Interlude Six

You call this stabilised? You’re having the monkeys running the circus, is what I would call it. The main is tagging along like a good little doggy. Dial your electronic menace down a notch, before they notice that!

I woke up at 5:03 again, as usual. Fragments of a half-remembered contextless dream still stuck in my brain, like shards of glass. I hated those mornings. I preferred waking up dreamless or even after a realistic dream.

I was halfway to the bathroom when I noticed that something was off. Not trusting my recollection, I turned around and looked into the bedroom, counting heads. There were four of them in bed. With mine safely attached to my shoulders, that was one too many. I looked again, there were Livia, Samantha, Jane and Geri, so all as it should be. But how then didn’t that add up?

It hit me a second later. I was Jane. Why was there a Jane in bed?

I stepped closer, taking a good look at…her? Me?

It certainly was me; there was no question. It wasn’t a copy of Sam or another lookalike. I bent down to take a closer look when I noticed one small difference. This Jane had a nipple piercing. It looked fresh, as far as I could tell. Livia had once remarked I had the nipples for those, and I had considered getting one but couldn’t justify the expense. I extended my hand to touch it, but when I came into contact with the other Jane’s boob, she plopped out of existence like a soap bubble, the piercing landing in my open palm.

What in all the hells had this been?

But with her gone, my bladder took command again. This time, I turned on the lights in the bathroom. My bladder soothed, I took a closer look at the piercing. It was a simple bar-type one, but there was a tiny engraving. I had to hold it into the light just right to make it out letter by letter. It said “Livia’s bitch”. Huh.

As much as we had teased each other over the years, me being her bitch hadn’t come up, as far as I could remember. Or, if it had come up at some point, it hadn’t made an impression I could remember. I wouldn’t dispute that she could make me her bitch with those puppy eyes, or bait me with an evil grin to do just about anything, but we never called that out that way.

I wiped and stood up to put it on top of the bathroom cabinet. It was high up, me barely reaching it, so it was unlikely someone would stumble over it. Then, I sat back down for my traditional thinking session.

Had anything changed since yesterday’s session? Not really. More bullshit coincidences, more people showing up that would make any statistician run away screaming, and such stuff.

The guild fell into the former. One coincidence after the other, as if someone had orchestrated it second by second. But let’s be real, someone had. There was no question on my mind.

We got to Megan just in time again, and her battleform was unsettling. Should I have connected the dots so quickly and recognised it was one and not a real child with powers that transformed her hands into swords? I didn’t know. Either was as likely as the other.

Greg, not even dropping a single word about us ignoring the seatbelts when overfilling the backseat of the car, I would have accepted if one of us hadn’t been his daughter. Yet I couldn’t fault him when I ignored it all the same.

Marco, Paul and Rune. What a clusterfuck of people. I’d call them the Virgin Parade, but I had sabotaged that nickname myself. How weird was it that the hour I spent with Marco in bed was the most normal thing that happened yesterday? Had I met him back in London, we might have ended up in bed for a one-nighter doing virtually the same. Just with a rubber or three.

Something about Paul still was nagging me, but I got no more insight now than I had earlier. But then, did I need to know everything that was going on with other players? Not really. The second group could do and be whatever they wanted. They all were grown-ups and could handle their own business.

Oh, bullshit. I couldn’t simply ignore them. We, as a fam, had had sex with half of them. Even if it had been in a “professional” setting, that stuff tended to stick around. Once, on the bus to work, I overheard someone saying, “I don’t do it with guys I know; I’m not stupid”. I had no idea if that had been about whoring, but it would make sense.

Congratulations, Jane, you messed that all up by yourself just to shock Paul. Bummer.

I was getting tired again, so I moved on to other oddities. Why had Sam not gone home to fetch some clothes? Wait, hadn’t we planned for her to do that? I couldn’t remember. But I was sure it hadn’t happened, as we had to share a toothbrush yesterday. Ugh. Who does that? Even with us looking so much alike, this was crossing a boundary. There was a whole stack of cheap ones at the apartment, she could just have waited until we got there.

She even had suggested that, but I had said, “What’s the deal with sharing one with someone you kiss?” Yuck. What’s next? Swapping panties without washing them first?

That did it for me. Enough thinking more sleeping needed. I went back to bed.