Dead Girls Like Me

Sheldon would have been lying if he'd claimed not to be glad that it was over with. Not that it hadn't felt good to shove a relatively easily-earned $20 into his empty wallet, but still. He'd just had sex with a dead body. He couldn't help but be the silghtest bit traumatised.

He rubbed the soap over his crotch with a vigour rather akin to masturbation, minus the whole 'arousal' component, trying desperately to feel like he was clean, again. It had never been a problem for him, before. He could shove his cock into just about anything and remain virtually nonplussed...but he'd never inserted himself into anything quite so... icky, for lack of a better work, as that dead girl's vagina. At least animals tended to be warm.

In retrospect, he supposed that he wouldn't have been telling the entire truth if he'd said that it wasn't at all unenjoyable, if only for the sake of its novelty. It definitely earned him punk-rock points, to say the least. He didn't know anyone who'd actually taken part in necrophilia before, and half the boys he knew didn't even know what the hell that meant. He felt an odd sort of pride overlaying the feeling of revulsion and fear that had gripped him ever since the whole thing began. At least he'd managed to stop shaking enough to keep a decent grip on the soap.

As he reached for the knobs to shut the water off, Sheldon was dismayed to find himself faced with another small problem. Well, maybe not small... Due to the superfluous amount of penis-scrubbing he'd just engaged in, he now had an erection. Cue the previously absent arousal component. He toyed with the idea of relieving it through his usual method, but found that whenever he closed his eyes in preperation to do so, all he saw was her dead face. He soon came to the grim realisation that he couldn't even manage it with his eyes open. He felt the shivers recommence their dance up and down his backbone as he recalled the memory of her cold skin, the strange smells...the cotton. At this last thought, he had to swallow hard to keep from vomitting all over the bathtub. He kicked himself for being so squeamish and juvenile, but he couldn't help it.

It just wasn't going to work. He would simply have to eke it out and let it go away on its own. He couldn't remember the last time he'd done that. In fact, he wasn't entirely sure he'd -ever- done that, and was a little put off by the fact that he felt like he was being forced to let it "escape", as it were. Somehow, it felt like a waste. As though somewhere, some poor, beautiful, teenaged (or possibly a little younger...or older) girl was crying because of the lack of male product on her person. Doubtful, but it was a funny mental image, anyway.

Oh well. He was pretty tired by now, anyway, and all he wanted to do was find a soft, warm place to stretch out and sleep for the next few hours until someone woke him up, again. He wanted to chill out, to forget, to recover.

As he made his way downstairs to say his good-nights, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach; what if his recently acquired disabilities included not being able to sleep? What if he wouldn't be able to stop thinking about it, about her, and he spent the next few hours, hell, the next few nights in a state of horrified half-awareness? He had done it before, when his medication had refused to work. He didn't really want to have to go through that, again.

Why hadn't he read into it a little more before he'd agreed to that stupid dare? Why hadn't he just taken a little more time to consider, to realise how difficult it would be to get over? And she was still there, a mere floor below him, just lying there, dead and cold and...

"Well, at least she was sexy," he mused to himself, letting go of the bannister he hadn't realised he'd been clinging to for the past few minutes.

"What?" Nate asked, just having entered the hallway.

"Er, nothing," said Sheldon, rubbing the back of his neck, still not entirely snapped out of it. "I'm gonna go to bed, now. The couch taken, yet?"

"Not the one in the den," he replied, yawning and passing Sheldon and proceeding up the staircase to his room. "You okay? You look kinda...weird."

"Heh, yeah, thanks," Sheldon replied, sardonically. "You -always- look weird."

"Go get some sleep, loser."

Normally, Sheldon would have thought of some snappy come-back that could have kept an argument going till the sun came up, but he was much too out of it to even think of retorting. Normally, Sheldon was completely against doing what he was told, but this time he desperately hoped he would be able to, and fast.

Jumping at the sound of someone flushing the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, Sheldon slowly padded across kitchen and into the dark room where he would be sleeping. But it wouldn't stay that way, no way.

Thankfully, it didn't take much blind groping before he found the light switch, flicked it on, affirmed that no one else was in the room, and claimed his place on the couch. He plucked the blanket from the back of the couch and unfolded it onto his reclined form. He fluffed the throw pillow beneath his head a bit, arranged his long limbs in the most comfortable fashion possible, and let his heavy lids flutter closed over his eyes.

No more than three minutes later, he realised that it was just too damn bright in the room. Groaning, he threw the blanket off of himself, swung his legs over the side of the couch and trudged over to where the light switch almost seemed to be mocking him from across the room. He would have preferred it to not be completely dark, but if he shut this light off, it didn't look like there was much of an alternative.

Sheldon stood there, frustrated, debating whether or not he should risk not being able to sleep because of the light, or because of the lack thereof. He heaved a deep sigh and decided he would take his chances in the darkness. He had never minded it, before, not even when he was younger. He had never really believed in monsters or the like, for his parents had always taught him that the real monsters were the ones news reporters talked about, the funny-looking man down the street, and, scariest of all, the ones in your head. Perhaps his parents hadn't told him this, outright, but they had definitely contributed in his gaining of this knowledge. Now it was the memory of the nameless body in the basement that haunted him; the girl with the shaved pubis, the large breasts and no pulse. He didn't know her name, either. He usually took the time to find out the name of his most recent conquest, at least afterwards, if nothing else. He wondered if Nate knew.

Sheldon wiggled down as deep as he could into the plush cushions of the couch and pulled his blanket up to his chin. It wasn't really cold in the house. In fact, it was even a little warm, and he should have been perfectly comfortable, but ever since he entered the basement and laid eyes on that corpse, he hadn't been able to stop himself shivering constantly. Not even the warm water spewing from the showerhead had seemed to help, much. This cold came from the inside, from that deeply buried part of himself that wasn't completely desensitized to, well...things like this.

He secretly wished that his sister were there. He wasn't sure what good she could do, but he wished for her presence, all the same. Something about her made him feel...well...he couldn't really say. Aside from the automatic boner he got whenever she got close to him, there was something else there, too. He supposed she made him feel safe. Loved, even. No one else made him feel that way. He would never admit it to her, of course, but just then he would have liked nothing more than to simply have her hold him. ...And maybe give him a blowjob. That was always a welcome thought. He tried to concentrate on it, tried to wield it as a barrier that would block out the less pleasant thoughts plaguing his tired mind, and for a time it worked...but there was only so much fantasizing about his sister he could do before that pesky erection would return, and that simply would not do.

Sheldon watched the minutes go slowly by, watched with drooping eyes as the little illuminated numbers on the right got bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller. His brain had long since shut down, all but for the little piece that kept jarring him awake with the memory of the dead girl every time he let his eyes drift closed, even for a second. And so reluctantly, obsessively, he kept his eyes fixed on the numbers until it was almost four AM.

He wasn't sure exactly when or how it happened, but, as his blanket was on the floor and he was standing completely still in the middle of the dark room, he'd apparently decided that he'd had enough.

He moved without thinking, shuffling out of the room, through the kitchen and over to the basement door. He knew that he was at least partially awake, for along with the bile that rose into his throat as his hand touched the doorknob, there was also the little voice in the back of his head telling him to just suck it up and confront his fear. If he went down there again, he would see. He would realise that she wasn't going to reanimate and try to eat his brains, as was so typical a scenario in the horror films he liked to watch. Her ghost wasn't going to scare him senseless and drive him mad or anything so ridiculous and cliche as that. She was dead, no longer alive, gone. She was just a body, just a shell, a harmless, lifeless, peaceful...

Sheldon gulped audibly as he turned the handle and opened the door, whose hinges were in dire need of lubrication. The stairs creaked spookily beneath his weight as he slowly put one foot in front of the other. He felt like he was in a movie, like there should be cameras from all different angles filming him, or spooky music should be playing or -something-. But there was nothing but the monotone hum of the various electronics within the quiet house. It wasn't right. He would have to start talking to himself.

"All right, I'm turning on the light. Anyone mind? ...No?"

No answer, as it should be.

The light switch was flicked on, making a faint clicking noise, preceeded by the buzz of the bright overhead lights. There she was, just as he'd left her, barely a strand of her long curly hair out of place. She really was rather pretty, he thought to himself as he walked over to where she lay, feigning confidence with a puffed-out chest as though it actually mattered to anyone else but him. Even despite the sickly blue-grayish hue of her skin, he couldn't deny that he found her attractive. It was as cold as it looked, but for some reason, he reached out a hand to touch it, anyway.

"God damn," he said, once again pulling his hand away, as though he hadn't learned his lesson the first time. Someone had once told him that a main definitive of insanity was repeating the same action over and over again and expecting different results. But he just wanted her to be warm, or at least not teeth-chatteringly, skin-crawlingly, stomach-upsettingly cold.

"I guess it is pretty chilly down here, huh?" he said, awkwardly. After all, it's difficult to be talking to a corpse and not feel the tiniest bit awkward. It wasn't that Sheldon had never spoken to himself, or even an inanimate object, before. And hell, everyone talks to their pets, now and then. But this...

"So...you're dead. That kinda sucks, doesn't it?"

Yeah, it sure does.

"Um...sorry if I, uh..." Sheldon ran a hand through his greas--...his surprisingly clean hair.

What, hurt her? She's dead, man. What the fuck.

"Sorry, I'm kind of not very good at one-sided conversations. I mean, I guess I've had enough practise, what with that whole psychward episode and what-not..."

Dude. You can't impress her, either.

Sheldon sighed. As difficult as it was, his inner voice was making it even harder for himself. But he was too tired to question why he was even there, and therefore not awake enough to simply go back up the stairs to the couch. So he just stood there, in his stocking feet, staring at the girl he was pretty sure he would have really like to get to know if she weren't so fucking boring and smelly. No self-respecting male likes a Chatty Cathy, but he would have settled for an Occasionally-Responding-When-Spoken-To...whatever her name was. He wondered if he'd ever find out.

He was -this- close to asking her, when he remembered what the hell he was doing.

Maybe if he kissed her, she'd wake up. Yeah, like in the fairy tales. That always worked, right? She wasn't -really- dead, just under some kind of spell or something.

At four in the morning, when you're Sheldon Sands and you haven't had decent sleep in days, you're capable of just about anything.

Trying not to think too much about it, first, he took a step closer, leaned forward, and licked his lips. He was going to do it. He was totally going to kiss a dead girl, right on her cold, white lips.

And then she opened her eyes.