Sneak Peek: Chapter 6 - Jonas (Patreon)

With the revision of chapters 1-5 of Constant finished, I've gone back to writing new stuff. It was unexpectedly difficult to return to the keyboard, but then it's always a little scary after a break. In any case, it feels good to be back at it. My goal's to have the chapter done before the end of the month, especially as I'm very keen to try writing some shorter fiction. I've got all these ideas I want to develop, but want to finish off the chapter, first.

In any case, here's a sneak peek at chapter 6-8 (in the new TGS format): The Story of Jonas, which I posted a fragment of about a month ago. Enjoy!

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Eight: The Story of Jonas

He couldn’t understand, of course, that I was suffering an existential crisis as I wailed and clung to him the way a drowning sailor might cleave to a life preserver in a tempestuous sea.  Both sides of my selves were collapsing into each other as I cried into this confused boy’s shoulder. I mourned a part of myself forever dead: some heterosexual fragment that had never tasted a man’s cock on his tongue.

And so, Jonas’ shirt darkened under my tears and he winced a little as my nails dug into his arm.  He held me lightly and made little comforting sounds.  He had no idea what was going on or quite how he’d ended up with this girl holding on to him.  No doubt he questioned whether a half-assed blowjob was worth the price of all this drama.

            He didn’t have to put up with me for long.  Though intense, my crisis was short-lived.  I felt remarkably better as I pulled away.  Something had dislodged within me.  Something toxic, now expelled and almost instantly my mind cleared with an odd elation taking its place.

            “Wow,” I said and smiled to see his confusion.  “What was that, huh?”

            “Are you—okay?” He blinked. “Should I get Bruno over here?  He can take you to the medical room.”

            I laughed.  “No.” My shoulders shook, seeing his unconvinced scowl.  “No—really.  It’s… fine.”  I pressed my hand to his chest, fingers spread.  “I’m fine. Really. Tonight brought a bunch of stuff to the surface. I really just needed a good cry.  And… thank you for being there when I needed someone.”  With my other hand I cupped his cheek.  “You’re a good kid, Jonas.”

            “Kid?” His crooked smile sparkled with a hint of condescension.  “I bet you’re not even twenty-one.”

            “My ID says I am,” I answered and stuck my tongue out at him.  “So there.”

            “You alone tonight?” He made a show of looking around.  “No beefy boyfriend coming to beat the crap out of me?”

            “Nope. You’re safe.” That little sardonic smile of his, equal parts charming to annoying, grew.  “What?”

            “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just—surprised, I guess.  A girl like you, single?”

            “I know, right?”

            “Here with friends?”

            I nod.  “Yeah.  I should probably check in on them.” My little clutch purse sat at the back of the pod.  “But—they’re big girls.  I’m sure they’re fine.”  I sidled a little closer to him, arm sliding around his waist.  Leaning into him, I add, “I’d rather be here right now.”

            “I—” He blushed.  “Um—are you sure you’re okay?”

            I nodded. We sat in silence for a short while.  Occasionally someone walked by, often peeking in though the darkness of the pod.  At one point the girl from the neighbouring pod got up, stretched and stared for a long time at the rising sun. Eventually she wandered off, staggering a little in her chunky heels, leaning against the wall for support.  The digital sky brightened.  Under the yellow sun, the hall shimmered with an amber glow, and shadows fled.

            I giggled.

            “What?” Jonas asked.

            “Oh, I was just thinking,” I said, and nudged him in the ribs.  “I’m glad it didn’t do that—you know—earlier, when I was—you know.”

            A tremor of a laugh passed through him.  “Oh.  Yeah.  No chance of that.”

            I glanced up at him.  “How so?”

            “The pods….,” he continued, were equipped with a number of micro-cameras linked to the surveillance software watching over the entire club.  While visuals were obviously anonymized for legal reasons, the AI had been trained to identify hotspots and flag security as needed: such as when a girl suddenly finds herself isolated and alone on the dance floor, surrounded by boys turning nasty.  It’s how Bruno got to me so quickly, he explains.

            “Oh,” I said.

            He rubbed my shoulder. “The AI also monitors these pods.  It adapts the visuals to match the needs of the people in the room, which isn’t always easy because obviously not everyone needs the same thing at the same time, but—” Jonas chuckled a little uncomfortably.  “Well, if people are getting a bit, uh… intimate, I guess, you know, it triggers a low-light mode for, um, privacy.”

            I twisted a little to sit and look up at him more clearly.  “How do you know all this?”

            He nearly beamed with pride; he’d clearly been hoping I’d ask.  “Oh, well… it’s my job," he said. “It’s my AI. I’m the one who trained it. Am still training it. It’s a side job.  Bruno brought me in a year back and I’ve been working for the club since.”  He chest puffs out a little. “By every meaningful metric, it’s made things better here.  Fewer call outs to the police, sexual assault rates, theft, drug ODs way down—it’s made the place a lot safer. The club’s old security AI was a bit shit, but I’ve brought it a long way.”

            I was listening, but also curiously looking across the length of the lounge, picking out the individual pods and their inhabitant.  I blushed a little, to think of all the girls at the same moment as me, on their knees—enough to bring on sheltering darkness as we pleasured our men. “I wonder how many,” I murmured.

            “Hmm?”

            “How many other girls were, you know—like me—when I, uh, with you?”
            He laughed.  “Oh, that!  Oh, I don’t know—I mean, I could find out,” and he waved a hand at his laptop, “but it might’ve just been you.”

            “But you said—”

            “Yeah, but it’s my AI, right?”  He grinned.  “I’d have to check the log, but I suspect it was doing me a favour.”

            “What? Eww.”  Frowning, I put a little distance between us.  “Like—a digital pimp?”

            His eyes went wide.  “What, no! No, nothing like that!” He looked around, as though security forces were about to jump out and drag him away.  “Believe me—this was a first!  I normally just sit here and work away, you know, nudge the code along during the night. But you…”  He laughed nervously, rubbing the back of his head.  “Girls like you don’t normally come and sit with me.”

            I made a show of eying him warily.  “If you say so….”

            He threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Trust me.  I’m totally legit.”

            “Fine.” And then, rather impulsively, I leaned in and gave him a little kiss on the cheek.  “Well then… thank you. Again.”
            He looked a little embarrassed again.  “It was, um—my pleasure.”
            “I really thought I could do it, you know,” I said.  “I really wanted to.”

            “I don’t follow.”  His hand was at my waist again, pulling me closer and again I leaned into him.

            I gave a little smile.  “You were my first.”

            “First—?”

            “Blow job.”

            “Bullshit,” he said. The word just sort of popped out. His eyes went wide and he immediately grimaced.

            “Excuse me?”

            “Nothing.”

            “No—not nothing.  What did you mean?”

            “It’s just….” He shrugged apologetically.  “I mean, look at you, at the way you’re dressed.”

            I looked down at myself—at the dress—at the gleaming expanse of thigh and cleavage and the eye-catching twinkled of every movement.  And I knew what he meant—agreed with him, to some extent—but wasn’t letting him off that easily.  Beneath the wreckage of my makeup, my cheeks flared red with anger. “What’s wrong with the way I’m dressed?”

            “Nothing!” He raised his hands, palms out.  “Nothing. You look… great.”  There was a brief struggle in his eyes; he couldn’t help himself.  “It’s just—”

            “Yes?”

            “The way you’re dressed, you know, girls like you?”

            “Girls like me?” I arched an eyebrow.  “Oh, please, do go on.  That’s the third time you mention “girls like me”.  What about ‘girls like me’?”

            A tremor quavered his voice, as though he knew he was about to ruin something wonderful but couldn’t help himself.  Sounding one part angry to one point defensive, he added: “Oh, come on, give me a break—you know what I mean.”

            “Yeah, I think I do,” I said, and pried his hand off my waist.  “But I want to hear you say it. Go on. Tell me about ‘girls like me.’ Tell me about the way we dress.”

            He took the bait. “Well, it’s just a bit… much, isn’t it? You’re beautiful,” he said, “obviously,” and it didn’t feel like a compliment the way he said it. “Beneath all that makeup. But you plaster on the makeup anyway, and then the nails—and the hair—"

            I tugged at a pigtail, combing glittering fingernails through its length.  “Oh, but don’t you like it?” I said, twirling the coloured strands on which Willow worked so hard between my fingers.  “I thought it was cute.”

            He rolled his eyes. “And the dress—”     

            “Oh, please, tell me about the dress.”  I held my hands akimbo at my narrowed waist and twisted this way and that, sending scintillating dots dancing across the inside of the pod.  “I love this dress!”

            “It’s all just so… so ‘look at me!’ man-chasing, alpha-male signalling, isn’t it? Over-compensatory attention-grabbing to ease deep-rooted insecurities created by an industrial complex driven by constant growth—flogging solutions to contrived anxieties rooted in artificial needs that only exist to be exploited.” 

            Pink-faced, he was working up a full head of steam; it was kind of cute, in a first-year idealism sort of way. He was all of twenty-one and had the world figured out, and I sort of envied him that ridiculous confidence.  He’d probably never been truly hurt; never suffered genuine loss; or directly confronted the reality of these abstract injustices he felt so strongly about.  What did this kid know of the world, sitting as he did in the comforting darkness of a pod watching people flow by under his AI-controlled lights? 

            “And all this ego-punishing, fear-inducing bullshit manufactures unconscious consent in—girls,” he continued, as I sighed and waited. “Girls like you, coming to places like this, in short skirts and flashing your skin and yearning for male validation, making sluts of yourself to—”

            “There it is!” I jabbed my finger in the centre of his chest. “Took you long enough.”

            “Ouch.” He swept away my finger.  “Don’t try and—”

            “You think I’m a slut,” I said, “because of the way I dress.”

            “You don’t understand.  They—”

            “Shut the fuck up,” I said.  “Because, yeah, I do understand, thank you very much: you think I’m a slut because I’m wearing a short dress. You think I’m stupid because I wear makeup. You think I’m frivolous because I spent hours tonight doing my nails and hair and picking out this outfit and pouring so much effort and time into my appearance. And you think that’s all there is to me—appearance, surface, makeup and shine.

            “And you say “they” made me this way but here’s the thing, you arrogant little prick.  There’s no ‘they,’ it’s just ‘you’—you, robbing me of agency and you, projecting your own insecurities.”

            I leaned in close to him and his eyes went wide.  “So shut the fuck up and listen; and you can take your Chomsky and your Greenblatt and whatever other book you have in there,” I said, waving a hand at his backpack.  “And shove them up your ass.  I understand just fine.  I really do.  And what you don’t understand is how this dress—this gorgeous, sparkly dress—is emblematic of so much in my life, right now: there’s a whole story wrapped up in this little dress, an entire narrative you can’t even conceive because you’re blinded by arrogance and a tiny bit of education and an absolute lack of experience and you think you know the world, Jonas, but you know nothing.

            “You ever think maybe you’re the one with the problem, you’re the one who internalised the narrative of female inferiority and perpetuate it through the misogynistic bullshit you force on the girls around you?” My hand danced from hair to face to breast to leg. “Instead of genuinely sympathising with our supposed oppression, you simply deny any value to femininity and anything associated with it.  You can’t even recognize the language I’m speaking when I wear these thing because you think you’re better than it all, don’t you?”

            I pulled my shoes up for him to see.  They glimmered in the bright light, even as that light dimmed slightly and turned a calming blue.  Those sandals were gorgeous, too, a dizzying ten centimeters of slender heel, another two of platform, silver and shiny with the most delicate, sparkly straps.  Then with a sweep of my hand, I took in my outfit for the night and then went wide, wider, taking in the entirety of the club and all the gorgeous, wonderful women in it. 

            “Is it fair?” I said, “that us girls, all of us girls, whatever we wear: heels, skirts and dresses, stockings or tights, even our fucking underwear, our bras or God-forbid something really scary like a corset—that our every choice is weighted with meaning?  Why does everything we wear have to be a nexus for gender discourse, Jonas, why is every decision subject to your fucking scrutiny—and found wanting? 

            “These shoes: fun and sparkly?  Or embodiment of patriarchal oppression? Maybe they’re empowering; maybe they’re crippling; maybe they’re freely chosen or a cultural imposition.  Maybe I really just don’t give a shit and just wanted to have some fucking fun tonight, and guess what, Jonas, it’s fun being a girl and it’s fun wearing makeup and doing our nails and putting on a sparkly dress and getting shit-faced with girlfriends before heading out to go dancing.  Maybe you should try it sometimes, Jonas. Have a little fun!”

            He opened his mouth to say something when I went to take a breath, saw my eyes widen, and stayed quiet.

            “Like, maybe try taking a goddam shower before coming out, not because it’s yet another mechanism of capitalistic exploitation, and not because ‘they’ are feeding you an anxiety-narrative of impossible beauty ideals. No, do it because it shows you give a shit; and do it so that next time a drop-dead gorgeous bitch like me goes down on you, your crotch doesn’t smell like a fucking dumpster!” 

            With a final huff, I crossed my arms beneath my tits and turned my back to him.

            A long, awkward moment, and then I heard him stir behind me, and a nervous hand on my shoulder. “Um…”

            I blew a raspberry and swept his hand away.

            “I, uh… fucked up, didn’t I?”

            “You think?” I deigned to look at him over my shoulder. “Yeah, you did.”

            He shuffled a little closer, and his hands tentatively circled my waist again.  I let him keep them there. “Is there anything I can… do? You know.  To make it up to you?”

            “Tell you what,” I said, and finally gave up the scowl and smiled. “You’re a jackass and a snob, but you’re also really nice and you were there when I needed you.  I’ll give you a second chance.  On one condition.”

            “What?” he asked warily.

            “I’m hungry. Take me home tonight. Buy me something nice on the way. And you know that shitty blow job? Maybe, if you’re really lucky, and really nice, I might try and squeeze in a little more practice tonight…”