Alina’s Journey - Prologue: By Grace of God

By: Wax the Velvet

TW: Dubious consent. Teenagers. Death. Religion, Sexual Content.

How did I even get here? Sitting on a cloud in front of an angel with a high tech tablet?

One moment I was trying to download porn. Yes. Download porn. We have only one computer at home, and it’s in the living room. My parents are absolutely sure it’s one hundred percent safe against “immoral websites” using some blocker that they heard of from a guy in our church. Well, guess what? It doesn’t work on incognito windows. It’s not rocket science. It’s what happens when you listen to technology advice from some boomer at church.

Anyway, I wasn’t about to just masturbate in the living room. I’m not a brute. I was going to burn it into a DVD and use an old DVD player I had lying around in my room. To tell you the truth, I was just curious about it. I lived such a repressed life. My parents are somehow sure that if they talk about Jesus enough, they can pray the gay away or something.

Wait, I’m digressing. I was dead, and in front of me was an angel. Or a beautiful woman shining with holy light with wings. On her tablet was my life story apparently and she was skimming it. “Huh, so you died from a brain aneurysm at nineteen. Downloading porn?” Dang. My parents are going to kill me!

BUT IT’S SO UNFAIR! Let me tell you why.

When I was in high school I could hardly meet friends after school. In the God enriched state of Arizona, the sex ed teacher asked for our questions on the first day of school, wrote them down, taught us abstinence, and then called each student’s parents to share what they asked. I wasn’t stupid enough to ask any questions, but one of the girls that did came back the next day with a black eye.

It’s not that I know nothing about sex. Even in my sleepy town there were horny teenagers. And yet, you just don’t get how it is when your parents are this… intense. For years when our preacher would speak about ‘The Gays’ I didn’t even know what it meant! Still, at around sixteen, when pheromones were in the air, I realized that I wasn’t "normal". I didn’t know what I was, because I didn’t feel like I was attracted to anyone. Well, a friend I was a little more comfortable with told me I might be A-Sexual. Ace. I was pretty pleased with it, sex being a sin, so having none sounded nice. At least that’s what I thought I was. About a year and a half later I had a rude awakening.

Wait, why am I going into all this? Because this angel, this beautiful blessed being, she was giving me this… pitying look. I went into all of this because the first thing she said after reading my life story was “Wow, you’re a virgin? At your age? What a loser.”

So, yeah, a while afterwards, around when I turned eighteen, I started talking to this girl at church. Her parents gave her the graceless name ‘Grace of God’. Not Grace. Grace of God. Anyway, Grace, as she preferred to be called, was a God fearing girl just like me. No, she was better than me. She was blonde with deep blue eyes. Better. She volunteered for everything at church. Better. She was taller. Better. Leaner. Better. For the first time in my life I was sitting in church looking at her and thinking. By Golly, she’s just my type. my type? What sort of type is that exactly? Aren’t I an ace? It seems like I got the ‘gay bug’. At least if you ask my parents.

Anyway, one day I was helping this Grace of God sort things out after the bake sale. We were alone in the church’s kitchenette packing leftovers to give to the homeless. I was about to ask her where to put the danishes, when she took my hand and like some sort of Casanova, she said “I noticed you checking me out. Like what you see?” 

I was in shock, but instead of asking “what do you mean?” or something like that, I ended up saying “yes” in a choked voice.

Answer in hand, she grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me. Aggressively kissed me. Consent? What about it? Isn’t this sexual assault? I was assaulted. I was assaulted by the fact I didn’t have the presence of mind to shove my tongue down her throat.

After a few seconds she stopped the kiss abruptly. I sucked in air as if I was underwater for at least 10 minutes. Later, I would understand it was a part of her strategy, but I had more important things to deal with at that moment. I had like… A genuine angel in front of me?

“Wow, so a single partner. Didn’t even reach third base.” the angel said with a thoughtful expression.

“Ah, so we’re actually talking about this? Ok. I’ll explain” And I explained everything.

I told you it was a strategy, right? Well, Grace was a very covert gay. Any gay girl with religious parents knows that you have to be quieter than a church mouse about your preference. So, how come she was so bold? That’s a part of it. Being this abrupt and aggressive was sort of a recipe to prevent girls from complaining. She really vetted the girls she would do it to, but “even the best ‘gaydar’ isn’t perfect”.

She always gave this really submissive impression, and she thought no one would believe me if I complained that she kissed me this way. She would say something like “Kissed her? We were alone in that kitchenette for just a moment. She’s hallucinating. She’s fantasizing.” I know it sounds cruel, but what did you expect from her? She almost lived in the church. Her parents homeschooled her, so this was one of the only ways she had to meet people. They were way crueler than my parents about those things. What do you expect from people who called their daughter Grace of God?

Still, I thought she was pretty daring for the virgin Mary type. She was definitely my type.

We got along pretty well. At the beginning we just talked. Kind of a  letdown, since we already kissed and all, but still. This is how I imagined going on adult dates would look like. Well, I imagined them at starbucks like some sophisticated women drinking coffee and not in church events or in each other’s living rooms. But there wasn’t a Starbucks in our little town, and neither of us had a driver’s license, so we couldn’t just drive to the next town over. Oh, and the biggest snag is that I never even tried coffee. Oh, and the biggest-er snag was that my parents always called Starbucks “the whore of Babylon”.

No, we’re not Mormons, we do drink coffee, well… they do. My parents had this insane view that only adults are allowed to drink coffee. What is the age of adulthood? For my brother? Sixteen. For me? Twenty one. Which was some consolation, because under no circumstances would they ever have let me drink alcohol. Let me get back to the point!

We talked. I learned a little about her and she learned a little about me. We had a similar story, but Grace’s parents were definitely worse than mine. We had about the same hobbies, if you can call doing what your parents told you to do a hobby. Mostly, I felt like we were connecting. Like our souls were talking to each other while we chatted.

Then the day came. Grace was about to come for a sleepover. How naive were my parents? Two eighteen year olds have a sleepover? They still saw me as their little girl, so it seems like it wasn’t that strange.

So we talked until lights out and my mom walked in and told us it was time to sleep.

“Thanks, Mrs. A” Grace said, in her church voice. The light went off. We waited quietly, like international spies, noting the lights go off in every different room, and finally hearing the door to my parents room closing.

Grace was quiet for several moments. I felt my heart pumping, going a mile a minute. I was about to say something like the “coast is clear”, but I didn’t have the time, because Grace pounced on me like a predator. Even with her predatory approach her kisses weren’t forceful. She was very gentle. Her lips were soft and wet. She felt her way through my shirt and for the first time she touched my breast. Even through the shirt, I could feel my heart soaring. Every time her fingers caressed the edges of my areolas I had to stifle a moan.

A few moments later she started heavily petting me. She was massaging my breasts, squeezing, caressing, kneading. It was the first time I felt someone touching my nipples. It was godly. I even took the name in vain by mistake. “Mary”, she told me. My name is Mary. Did I mention that? “I want you to touch me”. She took her hand in mine and put it on her chest. I tried to imitate her, and even though I felt like I was doing a pretty graceless job at it, she moaned softly with every squeeze. The truth is, touching her was about as good for me as her touching me. Her breast, which was bigger than mine, felt, with a lack of better description, like heaven. Each breast felt soft, but fleshy. It made me want to bite them, or at least lick.

Grace went on top of me and put her leg down in a way that her thigh squeezed my groin. With all the stimulation, the kisses, the touching, mine and hers, I felt like I was about to reach an orgasm. Again, in my piety, I invoked the lord name, but this time, in this heavenly state, I just couldn’t stop. In a crescendo, I just started saying “oh God, oh God, oh God! Oh God! Oh God!...” louder and louder. This… piety was my bane, because mom seemed to have heard something and came to check on us.

She burst into the room, gave us one look, and started screaming for my dad. You’ve heard about those moms on TV that lifted a car, or wrestled a bear to help their toddlers? Well, my mom was experiencing one of these moments where she had to wrestle Grace aside to save me from Satan. The Satan in Grace’s lips, hands and breast.

She didn’t just push Grace aside, she literally threw her to the other side of the room. My wall still has an indentation where Grace hit her elbow. A moment later my entire house was in chaos. My big bro came out of his room, and my little bros, who were too young to understand what was happening, started crying. I don’t think I have to paint a picture.

You wouldn’t believe what happened next. This girl, this image of innocence, somehow convinced my parents I made her do it. Even though when mom caught her she was on top of me. I don’t remember the exact lines, but with the authenticity of a movie star giving their Oscar-winning performance, she spun a yarn about how I seduced her on some pretense. It was complicated, and my parents somehow ate it up.

Dad mumbled something about failing me, Grace’s parents came to pick her up, my parents apologized. Yes, they apologized for what I did. I think that in a parent’s eyes there’s no one guiltier than their own child.

That night ruined everything for me. I was almost pulled out of school. At church no one wanted to associate with me. I was going to go to community college in the next town over, the one with the Starbucks, but that dream was cancelled as well. My parents called me “The whore of Babylon”. they really did love that expression, huh? When I tried to explain that they were using it wrong my mom said that “disrespecting your parents is the path of sin” and my dad yelled “you chose to be a lesbian, and now you’re arguing with your mom?!”

So what now? I was nineteen, in my parents’ house, downloading lesbian porn while dad was at work and mom was at Walmart. I just wanted to see it. I just wanted to be able to understand that thing I had in me.

“So now you’re telling me I died of a brain aneurysm and I’m a loser who died a virgin? I thought being a virgin was normal before marriage. You know, you people in heaven could have helped with that, don’t you think? Try telling my parents to chill, or something?” Yes. I told the angel everything.

“You know what?” she said. “I was going to send you to heaven, but I have a better idea.”

“Not hell, right? I thought it was a sin to be a lesbian.”

“No. No one cares about that. It’s not like you downloaded winrar without paying for it, right?”

“I don’t even know what it is,” I said fearfully.

“It’s a compression software, you don’t know it, but your parents definitely downloaded it and never paid. Probably going to hell”

I just stared. “Are you serious?”

“No. I am not serious. Do you think we’ll send them to hell for that? Are you not on the internet? It’s an old joke”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“I’m not so thrilled about how they treated you and your brothers, though” she said while still browsing through my life story on her tablet. “We’ll see. Anyway, do you want to keep talking about your parents or start making important decisions.”

“Sorry, decisions. I think heaven is good. Why not heaven?”

“Don’t you think you deserve another chance? Maybe in a better place without crazy parents? Don’t you want to live?”

“When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“So let’s decide. I think we need to put you in a world where sex is much more casual, no? Only women or do you like men as well?

“Don’t like men, no.”

“So a world without men.”

“Oh… hmm… I mean, I don’t hate them. I liked my big bro, and I had a couple of male friends.”

“So you don’t care if there are men or not. That’s good. It opens up our possibilities.” She wrote down something on her tablet. “What do you like? Historical romances? Magic? Sci-fi? Fantasy races? Vampires? Before you ask, vampires don’t sparkle, and I wouldn’t even know why anyone would want those creeps.”

“What do you mean? Sparkle? They all sound good to me.”

“All? That doesn’t leave me with many options”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant any.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll get it all. I’m assuming you’re not up for a frozen world?”

“I’m from Arizona. We get panicked when it rains”

“You’re right. I’ll get you something else. Have you ever played video games? RPGs?”

“I know what it is… sort of. My parents were pretty controlling.”

“You know… classes, fighter, witch, thief, barbarian, cleric. What do you think? Which one would you choose?”

“That’s simple. Magic is from Satan, so I won’t be a witch. Stealing is a sin too, so not a thief. I don’t have the physique to be a barbarian, and I don’t want to become celibate, so I don’t want to be a cleric. So maybe a fighter?”

“Do you think I would let you become a witch if magic came from Satan? I? An angel? Ok. You know what? It’s fairly obvious that you don’t understand what I’m talking about, so we should do something simpler.

“A fighter is good, but I don’t want to just make you something generic.” The angel scratched her chin. “Remember this. The first thing you need to do when you wake up is open your status screen.”