“Julian!” I shouted as I ran up and flung my arms around him. I looked over his shoulder and saw Adam climbing back in through the window as well.
“You did it,” I said to him as he walked up behind Julian and put a hand on his shoulder. “You saved his life.”
“Eh, it wasn’t that hard,” Adam said. “I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot harder undoing all the pregnancies that just happened while I wasn’t watching the fourth floor.”
I laughed. I was just so happy that they were both okay.
“What happened?” I asked Julian once I had let go of him.
Michael and Adam both stood around us wanting to know too.
“I’m not really sure, to be honest,” Julian answered. “One minute I was drinking a glass of water and trying to figure out how to de-zombify the students on my floor, and the next minute I was standing outside on a ledge.”
“Wait a minute,” Michael interrupted. “Where’d you get the water from?”
“The drinking fountain,” Julian asked. “Well, mostly from the fountain, but then a little from the kitchen sink because there was a line for the fountain, and I didn’t want to hog it. Why?”
“It’s in the water supply to the dormitory,” Michael said. “David has put the drug in the water supply. He looked over at me and Adam. “Did either of you drink the water today?” he asked.
We both shook our heads. I had even brushed my teeth with bottled water because tap always grossed me out.
“Neither have I,” Michael said. “It’s in the water.”
“What do we do about it?” I asked.
“We have to flush it out of their systems,” Adam said.
“That’s going to be hard to do without clean water to flush it out with,” Julian said.
“Well at the very least we need to keep them from doing anything fatally stupid until the drug wears off.”
“How long until it wears off?” I asked Adam.
He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know, depends on the drug. But you’ll be able to tell when it does because not only will they start to act normally again, but if the descent is as strong as the high appears to be; they’re going to be all very unhappy when the drug wears off.”
We all went back to our respective floors to try to keep the students under our care as safe as possible until the effects of the drug left their system. We each took a small bottle of water with us and promised to be as careful as we could be until we met back up together tonight.
There were a few outliers as the day stretched into evening, whose bodies didn’t purge the effects of the drug as quickly as the rest. But overall, by late evening, most of the students were back to normal. Most had headaches and felt disoriented and confused by their earlier behaviors and went to sleep it off in their rooms. When I got back to our own floor, Michael and Julian had similar accounts to tell but Adam still wasn’t back. I waited for a while but then went to go check on him. It sounded like he had a lot to handle with the craziness of all the naked intermingling thanks to the drug. I thought that he might have needed a bit of moral support and maybe some help with wrapping things up so that he could call it a night.
But when I found him, he was sitting in one of the dorm rooms, cradling a naked girl in his lap and stroking her head.
“Adam?” I asked from the open doorway.
“Lisette, what are you doing here?” he asked as he looked surprised to see me.
I tried not to let myself get jealous. “I came to check on you since you still weren’t back yet. Is she okay?”
The girl in his arms was shaking and looked cold. I had no idea why Adam wouldn’t have put some clothes on her instead of sitting there touching her while she was nude.
He sighed. “Yeah, she’ll be fine. She’s just having some trouble shaking the aftereffects. Thus, the shaking and the glassy eyes.”
“Why isn’t she dressed?” I asked.
Adam looked like the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “I guess I just grabbed her before she did anything else stupid and didn’t really think about it.”
The girl was pretty. She had thick blonde hair that fell around her shoulders, and even though her eyes were glassy, they were still a brilliant blue. She was curled up in Adam’s lap with her legs wrapped beneath her and her head lying against his chest. His arms were wrapped around her and her heavy breasts sat atop of one of his arms as if it were a shelf. After an awkward and elongated moment, I think Adam began to pick up on my discomfort with the whole situation. I wasn’t quite sure whether to stay or to walk away. Part of me wanted to stand there until he took his hands off of her, but the other part of me just wanted to stomp away in disgust.
I mean, it wasn’t like he was doing anything sexual with her, he was very plainly just holding onto her while her body attempted to detox completely.
But still, she was naked, and beautiful, and his same arms that held me just this morning were now wrapped around her body.
“How long are you going to sit there and hold her?” I asked.
The edge to my voice came across very clearly and Adam suddenly realized what it was that I was thinking.
“Lisette, this isn’t at all what it looks like,” he said as he immediately let go of the girl and, after carefully leaning her against the wall and putting a blanket over her, he walked toward me with his hands outstretched. “I swear to you that I was just trying to help her like I did for everyone else. Nothing at all happened, I swear it.”
“I believe you,” I said. But, I stepped back away from his outstretched arms on instinct and the look on his face made it seem like I had backhanded him. I mean, sure, I didn’t think anything had actually happened. I just didn’t like him touching another woman. Which I realized was super hypocritical of me since I was always touching all three men at once.
I didn’t care how hypocritical of me it was, though, I still didn’t like it.
“Let’s go back to our room,” Adam said as he tried to put his arm around me again.
But, I backed away, not ready to be touched yet after what I just walked in on.
“Don’t you need to stay here and hold her some more?” I said bitterly. “She still doesn’t look quite right.”
“Come on,” he said with a look that made me feel like I was being a petulant child—which I knew I was, but that was outside the point. “You know that this didn’t mean anything at all. You know that I love you, Lisette. She’ll be fine now, she’s over the worst of it. I’m glad you came to find me, too. I want to go back to our room with you.”
