“Vanishing Act”
Kara sat by the side of the road with cold rain rapidly soaking through her thin clothes, her dirty blonde hair matted down with a mix of sweat and freezing water. Shivers of exhaustion, cold and hunger coursed through her body. She looked again for a red Pontiac Vibe that she already knew wasn’t there, and decided she’d pretty much had it with Vanessa’s bullshit. Fuck ‘something came up’, fuck ‘family emergency’, fuck ‘I wasn’t feeling good’, and oh by the way fuck ‘I don’t know what you’re talking’ about three times sideways with a rusty pitchfork. Kara was going to find out what Vanessa’s deal was, because it was the alternative to murdering her best friend.
It had been funny at first. Back in freshman year, Kara greeted each new excuse with a mixture of amusement and pity. Vanessa showed up thirty minutes late for an afternoon class with a mumbled excuse of, “I overslept.” She went to get popcorn five minutes after the movie started and never came back, saying, “I had a blonde moment.” (Which was even funnier, because she was a redhead.) She missed entire shifts at work, and said, “I had the wrong day on the schedule.” She managed to get a reputation as the flakiest girl on campus, which was hella impressive considering that the student body numbered in the tens of thousands.
But that didn’t stop Kara from liking her. In a way, it was what brought them together—well, that and a meteorically unsuccessful pledge of Chi Omega that wound up seeing both of them walking backwards across campus while holding an egg on a spoon. Vanessa was a flake, but she was such a sweet person that you wound up feeling sorry for her. It clearly wasn’t her fault that she was such a scatterbrain that she showed up at the wrong bar for karaoke night and didn’t realize where anyone else was until three minutes before closing, and she always looked so flustered by her constant mistakes that Kara felt like someone had to look after her.
So Kara took all the same classes Vanessa did so there’d always be someone taking notes. Kara picked Vanessa as her roommate even though Vanessa had never managed to hold a steady job for more than a month and half the time she only made rent due to the generosity of her parents. Kara made sure to invite Vanessa to every party and movie and social event even though there was only about a one in three chance that she’d show up at the right place, the right time, and be able to stay for the whole thing without an ‘unexpected’ scheduling conflict. Kara made sure Vanessa had someone to rely on, and she thought before today that she had learned to accept the fact that she couldn’t rely on Vanessa in return.
But today was Kara’s first full marathon, after months of training. Her parents couldn’t make it down to Austin, a variety of coincidences had crossed one friend after another off the list of people who could pick her up afterward, and she wasn’t going to carry her handbag for twenty-six miles. She had made, with grave misgivings even at the time, the reluctant decision to turn to Vanessa to help.
Kara had extracted a solemn oath from Vanessa, made under pain of gargling fire ants and freebasing scorpion venom and every other ludicrous thing Kara could think of, that she would remember to pick up Kara at the finishing point of the marathon at five o’clock in the afternoon. Not at the starting point, not at five o’clock the next day, not six hours later because there was a ‘family emergency’, but 5 PM sharp. And Vanessa, her eyes wide with sincerity, had agreed.
And now it was six thirty. A steady, cold rain was falling on Kara’s exhausted body as she sat there, too tired and angry and miserable even to go find someone to ask for a ride. And Kara decided it wasn’t funny anymore. Vanessa had pulled her little vanishing act one too many times for Kara to keep believing her excuses. There had to be something more to it, something her best friend wasn’t telling anyone—not even her. And Kara was determined to find out what.
It was a determination that outlasted Vanessa pulling up at seven o’clock with an expression of sheer panic on her face and an armful of dry towels and warm blankets and a sob story about engine trouble on top of a flat tire. It even outlasted homemade chicken soup and a rubdown with Ben Gay (and a few terrible jokes about rubbing another woman with ‘Ben Gay’ that Kara snickered at because one of the reasons she liked Vanessa so much was that they both had roughly the same sense of humor as a twelve-year old boy). Kara was going to find out what Vanessa was up to. She just wasn’t sure how.
The next day, during CS 314, Kara divided her attention a bit from the lecture (which was mostly review anyway) to brainstorm ideas in a notebook that she carefully kept averted from Vanessa’s seat. The most obvious idea was to just wait for Vanessa to have one of her ‘blonde moments’ and follow her to see where she went. But Kara quickly decided that was pretty much out of the question—the whole problem was that Vanessa kept dashing off while Kara had to stay put and be responsible. Not to mention, Kara didn’t know the first thing about tailing someone.
Maybe she could hire a professional? Kara surreptitiously took out her phone and did a search for private investigators in the area. Most of them talked about tracking down cheating spouses, which made Kara feel a little weird for a minute—was she maybe going a little bit off the deep end here? It wasn’t like Vanessa was really hurting anyone, except maybe her own job prospects and college career. Maybe Kara was overreacting just a bit.
Then Vanessa looked up from her own slightly concealed cell phone with a tiny yelp. She dumped her stuff into her book bag and hastily dashed out of the classroom with a hastily mumbled apology. “GottagocatsathepoundKaracanyoufinishtakingnotessosorrybye!”
They didn’t have a cat. Kara started looking through the list of private detectives.
A few minutes later, she gave up on the idea. Most of the websites she found were reluctant to list any actual dollar amounts—never a good sign—but Kara finally found a consumer awareness site that listed $95 as an average rate. Per hour. At that rate, Kara could probably pay for about fifteen minutes of hard-boiled detecting without having to sell plasma.
Her thoughts drifted into fanciful solutions. Maybe she could put a radio tracking collar on Vanessa, like the ones that zoologists used to track bird migrations. “Here,” she’d say, “I got you this giant clunky necklace for your birthday! Promise you’ll never take it off!” Kara let out a chuckle, hastily stifled when she realized she’d apparently laughed at an explanation of database organization schemes.
Suddenly, she started scribbling notes. A radio collar was silly, but it wouldn’t be that hard to make a GPS sensor. These days, you could get most of the components off the shelf, and Kara was pretty sure she could make something smaller than a deck of cards that would send its location to Kara’s laptop. She could hide it in Vanessa’s car, maybe, and at least see where she went if she was driving...
But what if she didn’t drive wherever she was going? What if it was someplace near campus? It had to be something Vanessa would carry on her person, something that she’d never leave behind. Something inconspicuous, something she’d never connect with tracking her...
Kara looked down at her phone. She smiled wickedly. She scribbled down one last note, and then returned her thoughts to the lecture.
Vanessa didn’t turn up at the apartment until almost nine o’clock, looking so utterly exhausted that Kara almost felt guilty about what she was planning to do. “You look dead on your feet,” she said to her friend. “Why don’t you just have a bowl of chili and crash out for the night?”
Vanessa nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “I was doing a volunteer thing, and...” She waved her hand vaguely, too tired to bother with the rest of the excuse. She ate her dinner with a grateful smile, stumbled off to her bedroom, and was snoring loud enough for Kara to hear within about five minutes.
At which point Kara snuck into Vanessa’s bedroom and grabbed her phone. Because ‘almost guilty’ and ‘guilty’ weren’t quite the same thing.
It took her about two minutes to find the app she was looking for. She already knew Vanessa’s password—she’d helped jailbreak Vanessa’s phone a few months ago—and she’d spent most of the afternoon researching spyware, so she already knew what she wanted to install. ‘iSpy’, according to the ad, ‘gives the details on every text, email and call he makes! Even tracks mobile phone location in real time! Find out who the other woman is FAST!’
Kara’s thumb paused over the ‘Download’ button. Once again, she felt a little twinge of weirdness about using a program very clearly marketed to jealous wives, but it passed a little quicker this time. It wasn’t like she was expecting Vanessa to be off being best friends with another girl or something—she just wanted an end to the constant excuses, that was all.
If she was upset about anything, it was that Vanessa didn’t trust her with whatever the truth really was. How could it be worse than the time Vanessa tried pot and wound up getting paranoid and locking herself in the bathroom? How could Vanessa need to hide this...this whatever it was...from someone who knew about her and Brian Vickers and the stairwell incident in sophomore year? How could she lie to Kara the same way she lied to everyone else and not think it could possibly affect their friendship?
“Okay,” she muttered. “Maybe a little bit jealous.” She stabbed her thumb against the touchscreen and started the download process. Five minutes later, she returned Vanessa’s phone to the bedside table and registered the account on the company’s website.
The second she did, she had a sudden panic-doubt-fear-guilt-shame attack, and she didn’t even look at the data for about three days. Every time she thought about checking up on it, she wound up sitting in front of her laptop trying to decide what things she would let herself look at and what things would totally be an invasion of her best friend’s privacy, and then she’d wind up tying herself in knots over it all and she’d close the website without ever logging in.
Kara had never imagined how nerve-wracking it would be to spy on someone. Every time Vanessa took out her phone, Kara imagined her saying, “Gee, that’s funny, there’s some weird app data on here. Let me take a look,” and then starting an argument that would leave Kara groveling in apology. She rehearsed her explanation a thousand times, each time stressing the sincere concern she had for Vanessa’s well-being, and almost blurted it out on half a dozen occasions. She had nightmares about sinister men using the app to steal Vanessa’s identity and commit credit card fraud, and her best friend getting the chair. It was three days of rock-solid regret.
And then one Thursday night, Vanessa went out to pick up Chinese and didn’t come back for three and a half hours, and Kara logged onto the website in a rush of frustration and severe hunger pains.
The first thing Kara noticed were the texts. There were about five of them, all from someone named ‘Marlene’ that Kara had never even heard about, and all of them saying roughly the same thing. “Come here.” “Come on over.” “Come to me.” “I need you.” “Time to come over.” The last one was from about three hours ago.
The second thing Kara noticed was the GPS data. Most of it traced the usual routes—between the apartment and campus, between campus and Vanessa’s current job, between the job and the apartment again—but five times, it veered off to an apartment building south of the river, about a mile away from the little red rambler Vanessa’s parents lived in. And most significantly, it was there right now. Kara zoomed in on the map until it was right over the street in question and stared at the little blinking cursor as it flashed on and off, over and over again for what seemed like ages. Finally, it started to move, and she hastily closed the browser as though Vanessa would be walking through the door at any second.
Vanessa came through the door about twenty minutes later, with room-temperature beef and broccoli and an unconvincing story about getting lost. Kara let it slide...but she was already planning her Friday night.
As soon as class let out on Friday, Kara made an excuse about an emergency at work—she was blushing beet red as she talked, and she was sure that she sounded every bit as unconvincing as Vanessa always did, but her friend only gave her a hug and said, “That sucks! I’ll have dinner ready when you get home!” Then she took the bus south of the river to the apartment building she’d seen on the iSpy website.
She found a convenient bench near the entrance and pulled up the site again on her phone, waiting for the text that she felt certain would be coming. Sure enough, at around seven, Marlene’s text popped up. “It’s me,” it read. “Come over.” Kara switched to the GPS data and watched as Vanessa’s little red dot made its way south.
After about twenty minutes, she saw Vanessa’s slightly battered Vibe pull up to the curb. Vanessa got out, and Kara jumped to her feet before she had a chance to lose her nerve. She wasn’t sure if she was really ready for this conversation, but it didn’t seem worth coming out here just to watch Vanessa go into an apartment building and close the door. Best to rip the bandage off now.
She took rapid strides, feeling the butterflies in her stomach get worse with each step, until she caught up with Vanessa right in front of the door. “Vanessa,” she said. “We need to talk.”
Vanessa walked right past her.
Kara almost let her, she was so surprised. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting when she showed up on the doorstep of Vanessa’s guilty secret—Surprise? Shame? Anger? Relief? They all seemed like reasonable candidates. But Vanessa hadn’t looked twice at Kara. She hadn’t showed any sign of recognition at all. She’d just walked right by as if her best friend and roommate was a complete and total stranger.
Luckily, Kara’s body was moving faster than her brain. She darted after her friend and caught up with her just as Vanessa buzzed Apartment 207 and said, “It’s me.” The door unlocked, and Kara slipped in behind the other girl as she went through it, all still without any evident sign of noticing Kara at all.
Kara stepped in front of Vanessa as she started for the stairs. “Vanessa, I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to—wauuugh!” She backpedaled hastily and finally sat down hard as Vanessa shoved her out of the way and kept right on walking without losing a step.
Kara scrambled back to her feet. “Hey!” she said sharply, before remembering that it might not be a good idea to make a scene while trespassing in someone else’s apartment complex during the process of cyberstalking her friend. “Hey!” she whispered, catching up with Vanessa at the top of the stairs and grabbing her arm. “What the hell? If this is about—”
She trailed off into mildly astonished silence. Not only did Vanessa not stop, but she was dragging Kara along behind her without any apparent sign of effort. Kara dug in her heels, but all that achieved was scuff marks along the hallway tile as Vanessa pulled her toward the apartment like she was a recalcitrant puppy. Kara would never have thought of her friend as particularly athletic...unlike certain people who finished their first marathon this week...but the extra weight didn’t seem to be giving her any problems at all. Vanessa didn’t stop until she got to the front door of 207.
Vanessa knocked once with her free hand. “It’s open,” a female voice said from inside. Vanessa opened the door and went in, still dragging Kara along behind her.
Once inside, Vanessa closed the door and kicked off her shoes. She unbuttoned her jeans and shucked them off along with her panties, still without any kind of signal that she cared about or even noticed Kara’s presence. Kara opened her mouth to speak, and realized she had no idea at all what to say.
Was Vanessa gay? Kara would have said no a few minutes ago, but she was a lot less sure right now. Was that why she’d made all those excuses? Flaked out all those times? Had it all just been a bunch of elaborate...booty calls? Kara slowly let go of Vanessa’s arm, her brain occupied with bigger things, and Vanessa used the opportunity to pull her shirt off and add it to the clothing pile along with her bra. Kara gaped almost without meaning to, still trying to take it all in.
Vanessa walked down the small foyer into the living room, and Kara followed in a state of mild shock. She didn’t even know how to feel, let alone what to say. Anger mingled with sympathy and bumped into confusion and a lingering sense that something didn’t feel right about any of this—even if Vanessa had been keeping it a secret, the game was up now. Why strip naked right in front of her? Why act like she wasn’t even there? Why—
“You must be Kara, right?” Kara whipped her head around to see a dark-haired Caucasian woman in her early forties lounging in an easy chair, completely naked. She had a towel under her, and she was lightly teasing her pussy with her fingers as she talked in a honeyed Southern drawl. “The marathon? She fought me hard on that one. Never had so many problems with her before or since.”
Kara stared in confusion at the bizarre sight. Vanessa walked directly over to the chair and knelt down in front of the woman—Kara could only assume this was Marlene—and leaned in to lick her pussy with every sign of rapturous enjoyment. She sputtered for a moment, unsure of what to say. “I don’t—is she—are you two...um...lovers?” She knew she sounded stupid, probably even homophobic, but most of her gay friends didn’t do it right in front of her.
“Lovers?” Marlene chuckled. “I guess you could call it that.” She leaned back in the chair, pressing her crotch into Vanessa’s face. “I love telling her to fuck me, and she loves to do what I say.”
Kara goggled, unable to look away. Sheer astonishment kept her riveted to the sight even as Marlene flicked her thumbs across her nipples and Vanessa panted in evident arousal as she buried her face between Marlene’s thighs. She kept expecting that any second, the two of them would realize how fucking weird all this was and stop, but Marlene acted like she was getting off on this, and Vanessa still didn’t seem to know that anything existed except Marlene’s pussy.
Finally, she found her voice. “Did you...do...something to her?” she asked. If anything, it sounded even dumber than her previous sentence. Even if Marlene had done something—even if there was something you could do to make someone a lesbian sex slave—it wasn’t like she’d admit it.
“Years ago, sweetheart,” Marlene said, running her fingers through Vanessa’s hair as she spoke. “I was her tutor back in high school, and....mmmm...there was only so long I could sit next to this hot little body and not...ohhh, fuck yes...and not do anything about it. I slipped her a little something when she came over for college prep, and while she was out I gave her a few...oh, that’s good...a few extra lessons. She’s been visiting me regular ever since.”
Kara stared at her in horror. “You brainwashed her?”
Marlene took a moment to answer, clearly distracted by Vanessa’s relentless tongue. “Oh, yes, oh fuck yes I did,” she moaned. “I, god she’s so, ohhh, she’s so good down there, so pretty with those sleepy eyes looking up at me.” Marlene’s hips bucked erratically as she spoke, and she pressed Vanessa’s face hard into her cunt. “You don’t know what you’ve been missing, she’s so sexy, so hot, and she’s all mine and it’s so fucking good OH FUCK!” The last word dissolved into a wordless groan of orgasmic bliss as she wrapped her legs tightly around Vanessa’s head and quivered in ecstasy for long moments.
Kara stammered out, “But—but you can’t! It’s wrong! She—she’s losing jobs, and she’s having trouble in school, and—does she even remember doing this?”
Marlene smiled lazily, slumping back into the chair as Vanessa leaned back into a kneeling position. “Naw,” she drawled, her voice slightly slurred with residual pleasure. “She don’t remember a thing. She just snaps out of it all sticky and happy and fills in the blank with whatever comes to mind. All part of the lesson, and my pretty girl’s such a good student.”
Marlene sat up. “Still, you got a point. I don’t want to hurt her none, but every time I think about her going down on my muff I just got to give her a call and get her over here. I admit, I probably been working that tongue just a little too much.” Internally, Kara sighed in relief. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if Marlene hadn’t been willing to see reason—Kara didn’t even know what drugs she’d used to brainwash Vanessa, let alone how to undo the effects.
Her warm relief chilled to ice water in her veins when Marlene spoke again. “Maybe what I need’s a second girl,” she said, her stare suddenly sliding across Kara’s body as though she was fondling Kara with her eyes. “Someone to take a little of the load off little ’Nessa, keep her from having to come over quite so much. What do you think of that, Kara?”
Kara began backing up. “I think you better keep away from me,” she said, her voice thick with adrenaline-fueled menace. Part of her wanted to grab Vanessa and drag her along, but she wasn’t sure she could get the other girl to leave in her current state. She could come back later, with the police or a torch-wielding mob, or something.
But Marlene just chuckled. It wasn’t even a sinister chuckle, just a little snort of laughter at the foolishness of youth. “Oh, honey,” she said, “I don’t even have to get up.” Her tone changed slightly, becoming deeper and more commanding. “Vanessa, pin her down and keep her quiet.”
Kara turned to run, but her friend had unexpected speed as well as strength when she was like this. She grabbed Kara’s ankle and yanked her to the floor, then pounced on her with inhuman strength. Kara opened her mouth to yell, but Vanessa met Kara’s lips with her own in a ferocious kiss that muffled her screams.
“Getting started already?” Marlene asked as she stood up, her voice bright with humor. “Dang, watching the two of you like that, well, I might be having you two carpool here every once in a while.” She walked out of the room for a moment, then came back with a small vial of liquid.
Kara tried desperately to struggle as the older woman unstoppered the bottle, but Vanessa held her down like she was a tiny kitten. “Here, honey, take a little whiff,” Marlene said, holding the vial up to her nose. “You won’t worry so much after that.”
The smell was acrid in Kara’s nostrils, a harsh chemical tang that made her vision instantly go blurry and her muscles go limp. She barely even heard Marlene say, “You can get up now, Vanessa,” and she barely even felt Marlene prying her jaw open.
“Just a couple of drops’ll do,” Marlene said, her voice suddenly sounding to Kara like it was coming from the bottom of a well. She tasted something for a moment, but then her tongue went instantly numb and her body rapidly followed. Her vision went from blurry to foggy to a warm red haze within instants as her eyelids slipped shut.
“That’s a good girl,” she heard someone whisper in her ear, and the words seemed to sink right into the depths of her mind like they had weights. She couldn’t stop listening now, even if she wanted to. Everything she heard felt like the most important thing in the world. She was a good girl, and now she knew exactly what good girls do.
She felt someone undressing her, and she couldn’t imagine anything sexier. She was so happy to be naked—no, that wasn’t right. She was so happy to be commanded to be naked. Everything felt better when it was a command from Marlene. She felt so good when she obeyed that she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
She was kissing Vanessa’s breasts. She didn’t remember when her eyes had opened, but they were open now and she was staring at Vanessa’s nipples before leaning in to suckle at them again. She saw Marlene out of the corner of her eye, openly fucking herself with a thick black dildo, and it was so hot to know that they were giving Marlene a show. It was so fucking sexy to feel Vanessa’s thumb massaging her clit, and to know that she was doing the same to Vanessa, because it was all for Marlene’s pleasure and pleasing Marlene was the most important thing of all. Even forgetting felt good when it was for Marlene.
And then at last, Kara was between Marlene’s thighs, pleasing her in the deepest, the most intimate way possible. She licked and licked, spiking her tongue deep into Marlene’s cunt and savoring her musky taste, carried away on a tide of irresistible obedient bliss. When she felt Marlene cum on her face, she shivered in transcendent ecstasy as even her knowledge of her obedience slipped away...
“Where have you two been?” Tina asked, as Vanessa and Kara finally sat down at the table. “The waitress has been giving me the stink eye for about twenty minutes now.”
“Sorry,” the two girls said practically in unison. “We got held up—the trafffic/dog was really bad/sick.” They looked at each other, realizing that their words had dissolved into a mess of contradictory crosstalk.
“Um,” said Vanessa, “see, the dog was sick, and...”
Kara took over. “And we had to get him to the vet, but traffic was so bad, so...”
Tina rolled her eyes. Her friends were sweet, but they always seemed to have an excuse for everything.