Aftermath

As soon as I patch myself up with some **** and bandages, I spend the next hour or so comforting Scarlet, her shivering body pressed against mine, quick breaths ever so slowly drawing down to something normal as I stroke her hair and murmur things into her ear. Eventually, she loosens, breathing out.

“We should get out of here,” she says, looking around this mess of an apartment that we’re still in.

There are four dead bodies strewn across the ground, which itself is a sea of shattered glass. Half the furniture in here is broken or soaked in blood. Things are beginning to stink.

“We can’t,” I mutter, checking my phone.

“Is it dangerous outside?” Scarlet asks, nervous. “What’s going on? What happened to my people, are they…”

"Bogotá is under lockdown,” I say, and I hand her my phone to let her read the breaking news.

Outside, the sirens continue to blare, but the protesters and counter-protestors alike have been corralled and driven indoors and arrested in troves.

“They shut down everything,” Scarlet says, continuing to scroll through my phone.

“Curfew doesn’t let up until eight tomorrow morning,” I nod.

“So we’re stuck in here,” Scarlet says, staring at the destroyed apartment we’re standing in. She picks up her own phone and flicks through the flood of notifications, and then sighs in relief. “Mom’s safe. So are most of our organisers. A couple got arrested, but they should hold up fine. Nothing they haven’t seen before. And…” She frowns, glancing at me.

“Something wrong?” I ask.

“No,” she says, too quickly. She puts her phone aside. “Let’s clean this place up. We’re going to have to live here for at least a night.”

I give her a questioning look, but she’s already wrapped her jacket around her feet as make-shift slippers, and she shuffles across the room to grab the broom and dustpan laying by the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, glancing at me. “You don’t think we should tidy this mess up?”

“Alright, if you insist,” I say, gingerly stepping through the glass and lifting up the remains of the CRT on the ground.

We spend the next hour or two doing our best to make the apartment livable for a night. We clear out the glass and other broken things across the ground, and then dump the bodies out in the back alley, catching the attention of a wide-eyed kid with his nose pressed against the window. Then, we scrub down the main living space, removing all traces of blood and leaving the place sparkling with a cloying floral smell.

I don’t know if we had to do such a thorough job with the cleaning, but Scarlet seems to be absorbed into the task, so I play along. Anything that distracts her from what just happened must be good. She makes a couple small mistakes along the way, to be expected from someone who’s probably never had to do all this for herself before, but I keep an eye on her, gently correcting her whenever things go awry. Before I know it, I’m dabbing at the bloodstains in her white suit jacket with window cleaner, getting the last signs of abnormality out of the house.

“All done now,” I say, showing her the cleaned jacket. “I’ll just hang it up to dry over here.”

“Thank you,” Scarlet says, giving me a rare warm smile of hers. “That jacket means a lot to me.”

“Anything for the fearless leader,” I say.

But she doesn’t respond, instead looking down at her phone and frowning, distracted by something. Then, she shakes her head, and runs into the bedroom. I hear a thumping noise, her body slumping onto the mattress.

I follow after her, and see her lying face down on the twin-sized bed there. She’s got nothing on but her white shirt and panties. Ordinarily, this would be an erotic sight, but not right now. Everything else she had on was soaked with blood and now drying off. I take a seat by her head on the bed, feeling the bed frame creak downwards as I do so.

“I’m here to listen.”

She stays quiet for a few long seconds, and then she looks up at me, tears glistening in her eyes.

“What’s wrong with me?” she cries out, folding her arms beneath her chest.

I reach out, resting a hand over hers.

“No, seriously,” she says, blinking away the tears and bringing forth fresh ones. “What is wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” I instinctually say, patting her hand. “Nothing is wrong with you.”

“It can’t be normal,” she says, shaking her head. “It can’t be right…”

“What’s not right?” I ask, knowing that there are a million valid answers to that question of hers.

But sometimes, you just need to give them a chance to talk.

She pulls out her phone and sticks it in my face. She was looking at her group chat with some of the community organisers. Lots of people wishing Scarlet well, asking if she’s doing alright, and then, at the top of the screen, I see it: a link to a rehost of the livestream, sent by Miguel, accompanied by the text please tell me you’re okay.

“Oh god,” I say, sidling behind her and cradling her shoulders in a broad hug. “It’s gotten out, hasn’t it. That’s not right, that other people are seeing it and…”

“I don’t care about that,” Scarlet snaps.

I look at her, aghast.

“No,” she says, “I mean, who cares, it happened, at least this way there’s evidence that it was really as bad as it was.”

I don’t know if I’m convinced by that.

“It’s fine to be upset about it,” I say, trying to be delicate. “We don’t have to spin everything into something positive. Sometimes things just suck.”

She shakes her head.

Then, she presses play on the video. She lets it run for a bit, watching the video with wide eyes, and I follow along over her shoulder.

“Feel her panties. God the white bitch is wet,” one of the guys laughs.

He’s slicked a finger against the outside of her panties, the camera zooming in on Scarlet’s crotch, and then Scarlet pauses the video.

She looks up at me. That final frame of her panties, the offending finger pressed up against it, lingers in my eye.

“This is what’s wrong,” she says, her voice sounding awfully conflicted.

“They’re disgusting pigs, the lot of them,” I say, hugging her tighter. “And they’re dead. Gone. They’re not going to hurt you anymore.”

She looks back at me, and then laughs bitterly.

“It’s not them,” she says. “It’s me.”

“No, that’s not on you,” I say, hearing the exasperation in my voice. “They were the ones who decided that they were going to try to **** someone today. Not you. Them. Doesn’t matter that you’re the leader of the protestors, you’re not—”

“I know that,” Scarlet says.

She grabs my hand, and presses it up against her panties. I feel the dampness there, immediately.

Now I get it.

“What’s wrong with me?” she asks quietly. “Let me tell you. Every time I see that video mentioned, I get turned on. And when I was sitting there, on that chair, tied up, their rough hands handling me… god, he was right, I was wet, I was so goddamned horny…”

“That doesn’t mean you wanted it,” I say.

I notice that my hand is still pressed against her panties. She keeps her hand over mine, as if wanting it to stay there. I feel the heat radiating out of her pussy, the **** need in her.

“But I did,” she says. “I wanted a cock in me so badly. So fucking badly. Why the fuck am I so broken?”

“It was just a biological reaction,” I say. “Arousal isn’t something we can control, just ask any teenager with a boner, they don’t—”

My words are cut off as Scarlet kisses me, her lips pressed hard against mine, her arms pulling my chest into hers, the sudden urgency in her actions awakening something primal in me. I kiss her back, and she guides my hand into her panties, my fingers resting on the edges of her wet folds.

“If it’s going to fuck me up,” she breathes, pulling away from me. “I might as well make it into something better, right? Turn the memory into something good?”

She places a hand against the stiff outline of my cock.

“Maybe you’re not completely sound of mind right now,” she says, gripping my cock through my boxers. My own fingers are playing with her pussy lips, moving on instinct, my brain still processing everything that’s going on. “But believe me when I say I am. And I want you.”

“Fuck, I want you too,” I say, and we kiss again, her hand fishing out my cock, her kisses so hard and powerful that I hardly have space to breathe.

Then, she unbuttons her shirt, unveiling her tits for me.