Chapter 3: The Web of Lies Tightens
Jason’s phone buzzed itself off the nightstand and hit the dorm room floor with a plastic clatter. He jolted awake, the sound tearing him from a sleep full of shifting, unremembered dreams. Sunlight cut a sharp blade across the unmade bed. For a confused second, he just lay there, the events of last night feeling like the dream—the pencil, the edits, Ava’s newly monumental physique, her message.
Then the phone buzzed again on the linoleum. And again. A persistent, insect-like hum.
He scooped it up. The screen was a constellation of notifications, all from Instagram. All from her.
Ava RoseFit: Morning you! Hope I didn't wake you. 5:23 AM
Ava RoseFit: Just finished my fasted cardio. Remember how you used to tell me I was crazy for the 5AM sessions? Still crazy. 😂 5:47 AM
Ava RoseFit: Thinking about that podcast we both listened to... the one about adaptability. You were right about it. 6:15 AM
Ava RoseFit: Okay, sending you this before I lose my nerve. Privately, obviously. Don't make it weird! 7:02 AM
Beneath that last message was a video. A private, unlisted video. His thumb hovered. His mouth was dry.
He tapped it.
The video loaded, full screen. It was shaky, handheld, taken in a gym empty save for her. No music, just the ambient whir of distant machines. She was wearing dark leggings and a cropped tank. She stood facing a loaded barbell on the squat rack, her back to the camera. The changes he’d authored were even more undeniable in motion. Her shoulders were broad, her back a tapered map of muscle. But it was her lower half that commanded attention. As she stepped under the bar, the fabric of her leggings strained over her glutes, the material weaving a complex pattern of shadows and highlights across the dense, powerful curves. She lifted the bar with a smooth, practiced motion, settling it across her shoulders.
Then she sank into the squat.
Her form was impeccable, a textbook descent. Her thighs, already enormous, swelled further as they took the load, the individual striations of her quadriceps flickering into view like cables under tension. At the bottom of the movement, she paused, the weight crushing, and then drove up. The ascent was slower, a grinding, powerful push. A low, guttural sound escaped her—not a scream, but a raw, unfiltered expulsion of effort. The camera shook slightly, as if the person holding it was tensing in sympathy. As she locked out, her entire posterior chain—hamstrings, glutes, lower back—stood out in breathtaking, sweat-sheened relief. The muscles trembled under the skin, quivering with spent force.
She re-racked the bar, turned to the camera with a huge, exhausted grin, and gave a wink. The video ended.
Jason stared at the black screen, his own reflection a pale ghost over it. She had sent that to him. Privately. With a wink. The architect of her form was watching the blueprint breathe and strain, and she had no idea. A hot, possessive thrill shot through him, immediately followed by a wave of vertigo. These messages, this shared history—they weren’t just text on a screen anymore. They were alive. She was alive, in another country, thinking about him, referencing a podcast they’d apparently discussed.
He started typing, his fingers clumsy with sleep and adrenaline.
Jason: Crazy form. Depth was perfect. You made that look lighter than it was.
He hit send. The reply was almost instant.
Ava RoseFit: You always say that. My ego doesn't need the boost, J. 😉 But thank you. It felt heavy today.
J. She’d called him J. A nickname born of fake familiarity. He leaned back against the wall, a slow smile spreading across his face. This was a new kind of experiment. A social one. He could ask anything, and her memory would justify it.
Jason: Remember that awful smoothie place we went to after my first powerlifting meet? I think my stomach's still recovering.
He invented it on the spot. A powerlifting meet? He’d never touched a barbell in his life.
The three dots bounced. Then stopped. Then bounced again. A full minute passed. He watched, his heart pounding against his ribs. Had he broken it? Pushed the fiction too far?
Her reply came, longer this time.
Ava RoseFit: OMG DON'T. I literally gag thinking about it. The "Colonial Colada" or whatever it was called. You puked in the parking lot and I had to drive your mum's car back with the windows down. I've never let you live that down. Also, you came LAST in your weight class. 😂😂😂 Still proud of you for trying tho.
A cold shock washed over him, followed by a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with a fictional smoothie. The memory was complete. Vivid. Sensory. He could almost smell the fake pineapple, feel the humiliation. Her memory had fleshed out his lie with brutal, specific detail. He hadn’t just edited her past. He’d edited his own. A phantom history, sickly real, settled into the cracks of his mind. He saw a woman who looked like his mother, scowling as she handed over car keys. He felt the scratchy polyester of a singlet. The taste of bile.
He took a deep breath, pushing the false sensation away. It was just data. Implanted data. He focused on the power, not the disorientation.
Jason: Yeah, well, your boyfriend at the time was a tool who kept calling it "weight-lifter's flu." Never liked him.
Another test. Another insertion into her personal life.
Ava RoseFit: Ugh, don't remind me. SO embarrassing. What did you used to call him? "The human cricket bat?" 😂 So glad that's over. You were a saint for putting up with him coming to all our gym sessions.
Our gym sessions. The words glittered on the screen. A shared life, woven from whole cloth. A new confidence, cold and clear, solidified within him. He wasn’t just conversing with her. He was scripting her. Her past loves, her friendships, her inside jokes—they were all his to write.
His phone vibrated, not with a message, but with an incoming video call. Ava RoseFit.
The sound was like a physical shock. He fumbled, nearly dropping the phone. He stared at her icon—a perfectly angled selfie of her new, more muscular face smiling back. He could let it ring out. That would be sane.
He swiped to answer.
The screen resolved. She was in a gym bathroom, the tiles stark white behind her. Her face was flushed from her workout, a fine sheen of sweat on her temples. Her blonde hair was piled in a messy bun. She was breathtakingly real. The pixelated image of her from the videos was gone; here was the living, breathing woman, slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens.
“Hey!” she said, her voice bright and slightly breathless. A British accent, melodic and clear. “I was mid-set, but I saw your message and just wanted to say hi properly. It’s been like, two days since we proper talked. That’s too long.”
Her eyes were a striking shade of hazel, looking directly into her front-facing camera, and therefore directly at him. He felt exposed, pinned.
“Hey,” he managed, his voice croaky. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, sorry. Schoolwork.”
“Don’t be sorry, you nerd.” She grinned, adjusting the angle so he could see more of her shoulders. The tank top strap slid slightly. “I just miss our chats. You’re my good luck charm before a heavy deadlift session. You ready? I’m going for a new PB today.”
Before he could answer, she flipped the camera. Now he was looking at the gym floor, then the racked barbell, loaded with plates. The perspective shifted as she propped the phone against her water bottle, aiming it at the deadlift platform. He was watching her, live, from a thousand miles away. She moved into frame, her back to him. The altered physique was a monument in three dimensions. She bent over, gripped the bar, and took a deep, audible breath.
He watched, silent, as she pulled. The weight left the floor slowly, then accelerated as it passed her knees. She stood up with it, her back arching slightly, every muscle in her legs and back and arms corded and defined under the gym lights. She held it for a second at the top, the barbell trembling, before dropping it with a crash that made her phone microphone crackle.
She turned to the camera, her face exploded into a triumphant, ecstatic scream that was silent through the phone’s tiny speaker. She jumped up and down twice, the incredible mass of her lower body absorbing the impact with barely a quiver. She scooped up the phone, her face filling the screen again, glowing with pure joy.
“Did you see that? Two hundred fifty kilos! Two-fifty!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “I felt you cheering me on!”
“I was,” he said, and realized he meant it. The visceral thrill of her lift had bypassed his brain entirely and gone straight to his gut. “That was insane.”
“Okay, okay, I need to cool down and eat a horse,” she laughed, still panting. “Call you later? I want to hear about that philosophy paper you were stressing over.”
Another implanted memory. He nodded. “Yeah. For sure.”
“Awesome. Bye, J!”
The screen went black. He sat in the sudden silence of his dorm room, the echo of her voice and the crashing weight the only things left in the world. He looked at his hands. They were steady.
He got up, walked to his desk, and unlocked the cash box. The pencil lay there, inert. He picked it up. It felt different now. Warmer. Like a key that had finally found its lock.
He opened his laptop, navigated back to their direct message thread. He scrolled up, reading the fictional, years-long conversation he had created through implication and her mind’s own frantic, generative fill-in-the-blanks. It was a tapestry of banter, support, shared hardships. He saw mentions of a trip to Brighton that never happened, a joint New Year’s resolution to stop eating supermarket cupcakes.
He could edit any of it. Right now. He could add a layer, change a tone. He could write a fight and then write the making-up. He could craft the perfect, intimate history.
His cursor hovered over a message from ‘him’ from eight months ago. A bland comment about the weather. He clicked edit. He deleted the text. He thought for a long moment, his pulse steady, a calm, focused certainty descending upon him.
He typed, then saved the edit.
On the screen, the old message vanished. In its place, a new one appeared, dated eight months prior, seamlessly woven into the chronology of their friendship.
Jason: You looked incredible today. Seriously. Sometimes I watch your stories and just forget to breathe. I must be the luckiest guy in the world to be dating you. I love you more than you know.
He leaned back, watching. Waiting for the universe to catch up.
A minute later, his phone buzzed on the desk.
The phone buzzed again, a second time, rattling against the woodgrain. A single, concrete sound in the thick silence of the room. Jason watched it, a strange detachment holding him still. He had thrown a stone into the lake of her reality. Now he would witness the ripples.
He picked it up. A new text message. Not a DM.
The contact name at the top wasn’t Ava RoseFit. It was just Ava, with a pink heart emoji beside it. A contact saved in his personal phone. He had no memory of entering it.
His thumbprint unlocked the screen. The message thread below was already extensive, months of back-and-forth banter, photos of meals, complaint-filled voice notes about her reps, screenshots of movies she wanted to watch. It was the full, mundane infrastructure of a relationship, now planted firmly in his device’s memory.
Her latest message glowed at the bottom.
Ava: That’s so sweet, you muppet. You tell me that all the time but it still makes me blush. I love you too. More than deadlifts. 😉💕
He read it three times. The declaration was intimate, casual, absolute. More than deadlifts. The highest praise she could give. It was accepted. It was reciprocated. It was, according to the logic of the pencil and the phone in his hand, true.
He felt nothing. Not a surge of triumph, not a prickle of guilt. Only a profound, analytical calm, like a scientist observing a predicted reaction. The edit had not just changed a message in an app. It had retroactively rewired the emotional core of their entire fabricated history. The "years-long friendship" had just deepened, in an instant, into something else. Her bubbly affection had been given a specific, romantic target.Him.
He ran a hand over his face. The memory of the powerlifting meet surfaced again, unbidden and unwanted—the taste of pineapple bile, the scratchy singlet, her driving his mother's car. He blinked, forcing the phantom sensations away. They were collateral damage, glitches in the code of his own mind.
The box called AvocadoFitness rushed into his awareness. It was adorable.It was staggering. It made his stomach clench with something that wasn't quite panic.
It looked real. He knew, intellectually, that it was a fiction. But every text, every shared joke in the scrolling history beneath it, every reference to a TV show they'd "binge-watched together" screamed its validity. Her memory, her emotions, her very sense of their shared past had been reconfigured to accommodate this new, central fact: Jason was her boyfriend.
Her phone was burning a hole in the gray cushion next to her bare thigh. He knew he should feel something about that designation—girlfriend—but the feeling was buried under layers of clinical observation. He could feel the phantom neural pathways trying to fire, trying to conjure fondness for the strawberry-patterned case that now felt as familiar as his own hand. His own phone, the one he’d had for years, looked wrong to him suddenly; a barren, impersonal device.
He unlocked it, the passcode his own, and found the sprawling, intimate text history with “Ava 💕” waiting for him. He scrolled up randomly, his eyes snagging on a photo from three months ago. It showed his own arm around her shoulders, her head tilted against his cheek, both of them squinting in what looked like California sunlight. His face was thinner in the picture, his hair shorter. His own memory supplied a scent: salt air, and her coconut sunscreen. The nausea returned, a low tide of wrongness in his gut.
He forced himself to zoom in on the background. The pier, the specific angle. A flicker of a real memory, from a family vacation when he was fourteen, overlaid the image. They were different. The pencil had not just inserted him into her life; it had Photoshopped him into specific, real-world locations, weaving him into the geography of her past.
“This is deep tissue editing,” he whispered to the empty room. The scope of it was staggering. It wasn’t just text or bodies. It was context, location, light, time. A whole fabricated ecosystem of intimacy.
A new message bubbled up, overlaying the old photo.
Ava: I’m freaking out a bit. Just looked at my empty flat. It’s really happening, isn’t it?
The text was recent.Minutes old. It sat there, quivering with a nervous energy that felt completely genuine. She was referencing a move he hadn’t written. A narrative was spontaneously generating, growing from the seed he’d planted. The “logic engine,” as he’d begun to think of it, was operational, filling in the gaps to make the central fiction—their relationship—cohere.
He typed a reply, testing the edges.
Jason: Don’t freak. You’ve packed the most important thing: your lucky lifting straps.
Ava: Ha.Very funny. They’re in my carry-on, yes. Along with my kneeblings-heremlin? My knee sleeves, you idiot. My autocorrect is having a meltdown. I’m having a meltdown.
He could picture her, sitting on a suitcase in the middle of a half-empty London flat, chewing her thumbnail. The image was so vivid it startled him. It was inference, imagination, but it felt like knowledge.
The pencil lay beside his laptop, an unassuming piece of graphite and wood. A decision point crystallized. He could react, respond, live inside this fiction as it unfolded. Or he could direct it. Seize the narrative completely.
He opened their Instagram DMs. It was the original canvas. The text box blinked, a patient cursor. He considered the nervous, bubbly woman across the ocean, a woman whose muscles, memories, and love for him were all authored by his own hand. A wild, gravitational idea pulled at him. Why be pen pals across an ocean when he could remove the ocean entirely?
He picked up the pencil. The wood was cool. He didn’t question the impulse, the sheer magnitude of the act. He focused on the feeling of her head against his shoulder in that rewritten photo, the impossible weight of her deadlift, the way she’d said “you muppet” with so much fondness. He didn't want a digital relationship. He wanted the real, breathing, sweating result of his work. He wanted proximity.Control.
With deliberate, clear strokes, he wrote directly into the DM box, the graphite whispering against the screen.
“Can’t wait for you to officially move to the States tomorrow. You enrolling to A&M too makes it even better. See you at the airport tomorrow, I’ll have a big sign when I pick you up.”
He hit ‘Edit’ on the message directly above, replacing some forgotten comment about the weather. Then he sent it.
The screen flickered, a brief digital gasp.
For a second, nothing. Then, a whirlwind.
His phone vibrated, buzzed, and chimed in rapid succession. Notifications piled up: a calendar alert for ‘Airport Pickup - AVA’, a second for ‘A&M Orientation Week’. An email popped into his main inbox with the subject “Welcome to Texas A&M University, Ava Rose!” A Southwest Airlines confirmation code for a flight from Heathrow to College Station appeared in his texts, sent from his own number to Ava’s days ago.
Outside his dorm window, a car honked. The familiar southern oak tree seemed to waver, its branches shifting slightly against the blue sky as if adjusting to a new timeline. A faint, phantom scent of jet fuel and airport carpet touched his nose, then vanished.
The real, tangible change, however, was in his body. A deep, muscular ache bloomed across his shoulders and back, the specific burn of a heavy bench press session. He flexed his hand, and a fresh callus on his palm stung. Memories, slick and fully-formed, slid into place: driving to the gym with Ava last week, her hand on his thigh as he navigated his pickup truck—a truck he now remembered buying with his dad’s help after high school. He remembered spotting her on that final, monumental deadlift, his own hands hovering near the bar, feeling the strain in his own spine. He remembered the taste of post-workout protein shakes they’d blend together in his kitchenette.
He was stronger. His body had the new, lean density of someone who trained consistently. The unremarkable tall frame was gone, replaced by the build of an athletic man. His own reflection in the darkened laptop screen confirmed it—a sharper jaw, a broader set to his shoulders.
Before the disorientation could fully root, his phone rang. The screen showed a video call from Ava 💕. Her face, radiant and slightly tearful, filled the tiny circle.
He answered.
She was in a car, the city lights of London blurring past behind her. Her eyes were puffy but shining. “Hey,” she said, her voice thick. “I’m in the Uber to Heathrow. I just… I saw your message and I started crying. The poor driver thinks I’m mental.”
“Only a little mental,” Jason said, and his own voice was steadier than he felt. The line between his old self and this new, implanted one felt thin, permeable. The memories of her were right there, as accessible as yesterday.
“I can’t believe it’s happening,” she said, swiping at her cheek with a laugh. “All the paperwork, the visas… it felt like it would never end. But tomorrow? Tomorrow I get to see you. And start school. And we can go to the campus gym together.” Her expression shifted, a playful smirk replacing the tears. “You’re still spotting me, even if you are a weakling compared to me.”
“Deal,” he said. The word was automatic, drawn from the well of their shared, fake past.
“I should go, they’ll be queueing for security for miles,” she said, but she didn’t hang up. She just looked at him, a soft, longing look that tightened something in his chest. “I love you, J. I’ll see you so soon.”
“I love you too,” he heard himself say. The phrase left his mouth easily, fueled by a thousand new memories of saying it. It felt like an echo, but it also felt, terrifyingly, true.
The call ended. Silence roared back into the room.
Jason sat in the aftermath. His body was different. His mind was a palimpsest, his real history faint beneath the bold, fresh ink of a life with Ava. A suitcase he didn’t own was probably in his closet. A parking permit for Texas A&M was likely in his wallet. He had a girlfriend flying across an ocean to live with him, a girlfriend whose very existence was a monument to his will.
He stood up, walked to the mirror above his sink. The man looking back was familiar, but undeniably altered. The eyes were his. The rest… the rest was better. He made a fist, watched the forearm muscle cord and shift. He thought of the airport tomorrow, the big sign he’d promised. What would it say? Just her name?Something clever?
He turned from the mirror and looked at the pencil, lying innocently on his desk. A laugh, sharp and disbelieving, escaped him. It wasn't just a pencil anymore. It was a passport. It was a shipping manifest. It was a love letter he’d written to himself, and the whole world had signed it as a witness.