Olivia Blink's Life Is Stranger Than Fiction

Olivia Blink pulled her rickety blue Honda Civic into the narrow driveway alongside her house, shifted the car into park, turned off the engine, and sighed.

"Twenty-six years old, Liv. Twenty-six ... today." She glanced at her watch, a cheap Apple Watch knockoff imitation. The display said 12:02 in a light just bright enough to sting her eyes (and just off-white enough to make her think her vision was failing). Olivia let her head fall forward, her body tired, her mind saddled with mild disappointment. "Happy birthday, Liv. What an amazing life you have."

It wasn't unusual for Olivia Blink to talk to herself in her car. Or in her house. Or anywhere, really. She had a tendency to narrate her own life as she walked through it. She had the sense enough not to do it when she was with friends or family, when she was out with her boyfriend Brian, or really anyplace people might overhear her. But in a moment like this one -- late at night, home alone, slightly bummed at the utter lack of excitement she felt on her twenty-sixth birthday -- this was prime time for an Olivia Blink narration.

"Unlock the door, kick off the shoes, say hello to the cat. Hello, cat." She padded into the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator, and withdrew a half-bottle of white wine. "Pour a glass of wine," she said. Then, with another look at the bottle, countered with, "Or, just screw the top off and drink. Because you're twenty-six, you live alone, and you'd rather be a girl who drinks wine from the bottle than be the girl who has to wash another glass."

She flopped down on the third-hand sofa that adored one side of her narrow living room. Without really paying attention, she flicked on the television, then pulled out her phone. She reread the two birthday texts she'd gotten -- one from her mother, who wrote hello Olivia I tried to call you but I think I have a wrong number written down (to which Olivia said aloud, "somehow you texted me, though ..."); and from her best friend Kate, who wrote Liv! I love you and hope you have a great day! Matt and I are thinking of you from the leaning tower of Pisa! (Kate was on vacation in Italy and had sent a classic picture of she and her husband pretending to push over the tower). After studying the picture for a moment, Olivia switched apps and idly scrolled social media.

"Happy birthday, Liv -- random Facebook posts, mostly people I haven't talked to in years." She grumbled over the imbalance of birthday acknowledgments. Too many from so-called Facebook "friends," not enough from people she actually cared about. "Still," she added with another sigh, "it's only like five minutes after twelve. It's not even my birthday yet on the west coast." She drank more of the wine, and then set her phone down and stared straight ahead as if talking to someone else in the room. "Of course, it's been my birthday for six hours in London. Not that I know anyone there, but whatever."

Olivia Blink was a relatively normal woman. By the time she reached her mid-20s, she was content with who she was, and didn't carry any heavy emotional or psychological baggage. As a youth, she was more high-strung -- starting with being the first girl in her school to physically develop. As a kid, she always wanted to grow up to be beautiful, like many girls -- but then at age eleven when it seemed that overnight, she had the biggest boobs in school, she was mortified. Even if she rationally understood that girls turn into women, she resented being the first one of her friends to experience it. Once everyone else in school started catching up, she realized that what once seemed monstrous and unparalleled (i.e., her breasts, which she perceived as enormous) was actually pretty standard. In fact, her body was by the time she basically finished growing at age 15, was, for lack of a better word, average. She wore a 34B or C, depending on the bra. Her butt was plump without being uncomfortable in snug pants. She was 5'4", which always seemed right in the middle of a crowd of friends. She had dark hair, which she'd worn in a low ponytail since grade school, and a small smattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose.

Outside of everything else being completely ordinary, Olivia Blink had two more noticeable features. The first was her eyes, which were quite striking -- pale blue irises with a darker blue ridge. She had a college boyfriend who told her that the outer ring was called a "limbal" ring -- though that was a term she'd never heard again since, and as the years passed, she occasionally wondered whether what she was told was accurate. She also worried, sometimes, that her stark eyes gave the false impression that she was more severe or serious or angry or bitchy than she actually was. That, and the fact that her last name was Blink always led people to pay a little more attention to her eyes than they probably ought to.

The other noticeable thing was a small tattoo on her wrist. When she was very young, playing on a beach with her family, she got stung by a scorpion. It left a scar, a bright pink line that never faded away (despite what doctors had told her and her parents). Over the years, and too often for Olivia to just brush it off, people would ask about her scar -- sometimes worried that marks on her wrist were indicative of self-harm. This was never the case, of course, but Olivia didn't really like the negative attention. So when she was in college, she decided to give people something else to see -- and got a tattoo of a blue scorpion, with its stinger hitting exactly the point where she'd be stung. As a result, people often saw the tattoo, and no one ever really worried about her mental health again.

Olivia Blink didn't need much. She had friends, hobbies, went on trips, ate at restaurants -- and was completely at ease with all of that being just a medium level of plain. She didn't need to be famous, she didn't need to go viral, she didn't need to achieve astounding things. She had an enjoyable if uneventful job, an enjoyable if unadventurous boyfriend, and an enjoyable if unambitious life.

Olivia Blink didn't have to work the next day. She contemplated whether that was just the luck of the draw with the schedule at The Sleepy Owl (the bookstore/café she worked at), or whether her boss, Traci, knew it was her birthday and gave her the day off to be kind. "But ... is Traci the kind of person who would even do that?"

Regardless, a day off was a day off. But part of what made Olivia kind of sad was the fact that she didn't actually have anything planned. She figured that Brian was probably going to do something with her, though he wasn't great at remembering events or planning anything. "Maybe we can go out to dinner," she muttered, taking another swig on her bottle. "And maybe as a special treat, we'll have sex in a different position for a change. Ooh, and maybe he'll even go down on me. That would be a banner birthday."

She liked Brian, and at the bare minimum, he was a kind man and a respectful boyfriend. He was a little forgetful, and he was not particularly adventurous in bed. But Olivia didn't like the idea of being single again, and so she stayed with him, even though the relationship had probably plateaued quite a while ago.

"You know, it's probably just as well." She finished off the wine, turned off the television, and walked back to the kitchen to toss the empty bottle in the recycling bin. "I'm tired. And old. And if I'm being honest with myself -- which I always am -- a day of doing nothing might actually be a perfect birthday present to myself."

With yet another sigh, she turned off the kitchen light, and traipsed into her bedroom. She got mostly undressed (save for her panties), pulled on one of Brian's extra-large t-shirts, and crawled into bed.

She glanced at the clock on her nightstand. "12:26. You're twenty-six minutes old on your twenty-sixth birthday. How poetic." She lay on her back, her mind flooded with assorted blurry thoughts that weren't meshing together into any coherent ones. "Is this the year of my life when I finally stop masturbating at night to help me fall asleep when I'm alone?"

The cat hopped up on the bed, purring. He rubbed his face against hers, and Olivia pet him for a few minutes before he got distracted and jumped away. She giggled to herself as she tried to think of a clever pun on 'pussycat' and 'pussy,' somehow combining the thoughts of her cat and the fact that she hadn't decided yet whether or not to masturbate -- and even without arriving at a clever pun, still found just the idea of trying to come up with one funny enough.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Liv. It's just a birthday. It's not the beginning of the rest of your life. If you want to rub one out, then rub one out. No one will care. No one will even know."

She reached into the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out her Rabbit vibrator. She checked the buzz of it, flicking the power on and off again. She pushed the blankets and sheets down, lifted the front of her t-shirt up, and softly rubbed her stomach with one hand. She allowed her fingertips to graze her skin, stimulating things just a little, giving herself a bit of a shiver.

With the same hand, she pushed down the front of her cotton panties, and ran her fingers across her small patch of pubic hair. She took a deep breath, turned on the Rabbit again, and pressed it against her body. She slowly pushed the end against her pussy, gently inserting it, and softly driving it in and out.

She knew the settings she liked, and combined the buzz on her clit with the slowly turning shaft inside her vagina. Even when she was tired, like tonight, she was confident that she could arouse herself to an orgasm fairly quickly. "And that's all I need," she moaned to herself while masturbating. "Just a quick climax, and then you can fall asleep."

She worked the Rabbit in her vagina with her right hand, and used her left to rub and squeeze her breasts softly. She tried to think about sexy things to help her along. First, she thought of Brian -- though had trouble landing on a mental image that kept her aroused. Then she thought of Tyler Jones, a new barista at The Sleepy Owl who she found to be "pretty durnéd cute," as she liked to say, playing with some kind of Southern accent (which vaguely matched Tyler's).

"Ooh, yes, that might work ..." She smiled and bit her lip softly as she pictured Tyler -- tall, lean, Black, athletic without trying to be. In reality, she found him to be a tad more intellectual than she would have liked in her fantasy -- but tonight, in her fantasy, he could be anything she imagined. "Mm, Tyler ... talk to me in the low, slow voice you have ..."

With her eyes closed, Olivia was able to picture Tyler, half frozen in place at work, half moving in slow motion, smiling, one dimple showing up on his cheek. He slowly poured two cups of coffee. She saw him stirring cream into one of them and offering it to her.

"Mm, yes, that's so sweet of you, Tyler. Making me a coffee ..."

In her vision, Tyler turned away to pick something up from the shelf behind him. She admired his strong shoulders, his firm back, his skinny-cut shirt which, at least in her fantasy, did quite a bit to accentuate his muscular physique (which, also in her fantasy, was likely a bit more enhanced than in real life).

"Is that a copy of A Court of Thorns and Roses? Tyler!" Olivia was half mumbling to herself, half picturing it. "Read me a little, won't you?" His voice was always soothing to her, and the notion of Tyler Jones reading the soft romance fantasy world fiction gave her a fresh tingle.

The truth was that she hadn't ever seen Tyler anywhere except at work, and there had certainly never been anything between them. "But that's what fantasies are for, aren't they, Tyler? You won't mind if I pleasure myself while I think about you, will you? Of course you won't."

She pushed the Rabbit harder into her pussy, rubbing the smaller end along her clit more forcefully. "Oh fuck ..." she moaned. "Yes, that's it ... Mm ..." She wriggled on her bed, the stimulation of the Rabbit becoming more and more pronounced. With a growing moan, increasing in volume and rising in pitch, Olivia felt an orgasm wash through her body. "Ohhhh ... fuuuuckkkkkkk."

Satisfied, she turned off the Rabbit, cleaned it with a wet wipe from a box on the nightstand (throwing the used wipe into the trash bin on the floor), and replaced the toy in her drawer. She pulled her panties back up, lowered her t-shirt back down, tucked herself back into the covers, rolled onto her side, and sighed.

"Happy birthday, Liv. See you in the morning."