Chapter 11: Yeji
The silence in the bedroom was absolute, a thick blanket smothering the last echoes of the police raid. Only their breathing remained, ragged and syncopated in the dark. Lewis stared at the ceiling, the red duvet a pool of shadow around him. His skin still hummed from her, from the violent absolution of it. But in the quiet, other things surfaced. The look on Lia’s face. The sound of the cuffs.
Yeji lay beside him, a sleek line of heat, tracing idle patterns on his chest with a fingernail. She could feel the tension coiling back into him. The doubt. It was boring.
“Penny for them,” she murmured, her voice smoke.
He didn’t answer for a long moment. “It doesn’t make sense,” he finally said.
“What doesn’t?”
“Why she’d just… snap like that. On you. Out of nowhere.”
Yeji went still. The idle tracing stopped. She propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at him. The blue police light from outside was gone, leaving only the faint glow from the digital clock. It painted her face in angles of pale green. Not the vibrant emerald of her full form, but a spectral, subcutaneous hint. A reminder.
“You’re thinking about her,” Yeji stated. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m thinking about the facts.”
“The fact is she’s a monster,” Yeji said, her voice cooling. “The fact is she was going to kill me. Would that make more sense to you? If you’d walked in and found my body instead?”
He flinched. “No. Of course not.”
“Then stop.” She laid her head back on his chest, but the mood had cracked. The victory was slipping. She could feel him drifting back to that place of pathetic sympathy. It was intolerable.
After a minute, he spoke again, his voice different. Thicker. “Yeji?”
“Hmm?”
“Could you… I mean, would you… give me that treatment?”
She smiled into the darkness. “What treatment, baby? The one where I save your life?”
“No. The other one. The one from before.”
She lifted her head again, slow, deliberate. “I’m not following.”
He turned to look at her. His eyes were wide, pupils black in the low light. There was a hunger there, but it was tangled up with something desperate, something needing to be erased. “You know. What you did… when you changed. For me.”
A slow, understanding curl touched her lips. “Oh,” she breathed, the sound rich with promise. “That treatment. You’re getting freaky, Lewis. I like it.”
She rolled on top of him, straddling his hips, her hands pressing his shoulders into the mattress. She leaned down, her lips brushing his ear. Her whisper was a visceral thing, a vibration he felt in his bones. “Mommy gets what she wants. Remember that.”
She began to breathe deeply, a focused, rhythmic intake. The faint green hue under her skin deepened, spreading like spilled ink. A low rumble started in her chest, a purr that shook the bed frame.
He watched, rapt, as the transformation claimed her. It wasn’t a blast of light or a scream of pain. It was an inevitable swelling, a rising tide of power.
Her shoulders broadened first, the delicate bones expanding, pushing against the seams of her torn white designer shirt. The pristine cotton, already damaged, gave a soft pop as a seam along her shoulder split. Then another. The fabric strained, the weave screaming as her back and arms swelled beneath it. The shirt became a canvas of tension, every thread defined, until with a series of crisp, tearing sounds, it gave way. Ruptured sleeves slid down her thickening biceps. The back split open like a peeled fruit, revealing the powerful, sculpted landscape of her emerging form.
She arched her back, a groan of pleasure escaping her as her chest swelled. The remains of the shirt’s front, caught on her now-massive breasts, strained for a second before the buttons shot across the room like little plastic bullets. The fabric fell away, useless.
Her leggings were next. The black material stretched, going shiny and thin over her expanding thighs and calves before succumbing with a long, sighing rip. She kicked the shredded remnants off her feet.
In less than a minute, it was done. The Yeji he knew was gone, replaced by seven feet of solid, dominant verdant muscle. She loomed over him, blotting out the ceiling, her heat radiating like a sun. The record player in the corner, forgotten until now, picked that moment to reach the end of the album. The needle lifted with a soft click, settled back at the beginning, and the first notes of the same jazzy track started again. A loop. A sealed world.
She looked down at him, her eyes gleaming with possessive amusement. “Better?”
He could only nod, his throat tight.
“Good.”
She shifted her weight, a deliberate, crushing movement, and then lowered herself. She didn’t kiss him. She took his face in her two massive hands, tilted it up, and pressed it into the hot, soft valley of her chest. He was enveloped, smothered in her scent and her overwhelming presence. It was a total assertion. A quiet, physical declaration that there was no space here for anything but her.
Then she began to move.
It was nothing like before. This was not a consolidation or a performance. This was a claiming, slow and absolute. She used him with a lazy, devastating rhythm, each movement a deep, rolling wave that left him gasping, his hands scrambling for purchase on the vast slope of her back. The bed protested, the carved wood frame groaning in time. The red duvest was a riot beneath them.
She rode him until his thoughts were sand, until the memory of police lights and his girlfriend’s screams were just distant, meaningless noise. She rode him until the only truth was the ache in his muscles and the crushing, glorious weight of her.
When she finally stilled, it was abrupt. She stayed where she was, planted on him, listening to his frantic, sobbing breaths. She ran a hand, now large enough to cradle his entire skull, through his sweat-soaked hair.
“See?” she whispered, her voice a landslide in the quiet. “No more thoughts.”
He was empty. Spent. Purged.
She finally rolled off, the mattress rising with relief as her weight left it. She shrank back to her normal size in a smooth, silent contraction, the green fading like a forgotten dream. She pulled the red duvet over them both. The record played on, the same saxophone solo beginning again for the third time.
Lewis lay on his back, staring at the dark ceiling. He felt scraped clean. Hollowed out. The guilt, the doubt, the fear—they were gone. For now.
Yeji curled into his side, a perfect, warm curve. She listened to his breathing even out, a smile touching her lips. He was so beautifully broken. So perfectly hers.
Outside, in the living room wreckage, a single piece of broken glass, caught in a draft from the shattered window, trembled and fell from a splintered shelf. It hit the floor with a tiny, clear ping.
Neither of them heard it.