The First Day - Evening

Bing bang boom, and just like that I was a homeowner.

I wouldn't be able to sort utilities out until the next day, so Eric drove me to the store so I could by a few essentials. Air mattress, blankets, a space heater, and booze. Lot and lots of booze. I didn't see anyone at the store, neither customers nor employees. we just ran through the self checkout, and scanned my card.

I can't tell you the complicated legal history that'd followed my family's selling of the house, but it clearly hadn't seen much occupation in 8 years. You'd be surprised by how quickly one of those things can **** especially when you have rats and local kids ripping it apart. Where once there had been a warm family house, there was now a dusty, creaky... something else.

"This is bullshit." I sighed, touring my old room. "The app said it would be a new house."

"It just needs a little love." Eric herded some rat poop into a corner with his shoe.

"Don't we all?" I turned to him. "Would it be pathetic if I moved back into this room? It'd feel weird sleeping in my parent's old bedroom."

"Can't say I have an opinion." Eric replied, wonderfully ignorant to how emotional this return had been for me.

I walked over the the window, where I'd spent many a night spying on our friend Kate.

"She still lives there you know?" Eric said, as he spotted me looking.

"Really?" To my shame, I peered a little harder, willing the curtains to blow aside.

"Really really." He leaned against the wall. "Of course she's doing her whole Trad-wife thing now. Which is fucking funny since she owns the house."

I shook my head. "And that's why I didn't come out until college. God." I shook my head, it was scary how easily I could remember those feelings. The sweaty palms and throbbing heart. There was a time where it felt like a kiss from her would stop time. "Always knew she'd burn me at the stake if I confessed."

"You were the smart one." Eric agreed. "Just look at what we did to Ginger."

"We were kids."

"So was she."

I sighed, there was way too much shame there for me to unpack. Some serious closeted angst. "What's Marshall doing?"

"He's night manager at the local market." He shook his head. "She makes more money than him pretending he's the breadwinner to her audience, the fat fuck."

"Jeez, Eric. No love lost there huh?"

He snorted. "You didn't leave town because we were all doing great."

"Yeah." I looked back at Kate's window. "I dunno I just thought..."

"We'd all grown up?"

There was still weed in the attic.

Is it safe to smoke ten year old grass? Asking for a friend.

Eric held true to his sobriety promise, and stayed away form the devil's bush. He made up for it, by drinking a lot. I hadn't thought to buy glasses so the two of us were swapping spit through the medium of a tequila bottle.

I was absolutely **** down a joint as Eric regaled me with some classroom horror story. Weed can go bad, I'd discovered. But I felt like I owed it to myself to burn it down. The two of us were huddled in the attic, around a space heater. I'm glad to say the roof was still in good condition. That'd been the final piece of work my dad had paid for before we sold it. It would have made for a miserable reunion if the snow as melting through.

It was still cold as fuck up there, and I'd had to dip into my wardrobe to put on a few more layers. Luckily the booze and weed were both warm.

Between puffs, and gulps, and a bit of **** laughter I was thinking.

Thinking about the app... the quest, and what it could mean.

There was someone doing... something.

Not a god, just someone with godlike powers.

Not scary at all.

"Fuck I need some good weed. Remember the stuff Blair used to get?"

"Oh yeah." Eric smiled. "Not anymore though. She works for City Hall, she's just as clean as me."

"Fuck." I choked down another puff. "Am I the only cool one left?"

"Pretty much."

Emancipation.

What the hell did that mean?

Freedom from whatever the quest master had planned for me.

The fact that the Quest was called Harem in a Small Town, made me a little suspicious.

I was lucky I’d already seen the power of the app. I could skip the disbelieving and get straight to the game.

There was a man out there who needed finding.

And he just might be in the room.

I hadn’t told Eric about the quest. It could be him, it could be anyone but so far he’s the only person in town i had contact with. Besides the gal from the credit union and she was already in the rear view of my life.

Which left me with Eric, who was a tasty suspect even in a wider field of players. He knew where I would be to pick me up. That was suspicious, plus he had a well known crush on me in high school. Sure I had the same for Kate and I wouldn’t do anything weird with her, but come on… guys can be fucking losers sometimes.

Then again, was I really worth all that trouble? I didn’t see it. Eric could do better.

“So you’re level three huh?” I inquired trying to be subtle in my own drunk way. “That means you’ve been using the app a lot?”

Eric shrugged, either try to create an air of mystery, or embarrassed. “Yeah I guess. I think Blair is like… five? So….”

“What have you been doing with it?”

“I dunno, what’s it asking you to do? Cook meals, work out, pick up long lost friends?” He took a sip of the tequila. “A lot of little things, with big payouts.”

“Like what?” I pressed.

“A fixed leg…”

“And?”

“A few inches, alright?”

I eyed him. Was that a lie? “You don’t look any taller to me.”

He blushed. “Um I mean. Not in height…”

Feel free to imagine the internet dial-up sound bouncing through my head. Then suddenly I lit up with horror. “Oh gross!”

“You asked!”

“Ugh.” I swatted at him. “Don’t tell me you got that for driving me around.”

“Okay I won’t.”

I grunted and took the tequila from him. “You’ve lost drinking privileges… a bigger dick really?”

“Hey.” He shrugged. “Was I supposed to leave you to freeze in the snow while I played with my tiny dick?”

“Wouldn’t that have been a funny end to all of this?”

“Not really." He looked around the abandoned attic as if worried it were bugged. “Whoever is behind this is sinister. It’s giving us good shit now, but something bad it coming.” He gestured to me. “It might have already come, you gave up your whole life just to come here? What’s up with that? Then I get a mission that’s basically let you die, or keep my body unaltered. What’s that about?”

“So you’re not happy with the bigger dick?”

“Not the point.” He brushed me off. “The point is it changed my body and didn’t give me a choice. What if it had been something bigger, scarier?”

“Okay chill out dude, I wasn’t on a **** march through Siberia. I could have called an uber. But I get your point.”

He took offense to my laugh. "Aren't you scared?"

"Out of my mind. I'm with you, I think this thing is building towards something sinister. I mean, it draws me back into town and has you pick me up. That's no coincidence, it's got to be someone we know."

"What's 'it?'" He asks me with a raised eyebrow.

"It! The App, the quests. It has to be somebody."

I looked down at his phone, but said nothing. He was looking thirsty so I handed him the tequila. I was having such a hard time imagining Eric being behind all of this. He was far too sweet, too dorky. And yet I couldn't bring myself to trust him. Of course that was a general problem with me, just ask any of my exes. Eventually though he did offer me something that got me close. "What if we delete the app? Let's just not play."

"Oh." I said, instantly rebelling against the idea because it was so anticlimactic.

"We got lucky, hit the lotto, now let's take the money and run."

"Yeah but..." Why not? Because I wanted more? More than what? More than a house? I'd never considered myself a greedy person. "Yeah!" I took out my phone. "Fuck yeah."

I opened the app up, and saw my quest waiting for me. Thirteen days and a few hours before it was over. To me the countdown was like something you'd see on 24. It was leading to a detonation that Jack Bower was racing to stop. What that detonation was, I don't know. The app had failed to impress upon me the importance of the timer, and thus I would ignore it without angst.

I closed the app up, and held my thumb over it's icon. I half expected it to fight me, but there the option was in red. Then with an anti-climatic flick of my finger, it was done. The app was off my phone and out of my life. I looked up at Eric with a smile. "Easy enough."

"Same." He set his phone down, and the two of us shared an uneasy smile. "Well, what do you want to do now?"

"I'm not sure, that really took the wind out of my sails." I said, reach over to his pants and undid his fly.

"Mhm." He said, eagerly opening his legs to let me get about my work.

"You never hear fairytale stories about people that beat the fairy on the first go around. Wow." I found the snake in his pants, and pulled it free, healthy and thick even in the cold attic. "I see you already collected your reward."

He winced at that, another guilty look that wasn't nearly as charming as it usually was. "Do you... like it?" He asked vulnerably.

"As much as any lesbian likes handling an erect cock." I said casually, jerking the thing to full mast. "I'm more impressed is all. Were all your rewards for a big dick?" I laughed.

"A few." He confessed, groaning happily as I jerked him off.

None of this was odd to me, and I wouldn't question the events until the morning. But don't worry you hadn't missed a step there. It went straight to us talking to me jerking him off, and I'll spoil this for you, he fucked me not long after. Through all of this I yapped and yammered as if fucking him was beyond notice. So obvious and casual that it didn't need explaining. Horror, disgust, pleasure, none of it even came to mind, and truthfully when I remembered it later, they were still lagging far behind. It's like I had been numbed.

"Ah fuck, it's cold." I groaned as I undressed and laid myself out on the blanket. My nipples hard and pointing up at the little redhead as he lined himself up with me.

"I'll warm you up." He assured me.

To which I rolled me eyes. "You must use that all the time."

He gently rubbed his head against my sex, lubing his gland up for penetration, and like a gentleman didn't comment on the bristly jungle of pubic hair that poked at him. He entered me just as gently, bit by bit, though I'm sure he was eager to try his new dick out on me. I'm not sure if it would have mattered. If he slapped me or chocked me would I have snapped to my sense, or would I have had some cringy joke to say to that too? I was a lesbian so where was the disgust. He was my friend, where was the awkwardness. I didn't want this, so where was my horror?

I can't say, and I don't know what was going through his mind either.

I just laid there and took it, moaning as he entered me, but only a little. Like a hiccup.

After that, I don't know.

I talked, and he talked, and the two of us talked. Like we were in separate rooms from our bodies. Like our friends were fucking in the living room and were trying not to make it awkward by talking over them.

And I wish I could say it was over comedically fast. A few pumps and he was done, but I don't think so. I think we hung in there for a while. We must have. Two adults, heaving and sweating, and panting in a steamy reunion years in the making. Because there as nothing after that. Just a gasping climax, so compelling I had no recourse but to drift asleep when it was all over.

It wouldn't become clear to me until the morning that while I might have been done with the app, it was not done with me. That timer may have pointed towards a detonation at some point in the future, but it had surely shown that the game had already started.

These realizations, like the day, would start at dawn. Until then I had the pleasure of basking in the warmth, and the ignorance of my home town welcome.