There's a Party at Your House, part 2.

You have a choice.

You can go into the shed with the electric heater and a warm beer and spend the night listening to your MP3 player on repeat, wrapped in a duvet on a moth-eaten deckchair, alone.

You can hear the party, but only see a spider’s web, thick and heavy with dust. You stare at it, trying to guess what time it will be when you next look at your watch. 27 minutes past? At 32 minutes past, your batteries give out. At 11 stones of loser past, you jerk upwards as the hinges of your fortress begin to creak. The door shakes, rattles and moans. 43 minutes past. You step towards the door and peer out of the crack by the hinges. You crane your neck but can only see the hunched shoulder of a guy wearing a red t-shirt. Dust rains down on you each time he thrusts at the girl and she whimpers but you can’t see her face. The guy turns his head and you can see him grimacing.

Step back from the door, what if he can see you? You can’t get out; you can’t let anyone know that you’re so much of a loser that you’re hiding in a shed at a party being held in your own house!

You can feel trapped in the dark, the wood still creaking and the gasps and grunts getting louder. You back away into the depth, but you can feel something crawling on your neck. You jump forwards. You can feel insects crawling all over you, under your jumper, on your face, the millions of tiny legs tickling and squirming inside your socks.

You pause, still tingling, rubbing your hands over your arms, squashing all of the bugs. Then you can feel something stirring, and this time it’s not a rogue insect.

You can stand in the shed, head tilted back, with your jeans around your knees, listening, working. You shed your jacket and roll up your jumper sleeves. A vein begins to stand up on your forearm.

You can choose to ignore the murmured speech outside as the creaking stops and the opening of the latch. The moment of climax has arrived, but you can only stare dumbly into the two pairs of eyes for seconds after seconds, no one knowing what to do.

It’s all on you. And him, the other guy, it’s on his knee a bit too. At least he managed to pull up his trousers, you haven’t, though his flies are undone. The cold from outside swoops in and chills your skin, but the heat is still rising in your neck. Your heart can pound all it wants but it will never break through your ribs and your stomach will never fall far enough to save you from this. All the clichés in the world can’t save you form this.