AN: Here's the second chapter!
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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The pounding in her head might have drowned out, completely, the pounding on the door. It might have at least drowned it out for a while, but slowly Carol started to come into consciousness. Immediately she was hit with some very acute observations about the state of her body. She was thirsty. She was as thirsty as if she'd crawled across the Sahara Desert on her hands and knees, and her head was pounding with more velocity than her heart had in some time. It was practically drumming out a musical rhythm – one which she found very unpleasant for the time being.
She groaned to herself, wishing that the feelings would go away or else she'd slip back into unconsciousness where, at least, she'd been unaware of her suffering.
When her bedroom door squeaked open, she lifted her head just a bit – just enough to get a good look at the person who was likely to kill her. She at least wanted to see the face of the person who would end her life with an axe, or something equally dramatic, because she was far too overcome with her body's aches and pains to have defended herself.
And it was fine, really. Given the current condition of her head, she felt like she was ready to go.
Instead of an axe murderer, though, it was Andrea who stepped through the bedroom door. Carol's long-time best friend brought, with her, the wafting smell of shampoo and a floral perfume that sharply contrasted with the smells invading Carol's nostrils at the moment.
Carol groaned.
"You're still in bed? What the hell? It's past nine. I've been beating on your door so long your neighbors are going to think you owe me money," Andrea declared. "I finally let myself in because I started to think you'd like—had a stroke or fallen in the shower and broken your damned neck. Now I find you're still in the bed? What gives, sleepy head?
Carol groaned again.
Normally it wouldn't be too early for Andrea. It had hardly ever been too early for Andrea in Carol's world. She was used to hearing Andrea's voice at very nearly every hour of the day, and she always welcomed the sound of her best friend speaking to her. But, today, it felt like every word that she said was ripping through Carol's brain like hot nails.
"You look like shit…" Andrea said, hovering near the bed. "What the hell happened?"
Carol tried to focus her eyes. Her vision was far blurrier than it needed to be. Andrea looked around the room like she was searching out clues about what might have confined Carol to her bed, like an invalid, until the incredibly late hour of past nine.
Carol lie back against her pillow and thought about her own situation. Slowly realization began to flood into her mind. It came along with the overwhelming presence of flashes and bits of memory and, especially, it came along with the feelings of her body and the unfamiliar ache between her legs. It came with the tidal wave of guilt and disbelief that crashed down on her when she realized what she was pretty sure she had done, but couldn't even piece together entirely.
She groaned again.
"Oh no…" she declared, bringing her hand up to swipe at her face. "Oh, shit."
"What?" Andrea asked. "Your bedspread is nasty, Carol. For crying out loud, what the hell happened to you?"
"I did the thing…" Carol groaned out.
Andrea raised an eyebrow at her.
"What thing?" She asked.
"The thing. I did the thing. Oh God…" Carol responded.
Andrea came over, personal space and respect for privacy something she'd lost so long ago that Carol wasn't even sure her friend had ever really possessed it, and sat down on the bed, close to where Carol's body lie under the cover.
"Did you fuck Alice again?" Andrea asked. "Because if you did, I mean, it's not a big deal. Not really. It's not like it bothers any of us…and we've all been there. But I think, if the thing happens three times, it's not really something you can call an accident anymore, Carol."
Carol groaned and struggled to sit up, supporting herself with one of her arms while the other rubbed her face and raked through her short hair.
"That was twice," Carol said. "Twice in—how many years?"
Andrea shrugged her shoulders.
"Still, it was only once for me," Andrea offered.
Carol and Alice had gotten drunk together more than a handful of times, they all had. But only twice had things gone from happily drinking and listening to outdated songs, to lamenting failed relationships, past failures and travesties, and the passing of time that was marching across their backs and across their faces. And twice, Carol and Alice had ended up having to have the awkward conversation of "sorry that we did the thing in some drunken attempt to comfort one another," that made things awkward for at least a few days before they realized that really there wasn't any harm done. There had been no real damage.
Of course, other people had also seen lamenting at their grown-up slumber parties accidentally turn toward seeking and providing comfort that only caused more discomfort later.
Still, when you drink, as Alice never failed to remind them when anyone was lamenting what they'd done while over their legal alcohol limit, shit happens and you just have to learn to accept that if you're not willing to change the behavior.
Carol sighed.
"No…I did the thing where I listen to you," she said.
Andrea snorted.
"Well then it can't be a bad thing. You should always listen to me. I'm good to listen to. What did you listen to me about, though?" Andrea asked.
"I went to the bar, and I met a guy," Carol said.
"Did you sleep with him?" Andrea asked, looking far too amused for Carol's tastes at the moment.
"From the way I feel right now? Yeah…and I think my vagina's sorry for it," Carol said, wincing a little at the residual soreness.
Andrea chuckled.
"Oooh…long time outta the saddle," she said with a laugh. "It happens if you stay off the trail too long. Now you gotta baby her or she'll bitch at you all day." She pulled Carol's blankets back, clearly unmoved by her nudity. "Get up. Take a shower. You'll feel better if you do. I'll make something for breakfast, and I'll get you some water and Tylenol."
Carol shook her head lightly.
"I can't," Carol protested. "I think—it's better if I just lay here and die."
"Stop it," Andrea demanded. "Get up. We're going to Snydersville today. Remember? There's a sale and we're stalking that bistro. Get in the shower and be nice to your flower, she had a rough night, and she's not feeling so great right now."
Andrea laughed, enjoying the whole thing far too much. Carol rolled her eyes at Andrea, but it was obvious that her friend found this whole thing hilarious. Of course, Andrea was a little more on the promiscuous side than Carol was and always had been. Her "flower," as she referred to everyone's vagina for the entertainment value, hadn't been out of commission in years – at least not for extended stints.
There was really nothing to be done about any of it now. What's done was done. So, Carol pushed back the covers all the way, not caring about her own nudity, and Andrea moved to let her get free from the bed.
Carol walked toward her bathroom, wishing her head didn't feel so incredibly horrible, and ignored Andrea's wolf-whistling behind her.
"You want me to bring you the Tylenol or whatever first?" Andrea called out. "Or wait'll you eat?"
"Now…" Carol called back. "Please—you can pass it to me in the shower."
"Aye aye…" Andrea responded.
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By the time that Carol got out of the shower, having gratefully swallowed down the aspirin thrust at her by the arm that came through the shower door shortly after she stepped in, she felt better and was almost done beating herself up for her transgression. She still couldn't believe what she'd done, though, and she figured that the waves of random guilt and mortification might continue to crash over her for some time.
The man from the night before had been no dream, though, and she noticed when she stepped back into her bedroom to get dressed that Andrea, without being asked, had stripped her bed for her to start the wash. Carol didn't even want to know what kind of evidence of her night was left there. Her body was sore enough to confirm that she was entirely out of practice and that she hadn't done a few good warm up laps around the track.
She slipped into one of her loose-fitting dresses that hung down to her knees, loving the way the fabric felt against her skin when she felt, otherwise, so uncomfortable at the moment, and she wrestled her way into a pair of matching leggings and slipped into her ballet flats.
She sighed at her own feeling of comfort in the outfit, especially while parts of her still felt positively grainy—the Tylenol was only just starting to truly make its presence known.
The rest of getting ready was a simple process of running some of the styling product through her hair, the volume of the chopped-off curls enough to handle most of the so-called style that she'd adapted through the years, and putting on just enough eyeliner, mascara, and lip gloss to say that she'd put on make-up. She preferred the simplicity to the more complicated process that some of her friends employed to try and hide the truth that they weren't—not a single one of them—twenty anymore.
Carol's group of friends were one of the greatest blessings that she had in her life at this point.
They called themselves the "Glory Gals" – a name born out of a wine fed bitch session where they had all declared that thirty was the new twenty, and twenty the new thirty, and that when they'd begun to hit their forties, they'd really just begun to find the most glorious years of their lives. In their forties, after all, they'd really just begun to know, and to understand, what it was to live.
And, in some ways, it was more than true.
Gone were so many of the self-doubts that they'd had in their youth. Gone was the need to scrutinize each and every dimple, and each and every little imperfection, because the imperfections kept on multiplying. Finally, there was nothing left to do except to realize that there was no sense in repeating, for yourself, that "next year" you would fix this or "next year" you would fix that. Next year there would be new things to fix, perhaps, that made the problems of this year look like prizes to be won.
Gone were the days of scrounging around – borrowing a dollar here and twenty there, promising 'I'll pay you back.' Those days were gone with the dime and penny jobs that they'd struggled through – all the jobs where they'd felt like they were selling their souls for minimum wage. Because now, even if some of them were struggling, from time to time, to make ends meet, it wasn't what it once had been.
And gone were the days of spending as much time as they once had worrying over what other people might think of them…what someone might say about their hair, their makeup, their choice in clothes, their escapades, and their mistakes.
If they were brutally honest with each other, and they more than often were, there weren't too many mistakes that, between them all, they hadn't all committed at one point or another.
All of them had pasts – what they might call rich pasts, perhaps – that were all a little different. Somehow, they made them work and, somehow, those differences had just served to bring them all a little closer together in life. Their current lives were different from each other as well, but they still made time, at least once a month, to spend time together. They gathered, typically, at the café that Carol owned and ran with Jacqui, to sit and talk under the pretense that they were talking about some book or another. Typically, their so-called book conversations got out of hand quickly, given the fact that the first confession made by any member of the group was usually that they hadn't read the book, or that hadn't finished it.
Now, especially since Carol was staring fifty straight in the face – middle age, they called it – and was the oldest of the group by at least the two years that split her from Andrea, she was realizing, more and more, how important the Glory Gals were to her. The honesty and easiness she could have with her friends was vitally important to her.
No matter what she'd been through, and no matter what they'd all been through – no matter the falling out of touch and back in again that took place so many times in their lives – they'd always been there for each other, supporting each other, in one way or another.
When Carol came into her own kitchen, she was greeted with the smell of coffee brewing and of bacon cooking. She inhaled it deeply and walked to the coffee pot, smirking slightly when Andrea purposely got close to her and bumped her with her hip.
"Feeling better?" Andrea asked.
"Mmmm hmmm…" Carol hummed, fixing her mug. "At least as much a shower can help."
"So…this guy? Was he hot?" Andrea asked.
Carol groaned again, a quick gush of the guilt she thought she washed off in the shower rushing over her, and leaned back against the counter to watch her friend making misshapen pancakes in one pan while trying to keep the bacon from burning in the other. Carol didn't offer to help her because Andrea wouldn't have accepted her help, anyway.
"I don't really remember much," Carol admitted with a chuckle. "I mean—he must have been. Or I must have thought he was."
Andrea glanced at her and raised an eyebrow.
"You must have been trashed," Andrea declared.
Carol nodded her head and groaned again.
"Unfortunately, I was," Carol said. "I can't remember the last time I drank like that. All hard liquor, too. Shows me what the hell I get for listening to you. I can't believe what I did. I can't—I just can't believe I did that!"
Andrea sighed.
"I told you to go out and have a few drinks," Andrea said. "I told you to find a nice guy. Someone you wanted to…to use to get things in working order. I did not tell you to get so blitzed that you didn't even know if he was hot."
Carol groaned again. Andrea laughed quietly to herself.
"Cheer up, Carol. There are worse things in life to regret than a good fuck with a guy you thought was hot enough to bring home for a little loving. Look at this way, there must have been something about him you liked, or you never would've let him near your flower." She winked at Carol and smiled to herself.
Carol sighed in response.
"I guess it doesn't matter now, does it?" She asked. She chuckled again. "I don't even know what his name was. It's probably better that way."
Andrea looked at her for a quick second and then flipped the pancakes she was making out of the pan and onto the small stack she had resting on a plate by the stove. She took the bacon off the heat, too, and then came over, leaning beside Carol against the counter, and dug in her pocket.
"Wouldn't matter," she mused. "Doesn't matter. But he left a note." A devilish grin curled across her lips, with the last of the words, as she waved a piece of folded paper around. She unfolded the paper that she'd tucked in her pocket and held it out for both of them to look at.
It wasn't much of a note. In fact, Carol wasn't sure it constituted as a note at all. In scrawling letters, written on what she now recognized as a torn piece of paper, which she'd left on the counter to throw away when she went through the mail and had never got around to throwing out, a phone number. Just below the number, there was nothing more than the letter "D."
"So, let's see. What could've been his name?" Andrea asked, studying the piece of paper. "Don? Dan? Ringing any bells?"
Carol shook her head. It was useless. The name wasn't in her head. She wasn't entirely sure that she'd ever known it to begin with. If he'd told her, she'd forgotten it almost immediately, and she'd never used it during the run of the evening.
"I don't know. Honestly, I don't remember," Carol said.
Andrea's eyes went wide.
"Dick," She declared, somewhat bouncing with excitement as she continued unravelling her fantasy. "Here have some Dick. Come ride my Dick. Did you enjoy my Dick? Thanks for letting my Dick come to play!"
Carol snorted and sharply elbowed Andrea in the ribs. Andrea slinked away to the other corner of the kitchen, rubbing her side and laughing, holding the piece of paper with a death grip.
"Well…he left this on the fridge, so he wanted you to see it," Andrea said. "You're going to call him, right?"
Carol looked at the piece of paper in Andrea's hand and thought about it. She wasn't sure that she wanted to open herself up for that embarrassment. She wasn't sure that she wanted to face the man, and to be reminded that she had basically gotten trashed, thrown caution to the wind, and invited him into her home to fuck her. After which, she'd apparently passed out and he'd left.
She could only vaguely remember what he even looked like, and that had been, perhaps, improved upon by her drunken stupor. He might not even be anything that would interest her. There was really no telling what she might find out, and how horrible it might make her feel, if she dared to dial that number.
And, if she remembered correctly, he had been quite drunk too, so she might not be exactly what he remembered her to be either.
She shook her head.
"No…I'm not going to call," Carol said.
Andrea looked at her like she'd lost her mind.
"You have got to call him," Andrea declared. "You must have liked something about him." She sounded almost personally offended that Carol was considering not calling the mystery man, known only to her as "D," who had left his number scrawled on the envelope for a request from a local charity group seeking money.
Carol chuckled and shook her head gently.
"Yeah, I bet that I liked that he was willing to go home with me when I was looking for a man to go home with me, and that's not exactly a foundation to build your future on, now is it?" Carol responded.
Andrea clucked at her and sashayed dramatically across the kitchen, returning the piece of paper to the fridge and securing it in place with one of the fruit shaped magnets.
"We'll leave that there. You might change your mind," Andrea said. "Gotta keep the weeds out of the garden somehow. You don't want your poor little flower to choke and die."
Carol rolled her eyes at Andrea and moved to fix herself breakfast, hoping to get control over the remaining residue of her hangover.
Andrea could leave the number on the fridge if she wanted, but Carol wasn't going to open up that can of potential embarrassment and sheepishly call some guy whose name she'd have to ask for right off the bat, and who would probably just turn out to be an asshole, like all guys really ended up being. She wasn't going to awkwardly try to start some conversation with this guy. Not after she'd brought him home and had her way with him. She was just too old for that kind of thing.
