Chapter 9: The Offering
The knock was so soft I almost didn’t hear it over the hammering of my heart.
“Justin?” Andrea’s voice was muffled through the wood, stripped of its earlier jagged edge. It sounded hollow. “Please open the door.”
I couldn’t. I was frozen on the cold tile, my cheek pressed against it, staring at the grout lines. The traitorous pulse between my legs had faded to a dull, shameful ache. My own breathing sounded wrong in my ears—lighter, higher.
“I’m… I’m sorry.” A long pause. I heard her slide down to sit on the other side of the door. “That was cruel. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
I said nothing. My eyes were fixed on the cabinet under the sink, on a tiny spider weaving a web in the shadow.
There was a soft, sliding sound. The gap under the door darkened. Something black and supple slid through, whispering across the tile like a serpent’s promise. The harness. She’d pushed it through.
My breath caught. Before I could react, a second object followed, heavier, rolling with a dull thump. The dildo. It came to rest against my thigh, the silicone cool and unsettlingly lifelike. A fleck of glitter, pink and iridescent, was stuck to its base.
“I’m not asking for anything,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I just… I thought you might want to see. To know. Without me watching.”
Silence stretched. I heard her stand up, her footsteps retreating down the hall. The floorboards creaked. Then, distant, the sound of the kitchen tap running.
I looked at the objects. The leather was dark, well-oiled. The metal ring glinted. The toy lay beside it, a blatant, veined fact.
A morbid, crushing curiosity settled over me. A need to debug this, to run the diagnostic. To see if the system would respond the same way when the stimulus was applied by me, and not just implied by her.
My movements were mechanical. I pushed myself up. My breasts, these heavy, foreign appendages, swung with the motion, a jiggling weight that made my stomach lurch. I faced the mirror.
Sabrina looked back, wrecked and wary. I reached down, fumbling with the button of the ill-fitting jeans. The denim was tight over the hips, gaping at the waist. I pushed them down, along with the cheap cotton panties.
I didn’t look at first. I kept my eyes on my own in the mirror. But my peripheral vision took in the thatch of dark, neatly trimmed hair, the curve of hips that flared from a waist I could have spanned with my old hands. The absence was a phantom limb screaming into the void.
I bent, picked up the harness. The leather was cool. The straps were confusing. I stepped into it like a pair of shorts, pulling it up over my thighs. It settled against my skin, the central panel a flat, restrictive press over my pubic bone. I adjusted the straps at my hips, tightened them. The sensation was strange—a firm, encircling pressure where I was used to nothing, or the gentle weight of my own boxer briefs.
Then I picked up the dildo.
It was heavier than it looked. The silicone had a slight give. The details were obscenely accurate. My hand, with its slender fingers and black-painted nails, looked alien holding it.
I fitted the base through the O-ring. It clicked into place, locked by a flared ridge. It stood there, jutting out from my new body, a thick, flesh-colored spike.
I finally looked down.
For one dizzying, heart-stopping second, it worked. The view from my eyes—the familiar shape projecting from the general region where my body should have had one—triggered a neural shortcut. A ghost of sensation, an echo of weight, a memory of ownership. My breath hitched. Yes. There. Almost normal.
Then I lifted my gaze to the mirror.
The illusion shattered.
Because in the reflection, above that false projection, was the undeniable reality of Sabrina Mooers. The harness straps cut into the soft flesh of my hips, emphasizing their feminine curve. My waist dipped inwards, a rail-thin valley above the pronounced swell of my hips. And on my chest, unrestrained by a bra, my breasts hung full and heavy, the large, dark areolas and the silver barbells through my nipples now the most prominent features in the frame. The pink-streaked hair. The tattoo of a serpent coiled around my left ribcage, peeking out from under my arm.
The dissonance was violent. The lower half of the image promised one reality; the upper half screamed another. The dangling, glitter-dusted silicone looked like a crude prosthetic attached to a mannequin, a joke in terrible taste.
A sob welled up in my throat. I turned from the mirror, unable to bear it. The movement made the toy swing, its weight a faint, foreign tug on the harness. It brushed against my inner thigh.
A spark. A tiny, electric jolt of sensation zipped from that point of contact, not from the toy, but from my own skin, from the nerve-rich flesh of my thigh. It was a good feeling. A sharp, pleasant feeling.
Revulsion coiled in my gut. My body was approving of this. This costume. This parody.
I stumbled out of the bathroom, the harness tight around my hips, the thing bobbing with each step. The cool air of the hallway on my bare legs and exposed sex was a shocking intimacy. Andrea was at the kitchen sink, her back to me, staring out the window at the darkening yard.
She turned.
Her eyes widened, traveled the length of me: bare feet, the harness, the toy, my naked breasts, my face. Her expression was unreadable—a storm of horror, pity, and something else that made my skin crawl. A dark, fascinated curiosity.
“Oh, Justin,” she breathed.
“Don’t,” I said, my voice a broken thing.
“Does it…” She swallowed, her eyes fixed on the silicone. “Does it feel… like it’s yours?”
“No.” The word was a whipcrack. “It feels like a tool strapped to a meat puppet. A meat puppet that…” I trailed off, shame burning my cheeks.
“That what?”
I looked away. “That likes the feeling of the straps. That got wet when you showed it to me. That’s reacting right now, just from the air on its skin.” The clinical detachment of my own words was a new kind of hell.
She took a step forward. Then another. She stopped a few feet away. Her gaze wasn’t on my face anymore. It was on my chest, on the hard, pierced nipples, then lower, to the junction of the harness and my body. “Show me,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Show me what it does. What she feels. I need to see it. I need to understand what’s in there with my husband.” Her eyes were glistening again, but her voice was steady, insistent. “You debug by running the code, right? So run it.”
It was a madness. But it was a madness with a terrible, logical core. I was trapped in the hardware. We needed to know its specifications. Its… outputs.
My hand, trembling, moved of its own accord. Not to the false phallus, but to my own body. My fingertips touched the skin just above the harness strap, on the soft, flat plane of my lower abdomen.
I dragged my fingers down, over the leather, and then just below it, into the trimmed hair, and lower.
The touch was mine, but the response was entirely Sabrina’s. A shockwave of sensation, deep and resonant, erupted from the point of contact. It wasn’t localized. It radiated out, a warm, pooling heat, a clenching deep inside a place that had no name in my old mental map. A gasp tore from my lips, high and sharp. My knees buckled slightly.
Andrea made a small, choked sound. Her hand flew to her mouth.
I looked at her, my vision blurring with humiliated tears. “See?” I rasped, my fingers still resting there, the proof of the system’s operation a throbbing, wet reality under my touch. “The hardware works perfectly. It’s just running the wrong fucking OS.”