Have you ever seen a ghost? I have. It changed my life.
I got to New York in September, which, honestly, is the best time to be in New York. The leaves were changing. The air was crisp. I was twenty-five and had just gotten my first real job and little apartment up in Harlem with a girl I was roommates with in college.
We were two single girls in the big city, and it was the most exciting time in my life.
I first saw the ghost waiting for the L train at two in the morning one Friday night, about a year after I moved to the city. At first, the ghost was just some stranger with a lot of eye makeup and indeterminate gender. Not very uncommon on the L train.
Just as the train pulled into the station, my tipsy mind suddenly focused on her face, and memories hit me so hard I almost fell forward onto the tracks.
We were twelve, me and my best friend, Erin Hampton. She lived across the street from me. Our parents were good friends. We went to the same church, where her father was a minister. We told each other everything. We were inseparable.
We were both tomboys. Rough and tumble girls who played in the woods and liked to run and swim and fly kites and build bonfires and laugh. Individually we’d been picked on, but together we were unstoppable. We defended each other and escaped the social circles that had made fun of us together.
Erin, with a short mop of black hair sticking up at different angles, and me, Molly, with a shock of red curls and more freckles than pale skin.
Inseparable, until the summer after seventh grade. We got into a silly fight, Erin and me. She wanted to stay over my house one night. She was adamant about it, but I had a tummy ache, and I had to be up early to go to my grandmother’s house. I was tired, and I just wanted to be alone that night.
She called me, and there was this seriousness to her voice. “I need to stay over,” she said. For some reason, it annoyed me. I didn’t like being forced to do things. I didn’t like to be emotionally controlled. I didn’t like my routine interrupted. I told her no. She reiterated, “if you say no, we’re no longer best friends.”
“Fine,” I said, with the surety only a twelve-year-old can muster. She was being dramatic. She was being manipulative.
That was it. We broke up. We still occasionally sat together, we sometimes went on hikes, but something on a root level-shifted. We were never best friends after that.
Plus, in either grade, I met Katie Daniels. Katie wasn’t a tomboy, and I was sort of moving away from feeling like one all the time. Katie was quiet and kind, and we went shopping and did each other’s hair, and she taught me how to put on makeup.
The sting of Erin’s breakup was dulled a bit by having Katie. It helped me forget the guilt, too. Because I knew, on some level, that Erin asked to stay over because she was in trouble. Some trouble I couldn’t really understand. Some trouble she was unable to talk to me about.
I said no to her because that trouble scared me. Maybe it scared me because we never talked about it. We never acknowledged it. It was just the invisible tension hanging over us, and on some level, I thought it might be contagious.
Just before junior year, Erin ran away from home. The police searched for weeks. In the beginning, I went out with my parents and everyone else. Flashlights and walkie-talkies. Hot cocoa between shifts. Eventually, we gave up.
Her parents seemed to double down on church and hate. In my heart, I knew she was either dead or never coming back. I thought if she wasn’t dead, she would contact me eventually. Just to let me know she was alright. She knew I could keep a secret.
The guilt of not letting her stay over, driving her away, being afraid to help her with whatever trouble had obviously made her run away didn’t fully hit me until senior year of high school. I had killed her. I had killed my best friend. I had killed someone I love.
I never saw or heard from her again. Which is why I was sure I was looking at a ghost getting on the L train.
I came to my senses just as the doors started closing and squeezed my way onto the train at the last minute. She was sitting alone at the end of the car, wearing oversized headphones and looking at her phone. I slipped into an empty seat across from her, wondering if she would recognize me.
It was a miracle that I recognized her. She looked so different from the girl I knew. She never wore makeup when we were kids, now she had black eyeliner like a raccoon and blue electric blue eyeshadow. Not that it looked bad, just wildly different, like a club kid or a model or something.
She wore tight black pants and a baby blue cropped t-shirt that emphasized her thin waist and large bottom and thighs. Her hair was a short pixie cut, artfully disheveled and partly held back with blue barrettes that matched her shirt and her eye makeup. Her lipstick was blue as well, exaggerating her large cupid bow lips. Around her neck was a black ribbon choker that looked a bit like a collar.
She looked young. Not as young as the last time I saw her, obviously, but she looked younger than I felt. We were the same age, but looking at my reflection in one of the windows, I looked like an adult. A business person, which I was. She still looked like a kid in some inextricable way.
It was probably the barrettes, the makeup, the clothes, the oversized headphones. She looked like someone you would see on one of those new social media apps.
We went farther out into Brooklyn than I usually went. I found myself wondering if I should reintroduce myself. How would that work? “Hi, it’s me, your childhood best friend. Good job faking your death.”
When she got up as we approached a stop, I froze, unsure what to do. My body seemed to take over, and I slipped out of the other door at the same time she did.
It wasn’t until we got a block away from the station that it really dawned on me that I was following her. I pulled my bag to my body, worried about the neighborhood we were in. I wondered if she had recognized me, if she saw me follow her.
She seemed like she was focused on finding her destination and didn’t seem to look back at me once as we navigated the somewhat labyrinthine streets of Brooklyn. It was an industrial neighborhood, with big square buildings all around, some of which looked abandoned. Many streets had big freight trucks parked on them or no cars at all and just pallets of cement or big metal pipes.
I stopped short a half a block away from her when I saw her suddenly turn to look at one particular building. She looked at her phone, then the building, and she seemed to pause to decide something.
The building looked like all the others around it. A four-story brick structure that seemed like it might have been some kind of factory at some point. There was a pair of metal doors with flaking white paint on them. She walked to the doors and knocked.
After a few moments, one of the doors swung open, and a large man in a black suit stepped out, looking Erin up and down. They spoke for a few moments. He continued to look her up and down, and finally, he nodded, letting her in.
I wondered if that was it. Would I just go home? Would I try to sneak in? Would I just try my luck with the bouncer? Walking a bit closer to the mysterious building, I strained to listen for some kind of music or clue what was inside. I assumed it was some kind of secret dance club or rave or whatever cool people did that I was no longer up on.
I made my way close to the door and tried to come up with a game plan. As I considered my options, I heard a sound from behind me. A man in a leather blazer with a taller man in a mesh shirt was rolling a shopping cart full of expensive-looking suitcases and bags to the door. They looked at me and smiled.
“I don’t think they are going to let you in like that,” the man in the mesh shirt said. He had black lipstick on and rainbow eyeshadow. His nipple rings sparkled through his shirt.
I looked down at my black skirt and matching blazer. My pearl-colored blouse. My standard issue black pumps. I sighed.
“Any suggestions? I really want to get in,” I said, trying to sound both desperate and fun, somehow.
They looked at each other and sighed. The other man circled me, looking me over and rubbing his chin.
“Okay, take off your blouse and just wear a bra under the blazer. Mess up your hair a little, and maybe we can, like, roll up your skirt from the top, make it shorter, you know, like the slutty girls in those private schools do!”
I got to work, a little self-conscious, taking off my blouse in the street, but glad I was wearing a nice black lacy bra. As I tried to remember how I used to roll up the top of my skirt to make it shorter in high school, the two men closed in on me, one shaking my hair, brushing it with his fingers, and trying to make me presentable. The other found some dark purple lipstick in one of his bags and applied it to my lips expertly.
They looked at me and simultaneously said, “make the skirt shorter.” I did.
There was also some blush, some glitter, some adjusting of my tits, and then they stepped back and nodded at their work. “Not the worst,” Mesh Shirt said as Leather Jacket knocked on the door.
The bouncer appeared, seeming to know the two men, but he raised an eyebrow at me. “This bitch is with us. Don’t be a dick,” said Leather Jacket. The bouncer shrugged and let us all in.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but the place completely confused me. It was one huge space, taking up the whole first floor of the building. The walls and windows were covered in plywood, painted matte black. There were little rooms built out of the same wood all over the place, making it look like some kind of cross between the floor of a convention center and a maze. There was music, but it was low ambient thumping coming from speakers in the corners of the ceiling.
There were people of various ages and races, and styles. Leather daddies, candy ravers, tie-dyed Burners, occasionally completely naked people. I counted perhaps thirty.
It was obviously some kind of sex club. Couples made out against the rickety-looking walls. People rolled around on blankets and pillows that were laid out on the floor.
I had never been to anything even remotely like it. Initially, it had the feel of some of the wilder gay bars I had gone to when I first moved to the city, but almost immediately, what I saw blew that comparison out of the water.
A girl in neon rope was tied to one of the walls, being spanked by two tall drag queens. A man sat on what looked like a pommel horse, with two men in front of him, their heads in his lap, obviously sucking his cock.
It smelled like fresh lumber, sweat, sex, and perfume. It was not unpleasant, just sort of alien. It was also hot. I stripped off my blazer and found an empty bench against one of the walls and stashed it and my bag, keeping only my phone and my wallet.
I almost immediately lost my two chaperones. They rolled their shopping cart to the far corner of the place.
As I walked around, marveling at the various sights, a flash of blue caught my eye. I saw Erin turn a corner. I rushed to follow, but stopped when I got to the corner. What might I see? Would I get caught?
I bit my lip and waited a moment, then took a deep breath and rounded the corner.
Erin was on her knees on the cement floor, facing one of the flimsy walls. In front of her, just at the height of her head, was a hole in the wall, with masking tape all around it. I knew what it was. I had watched porn about it. A gloryhole. I’d never seen one in real life, though. At that moment, I was questioning if it was real life.
I was focused on her, and I didn’t notice at first that a few other people had moved over to the area we were in. A little crowd came to watch Erin. I tried to stay an arm’s length from the others. Erin, thankfully, didn’t look over at me. Her eyes were focused on the hole.
My friends returned, the Mesh Shirt and Leather Jacket. They stood on either side of me and nodded. “Oh, you’re lucky. Bluejay is here and already on her knees,” said Mesh Shirt. “I’d say she puts on a good show, but she’s so into it I don’t even think she knows we’re here. It is pretty wild to watch her suck cock, though.”
The thought of watching her do anything sexual filled me with a range of emotions. Curiosity, guilt, excitement, fear. In the back of all that, a little sadness, because I thought she liked women. I thought she was like me. I tried to process that for a moment, while I watched Erin unzip her pants and wait.
My heart was pounding. The proximity to others while I watched something so intimate and with someone who was once so close to me felt genuinely bizarre, like a complicated dream you wake up confused by.
Those thoughts seemed to evaporate when the first cock popped out of the gloryhole.
I held my breath, and she knelt there, looking at it for a moment. She reached up slowly and slipped her hand around the base. It was not that long, but it was thick, hard, and ready. She licked her lips. I licked my lips.
I’d never seen someone have any kind of sex in person. I’d never seen something I wasn’t part of, other than porn, but being there, in that room, ten feet away from her, was so utterly different than dirty movies on a screen.
I suddenly felt very aware that I was not wearing a shirt. My nipples felt hard under my bra. My skirt felt heavy and hot. The people around me weren’t that close, but I felt surrounded.
The fear and anxiety, though, seemed to amplify the lust.
Erin licked the cock that was in front of her. She looked drugged. She looked possessed. She sucked the head into her mouth, and my whole body ached. I want to have a cock she could suck. I wanted her lips on my body. I wanted to suck that cock. I wanted all of it.
“Does she do girls?” I choked out to Mesh Shirt. He smirked and giggled.
“You really are new here, aren’t you? We’re not very picky when it comes to gender in The Workshop. See that bigger hole in the wall to Bluejay’s, right? You stick your ass out of that, and I’m sure she’ll service you just like she’s doing to that fat cock,” Mesh Shirt said, and for the first time, he really looked me over, sucking his bottom lip.
Leather Jacket whispered something to him, and they laughed. I heard “I’d like to watch that,” from another person in the little crowd. I swallowed. Would I really do that? Could I do that?
I watched her suck cock, jerking it and rubbing it and then pushing it down her throat. As she did, she awkwardly pulled her pants down to her knees. She knelt there, in little boycut underwear, white and baby blue. I had to laugh when I saw they had little Superman logos on them. Why did that make the whole thing hotter?
When I saw one of her hands slip into her panties, quickly rubbing herself as she sucked him off, I gasped. It was so intimate it was almost too intense to watch. She was getting off so hard from the act, from being watched, from that fat cock.
My thighs squeezed together. My knees almost gave way. Someone laughed and cheered at the show, and it startled me. Someone bumped into me, and I jumped.
When I looked back at Erin, she was standing up and reaching for her pocket. She took out a condom, and more people laughed and clapped. “Oh, she’s a spinner,” someone said.
She very adeptly rolled the condom onto the cock and then pulled her panties down to her knees along with her pants. I wanted her to pull up her shirt, too. I wanted to see all of her. I wanted to see everything.
Was she really going to fuck him? Just like that? Not even knowing who it is?
I shook my head. She was, obviously. She was about to. Her pussy was bare, shaved, naked. Her fingers pressed between them, rubbing herself a little more. Her face was ecstatic. Her eyes closed, biting her bottom lip.
My thighs tightened more. My body swooned and clenched. She bent over and leaned back, finding the cock with one hand, guiding it in.
She made one sharp sound as she penetrated herself on the cock. A whine, a whimper, a moan, and I felt the same sound in my throat. An echo in my body.
As she pushed forward and back on the cock, her hands strained behind her, blindly trying to find something to hold on to. Her knees gave out for a moment. She recovered and pushed back again, another thrust and then another whimper, another moan.
Fuck, I wanted to rub my clit. I wanted to ride someone’s knee. I wanted to get fucked.
She was still going. She was still riding the cock. She was rubbing herself as she did it. She was close to coming. Somehow I could tell. Her face was red, and I could hear the slapping of her thighs against the thin wooden wall as she rode.
Looking around, I saw people pressed together. People kissed. I locked eyes with Mesh Shirt. Leather Jacket was on his knees, sucking his friend’s cock. My leg was shaking, my nails dug into my palms.
“Can we help you, honey?” Mesh Shirt asked, but I could only shake my head. He laughed.
When she came, her cries broke through the buzz of the crowd. It broke through the static in my brain. Sweet little bird cries, like the one she named herself after. I groaned. My cunt ached.
She extricated herself from the cock. She turned and leaned against the wall, gasping, her pants still around her knees. I watched the cock throb and bob up and down, the condom full of come. In a moment, it disappeared through the hole.
I tried to slow my breath as I watched her recover. Her eyes were closed, then in a flash, she looked out at the crowd. I almost ducked. I felt like her eyes were searchlights, but they passed over me.
Mesh Shirt pointed to a door. “Go through there if you want next. I’m sure she’ll be able to take care of you in a few minutes,” he said with a crude little chuckle.
I didn’t really think. My jelly legs just started moving. I was closing in on the door. There was no knob, just a little rope. I pulled it open. I saw a naked man, hairy and muscular, pulling on boxer shorts. He was the one who had fucked her. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I found the other hole.
There was a sort of bench there. It was awkward and a bit confusing, but I saw how it worked. I laid on the bench and scooted forward. I put my feet up on the wall and pushed my butt forward.
I pulled my skirt all the way up and without hesitation, pulled my pantyhose and panties off. The cool air touched my soaked pussy. I fought the fear and shame with every ounce of courage and lust in me.
Some amalgam of memories and guilt seemed to grab me by the throat for a moment. Thinking of how I didn’t help her. I pushed it down, like bile, like vomit. I swallowed it and pushed myself forward, my ass and pussy and thighs jutting out of the hole.
I heard the ocean. Waves in my ears as the anxiety and want overwhelmed my brain. I closed my eyes and waited.