Chapter 2: A Little Larger Than Average
The silence stretched, thick and elastic, pulled taut between Daisy’s stunned calculation and Gemma’s paralyzed dread. The morning light felt accusatory, highlighting every dust mote, every threadbare seam of the blanket, the undeniable new reality of Gemma’s body.
Daisy’s hand didn’t move from Gemma’s hip. Her fingers weren’t stroking anymore; they were anchored, a warm brand. “Holy shit,” she finally breathed, the words barely a whisper. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, traveled the length of Gemma’s torso and back up. “It’s… it just kept it.”
“I can see that,” Gemma said, her voice flat. The sarcasm was a reflex, a life raft. Inside, she was free-falling.
“No, I mean, it permanently kept it. The gains. From last night.” Daisy finally let go, pushing herself up on one elbow. The blanket slipped, exposing the gentle swell of her breasts. She didn’t seem to notice. Her entire focus was forensic. “This isn’t just a temporary state. This is progression.”
Gemma closed her eyes. “Please stop saying ‘gains’. It makes it sound like I’ve been lifting weights at a very specific, grotesque gym.”
“But that’s what it is!” Daisy’s excitement was starting to bleed through the shock. She was a scientist with a miraculous, horrifying specimen. “Each time you… finished… it added a little. And then it didn’t reset. The baseline shifted. Permanently.” She chewed her lip. “We need to measure it.”
“We are not measuring it.”
“We have to! For the data! How else do we track the rate of change?” Daisy was already rolling out of bed, her nakedness a casual afterthought. She padded over to their cluttered desk, rummaging through a cup of pens and highlighters. “Where’s that ruler from the failed shelving project?”
Gemma sat up, pulling the blanket tightly around her shoulders like a shield. The movement made her acutely aware of the new weight between her legs, the way it shifted against her thigh. It felt alien and yet intimately, terrifyingly part of her. “Daisy, this isn’t a fun experiment. This is my life. My body is… mutating. Based on… on what you did.” The last part came out quieter, tangled with a confusion that wasn’t entirely accusation.
Daisy paused, a dusty, 12-inch plastic ruler in her hand. She looked back at Gemma, and for the first time, Gemma saw a flicker of something else in her eyes—not just fascination, but a dawning, shared responsibility. “I know,” Daisy said, her voice softer. “And I’m in it with you. But pretending it isn’t happening won’t make it stop. We have to understand it.” She approached the bed, ruler in hand, but didn’t reach for the blanket. “Please?”
The word did it. That simple, earnest ‘please’. Gemma hated it. She also needed it. She was adrift, and Daisy, for all her chaotic, amoral curiosity, was the only shore in sight.
With a sigh that came from the soles of her feet, Gemma let the blanket fall away from her lower half. The cool air raised goosebumps on her skin. She didn’t look down. She stared at the sticky note on the mirror—DO NOT TOUCH THE GROWTH—and let out a hysterical little snort. “Too late for that.”
Daisy didn’t laugh. She knelt, her expression utterly serious. She handled the ruler with a clinical precision that was almost a relief. The cold plastic against Gemma’s skin made her flinch.
“Just relax,” Daisy murmured, more to herself. She positioned the ruler, squinting. “Flaccid length… approximately five and a quarter inches.” She looked up, meeting Gemma’s eyes. “For context, the average is about three and a half. You’re already… notably ahead of the curve.”
“Lucky me,” Gemma deadpanned.
“Circumference is trickier without a tape measure. We’ll need to get one.” Daisy sat back on her heels, tapping the ruler against her palm. “Okay. So. Hypothesis: The growth is tied to orgasm. Specifically, orgasms facilitated by… external stimulation.” She paused. “We need to establish a control.”
Gemma’s stomach dropped. “A control.”
“Yes. We need to see if it happens if you… you know. DIY.”
“I know what it means, Daisy.” Gemma wrapped her arms around herself. The thought was mortifying. Touching herself there, on purpose, with Daisy likely taking notes a few feet away. But the logic was inescapable. Was it any act of climax? Or was it something about Daisy’s involvement? “Later,” she said, the word final. “I need a shower. I feel… sticky. And weird.”
“Okay,” Daisy said, surprisingly agreeable. She stood up, tossing the ruler onto her own rumpled bed. “But we’re keeping a log. Starting now.” She grabbed a fresh notebook from her stack of art history texts, the one with a splatter-paint cover. On the first page, in her looping script, she wrote: Project G. Day 1 (Post-Discovery). Initial Flaccid Measurement: 5.25". Hypothesis: Growth correlates to orgasmic event. Control test pending.
Gemma watched her, a strange ache in her chest. Her life was now a project in a splatter-paint notebook.
The shower in the communal bathroom was a nightmare of paranoia. Gemma waited until the hall was empty, hustling from her room wrapped in a bathrobe that felt absurdly inadequate. Every splash from another stall, every creak of the pipes, made her heart jump. She kept her back to the wall, showering faster than she ever had, scrubbing away the physical evidence of the night while the new, permanent evidence swayed gently between her legs. Soaping it was a psychological ordeal. The skin was sensitive, the sensation entirely its own category of strange. She was both washing a part of her body and handling a foreign object.
Getting dressed was worse. Her cotton shorts from yesterday were impossible. The fabric strained, outlining everything in blatant, obscene detail. She dug through her drawer, finding a pair of old, soft sweatpants. They were baggy, a campus cliché, but they provided a merciful drape. Even then, she was hyper-aware of the loose fabric brushing against her, of a new, gentle heaviness in her stride.
When she returned to the room, Daisy was dressed in a crop top and jeans, the notebook open on her knees. She’d ordered a giant coffee and placed a second cup on Gemma’s desk. “Fuel,” she said, not looking up from where she was sketching a rudimentary, surprisingly accurate diagram.
Gemma took the coffee, sipping the bitter, scalding liquid. It grounded her. “You’re really going full Da Vinci on this, huh?”
“Visual data is important,” Daisy said, finally looking up. Her gaze flickered down to Gemma’s sweatpants and back up, a question in her eyes.
“Sweatpants. It’s a sweatpants day. Possibly a sweatpants life.”
“Fair.” Daisy took a deep breath. “Okay. We need to talk about the practicalities.”
“Beyond the obvious ‘my body is cursed’ practicalities?”
“Yes. Like… what happens in our lit seminar later? What happens at the gym? What happens if you meet a cute guy at the library and he asks you back to his place?” Daisy’s questions were rapid-fire, pragmatic. “The world isn’t this room. It has expectations. And you currently defy all of them.”
Gemma sank into her desk chair, the weight of it pressing down on her. She’d been trying not to think about any of that, about the colossal effort of just existing in public. “I’ll just… not go to the gym. Ever again. And the cute guy scenario is so laughably off the table it’s in another universe.”
“But class?” Daisy pressed. “You can’t drop out of life, Gem.”
“I can try,” Gemma muttered, but she knew Daisy was right. She had a paper on Beowulf due Thursday. Life, absurdly, was demanding she continue.
The morning passed in a strange, liminal space. Gemma tried to read, but the words swam on the page. Her focus was entirely internal, a constant, low-level monitoring of her own body. Daisy busied herself with her own work, but Gemma could feel her roommate’s attention like a physical warmth, always radiating in her direction.
It was after a silent, awkward lunch of cold pizza that Daisy closed her textbook with a definitive thud. “We have to do the control.”
Gemma’s head snapped up. “Now?”
“The sooner we have more data, the sooner we can maybe, I don’t know, predict something. Get ahead of this.” Daisy’s voice was gentle but firm. “You don’t have to if you really don’t want to. But I think you need to know.”
She did need to know. That was the awful truth. The not-knowing was a bigger terror than the knowing. Gemma set her half-eaten pizza crust down. Her mouth was dry. “How… how do you want to…”
“I’ll just be over here,” Daisy said, moving to sit on her own bed, turning to face the wall. She picked up her phone, pulling up a podcast. “You have privacy. Just… when it’s over, call me. I’ll measure.”
The absurdity was sublime. Her roommate was giving her privacy to masturbate for science. Gemma wanted to laugh until she cried. Instead, she just nodded, a stiff jerk of her head.
Daisy put in her earbuds, a clear signal.
Gemma lay back on her own bed, staring at the underside of Daisy’s bunk. Her heart was a frantic drum. This felt a thousand times more exposing than the night before, when Daisy’s hands had been the instigators. This was all on her.
She slid her hand into the waistband of her sweatpants, then her underwear. Her touch was clinical at first, just making contact. It was warm. Firm. Her own.
Thinking about the TA from the film course felt forced, ridiculous. Her mind kept skittering back to the sensations of the night before—the sharp, shocking pulses of pleasure, Daisy’s focused expression, the feeling of being both powerful and utterly powerless. That memory, tangled and confusing, was what did it. A slow heat began to kindle, unrelated to fantasy, rooted entirely in recent, visceral history.
It responded quickly, filling her hand, the familiar coil tightening in her gut. It was easier this time, a path already walked. She moved her hand, mimicking the rhythm Daisy had used, and the response was immediate and intense. It was different, though. A solo performance lacked the terrifying, electric charge of being observed, of being used, but it was still profoundly effective. The climb was swift, a straight line upwards.
When she came, it was a quiet, contained event. A sharp intake of breath, her back arching slightly off the mattress, a warm rush of release that left her tingling. It was good. It was, objectively, a very powerful orgasm. And it felt strangely lonely.
She lay there for a moment, breathing hard. Then, with a sense of deep
She lay there for a moment, breathing hard. Then, with a sense of deep resignation, she pulled her hand free and cleared her throat. “Okay.”
Daisy didn’t turn around immediately. She finished the sentence she was typing into her phone notes, then slowly pulled out an earbud. The podcast’s tinny murmur cut off. “Done?”
“Yes.” Gemma’s voice was hoarse.
Daisy turned. Her eyes went straight to Gemma’s sweatpants, zeroing in on the obvious, damp patch. She didn’t comment. She just picked up the ruler and knelt again. Her movements were careful, deliberate. The plastic was cool. Gemma watched the ceiling, trying to divorce herself from the sensation.
“Flaccid post-orgasm,” Daisy murmured, her brow furrowed in concentration. She adjusted the ruler slightly. “Five and seven-eighths.” She looked up, her expression unreadable.“Growth confirmed. Approximately five-eighths of an inch from a single, self-induced event.”
“So it’s me,” Gemma said flatly. “It’s just… me.”
“The variable is orgasm,” Daisy corrected, standing up. She didn’t move away. She hovered by the bed, the ruler dangling from her fingers. “The source appears to be irrelevant. Which means…” She trailed off, her gaze lingering.
“Which means what?”
“It means you have a choice. And a problem.” Daisy finally broke her stare, walking to the notebook on her desk. She wrote down the new measurement. “The problem is your libido. I can see it. You’re vibrating. The choice is whether you act on it.”
Gemma pulled the blanket over herself, a pathetic barricade. “I don’t want it to get bigger.”
“But you want,” Daisy said softly. It wasn’t a question.
The week that followed was a study in exquisite tension. Gemma’s body had become a traitorous echo chamber of want. It hummed in the background of her Lit seminar, a persistent bass note beneath the professor’s droning analysis of The Waste Land. It flared when she bent to pick up a dropped pen, the brush of fabric a shocking reminder. It was a constant, low-grade fever.
And Daisy… Daisy found reasons.
It started subtly. A brush of her hand against Gemma’s hip as she squeezed past her to get to the mini-fridge. “Oops, tight fit.”
Then it became brazen. They’d be watching a movie on Daisy’s laptop, sitting side-by-side on her bed, and Daisy’s hand would just… land on Gemma’s thigh, fingertips drumming absentmindedly, creeping incrementally inward until Gemma would jerk away with a hissed, “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” Daisy would say, not sounding sorry at all. “Just fidgety.”
The worst was the measuring. It became a nightly ritual, a grotesque bedtime story. Daisy would approach with the ruler, her face a mask of clinical interest that Gemma didn’t believe for a second. Her touches during these sessions were different. Not clinical.Deliberate. She would position the ruler with one hand, her other resting lightly on Gemma’s stomach, her thumb stroking the faint trail of blonde hair below her navel.
“Six and a quarter,” she’d announce one night, her breath warm against Gemma’s skin.
“Six and a half,” she’d whisper two nights later, her thumb pausing in its circuit.
Gemma stopped looking at the numbers. She stared at the neon glow stars on the ceiling instead, biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper. The urge to touch herself was a physical ache, a heavy, throbbing pulse that seemed to sync with her heartbeat. She’d wake in the grey dawn, aching and hard, the sheets tented. She’d lie perfectly still, rigid with denial, waiting for it to subside. She took cold showers. She did jumping jacks. She re-read the densest passages of Kant.
It was a losing battle. Her body was rewriting its own rules. Every accidental graze from Daisy was a lit match tossed on kindling. By the fourth day, just the sound of Daisy rustling in her bedsheets was enough to make her swell against the confinement of her pajama pants.
She was constantly, painfully hard. It was distracting in class, obvious in the loose sweatpants she now lived in. She developed a hunched, careful walk.
“You look like you’ve got a stick up your ass,” Daisy observed cheerfully over cereal on the fifth morning.
“I wish,” Gemma grumbled. “It’d be simpler.”
On the sixth night, the ritual changed. Daisy knelt with the ruler, but her hand didn’t go to Gemma’s stomach. It wrapped around her instead, bare skin on skin, bypassing the instrument entirely. She gave a slow, testing pump.
Gemma gasped, her hips bucking off the mattress entirely. “Daisy—the data—”
“I’m getting a baseline for circumference,” Daisy murmured, her voice thick. Her thumb rubbed over the tip, smearing the bead of moisture that had already gathered there. “It feels… significantly thicker.”
She didn’t use the ruler that night. She used her hand, her fist, her wandering, curious fingers that explored the new heft and weight until Gemma was a shuddering, desperate mess, begging into her own pillow. Daisy didn’t let her finish. She stopped right at the edge, leaving Gemma coiled so tight she saw stars.
“Control,” Daisy breathed into her ear, releasing her. “Remember?”
The seventh day was a special kind of hell. The denial had sharpened every sensation into a weapon. The seam of her jeans was torture. The warm blast of air from the library vent felt like a caress. She caught her reflection in a dark computer screen and didn’t recognize the flush on her own cheeks, the dark hunger in her own eyes.
That night, Daisy didn’t even pretend with the ruler. She just crawled onto Gemma’s bed, a look of pure, predatory fascination on her face. “I think it’s time for the final measurement of the week.”
Her touch was no longer inquisitive. It was possessive. She handled Gemma with a firm, knowing confidence that made Gemma’s theory about control seem laughable. This wasn’t an experiment anymore. This was a game, and Daisy was deciding the rules.
Gemma was too far gone to protest. A week of denial had sandblasted away her resistance. She watched, dizzy and rapt, as Daisy finally picked up the plastic ruler.
The end of it pressed into the skin above her pubic bone. Daisy’s other hand cradled her, holding her straight. The room was silent except for their ragged breathing. Daisy’s eyes tracked the length, her lips moving silently as she calculated.
She looked up, her eyes wide in the dim light. “Seven and an eighth.”
The number hung in the air between them. A little over seven inches. A monument to a week of agony and temptation.
Daisy didn’t remove her hand. She leaned down, her lips almost brushing Gemma’s ear. “Your control is impressive,” she whispered. “But look what I did to you anyway.”
She kissed her then, hard and claiming, while her hand began to move with a purpose that promised no more stopping, no more data points, just a long, shuddering conclusion to the longest week of Gemma’s life. Gemma’s hands finally moved, tangling in Daisy’s hair, pulling her closer, surrendering to the frantic, hungry truth her body had known for days. The ruler clattered, forgotten, to the floor.
The world narrowed to Daisy’s mouth, her hands, the shuddering release that tore through Gemma in wave after wave of blinding white static. It was less pleasure than obliteration, a violent rewriting of her nervous system. She clung to Daisy’s shoulders, fingers digging into skin, as the last contractions faded into a deep, full-body tremble.
Afterward, they lay tangled in the dark, the only sound their slowing breath. Daisy traced idle patterns on Gemma’s stomach. “Seven and an eighth,” she murmured again, as if marveling at a astronomical discovery.
“Stop quoting the stats,” Gemma whispered, her voice ragged. The emptiness she felt wasn’t peaceful. It was cavernous, echoing with what she’d just allowed, what she’d craved.
“Just observing the results of the experiment.” Daisy’s finger dipped lower, circling her navel. “The growth is… exponential. The last event added over half an inch.”
Gemma flinched. “Don’t.” She pushed Daisy’s hand away gently and rolled onto her side, facing the wall. The cool air on her sweat-slicked back was a relief. “I can’t do this again.”
“You say that now,” Daisy said, unoffended. Her voice was a smile in the dark.
The next morning in their Victorian Lit seminar, Gemma felt like a ghost haunting her own life. She chose a seat in the back, drowning in an oversized hoodie. The professor’s lecture on the repressed sexuality in Jane Eyre felt like a cruel, personal joke. Every word echoed in the hollowed-out space inside her.
She was trying to parse a passage about Thornfield Hall’s secrets when a folded note landed on the corner of her desk.
She stared at it like it might be venomous. Slowly, she unfolded it. The handwriting was bold, masculine.
You look like you’re decoding ancient runes, not poetry. –Blake
Gemma’s head snapped up. Two rows ahead and to the left, a guy was glancing back over his shoulder. He had the clean-cut, athletic build of someone who lived in a gym, short brown hair, a smile that was disarmingly easy. Blake Samson. She knew him by reputation—second-string quarterback, universally liked. He gave her a small, acknowledging nod before turning back to his notebook.
Her face heated. She scribbled a reply, her hand unsteady.
Maybe the poetry IS ancient runes. Worse grammar. She passed the note to the person between them, a bored-looking junior, who handed it forward.
A minute later, it came back. So you’re saying Brontë needed an editor? Dangerous talk in here.
A startled laugh escaped her. She muffled it with her hand. I’m saying a madwoman in the attic is a pretty glaring structural flaw. Just my two cents.
Their note-passing became a silent, surreal lifeline. His comments were witty, unpretentious. He didn’t ask why she was wearing a hoodie big enough to shelter a small family. He just engaged her about the text, about the professor’s tie, about the existential dread of midterms. For fifty minutes, she wasn’t the girl with a cursed, growing appendage. She was just a girl passing notes with a cute guy in lit class.
As the students shuffled out, he waited for her at the door. “So, you’re the structural critic,” he said, falling into step beside her. His posture was relaxed, but his eyes were keen, noticing everything.
“Gemma,” she said.
“Blake.” He held up his phone. “I need a second opinion on my thesis that Rochester is just a nineteenth-century fuckboy. Feel like being a consultant?”
This was the part where she’d normally make an excuse, retreat to the safety of her books and her disordered room. But the normalcy of the last hour was a drug. “Depends,” she said, aiming for her old sarcasm. “Is your argument based on textual evidence or just visceral dislike?”
“Visceral,” he confessed with a grin. “But I can fake the evidence if you help.”
She found herself smiling back. “Fine.” They exchanged numbers. The entire interaction felt stolen from someone else’s life.
The texts started that afternoon, a ping on her phone that made her jump.
Blake: Okay, consultant. Opening argument: He locks his wife in the attic. That’s not brooding romance. That’s a felony.
Gemma: You’re applying contemporary law to Gothic fiction. That’s your first mistake.
Blake: So you’re PRO-madwoman-in-attic? I’m shocked.
Gemma: I’m pro-nuance. And maybe anti-Rochester. But for better reasons.
The flirting was light, a gentle tennis match of banter. It was everything interactions with Daisy weren’t—easy, predictable, surface-level. It existed in a world where bodies followed known rules. She clung to it.
Days bled into a week. Their texting became a constant, warm undercurrent. He sent her a stupid meme about Mr. Darcy. She critiqued his misuse of a semicolon. He asked what she was reading for fun. She lied and said Wuthering Heights, because it was safe. The truth was she’d read nothing but the splatter-paint notebook for days.
Daisy watched this new development with arched eyebrows. “Texting a jock about literary theory? That’s your kink? Weirder than mine.”
“He’s not a jock. He’s in our lit class,” Gemma defended, too quickly.
“He’s on the football team’s roster, Gem. I checked.” Daisy smirked. “Is he gonna help with our… research?”
“No.” The word was final. Gemma guarded the texting like a secret garden. It was hers.
But the garden had a serpent. Her body. The nightly measurements with Daisy had continued, a tense, silent ritual. The numbers climbed. Seven and three-quarters. Eight. The physical reality was becoming impossible to hide, even under layers. The want was a constant, humming engine inside her, refueling every time Daisy’s clinical touch lingered, every time Blake’s name popped up on her phone.
The duality was splitting her in two. She was the girl bantering about books, and she was the biological experiment aching in her sweatpants. The dissonance grew deafening.
One late night, the texts took a turn.
Blake: You seem different in person than over text.
Her heart stuttered. Gemma: How so?
Blake: In class, you’re guarded. All hoodies and hiding in the back. Over text, you’re all sharp edges and opinions. Which is the real you?
The question hung in the blue light of her screen. The real her? The real her had a permanent, growing erection and a roommate who tracked its progress in a notebook. The real her was terrified. The lie of omission between them felt like a canyon.
She typed and deleted three responses. The truth was a nuclear option. But the weight of carrying it alone was crushing her. Daisy’s fascination was a pressure cooker. This, with Blake, felt like a window cracked open. A stupid, reckless part of her wanted to feel normal air.
Her thumbs moved before her brain could veto.
Gemma: The real me is having a really, really weird medical situation. And I mean weird. The hiding-in-hoodies thing isn’t an aesthetic choice.
She hit send. Instant regret, cold and nauseating. She threw her phone face down on the bed as if it were on fire.
It buzzed a full minute later.
Blake: Weird how?
Gemma: You’d think I was insane.
Blake: Try me. I read Gothic fiction for fun. I specialize in insane.
She laughed, a wet, choked sound. The absolute absurdity of it all surged up. Here, in the dark, with a boy who liked her opinions on Brontë, it suddenly seemed possible to say the unsayable. Not as data. Not as a project. Just as a thing that was happening to her.
She typed it plainly, no embellishments.
Gemma: I’m growing a penis. Like, an actual, functional one. It wasn’t there a few weeks ago. Now it is. And it doesn’t stop. Every time I have an orgasm, it gets permanently bigger. I’m at 8 inches right now. I know how this sounds.
She sent it. The phone felt like a live grenade. She waited for the confusion, the horror, the disbelief, the rapid backtracking.
The response came after the longest ninety seconds of her life.
Blake: Okay.
Just that. Okay.
Gemma: …Okay? That’s it?
Blake: That’s… a lot. But okay. 8 inches is… significant.
Gemma: You believe me?
Blake: You have no reason to lie about something that bizarre. So yeah, I believe you. Does it… work?
A hysterical giggle bubbled in her throat. Of all the questions. Gemma: Unfortunately, yes.
Blake: Can I see it?
The question was so blunt, so devoid of revulsion, so curiously neutral that it short-circuited her panic. It wasn’t a leer. It was a request for data, mirroring Daisy’s, but from a completely different, unexpected source.
Gemma: Why?
Blake: Because I’m fascinated. And because you’ve been carrying this alone, right? You shouldn’t have to.
Tears pricked her eyes. That was the thing that undid her—the simple acknowledgment of the isolation.
Gemma: I’m not alone. My roommate knows. She’s… very involved.
Blake: The art history major? Daisy?
Gemma: How do you know that?
Blake: I pay attention. Is she helping or making it weirder?
Gemma looked across the room at Daisy’s sleeping form, the notebook open on her nightstand. Gemma: Both.
Blake: Then let someone else in. Without a notebook. Come over.