Something's wrong

The smell… why can I remember the smell, but not anything else? It comes in layers. The first is the sweat. When you spend as many nights out dancing as I do, you learn to tell the difference between kinds of sweat. It doesn't smell the same when you get out of the gym, or when you're dancing, or if you're in bed with someone. But what I remember from that odd, dark period, when the rest of my memory is fractured, was a smell of sweat I'd never known before. What comes next is something sweet. They say your sense of smell and sense of taste are more closely connected than almost anything else, and so maybe I'm not totally making it up when I say I think I've tasted this smell before.

Then there’s something even deeper. It reminds me of the scum at the bottom of a lake. To try to identify it, I push my fingers into it. It slips away from me. Just for a second I have the shape of it in my hands. It’s… No, it’s gone again. The dream, if it’s a dream, is ending.

When my memories come back, the night was still ongoing. I’m tangled up with the woman from Le Mythe. Neither of us are wearing anything more than underwear, somehow. I suspect I know how. My mouth feels numb. The last few hours trickle through my head. Something is wrong with the memories. Not the gaps in between them, that’s no surprise. It’s like looking into the face of someone who’s had too much work done. Or seeing what was a forest after all the trees have been chopped down. The sound of running water comes into the bedroom from the direction of a light in the hallway. It’s the only light in the place, and blocked by the door except for a slim sliver. Our host is washing up. I sigh, curling into the warm body of the woman beside me. I love brunettes. She has that beautiful Mediterranean complexion to go along with her dark curls. The perfect woman. And, feeling my body move, she lifts her head, half awake, and kisses me.

“Mmm,” I moan.

The sound of running water.

You’re not there anymore, Isobel. That moment is gone.

I moaned. Past tense. Her name was Rania. Her kisses, and her fingers trailing up my side, were almost enough to bring back what had happened here tonight. Men, in their mannish ways, had slipped things into my drink before, and I’d helped friends who got roofied, too. This wasn’t that. I wasn’t supposed to know what had brought us here, to this apartment. It didn’t seem like Luke’s. Rania’s fingers found their way between my legs. I whimpered, opening them to make it easy for her. Despite her oh-so-classically feminine looks, she was clearly an old hand at this. I wondered if she was one of those girls who sought out threesomes just so she had an excuse to fuck other girls. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I thought as she started kissing her way down my body. Her hands moved to the waistband of my panties.