Chapter 4: The Forbidden Experiment
The silence after that look was a vacuum. It sucked all the reasonable words right out of the room, leaving only the thick, ugly truth hanging between us.
Sabrina launched off the couch like it was electrified. My body moved with a violence I never possessed, all coiled athletic fury. “I can’t— I need to—” she stammered, not finishing the thought. She just stalked across the living room, my shoulders hunched, and slammed the bathroom door shut.
The lock clicked, a sound of finality.
I sat frozen, the cheap throw pillow digging into my lap. The warmth between my legs hadn’t subsided; it had merely changed, becoming a damp, insistent presence. The thong was now a wet, chafing line. Every tiny shift of my hips ground the seam against that new, terrifyingly sensitive topography. I clenched my thighs, a useless reflex that only intensified the pressure, sending a jolt of something that wasn’t pleasure, wasn’t pain, but a shocking, alien signal of aliveness from a place that had no right to exist.
From behind the door came a series of sounds that painted a clear, devastating picture.
A faucet squeaked on, then off. A frustrated, guttural grunt—my voice, but strained. The rustle of denim. Then nothing. A long, tense silence. Then a sharp, pained hiss. “Come on,” I heard her mutter, the words muffled by the door. “Just… work.”
There was a rhythmic shuffling, the creak of the floorboard near the sink. A shaky exhale. Another grunt, this one edged with effort and revulsion. The sounds were methodical, desperate, and utterly devoid of any kind of grace. It was the sound of someone operating unfamiliar, disliked machinery.
My stomach roiled. I knew what she was doing in there. She was trying to solve the problem, to manually calm the rebellion in my—her—nervous system. The clinical understanding did nothing to stop the hot wave of violation that washed over me. That was my body. Those were my hands.
A final, sharp intake of breath. A stifled curse. Then the heavy, relieved slump of weight against the bathroom wall.
The faucet ran again, longer this time. The toilet flushed.
When the door finally opened, the figure that emerged looked hollowed out. Sabrina’s face—my face—was the color of sour milk, a fine sheen of sweat on the forehead. Her eyes, my eyes, were wide and glassy, fixed on some middle distance of profound disillusionment. She didn’t look at me. She walked back to the couch on unsteady legs and dropped onto it, the springs groaning.
She stared at her hands—my hands—turning them over as if they were covered in something she couldn’t see but could feel. Her lips were pressed into a thin, bloodless line.
“Well,” she said, her voice a scraped-out husk. “That’s a thing.”
I couldn’t speak. The dampness in my underwear was cooling now, a clammy, shameful patch. My breasts felt heavy and tender in the constricting bra, each heartbeat a dull throb against the fabric.
“The goddamn… plumbing,” she continued, almost to herself. “It’s so… external. So messy. You just… grab it and it’s right there, and it’s…” She trailed off, finally lifting her gaze to meet mine. The disgust in her eyes was mirrored by the nausea in my gut. “I just jerked off. In your body. Because it wouldn’t stop… broadcasting.”
The word was so absurdly technical for what had happened. It broke the last seal on my own tension.
“It’s broadcasting here, too,” I whispered, the confession like shards of glass in my throat. I couldn’t say the words. I just gestured weakly toward my own lap, my face burning. The skirt felt impossibly short, the crop top a flimsy barrier. “It’s… wet.”
Sabrina blinked. A flicker of something that wasn’t quite sympathy, more like grim comradery, passed over her features. “Great. So we’re both hostages to the hardware.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. “This is a nightmare.”
The admission hung there, stark and undeniable. We weren’t just minds in jars. We were animals in each other’s skins, subject to every primal urge and hormonal tide.
“We need rules,” I said, the words firmer now. This was a systems problem. It required a protocol. “We can’t… react like that. We have to ignore it. Discipline.”
Sabrina let out a short, bitter laugh. “Discipline. Right. You try disciplining a random boner when you’re trying to remember if you flossed. It’s like having a needy, stupid pet attached to you that you have to… manage.” She shuddered. “And what about you? You’re just going to ‘discipline’ arousal when your whole… centre of gravity is different? When you’re walking around in this?” She gestured at me, at Sabrina’s body, with a kind of resentful awe.
“It’s not an excuse,” I said, but even I heard the weakness in it. The sensory barrage was constant, inescapable. The slight weight of the pink hair brushing my shoulders. The way my new tongue felt against my teeth—smaller, neater. The perpetual awareness of the empty space between my legs, a void where solidity should be. Every breath was a negotiation with the sports bra. Every step a reminder of the soft, jostling weight on my chest and the shift of my narrower hips.
“It’s not an excuse, it’s physiology,” Sabrina countered, a hint of her old defiant tone returning. “You can’t code your way out of endocrine systems, Justin. You’re swimming in a chemical soup you don’t have the instructions for. I’m…” She looked down at my body’s broader, hairier hands. “I’m running on a different operating system entirely. One that’s slower, and clunkier, and… hornier at all the wrong times.”
We sat in the wreckage of that truth. The hum of the city through the open window, the distant thwack of a golf ball, it all seemed part of a different, simpler world.
“So we acknowledge the problem,” I said, forcing myself back to logic. “We factor it in as a variable. A… a persistent glitch in the user experience. We work around it. But we keep working. The data is the only way out.”
Sabrina nodded slowly, finally seeming to grasp the necessity. “Fine. But ‘working around it’ means I need to know how to make this stop.” She pointed again at my lap. “And you… you’re going to have to deal with that.” Her gaze flicked to my body, and the unspoken, looming realities settled over me: menstruation, bathroom logistics, the relentless, vulnerable architecture of the body I now occupied.
The path forward wasn’t just through corrupted code. It was through this mortifying, intimate exchange of operating manuals. We had to become experts in each other’s flesh, in its weaknesses and its humiliating demands. The puzzle was no longer just on the screen. It was in the damp fabric against my skin, in the shaky breath she let out, in the terrifying, undeniable fact that our prisons were alive, and they were beginning to whisper their needs.