The second shittiest feeling he ever experienced was waking up in a stranger's house with no recollection of how he got there. The first shittiest feeling hit a few moments later when he realized that the inside of his head had been taking over by a boisterous chain-gang rhythmically going about their duty of smashing debris inside his skull.

There was a lot to be said for the rockstar lifestyle, but the morning after never seemed to make it into any of the biographical material – a great shame, as far as he was concerned, because that depressed state of semi-comatose always seemed to last much longer than the actual inebriated euphoria that got him there in the first place.

He turned sleepily and looked to his companion from the night before. She was sprawled out next to him, face down in the pillow. He vaguely remembered a drunken discussion with a lovely brunette about her arts degree and her dad's vintage vinyl collection (from which she had acquired her eclectic music taste) before some sloppy, but not altogether un-enjoyable, intoxicated sex.

He had discovered his winning strategy at an early age, and stuck with it through the years. The old adage held that hotter girls would be worse in the sack than their less physically attractive counterparts, thus levelling the playing ground and giving those languishing at the top of the bell curve a chance to distinguish themselves in bed. In truth, he found little difference. The age of porn and body issues had turned nearly every intimate encounter into a bizarre re-enactment of an erotic novel written in haste by a 13-year-old boy. He yearned for days of yore, when the orgasms were real and neither party felt obligated to put on an Oscar-winning performance for the other. It seemed sad to him, but in a world growing more fake and distant by the minute, he was a romantic dinosaur who could not hope to evolve to keep up with this new, strange sexual ecosystem.

The pounding in his head intensified and he eased himself off the bed, pulling on his clothes and strolling into the hallway past a sleeping hipster. He made his way to where he thought he remembered the bathroom being and rifled through the medicine cabinet. Party etiquette was thankfully not quite dead, and he located some store own-brand aspirin, gulping it down with tap water.

He realized that the pounding wasn't coming from his head.

He peeked out into the hallway, through towards the glass-panelled front door, behind which an ominous dark blob loomed and swayed in rhythm with the thumping. He moved towards it and undid the latch. The door swung open and the blob revealed itself to be a beefy and peeved-looking individual.

“Awright, mate?” he offered. The stranger ignored him, pushing past him and making a beeline for the bedroom. Alan shrugged and followed cautiously, a few steps behind.

The stranger spied the messed-up sheets and the sleeping girl.

“What the fuck are you doing-..” he started and pulled back the covers to reveal the lovely brunette, in all her lovely nakedness, “What the FUCK?!”

She blinked up at him, roused by his impassioned advance and offered a weak and disorientated smile.

“..Hey.” she said meekly.

Alan watched the scene from a respectable distance, while his mind raced like a VHS tape running in reverse through the events of the night before. He vaguely recalled her mouth forming words after he had gone down on her, when she pulled him up by the shoulders and pulled off his t-shirt.

 “I have a boyfriend, you know,” she had said, or something along those lines, but she was smiling at him all the same. This would not usually be territory he preferred to get entangled in – apart from very notable cases – but by this time, the vodka had allowed the primal lizard brain to take over and to ignore the pleas of common sense as it tried to weakly protest in the name of self-preservation. He remembered hovering there for a few moments. She had made a sour face, quickly realizing that mentioning significant others after he had eaten her out so voraciously was likely to be a turn-off. She had leaned in towards him and made amends - “I'm kidding! Come and fuck me.” - and he had no choice but to oblige.

Turns out she wasn't kidding, by the looks of it. The beefy cunt certainly looked like he'd be her type. Pleasing aesthetics (if you liked your men to look like gorillas), the strong eyebrow ridge of someone with only a fleeting grasp of the English language. Alan grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair as he watched the sleeping hipster stir just in time for the commotion to kick off. The wise thing to do in such a situation, he knew, would be to get out of the way before Popeye put two and two together, but some morbid curiosity – and a share of the guilt, should anything happen to the girl - kept him fixated on the scene.

“Fuckin' slut!” the stranger yelled, pushing one of his knees down onto the bed. The girl raised her hands, still smiling, nervously. “Baby. Baby! It's not what you think!”

“Hey man, just relax, yo,” the hipster piped in, laying a soothing hand on the angry boyfriend's shoulder. The man jerked round, slapping the hand out the way.

“This guy?!” he looked the hipster boy straight in the eye, towering over him like an angry, vascular troll. The wee man retracted his hands in a show of peace, but it was too late. The haymaker came flying out of nowhere and knocked him back to the wall.

Alan took a step back, into the hallway, before he encountered the same fate.

“If you EVER fuckin' touch her again,” he heard a voice say in the direction of what was most likely an unconscious body, “I'll fuckin' destroy you, mate.”