doomcloud
horrors & dread #38 - has anyone written a horror story about bisexuality and vaping before? Well, here's one.
The evening sticks to you like an overbearing lover. Your t-shirt damp with sweat, chinos welded to your thighs like a second skin. You sit at the corner table in the local pub with your friends’ legs crammed together with yours like a badly played game of Tetris. No matter what you drink sooner or later it’s flooding out from the pores in your body, streams from your scalp and forehead running down your face. As your hand passes your nose when you go to wipe the sweat away you smell the stink of accumulated grime and perspiration from the repeated attempts.
Your friends are enjoying themselves at least. They say men can’t multitask, but we’ve always managed to watch a football game while looking at our phones, discuss partners and potential future infidelities, all whilst downing pints and picking on whoever in the group is in the lowest pecking order. You are thankful it’s never you.
Fuck. You’ve caught yourself being weird again. Getting in your head again. You wait for the next person to stop speaking to join in with the laughter that naturally follows. It doesn’t matter if it was funny. It matters that you fit in.
While you’re not sure if it would bother them that you’re bisexual. It matters to you that they don’t know. While you mostly agree with the ratings your friends have on the hotness of girls at the bar, there’s a tiny sliver of sadness that you can’t voice your thoughts on their boyfriends.
One of the particularly attractive ones catches you staring and you instinctively avert your eyes. Even if the guy thinks you were looking at his girlfriend either scenario is unlikely to have a good ending.
You drop your eyes to stare at the top of the table. Unfocus your eyes and absent-mindedly finish your pint. Fade into the seat, become nothing, pretend to be invisible. You wait for your breath to get back to a loose, slow rhythm. Then, after a moment, you look back.
He’s still staring at you, but what halts the growing fear is seeing his face break into a sly grin. Your bottom lip begins to hang open and he surprises you further by winking and reaching into his jacket for a vape pen, then gesturing delicately outside.
Why not? You think.
“Going for a vape. Same again when I’m back?” You say, seeing the pint glasses two thirds empty. The time to offer is not when you need a drink but when the table needs a drink. Mostly though you need to get outside but to do so without offering would be like pissing in their faces or worse, arouse suspicion.
Your friends give a collective Yes and now you’re free to squirm from your seat. The wet fabric pulls on the hair and skin of your legs as you shuffle yourself out. Standing up reminds you of the time you got that tattoo and had your arm wrapped in clingfilm.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” One of your friends asks, waving your vape pen back at you.
You slap your head to signal being an idiot and take the offered vape back from him. “Cheers.”
He gives you a strange smirk as you take it and for a second you worry that he knows - even though that’s impossible. Still, your heart races and you turn away to push through the crowd and make your way into the street. As the doors close behind you there is the sound of laughter from your table. Hilarious laughter. The kind of laughter that when you hear from your friends when you’re not there that it’s about you. Maybe they know.
Outdoors there’s no cool breeze to soften the humidity. If anything, it’s worse in the evening air. No matter, everything feels right when you see him. Rested against the wall, one foot cocked back against the brick and the other firmly planted to the ground like a sexy ostrich. Sexy ostrich? What the hell are you talking about? The scent of candy floss hits your nose as you approach, your own holds peppermint, and you wonder if the combination of the two will be compatible.
“Hey,” you say. Your verbal rizz game an echo of your dreadful messaging rizz game.
“Hey,” he says back, but you can see there’s more in his eyes. The same hunger that’s in yours. You tell him your name. He tells you his. Your hands are full of a nervous energy and when you’re nervous you vape. Thankfully that’s why you’re outside. Well, one of the reasons.
You hold the vape to your lips and inhale deeply.
Immediate regret. Disgust floods your entire body. Caught by surprise you can’t even try to hide it. Your throat and sinus absorb the acrid rotten cloud you’ve sucked in. It’s a horrendous smell that clogs your lungs, sticks to your throat, closes off all your airways. Before you’re even choking you hear your friends howling with laughter. Somehow, they’re outside and watching you. You fall to your knees by the road and dry retch into the gutter. The guy you fancy is quickly beside you.
“You okay mate?” he says but suddenly he’s smelling what you’ve inhaled and immediately puking too. You feel the warm liquid land on you, the soupy vomit splattering over your head then running through your hair and down your face like the sweat before it. Even through the stench of sick you can still smell whatever it was you vaped.
“You just vaped my piss!” one of them shrieks, doubled over in laughter as the rest of the group catcall and mock you. You cough harder trying to rid yourself of the taste but it’s in your lungs now, clinging to each little air pocket.
Knowing what they’ve done somehow hurts less than knowing that it was your friends that did this to you. Alleged friends. You hear slurs in their cries too. They did know. You truly are alone. Each new breath brings with it the acrid stink of puke, candy floss or urine vapour. The guy you fancy is stumbling away into the night, he throws up again after he’s got a few feet away, this time just watery bile that splashes around his feet. You collapse to your knees and watch as the vomit pools from both of you muddle together into the road, before draining away into the gutter - just like your chances of ever getting with him.
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash