(tags: m/F, f/F, mm/F, handjob, blowjob, clothed titfuck, teasing, voyeur, MILF)

Chapter 5: Born Under a Bitter Star

The air stank from fucking. The bedroom’s dusk-ashed walls resonated with lewd, obscene sex-noises: squelching, slurping, rutting; moaning, grunting, panting; the moist slippery beat of flesh piledriving flesh.

They screwed on the bed, twisting like snakes, two dripping and burning bodies chiaroscuro’d in shadow and sweat. Their hands and tongues and hips seemed to fuse together like white-hot metal. They were losing grasp on distance and orientation and space and time and life and death. Against the awesome and all-encompassing present, everything was noise.

Nate dropped his hips between Scarlett’s cum-splattered thighs. Again.

Hilted his dick inside her spasming fuckhole. Again.

Saw tendons pop and nostrils flare and lips slash the air apart with screams. Again.

Scarlett groaned as his cock slowly sawed back through her oozing cunt. Her massive, sweaty tits collapsed into her armpits. Then next lunge of his hips flung a shockwave across her body, catapulted her breasts forward on her chest. Nate’s bone-jarring fucking tossed her tits back and forth like speedbags. They rebounded with meaty WHAPS and CRACKS as he filled her slack cunt with dick, her nipples whirling complex figure-of-eight patterns as they spun and collided.

Nate fucked his wet, slippery cock into the huge-breasted actress’s cunt, time becoming stuck. They were both caught inside a single broken and spliced and looped back into itself so that it repeated, repeated, repeatpeatpeatpeatpeated.

“Oh yes…oh yes…like that…again…HARDER!” ScarJo’s fingers clawed handfuls of linen as she was gaped. Blonde hair burst across the pillow in a radiant spray. It was the only point of brightness in the room. “HARDER! FUCK ME!”

The cries smashed against Nate’s numb ears. How many times had he heard that, since the bedroom door had swung shut a lifetime ago? How many times would he hear it, before it reopened, and he was free?

It had started in the pool of the frat mansion. She’d screwed him atop the floating inflatable toy. Then she’d dragged the shellshocked young pledge upstairs, like a lioness dragging a zebra to her den, with cheers from the frat bros ringing out around them. She’d shoved him through the bedroom door, and locked it behind them. Shutting out the world.

“Welcome to the frat,” she’d said matter-of-factly, before falling on him like a hammer.

They’d fucked three times in quick succession. Him on top of her. Her on top of him. Doggystyle on the floor. Three explosive fuck-sessions scored by her curses and exhortations. Scarlet had a slavedriver’s mind. Give everything to me. Your mind, your soul, your body. Over and over, she drained him of cum. Every time he thought he was done, she bullied him back between her thighs.

“You owe me,” she growled, fingernails tracing a slow drag across his stunned face. “You owe me everything. Now get hard, damn you. You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

Scarlett was berserk. Inhuman. The Terminator 1000 with tits. She could not be bargained with. She could not be reasoned with. She did not feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

Finally, Nate was utterly exhausted by her relentless sexual demands, and had begged for sleep.

Then she had given him something from her handbag—a blue-striped capsule, no way of knowing what it was—within thirty minutes, a thrilling numbness was drumming under his skin, chanting catechisms through his blood. His skin rippled into a carpet of gooseflesh, hot and cold all at once. He stared at the ceiling, and his mind lifted away into a vast region of cold arctic sky, like a Wagnerian ubermensch. He had won the throne to the entire world, but as Scarlett splayed her legs apart for him, he suddenly only wanted one part of it.

They’d gone at it all night, and throughout the day, with only brief pauses between sessions. The sun had fallen on the mansion, then risen, then fallen, always capturing them in much the same position. Cock inside cunt.

They’d rutted in bed, in the shower, on the kitchen table, on the couch, on the floor, against the window overlooking the college campus, and in many other places. He didn’t know what time it was now.

The artillery-fire of his rapidly-fucking hips against Scarlett’s slavering cunt broke against his ears. “Uhhh! Ughhh! That’s it! Almost there! Almost…THERE!”

Lunging and rocking wildly, skewering her on drumming slaps of his hips, he pounded Scarlett into her next dizzying climax.

“AuuughhhhhHHHH!!!” Her mouth howled, and her cunt seized like a bear-trap around his cock. Her walls imploded on him, frantic jerking convulsions almost crushing his shaft. Trying not to cum, he slapped her broad hips, plowing her hard, submerging his shaft to the hilt in scalding hot slutflesh. Her face tore and twisted like a Halloween mask.

“UGH! UGH! UGGHHH!”

She came and came, discharging like a blunderbuss, arching her back into a question mark as he delivered hard pounding strokes into her core. Her body slackened. He thought he’d fucked her unconscious or worse. Then she roared back to life.

Her fingernails tore four streaks of pain across his back. “Don’t stop! DON’T STUHHHHHPPPP!”

The wild screwing continued. Bedsheets flew, and the headboard thudded against the wall, punching a dent in the drywall. WHAM! WHAM! Plaster-dust spewed out in clouds.

Nate hammered at the woman splayed beneath him. Her legs curved back to receive him. His own orgasm was racing down on him; with a maglev’s force and velocity.

Their hips twisted together, cock socketing in cunt, squelching at the bottom in a churn of slathering flesh.

Pinned on his plunging cock, Scarlett busted another nut. Her body writhed brokenly, and she screamed. Her tight-banded muscles—seemed to grip his cock in a sequence of squelching surges as her body exploded in orgasm.

Then the world before Nate’s eyes vanished in a shock of white, and he was spewing cum too.

He hilted his penis inside her yawning pussy, tensed, and exploded. Sperm gushed from his leaping penis, splattering against her walls. Twitch. Twitch. Twitch. Each pulse of his prostate shorted out his vision like an electrical storm.

His orgasm ran down. Incipient darkness clawed over him in a drowning-deep ocean. He closed his eyes, ready to be washed away in whatever sea might exist beyond oblivion.

Then a sharply fingernailed hand traced lines up his face, until she cupped the side of his head.

“We are having such a good time,” sounding so ironic, so sardonic.

Then she slapped him, harder than playfully. Her hand seemed to cut his face like a hatchet’s blade.

“Why have you stopped moving?” Her eyes slitted into knives of dark. Avaricious. “Don’t you want me to have a good time? I thought you were a real man, Nate.”

I’m not. Something inside Nate threatened to break beneath the force of her. I never was.

He was exhausted. What more could he do? What more could she take from him? He couldn’t move. His muscles were filled with burning ice. He couldn’t even flinch in fear as her slapping hand slid across his face.

But she pulled his head closer, pressed their lips into a kiss, and her hot dirty tongue was exploring his mouth.

And with it, another pill. Fuck-energy in a capsule. She had put it inside her cheek.

It slid into his mouth, wet with her saliva, and he swallowed it.

Then magic happened. Sparks raced through his extremities. His penis began re-erecting inside her cum-filled cunt. It happened so slowly that it was imperceptible even to him. Then her other hand clawed a handful of his ass, making him gasp and jerk forward. He slammed forward, slammed back into her. It was a reflex. Then his cock plopped out again, twitching on her thigh.

“I brought you up here to fuck.” Her voice was silk draped over a knife. She found his asshole and started fingerfucking it. “So why don’t you start doing it??”

Gasping, trembling, lungs drawing shallow useless breath, he began to ream out her pussy again. To ride a tiger is to know great power.

You cannot get off, though. Do you care?

* * *

Downstairs, the party had ended days ago.

A hopeful frosh tried to gain admittance to the upstairs bedroom. A bouncer barred the way.

“No go,” the 6’4 frat bro said, crossing his steroid-pumped arms. From behind the door came violent crime-scene noises. Grunting, thrashing, and ringing bedsprings . “Room’s occupied.”

“I left my meal card in there,” the dude whined, fixing his popped collar.

The bouncer crossed his arms over his chest. “Sucks, man. That’s the frat’s newest member and he’s banging the mom. Right now, they get the room. You’re in a place of history, dude. Show some respect.”

Behind the door, a woman had an orgasm. Her moans screamed out like wind beneath the door.

“I came here yesterday,” the kid whined. “Someone said the same thing.”

“That’s right. They’re still going.”

“Should I come back later?”

“No point.”

“I didn’t tell you when I’d come back.”

“Doesn’t matter when. Whatever time you say, they’ll still be fucking then, too.”

* * *

Night swung meaninglessly to day. The sun drenched the slats of the blinds yet found no purchase.

Scarlett grunted obscenely. Violently. Her huge boobs wobbled in her armpits like soft, jiggling abysses.

Clasping her shoulders, Nate humped her into the bed, struggling to breathe. Sweat dripped from his chest into her face. Air. Air. The fucking air. Where was all the air?

“Can’t you drill me harder with that teenage prick of yours?” Scarlett spat up at him, twisting her sweat-shiny hips around the cock pinning her against the mattress. She ground her slippery pussy against his pumping shaft, dirty and messy and hot, trying to make him ejaculate.

He lifted his eyes from Scarlett’s cock-filled cunt and stared into space, wondering when this final, apocalyptic initiation rite would be over.

Every time he tried to rest, to stop, to slow down, she started climbing on him, kissing his lips, kissing his cock, making him hard with her body. Telling him what he could do with her tits. With her asshole. She was just full of soft places and crevices that would fit his cock. Scarlett Johansson was all cunt. All hole. All orifice.

Gathering the broken remnants of himself, he lunged for her, and slipped inside.

One last time.

She gasped as he speared apart her slavering walls open with a single galvanic stroke, ripping her tight moist cunt wide open. His prick slid deep inside her, glans throbbing like a grenade against the nerve-rich of the anterior fornix, causing shivers and screams. Scarlett’s head tipped back, eyes rolling, tongue dangling out as a tsunami of pleasure rolled out from her cunt. Thudding. Unending. Demonic.

“I’m gonna cum!” she bellowed.

At long last, he’d shredded through her thespian eloquence and sophistication. She looked like a demon-possessed Realdoll.

Almost crying, Nate propped himself up on his elbows. His lower body muscles were flickering in and out of commission like a truck’s engine light. He punched his cock into the spasming sleeve of her pussy, wrestling his cock up the ribbed tube of squeezing muscle. She arched her ass up to meet his thrust, her movements taut and explosive. Vile noises exploded out of their mouths, their grinding hips. An entire zoo of animals in full rut wouldn’t have been so loud, so lewd, so wanton.

He throbbed in Scarlett’s slithering fucksleeve. His balls itched hotly against the puffy flesh of her labia minoris.

I might be trapped. The thoughts emerging from endless sex had something like panic to them. Woven together with her. I’m lost and wandering inside a maze made of Scarlet’s skin and teeth and mouth and orifices, and there’s no red thread to guide me back out.

And Scarlett was the frat. Being trapped with her meant being trapped with them. And that dream now seemed poisonous.

Scarlett twisted her gymnast-thick legs around him, looping her ankles across his back in an X.

Gasping as he pummeled her, she yanked him down, squeezing him all the way down inside her body. Hot quivering walls of flesh enveloped him. Their eyes met—there was a tigerish, predatory heat radiating out from her, as she controlled and steered and manipulated his body. She was an undertaker, and the bed was a coffin with a few sides missing.

Nate felt sweat dribble down his body, then realized he hadn’t drawn in breath in over half a minute. Hadn’t felt the need to. He’d left breath behind. Two corpses. Rotting in euphoria, but rotting nevertheless.

Scarlett’s face contorted with lust, her mouth open and drooling. Her fat lips pouting and whining, her ass clapping monstrously against itself as it flew like a mechanical bull. He squeezed her fat white tits together, engraving fingerprints in the sweaty flesh surfaces as he pulled them apart and clapped them together, pistoning in and out of her.

He humped deep, motorboating her chest. The mounds of boobflesh rose up around his head, colliding in a single gigantic breast that almost covered him.

Her pussy made lewd, loud shlicking and slurping nosies as he sped up, feeling his orgasm stalk closer.

His dick blindly thrusted, glistening fuck-slop gushed frothily from her cunt, and his swinging balls clapped against her perineum.

Scarlett arched her back and howled loudly as her pussy spasmed, juices sprayed out of her.

And then Nate orgasmed too, for what was possibly the sixteenth or seventeenth time in two days.

His withered, chafed cock jerked, his abused balls releasd a pathetic dribble of seed inside her, and then he immediately went soft.

He slid off her body, tumbling into unconsciousness.

He didn’t sleep. He didn’t even pass out. He just fell away from everything, like a medieval adventure plunging off the world’s edge, fingers scabbling, then just accepting that here there was no more.

* * *

Chapter 6: Flight

Scarlett sat up in the dark, shaking her head free of stars. Her bedraggled blonde hair flew in a salty-sweaty spray. She gazed in shock at the room.

Not shame. Just shock.

They’d destroyed it. The carpet was ruined with female ejaculate. Strands of cum was plastered in gelid loops over the bathroom mirror, like party streamers. The wardrobe door was torn off its hinges when Nate had tried fucking her upright against it—it had taken his hammering until it hadn’t. Empty takeout boxes and cans of energy drink—supplied by members of the Mu Sigma Phi frat—were strewn over the floor, converted into fuel for sex.

Once, they’d have pledged Nate into an early grave for letting the room get messy.

Now, he was the one who got to make the messes. Lucky him. What was the time?

She jumped out of bed, thighs glinting a muted flash. Her athletic gymnast legs straightened, and then she was up and moving.

With her large sweaty breasts wobbling as she walked, she crossed the room to the duffel bag at the doorway, and retrieved her phone.

Dead battery. She plugged it in to Nate’s laptop, letting current ebb across. As she waited, she hummed a Tom Waits song. The same one she’d done with David Bowie.

“This hotel room’s a goner…” Sounded like Gawwner, in her New York.

Thinking of Nate again, she glanced back at the college kid she’d promoted into the frat via her cunt. He lay motionless on the bed; dead to the world and maybe just dead. The early morning sun was probing the slits between blind slats, bleeding through, trying to get inside. She watched a glowing slant of light rake an almost invisibly slow sweep over his sweaty, sex-fogged face. He had hickeys all over his neck. One was actually bleeding. Damn, what psycho did that to him? Oh, wait.

She slapped her head, trying to wake herself up, and started chugging cold water from a Camelbak. Maybe she’d been too rough on him. Thanks to the compassionate fratties of Mu Sigma Phi, he had rougher rides coming.

I’ve done all I can, Nathan. She shook her head, remorse bubbling up. You’re in now. And may God in all Her mercy help you when you decide you’d rather be out.

Her phone had sucked enough voltage from the laptop to wake. Messages and voicemails and oh fuck, such a mess. She tapped through them, wincing at how many of them were from people she couldn’t ignore. Such as, for example, the line manager for Paramount.

> Scar, we need you on set at eight for chemistry reads with Javier Bardem. Please respond NOW.

“Shit.” She closed the phone, found a bra and some clothes, and hastily fixed her makeup in the piss-smelling bathroom.

One of the fratties was in her blind spot.

“Everything good?” He shamelessly stared at her jiggling cleavage and big fat ass.

“I’m hitting the road. Gotta make LA in five hours.” She pursed cracked lips, and made them crime-scene red.

“But LA is six hours away.”

“Yes, you appreciate my problem. Give my farewells to the boys. I’ll send a self-addressed envelope so you can mail my clothes and other effects. Take care of Nate. Remember, he’s one of you now.”

“We’re gonna miss you, Scar.” A small smile crossed the kid’s face at that. “It’s been great having you”

She used the fresh coat of lipstick to smile. “Aw, hell, it’s been great to be had.”

His tone became hopeful. “How ’bout a goodbye blowjob?”

He got a goodbye middle-finger. “I wouldn’t dream of putting your sister out of a job, Tyrus.”

Then Scarlett Johansson picked up her handbag, and walked past him, walked down the hall, and walked out of the party mansion where she’d lived for the past two semesters. Her thick ass zigzagged as she strutted.

Then she sped away in her McLaren 570S, plumes of dust rising in an arrow, the tip aimed at Hollywood’s heart.

* * *

Nate slept for twenty hours and woke in a different world.

One where nobody bossed him around or hazed him. One where girls didn’t cold-shoulder him on his third stammered word, where even the profs seemed to treat him differently. A world where his dad paid him grudging compliments—though always with the reminder that Steven Copelander had gotten into the frat in his freshman year.

The frat invited him to parties. Not to buy alcohol, or to card geeds and fatsos at the door. They actually invited him.

It was wonderful. He hated it in two days.

Nothing seemed fun. He got trashed, then recovered, then got trashed again, and recovered, and then realized that he never wanted to drink again. He smooth-talked a chick into giving him a blowjob, and got tooth-marks all over his dick and a borderline stalker blowing up his phone.

Two weeks into the semester, he was thoroughly disillusioned by Greek life.

I was treated like a dog for this? He thought, heading to yet another party filled with moronic dudes, and idiot party girls who just wanted to fuck a fratty, alive or dead. Vacant hours, arrayed like soldiers on all sides. He was dreading the braindead conversations. The stupid rituals and rules to remember. The dues to pay.

There had to be more than this thing he’d spent months striving for.

He felt like he’d unwrapped a present on Christmas morning, and found an empty box inside.

* * *

Scarlett was gone from his life. Gone without a goodbye. That was what mattered.

He hadn’t realized what an emotional rock she’d been to him.

And that final party…hard to enjoy any day when you’re just coming off the best three a teenage boy has ever had in history. No wonder the future seemed so gray and barren.

No goodbye. Strangely, that thought actually encouraged him. If there was no goodbye, then she hasn’t actually left. She must be planning on coming back some day. Coming back for me. At first, the idea was something he looked forward to. Soon, it was the only thing he looked forward to.

The idea of Scarlet pulling up at the frat was keeping him tethered to sanity.

He sent her texts. Probing. Prodding. Shaking a tree and hoping something fell.

>Hi SJ, how are you? >When will I see you again? >Scarlett…when the movie is done…what happens then?

No reply. Never a reply.

He sighed, putting his phone away one day. She must be really busy.

He thought of Scarlett making a movie, constructing fantasies of what she might be doing.

She’s on set right now. Probably has a doublewide trailer parked out back of some film lot. Full of shy smiles, treasuring my texts, fumbling line reads because I’m in her head instead of the script. Willem DaFoe notices her crack. His Grand Canyon-etched face twists in a smile-shape. Saying wassamatter, Scar? You used to be a pro. And she laughs it off. Oh, just stage rust. Only the mediocre are always at their best. And she smiles, because of her phone, because of her secret. Because she has me. The college kid she fell for.

He replayed those fantasies until they seemed etched in his mind, racing on parallel track with actual memories. Maybe they’d eventially seem like memories. Even if they didn’t, they were better than real life at the frat.

* * *

The miserable semester meandered on and on.

Then Nate had a realization about Scarlett.

She’s not coming back because she wants me to go to her. Of course. This is a test of my love.

The thought hit him in the middle of his next chair meeting. Out of all his new obligatory social events, it ranked near the bottom. Guys wargaming and strategizing their next boring-ass party like it was the D-Day landing. Holy fuck, get a grip.

But suddenly, his mind was full of electricity. This solved everything. Yes, She ran away to see if I would follow. It all makes sense. What mountains will I climb to be with her? What obstacles will I cross? She’s seeing how much I’m willing to lose.

He felt happy; for the first time in quite a while. The animal trapped in him had just seen a way to escape.

Around him, fratties were bitching and complaining and laying blame about failed parties and socials and calendar events. Nobody seemed to be having fun anymore. He wasn’t the only one who was pining for the frat mom. It was like a load-bearing pillar underpinning MSZ ha been yanked away. The strict discipline she’d enforced collapsed. Meals weren’t prepared on time. Carpets were rapidly overrun by a fast-spreading kudzu of dirty boxers. Trash cans overflowed with empty Miller Lites. It didn’t help that with Nate Copelander unexpectedly joining them as brothers, there were no pledges to clean up the mess.

“…Okay,” Scott said, from his position of head chair. “So the tailgate party’s on the 5th. Like usual. Nate, you’re on alc duty.”

Nate bristled. “Buying beer is a pledge’s job.”

“Right. we keep forgetting.” Kyle smirked at Brad. “You’re still a pledge in our hearts, bro.”

“Ha, ha.” Nate’s sullen laugh was just as real as his smile. “You guys are a riot.”

“Alright, I’ll see if I can trick some dumb frosh into buying beer,” Scott, shooting him an offside you okay bro? glance. “Now, we’ll need pens and nametags.”

“Why?” Chad said.

“They’re useful,dude. You can play a million drinking games with them, but nobody ever brings any. So if we can—”

“You’re all pieces of shit.”

Nate spat out the words. The room plunged into silence.

“You’re still hazing me,” Nate said softly. “Even after I’m in the frat. What a joke.”

“Take a joke, man,” Kyle said, holding up hands in a peacemaker’s gesture.

Nate didn’t accept it. His eyes flared. “You know what the joke is? You lost. You all wanted Scarlett for yourselves. But in the end, she chose me. The geed.”

This anime villain spiel ended in a way Nate hadn’t anticipated.

With deafening laughter.

Roars and guffaws swept across the circle. Everyone seemed to think this was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Nate’s eyes came dizzily unfocused as they laughed and laughed. Muscles tensed beneath his jaw.

“Jesus,” Chad leaned forward in his seat. “You seriously think you rizzed up Scarlett Johansson so good she just had to fuck you? Ha. Just ha. That’s comedy.”

“She fucked you as a charity case, dude,” Kyle said. “That’s all. She felt bad for you,, and wanted to help you get into the frat. Don’t make it more than it is.”

“You’re wrong.” Nate snarled. “It’s not like that at all. She…she loves me. When we were in bed together…we had a connection.”

“So where’s she now?” Chad Grandstaff asked sharply. “Why did she leave?”

“She has work, dumbfuck!” Nate said, face purpling with rage. “She was staying at the frat to research a movie, remember?”

“And now her ‘research’ is over,” Scott said. “She got what she needed, and she’s not coming back.”

“Bullshit.”

“Trust me, I hate it as much as you do—almost—but we’ve seen the last of Scarlett Johansson.”

Nate spluttered but had no answer.

“It’s a waste of time talking to you guys. You don’t understand. She loves me. SHE LOVES ME!”

“She told you all this?” Brad asked. “That she’s in love and she’s coming back?”

“Well, uh, not exactly…”

Brad nodded. I rest my case. “You were a fling at best. She’s moved on. Do the same.”

Kyle’s voice dripped contempt. “Seriously, how high are you that you think you’re in Scarlett Johansson’s league? Look at yourself. You’re an eighteen year old college sophomore. Can you imagine the media scandal if she was seen dating you? Assuming she even wanted to?”

Nate swept his head across the circle, mouth opening and closing, trying to find words to put to feelings. How could he explain? How could he communicate what he’d seen in her eyes, and felt in his heart? How to make them understand the strength of it, the realness of it. His head was still full of the looks she’d given him. Each of them glowed in the back of his mind like some preciously guarded jewel. There had been something there. Something out of reach, something not yet his, something he might have to fight and bleed for, but something.

“Why bother explaining,” Nate said. “What would you idiots know about love? About anything?”

Scott, sensing that there would be a fistfight soon, took Nate by the shoulder, and escorted him outside.

“Take ten deep breaths, Nate.” He said, once they were bathed in the ambience of tiki torches and buzzing cicadas.

Nate breathed. He drew in air, held it, and let it out. His anger did not disappear with the breath, but seemed to tunnel further inside him. Deeper.

Scott clapped a hand on Nate’s shoulder.

“I’ll give you some advice. Relax. Stop reacting to everything. Just be a chill guy who lets stuff slide off you. That’s how you make friends.”

“Who says I want friends?” Nate snarled, throwing his hand away. “Especially those friends. Buch of losers.”

And then the friendliness fell from Scott’s face.

“I will say this once more: calm down. I know you got hazed, and maybe you’re sore about that. But that’s the process. It happened to me. It happened to your dad, assuming he was ever in the frat at all.”

“What do you mean ‘assuming’?” Nate said. “My dad was the biggest big man on campus. ΜΣΦ ’88-92. He mentions it every chance he gets.”

Scott shrugged. “My dad was an alum from around that time, and he says he doesn’t remember a Steven Copelander in the frat.”

“So you’re calling my dad a liar?” Shadows turned Nate’s scowl to something diabolical.

“I’m not calling anyone anything. But you need to think about how you react. Half the reason people razz you is that you always respond in a funny way. That Scarlett-loves-me shit just earned you a good two weeks of ribbing. Just forget about her and live in the present.”

The request seemed absurd. Impossible.

Just forget that Scarlett Johansson had sex with you. Just stop breathing. Just slit your own throat. Just fuck off, Scott Mikkelson.

And the last frayed mooring cable connecting him to the fraternity snapped. He stepped away from Scott, toward the dark throat of the night.

“I hate you,” Nate snarled. “I hate all of you. None of you are worth shit. Wondering why she left? Maybe it’s because she’s a better, sweeter, kinder person than everyone in this frat combined.”

“That’s enough.” Scott said firmly.

“You’re right. It is.”

Nate stepped back, until just his eyes were visible in twilight. Two icy points, catching light. Then he turned, and trudged away.

The hot darkness took him in its teeth, and then even the sound of his footsteps disappeared.

* * *

Nate Copelander did not attend the next frat meeting, nor the one after.

When the actives texted him—yo, where are you, cheesedick? married scarlett yet?— he did not reply. He stopped going to classes. His dorm room was let out to a Comp-Sci transfer from Tsinghua University.

Where’s Nate?, everyone asked. He seemed to have vanished off the earth.

If he’d been popular, people would have been concerned. There would have been wellness checks. Someone would have told his father. But because he was not popular but rather the weird kid that Scarlett had bonked into the frat, none of this happened.

When people spoke about his disappearance, it was in tones of relief. Thank God he’s gone. Hopefully he’s okay. But still…that kid was like a bad smell at every party he went to.

“He scared the hoes.” Brad said sagely at their next rager, and nobody disagreed. Nate had been certifiably alarming to the hoes.

None of them hated Nate. But that did not mean they missed him.

* * *

Chapter 7: Night of the Hunter

Interstate. Driving ten above the speed limit. A purpose inchoate and desperate hurling him forward like a human dumbfire missile.

The arrow doesn’t question where it’s going. Loosed from the archer’s bow, it just flies.

Nate Copelander drove and drove, chasing the infinite horizon, staring with narrowed eyes at the blurriest, dustiest part of it.

The highway sizzled with sunlight, stinging his sleepless red eyes. The cracked blacktop surface leaped and jittered, heat convection coruscating it into an undulant snake shedding its skin under the sun’s terminal blank glare.

Every few minutes, his phone blipped at his side. He did not respond to them.

Many were messages from his dad.

> so, the newest copelander alum! i got a question for you… > did you take the p22 from my gun vault? went to re-register it the other day, and it’s gone. > if you took it, i get it. some pledging thing. ha. did they do william tell on you? but you gotta return it now.

Nate took a hand off the wheel, and dragged the messages to a folder called FUCK OFF.

The hand reached over even further, stroking dad’s Walther P22 on the passenger seat. When he went over potholes, it bounced, leaping like a salmon that flashed in the sun. Dangerous. If a cop drove past and spotted the coppery glint, he would be pulled over and then experience huge problems. But he couldn’t not have it there. It was talismanic.

Other messages were from the frat he’d abandoned.

> where are you at, softcock. you’ve missed THREE MEETINGS now. > dont you check your phone, jerkwad > what’s the point of joining the frat when you don’t want to participate in greek life at all?

These joined his father in the FUCK OFF folder.

Pressure.

Caught between a rock and an Ed Hardy place.

He giggled, feeling his dry lips crack. I don’t want any of this. Strange how small and how shit this mountain looked now he’d climbed it. Now that he’d seen something he actually wanted.

He closed his eyes against the thundering sun refracting in painful splinters through the windshield. His mind circled restlessly on her face. Her image.

Scarlett…you’re mine…

Scarlett had fucked him—an act that had simultaneously gotten him into the frat and destroyed any last desire to be in the frat. The funniest joke he couldn’t laugh at. To hell with Mu Sigma Phi and following in his father’s footsteps. He simply wanted her. Her and nothing else.

She was all he thought about now, night and day. Scarlett pirouetted in his head, Scarlett sang in his blood. She seemed the pigment that colored the world. As the rising sun bled a pastel-wash of light over the chipped bitumen, he imagined it was long blonde hair, coming unribboned as she pulled out a hairpin like a sacrificial knife. As the sky drained to sangria, he saw her eyes. He was just a dust particle before her floating gaze. The hills became her breasts and hips and buttocks. The car made a volptuary hajj across them. This little road trip was like erotic exploration.

The only things that weren’t her were his, and these were all bad things. His dry mouth, his pounding head, his want and need and inadequacy. His ragged and horrified nerves, which seemed to scream from each attachment point strung on his pre-death carcass.

He was running away. Running toward. Didn’t matter. He was running.

And Scarlet was the center, the everything. The delta to which all rivers bleed.

The only other place to go was away from her, into the dark. Or deeper into himself. But that was the same place.

* * *

Hours later, his truck GPS led him to the front of an apartment, not far from Hollywood. Fired brick walls, glittering with flecks of mica. Sunlight made the windows glow..

He knocked on the door.

Then he waited, his heart pounding staccato under his skin.

He heard footsteps inside the building, coming to the door. Feminine footsteps. Something nervous and fragile seemed to beat behind his heart.

Just as the door swung open, he closed his eyes.

“Scarlett…I love you…” His pre-written speech sounded ludicrous, but he stumbled through it anyway. “The time I spent with you…I’m still there. Inside it. Like it never ended. I want to be with you….forever.”

“…do I know y’all?” a female voice said.

West Texan accent. Fuck.

His eyes fell open in horror. His jaw followed.

The woman couldn’t have been much older than twenty. She had aquamarine blue hair, a heart-shaped face, hard fake tits and a shirt was scissored back to expose a tattoo’d midriff. She had the bearing of a stripper, of a model, of a high-priced call girl. A women for whom everything was on sale, though you might not like the price.

“I came here for Scarlett.” He said.

“Good for y’all.” Blue gum snapped in her mouth, nearly the same shade as her hair.

“…Is she here?”

The most awful silence of his life stretched out. But the girl did not say no.

Your name, spazz. Tell her your name!

“Um, I’m Nate Copelander, by the way. From Mu Sigma Phi. She…um…she told me to come visit her.” Scarlett had said no such thing. But he strongly felt that it was not a lie. Some things were so fundamentally true that they did not even need to be spoken.

The girl chewed gum, eyes flickering, gears turning in her head. She seemed to be weighing options with this gangly stranger. Slam the door. Call the cops. Finally, she reached a decision.

“Kid, I hope I don’t regret this.” She flipped her pretty head in the direction of a stairway, and yelled.

“Um, Scar….! There’s this boy here to see you!”

* * *

More footsteps.

“Hey! Um…Nate! Wow, this is a surprise! What brings you here?”

Then they stood in front of each other.

It was not the reunion Nate had expected.

Scarlett Johansson did not kiss him, or hug him, or drag him into her arms. Her bearing was detached. Distant. She seemed puzzled that he was here—deeply puzzled.

She’d changed. Almost like she was an animal that had shed its winter coat. She was fresh out of the shower, her hair a wet glossy sheet that darkened at the tips. Her makeup was fast, efficient. She seemed almost like a different person to the commanding turboslutty frat mom persona she’d evinced at the mansion.

“I missed you,” Nate whispered.

Scarlett laughed uneasily, and shot a glance at the blue-haired girl that Nate, to the extent he could decipher it, did not like. “How did you find me?”

He shuffled, trading one foot for the other. “The chapter mailed out your clothes and stuff. I got the post office to give me your address.”

Speaking it out loud made it seem like a far bigger violation of her privacy than it had seemed at the time, and the blue-haired west Texan chick laid a hand protectively across Scarlett’s shoulder. “Scar, is everything okay with this kid?” the blue-haired girl asked. She stared suspiciously at Nate. Want me to call the cops? hung in shadow over the words..

“Everything’s fine, Lex.” Scarlett brushed the girl away, and then turned back to Nate. “That’s Alexis, by the way. My girlfriend.”

“Oh.” *Girlfriend.“*”So…you live here togeher?”

“No, this is a temporary situation,” she said. “Principal photography starts tomorrow. And then I’ll be on set.”

“And then where can I find you?” He quivered with excitement. His whole life seemed to hang on the answer.

Scarlett shrugged. Either a don’t know shrug or a not telling or I don’t want you to find me shrug. He hoped for the first, but heart was sinking. Sinking fast. Oh hell, something’s wrong, this isn’t how it’s meant to go.

“Come inside.” Scarlett said.

He stepped throught the door. He’d gotten in, but Scarlett’s eyes and voice were no warmer than before.

* * *

She swung open the fridge. He watched her ass swing out explosively, and began to get hard.

“How are things at the frat?” Scarlett asked. She pulled the ring cap on a coke, and thrust it into his palm.

Soft drink fizzing over his hand, Nate tried to stammer out an answer. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t form one. Her phone rang, cutting off his words.

Scarlett took a call, and walked from the room with a phone in her ear and a finger twirling her hair in a ringlet. Going mmm and yeah and cool, while he just stood there. She hung up, sighed, and returned. “That was Jules. My boyfriend.”

Things went smash in his mind. She has a boyfriend too. That was worse than Alexis.

“Nate,” Scarlett said, sounding confused. “Seriously, I’ll ask you again: why are you here? You got what you wanted. Frat membership.”

“I don’t want the frat.”

“So what do you want?”

Isn’t obvious? How can’t she know? How can I tell her?

“You.” He couldn’t tell if he was whispering or shouting. It didn’t matter. She heard…and her face didn’t change.

The fundamental differences between him and her crashed down on Nate then. She lived a life overflowing with love; his was lonely and empty. She was a vase erupting with peonies and racemes. He was a rattling tin cup, echoing as it blew down the highway.

His lip trembled. He tried not to cry. Fought so hard to hold tears back. Continued fighting even after he’d lost, even after tears were streaming in tracks down his face, like an army digging foxholes deeper even after the general has flown a white flag.

She took the crying teenager to her bedroom, cooing and murmuring.

* * *

“Nate, do you want to know what your problem is?”

Scarlett sat on her bed, crosslegged and opposed to him. She was barefoot, and painting her toenails like a sixteen year old girl. He watched stripes of red glaze her toes as they spoke.

“You want things that aren’t real.” She dipped the brush in the pot, and laid a stripe of red over a toenail.

“I don’t get it. What’s not real?”

“You’ve never desired anything that actually exists. You wanted your dad’s approval. But now that you have it, you see it means nothing—in a few months he’ll treat you the way he did before, because your dad’s a prick who can’t live without someone to step on every morning. You wanted to be a cool frat guy. And now you’re there, you see that you’re chasing a cliche from a movie, and you hate the reality. What would make you happy, Nate? Everything you set your heart turns to ash as soon as you get to it.”

Thoughts splayed and dissected analytically. It was as though she was cutting a surgeon’s scalpel through his mind.

Yet he did not understand.

“But Scarlett, I want you. Aren’t you real?”

She held his eyes with hers. Something bright and piercing seemed to cleave through him, drawing a shocked rush of blood. He saw the truth.

“No.” Said softly and simply. “I’m not.”

“What…?”

She clasped his hands in hers.

“I mean, hello? Of course I’m not real. I’m an actress. The chick you met at the frat mansion was just another role I was playing. I would never have earned the respect of those party animals if I’d been soft and sensitive. I had to pretend. Had to be fake. I became a tougher, meaner, more confident version of myself. Is that the woman you fell in love with? Sorry, Nate. She’s as fictional as the Black Widow.”

The weeping had stopped. The tears seemed to settle in his shoulders, which quivered in rubbery spasms.

“Scarlett,” he gulped. It felt like a cinderblock was blocking his throat. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe so you can understand yourself. And then change yourself. Right now, you’re setting yourself up to fail. You’re like someone who goes to the zoo and is surprised that there aren’t any unicorns, dragons, and gryphons. You have to learn to appreciate real animals, too.”

“So what should I do differently? How should I change?”

She smiled. “Learn to enjoy reality. Enjoy your day at the zoo. Life can be pretty fun even if there are no unicorns.”

Then Scarlett undressed. She pulled the sundress over her head. She wore no bra, and her big jiggly tits wobbled as fabric slid over them. Her heavy, curvy ass exploded out of her panties, with the upper crack getting forced up into her lower back. She stretched, arching her back into a recurved bow of bone and muscle, thrusting her ass forward as she lay prone on the bed. Then she pulled the panties off.

Her bare legs split apart, and his mouth became a dry arroyo floor.

His eyes followed their shaven hemispheres into the darkness of her crotch. Voices seemed to call from inside her cleft.

“For example,” Scarlett seemed very naked and yet very distant from that nakedness. “You could forget the fantasy of us being together, and enjoy the reality of the next five minutes. Undress.”

Fumbling with his belt, he heard small and soft feet on the carept at his back. As his clothes hit the floor, he sensed a woman’s breath behind him. He glanced at his feet, and saw a feminine shadow overlapping his own.

Scarlett pranced along the carpet in front of him, big fat butt wiggling and jiggling. She spun on the heel of one foot like a dancer, twisting in a flash of milky flesh and refulgent hair. The hefty slabs of meat comprising her body jiggled and sprang back like elastic.

He saw her asshole wink into existence between the shifting mass of her buttcheeks.

Seeing this flung him over a cliff to orgasm. Blind and lust-stricken and out of control, he buried himself into her yielding moist flesh. They crashed, colliding, and then he forced her onto the bed.

“I love you…” he whined, slamming into her. He felt like he was dying of thirst, and here was a woman made of water. He was trying to drink her. Consume her.

They fucked. Rough and hard and fast. Time seemed to be running quickly through his fingers at double time.

Her cunt was squirming like a living thing, convulsed greedily on his cleaving erection. Her legs split wider still, affording him deeper access, her cunt grinding up to swallow the phallic intruder. She wound her legs around his back, pulling him down. Their groins pressed together. She let out a grunt. He let out a louder one.

They humped, twisting and tearing the bedsheets loose in sprays of Egyptian cotton. He watched a vein squirm in her neck.

“I’m gonna cum,” she whispered, her face darkening as she flushed with blood. The air hummed with her rough breathing. For the next few minutes, they rutted like animals, grunting and moaning, sweat beading on their bodies. Her swinging tits flung sweat onto the sheets, and onto his bare chest.

Nate gripped her shoulders, and began to plow Scarlett’s sloppy vagina in earnest. The room was filled with the sound of their bodies coupling on the sheets.

“OOHHH FUUUUUCKKK!” the actress wailed, her cunt collapsing.

Nate gasped, feeling her pussy clenching and jerking on his penis until his own prostate blew up with pleasure. Thick sperm began to gush and spray from his prick like bolts of liquid light. He pounded his hips into her slack cunt, wrecking her depths, flooding her with sperm.

Twenty seconds later, they came back to earth, lying panting and tangled. Scarlet glowed like a fire under him.

She turned her head, and spoke to someone over his shoulder.

“Lex? Come in. I need you.”

And a Texan accent came from behind them.

“Do ya now…”

How long has she been in the room? Nate wondered, as his cock softened in her pussy. Did she just watch us bang?

“This kid needs something from you. That thing we did before, with Jules”

Alexis giggled. A sound like bright jade.

And then Nate felt hot and cold breath on his ass and balls, which were still embedded on Scarlett’s splayed crotch. He felt fingernails explore his ass, digging into his skin and tenting his sensitive flesh.

He shivered, feeling a girl sliding up behind him on the bed.

He could not see her. He lay on top of Scarlett. He perceived Alexis as heat, as ten delicious points of pain pincered onto his skin. Her breath traced the ring of his anus, causing it to convulse.

He tried to turn around to look at the girl. But then Scarlet clasped his head in her hands, and stared intently at him. Her eyes, and the intensity of the stare behind him, set spotfires flashing up in his mind.

“Don’t look back.” She murmured. “Only forward.”

He nodded. Only forward.

He filled his mind with Scarlett’s pretty face—the embodiment of forward—sweat-flushed yet still so composed and beautiful, as something very unbeautiful happened behind him.

His ass cheeks were pulled apart, as her nails dented skin in ten places, five per ass cheek, and pulled them apart like taffy. Then Scarlet forced him to hear her words, while her friend anilinged them into his brain forever.

“I will give you a lesson now.”

He moaned, as a tongue as rough as a cat seemed to cleave lines of radiant pleasure through his core. Spearing through his asshole like a moist glowing pylon. The girl ate out his ass like she was getting paid per shiver.

Scarlett began talking as he was eviscerated by the knife of this woman’s tongue.

“A monk had a beautiful, delicate tea cup. His student asked him about the cup. And to the student’s surprise he replied that the cup is already broken. ‘What do you mean?’ the student asked.”

A sticky disease of lustful pleasure began to roll out in slow surges along his prostate, charting ley lines of forbidden desire through the continent of his body.

Blood swelled into his cock as she spoke, re-erecting inside Scarlett.

“The monk said ‘To me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink from it. It holds my water admirably. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put it on the shelf and the winds blows it over or I knock it off the table and it shatters on the ground then I say – of course. When I understand the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.’:

Slowly, timing his strokes around the driving plunges of Alexis’s neck, he began rocking forward into her.

“MMPH!! MMRRRRPH!! MMMMMMMMUNFFFFFF!!!”

“And in this is a life mindfully lived. This is the way to view everything in the phenomenal world—our possessions, our loved ones, and, above all, our own lives. This is the difficult art of loving nonattachment. How can we love others and engage in our lives wholeheartedly without clinging and without fear? In the end, the cup is already broken. The end is certain. So certain that you should live as though it has already happened. Here and gone, in one breath. And this is what makes life so dear: that it is not vouchsafed to anyone who experiences it.

Alexis’s tongue was sending shockwaves of pleasure through him as she huffed and licked his sphincter. Her tongue invaded his ass, plunging deep inside the dark. Nate felt his willpower disappear as he finally released the floodgates.

“GRAAAHH~!! CUMMIIIIIING~!!!” He belted out as loud as he could.

Alexis’s head seemingly drove itself all the way up his rectal chute.

He bottomed out in Scarlett. Stars whirled in a forlorn galaxy. He clenched and spasmed. Silver spurts of cum pulsed from his balls into her core, jets of semen punctuated by his raw-voiced cries. They hit the room like the fracture of a cup breaking. Then he collapsed on her breasts, sinking into a delicious buzz of dying stars.

* * *

When Nate recovered, he was back in his car. A headache pounded a hammer inside his skull.

He had vague memories of being dragged outside, into the cold, by a woman. Or perhaps it had been a man. Or a couple of men.

Was I drugged? He remembered the pill Scarlett had given him once, and wondered what other pills she might have in her handbag. Downers as well as uppers, maybe. He’d never had an experience like that before. The world seemed like blown-apart shards that his mind was struggling to gather. Oh God, it felt like that woman’s tongue was six feet inside my body!

But he’d found Scarlett. That was what mattered.

He’d found his true love, and would never let her go again.

You want things that aren’t real, she’d said.

But that was madness. Insanity. Of course he wanted something real! Nothing was more real than her!

He got out of the car, and knocked on the door.

Scarlett didn’t answer, and nor did Alexis.

There was no answer at all.

He tried to turn the handle, and found it locked.

And then he noticed an envelope, wedged into the crack of the doorframe.

It had his name on it, written in Scarlett’s squiggly handwriting.

He opened the envelope in the car. Inside was a card for the mental health division of the university he was still theoretically attending. I’m not crazy, he thought, the suggestion making his blood boil. I don’t need help. Who does she think she is?

Then he started on the letter.

To Nathan, Who Is Strong

I do not love you in the way that you want. We cannot be together. You know that is the truth….

And that was all he could read.

Pain twisted a knife through him. She doesn’t love me. She doesn’t. She doesn’t. Those grinning hooting frat boys who’d made his life hell…they were right. She doesn’t love me. Oh, God, how delusional am I?

He laughed. The laugh sharpened, became brittle, then broke apart and became a scream.

In the backseat of his car, he tore the letter to pieces.

The pistol was still in the glovebox, where he’d hidden it.

He sucked the barrel. Sucked and sucked it like it was a nipple. Pull the trigger. Shoot. But he couldn’t. A wall seemed to lie between his finger and the trigger. Why can’t you do it? Maybe because it’s dad’s gun…

Eventually, he lowered the gun. Continued life was not a relief. But he simply couldn’t bear to lose it. Not yet, anyway.

He flung the shreds of Scarlett’s letter to pieces underneath the car, where he wouldn’t ever be tempted to read them.

And then he drove away. Far, far away.

He did not cry.

* * *

Chapter 8: The Cup is Already Broken

Months later, an indie arthouse film called OD/DC screened at Cannes Film Festival.

It acquired distribution, appeared on a few thousand screens, then disappeared into a genteel afterlife on streaming.

In the film, Scarlett Johansson played the longsuffering girlfriend of a dissolute fraterity chair. Superficially tough, but secretly naive and far-too-kind, she was ultimately a tragic figure: a damned young woman, consigned to smiling and cleaning and tidying other peoples’ messes, trying to redeem places and people who werent worth saving. For eternity. A coat-check girl to hell.

An intimate character drama, shot on a small budget, OD/DC was one of the small personal projects ScarJo filled her schedule with, between $300m Marvel toy commercials. Every actor at a certain level works like this. One for the Hollywood machine, then one for me. It had a strange Lynchian tone, and no clear climax. It asked questions; had no answers. It sketched the beginning of interesting pictures of humanity, and then seemingly had no interest in completing them.

OD/DC received middling reviews. Scarlett’s performance was a point of divisive critical commentary, both positive and negative.

Many critics just found it implausible that her character could not just exist but thrive in an environment of testosterone and masculinity. They didn’t believe she could bring a frat under her control using sheer force of will. They found it unbelievable.

No woman like her could survive in any frat, they said. The guys would eat her alive.

Like Nate, like the frat, like many others, they thought they knew her.

Misunderstood masterpiece or otherwise, OD/DC was too niche, weird, and outre to reach a mass audience. But it obtained at least one small one: fraternity brothers. One frat—Mu Sigma Phi—booked out theaters around the country, and bussed out the brothers to watch it. They sat in silence. It wasn’t a comedy and there were no tits in it.

In a sense, it was the anti-frat movie. Everything they disliked. Gay artsy theater kid shit.

But one part in the movie made them cheer. In the ending credits, a line flashed up on the darkness of the screen.

Ms Johansson would like to thank the Mu Sigma Phi fraternity for assisting her research

All across the country, roars from the actives nearly brought the roof down.

* * *

Spring became summer. The wheel turns. People who cling to the past don’t regain the past, they just lose the future.

But sometimes, the past pays a visit.

A McLaren 570S pulled up in front of the Mu Sigma Phi frat shack. A woman got out, and walked to the door, heels clicking.

Scott had told Nate that Scarlett would never be back.

He was wrong.

* * *

A newly-recruited pledge answered the knock on the door.

He was dumbfounded by who was standing there.

Scarlett Johansson filled the doorway, smiling. She wore a mid-length red chiffon, matching her hair, with the flared silhouette falling just below the knee. Her asymmetrical, one-shouldered neckline fell beautifully into a draped bodice. A necklace of pearl wove a bolus around her neck.

Her smile had a restrained, guarded charm: like she had the power of the sun in her gaze, and she was letting him see just a sliver of it. Her inner filter was set to max.

“Holy fuck…” he said, astonishment making a blank map of his face. “Are you…?”

Yes, he’d seen OD/DC—and heard rumors about the unusual research method its star had employed. But seeing her in the flesh…Some things simply seem impossible, even after they’ve already happened.

“Your frat’s former house mom. Yes.” Scarlett smiled, crossing her arms. Demure and businesslike, like a 1950s Avon saleslady. “I used to live here. I was just stopping by, to say hello to some old friends. Can I come in?”

Inside, a lot and a little had changed. Some boys had graduated. One or two had flunked out. It remained a place of sin and debauchery. A place for young men to misbehave.

Immediately, Scarlett was thronged by friends old and new. Smiling, her eyes flashed among them. Chad. Brad. Kyle. Scott…

But one boy wasn’t there who should have been. Scarlett’s smile faded, but her eyes kept roving, hunting…

“Where’s Nathan Copelander?”

“Nobody’s seen him in half a year,” Jay Weltzer said.

Scarlett looked concerned.

“He’s blackballed from the frat,” Jay said flatly. “Nothing personal. He wasn’t paying his membership fees or even showing up at college, as far as we could tell, so we rescinded his membership…”

“Honestly,” Brad said, “it was probably the wrong place for him. I know his dad was really lighting a fire under that kid’s ass to get in.”

Scott shrugged. “Which is ironic, because his dad wasn’t ever in.”

Scarlett’s face was incredulous. “Wasn’t he?”

“The night he ran away, we had an argument,” Scott said. “I told him that my alum dad didn’t remember his dad, and he got offended by that. Naturally, I cracked open the books. Steven Copelander never wore the ΜΣΦ letters in his life. He was enrolled, but only as a student. I pestered my dad, who vaguely remembered some kid who might have been Nate’s dad. He wasn’t bidded, though. Just another no-hoper geed.”

Scarlett chewed her lip, ruminating on this. She shifted from one foot to another. “So his dad was bullshitting the whole time? Making his son live up to a standard he couldn’t achieve?”

“Seems like it.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. But that’s just ancient history.”

Then she walked forward, into the center of the room. Dozens of eyes tracked her..

“Let’s talk about right now…I pushed the studio to credit you guys in the movie, but I’d like to offer a more tangible reward.”

Scarlett had lied. She hadn’t come to say hello to old friends.

She began undressing before them. The chiffon slid from her shoulder, whispering its way down her body then piling on the floor. Her skin had a blinding pearlescent lustre. Mouths dried up and cocks hardened before her.

“I was your frat mom,” she said, unhooking her bra. “And in that capacity, there were certain professional lines that I could not cross.”

Some boys shared eye contact. She definitely stepped tight to the edge of some of them. They remembered the secret blowjobs and handjobs and titfucks.

She turned her head left, then right. Her gaze whipped across them like a slicing blade.

“But now, I’m just Scarlett Johansson. I’ve finished making the movie. All of those boundaries mean jack shit.”

She held out her arms, giving them a view of her breasts, her navel, her shaven cunt. She flared out a hip.

“You boys were an important part of getting the tone and feel right. You won’t be credited. You won’t get a SAG card. But you deserve to be rewarded.”

She turned back and looked at him as she wiggled her big ass, her butthole and slit beckoning to them. She shimmied her shoulders and her big boobs shook from side to side. They looked like swinging pendulums. Already, some boys were stripping.

“Remember what you wanted to do to me? The thing that I stopped you from doing? Now’s your chance. Have at it, boys.”

* * *

Anarchy reigned.

They threw her on the couch, and took turns with her hungry, slurping pussy. One boy finished, and another boy took his place.

Scarlett’s gigantic milkers flattened against his chest, crushed out in two huge luscious orbs of fuck-flesh.

Scott came last. In multiple senses. With a rage-guttering snarl, he thrust into her gripping twat and exploded. He ejaculated huge fertile jets of cum into Scarlett, causing her pussy to overflow with his load.

“Holy shit!” one of the boys said, as they surrounded her. They groped her. Her breasts wobbled like bowls of jell-o. She raised her arms above her head, and pulled her body through a delightful sequence of cheesecake poses.

“I’m your sex doll for the day,” Scarlett smiled as they grasped handfuls of her body. “You’re going to fuck over and over until none of you can walk”

In their haste to fuck Scarlett, the boys fought each other, knocking each other out of the way. Scarlett ended up catching a stray shot and landing on her back, her legs splayed apart, exposing her hairless cunt to the air. The sight of it was like catnip to the horny boys. They went for her like starving wolves, fighting to be the first inside her snatch. Several latecomers stood at the outskirts and masturbated.

The first one mounted her, plunging his dick inside her. He orgasmed instantly, on his second or third stroke. There was a high-pitched SPLURT-SPLURT-SPLURT sound as he dumped his balls into Scarlett.

He found himself pushed out of the way by another boy, who rammed his dick into her cum-filled snatch. He lasted only slightly longer the first. His testicles clenched and he blasted a huge stream into her cunt, followed by eight or nine more.

A third boy slammed his cock into her and began humping. Her crotch was a mass of frothy sperm by the time he climaxed. He was thrown out of the way by a fourth.

Scarlett’s grunts and moans were stifled by the moist shaft being rammed down her throat by another boy. A pair of large, heavy testicles bounced and jumped as the college kid pounded her throat. He brutally humped her face until he orgasmed. Spurts of cum filled her mouth, flooding down her chin. This was followed by two or three boys ejaculating in turn, jerking off and spraying a criss-cross of cum ropes over her body.

Scarlett gagged on the viscous release of cum pouring into her stomach. It almost clogged her throat. The boy gasped for air and continued to wring out shot after shot onto Scarlett’s face. His toes curled in pleasure, and his knees buckled. As the last of his spunk flowed out over Scarlett’s face and boobs, he fell back against her desk and stood gasping for air, along with a half-dozen other kids.

Anarchic gang-sex consumed the house like a disease. Boy after boy after boy after boy blew his nuts into Scarlett Johansson, using and abusing and misusing her. Two semesters of restrained lust, released in one brutal climactic afternoon.

* * *

Scarlett was not the only one who had put the date of the frat’s party in her calendar

Someone else had, too.

Late afternoon saw a beat-to-shit truck climb into view atop the hilltop, overlooking the frat mansion. The sides were dented. Its slowly revolving wheels were caked with dirt. A crack twisted through the windshield like a scar.

Behind the scar, Nate Copelander’s haunted face was broken in two like a plate. Like a cup.

Cheeks unshaven; eyes sleepless; he stared down at the frat mansion. Stared and stared.

His eyes smoldered with hate.

He braked. The truck jolted to a stop. The gleaming arsenal of weaponry in the truck went clank.

A Bushmaster XM-15 semi-auto racked in a socket mount. A Savage 67H pump-action shotgun side-clipped to the interior surface via an aircraft-grade crossmount. Four hundred rounds of centerfire .223 ammunition—the last six hours of his journey had been spent listening to their dry metallic rattle-rattle; an army of undervoiced choristers longing for war. His dad’s Walther P22 pistol was on the passenger seat—his touches and caresses had grown increasingly frequent, increasingly fervent, as he’d gotten closer to mansion, and to his destiny.

The day had arrived.

He was going to kill everyone in the frat.

He’d spent months off the grid. Hiding. Planning. Biding his time. Laying plans. Setting irons in fires and tending them. He’d found in himself a desperate genius for pulling off plans with short notice and limited resources. A shame to discover this talent so late. In earlier, saner times, he could have been a soldier. A good one.

Not now.

Not unless they needed another Lt. William L. Calley.

He stared ahead, above the curves of the wheel. His knuckles quivered on those curves like spiders. His face was gaunt. He’d lost a lot of weight. The eyes inside the slack hollows of his face were alert, attentive, but far from well.

His revenge would be glorious.

* * *

He’d line the truck up with the mansion. That came first. The angle. Getting it right. Then he’d step out of the cabin, ratchet the stick to the letter D in the gearbox, and drop a brick on the gas pedal.

The shockwave of the truck hitting the building would trigger a piezoelectric pressure sensor, detonating the kilo of Semtex 1A in the trunk.

The frat house would go up like a Roman candle. As survivors streamed through the blazing doors and windows, he’d be on the hill with the AR-15, picking them off. Shooting the boys who’d made his life hell. He hoped the screams would carry up the hill.

Then a clock would start ticking. He didn’t know how long the police would need to catch him. He suspected not long.

He might have enough time to drive to his dad’s house before the net drew tight. Hey pops, remember me? Remember the gun? I brought it back. Or maybe it would be crueler to leave Steven Copelander alive. He’d figure out the details later.

Either way, he would save the last bullet for himself.

There was only one thing to live for now, and in an hour, there would be nothing at all.

* * *

Lights strobed from the party mansion, washing over the cracked windshield. Bassy music pulsed through the ground.

Once or twice, he thought he heard Scarlett Johansson’s husky-edged voice weaving through the chaos—screams and moans—but he couldn’t be sure. He heard her voice everywhere now. In his sleep, in his moments of idle reverie, as he attended to some wrinkle in his war plan.

Nate didn’t care if Scarlett was here. Bad luck if she was. She’d die like all the rest

Bitch.

Hatred for the world burned under Nate’s skin. Hatred for everyone. He was going to fucking slaughter them like hogs. Alright, soldier. Time to do it. Execute. Pardon the pun.

He got out of the truck, stepped back around, and lifted the brick from its place off the flooring.

Beneath it was a fragment of paper.

It was part of Scarlett’s note, in much the same place he’d thrown it months ago.

* * *

Maybe he was just trying to delay the end.

But with party music pounding, he reassembled Scarlett’s note like a treasure map and read it. This time, in full.

To Nathan, Who Is Strong

I do not love you in the way that you want. We cannot be together. You know that is the truth.

Certain things are not possible between us, and were never possible. I want you to treasure what happened, and let it change you for the better. You will have that forever. That is what’s possible.

I know you’re suffering. In acting school, I had to work hard. I suffered too. I broke arches in my feet from dance training. I rehearsed until my voice was gone. I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

My teacher gave me some advice that helped: remember that the day always ends. No matter how tough it gets, a shitty day or a shitty week or a shitty month will eventually be gone from your life. The idea got me through difficult moments. Nothing lasts forever. You’re in the infinite depths of hell…and then suddenly you walk out of the other sde.

But only if you’re willing to let the past go, and not carry it with you. If you don’t, you stay in hell forever.

I know you feel hatred, Nathan. Resentment. Jealousy. It’s in your eyes. Pain. But you feel pain because you’re deep. You think there’s not much to you, but I believe—I know—you’re deep and wide. Things that make ripples in some hearts will create tsunamis in yours. This is a mark of your strength.

Your father will not be around forever. I will not be around forever. The boys of Mu Sigma Phi will not be around forever. The question is…what will you be when they’re gone?

Who are you, Nathan? Are you the ghosts of all the wounds you’ve ever suffered? Or are you someone in your own right?

Don’t live a life of resentment. That’s stopping the bad day from ending. Don’t. Let it go. Take yourself to bed, and have a sleep, and wake up. Then let the dawn wash over you. Let something new and wonderful come to replace the old.

I told you that you don’t know me. Here’s what I didn’t tell you: I don’t know myself either.

Scarlett Johansson doesn’t exist because I’m still writing her. It’s a day to day process. Another lesson from acting school: I can become anyone. And so can you, Nate.

You don’t know who you are. Not yet. You want to fill the hollow space inside with the approval of peers and the adulation of parental figures. But these are not substances. They’re smoke. They will flow into you and then flow out. You need to have some ideal or dream or thing of substance to fall back on when they’re gone. Visualize the person you could be. But it has to be someone who makes you happy, not a mould etched by another—And then be it. You can be someone large of your own design, or be someone small of another person’s.

I love you. But I love many things. I love them and I let them go—rather than cling to them, until they wither and die. That is the way of it. The cup is already broken.

I wish you the best, and I hope you remember me fondly, as I do you.

* * *

Rage burned and burned. But increasingly, it burned on nothing. A fire with no fuel beneath it, subsisting on air.

It could not sustain itself. Not when the thing underneath it—his own heart—seemed so conspiciously not there.

She’s right.

There was no firewood in him to support it. He shuddered, sighed, and started crying.

Anger. So much anger. The desire for revenge scoured lines of lightning over his heart. But anger over what? Revenge for what? Nothing. Small slights, in the grand scheme of things. And doing what he’d planned wouldn’t break any chains. It would wrap more over him.

If I kill them, I’m still in their power. They’ll have won and I’ll have lost.

It was the final and worst act of pledging—but now, he was pledging himself. Continuing their role in his life. He stared around at the car, saw the weapons, saw the ammunition, saw everything he’d planned to do laid out before him. Saw the past wrapping around him like chains.

Oh God, what have I become.

Not me. Not me. Not me.

This isn’t me! I won’t let it be!

He let out a breath, bit the inside of his lip, and used pain as an access point for truth.

He let truth wash over him. Let it pierce him. Let it remake him and reforge him. I can’t be with her. And I never wanted her, except as a way to fill the hole inside. Like any celebrity, she was shaped like my hunger. Time to fill it with other things.

I will never see her again. But she’s in me still…so long as I live.

He hunted until he found the card for the university’s mental health services. Then he dialed the number.

“H…hello? My name’s Nathan Copelander. I…I…almost did a terrible thing. I need help.”

THE END