Let me start this off by saying: do not fuck with a woman and her vacation. Trust me, it will help you out a lot in the long run.
I fucked around and found out, and now I’m terrified of my girlfriend. I so desperately want to break up with her, but going by the repercussions I’ve suffered since denying her the dream vacation she suddenly wanted to go on within the week of proposing it, I’m scared of what she would do to me in retaliation.
This whole thing started the night I took my girlfriend out on a nice dinner date. We were all dressed up and went to a fancy and pretty expensive restaurant of her choosing.
My girlfriend, Karla, enjoys the finer things in life. She comes from a poorer background than most, so I can totally see why she likes the things she does. She likes higher end food (who doesn’t), fashion, cars, you get the point. I try to help fund her little adventures when I can, and love to see her smile when she’s having fun. Growing up she had to do whatever it took to survive, if not she’d probably be dead by now, so I have to admire her for that. Her strength is one of the many attributes about her that made me fall head-over-heels in the first place.
I make good money at the company I work for so it was easy to spoil her every once in a while. Karla does well for herself too. She runs a small business that is pretty successful and growing by the day. Bottom line, we’re well off. Besides, The pure unbridled joy on her face was priceless compared to a new designer dress or handbag.
Karla had just downed her second glass of the four-hundred dollar bottle of wine we ordered when she brought the topic up.
“Hey babe? When was the last time we went on a trip?”
“About six months ago, why?” I asked, recalling the fond memories of our time together.
“I think we both deserve a break don’t you? We’ve been working hard and should go on a vacation!”
I nodded in agreement, entertaining the idea in my head as I took a bite out of my juicy porterhouse. “Where are you thinking of going?”
“I’m so glad you asked!” She squealed in delight. She then reached across the table to wrap my hands in hers. “I’ve been thinking we could go on a tropical cruise to the Bahamas!”
“That sounds doable. When were you thinking of going?” I asked, taking a sip of wine. It definitely didn’t taste like four-hundred bucks worth, but Karla ordered before I could say anything. We had agreed that I’d cover the dinner so I was calculating how bad my pockets would be suffering after the date in the back of my head.
All the talk of vacation sprang on a sudden migraine, but that could’ve been due to the ridiculous and overwhelming sweetness of the wine Karla ordered. I was also under a lot of stress at the time, both financially and mentally. Being up for a huge promotion will do that to you.
“Oh I wasn’t done, sweet cheeks.” She interrupted.
“My bad, continue.” I said as I poured her another glass of red wine.
“After the cruise I was thinking we could visit Japan! I hear the cherry blossoms are beautiful this time of year, and on the way home we could stop in Hawaii for a while to swim, drink, and explore!”
She looked so excited as she talked, but I had to be the reasonable one in this situation.
“That’s quite the vacation you’ve dreamt up there, darling. How long would this trip even last? Between the cruise, the flights, and hotel stays, it would probably be a few weeks. I don’t know if I’d be able to take that much time off right now. You either. Not to mention how much a translator/guide would cost since neither of us speak Japanese or have ever been to Japan before.”
Her smile turned into a frown.
“Plus, it’s going to be pretty expensive between the two of us.” I added on.
A defeated look filled her features.
“Listen, I’m sure if we save up for a while we’d be able to afford to go on the trip. We’d probably have to save up for a year at most.”
She looked down at her plate shyly before she spoke,” Well actually… I was hoping we could leave by the end of next week or the week after that at the latest.”
I had to take a beat to process her request. There was no way in hell I’d be able to get that much time off approved from work on such short notice. And to be quite honest, Karla’s lavish lifestyle was becoming difficult to maintain. Sure I loved to see her happy and all, but she was spending more than what she was making, so there was little of her money left for important things like rent and utilities that I had to continually make up the difference for. It didn’t help that she chose the large open concept apartment we live in. It’s beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s in the richer part of the city so rent is outrageous and we barely use fifty percent of the space anyway. I had spoiled her so much since beginning our relationship, I’d created a small, bratty and demanding monster that always got her way.
Besides, our last trip to Myrtle beach was enough for me. We ate good food, had fun at the beach and in the hotel room, what more did we need? International travel seemed fun and all, but if you think about it, it’s super taxing and just a lot. She was basically asking me to plan a two to four week multi-thousand dollar vacation in the span of like a week. Talk about unrealistic expectations!
“Listen love bug,” I started nicely, trying to soften the blow. Knowing Karla, she was going to throw a fit when I essentially told her no. “I know you’re excited about this whole trip that you’ve got planned out in your head, but we’ve gotta be realistic here.”
“Cecil.” She said, testingly. She gave me her signature bombastic side eye, daring me. Her whole expression read “I will scream right here and now if I don’t get my way.”
I sighed. “Karla, I’ll be shitting bricks when you get to go on this vacation.”
A hurt expression filled her beautiful features, but if I needed her to truly understand the gravity of something, I had to be blunt and harsh.
She downed the rest of her glass of wine before turning her head away to avoid looking at me. She rested her chin over her hands before she muttered something along the lines of,” Fine, have it your way.”
The rest of that dinner we ate in silence as she stewed.
Leading up to this, those past few months it was like little earthquakes leading up to a massive volcanic explosion when it came to Karla. Always walking around eggshells. Looking back at it, there were so many warning signs.
An ominous feeling loomed over me and something in my gut told me that I’d come to regret this. And come to regret it I did.
About a week after the date night dinner disaster, around the time Karla originally wanted to go on her dream vacation, she made me a bowl of maple and brown sugar oatmeal for breakfast. One thing that should be known is that Karla owns an e-commerce business and mainly works from home. So, if she has time in the mornings, she’ll make us breakfast while I get ready for work. If I’m extra lucky, she’ll even pack my lunch.
I was running a bit behind that day, so she settled on something quick and easy to make for me, an unsuspecting bowl of oatmeal.
“Here hun! Better eat it quickly, don’t want to be late or to let it get cold.” She said with a smile as she placed the bowl with the golden oats on our table for me. It seemed Karla had long since let go of her vacation whims by that point.
I quickly sat down and grabbed a couple spoonfuls of the stuff. Karla hovered behind me the whole time. Eagerly watching me like an animal stalking its prey.
The usually sweet oatmeal tasted extremely bitter, and even a bit burnt. After the first bite, my lips started to tingle a little. At least the tingling took my taste away. I thought I could’ve been having an allergic reaction to eating the oatmeal, but it had never happened before.
“Go on sweetie, take a couple more bites.” She urged as she gingerly lay her hands on my shoulders, starting to rub them a little. As time went on she started rubbing harder and harder, almost grinding her wrists into my shoulders.
“Mm! So delicious!” I lied. I mixed the oatmeal around to see if she had somehow burnt the oatmeal, but all I found were the usual small bits of brown sugar that hadn’t melted down yet.
“Be a good boy and finish your oatmeal, quickly for me, okay?” She whispered with a sickly sweet venom.
After the fifth or sixth spoonful shoved into my mouth, I had to cough. My lips, mouth, and throat were still tingling. The feeling was getting more intense as time went on.
She gave me a water bottle which I graciously accepted, telling me that it would help with the tingling when I told her my mouth was on fire. After chugging it my mouth felt a little better.
Before I could question her or do anything else, Karla ushered me out of the apartment after I practically licked the bowl clean. Dazed, I rushed to work.
Ten minutes after arriving at work, my still tingling mouth started to fill with drool as I started to uncontrollably salivate. The intense urge to vomit came with it. I felt ill. My stomach was upset, I was ghostly pale, nauseous, and sweating buckets. It looked like I was an unsuspecting victim of the ice bucket challenge because of how much I had sweat through my work shirt.
One of my superiors took notice of my ghastly appearance during that morning’s debrief meeting and asked if I was feeling alright. I didn’t get the chance to respond because I excused myself as I almost threw up all over him.
The second I was in front of a toilet in the men’s bathroom, everything in my stomach was unleashed into the toilet bowl with the same fury as a hurricane. I almost hurled again as chunks of gray oatmeal and acidic stomach juices swirled around the bowl when I flushed.
I just chalked it up to a bad case of food poisoning from the shitty oatmeal Karla had prepared.
Not a moment after I left the stall to clean myself up did the most intense, gut wrenching, pain fill my entire abdominal region. It felt like I had been stabbed with a sword and it was being thrust twisted inside of my guts. The most foul smelling cloud of gas left my tuchus, which thrusted me into another wave of pain as my knees went weak and buckled. Clutching my stomach, I slowly unbuckled my belt, pulled my pants down, and parked my ass on the toilet seat.
It felt like an eternity had passed of me trying to push out that god forsaken dookie. A grown man could’ve taken three showers with all the sweat that left every orifice of my body. My ass at one point was so wet, I had to push my hands against the stall to keep myself from slipping off my porcelain prison. I feared for my life. My heart was pounding so fast, I figured with all the stress my body was under I’d have a heart attack. I truly thought I was going to die in that stall.
I don’t know what giving birth feels like, but I think pushing that demon spawn out of my butthole was pretty close to the feeling. There was a tiny splash of water and a small stream of wet ickiness that came after.
I slowly gathered some toilet paper and gingerly wiped the ring of fire that was my rectum. The toilet paper was drenched in blood when I finished. I took a quick peek into the depths below and found a hard as rock gray pebble floating in the pinkish water.
That was the last straw for my body. A combination of exhaustion, blood loss, and dehydration caused me to slip in and out of consciousness. One second I was on the toilet, the next there’s blood dripping down between my legs as I lay pants-less on the floor of the bathroom stall with a puddle of blood leaking from my ass. I was surrounded by worried co-workers and I think I can remember the paramedics arriving. After that, nothing but a cool abyss.
I thought I had died. It felt like I had died.
I woke up in a sterile hospital room. My head was woozy and my stomach felt a shit ton better and lighter. It also felt stiff, tight, and ached a little.
Karla was sitting besides me holding my hand, stroking her thumb along the back of my hand. She noticed I woke up and gave me a smile.
“Oh, Pookie! I’m so glad you’re awake!” She then pressed the call button on the remote to my bed. “I was so worried about you.”
A doctor then came into the room. Turns out I had been in and out of it for a week, though I don’t remember anything during that time.
Turns out my coworkers had called an ambulance when they found me unresponsive in the bathroom. I sat there for an hour and half before I was found and was quickly rushed to hospital. After testing, they found I had some pretty severe burns to my mouth, tongue, and esophagus, along with a bowel obstruction. They rushed me into emergency surgery where about a foot and a half of my intestine was removed in what’s called a bowel resection.
When the tested contents of my removed bowel came back, it was revealed that the blockage was quite literally a concrete casting of my intestine. The doctors think I must’ve ingested something containing a hefty, borderline lethal, amount of quick drying cement powder.
After my doctor explained that to me, he went into detail about some serious damage that was done to my stomach. The best option, in his opinion, was a partial gastrectomy. Which is when a portion of your stomach is removed. Typically this kind of operation is performed on patients with stomach cancer or tumors.
They questioned me about what I ate that day, trying to determine how the cement ended up in my system, but I was still too weak and out of it to really answer them at the time. They asked me questions like,” Have you ever eaten and craved something people shouldn’t be eating?
I just shrugged my shoulders and the doctor told me about a condition called pica, which makes you crave weird things like dirt. He told me I probably didn’t have it since I didn’t have a history of ingesting quick drying cement, but told me they’d do further testing just to rule it out.
Karla talked the ears off the whole nursing staff about how unexpected all this was and how inconvenient it was for her. She even came up with a few theories of how it ended up in my system. One of them was about a McDonald’s breakfast burrito that came from a recently renovated McDonald’s. That one was rich. She told them all about how she was going to sue them for millions. Surprisingly nothing about oatmeal was brought up, though.
Finally when all the doctors and nurses were gone, and I had finished the tomato soup I couldn’t taste because of the burns, Karla snuggled up real close in the hospital bed with me. She stroked my matted hair and ran her fingers up and down my arm before quietly whispering in my ear,” You’ve shit your bricks, now where’s my vacation?”
A disturbing chill crept down my spine after she said that. It was then that I came to the realization she had somehow mixed quick drying cement powder into my oatmeal that morning. After doing some googling I discovered that it takes up to two minutes for the powder to dry and harden when mixed with water. Her menacing smile as she handed me that water bottle is permanently tattooed on the back of my eyelids.
That conversation was a week ago. I’m getting discharged from the hospital soon. Karla and I have been looking at hotel bookings in Japan a week out from when our cruise leaves in a few days. I don’t have to worry about getting anything ready since she’s been packed for weeks at this point. She just had to wait a little bit so I could get approved medical leave off of work to rest and recover a bit, but we’re doing it. We’re going on her dream vacation.
All it cost me were parts of my stomach, intestine, and whatever was in my 401k.
I don’t want to go on a stupid fucking vacation. I can’t taste for shit, I’m still in relative pain after my two operations, and I can’t even bare to be in the same room as her anymore. The nightmares are the worst part. Every dream is dominated with the memories of the bathroom, blood, pain, and Karla’s uncaring and lifeless eyes.
But, I’ve learned my lesson by now. When Karla, the absolute love of my life, wants something, she’ll get it. By any means necessary.
She’s also been hinting to me that she wants me to propose on this vacation. She’s sent me photos of various, expensive, engagement rings and is gabbing on and on about the nail appointment she made for the day before we leave. So, it looks like we’re also going to get married. I’ll be trapped with her for life, because she might literally take it away if I ever broke up with her. She’s proven herself very capable already.
Another take away from this whole experience is that my girlfriend is a terrifying woman who takes everything way too literally.
I’ve also developed a debilitating phobia of oatmeal that causes me to vomit every time I see it. Safe to say I’m never, ever, eating it again.