"Selene? Hey, Selene, are you around here?"
Juri crept down the long hallway that connected all of the staff quarters. For the first couple of weeks, she hadn't known what to make of their section of the ship.
The deep blue carpet was considerably more threadbare than in the other ship hallways, with the scuff marks and cigarette burns of who knew how many former staff.
The best comparison she could come up with was to a college dormitory, one that was religiously cleaned but still couldn't quite hide the extracurricular activities of its inhabitants.
She couldn't know this for sure, seeing as she hadn't ever stayed in a dormitory, but she felt reasonably confident that it was an adequate comparison.
Juri and Selene shared the largest room on the wing, one that had once been two separate rooms and was now converted into a suite. It was down at the very end of the hall, and Juri walked as quietly as she was able, careful not to disturb any of the other inhabitants. She couldn't quite say why this was so, she counted most of them as casual friends, but something inside of her told her to move with stealth. All of her skin tingled and it felt uncomfortable, and a full body shiver first gripped and then shook her frame.
"Stop it," she hissed at herself, "cut it out. You're a moron!"
She wanted to believe it, was borderline forcing herself to do so, but she couldn't get rid of the idea that something was going on here.
In the most distant parts of her brain, something like a memory threatened to make itself paramount, something that made her trembling legs shake all the harder. Whatever it was, a memory, maybe, or perhaps a dream, it felt eerily fortuitous; like she might soon be living out something she had already filed away as unreality.
When she heard the cry coming from the end of the hallway, from her room, she almost threw up. She recognized the voice as Selene's, but the way it sounded now was unlike anything Juri had heard before.
It was a loud, punctuated sound, full of something so intense Juri wanted to scream. It was the thought of the screaming that got her back in motion. She hurried down the hall, never more thankful for how thick the carpet was, for the way it dulled the sound of her footsteps falling to practically nothing at all.
When Juri arrived before her door, she found that it was still open, just a crack. Her heart leaped when she saw that. If she could get an idea of what was going on, of exactly what kind of trouble Selene was in, she might be able to do something to stop it.
"Oh! Oh, my God!"Juri's mouth hung open, shocked.
She must have looked like a ventriloquist dummy with broken hinges in its mouth, but she didn't care. She was too busy trying to figure out if it had been her or Selene who's made that last utterance. She was too busy trying to make her mind wrap itself around what she was seeing.
"No," she whispered, so softly it might as well not have been a word at all.
It certainly wasn't loud enough to disturb her room's current occupants. Juri seriously doubted that either Selene or Adam would have been distracted by anything short of the ship crashing. Possibly not even then.
Selene was naked, her swimsuit and cover-up tossed across the room. Juri could shut her eyes and see her friend taking those things off, throwing them aside blindly while Adam's face nuzzled into the hollow at the base of her throat.
Her head was currently thrust as far back as her body would allow, the chords in her neck standing at attention. They weren't the only thing standing at attention, either. Juri had never walked in on a couple having sex before, so she had no way of knowing that she was currently experiencing just about the worst version of that scenario possible.
As she watched, Adam's hands gripped Selene's hips so fiercely that Juri could see the skin beneath his fingertips go white. When Adam's fingers moved, that skin would turn a bright, angry red.
"Stop teasing me, captain," Selene gasped, her legs spread wide as she hooked her legs around Adam's naked ass. She was positioned at the edge of her tall twin bed with Adam standing in front of her, so close he was practically melting into her.
She reached out and wrapped a hand around Adam's cock, which Juri couldn't help noticing wasn't as long as it was in her secret imaginings, and pulled him closer. When he slid inside of her, she moaned, a loud sound containing no words at all.
"You like that?" Adam asked, already panting as he began to thrust his hips slowly, "You like that, baby?"
"Oh my God, yes! Adam, you feel so big! You feel so fucking big inside of me!"
Juri was hit with an absurd urge to pipe up and correct that last statement. Although she didn't have tons of experience with men herself, she was a good student and remembered the details from sex education well.
Maybe that was why she was watching the sex instead of having it, she thought forlornly. It was a shameful thought and all she needed to keep quiet.
"You're so wet, Selene, so wet for me right now!" Adam groaned.
Juri watched, fascinated in a truly horrific way, as Selene arched her back, pushing her breasts into Adam's direction. His face bent dutifully, his mouth closing over one of her nipples. His hands moved from her hips to her ass, clutching her greedily.
Selene stuffed one of her fists into her mouth and bit down, trying with little success to stifle a scream. That scream again, the one that had made her sure that something terrible was happening. In a way, something was.
All of her fantasies of being in this exact position with Adam flashed through her mind in rapid succession. They were fantasies she hadn't even allowed herself to realize she had which made it doubly painful to see her friend in such a compromising situation.
"From behind, Adam. I want you to take me from behind," Selene groaned. Adam made a grunting sound and rocked his hips faster, one of his hands wandering down between Selene's legs. Selene pushed him aside, her flushed face pouting.
"I'm serious, Adam, that's how I want it. Please, do it to me that way!"
Adam flipped her over so quickly Juri was sure he would drop Selene, and their sexcapade would end not in the climax but injury. She didn't fall, though. Juri wasn't sure whether she was relieved or disappointed, but Selene didn't fall.
She was too athletically inclined in her sexual endeavors to allow something like that to happen. Nothing was going to stop her from having her prize, which Adam surely was; the prize for playing the flirtation game so very well.
All of a sudden, Juri felt sick to her stomach. She felt sick enough that she was practically positive that she was going to lose her lunch all over the already worn carpet right there in front of her room's door.
If she allowed that to happen, Selene and Adam would surely hear the noise. If anything would be enough to distract them from each other, it would probably be that, which in turn would put the final nail in Juri's proverbial coffin.
What if they saw her standing there, if they caught her watching them getting it on in Juri and Selene's shared room, she would die of embarrassment and shame. Somehow she felt, they wouldn't mind the audience, it would just turn them on more and make them more wild and animalistic in their lovemaking.
"What are you doing?" She mouthed to herself, not saying anything out loud. She turned blindly from the partially open door and hurried back down the hallway, back towards what constituted freedom on the ship.
By the time she barreled onto the nearest deck, tears were running down her face. She didn't even realize they were there until a couple of young guys strolling by gave her dual looks of concern.
"Hey, you alright, honey?" One of them asked.
There was no trace of ridicule there, but to Juri, it didn't matter. Nothing was going to change the way she felt, not for the better or for, the worse.
"I'm fine," she mumbled, rushing past the two with her head lowered. She kept walking until she found a corner of the ship that looked to be completely unoccupied. There, she sank to the floor, did her best to curl in around herself, and started to cry.