Chapter 2: First Temptation
The walk home was a nightmare painted in the neon glow of streetlights and the soft, horrified sounds she made beside me. I kept my jacket wrapped tight around her shoulders, hiding the new curves from the world, but it did nothing to muffle the tiny, whimpering moans that escaped her every few steps. Each one was a nail in my conscience.
“Just keep walking,” I muttered, more to myself than to her. My arm was around her, feeling the unfamiliar delicacy of her frame, the way she leaned into me not for comfort, but with a seeking, needy pressure.
“Alex,” she breathed, the word warm against my neck. It was Bear’s voice, strained through a new instrument. “I’m… it feels so…”
“Don’t,” I said, my throat tight.
We didn’t speak in the elevator. She stared at our reflection in the brass doors, her new face pale under the fluorescent light. Her hand—small, with neat nails—reached up and touched the glass, tracing the outline of her bangs, her full lips. A tear welled in the corner of her eye, but even that seemed to trigger something else. Her breathing hitched, becoming shallower, and a blush spread down her neck, disappearing into the collar of my jacket.
My apartment welcomed us with its familiar silence and its smell of lost things—cinnamon from a forgotten candle, the ghost of old intimacy, my own lonely sweat. I flipped on the floor lamp, its amber light doing little to dispel the shadows or the reality of what stood in my living room.
She shrugged off my jacket, letting it fall to the floor. She stood there in the soft sweater and leggings, her body a surreal sculpture in the dim light. Her arms hung limp at her sides for a moment, then her hands came up, smoothing down her own stomach, over her hips, as if mapping foreign territory. The gesture was clinical, horrified. Then her fingertips brushed the outside of her thigh, and a full-body shiver racked her. Her eyes, wide and lost, snapped to mine.
“What did you do?” she asked again, Bear’s bluntness cutting through the panic. But the sentence ended in a soft gasp as her own hands stilled on her hips, pressing in.
“I didn’t mean this,” I said, the words pathetic. “It was a stupid stick in a joke shop. I just…”
“You wished,” she interrupted, understanding dawning with a fresh wave of terror. “For what? What did you ask for?”
I couldn’t say it. I looked away, towards the half-empty bottle on the coffee table, the box of Elara’s things.
Her silence drew my gaze back. The internal war was playing out across her features. The fear in her eyes was being slowly, inexorably, smothered by something else. A blank, placid warmth was rising to the surface, like oil on water. Her shoulders relaxed from their defensive hunch. A slow, deliberate smile touched her lips, not reaching the terror still flickering in the depths of her hazel irises.
“You were lonely,” she said, her voice dropping to a husky, intentional register. It was a statement, not a question. She took a step toward me. Her walk was different now—a subtle, hypnotic sway she couldn’t possibly have learned in the last twenty minutes. “You wanted… company.”
“Bear, stop,” I said, backing up until my calves hit the couch.
The name made her flinch. The placid expression fractured. “Don’t call me that,” she whispered, the fear back, raw and vicious. “That’s not… I’m not…”
Then, as if a switch had been thrown, the fear dissolved. Her expression smoothed into one of open, eager submission. She closed the distance between us. “You can call me whatever you want, Alex.” The new name, ‘Bindi’, appeared in my mind like a whisper from the stick itself. She said it aloud, testing it. “Bindi. If you like it.”
She knelt.
Just like that. On my worn rug, between the coffee table and the couch, her hands resting on her thighs. She looked up at me, and the conflict was still there, but it was distant now, buried under a rising tide of single-purpose desire. The real Bear was screaming somewhere deep inside, but the walls were getting thicker.
“No,” I managed. “Get up.”
She didn’t. She leaned forward, her hands moving to the buckle of my belt. Her movements were clumsy, earnest. Not skilled, but desperately willing. The flicker in her eyes was pure, undiluted humiliation, but her fingers kept working.
“Stop it,” I said, but my voice had no force. I was paralyzed, watching my best friend’s hands—smaller, softer—fumble with my jeans. The part of me that was raw and aching from weeks of rejection, the part that had made the wish, was waking up, coiling tight in my gut. It was grotesque. It was electric.
The zipper sounded obscenely loud. She looked up at me for permission, her innocent eyes belying the act. A tear finally spilled over, tracking through the blush on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away.
I should have pushed her away. I should have screamed. I did nothing.
Her hand touched me, and I flinched. Her touch was cool, tentative. Then she lowered her head.
The first contact was a shock of wet heat. A low, broken sound vibrated against me—a moan that was equal parts pleasure, shame, and despair. Her eyes were squeezed shut. She tried to pull back, a gag reflex seizing her new throat, but an invisible compulsion drove her forward again, deeper.
I looked down, my hand fisting in my own hair. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, or maybe in internal war. Her blunt bangs stuck to her damp forehead. She was trying, with a frantic, submissive zeal, to please. To be what I’d asked for. Every hesitant movement, every choked sound, was a brutal testament to the wish’s precision. It was everything my lonely, bitter id had craved: complete devotion, physical availability, no questions, no demands.
Except the only real question was there in the occasional, wild flash of her opened eyes, moments when the fog cleared and Bear looked out, desperate and betrayed, before the drowning wave of Bindi’s programming pulled her back under. In those flashes, I saw my best friend. In the long moments between, I felt only a selfish, rising tide of pleasure, so intense it felt like grief.
My knees trembled. My breath came in short gasps. The guilt was a solid, cold stone in my chest, but it was being heated, melted, by the visceral reality of her mouth, her tongue, the helpless, eager noises she made. I was using him. I was destroying him. And my body, traitorous and hungry, didn’t care.
One of my hands moved of its own volition, settling on the back of her head. Not guiding, just resting. Feeling the softness of her brunette hair.
At the touch, a shudder of pure, victorious delight went through her. She took me deeper, her throat working, a tear finally dropping from her chin onto my jeans. The conflict in her eyes finally, completely, vanished. Swallowed whole. Only Bindi remained, blissful in her purpose, serving the wish.
And as I fell over the edge, a strangled curse dying on my lips, the only thing I could see was the look of perfect, submissive satisfaction on the face that used to belong to my best friend.