Once again I was living in the big sprawling House, the one with many hundreds of randomly-connected rooms and lots of housemates I didn't know real well. We were throwing a House Party. Actually, it seemed to me more like a carnival of some sort-- for all intents and purposes the public was "invited" to come in and pay some sort of admission and hang out at the party.
There was a long hall in the House, like a giant throne-room with columns down both sides. It had a long shallow pool that ran down the length of its center. By shallow, I mean a foot or two deep, and by long I mean really long: hundreds of feet, extending so far that people at opposite ends were little specks to each other.
Some of the housemates had figured out a way-- it wasn't clear to me how it worked, it was either some sort of trick of water flow or some sort of air-induced tension-- to make the surface of the long pool really strong and really slippery, like ice without being ice. There was a slide at one end so that people could get up a good head of speed and shoot out onto the pool's surface and sort of hydroplane across it, spinning and bouncing off the edges all the way down to the other end where they'd finally slow down enough to settle into the water. I think it might have been an air-related trick because seeing people shoot across it reminded me of air hockey.
Anyway, I was too busy making sure people didn't wander off into unapproved parts of the house to spend any time playing on the water-skater, but eventually things wound down and most of the carnival-attendees had left and the rest had gone outside to the big pool. Most of the lights were off and the House was mostly dark and I had the long pool to myself so I could go skate on it awhile. But there was some sort of confusion, I had some trouble getting the machine set up to make the pool skateable, and I got all wet up to my waist in the pool.
So I headed back to my room to change, feeling sort of irritated, when I heard noises from my room. One of my housemates (not a real person, though he had the name of an actual former housemate and he did sort of look like a different person I know that I've never lived with) was in my room with a girl, apparently having sex with her. I opened the door and saw them squeezed onto my little bed, doing it, for just a moment, then I closed the door again instinctively as they sort of tried to act like nothing was going on.
"We'll be, uh, out in a minute!" my housemate shouted. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I shouted back through the door. "Get the hell out of my room?" I could tell they were trying to screw faster. Really, I should have just opened the door and thrown them out of my room, done or not done, but I was too nice to do that. I took off my wet pants because they were really starting to bother me, but then I realized I hadn't brought my dry sweatpants out-- they were still in the room. "Will you finish already?" I shouted again, and then finally I had enough, so I reached to open the door, but just then the door flew open and there was my housemate tucking his shirt back into his pants. He was a big sort of Ren-Faire-looking fellow. He pushed out past me. "Sorry about that," he said, completely unapologetically.
The girl was still in my little room. She was adjusting her little red dress and I suddenly realized what the story was: she was homeless, had wandered into the party off the street, and my housemate had told her yeah she could stay in "his" house if she had sex with him-- as if somehow he spoke for the House. But not wanting to let some homeless street girl know where his room and his stuff was, in case he fell asleep after the sex and she stole stuff and ran off, he chose to use my room instead. Asshole.
So anyway, the girl looked at me (still wearing no pants, I guess) expectantly and I realized that she was now under the impression that it wasn't my housemate who had authority to let her stay or not-stay for sex, it was me. She was actually fairly cute for a mid-20's girl trying to look 19, and I was tempted for just a moment but then I thought, what, are you kidding me? Not a chance.
"Look," I said, "I'm tired and wet and cranky and you need to go away now. I'm not having sex with you." She said, "That's okay, we can just sleep." I said, "I don't even know how the two of you managed to fit onto my bed to have sex. It definitely doesn't have room for two to sleep. No way. Go somewhere else." She looked like she was going to cry, so I gave her instructions on how to find my housemate's room, the one she had just been with. "He's got a big bed. You'll like it." She looked even more distraught: "He hates me and I didn't like him at all and I want to stay away from him." Aw, christ, I was starting to get really mad. So finally I told her to find some spare blankets out of one of the thousands of linen closets throughout the House, and just make a bedroll for herself in a corner of one of the many unused dining rooms. The House always had extra unused space.
That seemed good enough for her for the moment so she left. As soon as she was gone, I reached down and locked the secret latch on my door. One of the rules of the House was that no doors were supposed to lock within it, but I'd made a secret lock nobody else knew how to activate. I knew if I didn't lock the door, the girl would be back in the middle of the night-- maybe to try to crawl back into bed with me, maybe to steal some stuff, maybe just to talk my ear off because I was the only person in the House who had been at all nice to her.
Screw that. I put on dry pants and went to bed.