Chapter 2: The Solo Broadcast
The silence after the call was a physical thing, a thickness in the air of the shed. Ray lowered the phone. The screen went black, reflecting the ring light’s dead white halo back at him. He looked at the steel toy on the bed. The one she’d marked. MINE.
His museum. His tidy, catalogued rebellion. It suddenly felt pathetic. A diorama of a war he’d been fighting with himself.
He didn’t clean up. He left the lube bottle uncapped, the towels in a heap. He walked to his laptop, the spreadsheet still open. Tab: Inventory. Column B: Name/Descriptor. He scanned the list. The Foreman. The Quarter Inch. The Pension Fund. The Settlement. All in-jokes with no one else in on the punchline. Ghosts.
He closed the spreadsheet.
He opened his broadcasting software. Set up a new livestream, titling it only: Deaccession. He didn’t promote it. He didn’t schedule it. He just hit ‘Go Live’ and watched the viewer count tick up from zero to a slow, steady dozen. Ghosts in the machine, waiting for a show.
He dragged a stool into the frame and sat, facing the camera. He was still naked, sweat-dried, exposed. He didn’t smile. He just looked into the lens, his eyes flat.
“I keep a spreadsheet,” he began, his voice quiet. “You’ve seen glimpses. It’s very neat. Tonight, we’re setting it on fire.”
He reached off-camera and brought the first toy into view. A modest, smooth stainless steel plug. He held it up, let the light run along its curve.
“This one,” he said. “Inventory tag SJ-01. I called it ‘The Settlement.’ The day I signed the papers, my lawyer patted my back like I’d won something. I came home here, to this empty shed, and I fucked myself with this for an hour. I thought I was claiming something. Taking my pound of flesh.” He turned it in his fingers. “I was just hiding. Using the burn in my ass to ignore the one in my chest.”
He didn’t prep. He uncapped a bottle of lube, squeezed a cold, generous stream directly onto the plug, and let it drip onto the floor. He kept his eyes on the camera as he reached behind himself. His face tightened, a sharp inhale through his nose as he pressed the cold, slick metal against his hole. He worked it in slowly, the stretch familiar but now stripped of ceremony. A clinical act. He pushed until the base sat flush against him, a heavy, inorganic fullness.
“There,” he grunted. “That’s the settlement. It’s just a piece of metal up my ass. It doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”
He left it in and picked up the next one. A longer, thicker dildo. “This is ‘The Pension Fund,’” he said, his voice gaining a hard edge. “The one I lost. The foreman who canned me, his name was Gary. He had a mustache like a dirty brush. I’d imagine this was him. That I was fucking him, or he was fucking me, some stupid power play in my head.” He lubed it roughly. “But it’s not Gary. Gary’s probably on a boat. This is just me. Alone. Paying a different price.”
He didn’t use the machine. He stood, turned his back to the camera, and bent over, bracing his hands on the stool. He guided the tip to his already-stretched entrance, pressing against the base of the plug inside him. The challenge was real; his body resisted, clenched. He swore, a low “fuck,” and pushed backwards, forcing the second thickness past the ring of muscle. It was a brutal, dry-burning stretch that made his legs shake. He took it inch by agonizing inch, his breath coming in ragged pants, until he was fully impaled on both toys, a double violation that felt less like pleasure and more like demolition.
“See?” he gasped, the words strained. “It’s just… physics. Pressure. No revenge. No victory. Just… fullness.”
He straightened up with a groan, the toys shifting inside him. He was breathing hard, sweat beading on his temples. The viewer count was climbing. Fifty. A hundred. No comments. Just a silent, watching pressure.
He reached for the one on the bed. The marked one. MINE.
He held it up so the black letters were clear to the camera.
“This one’s new,” he said. His voice had gone quiet again, almost hollow. “A friend suggested the name.” A harsh, broken laugh escaped him. “It’s what I wanted to call it. When I thought it could be her. That she could own this part of me. That it could be a gift, not a… a fucking perversion.”
He looked directly into the lens, and his eyes were bright, wet. “She said I wasn’t gay. She said I was… confused. But I wasn’t confused. I was clear. I wanted her. And she made it filthy. So I made it a product. I turned my want into content. But it’s still just… want.”
He was crying now. Silent tears cutting through the sweat on his cheeks. He didn’t wipe them away.
He lubed the marked toy until it was gleaming, dripping. He walked to the fuck machine, his gait awkward with the twin burdens inside him. He dismounted the anonymous steel rod and replaced it with MINE. The black letters faced the camera, a stark declaration.
He turned off the ring light. The room plunged into near-darkness, lit only by the soft blue standby LEDs of electronics and the cold glow of the laptop screen. He was a silhouette.
He positioned himself on his hands and knees before the machine, his back to the camera. “This is the deaccession,” he whispered, his voice raw.
He found the remote. He didn’t start slow.
He punched the power and the speed dial to its mid-point in one motion.
The machine drove forward and the world dissolved into a white-hot split of pain and obliterating sensation. The marked steel was ruthless, a battering ram aimed at the heart of every locked-up memory. It wasn’t like before. There was no rhythm to savor, no performance to maintain. It was pure, brutal receipt.
“FUCK!” he screamed, the sound torn from his throat, ragged and real. The toys inside him shifted with each punishing thrust, a deep, internal pounding. He dropped onto his forearms, his back arched, taking it. Each drive punched a sob or a gasp from his lungs. “Oh god… oh fuck… mine…”
He wasn’t talking to the camera. He wasn’t talking to the subscribers. He was howling at the ghost in the room, at the memory of her rejection etched into his nerves.
“You said it was wrong!” he snarled, spit flying from his lips as the machine jackhammered into him. “You made it… ah!… you made it dirty! So here! Here it is! Is this dirty enough for you? Is this… fuck!… is this what you were afraid of?”
The pleasure was there, a terrifying tsunami building beneath the pain, fed by the raw emotional hemorrhage. It was too much. He was coming apart on a molecular level. His body was a weapon turned against itself, and the trigger was a piece of steel named for a failed fantasy.
His hand scrambled in the dark, found the speed control. He cranked it. The machine’s whir became a shriek. The thrusts were shorter, harder, vicious. He could feel his own body yielding, accepting, demanding more.
“I’m gonna… I’m gonna come,” he choked out, a warning to no one. “I’m gonna come from this… from this… and it’s still for you, you fucking bitch! It’s all still for you!”
The climax detonated without touch. It ripped through him like a seizure, a violent, convulsive wave that locked every muscle. A raw, guttural cry was torn from him, part agony, part surrender, part final, exhausted defiance. He spilled onto the sheets beneath him in hot, helpless pulses, his body spasming around the relentless, pounding steel.
The machine kept fucking him through it, through the oversensitivity that bordered on torment, until his trembling hand finally found the remote and killed the power.
Silence.
The only sounds were the hum of the laptop fan and his own shattered, wet breathing. He collapsed onto his side, the toys still buried in him, a wrecked tableau in the blue electronic dark.
The livestream counter blinked. Viewers: 347. Comments were scrolling now, a waterfall of emojis and fragmented text. “Holy shit.” “???” “You ok man?” “That was intense.”
He didn’t read them. He looked at the camera, a dark shape in the gloom. His face was a mess of tears, sweat, and release.
He reached a trembling hand and ended the stream.
The screen went black.
He lay there for a long time, feeling the deep, throbbing ache. He slowly, carefully, removed the toys. Each one felt like lifting a stone from his chest. He didn’t clean them. He left them in a pile on the floor, the marked one on top.
He limped to the laptop. The notification icon pulsed. A direct message. Not from a string of numbers this time. From a proper username: Curator.
He clicked it.
It contained no text. Just a single image link. He opened it.
It was a screenshot from the livestream. The exact moment he’d been crying, holding up the marked toy, the word MINE clear. His own ravaged, honest face.
Underneath the image, she had drawn a simple digital circle around his expression.
Her message followed, just three words.
Now it’s art.
Ray stared at the screen. Then he put his head in his hands, in the dark of his deconstructed museum, and for the first time, he didn’t feel alone. He felt seen. And it was the most terrifying and exhilarating thing he had ever known. The shed around him was no longer a refuge. It was a crucible. And the fire was just starting to burn.