I hope you like the way this started, and you'll follow it as it develops.
I am back to my old thing: writing and publishing online on the go, making things up as we go along. Therefore I have a general idea of where this is going, but can't really say how long it will be.
The longer the better is the idea, but let's wait and see.
Incidentally, this is partially inspired by a true story, and it might go in a few dark places before it ends.
But do not worry: it's going to be fun, and light. And hot and naughty.
It will only need a little time to build up.
So, here goes part 2.
“It was back in college,” she said.
I stared at her. “That was what, twenty-five years ago?”
She nodded, her eyes low.
I lit a new cigarette. “OK, I think this is going to be long.”
We had started together in college, even sharing a room in the dorms. Then we had slowly drifted apart.
“It was on the second year,” she went on.
Second year. I was about to drop out, back then. And Sabrina was no longer hanging out with me that much.
“It’s then the gossip started,” she said, her voice thin and distant.
“What gossip?”
She shrugged.
“They were talking about me. They said I was a slut.”
I coughed out a mouthful of smoke. “Are you kidding me?”
Sabrina had been a serious student. Easy-going and fun, yes, but you had to be on drugs to believe she was nothing but a straight A girl with a busy life and no time for any party girl shit.
“Who said that?” I asked.
“Everybody. Mike Forlani.”
I snorted. “Another fine specimen of asshole.”
She pressed her lips together. “Yes, he was.”
“I always wondered why you hung out together.”
“We didn’t,” she snapped.
“Oh, come on!”
Mike had been an upper class frat boy, the sort that hides his penchant for weekend drunken partying and belch contests under a smart jacket and a nice car.
I snorted. Sabrina always had a weak spot for those sorts of guys. She had always ended up with rich pricks.
“I never liked him,” Sabrina said.
“OK, if you say so. What did the bastard say about you?”
Sabrina just kept staring at the floor. She bit the nail of her left thumb. I gently pulled the hand away.
“Tell me.”
She looked up at me.
“I might be able to help,” I said.
“I don’t know if he was the one that started it,” she said. “But he was certainly one of those that helped it spread.”
“What?”
“They said I was easy. It started like that. A rumor. They started hinting that I was ‘very friendly’. That I couldn’t say no. That I wouldn’t say no.”
I laughed despite myself, and she looked at me, hurt.
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” I said. “You were spending your days in the library, for fuck’s sake! Never went to a party, never gave any hint of nothing. You did not drink, didn’t do drugs. Shit, you even stopped smoking!”
“Unlike you,” she said, nodding at my cigarette.
Or maybe she meant something deeper.
I had been wilder in college.
I liked my drinks, I did some stuff. Strictly social.
Then I dropped out. I had found out I could make a nice buck by modelling for the students in drawing classes. It was pretty neat: spend two hours sitting on your butt, as still as possible, and then get paid. Maybe get invited by the other students for a drink or a bite. Maybe a party on the weekend. Nude modelling meant more money and a boost in popularity. It also meant I discovered my exhibitionist streak in a very soft, non-traumatic way. I was doing something that I enjoyed.
One thing led to the other, and after two years, my curriculum was in shambles, but I had found a vocation of sorts. I did more art school modelling, then some photo-shoots, then some advertising. Normally stuff that did not require my face to be on the page or the billboard: lingerie, nail polish, lipstick, shoes. Bits of my body got plastered all over town, but it was all right. I started being requested for more serious stuff.
It was then, after I left college, that Sabrina had disappeared from my radars.
The proverbial light bulb lit up over my head.
“You think it was because of me?” I asked.
She shrugged.
Slut-shaming by association?
God knew I had seen weirder shit in my years on the road. The modelling biz was a den of snakes. Small communities tend to be gossip-ridden and sick thinking can fester fast.
“Damn, sister, I never thought they could— I mean, I never did anything—”
I was momentarily breathless. I was showing my boobs in art class and my best friend was being slut-shamed about it?
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
Sabrina stared at me hard. “I thought you knew.”
“I did not!”
My head reeled. Here we were, both in our late forties, talking about school gossip and—
“You thought it was me!” I almost shouted.
Sabrina just nodded.
“Why did you think it was me?!”
She shrugged.
I was putting the pieces together. I had been there. I knew the assholes. I knew the way they reasoned. The way they acted. “They fucking told you it was me!”
“Yes.”
“And you believed them!”
Sabrina looked at me. “Yes! No! I didn’t know what to believe. My life was collapsing a round me—”
“Because a handful of retards believed you were on the market?”
“Because everybody was talking about it! The students, the teachers. By the end of the second year I was branded. People approached me in the corridors, walked up to me in the library. Everybody was looking at me, everybody was talking—”
I looked at her, a bundle of greenish rags and misery. This was going deeper than that.
“Did anybody— Did anybody get physical?”
She laughed a short bitter laugh. “Get physical! What a nice way of putting it.”
I closed my eyes. “Shit, Sabrina, I didn’t know—”
“Oh, they patted my ass as I waked by. Some tried to squeeze my tits, others made rude gestures or lewd comments. And the girls were the worse.”
“But you never— I mean—?”
“Nobody raped me, if that’s what you are asking. But I felt raped every day, by everyone. Every. Single. Day.”
My cigarette laid forgotten on the rim of the ashtray.
“And you thought it was because of me.”
She nodded. A single tear rolled down her cheek.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I repeated. But we had already been there. “Why didn’t you tell Dan?”
She burst out crying, a long hollow howl that gave me the shivers.
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