Page 25 of Escape

Kel was right. This was better. So much better.

She came with a low grunt, throwing her head back. My name on her lips. As she licked her arousal from her fingers. Her gaze landed back on me, a sinister, knowing glint in her eye and smirk on her lips.

But I was too far gone to question it. My fingers moved faster as I kept my eyes locked on her. The moment my orgasm slammed into me, the monitor went from a rapid, screaming beep to a single, blaring alarm.

Jolts of sharp, static pain burned through my limbs. Every cell vibrated as I cried out again. My fingers still worked, pushing out another orgasm a million times more intense than the last. The electricity swam through my muscles as I came again, making my limbs twitch and cry with each shock.

Tears flowed down my cheeks as a third release crashed around me. Then the pain stopped. My body still hummed with lingering shockwaves. I was speechless. Breathless.

I’d just been fucking electrocuted through my orgasm and felt better than I’d ever felt before.

Still swimming in shock…literally, I removed my fingers from my damp panties and ripped the sticky pads from my chest, expecting to feel a lot more shame than I did. I had just taken pleasure in something absolutely sick and twisted, with someone absolutely sick and twisted.

After torturing my husband and shooting him in the fucking face.

I tilted my head to meet her gaze again, but the projection disappeared and I was left panting, vibrating and confused.

I slumped back into the recliner, my legs still spread wide and dripping. I hummed, filled with a strange satisfaction. I was changing. Breaking and being fused back into something that felt a lot more natural. A lot more me.

“Jasmine James to the principal’s office, please. Jasmine James to the principal’s office.”

Chapter 21

Jasmine

Still shaking, I reached the main office. On the door, a black envelope waited, labeled: The way OUT.

I ripped it down, the hesitance I carried through the night had slowly started fading. I tore it open and read through it, my stomach dropping when I realized it was essentially a script that laid out exactly what to say to come out as a lesbian.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. It was like she knew I would give in to the last test before I did.

I discovered I was a lesbian when I’d gotten unfiltered access to the internet during freshman year, but I’d known about my attraction to women for far longer.

Growing up, it wasn’t that I was surrounded by people or religion telling me being gay was wrong, I just simply didn’t know. I had no queer representation. No good. No bad. Just none.

Heterosexuality had been set as a default, so when my attraction for women started developing, I thought I was broken. Instead of trying to figure it out, I stuffed it way down and tried to be anything but that.

When the internet finally cracked open the world for me, I couldn’t deny it anymore. I dove down all the deep, dark holes of the web and everywhere I looked, it was spelled out clearly for me. I was a lesbian. But still, there were no real-world examples of what I was feeling. I assumed nobody around me felt the same and I was too embarrassed to embrace it.

Then I met Kel and I couldn’t help but dive in headfirst. I never thought love at first sight existed until she first spoke to me in algebra. We lived in our own little world of stolen moments and late nights, careful to never let our love be found out.

In high school, is when ‘gay’ all of a sudden became a synonym for ‘bad’ or ‘lame,’ sometimes even ‘creepy’. So, as much as I wanted to scream my love for her from the mountaintops, I pulled us deeper into hiding. I wasn’t willing to be out and proud, but I also wasn’t willing to lose her. It was selfish and, ultimately, letting go of her in an effort to protect my image led to this mundane, inauthentic life I was living, married to someone I wasn’t ever attracted to.

Behind the door, a phone rang, pulling me from the painful memories. I tested the handle and the door creaked open.

In front of me, a rotary-style phone sat on a small table. When I stepped towards it, the door slammed behind me, followed by a loud, mechanical whirring and another slam. I jolted back, twisting around to see if the demon had followed me in, but a shimmer above my head in the dim room caught my eye.

It floated there above me like the light had been captured and suspended in the air. I reached for it, my fingers meeting a cool, hard surface. I could barely hear the ring of the phone over my pounding heart. My arms shot out, feeling the smooth glass all around me. The second slam behind me was another glass wall covering the door.

I was trapped in a glass fucking box. Maybe that play I performed was telling me what was going to happen all along.

“Time’s wasting, babydoll. It won’t ring forever.”

My gaze darted from the telephone to the door across the room that read: Principal’s Office. In that room is where all the announcements were made when I was in school. I was almost certain that’s where Kel was waiting.

I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t break out of this box, but I’d watched way too many movies and my mind went straight to being buried alive or drowned.

I reached to snatch up the phone, but before my fingers could wrap around it, the ringing stopped. Immediately, darkness fell all around me. I could no longer see the phone or the glare of the glass. I waved my hand in front of my face, but saw nothing. Only felt the wisp of air brushing against my nose.