Flashbacks

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F L A S H B A C K S

by Miracle Jones

It was my idea to go to the love hotel escape room.

It was her idea to do the molly.

We’d both just broken up with long-term partners. The experience had been brutal for both of us and so we wanted to make sure that our first real date together was something really special and really stupid. We both wanted to do something that we’d never been able to do before with our former primaries.

I want to forget the good times, she said. MDMA is supposedly really good for trauma. You have to drink a lot of water, though. Honestly, this will be my first time rolling. He never let me. Don’t worry, I’ve done plenty of other drugs.

The good times? You don’t get trauma from the good times!

Yes you do! The good times hurt more. You’re just as likely to get stuck replaying them in your head while sobbing in some nail salon bathroom or whatever. Unable to move on. Okay, forget is the wrong word. PROCESS.

I eventually agreed to let her take the MDMA but only after she literally begged me on her knees in a bar where everyone was watching. She persisted even after people started laughing uncomfortably at her. They’d never seen a grown woman beg her daddy in public before.

I’m not going to take any molly with you though. You’ll have to do it alone.

Oh wow, yeah, that makes it even hotter. Like you’ve drugged me so that I’ll think it’s all my fault that I’m so horny for you. You’re taking your good little girl to Candyland for a daddy / daughter weekend because I’m so special and you love me sooooo much.

The Cherry Cherry Love Hotel was an “anything goes” 24-hour adult escape room in Midtown that I had been obsessed with for months. It started up during covid as an acceptable activity for pandemic social pods and it was still going strong as a louche, immersive experience for adventurous couples and small groups of neurodivergent scumbags.

I got there early and filled out all the forms for liability, for consent, for allergies, for what happened if you stole anything. When she arrived, we both signed a form that said we were fully responsible for anything that happened while we were locked inside together.

You can’t actually sign away your rights, I told her. Signing forms like this doesn’t mean you can’t sue later if you want, especially if they are negligent or breaking the law.

Wow, you are such like… a smart person. But what if I don’t want my rights anymore?

I kissed her forehead and she whimpered sweetly on cue.

As far as I could tell, Cherry Cherry was an excellent facsimile of a Dogenzaka Hill love hotel like in Shibuya, except that it was just ten rentable rooms on three floors of a midtown highrise which had formerly been zoned for commercial use. Love hotels usually had a main theme–like Egypt or the 1980s. They usually had rooms that elaborated on this dominant aesthetic that you could rent for the night or by the hour: variations like The Room of Mummified Cats or Cocaine Pool Party.

They usually didn’t trust white people to rent by the hour in Japan and they were probably right. They also didn’t rent to guy / guy couples, though they were more lenient to girls. Obviously anybody could rent anything here in NYC as long as they could afford it.

This Cherry Cherry Love Hotel (NYC x TOKYO) was dessert-themed: candy, donuts, cupcakes, chocolate, lemon cake, etc. The colors were lurid and bright (RGB not CMYK) and there were friendly faces on all of the cartoon food. The overall effect was more sinister than erotic. It was a place for adults to turn other adults into children. It was a place for innocence to be ripped open, explored without tenderness, corrupted, and then fucked to death. It was more exciting if this happened while someone was gripping a smiling cartoon donut like it was their last memory of a happy childhood in a room that smelled like fresh cookies.

Anyway, it was exciting to take a girl there who was into age play, where we would both be sealed up together as cell mates.

She showed up that night wearing a tight little pinafore dress with bows and knee socks. She was carrying an entire case of bottled water.

I just wanted to buy like three but this was a better deal. Also, just in case you want some.

I took the case from her while we filled out the forms. It was heavier than it looked.

We returned the paperwork to the concierge whose face we never saw. There was an opaque screen blocking him.

She cracked open a bottle of water and drank the whole thing at once. It was sexy, the way she chugged from the bottle, her lips wrapped around the neck like a baby goat. She saw me watching and let some of the liquid slip out of her mouth and soak the front of her dress.

Oh my god. I’m such a stupid slut. I can’t even drink water right.

You had to book your slot in advance. This was so people could arrive in staggered increments and still have their privacy. But of course there were security cameras everywhere, so there was only the illusion of discretion. I found this more comforting than alarming. The specific rooms were assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. They couldn’t guarantee specific scenarios but we would be able to pick from a list.

The hidden person behind the screen slipped us the laminated menu. There were ice cream parfait stickers over the ones that had already been rented. There was also a capacitive touchscreen monitor on the wall that carouselled between all the images of the themed rooms that were still available. There were only three left: Birthday Party, Chocolate Lava, and Candee Forest.

Do you want it to be your birthday today, sweetheart?

Let’s do Candee Forest, she said. That’s the same tree from the ad. I want the tree to watch us.

I told the concierge we wanted to do Candee Forest and we got our room keycards. We had the place for two hours, which was the maximum. You couldn’t rent the escape room for the whole night. That would make Cherry Cherry a real hotel, which would mean there were a whole bunch of different laws that would kick in with respect to ADA requirements, union labor, the fire code, etc.

She’d already taken the molly in the Lyft but she said she wasn’t feeling anything yet. She cracked open another bottle of water and drank half.

You really have to drink a lot of water when you’re rolling, she said. Your body will just burn it all up so you have to drink way more than you think you need.

I pushed her up against the wall in the elevator, smashing her face against the metal wall and fishfacing her red lips. A splash of water from the bottle hit the elevator floor. The wet smack of water on the laminate vinyl made me unreasonably aroused.

What are you doing daddy? Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?

We barely made it through the door of our room before we were consuming each other. We rearranged each other really hard for about twenty minutes, each of us deeply engrossed in the details of our incest roleplay. I ended up with slightly bleeding claw marks on my chest and shoulders, and she earned herself corresponding bruises and belt marks on her thighs and ass.

There was a cute stuffed cupcake with adorable plush sclerafacio that I stuffed in her mouth as I tore up ⅔ of her holes, leaving her asshole alone since we hadn’t specifically talked about anal sex yet and I didn’t want to break the scene by having any dainty discussions about consent. Eventually she started screaming no daddy as loud as she could and then I came in my condom while lightly holding her throat like I was checking for swollen lymph nodes. I had been holding her upper arm so tightly that she had to shake it out once we were done to get the blood flowing.

Numb noodle, she said.

I could tell she was pretty happy about what we’d just done. She was shivering with adrenaline. She looked sufficiently shocked and abused. Her eyes were wide. She looked like a kitten hiding under the wheelwell of an old car.

It’s starting to kick in, she said. I’m feeling really weird and really good.

She cracked open another bottle of water and drank most of it.

Thirsty, she said.

I’d honestly forgotten about the molly. Now it was more annoying than hot that she was on drugs and I was sober. I looked around the Candee Forest for the first time, contemplating the puzzle.

Do you want to take a bath? I asked. The bathroom seems cool as hell.

Yeah, sure, she said. Are we going to try and escape?

There’s no rush.

I made her clean off my cock and kiss my belt buckle and then I put my pants back on. She took a bottle of water with her into the bathroom.

There was a paper envelope by the phone that was sealed by a length of twine that was wrapped around a copper brad. I unspooled the twine and opened the envelope. I could hear her start the water in the bathtub. It was actually sort of pleasant to be lazily doing an escape room without much commitment or time pressure. It felt like existential facticity, like how we’re each caught in a personal death trap built by god but have basically infinite time to figure out how everything is connected if we approach the puzzle in good faith and apply ourselves with true intellectual rigor as a lifelong personal project.

There were little candy scenes all over the Candee Forest that I presumed were linked up in some logical way. In one corner there were a bunch of ragdoll-sized gummy bears all in a fairy circle on a plastic gingerbread podium (like a giant toadstool). Each of them had their arms outstretched as if they were supposed to be presenting something to the group. There was a mirrored chocolate cake made of plastic on the table by the closet (like a stump) and there was a mirror on the ceiling right above the cake. I looked into the reflection and saw hazy numbers up there etched into the glass but I couldn’t read them yet

Maybe some sort of blacklight would reveal them?

The room was dominated by a large acrylic tree the color and consistency of black licorice with a protruding cartoon face. His eyes were closed, but it was clear that the tree would talk if we solved one of the puzzles here. We’d seen this tree in the ad. The branches of the tree snaked up the walls and along the ceiling and there seemed to be smooth places along the trunk that could be pressed like buttons. I pressed one and there was a satisfying click, but nothing happened. It wasn’t clear what order I should be pressing these buttons or why.

I read the instructions from the envelope.

“The Candee Forest is deep and sweet. There’s danger here in every treat. Beware the lemon and the lime! You’ll be just fine if you leave on time.”

The bedspread itself was lemon-yellow. There was a drying stain from where her pussy juice had soaked through. I pulled the bedspread off the bed and flipped it onto the floor. There was a rebus on the other side.

I found something! I yelled into the bathroom.

Yeah, there’s weird crap in here too, she said. The medicine cabinet is full of little plastic instruments.

I bet that’s what the gummy bears are supposed to be holding, I said.

I heard her open up another bottle of water and take a long swig.

How you doing in there?

Feeling kinda whack, she said. But I’m digging it.

You’ll be just fine if you leave on time.

Obviously this was referring to the fact that there was a countdown for the escape room, but I wondered if this clue also pointed more directly to an actual clock somewhere. A clock was a common and necessary amenity for all hotel rooms, especially love hotels.

There wasn’t a clock by the bedside table, which was surprising. I looked everywhere, opening the closet, looking under the bed. I finally opened the bedside drawer again, moving stuff around this time, and found an old digital alarm clock under piles of neon pink stationery. The cord was wrapped around it. I hadn’t seen a clock like this since college. There was an outlet right there by the bedside lamp.

The alarm immediately went off as soon as I plugged it in. Lights in the room started flashing and the giant tree opened his eyes and looked at me. His mouth started going up and down and his eyes flickered back and forth. Eventually his voice came out of a speaker in the wall.

Well hello there, friend! Welcome to the Candee Forest. I’m Old Hickory and I’ve got an itchy trunk. Can you give me a good scratch under my arm?

He sounded vaguely like Piglet from the old Pooh cartoons. He had the same tentative plaintiveness mixed with fussy diction. I hated him.

Did you say something? she yelled.

I figured out how to turn the tree on, I said. That was Old Hickory.

Kinky!

10.

She came out of the bathroom naked and still wearing her heels. She was wobbling a little and holding her belly. She took a swig of water and then posed for me, fondling her own ass.

Are you trying to escape? she asked. I don’t ever want to escape from here, daddy. Her eyes were shining. She lay down on the bed, joggling her legs, flexing her dimpled ass. She looked over her shoulder with her thumb in her mouth.

I knew she was ready to go again, but first I went to the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet and saw all the little instruments for the gummy bears. I got them out and set them up on the bedside table for later.

11.

We started fucking again, but more tenderly this time. She seemed a little goofy, but it was hard to tell how much of this was roleplay and how much was the drugs.

Are you okay? I asked.

Do you like the way my little pussy feels today daddy? she asked. Do you like me as much as you like mommy?

I asked her if she had any crushes on any boys from school, but she said that her daddy had the biggest cock. Then she went stiff and silent. I thought she was going to come, but instead she just peed a little. Not even squirting or whatever, just a thin trickle of pee on the bed.

I’m so sorry daddy she said. I drank too much water and now I had an oopsy.

I pulled out of her and she stumbled to the bathroom to finish.

Hey, seriously, are you okay?

Totally she said. She flushed the toilet, came back out, and got back down on her hands and knees.

I slapped her ass and she giggled. I entered her again and she groaned.

Hold on, she said. Go slow.

Then she puked all over the floor on the other side of the bed. It was mostly water but it was still puke and there was a lot of it.

Oh fuck. FUCK!

I tried to get a trashcan for her but by the time I returned she was done retching and she waved the trash can away. All I could think about was cleaning up her mess, hiding the visible evidence of this physical dysfunction. But I made myself sit down next to her and put my arm around her.

I don’t feel so good all of a sudden. I feel terrible.

Is it the molly?

Maybe. I’m dead sober now, that’s for sure.

I got her another bottle of water and she drank half.

12.

I cleaned up as best I could with towels from the bathroom.

I don’t feel any better, she said. I feel worse, honestly.

I started looking up the symptoms of taking too much MDMA on my phone. The cell phone signal in the escape room was terrible, and I couldn’t even connect to the wifi for some reason. It took forever for pages to load. Her symptoms were: she had a horrible headache, cramps in her legs, and she was slightly blue in her lips and fingers. She threw up again, but this time in the toilet.

I wasn’t finding anything about MDMA poisoning, especially with respect to someone who seemed lucid, but that’s when I stumbled onto the Reddit post about hyponatremia, also known as water poisoning. There was also a Mayo Clinic explanation of this phenomenon, but I trusted Reddit more when it came to recreational drugs.

Drink plenty of water when you roll, said the post. But also be careful not to drink TOO MUCH water. You can dilute all the sodium in your blood and all the water cells in your brain will swell up. Your kidneys won’t be able to process the water fast enough and this can lead to seizures, coma, and even death. It’s hard to know how much water you are actually drinking when you’re really partying. Sweating and peeing doesn’t actually matter as far as leveling out the intake. A lot of people who die from hyponatremia are long-distance athletes who don’t realize how much water they’re drinking while they run.

I started to panic as I listened to her moan and wretch in the bathroom. The top comment was from the original poster.

People who are taking molly can also sometimes trigger ‘psychogenic polydipsia,’ which is compulsive water drinking. This can happen because drinking water feels so good, just like everything else! WINK EMOJI / TONGUE OUT DOLLAR BILL EMOJI.

There were articles about several girls who had died from water poisoning in England, deaths which had actually triggered the anti-rave laws of the ‘90s.

13.

I feel awful daddy, she moaned from the bathroom. Can you come sit with me?

I opened the bathroom door. She wasn’t naked anymore, which was maybe a good sign. She was curled around the toilet, holding a bottle of water like a teddy bear. I took it away from her.

I think you might have water poisoning, I said. It’s very serious.

Serious, she said. Serious, serious, serious, serious. Never mind, I feel fine now, daddy. We can keep going if you want.

She tried to get to her knees. She was extremely unbalanced. I was afraid she was going to slip and bash open her skull on the sink or the bathtub.

Careful, careful. I think we need to get you to a hospital.

Okay, daddy, she said. I love you.

She collapsed into my arms, letting herself go limp like a toddler throwing a tantrum in the mall. Luckily, she didn’t weigh very much. I carried her over to the bed. I stared at her, paralyzed, unsure of what to do. Should I call an ambulance? I mean that would be too much, right? That would be too dramatic?

14.

She lay on the bed singing Jesus Loves Me This I Know, with the rebus-covered lemony bedspread wrapped around her ankles. I gathered her things together, my heart jackhammering in my ears. I found some cocaine in her purse, but it wasn’t very much. I knew she wasn’t the sort to mix drugs. I flushed it.

If she died, she would be covered in contusions and there would be my DNA all over her.

I put her shoes in her bag, knowing there was no way in hell I was going to be able to get her heels on her feet while she was like this. I did a once over of the room, trying to see if I’d missed anything. Then I put her arms over my shoulder and carry-walked her to the door. I turned the handle, but it was locked.

Oh right, oh fuck. I’d forgotten about the escape room.

I opened my phone but now I had no bars. There was a phone by the bed, though.

But now she started sobbing. I let her fall to the ground and she curled up in a fetal position by the door, bawling, wailing, begging me to help her.

15.

They would know it was water poisoning right? They would know that I had nothing to do with it? Even if they decided that I’d given her the molly–which I didn’t!–they would still know that it was actually the water that killed her?

She wasn’t dead, though. I needed to stop thinking that way.

But surely they would be able to do some sort of autopsy and figure it all out. And it WAS the water right?

But then I had a more chilling thought: would they understand that she had consented to everything we’d done? Would they understand that it hadn’t been rape, even if she died?

16.

I picked up the phone to call the concierge to tell him that we were giving up on the escape room and to open the door for us.

She grabbed my legs, screaming, sobbing, puking.

Don’t leave me daddy. Don’t hurt me. Don’t kill me.

It was awful. She was in terrible shape. She was shaking. Her eyes kept going blank and then shutting as she greyed out between screams.

I couldn’t call downstairs with her like that. The concierge would assume I was hurting her. Maybe our call would even be recorded.

And then I started thinking, what would actually happen if she survived? What if she didn’t remember all the conversations we’d had about consent, about control, about what we liked and about what we didn’t like?

What if she decided later that none of this was okay?

It hurts so much, daddy. It hurts so much. Please, please, please, please.

17.

It was clear at this point that her father must have done something terrible to her when she was a little girl. I’d never considered that the creation of a fetish could be so straightforward. But I was worried that some part of me had known this all along, no matter how glowingly she talked about her real relationship with her real father.

I knelt down next to her, stroking her face.

Shhhhh, baby, it’s going to be okay. You’re going to be fine. Just stay with me. Just stay awake and don’t go into a fucking coma or have a fucking seizure.

I want some water, she demanded. I’m so thirsty. My head hurts so bad.

No more water, I said. Absolutely not.

I stared at the phone by the bedside lamp. We were locked in here. I needed to call for help. I needed to call an ambulance immediately. She was calm now. Stable. Nobody would think I was torturing her. There wouldn’t be a 911 recording of her screaming bloody murder that they would play on the news.

But when I got up to call the concierge again, she shrieked and clawed at me again. Don’t leave me, she cried. You promised you wouldn’t leave me.

I’m not going anywhere, I said, squatting beside her with the phone in my lap. Then she started to actually convulse. She was puking water out her mouth, out of her nose, out of her fucking eyeballs. I crossed to the other side of the bed and picked up the receiver this time

There was no dial tone. I didn’t actually know who to dial. Should I dial 0?

Hello? I shouted. What did we used to do in the past? I pressed zero a bunch of times. I dialed 911.

She wasn’t moving. I could see her feet peeking out from the other side of the bed but they were still. I didn’t hear her puking or breathing anymore.

You’re okay, baby, I said loudly, hoping to provoke a response. You’re going to be okay.

Nothing.

That’s the wrong number, said Old Hickory. That’s not the right number at all, friend. Trrrrrrrrryyyyyy again!