“Say my name while you come.”
Tabby hadn’t been so blindsided by sex since her first boyfriend got her to orgasm. Toby had pushed her for hours, way past the breaking point. One minute, he was all, ‘I’m in charge.’ The next, he was face-deep in her pussy, moaning about how soft it was. It had been so hot she’d done something she hardly ever did and opened door number three for him.
So now, not only was Tobynota virgin, he had his…
Someone needed to think of a better phrase for ‘brown wings’ because that was fucking gross. Anal crown? No, that implied spikes in and around her asshole. She’d have to work on that one. Either way, it had been a wild fucking ride. Toby was an absolute beast in the sack. But then, some people just had it. Like being able to shoot hoops, or spell ‘xylophone,’ or draw an accurate horse.
“Good for you, Tobes,” Tabby whispered, brushing more hair across his forehead. He had really nice hair, thick and shiny. If he were a girl, it would probably go down to his elbows and be the envy of all.
“Mfffff,” he moaned, sounding so much like when she’d found him face down on the floor, Tabby grinned.
“Almost time to get up, bud. Real life’s calling.”
“Fuck…”
They both knew it was coming. She had to work today, and so did Toby. But they could do it again. Meet up and fuck. She could go to his parents’ old house and put sheets over all the flayed Jesus paraphernalia and screw Toby senseless without worrying Noah would burst in with a baseball bat and bludgeon everyone to death. They could laugh and talk above a whisper and order Chinese food and listen to music, and hang out…
She felt a faint squirm of fear. She’d been so honest with him. But that was okay, wasn’t it? Toby was a good guy. They could make this work. After all, that was the best part of having mates you slept with—all the pleasure with none of the pain of a relationship. And who knew? Maybe one day she'd be at his wedding to some Mimco bag-owning basic bitch, and she'd mention how Toby had reamed all her holes, ad nauseum.
Or not. It might be considered rude. Maybe she could let it slip at his bachelor party…
“Tabs…” her new lover mumbled. “What’s the time?”
Her heart gave an unexpected sputter, like something struggling to go down a drain. “Ahhhh, almost seven thirty?”
“Fuck,” Toby said again. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Okay,” Tabby whispered and then, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she took his hand. “Let’s be friends forever, okay? Promise?”
Toby sat up and, despite his earlier statement, grasped greedily at her. They spent the next fifteen minutes having one for the road, and Tabby didn’t realise until much later that he had never answered the question, much less promised.
1
Two years later
“Have you ever fucked someone who went evil?”
The older woman sitting in Tabby’s tattoo chair blinked. “Sorry?”
“This guy I fucked went evil,” Tabby said as she continued drilling dots of black ink into the woman’s forearm. “One minute, he was this nerd who wouldn’t say boo to a goose; the next, we had casual intercourse, and he went full Darth Maul. Or Vader. Or Sidious. One of the Darths.”
The woman—Jo, according to her client intake form—continued to blink at her as though English was a foreign language. Tabby didn’t blame her. She wasn’t known for her small talk, especially not when she was tattooing. She specialised in big talk: rhetorical questions and philosophical debates, whatever weird thing was on her mind—but this was pretty out there, even by her standards.
“Sorry,” she muttered, refocusing on the tarot card she was inking onto Jo’s arm. “I’m not… I’m having kind of a hard time.”
Jo didn’t say anything. Possibly, she already knew that from looking at her. Tabby’s once bright-blue hair was aqua-pale with four inches of dishwater roots. She had zits on both cheeks, and her nails were bitten to shit. She could have minimised all of this with makeup or a nice outfit, but she was barefaced and in leggings, Crocs and a huge ‘Aliums Exist!’ hoodie doused in paint stains.
Sometimes, she saw old photos of herself wearing dresses and fake eyelashes and felt so tired she wanted to curl up on the floor.
“What’s going on?” Jo asked tentatively.
Please don’t say it, don’t say it…
“I was putting together a music festival, and it got cancelled. The weather got so extreme that insurance wouldn’t cover it, and the guy I was planning it with ran off to New Zealand without helping me sort out the ticket refunds or anything.”
“Wow. That’s really bad.”
Tabby squinted at Jo, checking she wasn’t making fun of her. “Yes…”
