by Jesse Raub

He was thinking too much about his date with Charlene – which dress she’d be wearing, how much wine to order, whether or not he should’ve bought the extra pack of condoms – that he didn’t notice when his Q-Tip slipped and punctured his eardrum.

The pain was instantaneous and rang out in his ear like shotgun over his shoulder; BLAM.  Bill looked up into the mirror with pain-blurred vision and could only see his goatee and half a Q-Tip sticking out of his head.  Blood trickled down his earlobe and dropped onto the striped dress shirt he got on sale.

“Oh Jesus,” he said as he went down, the bathroom rug sliding with him as his head met the tiled floor.

Ten minutes with his flushed cheek lying against the cold, cream colored tile and he was feeling all right.  Bill sat up, dusted himself off and assessed the damage in the mirror.  There was a little bit of crusted blood around the earlobe, nothing a warm washcloth couldn’t tidy up.  Besides, he was already running late.  He dashed to his car and drove to her house in his red Cavalier, and when Charlene trotted out to the car she didn’t even notice anything was amiss.

Dinner went well.  Charlene laughed at his jokes while eying the Q-Tip still protruding from his ear.  When she finally broke down and asked about the Q-tip, Bill revealed a tender side and he shied away, tried to say that “it was nothing” and that “he really was okay, honestly.”  He made a joke about how she told him he really only listened to her half the time anyway, and now he’d have an excuse.  Conversation progressed to family and work, having already covered favorite movies on the previous date.  Bill took stock of the evening; overall things went well.  She wore the black dress instead of the orange one, they only ordered one bottle of wine (which was a relief for both Bill and his mounting credit card debt), and later on, when Charlene was standing naked at the foot of his bed, tossing her hair back in an erotic display, Bill lay nude on the bed with a Q-Tip in his ear, glad that they made the giddy stop at the Walgreens on the way home for extra condoms.

“I don’t know why,” Charlene moaned in his ear as she ground her hips downward, “but I can’t get enough of you.”

In between pants and gasps, she added “There’s something sexy about that Q-Tip that just makes me want to fuck you all night long.”

After a total sum of seven orgasms between the two of them, Charlene flopped next him on the sheets, breathing deeply through her mouth.  Bill let loose a happy sigh and wondered why his abs looked so much more chiseled than normal.

“Do you love me?” he asked Charlene as she rested her head on his chest.

Charlene nodded

Bill smiled.  Things had just been looking up since the accident.  It was like a morbid good luck charm.  His arm raised up and he ran his finger along the smooth cardboard shaft of the Q-Tip until it rested on the dry cotton tip, and Bill contemplated just how much further he’d have to push it in to keep Charlene in love with him forever.

“Bill and the Q-Tip” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.