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  “The fuck?” he muttered, pushing the cover away from his body to examine his dick. Sure enough, he’d passed out with a condom on.

  Again.

  He gripped the base of the prophylactic and slid it up and off of himself, ensuring that he squeezed the base as it came off so the end results of last night’s escapade didn’t spill out onto his legs or stomach. Not like it wouldn’t have been the first time that happened, but he really didn’t want to deal with that right now because he didn’t remember shit about the night before.

  A bit of movement to his left made him aware that whomever he’d brought home with him from the bar had stayed the night. Lincoln adjusted the elbow on his non-condom-holding arm and lifted himself up slightly to see if he could figure out who the hell was in his house.

  The person lay on their stomach, facing away from him. Pale skin, thin body, a full-sleeve tattoo of skulls and flowers—were they roses?—short black hair, cropped close…

  Fuck! Lincoln screamed in his mind, fighting to keep quiet. He didn’t know what the fuck had happened, but somehow he’d brought home a guy. From the bar. And he had a condom on his dick.

  He jumped out of bed and rushed to the bathroom, closing the door lightly behind him. He took a few more giant steps across the open space and into the small room that held the toilet. He closed the door and locked it.

  Lincoln flung the full condom into the toilet, something he normally would have never done, and sat down on the seat. He crossed one arm over his stomach and brought his other hand up to his mouth, holding his chin in horror. Too late, he realized it was the hand that’d held the condom, and he tore it away from his face, retching in disgust.

  “How the fuck did I bring home a dude?” he whispered to himself as he rocked back and forth. “I’m not gay. I’ve never even had any real gay thoughts, except maybe a threesome or something…Fuck!” He continued to chastise himself in a harsh, barely audible whisper for fear of waking up the guy in his bedroom.

  He thought about what to do. He could stay on the toilet until the guy left. Yeah, that’s a good plan, he thought. He’d stay in this tiny room, without water—his mouth tasted like he’d been licking cat balls. Goddamn it! He probably had been licking balls. What was wrong with him?

  What the fuck did Carlos give me? he wondered, silently this time. He remembered drinking with Kurt, Jimmie, and Kevin, aka “The Crew.” They’d been friends since freshman year at Georgetown, where they were on the same rowing crew—well, Kurt hadn’t joined their team until sophomore year, but that wasn’t really the point. It was about—

  Focus, goddamn it!

  He’d been drinking with The Crew down at the 1776 Tavern, and Carlos, the bartender, was pouring heavy-handed drinks for his four regulars. They were having a great time, celebrating the announcement that Kevin had just found out his wife, Juanita, was pregnant with a boy. Sure, they’d been happy for him when they first found out that she was pregnant, but now that she was having a boy? Kevin couldn’t be happier. Lincoln remembered alternating between tequila and whiskey, but—

  The sound of his shower turning on in the next room made him pause. Actually, it made him freak the fuck out. “What the fuck, man?” he whispered, opening the door a crack.

  The dude’s back was to him, his long, slender arm testing the water temperature. His naked ass pointed right at him, which reminded him of the full condom he’d found dried to his dick a few minutes ago. Lincoln retched again and forced himself to look at the guy in his bathroom. He looked awful feminine from behind, standing up and leaning into the shower. Maybe he’d thought it was a woman at the bar, and then came back home with him.

  That had to be it. He’d been tricked by a transvestite or something. The Lord knows there’s a lot of them in DC.

  Lincoln closed the door quietly. What the fuck was he supposed to do with this? If the guys from The Crew knew about this, they’d never let him live it down. Jimmie especially.

  Jimmie was gay, and totally cool, but if he found out that Lincoln had drunken homosexual sex with some stranger, he would tease him relentlessly. Lincoln was by far the most masculine out of the four of them. He was a simple man’s man—or so he thought until he woke up next to a guy this morning.

  “Fuck me,” he mumbled. “Does that mean I’m… I’m…” He couldn’t even complete the sentence.

  No, surely not, he told himself. It was a mistake of some kind. Maybe the two of them had just passed out together. Naked. With a full condom on Lincoln’s dick.

  “Goddamn it!” Lincoln screamed in frustration.

  “Everything okay in there?” the guy asked in a higher-pitched voice than Lincoln was expecting.

  “Uh, yeah, sure, dude,” he replied. “My stomach just hurts.”

  “Probably all that street meat you were eating at four this morning,” he countered.

  Fuck you, Lincoln mouthed. Was “street meat” that guy’s euphemism for alleyway blowjobs? Seriously, what did I drink? Did I get roofied?

  That had to be it. Lincoln got roofied at the bar by that dude out there and was sexually assaulted. He thought about trying to call the police, but he’d come into the bathroom naked as a jay bird. His phone was…somewhere. Hopefully somewhere in the house.

  “Damn,” he mumbled.

  “Seriously,” the guy said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I can’t wait to try that brunch restaurant on the Washington Harbor you said you’d take me to. That Irish-sounding place.”

  “Uh…”

  “You said they have the biggest shrimp in the city,” he continued. “Reminds me of something big I got to eat last night.”

  “Oookay,” Lincoln said, standing up and pushing the door to the toilet room open violently. “I don’t know what happened last night, but this isn’t what—”

  A thin girl stood under the showerhead’s running water. Her breasts were smallish, maybe a very small B-cup if he was being generous, with dull-pink nipples, and even without flexing, she had a firm, flat stomach with the upper set of abs showing. Her hips only had a slight curve to them, which had helped to fuel Lincoln’s belief that she was a guy when he saw her from behind. The distinct lack of male genitalia down south made him breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

  “Get an eyeful, lover boy?”

  “Huh?”

  “I see you watching me,” she replied. “You certainly didn’t seem so shy last night.”

  “I, uh…” He couldn’t remember what he’d wanted to say as he stared at her hairless nether regions.

  “Okay, you’ve had your fill,” the woman said, splashing water at the shower door. “Quit staring. It’s kind of creeping me out, Linc.”

  “Huh? Oh! Sorry.” He coughed and turned around quickly without realizing she’d used a shortened form of his name until he was looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. He actually liked it; the name reminded him of the conquering explorer from his favorite video game as a kid. Then he felt stupid for standing there naked with his back to her. “I’m just gonna go out there.”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  Lincoln went into his bedroom and examined the floor. A pair of pink panties with black polka dots rested on the carpet on the side of the bed where the girl had slept. Her bra was sitting atop a crumpled pair of jeans in the doorway. There wasn’t any sight of her shoes or shirt. He walked out into the living room and saw the shirt on the arm of his couch, and her shoes, a pair of simple white sandals with a few sparkly jewel things on the straps, sat near the front door.

  He found his phone on the coffee table and sat down heavily on the couch.

  Thumbing his way through the text messages, he realized that Kevin had to leave around one o’clock in the morning, and the rest of The Crew decided to call it a night as well. He apparently hadn’t wanted to go because of his newfound Georgetown buddy, so they left him in the capable hands of “Sidney.”

  “Huh,” he grunted, this time in an acknowledgement of the
odd night instead of the questioning huh he’d given the girl—Sidney?—a few moments earlier.

  “You always sit on your couch butt-assed naked?” the girl asked as she came into the room with a towel wrapped around her body. Upon further investigation, her hair, which had seemed so damning when they were in bed together, was cut short on the sides until a few inches above her ears, then it was about five or six inches long. Lincoln thought it would’ve been nice to have seen that before he went through ten minutes of a serious freak-out session on the toilet.

  “Uh, no. Not normally,” he said, grabbing a cushion and placing it over his lap. “I was just trying to give you a little privacy…”

  “Oh. Okay, thanks. The shower’s open if you want to hop in,” she offered cheerfully.

  “Yeah, I need to.”

  She reached out and tousled his hair. “Yeah you do, Tiger. Go get cleaned up. I mean it, you promised me an absolutely fabulous brunch, and I’m going to collect on it.”

  “’Kay. The kitchen’s in there. Help yourself to whatever you want. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “All right. I’m just gonna watch TV. Where’s your remote?”

  “Ahh…” He searched between the couch cushions until his fingers wrapped around the hard, oblong surface of the remote control. “Here you go,” he said, standing and then handing her the remote.

  For some reason, he became self-conscious and covered his dick with the cushion as she slid between him and the couch. She plopped down and leaned back, the towel dangerously close to exposing her crotch. “Hope you don’t mind, but I used some of your toothpaste—don’t worry! I used my finger, not your toothbrush. That’s gross.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” he replied truthfully. “I’ll, ah, only be a few minutes.” He tossed the cushion over her, to the corner, before rushing back into his bedroom.

  Lincoln showered quickly and dried off with a hand towel. He only had one towel and “Sidney” was using it. He finished by brushing his teeth and putting on deodorant. He considered cologne, put it back in the cabinet, and then took it out again. “Why not?” he muttered and splashed a little onto his chest.

  A few moments later, he was dressed in a pair of shorts, a respectable polo shirt, and a pair of flip-flops, which Jimmie told him were horrifically out of style and that he should be wearing a boat shoe—preferably Sperry.

  He walked out of the bedroom and saw Sidney leaning forward, watching the television intently. “What’s up?”

  She clicked it off and stood up, tucking the edge of the towel back into the top, near her cleavage. “Some weird shit out in California and up north, in Michigan and Wisconsin,” she said. “The news doesn’t really know what’s going on, but they think there might be a solar flare blotting out the satellite and cell phone coverage everywhere except the East Coast.”

  “Hmph,” he grunted. Lincoln was a simple mid-level manager at a tech startup. He didn’t know anything about solar flares or how any of that shit worked. He just knew that when he placed a call, it worked, and when he watched TV, it worked. The technical stuff had always bored him to tears—which is why he managed the engineers and wasn’t one of them.

  “That’s so far away,” he stated. “It shouldn’t mess up our brunch plans.”

  She glanced at the television’s blank screen, then back at him. He saw her chew absently, and endearingly, on her lower lip.

  “You’re right.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me get dressed. If brunch is as good as you promised, maybe you’ll get a chance at Round Three afterwards.”

  Round Three? he mused, careful to keep his thoughts hidden as he smiled warmly. I don’t even remember Round One, let alone Round Two.

  For the tenth time that morning, he wondered just what in the hell he’d been drinking last night.

  2

  Georgetown, Washington, DC

  March 26th

  Georgetown was far enough away from the nonstop hustle and bustle of the District to seem like a different city entirely, especially given the steep hills of the neighborhood. Sidney enjoyed walking around the area and often made the short journey from where she lived in neighboring Dupont Circle. She glanced furtively at Lincoln beside her. Maybe I can come over here more often now.

  She lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment about a mile from here with her cat, Rick James, and went to school full-time at Georgetown Law. At thirty-one, she’d been an attorney for a little over four years, all of them at Refugee Assistance International, a nonprofit that helped international refugees find housing, food, and employment when they were brought to the United States. She’d been hired on at RAI after a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, where she’d spent a year in Senegal and a year in Bangladesh, learning to survive on her meager earnings. RAI was rewarding work, but she’d begun to want a little more out of life than simply earning enough money to pay her rent and buy food, which is why she was back at school, earning her LLM in Healthcare Law. She hoped to use that degree as a springboard into a new position somewhere that would pay a little more, while still allowing her to help those in need.

  It was, in her mind, a novel idea to earn money doing what she loved while helping others. The few law school classmates that she still maintained contact with were earning six figures, had nice homes, and didn’t worry about money as far as she knew. Why shouldn’t she be able to expand her lifestyle just a teensy bit?

  “So, this is the Castle,” Lincoln said, gesturing around them at the older, but grand-scale buildings.

  Georgetown Law’s campus was separate from the main campus, downtown near Union Station, so while she’d been in the neighborhood often enough, this was the first time Sidney had been here on the main Georgetown campus. She dutifully looked around, impressed by the small campus, but not really caring about the architecture, which Lincoln seemed to enjoy. She didn’t mind though; it was a beautiful spring day, and she loved being outside after the long, dreary DC winter. The sun was shining, and she thought she might actually like this guy, even if she had met him at a bar when he was already well on his way to being hammered—usually a warning indicator in men who are in the second half of their thirties.

  She’d talked extensively with his friend Jimmie and found out that they were celebrating the married one’s wife having a baby. She didn’t remember his name; they’d barely spoken to one another, like he was afraid of his dick accidentally falling into another woman if they had a conversation. Jimmie said that Lincoln was a casual drinker and rarely took it to excess. Hell, she’d been piss drunk just last weekend, so she couldn’t fault the guy for letting loose once in a while.

  They left the campus and started down 36th. It was yet another of the Georgetown neighborhood’s famously steep hills, stretching away in front of her toward the waterfront, which she couldn’t see because of the buildings and trees blocking her view.

  When they got to the end of the street, they took a set of stairs that ran between an old red brick building on one side and a massive stone wall on the other. High above them, an archway supporting a sidewalk ran across the gap. People stood, taking selfies at different points along the stairs. The closeness of the creepy, open-roofed stairwell probably looks wicked in selfies, she thought, resisting the urge to pull her cell phone from her back pocket.

  The stairs, oddly, fed them out into a gas station parking lot alongside a busy intersection. Lincoln reached out and grabbed her hand at the bottom. “I’m not going to step into traffic,” she laughed.

  He laughed too. “That’s not it. You said you don’t really walk around the lower part of Georgetown very often, so I just wanted to see if you know where you are.”

  She looked at the intersection near the gas station’s entrance. “Um…we’re on M Street,” she said, reading the sign.

  “Yeah, but where on M Street?”

  Sidney looked at the road but didn’t get anything else, so she looked right. A big stone wall towered above them and wasn’t recognizable,
so she spun around, looking up the stairs they’d just come down.

  “No way,” she muttered.

  Lincoln smiled. “Yup. See, here’s the plaque marking the spot,” he said, releasing her hand and taking a few steps toward the red building.

  She read the bronze plate aloud. “The Exorcist Steps. These iconic steps were featured in William Friedkin’s 1973 Warner Bros. classic motion picture, based on the novel and screenplay by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist. In the film’s climactic ending, Father Karras (actor Jason Miller) plummets the seventy-five steps to his death. Commemorated on this day, October 30, 2015.”

  Sidney turned and looked back up the stairs. “This is so cool.”

  “I know. We used to have to run these damn steps for cardio conditioning back when I was on crew at Georgetown. Up and down the stairs, ten or fifteen times, depending on how the coach felt that morning. Luckily, it was at five in the morning, so there weren’t very many tourists out at that time of day.”

  Sidney pulled out her cell phone and called out to an older lady taking a selfie at the base of the stairs. “Do you want me to take your picture?”

  “Uh, sure.” The woman handed her phone to Sidney, who took a couple of pics and handed the phone back.

  “Can you take one of us?” she asked hopefully.

  “Of course,” the woman replied with a drawl, indicating she was from the Midwest or Deep South. She took the phone, and as she was counting, “One…two…three.” Sidney stood on her tiptoes and kissed Lincoln on the cheek. The woman made comments about them being a cute couple as she handed the phone back before walking up the stairs.

  Of course, the picture was blurry, so they had to wait until the woman cleared the stairs and ended up taking a selfie anyway. Oh well.

  The remainder of the walk down to the Washington Harbor was pleasant as the two of them talked about themselves to try to get to know each other better. Somewhere along the way, it came out that Lincoln had been extremely drunk the night before and, well, he didn’t remember much of it. The knowledge irked Sidney quite a bit because she thought they had a connection—enough that she’d let him fuck her a couple of times—but she didn’t let him know. She’d done some pretty amazing things last night, and he didn’t even remember them. She’d have to keep that in mind if she let him back in her pants.