Ashley Martin adjusted her lingerie top—the black one with lace trim that showed just enough cleavage to make her communications professor uncomfortable—and reached for her vodka soda. The ice clinked against her multiple bracelets as she brought the glass to her lips, leaving a perfect burgundy lipstick print that matched her manicure.
At twenty-two, she’d perfected the art of commanding attention at LSU aftergame parties. “You coming?” she called to Laura, tossing her bleached blonde hair over her shoulder. Laura had been her loyal drinking buddy since high school, back when they’d broken into Ashley’s father’s liquor cabinet the night she was crowned prom queen.
“Give me five minutes,” Laura shouted back over the music. “Travis is looking for you, by the way.”
Three hours and two tequila shots later, she was in his car, headed to Shreveport, her overnight bag hastily packed with the usual accoutrements: tinted moisturizer, dry shampoo, charger brick, and a black lace thong she’d bought on her lunch break from Victoria’s Secret. After the two-hour drive—Travis’s hand already wandering up her inner thigh at every red light—Ashley was ready for some combination of adventure and regret.
Ashley Martin, champion of controlled chaos, had a running list of firsts she intended to knock out before graduation. Anal sex wasn’t technically first on the list. Still, when Travis McClure texted her after school, asking if she wanted to come back to his parents’ five-bedroom in Shreveport, her brain performed the necessary risk-reward calculations. Besides, Travis was one of those crew-cut southern boys built like an all-state safety but with the emotional intelligence of a Labrador Retriever.
Travis’s parents’ house was all red brick and brass fixtures, where every foyer table held a glass bowl of mints and every bathroom still had back issues of Family Circle from 2004. She feigned interest in his middle-school swim-team trophies lined up on the built-in shelves. However, the real action was in Travis’s room, which still looked like a sixteen-year-old’s: high school pennants, a signed Saints poster, and rumpled navy bedding that Ashley suspected hadn’t seen a washing machine since recessive genes were first explained to him in 12th-grade biology class.
They made out for a while—her lipstick smearing his jaw, his breath a mixture of Red Bull and Juicy Fruit—before Ashley slipped off her black lingerie top and looked him dead in the eye. “Let’s try something new,” she said, voice so low and direct it shocked him into momentary silence.
“Like what?” he said, tongue circling her large areolas as if he’d just received instructions in a language only his body understood.
“Flip me over and fuck my ass,” she purred, then bit his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark.
She unsnapped her jeans, tugged them over her smooth, porcelain feet, and stepped out of her panties. She assumed the position on all fours, knees pressing into his threadbare comforter, the room spinning in shadow and the purplish glow of an LSU nightlight.
She felt him hesitate at the entrance—enough, she’d later recall, to give her plausible deniability should the topic ever come up in a group chat. But after a few seconds, he spat on his cock, pressed forward, and the sensation was blunt and unfamiliar, a line of fire that made her pale toes curl into the sheets. “Holy shit, wait—” she gasped, bracing herself with a fistful of the pillow, but then shut her eyes and let the pain merge with pleasure.
It was right at that moment, as Travis succumbed to his primal rhythm and Ashley tried to remember every detail for later weaponization, that a knock came at the door.
“Travis, can you help me with my math homework?” The voice was high-pitched and nasal—a little girl, his sister, probably ten or eleven.
He froze, his entire body tensing like a linebacker about to blitz. “Uh, one minute, Hallie!” he called, but didn’t pull out. In fact, he kept going, albeit slower, as if inertia had gotten the better of him.
Ashley was mortified, face pressed so deep into the pillowcase she could taste the detergent. “Maybe you should… stop?” she whispered, but her own hips moved involuntarily, which didn’t help her case.
Travis held her smooth waist saddle in one hand, steadying himself, while his other hand fumbled for something on the nightstand. “I’m busy, Hallie!” he said, voice cracking.
Ashley could not imagine a more humiliating scenario: ass up, getting railed by a man-child who was working out his Oedipus complex while his sister recited fractions through the crack in the door. But the mortification only heightened everything, making her pulse race, her body clench, her vision go white at the edges as Travis finally finished, whispering her name in a way that sounded almost reverent, like he was praying.
“See you in the morning!” Hallie chirped from the hallway, followed by footsteps and the slamming of another door.
Ashley collapsed onto the bed, her body trembling with a mixture of soreness and laughter that caught her off guard. Travis, sweating, rolled over and smacked his palm into his forehead. “I’m so sorry,” he said, genuinely mortified and possibly on the verge of tears.
Ashley burst out laughing, partly to relieve the tension, but mostly because the absurdity of the moment had already entered her personal mythology. “Dude, you owe me,” she said, rolling onto her back and stretching like a satisfied cat. “That was so fucked up. You never told me you had a sister.”
Travis sheepishly handed her a tissue box and attempted to spoon her, his erection already a memory. “Want to get pancakes? My mom keeps the Eggo’s in the garage freezer.”
She didn’t want pancakes. She wanted to erase the humiliation with something bold and reckless, something that would reassert her status as architect of her own narrative. “Let’s go,” she said, throwing on her jeans commando and stuffing her panties in her purse. “I promised Laura and Rikki I’d show up tonight anyway.”
They left the house through the sliding glass door, careful not to wake the parents or the little sister, and got into Travis’s battered Camry. It still smelled faintly of weed and Little Caesars from the last time they’d hooked up, but tonight, Ashley insisted on driving, claiming the world was safer when she was at the wheel.
The ride back to Baton Rouge was two hours of half-flirtatious, half-existential conversation. Ashley queued up a playlist of Dave Matthews tracks, letting the bass rattle the loose change in Travis’s cupholder. Occasionally, she’d catch his eye and smirk, and he’d blush so deep it looked like a sunburn.
“Did it… hurt?” he finally asked, staring at the passing tail lights like they contained wisdom.
“Only for a minute,” she lied. She wanted to be remembered as the girl who said yes to everything, even if it made her want to curl up and die in the moment.
They stopped at a gas station outside Natchitoches, where Ashley bought a six-pack of hard seltzer, a sleeve of sour gummy worms, and a pack of Marlboro menthols she didn’t plan to smoke. She caught her reflection in the security mirror behind the cash register: hair wild, mascara smeared, looking exactly like the kind of girl whose stories people told at parties.
Back in the car, she cracked open a seltzer and washed away the sour tang in her mouth. “You’re not going to tell anyone, right?” she said, her witch-hazel eyes polished.
“Never,” Travis said, but Ashley wasn’t worried. Secrets were only as powerful as the people who kept them, and she’d already moved on.
By the time they hit the city limits, Ashley had reassembled herself: a little more intense, a little less delicate, like a diamond after a blast furnace. She directed Travis to the party address, a one-story ranch house near campus already vibrating with the promise of debauchery.
If the house party at 4315 Myrtle Drive—deep in Southern University territory—was a mosh pit of pheromones, Ashley Martin was determined to be its high priestess by midnight. She’d come to prove that LSU girls partied harder, scanning the crowd of strangers with predatory confidence.
Ashley spotted Laura and Rikki, already topless and dancing barefoot. She stepped away from Travis and joined the floor show, all three in spray-on jeans. And within minutes, Ashley’s top vanished somewhere near the sticky-tiled kitchen—a calculated casualty after two shots and a round of hard seltzers. Her DD breasts swayed, her nipples rosebud peaks, shining like glass under the corny Christmas lights that looped from ceiling fan to bookshelf, drawing every Southern U boy’s gaze exactly as she’d planned.
The music—someone’s cousin’s Soundcloud playlist, mostly remixes of ‘80s Thrash Metal—vibrated every wall and Solo cup in the place. Ashley, who’d grown up in the competitive gymnastics circuit, could body-roll with the best of them. She rotated her apple-round ass, threw her arms back—bracelets glittering—and invited the gaze of every horny guy in the immediate vicinity—plus several girls, including Rikki, who alternated between performing for the crowd and pretending to be mortified.
When Ashley danced, she danced on her bare, flat feet. It was an affectation she’d held onto since childhood, when gymnastics meets had required tape and rosin but never shoes. Now her toenails, painted a deep oxblood that matched her signature lipstick, flashed under the multi-colored glow of the portable disco ball.
She gripped the rim of a plastic Solo cup with her bare toes, lifted it from the coffee table, and passed it to a hungry, caramel-skinned guy kneeling at her feet with a baseball cap turned backwards on his head. He howled, delighted, and offered her a pull from his flask. She took it, then bent at the waist—her DD tits swaying—to whisper something in his ear. His jaw fell open, and he stumbled away, laughing and clutching his drink like a talisman.
She’d never taken her panties off at a house party before. That was a boundary, even for her. She tolerated the ogling—expected it, even—but some things were sacred. Tonight, though, the vodka sodas and the adrenaline of a new campus had made her reckless. On a dare from Rikki, she shimmied her jeans down over her coke-bottle thighs in full view of the kitchen crowd, pulled them over her porcelain feet, then twirled them above her head like a victory pennant. The applause was instantaneous and deafening.
“Holy shit!” Laura cackled, ducking behind the refrigerator door to keep from spitting out her drink. “She actually did it! I owe you five dollars, Rikki!”
Ashley, now completely barefoot and naked except for her bracelets and jasmine pelvic tattoo, climbed aboard the coffee table and began shifting her pale, flat feet. She cupped her manicured hands below her DD breasts, turned, and swayed to the pulse of the Metal music, pausing in a backwards stance to showcase the crack of her smooth, apple-shaped ass.
She didn’t believe in shaving her pubic hair—a minor act of rebellion against her mother’s meticulous Southern femininity—so her dark tangles were visible, a Bohemian statement, a signature. Someone yelled, “Bush queen!” and a chant began, building from the back of the living room until it shook the windows.
She was handed a cigarette, her first of the night—though she’d quit months ago—and smoked it with the languid grace of an old-movie femme fatale. Every time she exhaled, she imagined the smoke spelling out her name: ASHLEY, ASHLEY, ASHLEY. Her enameled toenails gleamed like jewels under the mascot-colored lights, as she humped her hand and circled her hips like a Burgundy Street stripper.
A football player she recognized from her public speaking class tried to grab her hips, but she spun away—tits jostling—and pulled Rikki onto the table for a two-woman show. They twerked, they posed, they pantomimed cunnilingus to the screams of the crowd. At some point, Ashley caught sight of herself in the reflective screen of a turned-off television. She looked like a painting. She looked like a goddess.
She could see Travis leaning against the kitchen counter next to Laura—expressionless—and she stared at him with her witch-hazel eyes. She turned sideways and brushed her hand along her naked hip—the side with the jasmine tattoo. But Travis only looked away, placed his palm against Laura’s cheek, pulled her close, and kissed her mouth.
The party stretched on. Ashley lost track of time, lost Travis, lost the thread of the music. She found herself hard-pressed against a hallway wall, palms flat, with a stranger’s cock inside of her. He was the same caramel-skinned guy she had whispered dirty somethings to earlier, with his baseball cap turned backwards, and calloused hands. He lifted her clear off the balls of her porcelain feet, his pants down to his ankles, his hips thrusting hard and steady while reciting lines from a Kendrick Lamar song.
She felt the cool air of the hallway and the hot crush of bodies near the bathroom door, some cheering, some pretending not to notice. His cock felt huge inside of her, maybe nine or ten inches. And for a second, she almost said his name, but didn’t because she didn’t know his name.
Afterward, she padded barefoot back into the party, still naked, with the stranger’s cum glistening on her inner thigh. She found someone’s oversized LSU hoodie and wore it unzipped, revealing everything. She floated from room to room, kissing girls, shotgunning beers, and giving out fake phone numbers. She wondered what her over-critical stepmom, Barbara, would think of her now: “Slut! Tramp! Floozie! Whore!”
The night blurred. Rumor has it that while she was slut-dancing in the living room, she decided to sit down on an anonymous guy’s exposed cock, a chubby incel guy who had his pants down, rubbing his cock and watching her dance. She stood between his legs, smiled down at him with sparkling white teeth, before pressing her knees into the sofa, taking his cock in her practiced hand, and guiding it to home base.
A few remaining male partygoers stood around the sofa. Some masturbated as they watched the anonymous guy’s hard shaft appear and disappear, his chubby face contorted, as Ashley’s toes coiled above the edge of the sofa, her white, undulating ass cheeks peeking out from below the hem of the LSU hoodie.
Later in the kitchen, during a game of Truth or Dare, it was revealed that she also got on her knees and gave another anonymous guy a blow job. Everyone watched and clapped, and when she sensed that he was ready to cum, she stopped and stood up. She stretched on the balls of her porcelain-white feet, lifted her apple-round ass, and implored the stranger to slide his cock into her hairy pussy to finish off.
She leaned against the countertop—a cigarette in one hand—as ripples formed across her naked thighs from the frantic pounding. And when he came, she lowered her chin to the counter and formed her finest LSU tiger’s face, eyes closed, as his hot seed drained deep inside of her.
She ended up on the back porch with Laura and Rikki at sunrise, all three naked, smoking menthols and sharing a bag of Chex Mix. They laughed about the night’s events and swapped sex stories. This is when Ashley learned that Travis never left the party, but rather slipped off into a back bedroom with Laura and Rikki, and took turns fucking them both doggystyle. And she wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
They posed for naked selfies, arms slung around each other, the world washed in the blue-gray of early morning. The mingled cum of strange men that oozed between Ashley’s thighs was a sticky reminder of why keeping her jeans on might’ve been a better strategy.
The next evening, Ashley woke in her apartment to a string of texts from numbers she didn’t recognize and a hangover that felt biblical, hair crusty, pussy sore. There were photos, mostly blurry, some more explicit than she’d anticipated. She scrolled through them in bed, at first mortified, then oddly liberated. For the first time in her life, she was the center of something real: a scandal, a legend, a story people would tell.
Some of her sordid photos made their way to Myspace, Hi5, and at least one student’s Twitter thread. So far, there was only one photo of her getting railed against the kitchen counter, but many had been taken that night, and she suspected—with both a sense of pride and terror— that many more would later be released.
Strangers greeted her by name in line at the campus coffee shop: “Bush queen!” Girls gave her high-fives in the quad. Guys stared, sometimes with open admiration, sometimes with disgust. Ashley took it all in stride. She bought a new pack of Marlboro menthols, wore her hair up, letting the jasmine tattoo peek out from her low-slung jeans, and she always kept a fresh coat of burgundy polish. She liked the way people looked at her now.
She was, suddenly and irretrievably, a very popular girl. And Travis was a sore memory.
