Shopping Experience.

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Nicole has gone to the megamart with the intention of purchasing shampoo, but a sale on panties causes Nicole to momentarily prioritize the care of her pubic hair over the blonde curls on her head.

The deal is five pairs for twenty dollars.

Nicole desperately needs panties for two reasons: one, she has been too lazy to do laundry for the past couple days and has been without clean underwear. Right now she wears a summer dress with no panties, but not because she is slutty, necessarily.

Two, Nicole has strategically planned on getting laid exactly a week from now. Her target likes boyshorts even more than thongs, which Nicole thinks is unusual for a man. But boyshorts make the bottom of Nicole's ass look like upside-down cleavage, so she is happy that he likes them, and is also happy boyshorts are part of the underwear sale.

Nicole browses the racks of panties. She decides to purchase smooth cotton pairs in order to contrast the laciness of her garter belt and fishnet stockings. Nicole loves fashion, and she has figured out its only secret: a combination of various textures. This makes her look expensive even if she still has to ask her parents for money from time to time.

Nicole has selected a pair of black shorts and a pair of blue ones when she feels someone tap her on the shoulder. It is an Asian man of medium height with spiked hair and wire-rim glasses.

"Hi, what are you doing?" he asks Nicole.

Nicole is holding the boyshorts in her left hand and her right hand is buried in a pile of g-strings, searching for a size six.

"I am buying underwear," she tells him.

"The reason I came over here is because I thought you looked wealthy. Are you wealthy?"

Nicole looks at the sign above the rack of panties that says "5 for $20." The panties she fantasizes about wearing someday are fifty dollars each.

"No, I am not wealthy," Nicole says.

"Well, you look wealthy. I need to find a wealthy woman because I need someone to help me support the twenty children I've fathered."

Nicole stares at the man. He is probably a few years younger than her - twenty-two or so.

"Are you...are you joking?" she says.

The man looks defeated. "Yes, I was joking. I just wanted to know if you wanted to hang out sometime."

Nicole looks up at the ceiling, which she does every time she is nervous. It makes her eyes looks bigger and sexier but she does not intend that effect.

"Sorry, I am leaving this city soon," she says.

"Oh. Well. Maybe another time."

The man walks away and Nicole is charged with anxiety. "I can't help but think they always think I'm a prostitute," she writes in her diary that night.


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Picking Up Items and Putting Them Back. Lena, Mark, an Unnamable Lover, and an Unknown Listener.

>>>>>2005.

Lena asks her roommate if he can stay the night somewhere else.

"I have plans here tonight," she says.

Lena's roommate is sad but obedient. He secretly records the sounds that drift from Lena's bedroom walls and sells them to a stranger on the internet. The stranger pays two-hundred dollars for each hour of audio. Sometimes the roommate gets excited by the audio but he is a man of god goddammit and he must save himself for a moral whore. Ten percent of each two-hundred dollar hour goes to the poor, he tells himself goddammit. 

Tonight is a six-hundred dollar night. Tonight will surely be symphonic. Lena has already tossed the lingerie she plans to wear over the armchair in the hallway. It is close to the color of her skin, which makes it very light and almost transparent. The roommate does not mind Lena's obvious promiscuity but wishes she would wear red sometimes. She would look goddamn better in red, he thought. 

The roommate enters Lena's room while Lena is  showering. He walks to her nightstand and places something underneath it. It is a tiny device that can record three hours of audio before having to be recharged in a wall outlet. The roommate sets the device to begin recording at 10 PM. It is 8:40 now.

The roommate is distracted by a piece of jewelry Lena has left on her nightstand, a single bone-shaped earring. It doesn't look like anything she would wear. The roommate picks up the earring and finds it quite heavy. 

"It's not for your ear."

Lena's roommate turns around. Lena has been watching him but there is no way to know for how long unless he asks her.

"How long have you been watching?"

"Nine seconds," she says. "Are you looking for something?"

Lena walks over to her roommate and he notices that she has managed to get into the skin-colored lingerie between the bathroom and her bedroom. She smells like her own cum because she always masturbates in the shower, but the roommate thinks Lena smells like shampoo.

"Just checking if you have any dishes in here before I run the washer. I saw the earring on your table."

Lena smiles. "It's for your tongue."

The roommate blushes in revulsion. He sets the ring back on Lena's nightstand. "I thought it looked weird," he says. 

"That's because - " Lena takes the ring off the nightstand "- you are used to seeing pairs." She opens her mouth and pushes the ring through an invisible hole in the center of her tongue. "Now get out of here Mark. I am barely dressed."

Mark leaves the room and doesn't run the dishwasher and leaves the house and doesn't lock the front door. He will stay at his girlfriend's tonight, even though he still hasn't been able to explain to her why he lives with such a crude woman. But his girlfriend loves the one-hundred-and-eighty dollar shoes he buys her so she asks few questions except "how ever did you afford these?" She will then give him a bad handjob. While she does it, Mark closes his eyes and pictures his girlfriend in red lingerie. Unfortunately she only wears white underwear. It reminds Mark too much of Lena.

Lena is polished when her lover arrives. It is 9:31.

Her lover motions to cup her breast after they have had a glass of wine. He squeezes it and likes how it is the perfect size for his hand.

"You're filthy," she tells him, but thrusts her chest forward and deeper into his grip. Her lover gets on his knees and lifts up her slip to kiss her stomach. The position puts him eye-level with Lena's desk a few feet away. It distracts him.

Her lover picks up several pieces of red-stained paper from the desk. "Your writing is covered in blood."

"It's only wine. I spilled it accidentally."

The lover holds the paper close to his face. The blue inky words bleed into the stained paper. A string of them he can make out: "the satisfied cunt will suffer my trials."

"You're going to kill one of your characters," he says. "A girl."

Lena takes the paper from her lover and replaces it on her desk. "No. She just needed to get dirty. But she'll be alright. You, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. You are filthy."

Lena walks to her bathroom and turns on the shower. "Come here and take off all of your clothes," she instructs. "I am going to watch you clean yourself." 

The shower is clear glass with sliding doors. Lena's lover slides one of them aside and steps in. He begins washing his hair and the shape his arms make when they are above his head does something strange to Lena. She sits on the sink that faces the shower. She draws one leg up to rest her foot on the sink and lets the other dangle. 

Lena begins to touch herself and when her lover notices what she is doing he also reaches for himself. For several minutes they refuse to meet the other's eyes, suspending the illusion for as long as possible that neither knows the other is watching. 

"Get over here," he says finally.

Lena obeys, not bothering to remove her slip. When wet it clings to her body like another skin, so when her lover puts his hand underneath it he feels like he is penetrating her already.

He attempts to pin her back against the narrow wall of the shower. He wants to fuck her standing. but the wall is wet and she slides down a little when her feet lift from the ground. As he pushes harder she slides further down. With her left hand Lena grabs the top of the sliding glass door and distributes her body unequally. She positions her right foot on the soap ledge and her symmetry is recovered. Now her lover is able to fuck her harder.

He does and when she is about to come, Lena's foot becomes dislodged from the soap ledge. A tremendous pressure is suddenly applied to the glass door Lena clings to. Her lover thrusts forward to deliver the concluding orgiastic movement. Lena screams, the glass door shatters, and the two lovers fall out of the shower onto the bathroom floor, still connected to each other and now also connected to several hundred shards of glass that beat them to the ground. 

Lena and her lover quickly survey their new surroundings. Then their eyes meet, both pairs still raw with desire from orgasm. The lover's body, covered in blood and glass, starts to shake with laughter. Lena, equally bloody, equally glass-covered, is equally amused. Lena and her lover cling to one another, closer than any two humans have ever been before, two laughing humans fucking on a pile of broken glass while their blood clots and skin breaks.

"I think about you all the time Lena," he says. 

Lena stands up and brushes bits of glass away from her body. Her slip is torn but nothing is punctured. 

"We're lucky to be alive," she says. Lena pulls off her slips and leaves it in the sink. A combination of water and blood coats her skin. Her lover has never seen anything so arousing. 

"Let's go to bed," he suggests. 

Lena nods and helps her lover off the ground. The pair enter Lena's bedroom and Lena begins to pull tiny pieces of glass out of her lover's skin. They take turns digging out little pieces from flesh and placing them in a coffee mug. With every freed shard comes a gasp of relief. When they are emptied of glass, Lena's lover puts two fingers inside her and she moans at the unexpected sensation of being filled. 

Lena's lover is happy and surprised with how vocal Lena is tonight. She tells him she masturbates to him all the time and orders him to come on different parts of her body. She is louder than usual and he responds proportionately. When he becomes too exhausted to continue, Lena waits for her lover to fall asleep and then cleans his wounds with alcohol. She reaches under her nightstand and takes out the audio-recording device. 

"I miss you," she says into it. 

Lena shuts the device off and leaves it under the nightstand for her roommate to retrieve in the morning. It is 12:57 AM.

>>>>>