Caught wearing roommates lingerie

## Act I: The Setup (Or, How One Man's Life Became a Sitcom)

Marcus Whitfield was twenty-five years old, and he had made a series of decisions in his life that, viewed in retrospect, seemed designed by a cruel cosmic comedian to culminate in the single most humiliating night of his existence.

He was a software engineer. Not the cool kind who worked at a startup with a ping-pong table and a nap pod. No, Marcus worked at a mid-tier enterprise software company where his job consisted largely of fixing bugs in a database management tool used exclusively by insurance adjusters in the greater Ohio region. His LinkedIn headline read "Passionate About Scalable Solutions." His actual passion was arguing on Reddit about why the Star Wars prequels were secretly genius, and he had a spreadsheet ranking every episode of Star Trek by "philosophical density."

He stood five foot eight. He had the physique of a man who had once owned a gym membership and now mostly owned the memory of a gym membership. His hair was the kind of brown that could charitably be called "hair" and uncharitably called "a suggestion of hair." He wore glasses with lenses thick enough to start fires in the right sunlight, and he had recently purchased a t-shirt that said "THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1" which he considered the height of wit.

And Marcus had four roommates.

Four. Roommates.

All of them nineteen years old. All of them girls. All of them — and this is important, so pay attention — objectively, catastrophically, devastatingly hot.

Their names were Brianna, Kelsey, Madison, and Zoe, and they had met in their freshman year of college, decided to rent a house together off-campus for sophomore year, and needed a fourth person to make rent affordable. Marcus had answered a Craigslist ad. The ad had said "chill roommate wanted, must be clean, no drama." Marcus had thought: *I am clean and I am definitely no drama.* He had not considered the possibility that he was about to spend the next year of his life being psychologically dismantled by four nineteen-year-old girls who treated him like a combination of furniture and a science experiment.

The house was a four-bedroom split-level in a college town. Marcus had the basement room, which was actually kind of cool — it was dark, it was quiet, he could set up his dual-monitor gaming rig and his anime figurine collection (thirty-seven figurines, meticulously dusted weekly) without judgment. The girls had the three upstairs bedrooms and, apparently, ownership of every common area, including the living room where Marcus had made the fatal decision to take a nap on a Friday night.

The dynamic was set from day one. The girls were loud. The girls were social. The girls brought home friends, boyfriends, casual hookups, and an unending parade of pre-gaming chaos. Marcus was quiet. Marcus was awkward. Marcus had once tried to make small talk with one of Kelsey's friends and had accidentally referred to the latest Marvel movie as "cinema" in a tone that suggested he was being ironic, but he wasn't, and the friend had said "aww, that's cute" in a way that made Marcus want to dissolve into the floor.

He was, in short, the house nerd. The house gremlin. The house mascot. The girls referred to him affectionately as "our Marcus," in the same tone one might use for a pet hamster that had learned a mildly amusing trick.

What they did not yet know — what they would discover on this fateful night — was that Marcus Whitfield had secrets. Dark secrets. Secrets that would become the foundation of his complete and total subjugation.

## Act II: The Night In Question

It was a Friday. The girls had gone out. Not just out — *out* out. The kind of out that involves pre-gaming with vodka shots in the kitchen while getting ready, then a bar, then another bar, then a third bar that they didn't even remember going to, then a deeply questionable late-night food stop, and then a ride-share home at two in the morning with the windows down and the radio up.

Brianna was the ringleader. Nineteen, five foot four, blonde, a communications major with the energy of a golden retriever and the strategic mind of a Napoleon. She had been the one to place the Craigslist ad, and she had been the one to interview Marcus over coffee, during which she had decided within four minutes that he was "adorable and harmless."

Kelsey was the tall one. Nineteen, five foot ten, dark hair, a biology major who was pre-med and therefore had the ability to be both extremely fun and extremely scary. She was the one who would later be holding the Sharpie.

Madison was the pretty one. This is not to say the others weren't pretty — they were all pretty — but Madison was *pretty* pretty. Nineteen, five foot six, auburn hair, an art history major who was effortlessly photogenic and knew it. She was the one who would later be applying the makeup.

Zoe was the wildcard. Nineteen, five foot five, black hair with a streak of blue, a film major who was always filming things on her phone and had a specific talent for capturing moments of maximum embarrassment. She was the one who would later be recording everything.

They came through the front door at 2:14 AM, loud and giggling, shoes off and discarded in a pile by the entrance, and immediately spotted a shape on the couch.

"Marcus?" Brianna whispered, though she didn't need to whisper because he was clearly asleep.

The shape on the couch was indeed Marcus. But the shape on the couch was not wearing what Marcus normally wore to sleep, which was a t-shirt with a video game reference on it and boxer briefs.

The shape on the couch was wearing lingerie.

Specifically, the shape on the couch was wearing a pair of black lace cheeky panties and a matching black lace bralette, and they were clearly not his.

The four girls stopped dead in the doorway. Then, in perfect synchronized unison, they all raised their hands to their mouths and made the sound of four people simultaneously suppressing a scream of delight.

"OH MY GOD," Kelsey mouthed.

"OH MY GOD," Madison mouthed back.

Zoe was already filming. "Is that— is that my bralette?!"

It was. The girls had been doing laundry together for months, and things had gotten mixed up, and at some point Marcus — who apparently had zero concept of what belonged to whom — had grabbed the nearest clean thing from the shared laundry basket, which happened to be Zoe's black lace bralette and a pair of cheeky panties that belonged to Madison.

And he was wearing them. Comfortably. Contentedly. Snoring softly.

The girls tiptoed closer. Brianna leaned over his sleeping form. Marcus was out cold. He had clearly been there for hours — a bowl of popcorn was on the coffee table next to a half-empty mug of tea and a controller for his Switch, the screen of which was paused on a game where a small anime character was standing in a field of flowers. He had been playing a farming sim. He had fallen asleep in lingerie while playing a farming sim. This was the most Marcus thing that had ever happened.

"Okay," Brianna said in a low voice, turning to the others. "We have to do something."

"What do you mean?" Madison whispered.

"I mean we have to do something," Brianna repeated. "He's asleep in our underwear. We can't just let this go. That's not who we are."

"She's right," Kelsey said, a dangerous glint in her eye. "This is an opportunity."

Zoe was already scrolling through her phone. "I have mascara, eyeliner, lip gloss, and a Sharpie in my bag."

"I have eyeshadow," Madison said. "And blush. And highlighter."

"I have a dildo," Kelsey said.

There was a pause. Everyone looked at Kelsey.

"Go get it," Brianna said.

Kelsey went to get it.

## Act III: The Operation

What followed was, according to Zoe's eventual nine-minute and forty-three-second video that would be watched by everyone the girls knew, one of the great collaborative art projects of the twenty-first century.

They started with the makeup, because that was the least invasive. Madison was the artist. She crouched over Marcus's sleeping face and got to work with the precision of a Renaissance master. Foundation — she had to match his skin tone, which was that specific shade of "pale nerd who hasn't seen the sun since September." She applied it with a beauty blender while Zoe filmed from above. Blush — heavy, deliberate, placed high on the cheeks so it looked like he'd been running or maybe having a fever dream. Eyeshadow — a smoky purple, because Madison thought it would complement his brown eyes. Eyeliner — a cat-eye flick that Madison executed with the steady hand of a surgeon, despite being two shots of tequila deep. Mascara — several coats, because Marcus had long lashes, actually, the kind that girls paid money for, and they looked *fantastic* with mascara. Lip gloss — a subtle pink, just enough to make it look like he'd been kissing someone. Highlighter — on the cheekbones, on the nose, on the cupid's bow, so that his face had the shimmering glow of a boy band member.

Throughout all of this, Marcus did not wake up