Chapter 3: A New Face
The door clicked shut, sealing out the indifferent hum of the hallway. The world shrank to the dimensions of the dorm room: the twin beds shoved together, the stale air, the anatomy chart on the wall that now felt less like decoration and more like a technical schematic for his suffering.
Jim collapsed onto the bed with the tight-fitted comforter—his bed, he assumed. The motion was a calculated, agonizing slowness. He rolled onto his back, then immediately curled onto his side, drawing his knees up. It was the only position that didn’t feel like his groin was being slowly torn from his body by invisible hooks.
The emerald silk sling helped, but it was a fragile dam holding back a ocean of ache. The throbbing was a deep, biological drumbeat, synced to his pulse. Each beat sent a fresh wave of nauseating heat radiating up into his stomach. He pressed his forehead into the rough fabric of the comforter, breathing in shallow sips.
Ali kicked off her shoes. She didn’t seem tired. She seemed energized, humming as she pulled the folded notepaper from her back pocket. She hopped onto her neon pink bed, sitting cross-legged, and smoothed the paper on her thigh.
“Alright, let’s see what Professor Nikki has in store for us,” she said, her voice bright with academic curiosity.
Jim didn’t open his eyes.
Ali cleared her throat. “‘Freshman Orientation, Practical Application Homework,’” she read aloud. “‘To be completed by the leaseholder, with the leased asset, prior to tomorrow’s 9 a.m. seminar. Exercises must be performed consecutively, with no more than sixty seconds of rest between sets. The goal is endurance acclimatization and tissue memorization.’” She paused. “Oh, she’s so professional.”
Jim’s fingers clawed weakly at the comforter. Asset. Leased. Tissue memorization. The clinical terms swirled in the fog of his pain.
“‘Assignment parameters,’” Ali continued, her tone shifting to a playful recital. “‘One hundred slaps. One hundred punches. One hundred knees. One hundred kicks.’” She let out a low whistle. “Four hundred reps. Damn. That’s… thorough.”
The numbers hung in the air. One hundred. Like it was a page of math problems. Not acts of violence. Not explosions of pain. Just a tally.
Jim finally spoke, his voice a cracked, dry thing. “I can’t.”
“Of course you can!” Ali chirped, folding the paper neatly. “It’s homework. You don’t not do homework. That’s how you fail.” She swung her legs off the bed. “Besides, four hundred? That’s basically just a warm-up. Nikki’s going easy on you because it’s your first day.”
“Easy,” Jim repeated, the word tasting like ash. He thought of the cockbox, the sound his body had made under her foot.
“Well, easier,” Ali amended. She stood up, tapping her chin. “But four hundred is kind of a lot for one person. My arm might get tired.” A slow, mischievous smile spread across her face. The predatory glint was back, brighter than ever. “You know what? This is a community. We should share the workload.”
She was at the door in two quick strides. “Let me go get Beth!”
The door opened and closed again before Jim could form another protest. He was alone with the drumbeat in his groin and the four impossible numbers echoing in his skull. Slaps, punches, knees, kicks. He imagined them, a relentless cascade, and a cold sweat broke out over his hot skin. He shivered.
The silence lasted maybe three minutes. Long enough for his mind to start constructing elaborate, futile escape plans. Out the window? He was two floors up. Pretend to be unconscious? They’d probably just continue.
Then the door burst open.
“Ta-da!” Ali announced, sweeping back in. She was followed by another woman.
Beth was tall, almost willowy, with the lean, defined muscles of a middle-distance runner. Her hair was a messier, paler blonde than Ali’s, pulled into a high, swinging ponytail. She wore a tight black sports bra and matching athletic shorts, as if she’d been interrupted on her way to the gym. Her face was all sharp, friendly angles, and her blue eyes were bright with immediate, keen interest.
“This is Beth. She’s on the kickboxing team. Also, she’s my best friend and she owes me a favor,” Ali said, waving a hand between them. “Beth, this is Jim. My new thing.”
Beth’s gaze swept over Jim’s curled form, the elegant silk cradling his bruised flesh. Her smile widened. “Oh, wow. Nikki really broke him in, huh?” Her voice was lighter, airier than Ali’s. “He’s all… purple.”
“Primed and ready,” Ali confirmed, picking up the homework sheet again. “We have a joint project. Four hundred reps. Slaps, punches, knees, kicks.”
Beth cracked her knuckles. The sound was sharp, like breaking twigs. “Nice. I was getting bored with the heavy bag.” She walked to the foot of the bed, looking down at Jim with the analytical eye of a mechanic inspecting an engine. “So, what’s the format? We alternate? I call knees. I love knees.”
Jim tried to shrink further into himself. This was worse. A stranger. An athlete. Her legs were long cords of muscle. Her knees looked like weapons.
“We’ll figure it out,” Ali said, her tone now one of easy command. She approached Jim’s bedside. “First, we have to prep the workspace.”
She leaned over and, with deft fingers, began untying the neat knot of the silk sling at his hip. The support vanished. The full, terrible weight of his injuries returned, a sinking, hot pull that drew a gasp from him.
“Sorry, roomie,” Ali said, not sounding sorry at all. She pulled the silk away and tossed it onto her pink bed. “Can’t have any barriers. Interferes with proper technique.”
Jim was fully exposed again. The horrific landscape of his scrotum lay against his inner thigh, a stark, violent contrast to the pale skin around it. Beth leaned in closer, letting out a soft, appreciative hum.
“That is some quality discoloration. The edema is really centralized. Perfect for impact work.”
“Right?” Ali said. She placed a hand on Jim’s shoulder, not to comfort, but to position him. “Alright, Jim. Uncurl. On your back. Legs flat. We need a stable platform.”
It was an impossible request. It meant surrendering the only slight relief the fetal position offered. He shook his head weakly, a final, pathetic resistance.
Beth clicked her tongue. “Come on, guy. It’s just homework. The faster we start, the faster it’s over.” She said it like she was coaxing someone onto a rollercoaster.
Ali’s hand left his shoulder. For a second, he thought she’d relented. Then her fingers closed, not on him, but on the sensitive, swollen flesh itself. She didn’t squeeze. She just lifted, a firm, inescapable grip, and pulled him onto his back.
The movement was a swift, shocking agony. A strangled yelp escaped his throat. His legs splayed flat under their own weight as Ali released him, the backs of his knees hitting the comforter.
“There,” Ali said, wiping her hands on her shorts. “All set.”
He was completely vulnerable. The ceiling, a blank expanse of institutional white, was his only view. Ali stood to his right. Beth stood at the foot of the bed, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, her ponytail swaying.
“Should we warm him up first?” Beth asked, rotating her shoulders.
“The slaps are the warm-up,” Ali said, consulting the paper. “One hundred. Consecutive. You want to lead off?”
Beth grinned. “Don’t mind if I do.”
She moved to the right side, opposite Ali. She didn’t crouch or strain. She just looked down at the target, her expression one of pleasant concentration. She held her hand flat, fingers together.
The first slap was almost casual. A crisp, open-handed smack against the upper slope of his scrotum.
Thwap.
It was a bright, stinging shock, a flare that ignited the deeper, dormant burn from the punches and the crush. Jim’s whole body jolted.
“One!” Ali called out, like a scorekeeper.
Beth adjusted her stance. The second slap came faster, with a little more wrist.
Thwap.
“Two!”
It was a rhythm. Beth found it quickly. Thwap. Thwap. Thwap. Her arm was a piston, her flat palm connecting with the taut, damaged skin with a sound that was somehow both soft and sharp. It wasn’t about driving force, like a punch. It was about surface-area punishment, about lighting up every inflamed nerve ending on the exterior.
Jim lost the ability to scream coherently. Each impact jerked a sharp, hacking grunt from him. His hands fisted the comforter, twisting it into knots. The heat built, a rising tide of pure, stinging fire that felt like his groin had been doused in gasoline and set alight.
“Twenty-five!” Ali announced. Beth wasn’t even breathing hard. She had the efficient endurance of an athlete doing drills. Her expression was serene, focused.
The slaps came in clusters now, a rapid-fire thwap-thwap-thwap that gave Jim no time to recover between them. His legs began to tremble uncontrollably, his heels digging into the mattress. The earlier, profound ache was now just a deep bass note under the screaming treble of the slaps.
At fifty, Beth switched hands, shaking out her right. “Your turn,” she said to Ali, as if passing a baton.
Ali stepped in, her style different. Less rhythmic, more playful. She varied the angle, sometimes slapping from below, sometimes from the side, making the heavy, battered organs swing and bounce against his thigh. She giggled with each connection, a girlish, delighted sound that was horrifyingly at odds with the violence she was dispensing.
“Seventy-five!” she sang out, delivering a particularly mean slap that caught the very bottom of his scrotum, where the skin was thinnest.
Jim arched his back, a silent scream locked in his throat. The world was reducing to the metronome of pain and the women’s cheerful counting.
Beth took over for the final twenty-five, and she finished with a flourish—ten slaps in a blinding, machine-gun burst that left Jim seeing a checkerboard pattern behind his eyelids.
“One hundred!” both women chorused.
A moment of stillness. Jim panted, dripping with sweat, his entire pelvis a unified field of fiery pain. The slaps had somehow made the deeper damage feel more acute, more present.
“Okay, good warm-up,” Beth said, flexing her fingers. “Punches next. My specialty.”
Ali checked the paper. “Sixty seconds rest. Starting… now.”
The rest period was a cruel joke. There was no rest. There was only the aftershocks, the ringing, fiery aftermath that was already being drowned by the anticipation of what came next. Beth cracked her knuckles again, the sound ominously loud in the quiet room. She was smiling, her eyes fixed on the target, already measuring her distance.
Jim stared at the ceiling. The anatomy chart was in his peripheral vision. He found the highlighted section. Erectile tissue. It seemed like a relic from a different, laughably innocent universe.
He closed his eyes. The drumbeat of his pulse was now a frantic, panicked sprint.
“Time,” Ali said, her voice gentle, final. “Begin.”
“Begin.”
Beth didn’t need a second invitation. The casual athlete vanished, replaced by something focused and precise. She settled into a textbook fighting stance beside the bed, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet. Her eyes were no longer bright with friendship, but flat with analysis.
She stared at the swollen target. Then she struck.
Her first punch was a controlled jab, knuckles aligned, her whole body rotating into it. It wasn’t about wild anger. It was biomechanics.Thud.
The impact was a dense, deep shock that traveled straight to Jim’s spine. It didn’t flare across the surface like the slaps. It plunged into the core of the existing damage, compressing it further. He made a sound like a deflating tire.
“One,” Ali counted, her voice a quiet murmur.
Beth reset, her breathing even. Her second punch was a cross, her hip twisting to add torque. It landed in almost the same spot.Crunch.
Something internal gave a wet, fibrous protest. Jim’s vision swam with gray static. His body tried to curl, a reflexive protection that his mind knew was useless. His muscles, exhausted and trembling, only managed a weak shudder.
“Two.”
She found a rhythm. It wasn’t fast. It was methodical, relentless. Each punch was a separate, deliberate event.Thud. Crunch.Splutch.
The sounds were wetter, more sickening than in Nikki’s office. The tissue was softer now, more compromised. Jim stopped making specific cries. Each impact just forced the air from his lungs in a ragged, continuous exhale. He was a bell being rung by a hammer.
“Forty-seven, forty-eight…”
Beth’s knuckles were slick. A fine mist of sweat coated her brow, but her technique never wavered. She was an artist, and his ruin was her medium. Jim floated outside himself. He watched from the ceiling, a distant observer to the ongoing dismantling of the body below.
The pain had transcended location. It was the air he breathed, the substance of his thoughts. The neat, green silk on Ali’s bed seemed like a memory from someone else’s life.
“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine…”
Beth drew her arm back for the final punch. She paused, setting her feet perfectly. This one had everything behind it. A final statement.
She unleashed it.
The punch landed with a terrible, final sound—a thick, deep pop that resonated in the quiet room. It wasn’t loud. It was profound.
Jim didn’t scream. His eyes flew open, staring at the ceiling in silent, shocked astonishment. A warm, terrifying numbness bloomed from the point of impact, followed by a wave of nausea so intense he tasted bile.
“One hundred,” Beth said, stepping back. She shook out her hand, examining her reddened knuckles. “Bag’s getting mushy. Less recoil.”
Ali peered over at Jim’s groin. The already-dark flesh was now a chaotic map of deeper purples and angry reds. The swelling had increased, pushing outward against his thighs. “Tissue memorization,” she said, nodding. “It’s really taking the lessons to heart.”
Jim tried to breathe. Each inhalation was a knife-twist in his gut. The world kept fading at the edges, threatening to go dark. He clung to consciousness out of a raw, animal fear of what would happen if he didn’t.
“Sixty seconds,” Ali reminded them, glancing at her phone. “You’re halfway, Jim. Look at you go.”
Halfway. The word had no meaning. There was only before the next wave and after it. He was a shell waiting for the next breaker to crash.
Beth was stretching her quadriceps, a long, lean muscle tightening under her skin. She grabbed her ankle, pulling her heel toward her butt, holding the pose. “My turn again,” she said, her voice light. “I told you I wanted the knees.”
Ali checked the homework sheet. “One hundred consecutive knee strikes. You sure your hip flexors are warmed up?”
“Born ready,” Beth said, dropping her leg. She moved to the foot of the bed. The vantage point changed everything. Jim was looking up the length of his own body at her. She looked tall, powerful, a monument poised to fall on him.
She didn’t need a running start. She just lifted her right knee, chambering it high. Her movements were efficient, athletic. She was going to use the piston-like force of her leg extension, driving her kneecap directly into the heart of the damage.
Jim’s breath hitched. A soft, pleading whimper escaped his cracked lips. It was the only protest he had left.
Beth’s eyes met his for a fraction of a second. There was no malice there. No pity either. It was the pure, focused intent of a task being performed.
She dropped her weight forward, her torso dipping as she thrust her hip. The kneecap, hard and unyielding, became a bludgeon.
It struck.
The knee drove the entire mass of his testicles up and back, crushing them against the bony floor of his pelvis. It was a totality of pressure that eclipsed everything—the punches, the slaps, the Cockbox. It was a full-body collapse of agony.
A silent, open-mouthed wail stretched Jim’s face. No sound came out. His body bowed upward, only his shoulders and heels touching the bed, suspended in a rictus of pure shock.
Beth recoiled smoothly, reset. She didn’t wait for him to come down.
She attacked.
The knees came in a rhythm now, a terrible, driving cadence. Thump.Thump. Thump. Each one was a denial of his humanity, a reduction of his existence to a single, pulverized point of nerve endings. The wet, internal sounds were muffled by the sheer force, by the compression of flesh against bone.
Ali’s counting was a distant chant. “Six… seven… eight…”
Jim was gone. The person who had walked onto campus was gone. What remained was a vessel for suffering, a thing that convulsed and choked on its own spit. His eyes lost focus, gazing past Beth, past the ceiling, into a void.
Somewhere around knee forty, a new sensation pierced the monolithic pain. A sharp, detonating crack, deep inside, followed by a flood of intense, wrong heat.Something had broken. Truly broken.
He didn’t care.He welcomed it. It was a change in the constant.
Beth, immersed in her work, felt it too. A change in resistance. She adjusted her aim slightly, her brow furrowed in concentration. “There we go,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone.
The knees continued. They became a punishment for the thing that had broken, a violent probing of the new internal arrangement. Jim’s body was just a ragdoll now, jerking with each impact, completely passive.
“One hundred,” Ali finally said, her voice holding a note of genuine awe.
Beth stopped, lowering her leg. She was breathing heavily now, a sheen of sweat on her torso. She put her hands on her hips, looking down at her handiwork. Jim’s groin was unrecognizable, a landscape of catastrophic injury.
“Kicks next?” Beth asked, rolling her shoulders.
“Kicks next,” Ali confirmed, her eyes wide and bright. She looked from Beth’s powerful legs to Jim’s destroyed body. “He’s all yours.”
“He’s all yours.”
Beth cracked her neck, a satisfied pop echoing in the stifling room. She took two steps back, gauging the distance from the foot of the bed to the ruined center of Jim’s body. Her target was a pulsing, darkened mound that no longer resembled any part of a human being he knew.
“Okay, legs,” she whispered, a coach psyching herself up.
Jim heard the words through a thick curtain of shock. Legs. Kicks. His mind, a scrambled mess trying to find purchase, could only latch onto the memory of her knees. Those had been close, mechanical, a brutal piston drive. Kicks would be different. They would have the full, swinging weight of her body behind them. The physics of it unfolded in his head with terrifying clarity.
Ali bounced on her toes, a spectator with prime seating. “Remember what Coach says about follow-through,” she offered, as if advising a golf swing.
“Plant foot, pivot hip, extend through the target,” Beth recited, her voice flat with focus. She rolled her shoulders and settled into a loose stance. This wasn’t the precise boxing of the punches. This was something more foundational, more brutal.
The first kick was almost experimental. A front kick, snap-quick, the ball of her foot connecting with the side of his scrotum.
Thwack.
It was a blinding, sideways jolt. It felt like she’d kicked a toothache that filled his entire pelvis. The air in his lungs became a solid thing, impossible to expel. He made a noise like a stepped-on mouse.
“One!” Ali chirped.
Beth nodded, analyzing the feedback. She adjusted her angle slightly. The second kick was harder, a driven push-kick that lifted his hips an inch off the comforter before they slumped back down. A deep, internal sloshing sensation followed, sickening and wrong.
He tasted blood. He’d bitten his tongue.
“Two!”
They came faster now. Beth worked with a rhythmic, terrible efficiency. Front kick, roundhouse, front kick again. The impacts were a catalogue of new agonies: the sharp dig of her toes, the blunt force of her instep, the hammer-blow of her shin. The room filled with the sounds of her exertion—grunts of effort, the shuffle of her feet on the cheap linoleum—and the wet, meaty thuds of connection.
Jim’s body was a puppet with its strings cut, yet it still danced under her assault. Every kick forced a reflexive, pathetic jerk. His hands, which had been gripping the comforter, now lay open and twitching at his sides. His eyes were wide, unblinking, fixed on the ceiling tile with a small, brown water stain shaped like a bell.
“Twenty-two, twenty-three…”
The pain was no longer a series of waves. It was the ocean, and he was on the bottom, the pressure absolute and eternal. The individual injuries from the slaps, the punches, the knees, had all merged into one catastrophic state of being. The heat was immense. He felt swollen to the point of bursting, a overripe fruit about to split its skin.
“Forty-one, forty-two…”
Beth was sweating freely now, her sports bra darkened in patches. She paused, breathing hard, and wiped her forearm across her brow. “This is a workout,” she panted, a grin flashing. “Way better than the bag. The bag doesn’t react.”
“He’s reacting,” Ali observed, pointing at Jim’s trembling legs, at the silent tears that had carved clean tracks through the sweat and salt on his temples.
Something was breaking down inside Jim, beyond the physical. The last fortress of his self was under siege. It was the simple, childlike understanding that if you were hurt enough, if you cried enough, the hurting would stop. That fundamental contract of existence had been voided here. His suffering was not a signal to cease; it was the desired product, and they were only halfway through production.
The kicks resumed. Fifty.Sixty. Seventy. They became a monotonous horror. He began to pray for unconsciousness, but his nervous system, traitorously resilient, refused to grant the escape. He was forced to be present for every single second of his own annihilation.
At eighty-five, Beth switched legs. Her left kicks were slightly less precise, but they carried a clumsy, jarring power that was in some ways worse. They destabilized everything.
“Ninety-eight,” Ali counted, her voice hushed with a kind of reverence.
Beth planted her foot, setting herself for the final two. She took a deeper breath, her eyes narrowing. The ninety-ninth kick was a roundhouse with her full bodyweight behind it. Her shin bone connected with a brutal, muffled crunch.
A fresh, white-hot lance of pain speared through the generalized agony. Something that had been holding together finally let go.
“One hundred.”
Beth dropped her leg, exhaling a long, satisfied breath. She put her hands on her knees, bending over to catch her breath. “Done. Hell of a syllabus.”
Ali clapped, a few soft, appreciative pats. “That was awesome. Textbook form.” She walked to the bed and looked down at Jim. Her head tilted. “Hey. Jim. You with us?”
He was with them. He was nowhere else. He was a container for catastrophe. His gaze slowly, slowly drifted from the water-stain bell on the ceiling to Ali’s face. His lips were cracked and dry. They moved. A rasping, paper-thin whisper scratched its way out, so quiet the women had to lean in to hear it.
It wasn’t a word, at first. It was just air shaped by despair.
Then it formed.
“Please,” he breathed.
Ali’s eyebrows lifted. She exchanged a glance with Beth, who straightened up, interested.
“Please what, roomie?” Ali asked, her voice softening into something almost maternal, which was worse. “The homework’s done. You did it.”
He drew another breath, a shuddering rattle. The plea had opened a gate. The raw, unfiltered terror of the last hour—from Nikki’s office, to the walk of shame, to this endless arithmetic of pain—surged up through the wreckage of his pride. It was a primal reflex, older than reason.
“Stop,” he whimpered. Then, louder, a broken crack of sound. “Please, stop.”
He saw them not as women, not as roommates or students, but as forces of nature. As inevitable as earthquakes. His body tried to curl, a final, feeble attempt at preservation, but it was too broken to obey.
Ali’s playful smile returned, but it was different now. It was wide, deep, and lit with a profound, glittering satisfaction. She looked over at Beth, who was grinning too, wiping her hands on her shorts.
This was the sound they’d been waiting for. Not just the screams of pain, which were data points. But the scream for respite. The acknowledgment of their absolute authority.
Jim’s chest hitched. The dam broke completely.
He screamed. It wasn’t a scream of pain, though pain was its engine. It was a raw, ragged, desperate shriek that clawed its way from the very core of his being. It was for mercy. It was for an end. It was the sound of a self breaking.
“MERCY!”
The word tore his throat, echoing off the band posters and the anatomy chart. It hung in the perfumed, sweaty air, a naked and utter surrender.