17 Days Until Nicole Returns to the Office

The distant beeping of the alarm clock pries Nicole from her deep slumber. Her head is throbbing and she feels very, very damp. Through her hangover, she tries to understand the sensation. She feels like she’s under a heavy wet blanket lying in a puddle on the floor. “Did I pass out?’ she asks, opening her eyes and seeing the living room ceiling. “Oh my god.” It hit her. She is literally under a wet blanket in a puddle on the floor. The realization sets in that she must have passed out in the middle of the floor and pissed herself. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she says, pushing the blanket off and sitting up. The morning sun hurts her head, but she doesn’t dare touch it because her hands, like most of her body, are covered in her urine. This had only happened once before after a night of binge drinking in college.

It’s an effort to get to her feet and steady herself, but she manages it. She looks down at the puddle and blanket. The alarm is still beeping from upstairs. Her ass aching from being fucked. “Hello?” she calls out wondering if the man was still in her apartment. No answer, but she notices that in addition to the blanket she had a pillow under her head. She can’t remember if she got those things for herself or if he did that for her. She reaches back and touches her butt. Her fingers pull her cum-glued cheeks apart. She felt like she was pancaked by a dump truck and then the garbagemen picked up her corpse and threw it in the trash compactor.

Nicole makes her way to the kitchen sink. Her body drips on the floor as she walks. “This is not good,” she mumbles as she washes as much as she can off with a dishcloth. She uses paper towels to dry off her body, so she doesn’t get pee all over the carpets leading upstairs.

As she heads upstairs she briefly wonders if she should call in sick, but she knows she can’t. The very important second meeting with the Choam Group is today. Making it to her bedroom she slaps the clock to turn it off. To her absolute horror, she notices it has been going off for nearly 40 minutes. She had barely half an hour to make herself presentable.

Twenty-five minutes later Nicole is mentally patting herself on the back for managing to shower, fix up her makeup, reasonably style her hair, and get dressed. She pops two birth control pills and swallows them down with some water. She could really use something bland to settle her stomach, but she’ll deal with that after the presentation.

Nicole’s section of the presentation is in the first 20 minutes. Although she starts to feel increasingly queasy, she manages to get through her section as if she was fresh as a spring daisy. That is, until she says ‘thank you now back to you...’ she isn’t able to get ‘Don’ out before the sickness hits. “I’m sorry,” she says to the camera before quickly turning off her video. She doesn’t get to the mute button before the booze from the night before comes up. Nicole is on the floor retching and she vaguely hears Don’s voice in the background “Nicole? Oh my, well, I’m so sorry about that folks and I hope Nicole’s okay. Stacy, can you please mute her microphone? In fact, why don’t you kick her from the meeting? Sounds like she might need a sick day.”

Nicole hears the tell-tale sign of the meeting hanging her up as she wipes her mouth. “Okay, I’m never drinking vodka and wine and beer ever again,” she says, starting to feel a little better now that it’s all out of her system.

Legs trembling she gets to her feet avoiding the pool of vomit that is roughly six feet away from the glistening pool of urine. She types a quick apology to Don and tells him she’s taking a sick day. She doesn’t add ‘obviously.’ She then crosses over to the kitchen table to find her phone. She thought it might be best to completely block off her calendar. The last thing she needs is the man coming back before she has a chance to recover from her hangover.

A yellow post-it note is waiting on top of her phone.

“I was going to wrap you in a blanket and carry you upstairs, but you wet yourself. Sorry, it isn’t my job to clean you up. At least it wasn’t vomit, right? Would have super sucked if you pissed while I was in your bed. Anyway, the boys will start arriving at 8 p.m. On the back side of this note is a list of shit I need you to pick up. Dinner, snacks, beers, cigars, and proper fuckin’ beer steins. Make sure you run them under water and put ‘em in the freezer at least two hours before we get there. No more warm beer, got it? The sloppy joe meat should be ready to go when we get there, too. And wear something pretty. Not one of those dumb sundresses. And because we have guests you can wear underwear. But sexy for after poker.” At the bottom of the note, there’s a crude drawing of a penis ejaculating.

Nicole deflates. She forgot about poker night. She was going to need to clean, go shopping, and get dinner started. Throwing up during the call was a disgusting mixed blessing. At least she didn’t need to worry about anyone at work thinking that she wasn’t really sick, so she had all day to pull her hungover self together and handle the requested pre-poker chores.

Nicole was thankful for the day off. She cleans up the mess in the living room and spends a little bit of time updating her Discord friends on what happened last night. She leaves out the part about how she woke up. DoctorMoan admonishes her for allowing her judgment to be impaired but admits her story was hot. He gives her some nutritional advice for beating the hangover so she can deal with the rest of the day. Betty is thrilled Nicole finally might be making friends with her neighbors. The group all agree to work on Nicole’s PowerPoint Party presentation so she can make the best possible impression and focus on getting ready for Poker Night. She wasn’t expecting that but was thankful because she didn’t know how she’d find the time.

The rest of the day is easy. Although she grumbles through the shopping list realizing she’s now spending money on this jerk. Everything on his list ends up being $200. She finds herself adding $50 to the bill when she selects a bottle of whiskey because “it might make him happy if I have it around.” As she swipes her credit card she thinks “what is wrong with me? He didn’t even ask for this.”

By the time she gets home from shopping she still has four hours before the Poker Night group arrives, so she manages to get in a much-needed nap. She wakes up well-rested and ready to entertain.