3

Gemma wakes while it’s still dark out.

Instantly, she is hit with an ugly feeling, an intractable knowledge teleported into her body: something bad happened in the night.

She is still in her clothes and in Ava’s bed. The A/C is still broken, and every part of her skin is sticky. Her mouth feels like bugs. In the moonlight through the shades, she can see Ava in her sleep mask under the covers, snoring quietly, her hair snarled. She looks gorgeous like that.

What happened? What happened? Gemma can’t remember. Her body hurts, and she can already tell she will be very shaky if she stands up. Her back … her back has a burning sensation? That’s weird. She remembers very little after they left Holly’s place. Could she remember anything? Anything? She’d been on a toilet and it was too warm. There was a buzzing fluorescent light; it reminded her of a basement back in the city … She couldn’t remember anything else.

Hey! Hey. Whatever happened, there’s nothing you can do about it right now. Take a shower. Take a shower and change into your sleep clothes. And you can lie back down next to this girl you like and you’ll wake back up sprightly, smelling good in the morning, and you can figure out everything from there.

Gemma rises, but she has not truly reckoned with the requirements of standing at the moment, and so she sinks onto all fours on the carpet.

There on the floor, she removes her blouse and then her skirt.

She scrabbles around and finds her sleep clothes and her phone. In the process, she discovers the tequila bottle, now empty. Heh, she thinks.

Silently, she rises again and exits the room. Slowly, shaking as if she’s just come inside from extreme cold. She nearly crashes full force into the bathroom door but steadies herself last minute. Oh boy.

Inside the windowless room, she turns on the light, and then a stabbing cramp hits her out of nowhere. She doubles over and sits naked on the toilet. It’s an intense cramp.

Oh fuck, like a bad one. Shit, shit, like shit, this hurts!!! Gemma clutches herself. Her eyes water. She waits for the pain to fade. It doesn’t fade.

It continues to not fade.

It keeps not fading. It’s excruciating, what Gemma’s experiencing, and it’s not stopping.

Her eyes stream as she’s bent over in the searing light.

She breathes, and breathes again, and breathes again, and breathes again. Eventually, the pain leaves.

“Fuck,” she whispers to herself. She’s been cramping more lately in the last few months, sure, but that was … awful.

Sweaty in the baking room, she drinks cold water from the tap. (She notices she has an apple piece stuck in her teeth. Good times.)

She lets the hot shower sauna her body. She washes every part of herself and holds her torso and closes her eyes.

There.

There.

Did something happen last night? She was usually well behaved in blackouts, but.