Page 90 of Fang Fiction

Confusion, panic. Quietly pulling on her clothes and rushing out of the apartment, terrified he might wake up.

A knowing smile from the doorman. Feeling like she might vomit.

Stumbling into the subway, unsteady on her feet. Wishing she had sunglasses so no one on the train could see that she was crying. If anyone noticed Tess’s tears, they looked away.

—

“Oh my god, how was it?”

A few hours later, Joni bounded into Tess’s room and leapt on top of her crinkly green comforter, wrapping Tess in her arms with absolutely no concern for whether she’d been sleeping. She hadn’t, of course—every time her eyelids started feeling heavy she was startled awake by a shot of adrenaline, her mouth filling with the putrid taste of acid and bile. Tess went rigid beneath Joni’s body; even breathing felt impossible. Joni immediately sensed that something was wrong and moved to a corner of the bed, a reassuring hand on Tess’s shoulder.

“Hey, you okay? How was last night?”

“I don’t, um…I don’t really know,” Tess said truthfully. “I don’t remember.”

Joni frowned. “You blacked out? You never black out.”

Tess made a tiny shrugging motion with her shoulders. She felt a quivering, shaking feeling pulsing through her blood, an ice-cold feeling like all the heat of being human had leaked out of her.

“Fuck, you must be really hungover.” Joni glanced at her watch. “It’s almost three. Have you eaten anything today?”

Tess shook her head, and before she knew what was happening, Joni was gone, banging around in the kitchen, returning minutes later with a steaming bowl of split pea soup and a hunk of brown bread from the nearby co-op.

“Eat,” she said, placing the food on Tess’s night table.

“I’m too nauseous,” Tess protested weakly, but Joni wasn’t having it.

“That’s because you need food. Eat,” she insisted.

Tess brought a steaming spoonful of soup to her lips, worried she would shake and spill it on her bedding. But the second she swallowed the soup, she did start to feel a little better.

“Helps, right?” Joni asked, and Tess forced a small smile. “So what happened after I left? You stayed over? Did you and Rick hook up?!”

“Oh.” Tess cleared her throat. “Um, I don’t think so. I think I just passed out on the couch.”

“Wow, you really were drunk. Are you okay now? Is there anything else you need?”

“Probably just rest.” Tess handed the soup bowl back to Joni. “I feel like shit.”

“That’s a good idea.” Joni gave Tess’s knee a squeeze. “You’ll feel so much better after you get some sleep.”

But Tess didn’t sleep that night—her body wouldn’t allow it. The adrenaline shocks persisted until her body roiled with pinpricks, like the feeling when your foot falls asleep, but across every inch of skin. (An ironic term, Tess thought bitterly, since actually falling asleep had become impossible.) When she did manage to doze for a couple of minutes here and there, she had nightmares of dark shadows looming over her, unfeeling eyes looking down on her, a hand across her mouth.

She woke gasping, terrified, and waited for dawn.

None of it made sense. She had gone to that party wanting Rick, with the express purpose of kissing him, being with him, spending the night in his bed.

And all of that had happened, right? She was pretty sure? Asking him was out of the question. Had he used a condom? She had no idea—she walked to the twenty-four-hour CVS at four-thirty in the morning and bought emergency contraception. She took it with a glass of tap water and said a small prayer of thanks that the pill made her incredibly tired—she’d taken it twice before, though always with firmer information about whether she actually needed it. Around eight a.m., as the cold winter sun filtered through dull gray clouds, she finally fell asleep.

After that first night, the most terrible night, the night when every minute crawled by in nail-screeching agony, Tess thought she’d sleep better. She’d have to eventually, right? Humans weren’t built to exist without sleep—and besides, she was fucking exhausted. It was Sunday, and she had classes to teach the following day. So after her few hours of fitful morning rest, Tess forced herself to stay awake through the afternoon and evening, going to a movie with Joni and absorbing none of it, grateful for the noise. She figured if she could just make it until nine or ten, she’d pass out and be functional the next day.

This was a mistake.

The second night wasn’t as miserable as the first, mostly because Tess gave up on trying to sleep more quickly and decided distraction was the best strategy. She opened her laptop and watched half an episode of some reality show about a woman looking for love, but it couldn’t hold her attention. She grabbed her old paperback copy of Blood Feud off her shelf and read a few hundred pages; she eventually slipped out of consciousness at five a.m., and her head pounded when her alarm went off at eight.

She dragged herself through a hot shower and the twenty-minute walk to campus, her mind so foggy she nearly stepped into traffic more than once. Her section that morning was a discussion on the use of prophesy in Macbeth, one of Tess’s favorite aspects of one of her favorite plays, but she kept forgetting things, misunderstanding her students’ points, losing threads of logic in arguments she’d made a thousand times.

“Are you okay? You don’t look great,” a pretty undergrad observed with concern.