muscles of her folded leg, which was trembling ... Sydney was shouting: "I'm gonna come ... I'm about to come ..." You couldn't hear her, but K could see her lips articulating the words. Carrie had already made one of the Dracula's spew with her mouth. She spit the jizz on the carpet and then got started on another dick. It had been the guy pounding her from behind. He'd pulled out and moved around when the Drac up front got out of the way. Another man took his spot, not another vampire but one of the zombie guys from the other square. And another zombie had crawled over next to him, on his stomach. That guy tugged off one of Carrie's hiking boots and her long sock so he could begin nibbling on her toes. This inspired another of the vampires to do the same to her other foot. Watching them do that made K cringe a little—she knew that type shit would have driven her hysterical, in the harsher sense of the term. Turned out to be equally true for Carrie—she thrashed around so much the three Dracs fucking her mouth and pussy and her ass had trouble keeping themselves inside her. Two of them were greatly annoyed by this turn of events, and nearly started a fistfight with the foot ticklers—the guy on the very bottom of the pile took it in better spirit. Of course, it was probably much easier for him to keep himself planted, with the girl saddled on top of him. "Say it, Graham. Just say it," she insisted, "Admit that you would have fucked either of those girls. Or both, if I let you." "No. Only if you had wanted me to. I knew you wouldn't and you didn't." He was right. She'd turned super-territorial, all the sudden, when Sydney made her proposal. That was why she'd turned it down. It hadn't been shyness or cowardice. K had actually thought it was when she said no, but it wasn't either of those at all. She simply hadn't wanted to share. Graham was hers, dammit. She'd brought this guy here and she'd be taking him home. And nobody else was screwing him tonight before then. She wasn't down with that. Her feelings on this matter weren't fair or balanced. She'd just been imagining herself with those two black mummy studs. Graham hadn't been part of that picture. She decided now that he might have been off to the side as an observer, wanking off, or perhaps she'd have made him wait alone in one of the closets. Locked in the dark 'til she was ready to let him out again. He certainly wasn't getting involved in anything with any of these other girls. No way, José. Sorry but there it is, them's the rules. Just plain no. And then almost before she realized what was happening, Graham had clipped his dog collar around her neck. Hadn't noticed him take it off himself—too many other distractions. Now he'd just put it on her. Then he pulled the leash out of her hand. "Um," she said, "Hey now. Just what do you think you're up to, boy?" "Your pet monster is turning the tables on you," he said, "Your magic had weakened. You didn't realize it was happening. It's all the turbulent emotional energy in this place. It's disrupting your power. You can't completely control me anymore." "Is that so?" she said. She felt a terrible sinking ache in her belly. He was going to ditch her. He was about to go over to Sydney and Carrie. Maybe he'd try to make her tag along behind him with the leash. Maybe he wouldn't abandon her entirely. But he wasn't gonna let her keep him stuck in this chair anymore, away from the rest of the fun. That seemed clear. He'd got fed up with her. K didn't have to accept this. She could tell him no, or she could make them leave. She knew he'd cooperate. He'd back down if she told him to. He'd be disappointed, was all. He wouldn't get mad or fight with her. He'd pretend like he didn't care. God. It would be horrible. Absolutely horrible. This was gonna be the end of their relationship. She could tell. Right here was where it all went down the tube. She could feel it. Oh Christ, she could feel it about to happen ... Only then it didn't. Not like she thought. She thought he'd push her feet off his lap so he could stand up and then he'd pull on the leash to make her stand up with him and follow him to the middle of the room. Then that didn't happen. That wasn't what he did. That wasn't what he wanted. He just pulled her head down towards his, so he could kiss her and keep kissing her. And while they were kissing, he made her scooch her bottom off the armrest so she was sitting directly on his lap. On his cock. A minute of two after that, he got to work gradually working his hands under her dress so he could push it up her body higher and higher ... the final goal (no, not really the final goal, only the goal of that stage of the proceedings) being to get the dress up entirely over her head and her arms and then off of her. This entailed some minor complications along the way on account of the leash and her broad-brimmed witch's hat. Nothing insurmountable, however. Inside her head she was screaming over and over: God! God! God! She was so astonished. She'd been so certain he was about to ditch her—and she'd been dead wrong. He had no interest in Sydney and Carrie and the rest of the room, after all, just like he'd said. Only her. Or, well, at least she was the one he was the most interested in, over all the other crazy girls. He was proving it now. He hadn't switched the collar and taken charge to get away from her. He did it to start fucking her. Probably noticed how watching the mummy guys had worked her up. He didn't have bandages to tie her up with, but he had the leash to use. Same general game. ********* The dress went away and all of Graham's things except his necktie and the gold wolf mask. That freaky mask stayed with her a long time. She had dreams about it. One time Graham and her dad were fighting. Graham was wearing the mask and he'd won and ate her father while she'd cheered him on. Yeah, well ... What else is there to say? She kept on her witch hat. Graham was insistent about it. The leash was discarded before very long—it got in their way. The hat was constantly getting knocked off her head—every single time, he'd grab it and put it back on. He wasn't letting go of the hot witch angle. Her bra wasn't removed, they just pushed it down out of the way around her waist. She kept on the leggings, as well, kind of—just on one leg. And pushed down to knee level—they had to be, to allow him inside her. Her panties did end up coming off all the way. Should have needed to take off the leggings completely to allow that, only Graham ripped them apart, so that wasn't necessary after all. She should have got pissed at him about ruining the panties; they'd been one of her nicer and pricier pairs. Any other day she would have freaked out. Except right just then in the heat of the moment it was super-hot when he did that. Stopped her heart for a second—in a good way. And hey, it was completely in character for a lust-maddened werewolf. The other way he surprised her this time was leaving on the leggings, if only on one side. She never would have predicted that—getting her barefoot was generally his first objective, whenever they got together, regardless of the setting or circumstances. If nothing else sexual happened between them, he'd still do his damnedest to get his paws on her tootsies as soon as possible and for as long as she put up with it. Never got tired of fiddling with them—and it was lucky for him he was as good at that shit as he was. Evidently tonight he got excited about the contrast between the one naked foot and the other in the brightly colored tights, with its different slightly fuzzy texture. This opened up all kinds of amazing new possibilities to explore. A major discovery. A paradigm shift. His excitement fueled hers. She enjoyed this footsy stuff with him much more than she used to. She never minded it but her feet weren't one of her essential vital trigger spots either. That had changed, and Graham had changed it. He got so worked up over that stuff that now it worked her up almost as much. Pleasuring your partner can be as pleasurable in every respect as him pleasing you—it's not just a chore or a tradeoff anymore, and there's more to it than the power trip angle, if you both get enough into sync. And they certainly were. She'd probably never got synced this much with another guy. With Graham she'd hit a new level. She thought she'd already gone as far as it was possible, at least for someone like her—she thought she'd had it as good as she was ever gonna get it, two or three times with earlier boyfriends. Nice thing to find out you'd got wrong. Amazing as this had turned out, it was also undeniably goofy, wasn't it? What kind of fucked-up people come to a Halloween party in February that basically transforms into an orgy, and then only have sex with each other the whole time (once they finally work up the nerve to get cookin'). As if they were by themselves. Why didn't they just stay home, or go back, if this was all they were gonna do? It's like when tourists travel to foreign cities and only wanna eat at McDonalds. Then again it still added an extra something, having all those other people around them. Despite the fact they tuned them out as much as they could. Deciding to do this together made a powerful statement, if you chose to look at it that way. Not the sex alone—the tuning out of everybody else. Almost made it genuinely romantic, maybe. And they did attract a large audience. Not instantly but more and more. Somehow everybody else in the place picked up on their intensity. Perhaps it was from ignoring the rest of the party, after all the earlier time they'd spent watching everyone; the switch made them a focus of attention. People can almost always feel when they're being looked at, and they can feel when the looking has stopped. Then again, there might have been a simpler and less hokey explanation for it. They made the chair rock and hop around, and doing that made the back edges of the thing smack into the wall behind them. That happened a lot and it was real loud every time it hit. Loud as the music was, it still couldn't drown out those bangs. Bound to turn people's heads. They were like gunshots. Picture frames got knocked down, and they left nasty gouges in the drywall. (K later offered to pay for repairs; Sydney waved her off, preferring to keep the marks as a memorial.) All the other people didn't just watch them, after everyone started watching—they didn't make the party stop; the rest of the crowd didn't suddenly stop their own umpteen separate screwings to stand around and stare. Instead what happened was everybody started keeping their eyes sideways on K and Graham as they did whatever/whoever else they were in the middle of doing, instead of focused on their partners or themselves. Everybody started matching their rhythms to K and Graham. They'd speed up when they sped up and ease off when they slowed ... Some couples went so far as to copy their positions, and also changing whenever they did to keep matching. In fact real soon even the people that weren't doing each other the same way as K and Graham would still switch positions when they switched. They'd pick their own particular positions again, but still follow along with K and Graham's example for a changeover. K and Graham never noticed. Or if they did they pretended they didn't. They kept going at it for an impressive length of time. The frequent changes of position and of pace made that possible. Also (exactly like the first time they fucked each other) an important contributing factor was the condom Graham was wearing (he'd brought some in his pocket), and the fact he was pretty much incapable of coming with one on. He only finally let loose when he did because the condom had busted inside of her. K had felt the damn thing give out and shred, but was too carried away at that stage to be able to stop and make him put on another one. It would probably be too much to claim that when they finished—their orgasms not perfectly simultaneous but just about as close as anybody gets in real life, with Graham shooting off about two seconds after she had peaked (for the third time that evening)—they made the rest of the party come again with them. But a whole lot of other people did, or followed them within the next minute and a half. The room got louder. It had been excessively loud already; felt at the end like everybody was gonna bring down the ceiling with their crazy howls and hollering. Left K's ears hurting afterward and she was sure she wasn't the only one. Graham had ejaculated inside of her. K had a hard time feeling as mad about that as she knew she should be. Feeling him do that had felt too good, while it happened. She had enjoyed that sensation a great deal. There was an extra level of power in it, and intimacy as well, which you didn't get when the guy pulled outside of you when he came, or had his condom catch it all. It had surprised her—maybe it shouldn't have, when she thought about it later, but it had. It wasn't something she'd fully considered the implications of before. Now it looked like this was something she was probably going to want to explore further. Which meant they were going to have to see about another method of birth control. That would make Graham happy. It just better not have too harsh an effect on his performance. His longevity was one of the best assets of fucking the guy. If that feature went out the window, he was gonna have to put the condoms back on to bring it back, regardless if she started herself on the good ol' pill or one of the other programs on offer nowadays. Of course she'd let him take it off at the end to finish, naturally, but not 'til he'd properly fulfilled his duties and earned the privilege. Three to one was the minimum orgasm ratio they were gonna be sticking with. That was nonnegotiable. The guy had no one to blame but himself for setting the mark that high. All the other guys in the place had apparently decided at the Moment of Truth to hose the room indiscriminately. When she looked around and saw how bad it had got, all K could say was "Jesus." The spray had got all over the furniture, all over the carpet, all over the walls. Hopefully some of these drizzles and big shiny wet spots she was seeing weren't actually jizz. Some of them, especially on the cushions, would be sweat-stains, and many others were probably spilled drinks. Yet those pearly globs spattered across that lampshade, and the thick white trickles oozing down the middle of the leaves of the big tropical plant beside their chair—no getting around either of those. The smell was one for the record books. Just two people in the ordinary run of things can make their bedroom reek of come. In here it was unbelievable. It was like having your head crammed inside a vagina or a guy's nutsac. If sperm had nostrils, this must be what they'd smell all the time, in the little tiny tubes where they waited with their billion brothers before they got fired out. Good thing for them they didn't. K's Costume Ch. 03 They should change the music. For this atmosphere, they needed to kill that techno crap and throw on some funk. (*Rimshot!) K theorized a lot of the mess ending up as awful as it had was the fault of the girls. They hadn't let the guys come on them because of their costumes, and because of the company. Or simply because they thought that was gross, though K had very little patience with girls that said that. It was one of those things girls claimed because they felt obliged to. Most girls lied. Most girls, so long as they were straight, liked seeing come, and liked feeling it land on their skin, whatever they might tell you or tell themselves. It was a hot thrill. The so-called money shot isn't all just for the guys. Even girls that genuinely thought it was yucky and gross—and yeah, fine, it was—they still liked it. They liked it because it was yucky and gross. They liked testing themselves against it, if nothing else. Anyway, that was K's perspective. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she really was wired different than the majority of women. She sure wouldn't bet money on it. She imagined a big bunch of last second dodges and deflections had occurred. Slapping those puppies to the side as they started to squirt, rolling clear ... She hadn't been paying attention at the time, still wrapped up in the initial sparkling haze of her own afterglow, so she couldn't speak as a witness. It was only a deduction. And amusing to imagine, anyhow. Even the guys that had worn condoms like good safe citizens—like half the men in the room, or maybe it was a bit better of a number than that, maybe two thirds—they seemed to have all either whipped off the thingies at the critical moment, like porn stars will for the money shot, or if they hadn't, they managed to spill the contents after removal. K saw at least five abandoned in different spots across the super-room, where they'd been dropped or flung away, with goo pooling out of them. Giant squashed grubs vomiting their insides out—that was what they looked like. Horrible. She saw one stuck on the ceiling—though it dropped down right after she noticed it. Actually which was more disgusting? The idea that they were dead mutilated alien worm things, or the true facts—discarded sopping plastic dick-sheaths, reamed-out catchbags for jizz, leaking out all they'd collected. Yeah, Jesus, the second one was way worse, wasn't it? Did idiots allow those spills to happen all over the place on accident or by malicious design? She wouldn't venture a guess. Her brain couldn't go there any further. Except it left her reluctant to climb off Graham's lap in the armchair. She didn't want to lower her feet to the floor, not without her shoes. There didn't seem to be any clean spots. Seriously. This must be what a treed cat felt like. Where were her shoes? She couldn't find them. Turned out one was underneath her dress. Graham fished it out and handed it to her. "Can you find the other one?" she asked as she put it on. Somehow it had ended up on a coffee table clear across the room, on top of a pizza box. Probably it had got in somebody's way on the floor and they moved it up there. Another guy grabbed it and flung it over to them. Graham caught it—K's hands were occupied trying to fit her other foot and her bare leg back into her leggings. There were beads of shiny goo streaked across the top of the shoe, including the laces. Jesus. Some asshole had jizzed on her shoe. No doubt it wasn't on purpose; it still pissed her off. "Motherfucker!" It also pissed her off that Graham thought this was funny. She wasn't sure if he was laughing because of the spooge on her shoe, or because she'd got mad about it. Both, more than likely. "Motherfucker!" she said again, and whacked him over the head with it, knocking his mask crooked. That just made him laugh harder. "Shut up," she said, "Freak!" He started trying to tickle her, under her armpits. She kept clobbering him with the soiled shoe. K realized his cock was still inside her. She'd somehow never quite got around yet to lifting high enough off his lap for it to slide out. Not even when she was stuffing her bare leg into her leggings—she still hadn't pulled them up above her knees. Believe it or not, she'd almost sort of forgotten she was still clenched on him in there, since it had gone soft and small after his ejaculation. At least she'd been pretending to herself that she'd forgotten. But now all the sudden she could feel it reawakening in there. Pumping itself upward again, stretching tall. And it felt real good, feeling it do that. Oh man. Holy crap. She made herself squeeze inside on it, to feel the feeling stronger and of course to encourage it, and him ... Yeah, shit. Wowee. Her and this guy, they really pushed each other's buttons, didn't they? Nobody ever pushed her buttons like this guy kept doing. Made her so mad. He had her hooked, was the thing. She had him hooked too just as bad. That was some comfort. Still, it was scary. She was pretty sure she'd never been hooked this bad. She'd hooked other guys but without getting hooked herself, not to the same degree. Not like this. Not where she was feeling it like she kept feeling it this time. He bounced his legs, to get her going. He only had to do it once or twice and then he could keep still. She took over the work. She'd do all the bouncing from here on. Well, not forever. Just this first phase, 'til they switched positions again ... Looked like this party wasn't done yet.