Chapter 8: The Giant Screen Call
The gym air tasted different on the second day. Staler. The lingering peach-and-metal scent of her perfume had faded, replaced by the anxious smell of Ron’s own sweat and the flat, recirculated breeze from the ventilation grate. He had slept fitfully on his mat, the disassembled washers arranged in a neat, silent circle around him, the sewing needle a cold line against his thigh.
The morning routine shattered with a violence of noise.
A high-pitched whine, like a dentist’s drill amplified through a stadium speaker, ripped through the acrylic box. Ron jolted awake, scrambling back against the wall as the entire eastern panel trembled. Dust rained from the seams. Through the transparent wall, he saw Mabel’s skeletal hands, guided by two silent maintenance men in grey coveralls, maneuvering a monstrous rectangle of technology.
They were installing something.
The drill-bit scream came again, biting into the wall. Acrylic shavings, each the size of his torso, curled and fell. Ron pressed himself flat, hands over his ears, the vibrations travelling through the floor and into his teeth. He watched, heart hammering, as they secured a massive mount, then lifted and slid a sleek, black-edged slab into place. It sealed against the wall with a final, hydraulic hiss.
It was a smartphone. A consumer device, but to Ron it was a monolith. Its screen, dark and reflective as obsidian, now formed one entire wall of his world. It was at least six feet tall from his perspective, its surface smooth, cold, and impenetrable.
Mabel’s face appeared in the open service port, her glasses gleaming. “A gift from Miss Ronita,” she announced, her voice dry and uninterested. “So you don’t get lonely.” A smirk touched her thin lips. “Or forgetful.”
The maintenance men packed their tools. Mabel produced a sleek, white remote from her apron pocket. “She’ll call. When she calls, the screen will activate automatically. You don’t get to choose. You just answer.” She gave him a long, withering look. “Try not to look too much like a frightened rodent. It puts her off her lunch.”
The port slid shut. Ron was alone with the dark slab.
For hours, he paced before it, his reflection a ghost in the black mirror. It was a window, but one that only opened from the outside. A perfect symbol. His disassembled barbell, his secret needle, felt insignificant against this blank, technological eye.
When it happened, there was no warning chime.
The screen simply blazed to life.
Light, pure and overwhelming, flooded the gym, bleaching the color from everything. Ron stumbled back, throwing an arm over his eyes. A deep, resonant hum filled the space, vibrating in his chest.
Then, her face resolved.
It was not like her presence at the wall. This was digital, crisp, and magnified to a godlike scale. Every detail was hyper-real. The individual strands of her curly black hair were thick as cables. The pores on her nose were vast, shadowed valleys. Her shrewd black eyes were deep, spinning pools that filled half his visual field. She had applied a shimmering bronze eyeshadow. He could see the microscopic glitter in it.
She was reclining on a plush hotel sofa, Zurich’s twilight skyline a glittering tapestry behind her. A glass of red wine, large as a swimming pool, dangled from her fingers.
“Ron! There you are!” Her voice boomed from hidden speakers, rich, warm, and calibrated to fill his entire universe. It was the voice from the memory of a dinner date, not the voice from the vanity. “Oh, sweetie, you look so small from here. Is the screen too bright?”
He lowered his arm, forcing himself to look up into that colossal, pixelated face. The training screamed at him to kneel, to avert his gaze. He locked his knees. “It’s fine,” he said, his voice swallowed by the acoustic space of the speakers.
“Good.” She took a sip of wine, her movements slow, deliberate for the camera. “I miss you, you know. This suite is enormous. Feels empty.” She pouted, a gesture that made her lower lip look like a falling curtain. “I was thinking about you all through my meetings today. About us.”
Ron said nothing. The words our serum hung in the air between them, unspoken.
“Did Mabel treat you well today? She can be such a battle-axe, but she’s loyal.” Ronita’s eyes scanned him, a digital inspection. “You haven’t been trying to lift that silly barbell again, have you? You need to rest. Preserve your cellular integrity.”
There it was. The first thread.
“Why?” Ron asked, keeping his tone flat, curious. “If the serum is going to fix everything, what does a sore muscle matter?”
Her smile was beatific, but her eyes held a fraction of a second’s hesitation. A buffer of pixels. “It’s not just about fixing, darling. It’s about optimization. The process is… delicate. We want you starting from a perfect baseline. Think of it as tuning an instrument before a grand performance.” She swirled the wine. “My performance hasn’t been bad either. This NRG-14 blend? Incredible. My skin hasn’t felt this taut in years. My energy is through the roof.”
She was steering the conversation, offering him a piece to distract from the whole. Ron clung to his needle of suspicion.
“What does the serum actually do?” He took a step closer to the screen, tilting his head as if puzzled. “I mean, to me. You said ‘reverse the cascade.’ Is it one injection? A series?”
Her magnificent face softened with what looked like affectionate exasperation. “So many questions! That’s my Ron. Always needing the blueprint.” She leaned forward, bringing her face even closer. The camera distorted slightly at the edges. “It’s a proprietary protocol, honey. Very complex. They’ve synthesized a retrovirus that can rewrite the mitochondrial DNA in your muscle and nerve tissue. It’s about restoring the original growth potential. The body does the rest, with the right… support.”
The words were a smooth, scientific glaze over a void of specifics. Rewrite. Potential. Support.
“And the risks you mentioned? Making things worse?”
Ronita’s expression shifted to one of solemn care. “There’s always risk with pioneering science. Neurological misfires. Uncontrolled tissue growth. Cancerous developments.” She listed them like minor side effects on a medicine bottle. “But that’s why we’re being so meticulous. Why I’m here. To ensure the safety parameters are absolute. I would never let them hurt you.”
I would never let them hurt you. The hypocrisy was so vast it created a silence in his mind.
“So,” Ron said, locking his hands behind his back to hide their tremor. “You take the NRG-14 to… support the process? From your end?”
Her smile returned, wider now, thrilled at his understanding. “Exactly! It’s a symbiotic preparation. My biochemistry acts as a stabilizer, a template. Our bond, our history… it creates a psychic and biological synchrony the researchers are very excited about. We’ll be pioneers, Ron. The first couple of the new era.”
The first couple. A chill, deeper than any he’d felt in the gym, seeped into his bones. He saw it now, with terrifying clarity. She wasn’t just restoring him. She was incorporating him. He wouldn’t be Ron, restored. He would be Ron, a component of the Nita System. His baseline parameters would be whatever best complemented her optimized, NRG-14-fueled existence. She explained that the serum helps her move at her massive size. So she can eat and get as big as she wants and still move with grace.
“When?” The word was ash.
“Soon,” she promised, her eyes glowing. “A few more tests. Some regulatory hurdles to… creatively clear.” She winked, a grotesque, slow-motion collapse of her eyelid. “Just be patient. Be good. Think of what’s coming. We’ll go to the beach. A real restaurant. You’ll be able to hold my hand again.”
The image was so specific, so normal, it was the most grotesque thing she’d said yet. He saw himself, his old height, sitting across from her in some candlelit bistro. And he saw the invisible leash of gratitude, of biochemical dependency, in his every gesture.
The call was breaking up, a deliberate signal from her end. “Signal’s getting spotky, darling. The Alps! I’ll call you later and we can have some phone sex. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” the conditioning recited for him.
The screen went black, plunging the gym into a darkness that felt thicker, more complete than before. The afterimage of her smile burned on his retinas.
He stood in the dark for a long time. The hum of the screen’s dormant power supply was the only sound. The metallic tang in the air was no longer her perfume. It was the taste of the future, sharp and coppery, like blood on the tongue.
He walked to the scattered washers. He did not reassemble the barbell. He began stacking them, one on top of another, building a narrow, unstable tower. It wavered under his careful touch. A column of little weights.
He looked at the black screen, then at his trembling tower of washers. He was not an instrument to be tuned. He was not a component to be synchronized.
He was a variable. An unknown in her perfect calculation.
With a slow, deliberate breath, he extended a finger and tipped the tower. It fell with a series of crashes, the washers rolling and spinning across the acrylic floor, a chaotic symphony of rebellion.
In the echoing aftermath, he picked up the bare darning needle. He pressed its point into the pad of his thumb, not enough to break the skin, just enough to feel its singular, focused promise.
The screen was a window they could open at will. But he was in the walls. And walls had cracks.
And walls had cracks.
He’d just settled the needle back under the edge of his mat when the screen ignited again. No prelude. No ringtone. One moment, darkness and the silent scatter of washers. The next, blinding light and her face, immense and expectant.
“Darling, you’re still up,” her voice purred, filling the gym with its intimate, suffocating warmth. The hotel background was dimmer now, sheathed in the deep blue of a Zurich night. She wore a silk robe, the tie loose, revealing the deep cleft between her massive breasts. Her expression was soft, languid. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m all… wound up from these talks. My mind is racing.”
Ron stood slowly, his heart a cold, hard stone in his chest. He said nothing.
“I need to unwind,” she sighed, her gaze dropping to him with a focused, possessive tenderness. “And I miss your touch. Even from here.”
Her fingers, on screen, were colossal. She traced her collarbone with a manicured nail. “I want you to help me, Ron. Right now.” It wasn’t a request. It was a velvet-wrapped command.
“How?” The word was flat, a placeholder.
A slow, knowing smile spread across her face. She shifted, settling deeper into the sofa, the robe falling open wider. The camera’s angle was high, looking down the vast landscape of her body. “You know how. Be a good pet. Talk to me. Tell me what you’d do if you were here. In detail.” Her eyes glinted. “And show me.”
A sick heat spread through his gut. The training was a wire tightening around his spine. Disobedience meant the brush, the slam, the box. Compliance meant survival. And survival, for now, meant the chance to use the needle.
He took a step toward the screen. His reflection, a ghostly smudge, overlayed her nipple, now visible, dark and pebbled against the brown silk of her skin.
“I’d touch you,” he began, the script ash in his mouth. “I’d use my hands.”
“Where?” Her voice was a low thrum.
“Everywhere.” He forced the words out, staring at the pixelated valley between her breasts. “I’d start there. I’d kiss my way down your stomach.”
“Mmm, yes.” She exhaled, a gust of static through the speakers. One of her hands slid into the robe, cupping a breast. Her thumb, the size of a car tire from his perspective, circled her nipple. “And then what? What would you do when you got lower?”
The obscenity of the scale made his vision swim. He was describing a pilgrimage across a continent of flesh he had once known intimately, now rendered monstrous. “I’d use my mouth,” he said, the clinical words somehow fouler. “I’d eat your pussy. I’d make you come on my tongue.”
“God, yes,” she moaned, her head tilting back. Her other hand drifted down, out of the camera’s frame. Her hips made a slow, rolling motion. “I’m so wet, Ron. Just thinking about your little tongue down there. But you’re not here.” Her eyes snapped back to the camera, sharp and hungry. “So you’ll have to use your imagination. And your hands. Take off your shorts.”
The command was a bucket of ice water. He froze.
“Now, Ron.”
His fingers moved mechanically, undoing the tiny drawstring, pushing the fabric down his legs. The air in the gym was cool on his bare skin. He stood exposed before the colossal image of her, his cock soft, a useless, shriveled thing against the horror of the situation.
Her gaze devoured him. “Touch yourself,” she ordered, her voice dropping to a husky whisper. “But look at me while you do it. Look at what you’re missing.”
He wrapped his hand around himself. The touch was dry, alien. He began to move his fist, a slow, pathetic mimicry of arousal. His eyes remained locked on the screen, on her face, on the knowing, cruel pleasure etched there.
“That’s it,” she crooned. Her own movements under the robe became more explicit, her shoulder shifting rhythmically. A soft, wet sound, magnified by the microphone, filtered through the speakers. “Think about my cunt. Think about how deep you could get that little dick inside me now. You’d disappear. You’d fucking drown in it.”
Her words were a violation, a psychic rape. He felt a traitorous, humiliating stir in his hand, a purely physical response to the graphic filth she was pouring into him. His stomach churned.
“Tell me you want to,” she demanded, her breath hitching. “Tell me you want to drown in my pussy.”
“I want to,” he breathed, the lie coating his throat like oil.
“Louder.”
“I want to drown in your pussy,” he said, raising his voice, pumping his hand harder now, a furious, self-loathing rhythm.
On screen, her back arched. Her free hand clutched at the sofa fabric. Her face contorted, a masterpiece of distant, self-absorbed ecstasy. “I’m gonna come,” she gasped, her voice ragged. “Watch me. Watch me come while you jerk your pathetic little cock.”
Her climax was a silent, shuddering event on the massive screen, a convulsion of her features, a sharp cry ripped from her lips that cracked the speakers. She bit her lower lip, her eyes squeezed shut, riding the wave for a long, trembling moment.
Then, stillness. Heavy, post-coital breaths filled the gym.
Ron’s hand stopped. He let go of himself, his arm falling limp at his side.
Her eyes opened slowly. They found him, still standing there, erect now from sheer, degrading mechanics. A lazy, supremely satisfied smile spread across her face. She withdrew her hand from her robe, glistening with her own wetness, and looked at it.
“See what you did?” she murmured, her voice thick. “Even from thousands of miles away. Good boy.”
She reached for a hotel towel, wiping her hand clean with a casual, dismissive gesture. “Clean yourself up,” she said, her tone shifting back to casual, post-coital business. “And get some sleep. We have a big day of meetings tomorrow. I’ll call you after.”
The screen went black.
The sudden silence was a physical slap. Ron stood in the blinding afterglow of the screen’s memory, the smell of his own shame sharp in the sterile air. He looked down at his own body, at the obedient, betraying response. A hot wave of nausea climbed his throat.
He stumbled to the small dispenser of cleaning solution, doused a rag, and scrubbed his skin raw. The fabric bit into him, but he couldn’t feel it over the deeper, septic feeling crawling beneath.
He had performed. He had said the words. He had become her instrument, even in her absence. The serum, the restoration, all of it was just another layer of control. A better, stronger, more permanent cage.
He pulled his shorts back on. The cool fabric was a mockery. He looked at the dark screen, then at the pile of washers. His tower was toppled. His defiance was a speck.
But the needle was still there, under the mat. A shard of potential. A secret. A crack.
He walked to the service port, his movements precise, robotic. He would not sleep. He would listen. He would plan. The humiliation was a fuel now, cold and burning. She thought she owned every part of him, even his desires. She thought the screen was a window into his soul.
He would show her it was a mirror. And he would shatter it.
The days bled into a granular, suffocating routine. The screen remained dark, a silent monolith, but its potential for violation hummed in the walls. Ron’s world contracted to the smell of his own body, the taste of nutrient paste, and the cold feel of the needle under his mat. He stopped exercising. He sat for hours, staring at the service port, mapping the sounds of the house.
He learned the schedule. Mabel’s footsteps, a brisk, irritated tap at 7 AM, noon, and 6 PM. The low drone of the cleaning bots at 10. The distant, tinny echo of afternoon television from the staff sitting room. Silence between 2 and 4 PM, when she napped. This was his window.
The day before Ronita’s scheduled return, he acted. When the last tap of Mabel’s heels faded down the corridor, he slid into the service port channel. The darkness was absolute, familiar. He moved not up toward the bedroom, but down, toward the foundational crawlspaces. The air grew cooler, dustier. He felt the hum of the home’s central systems through the framing.
He found a nexus of PVC piping—water lines. Tracing one with his hands, he found a joint, slightly damp, a slow seep condensing on the plastic. With immense care, he used the tip of his needle to worry at the PVC cement sealing the joint. He scraped. Tiny, invisible shavings fell. He worked for what felt like hours, enlarging a microscopic flaw, a weak point where pressure might someday tell.
It was a pathetic act of sabotage. It was everything.
He retreated, filthy and exhausted, as the house stirred from its slumber. He was back on his mat, the needle hidden, when Mabel’s face filled the service port for the evening feeding. Her pinched eyes scanned him, lingering on the dust streaking his arms.
“Been crawling where you shouldn’t?” she accused, her voice a dry rustle.
“The vent was blowing dust,” he said, not meeting her gaze. “It’s dirty in here.”
She snorted, sliding the paste and water in. “Poor baby. Maybe if you behaved, you’d get a damp cloth. But you don’t. You brood.” She slammed the drawer shut.
The screen stayed dead that night. The silence felt like the calm before an earthquake.
The morning of her return arrived, thick and expectant. Ron performed his habit. He sat cross-legged on the stained yoga mat, the one that bore the ghost of his former shape, and stared at the black screen. He did not move. He was conserving energy, focusing the defiant spark into a single, cold point of waiting. He visualized the damp joint in the pipes, the microscopic fissure he’d created. It was a fantasy of flooding, of chaos, of her perfect world undermined by a tiny, persistent leak.
Then, the floor jumped.
It was a deep, subsonic tremor that travelled up through the acrylic and into his bones. The scattered washers shivered, chiming against each other. Ron’s eyes flew open. Distantly, a massive thud echoed through the mansion’s structure—the front door. Then another. And another. Footsteps. But these were not Mabel’s sharp taps. These were seismic, crushing impacts that vibrated the very air.
They grew closer. Down the hall. To the bedroom door. The gym walls seemed to bow inward with the pressure change.
The bedroom door opened with a groan of stressed hinges.
Ron looked up.
She filled the doorway. The ceiling, which had always been a distant, remote sky, now seemed barely to clear the crown of her curls. She had to turn her shoulders slightly to pass through the frame. Ronita was visibly taller. And fatter. The custom business attire she’d left in was gone, replaced by a vast, stretchy black dress that strained over new, shocking rolls of flesh at her midsection, her hips, her thighs. Her arms, once just plump, now hung as immense, heavy columns from the ballooning sleeves. Her face was rounder, her cheeks puffier, pressing her shrewd eyes into even narrower, brighter slits.
She must have really been eating a lot while she was away.
She took two earth-shaking steps into the room, her new mass settling with a soft, ominous creak of the floorboards. She looked down, her gaze scanning, and found him in his box. A smile spread across her broader face, a smile of profound, gluttonous satisfaction.
“Hello, pet,” she said, her voice deeper, richer, a rumble from a cavernous chest.
She knelt. The action was slower, more deliberate, a careful negotiation of her new dimensions. The floor protested. Her knees, each the size of a small car, pressed into the carpet. When her face descended toward the gym wall, it wasn’t just close. It was encompassing. The sheer acreage of her brown skin, the pores like craters, the smell of her—a new, cloying mix of expensive perfume, sweat, and something metabolically sharp, like overheated machinery—saturated Ron’s world.
He couldn’t help it. He scrambled back until his shoulders hit the opposite wall.
She noticed. Her smile widened. She exhaled, a playful, whispered breath.
It was a hurricane. Warm, moist air blasted from her nostrils and parted lips, a localized gale that smashed into the gym. Ron was lifted off his feet and thrown backwards. He tumbled, a ragdoll in a typhoon, skidding across the acrylic until he hit the wall beside the service port with a bruising thud. The breath was knocked from his lungs.
Before he could even gasp, her fingertip, now wider than his entire body, tapped the wall above him. Tok. The sound was a depth charge in his ears.
“Missed me?” she cooed, her voice dripping with false sweetness. She let the silence hang, watching him struggle to push himself up, his body screaming from the impact. “I missed you. I thought about you constantly. About our future.”
Ron leaned against the wall, wheezing. He said nothing. The cold point inside him held.
Her expression shifted, the sweetness evaporating into something brusque and businesslike. “The Zurich trip was productive. But there’s been a development.” She leaned in even closer, her lower lip, glistening and vast, nearly touching the acrylic. “My serum. The NRG-14? Miraculous. As you can see. But your serum… the retrovirus for male mitochondrial rewrite…” She sighed, a sigh of put-upon disappointment. “It failed a recent stress test. Catastrophically. The test subjects… well, it wasn’t pretty. Uncontrolled osteosarcoma. Bones growing like coral in all the wrong places. A real mess.”
She let the image hang in the air, a gift of horror. “So it’s not safe for you to take now. Not even a little bit. A pity, after all that talk.” Her eyes gleamed, devoid of any real pity. “The science is just so fragile. But don’t you worry your tiny little head.” Her finger stroked the wall, a gesture that made the whole structure tremble. “My team is on it. We’ll find another way. A better way. For now, we just have to… continue as we are.”
Ron stared up into the galactic darkness of her pupil. The hope she’d dangled, however poisonous, was gone. Snatched away. The collapse of that possible future left a vacuum, and into that vacuum rushed a clarifying, absolute fury. It was all a lie. A game. A way to make him perform, to make him hope, just so she could watch the hope die.
“I see,” he said, his voice surprisingly steady.
“I knew you’d understand,” she rumbled. She began to push herself up, a mountain rising. “It’s been a long flight. I’m exhausted. And I need to unwind.” She looked down at him, her gaze travelling over his body with a naked, appalling hunger. “I want a proper welcome home. None of that screen nonsense. I want to feel you.”
She walked to the bedroom wall, her steps causing minor quakes. She pressed a panel. A section of the wall beside the gym hissed and slid open, revealing a shallow, brightly lit alcove with a plush purple cushion. The Transfer Nook. His heart froze.
“Now, Ron,” she said, her back to him as she began, with ponderous movements, to untie the sash of her vast dress. “Don’t make me wait.”
The conditioning was a chain yanking him forward. His legs moved. He walked to the service port. Mabel, her face a mask of grim efficiency, was already there, the drawer open. She placed a small, open-topped container inside—his transport pod. Ron stepped into it, the plastic cold against his feet. The drawer slid shut, and he was in darkness, moving horizontally on a motorized track.
He emerged into the blinding light of the Transfer Nook. The air was thick with her new scent, overpowering, animal. Before him, the purple cushion led to a steep ramp of fabric—the fallen belt of her dress. Beyond that, a continent of shadow and flesh.
Her hand entered the nook. It moved with surprising delicacy despite its new immensity, the nails polished and sharp. Her thumb and forefinger closed around him, plucking him from the container. The world lurched. Pressure, firm and inescapable, encircled his ribs. He was lifted into the dizzying air, face-level with her now-bare shoulder. Her skin was a landscape of warm, rolling hills, shimmering with a light sheen of perspiration.
She carried him to the bed, the surface a vast, quaking plain of grey silk as she settled onto it. She lay on her back, her body a range of terrifying, soft mountains. Her breasts, now astronomically larger, heaved with her breath. She placed him deliberately on the shelf of her sternum, between them. The heat was immense, biological. The slow, thunderous rhythm of her heartbeat vibrated through his entire skeleton.
“There,” she sighed, looking down the length of her own body at him. Her face was a moon over the planetary curve of her chest. “That’s better. Real.” One of her hands, a hovering skyscraper of flesh, came to rest on her stomach. The other drifted down between her legs, which were parted, a valley descending into shadow. “You remember what to do.”
He stood on the shuddering plateau of her chest. The smell of her skin, salt and perfume and that sharp, metabolic tang, filled his nose. The video call had been a degradation. This was annihilation.
“You heard about the serum,” he said, not moving.
Her hand stopped its lazy circles on her stomach. “And? It’s a setback. We adapt.” Her eyes hardened. “Now, adapt. Or do I need to put you in the jar for the weekend?”
The jar was a soundproof, airtight container. A favorite punishment.
Ron dropped to his knees on her skin. It was soft, yielding. He leaned forward, pressing his mouth against the warm, smooth surface. He began to kiss downwards, following the steep slope toward the canyon between her breasts. It was a parody of intimacy, a pilgrimage across a prison.
“Use your tongue,” she commanded, her voice a husky vibration beneath him. “Don’t be lazy.”
He licked a broad, tasteless stripe. The scale was absurd. His ministrations were less than a mosquito’s to her. But she sighed, a gust of air that rocked him. Her other hand, between her legs, began to move in earnest. The wet, squelching sounds were magnified, cavernous, filling the room.
“Lower,” she demanded, her hips lifting slightly. “Get to my tit. Suck on it.”
He traversed the rolling terrain, arriving at the base of her breast. The aureola was a vast, dark, leathery plateau, the nipple a risen pillar of deep brown flesh. He put his arms around it, as far as they would go, and pressed his open mouth against the hot, smooth skin. He sucked, he licked, he bit gently.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Just like that. God, you’re still good at that.” Her fingers worked faster below, the sounds growing louder, slicker. “Wish you were down here. Wish I could shove your whole stupid body inside me. Feel you wriggling around. You’d fucking love it, wouldn’t you? Being nothing but a fucking toy in my cunt.”
Her filthy words poured over him, hotter than her skin. He serviced her breast mechanically, his mind screamingly detached, focusing on the memory of the needle, the weak point in the pipe.
Her breathing became ragged, stuttering. The bed began to shake with a steady, driving rhythm. “I’m close, you little shit,” she grunted. “Don’t you stop.” Her hand on her stomach clenched, grabbing a great handful of her own new fat. “Fuck. Fuck.”
The symphony of wet noise reached a crescendo. Her whole body tensed, a seismic locking of muscles. The mountain beneath him rose. A low, guttural roar tore from her throat, a sound of pure, selfish animal release. The vibrations of it passed through him, shaking his teeth.
She climaxed with a violence that jolted him from her breast. He tumbled onto the soft, heaving valley between her ribs, scrambling for purchase as her torso convulsed. It seemed to go on forever, this earthquake of pleasure.
Then, a long, shuddering sigh. Collapse. The immense weight of her settled back into the mattress, which groaned in protest. Sweat covered her, a fresh, salty dew on the landscape.
For a minute, there was only the sound of her slowing breaths. Her hand, glistening and smelling sharply of sex, rose from between her legs and hovered near him. With a disgusting, casual intimacy, she ran a fingertip down the length of his body, coating him in her slickness.
“Good pet,” she mumbled, her voice thick with satiation. “You earned your dinner.” Her eyes were already closing, exhaustion from her travel and her climax pulling her under. “Mabel will get you.”
Her gigantic hand closed around him again, a warm, wet fist. She dropped him, with jarring indifference, back into the Transfer Nook. He landed in a heap on the purple cushion, soaked in her musk, every muscle trembling with adrenaline and rage.
The wall hissed shut, sealing him in the bright, silent alcove. In the darkness of the transport drawer, smelling of her and of his own impotent fury, Ron made a promise to himself. Not of hope. Not of restoration.
Of corrosion. Of a tiny, persistent leak.
He curled his fingers, her fluids sticky between them, and thought of the needle, waiting.