She retched, spewing a mouthful of rancid bile, raw red blood and viscera onto my lap. Ignoring the blood and viscera, the hot bile on my crotch was giving me flashbacks of the first time I’d thought I was going to lose my virginity.

Mind you, this “wasn’t” the day I lost my virginity…. “That” day wouldn’t come till like five years later. An uncomfortable pity fuck from a friend.

She was supposed to be moving away that year, and I “might” have been dying, from one of those rare diseases that everyone always thinks mankind has already magicked away, but actually is still being caught by people in shittier countries and unlucky idiots who happen to fall head first in the wrong puddle of sludge.....It was one of those things.

Unfortunately for both of us her moving plans fell through and I didn’t die. The resulting awkwardness leading to the death of the friendship.

But again, like I said, this wasn’t me reminiscing of the first time I got laid, it was reminding me of the first time I “almost” got laid.

I was fifteen then too, maybe closer to fourteen, she was older possibly college aged. Yes, I too, have no idea how my gawky, socially stunted, teenaged-self managed to swing that. I assume it had something to do with the fact that we were both very, very drunk. And maybe a little high from all those sweet purple fumes that had been filling up the ground floor of the house.

And the wonderfully irresponsible foster brother who’d taken me to the party had taken us there in a car that was maybe, probably, definitely stolen by “his” friend Rocco who’d also been responsible for bringing all the alcohol.

We got to the bedroom, she got down to her bra and then nothing happened. Like I said, I was thirteen and terrified and suffering from my first experience of whiskey-dick, and she was drunk. Super drunk.

Any mood that had existed, was killed when she leaned over and vomited into my lap. It was unpleasantly warm and smelled terribly.

Also... even back then I was already developing into the gentleman that I would one day become, even if she hadn’t filled my lap with hot, chunky, vomit, I probably wouldn’t have let things go any further.

Now here I was, again, sitting in bed with another young lady. Alas the first had been drunk and this one was too young. Even if our bodies were the same age, I was mentally an adult and had no interest in creepily trying to court teens like certain vampire heart throbs.

I imagine this was for the best, as my partner of the moment likely had romance as the very last thing on her mind.

You see, as far I could see, she was quite preoccupied with the business of not dying.

A few hours prior I’d been about to head out for the morning and start my day. I figured I’d get some breakfast from the cafeteria and then head over to the garden.

Today was one of the rare mornings where the neighbor girl and I left at the same time. I’d generally here her leaving her dorm earlier in the morning heading to go do whatever the school had her doing in some other part of the outer-school.

Seeing that we were both out and had technically run into each other, I was obliged to give a greeting as a courtesy. Thus I said,

“Good Morning.”

To which she responded by nodding once and then flopping onto the floor in a faint.

My first instinct was to take her over to the school infirmary to let them handle things.

Unfortunately she came out of the faint quickly enough and completely enough that her lucidity and adamance when it came to how much she did not want to be handed over to the school doctors became impossible for me to ignore.

Even more unfortunate our association was prolonged enough that my conscience, as meagre and vestigial an existence as it was, could not allow me to leave her in her room to quietly die in peace.

Instead here I was meddling, like some damn….meddler. Casting healing spells and brewing potions out of her illegally(School dorms have these regulations for a reason) kept crockpot.

And none of it seemed to be taking. Whatever was wrong with the girl seemed to be eating her from the inside out. Now that I thought of it, it had probably been killing her for quite some time. Some dreadful terrible disease, that she’d lived with on her own.

I really probably should have taken her to the infirmary anyway but those few times where I attempted to do so, happened to always magically coincide with her suddenly snapping out of her fugue. Growing lucid enough to not only protest but if necessary to physically resist.

I’ll tell you one thing….The girl was strong. Stronger than I was. (At least when I was still pretending to be normal anyway.) Strong enough that if I’d tried to get serious she would have, at the very least forced me to get a little rough to get her to come along. Which probably would have amounted to me killing her, or pushed her over the edge of whatever metaphorical and/or literal precipices she was dangling over.

It made me uncomfortable. I really didn’t want to be here when she died, yet whether consciously or unconsciously, whether it was her or me, every time I got up, her hand somehow found its way into mine. Nor did I want to feel at all responsible for her dying, which I would feel like if I gave up. Especially since I’d more or less failed to get her into professionally trained hands.

There was a solution to this that I could see….a fix that archive and my magical senses were telling me about. It was a clean fix that would probably get her out of this alive. But I was loathe to go that far. Some things shouldn’t be touched, even if one had to die for that inviolability to be maintained and yet….when you were dead, you were dead. Only immortals got to experience death as a revolving door.

“Oh fuck….FUCK! I’m really going to do this aren’t I?”