Crap, my answer was only going to make things worse. My mind grasped for purchase on anything I could possibly think of. “Uh…um.” Think fast. Come up with something, damn it! “It was…he—”
“You don’t know, do you?”
Oh God, I was the worst “bad girl” ever. I swallowed bile as I waved a wild hand at the computer. “Delete that!” She was the geeky one, after all. She spent hours in front of the computer. She’d know how to make it go away.
Sid frowned. “I can’t.”
Now the sickness inside was bubbling up. Sid wouldn’t lie about this to teach me a lesson. “What…why? Why the fuck can’t you?”
“Because, potty mouth, it’s not my account. It was uploaded by someone else and tagged #ComicCon. I’ve been following the tag since, um—you know, unlike you, the undeserving non-geek—I didn’t get a chance to go. And that’s a good thing, because it seems like a den of iniquity!”
Uploaded by someone else? How in the hell had that happened? Had I accidentally uploaded it to the cloud? What the hell was “the cloud” anyway, and how did it work? Had someone hacked me like those poor actresses who’d had their naked pictures spread across the Internet?
I was going to vomit. Projectile puke everywhere.
“Did I…did I upload that from my phone?”
“So it’s your video? April! Why would you video yourself having sex with some random guy? And how could you not know who he was?”
“He was dressed up as that bounty hunter guy from the game—”
“Falco.”
“Yeah—whatever. Anyway, he had that armor on, and the helmet. And…and…” My stomach churned. “Oh hell, I’m going to barf.”
“Too much alcohol, April!” Sid shouted after me as I bee-lined it to the toilet.
Vague memories filtered in. It was the last night of Comic-Con, a mere two days ago. Even in my drunken haze, I remembered that the sex had been incredible. Heated breathing, sweating through my elf costume, the feel of skilled hands sliding under my clothes, squeezing my hips so tightly they’d been sore the day after. He’d only spoken in whispers and that had made it all the hotter.
That steamy encounter, along with the alcohol, had helped me forget for a while. Before that night, I’d been miserable the entire time because of the awful news I’d received the day before. I blinked stinging eyes and pushed it out of my mind.
Damn it. I gripped my belly, waiting, but nothing came up. Instead, my guts were cramping into tighter knots. It was my first day working as an assistant in the CFO’s office, and I had to start under these circumstances? What if people at work had seen the video? What if those who knew my costume figured out it was me? The questions swirled in my mind, making me dizzy. How would I even be able to concentrate today?
I stumbled to the sink to splash cold water on my face, and icy droplets soaked my temples, running down my neck and into my nightie. Then I confronted myself in the mirror, examining the blotches on my pale skin, complete with new dark circles under my blue eyes. Above the eyes, there were perfectly arched eyebrows, thanks to my makeover before the Con. I combed through my dark brown hair. I looked like hell. Felt worse. How had I gotten into this mess?
Oh yeah, I’d gotten drunk to drown out the humiliation and had let that affect what little good judgment I had—yet again. Alcohol and April clearly did not mix and were a dangerous combo. They led to ugly tattoos and anonymous sex with a helmeted man who had a ridiculously large penis and the hardest abs I’d ever felt against my body.
I’d been at Comic-Con because of my job, and he’d been some Dragon Epoch-loving nerd that I’d picked up because that’s what nice, boring, docile little April would never do. She’d never go find some random dude in a costume and fuck his brains out. But drunk April was no nice girl.
I was like Dr. Jekyll and Miss Hyde when it came to booze, apparently.
Ten minutes later, after jumping in the shower and toweling off, I went back into our bedroom. Sid was still at her computer, gaping open-mouthed at the monitor.
“Umm,” she mumbled when I stopped next to her. She was watching the goddamn thing again.
“Shut it off. That’s just getting creepy with you looking at it over and over.”
“This isn’t the video—this is a gif that someone made from the video.”
I knelt in closer, staring at the animated gif of my pelvis gyrating over the guy’s muscular legs as he dug his fingers into my hips—on repeat. A flash of heat went through me as I recalled how amazing he’d felt. My remembered pleasure evaporated the second oscillating letters appeared above us, reading, “Cosplay geeks mating in the wild.”