Sick Read online

  Sick

  by

  Natalie Foxx

  “Patient Seven died last night,” the voice coming from the speakers in the sealed room tells us. It’s Doctor Nguyen, I can see him through the glass. He’s tired, and sad. He looks defeated, and he should be. Another patient died last night and he wasn’t able to save him, or even worse, he wasn’t even able to find out what was wrong with him, what is wrong with us.

  I look around the big, white room. There are sad, defeated faces in here too. If the doctors weren’t able to save Patient Seven, or Patient Six, or Patient Five, or all the way to Patient Zero, they won’t be able to save us. They won’t be able to save Patient Eight, or Patient Nine, or Patient Fifteen. I’m Patient Fifteen. They don’t call us by our names to make it easier on the doctors, or at least that’s what Deon, Patient Eight, told me. Too many of us will die, and if they start caring too much, the doctors won’t be able to live with themselves. They know we’re people, but it helps them cope if the one who dies is Patient Seven, instead of Nancy Ford.

  “We will keep on doing everything in on power to stop this horrible disease,” Doctor Nguyen tells us, trying too hard to sound confident. “Patient Seven’s death will not be in vain.”

  After that, the speaker shuts up and the see through glass becomes a mirror, and my tired and sick reflection startles me. We’re only fourteen left. Fourteen tired, sick young adults with no hope.

  “I liked Nancy,” Deon says to me as we walk towards me. “It’s crazy, just a couple of days before the doctors took her, she was the happiest, most positive patient in here. And now… She’s dead.”

  “They kept her alive a long time, though,” Maggie, Patient Twenty One, joins in the conversation. “She lasted two weeks instead of two days, and I heard she was getting better.”

  “Until she got worse,” Deon says. “Don’t try making me feel better, I know I’m next.”

  He’s next. We all know that. To treat and control the pandemic, hospitals around the country are containing us in sealed rooms like this, so we can’t spread the disease anymore. They put twenty two of us in a small, white room, with a bunch of beds, games, books, and a bathroom, and they try different medicines on us, to see if they can stop us from dying. Then, slowly, or fastly sometimes, we start to die, and it always goes in order. The sooner they diagnose you, the sooner you die. I’m the fifteenth one of the room, so I should die after Patient Fourteen, Thirteen, and all the way to Patient Eight die. And Deon was the eighth one to be diagnosed of our group, so he’s going to die next.

  “You have to stay positive,” Maggie tells him while I keep staring at my reflection in the mirror. I’m wearing nothing but a white robe, like all patients. Once you’re put in here, you can forget about your privacy. I’m just glad the bathroom is separate, and that I can shower by myself. I mean, there are windows everywhere, for the doctors to see us, but at least I can hide from the other patients in the bathroom.

  “I’m okay,” Deon says. “I’m good, I’m positive, just let me enjoy my last night here before they take me away.”

  This ends the argument. Once you’re next in line, like Deon, the doctors take you the next morning to your own room, where they’ll try all the medicines they’ve been developing to see if they can save you. No one has been saved so far. Not in this room, not in this hospital, not in the country, not in the world. So far this disease has a hundred percent death rate.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Deon says. He always showers after somebody dies. It’s his ritual, his way to cleanse. And he’ll need it today more than ever. It’ll be him tomorrow. It’ll be the last time he gets to be free and do whatever he wants before the doctors take him away and hook him to machines. It’s unbelievable, he’s next, and just right after I started to really like him.

  “I’ll go with you,” I say.

  “Me too,” Maggie says. “It’s almost time to sleep anyways.”

  Deon smiles. For some reason it feels right, even though it’s not much. He shouldn’t be alone his last day, not even to shower. He’ll be alone for the rest of his life, however long it is, just surrounded by doctors and needles. It’s crazy, to be eighteen but to have to worry about dying. I shouldn’t feel too bad about him, though, in a couple of weeks I will be next.

  The bathroom has three showers, just enough for the three of us, separated by small metal boards. Deon goes in the middle one and Maggie and I go to his sides, we can’t see each other except for our feet. But really, we are just wearing robes anyways, and there’s not much privacy in here anyways, so we’ve seen each other naked enough times. At first it was weird, but then I got used to it. Deon and the other guys got used to it too, at least they don’t have boners like they had before. I thought it was a little disgusting at first, then I was kind of flattered, and then it was just funny. It happens. Put twenty two almost naked young adults in a room, a tell them they’re going to die soon, and well, their hormones will go crazy and they’ll be horny all the time. Even if you take away the part that they’ll die soon, just put twenty two bored eighteen-year-olds in the same room for long enough, and sex is going to start happening. It started happening, but not in an erotic way.

  I turn the hot water on and start getting my body wet. The doctors encourage us to shower often, three or more times a day, with warm water and lots of soap, to try to clean our bodies.

  “You know,” Deon says from his stall. “Three months ago I was in school, it was almost time to graduate, and I was getting ready to ask my girl to prom.”

  “You have a girlfriend?” I ask him, worried.

  “Had…” Deon says, and he doesn’t have to explain what happened to her, we know it. “Anyways, I was trying to figure out how to do it. Should I just ask her? Should I take her somewhere? Should I do something special? Should I just assume we’re going together?”

  “Oh, please tell me you did ask her to prom,” Maggie says from her shower.

  “No, I did,” Deon says. “Of course I did. But I wanted to do it right. We had been dating for about a year and we were getting ready for our last weeks together. She was going to college in Boston and I was staying in Chicago, so I wanted to do something romantic, something cool.” I put shampoo on my hands and clean my hair, and the white cream falls on my feet and goes down the drain. “I thought about it for a while, and she always loved dogs, so I thought about giving her a puppy.”

  “You gave your girlfriend a puppy?” Maggie asks, excited, she loves dogs too.

  “I didn’t,” Deon says. “I knew she wouldn’t be able to take care of it in college. But I did the next best thing. I went to a local shelter and talked to the owner, he was a friend of my dad so he said he could help me. My plan was to get like twenty puppies and put them in a room and then take my girlfriend there, and while she’s cuddling with the dogs I would ask her to go to prom with me.”

  “Ow,” Maggie says. “That’s adorable!”

  “Yeah,” Deon chuckles.

  “I would’ve gone to prom with you if you did that to me,” Maggie says. “Anyone would.”

  “So what did she say?” I ask him, hoping for a happy ending. There’s a long pause, long enough for the water to rinse the soap off my body. The only sound is the water hitting our bodies and the floor.

  “She didn’t get to say anything,” Deon says. “She got sick before I could do anything.” Another long silence. I look down at my naked body. Everyone has been through a lot since the pandemic started. “I got to ask her to go to prom with me at the hospital, though, before she died… She said yes. I didn’t know she was going to die that day.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Maggie says.

  “Me too,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” Deon says. “Really. We all have stories like that.�
�� With silence we agree. The world has changed so drastically and so quickly.

  We step out of the showers, naked, and we go get clean robes. I walk behind Deon, looking at his body. He used to have more muscle, but more fat too, so he still looks ripped and strong. He is young, and hot, and handsome, and nice. It’s such a shame.

  In front of him, Maggie has also lost some weight, but it fits her even better than Deon. She’s hot now, with a firm ass and long nice legs. She turns around when she gets her new robe and I can’t help but look at her boobs, and her vagina. It’s kind of messed up, but being sick has made them become more attractive. And I think it has made me more attractive too, at least we have that going on for us.

  Deon grabs his robe, without putting it on, and gives us a half smile that’s more sad than happy. We’re going to have sex tonight. He knows it and we know it, but the reason why we have sex is never uplifting. It started when Patient Three died, about a month ago. We had been locked in here for about a month before Patient Three died, and we really thought we were going to get better. We thought the doctors were going to save us all. When Patient Zero died, we were shocked, and sad, but we were still hopeful. The Patient One died shortly after, and Patient Two and Three died the same week. We panicked. With all the tests and all the medicine and all the promises we really thought the doctors were going to find a cure, but they never did.

  I cried that night, I was crying instead of sleeping, trying to stay quiet when I heard a noise. We all sleep in the same two rooms, because there’s not enough space in the hospitals to give everyone their own room. At first we had girls in one side and boys in the other side, but that quickly stopped, because it didn’t really matter anymore. We didn’t have much privacy anyways, and the we were all dying, so we started caring less and less. Anyways, I heard a noise, a moan, and when I turned my head I saw Maggie and Deon having sex. It wasn’t love, just sex, just a way to relieve stress. I stared at them for a while, and honestly I started to get horny. I touched myself under my sheets, trying to be quiet, but I moaned too loudly once and they heard me. With her eyes, Maggie asked me if I wanted to join and I said yes. What the hell, we were all dying anyways. My first three-some. Then, after that day, we’ve been having sex every time a patient dies, the three of us. It’s fucked up.

  Maggie puts her robe on, and Deon and I do the same. We’ll wait until the lights are off and everyone is sleeping. At ten all the patients have to be in bed, but we’re there waiting long before everyone joins in. We talk about everything and anything. Books, TV shows, we play Never Have I Ever, we do anything to pass the time and try to make Deon forget about tomorrow. At seven in the morning the doctors will come to take him away. We put our small beds together, making a big bed for the three of us. Finally, after every patient is in his or her bed, the doctors turn the lights off, and after half an hour of waiting, to make sure everyone is sleeping, we start.

  Maggie rolls to the middle bed and I do too. We do it slowly and quietly, the last thing we want is the doctors finding out and having us stop doing it for some reason. I’m sure they know already, there are windows and cameras everywhere, even the bathrooms, but you can never be too careful. It’s stupid, having to worry about this kind of thing. If it wasn’t for this stupid disease, we would all be in college, in our own apartments or dorms, having sex with whoever we want. I’d probably not be having a threesome, or maybe even much sex, but I’d rather be healthy and free and not have sex than to be here and have a threesome every time someone dies.

  Maggie kisses me and I stop thinking, at least for a little bit. Kissing a guy and kissing a girl is such a different feeling. Maggie’s lips are soft, and sweet, but Deon’s lips are rough and saltier. It’s like the difference between eating dessert and eating lunch. Deon touches my arms and my back and caresses Maggie’s hair, while Maggie and I keep kissing. We’re laying down in the bed, under the covers. I had never kissed a girl before Maggie, and I’ll probably never kiss a girl after her. I was never really attracted to girls. I always wondered, and I think it’s normal, but not until that night, when Deon and her were having sex, did I actually want to have sex with a girl. It’s different, but still good, it gives a taboo feeling to it, and when things are taboo they feel so much better. But if Deon wasn’t here I would miss the penis, it’s such a big, important part to sex, at least to me. If Deon wasn’t here… He won’t be here tomorrow.

  I separate myself from Maggie and I kiss Deon instead. This is his night, we’ll make his night special. Maggie sees what I’m doing and follows along. I kiss Deon’s mouth, suck on his lips, and fence with his tongue, and Maggie kisses his neck, and his ears. Deon kisses me, then kisses Maggie, and then kisses me again. There’s a rule about threesomes, or a guideline, that you have to give the same attention to the other two people people, or at least is a rule in our threesomes. Maybe it’s because we’re friends, and we care for each other, but that’s how we do it. No one gets more or less than anyone else.

  I grab Deon’s hair while he kisses Maggie, then he shares her with me. As we get warmed up, our hands get more adventurous, my hand tickles Deon’s chest and Maggie grabs my ass, while Deon starts playing with Maggie’s nipples. We’re only wearing robes, so we’re practically naked, but Maggie gets me fully naked when she gets her hands behind my back and undoes the string, as if she was undoing a bra, and then she pulls the robe away. I’m the first one naked, and they both see it as if I was the first cookie to come out of the oven. They both want me now. Deon reaches his long fingers down my body, walking them seductively around my belly button until they reach my pubes, my clit, and my lips. At the same time, Maggie touches my nipples, and their fingers are so different I could tell it was two different people even if I was blindfolded. A third hand, Maggie’s, combs my hair away from my face, then she slowly slides like a snake, giving me a trail of kisses until she reaches my vagina. She pulls Deon’s fingers away and sucks on them before she starts sucking on my clitoris.

  The way a man and a woman treat your vagina is so different. Guy’s are rough and fast, because they’re used to that. When they jerk off they do it quickly, and when they penetrate you they do it quickly. It’s what they are supposed to do. But girls, they have more patience, they understand is all about the buildup and the small movements and sensations. Maggie sucks on me, slowly, as if she was sucking on a milkshake through a straw. I lay back and relax, but in a threesome you can’t relax, it’s like having nonstop sex. Deon crawls towards me with his dick, taking his robe off, putting his penis to a side of my face. I turn to it, open my mouth, and move my neck forward. Then I follow Maggie’s rhythm, what she does to me I do to Deon. If she sucks I suck, if she uses her tongue I use my tongue. It’s different, of course, but I try to translate it the best I can. I pay attention to what Maggie is doing, so I can copy it, and that makes me be more aware of her, so I can feel it even more.

  Deon lays down so I’m sucking his dick backwards, and then he stretches towards Maggie, pulling her legs towards him. He’s so big and strong he can move us around as he pleases. He helps her take her robe off. Maggie keeps on eating me out, but now Deon is also eating her out. It’s a sixty-nine-nine. Or nine-nine-six. Or six-six-nine. Or whatever, it’s a threesome, that’s what it is. I can feel Deon is making Maggie feel good, because Maggie’s movements get more erratic, slower, her tongue misses the mark, but it still feels great. Knowing the others are enjoying it is as important as enjoying it myself.

  Our first threesomes were more complicated. None of us had ever had a threesome before, so we didn’t really know the best positions, or what each other liked or wanted. Sex was still good, but it wasn’t as good as having sex with only one person. Besides the kink of being three people, it really didn’t feel that much different. There was more waiting to feel good, and more interruptions, but nothing too special. However, the more we did it, the more we understood how to do it, and what everyone liked, and most importantly, we learned how to share our bodies an
d include everyone in each position. The sixty-nine-nine is one of the best ones, because everyone gives and everyone gets.

  I use my hand to stroke Deon’s dick while I lick around his head, and suck a little. His legs get tense and he shivers, so I know he likes it. Maggie taught me how to do this. She has had more boyfriends, and more sex, than I have, so she knows much more and she has been teaching me. We’re getting so good at sex, it’s a shame it’ll be over soon.

  Maggie uses her soft and small fingers to spread my lips apart to start playing inside me. She starts going faster, so I start going faster, and Deon starts going faster. It’s like a grown-up version of the telephone game, but the conversation gets too heated because Deon has to pull out. That’s something I like about girls over guys, they don’t have to stop, they can orgasm as many times as they want. So as Deon rests he turns around to kiss me so I can taste Maggie’s vagina from his mouth. Then he kisses my nipples, and then goes down on me to kiss Maggie. She stops sucking on me to kiss Deon, and I sit forward so we can all kiss each other.

  I look at Deon and point at Maggie with my eyes. He gives me a nod and a small smile, so I pull Maggie’s arm to make her lay down on her back. Having rested for a little Deon is ready, so he leans towards Maggie. I don’t know if it changes anything, if it really lubricates and helps, or if it’s just for show, but before Deon pulls his dick inside of Maggie I give his penis a last wet suck, and a last wet lick to Maggie’s vagina. Then, Deon pushes it in.

  I’m not involved in this, so I take a second to look at all the other patients around us. They’re sleeping, all of them. Deon, Maggie and I have learned to be really quiet, to not make the bed sound and not to moan. One night when we were doing it I saw someone get up to get to the bathroom, I’m pretty sure he saw us, but he ignored us. He has a million other things to worry about, so he didn’t care about us. Maybe if he had cared more he could’ve joined us. A foursome might be better than a threesome. But I’m not stupid and I know the patients and the doctors are not stupid. Everyone knows we are having sex, but they don’t care enough to say anything. It’s not against the rules, and it’s not making anyone get sicker, it’s just helping us cope, so it’s a good thing.