Four and a Half Horsemen

V

           

When I woke up, my arms weren't burning anymore, and neither was my soul, which was a pretty big relief, because when I had lost consciousness, they both had been burning like a pizza box in a preheating oven in hell. That was kind of the only thing I noticed at first because my eyes hadn't quite remembered how to send signals to my brain yet. I was seeing the inside of some room but I wasn't really picking up any particular detail about it. I got a smell that was the first sensory information I can remember receiving. And boy, was it a bad smell. Imagine if someone tried to sugarcoat body odor to make it smell better, and it didn't work. It was a lot like that. Plus a little salt, like blood, or the sea. The room was warm, as my skin told me, and humid, but not too much of either. And it was pretty dimly lit. In fact, I think the only light shining was the yellow streetlight outside and the red digital numbers on the alarm clock. It was enough, once my eyes adjusted, to see Clem and Fergus, and I remembered what had happened. What I couldn't remember, was why we were in a hotel room. My ears tuned in to the noise of the room like an old AM radio.

            Creaking bedsprings.

            The hum of a shitty air conditioning unit.

            The soft babble of news reporters breaking a story about some kind of tragedy or another.

            Did he have to fuckin wake up now?

            Don't be inconsiderate, you ass. At least he's waking up.

            Talk about ass.

            A slap.

            Shit, sorry, jeez.

            I could smell the warmth of a burning cigarette, and it made my disposition perk up. It was my favorite smell. Weird, I know, shut up. My dad had smoked pretty heavily, especially in the car when his mom and he would pick me up and take me to hang out at their house. He had always been pretty lax about smoking around me, even when my mom told him if he kept it up she wouldn't let him see me. He still smoked around me, and I don't think it was because he didn't want to see me, I think it's because he really wanted to see her. In any case, the smell of burning cigarettes was cathartic for me.

            I realized with a start that Clem, who was on her hands and knees in the bed, looking to see if I was okay, was naked. Fully in the buff. I tried as hard as I could to look at her directly in the face and not let my eyes wander, but I'm a teen virgin boy, dammit, and I have interests. It just so happens that one half of my interests rhyme with the word interests. Her... "Interests" were hanging freely, the way i had imagined they might've in my deepest, darkest, most well-kept fantasies. Kinda stuff I wouldn't even tell you, sorry to say, I mean they're pretty personal, and most of them are pretty similar so it'd get kind of boring, at least, that's what I thought. Maybe one day I'll tell you one. You'll have to earn my trust, first, though. I could see her pale skin flush with color when she realized I had been ogling her. All the thought about 401K's and applicable college degrees couldn't help the tightness in my pants. I felt awkward for it. When Clem saw it she was even redder, her whole face was practically plum, and it kept all the way to practically mid stomach.

            "Morning sunshine," Fergus said with a grin. He had been lying in the bed under the covers, but now was sitting up, and he reeled his hand back and slapped Clem right on her ass. She jumped, and kinda sighed and closed her eyes a little bit when it happened, and flushed even deeper. She rushed to put clothes on just about as fast as I rushed to erase the image from my head. Not out of disinterest, as I can no longer lie about, but out of respect for her as my friend.  The image of her shoving herself into a pair of panties with a giant, pink handprint on her left ass cheek will forever be burned into my mind, though, because she had spread her leg a little too far and given me the deluxe tour. I felt pretty sick for even thinking something like that, I mean, not sick like I wanted to throw up more like sick like I wanted to make myself throw up, and shower for three days and still not get clean. I wasn't a disgusting person who only thought about girls sexually. I wasn't. I really just wasn't. Not one bit. I couldn't shake the feeling, though, that that's exactly what I was, and i had a funny feeling my OCD had something to do with it. Some kind of crazy nonsense notion, call it a hunch. She was in underwear and pants pretty quick, but she struggled with a bra, and it was then i noticed the scars on her stomach, and her back and sides, and near her shoulders and midway down her thighs. They were beautiful, really. They almost reminded me of tattoos, she threw on a thermal shirt pretty quick, though, so I lost the view of a lot of things pretty fast. Her cheeks were still glowing red as she came over to check on me and make sure everything inside my head was still functioning 100%. Spoilers; it wasn't. Although there was no net loss. She stood, hands on her hips, in a gray thermal and black leggings, and a pink bra and forest green panties that I was painstakingly aware of, and pushed some of her bangs to the sides of her face, behind her ears. She got frustrated after a few tries and threw it up into a messy bun. Let me tell you a secret really quick, I am in love with messy buns. No joke. Girls always seem to think they're hella casual and it's like wearing no makeup but there's just something about it that I love.