Chapter 16: The Red-Haired Courier
The living room accepted them like a slow exhale, the weight of the morning’s debauchery evaporating into the familiar embrace of home. The sun, now well past its zenith, slanted through the half-drawn curtains in thick, golden bars that painted the dust motes in motion, turning the air into something almost solid. Chris sank onto the couch with the leaden exhaustion of a man who has just been gutted and repurposed, his bones singing with the afterhum of the pump’s residual buzz still thrumming in his veins.
Bea remained standing in the center of the sunbeam, her curls like a fiery halo. She stretched, the cotton of her t-shirt pulling tight across her breasts, and exhaled a contented sigh that was anything but peaceful. "I can still feel it," she said, her voice low and rough."All of it. My pussy feels like it’s been remade.Stretched and used.And I love it."
Chris watched her, his own body responding instantly. Even spent, the pastille's power held him in a state of low-grade, perpetual hunger. His cock thickened against his thigh, trapped in his jeans, a dull ache of readiness that refused to fade."It was… a lot."
"It was everything," she corrected, turning to him.Her eyes were dark, pupils swallowing the green."But you know what I realized back there? Watching you wreck that smug professor’s ass?" She drifted toward him, her movements loose-limbed and predatory."You were focused on her.On the data. You were watching her reaction."He swallowed, his throat dry."Well, yeah. She was the—"
"The subject.I know." Bea stopped in front of him, placing a knee on the couch cushion between his legs.She leaned down, her breath warm on his face. "But I want you to watch me.I want you to see what I can take. What we can do, just us, without her notes and her vials."
She traced a finger along the prominent bulge in his jeans, feeling him jerk against the fabric. "I’m still loose and open from your giant cock, Chris.My pussy’s all puffy and tender. But I don’t want that right now."
Her hands went to the button of his jeans, popping it open with a deft flick.The zipper’s rasp was loud in the quiet room. "I want you in my ass.I want you to remember what my guts feel like wrapped around you. I want you to watch my face while you fill me up there."
She yanked his jeans and boxers down to his thighs, freeing his erection, which stood heavy and eager despite the recent satiation.Precum already beaded at the slit. Bea licked her lips, a purely carnal gesture, then turned her back to him.
She bent over the arm of the couch, presenting herself.The soft cotton of her shorts stretched taut over the full curves of her ass. She hooked her thumbs in the waistband and pulled them down, along with her underwear, in one slow, deliberate motion.The sight was breathtaking. Her pussy lips, indeed swollen and glistening faintly, were framed above the tight, hidden pucker of her anus. The afternoon light kissed the pale skin of her thighs and the vivid ink of her tattoos. "No oil," she said, looking back at him over her shoulder."Just spit.I want to feel every inch burn its way in."
Chris’s heart hammered against his ribs. He spat into his palm, slicking his shaft roughly.The primal demand in her voice erased the last vestiges of his analytical mind. He positioned himself behind her, the broad head of his cock nudging against her tight rosebud.
"Just shove it in, baby," she urged, her voice dropping to a hungry whisper. "Don’t be gentle.Own it."He pushed. The resistance was fierce, a hot, incredible tightness that defied the morning’s earlier invasion. Bea hissed, her knuckles whitening where she gripped the couch arm. Her back arched as he applied more pressure, his pelvis meeting the firm swell of her ass.
Her body gave way all at once, the ring of muscle yielding with a soft, internal pop, and he was buried to the hilt in a single, searing stroke. She cried out, a sharp, ragged sound that melted into a groan of deep satisfaction. "Fuck, yes.That’s it.God, you’re so deep."
He began to move, pulling back until just the tip remained caught in that clenching vise, then driving forward again. The sensation was raw and electric, a filthy, perfect friction. Each thrust drew a gasp from her, a muffled "uhn, uhn" that syncopated with his movements.
"Look at me," she managed, twisting her neck to meet his gaze. Her face was flushed, her lips parted.Sweat dampened her temple."See?See how good I take it? My ass is all yours.It’s swallowing your whole fucking cock."
He could see it, could watch the place where their bodies joined, his shaft glistening with her heat and his spit as it pistoned in and out.The lewd, wet sounds of the act filled the sunlit room. He fucked her with a growing, possessive fervor, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks."Come in my ass," she panted, her words coming in broken bursts. "Fill it up like you did hers. I want to feel it… I want to walk around all day with your cum leaking out of my hole."
The image, her words, the incredible tightness—it coiled the tension in his gut into a spring. He slammed into her one final time, his rhythm fracturing into a frantic, deep grind as he erupted. His climax was a hot, pulsing flood, jetting into her depths, and he shouted, a raw sound torn from a place deeper than words.
Bea clenched around him, milking him through his orgasm, her own body shuddering with a sharp, anal-induced climax that made her thighs tremble. They stayed locked like that for a long moment, panting, connected.
Then, with a wet, soft sound, he slipped out of her. She stayed bent over the couch arm, spent and open, a thin trickle of his release already beginning to trace a path down her inner thigh.
The metallic scratch of a key in the front door lock was deafeningly loud.It cut through their heavy breathing. The familiar click of the latch engaging. The groan of the hinge as the front door swung inward.
The groan of the hinge as the front door swung inward.
Bea froze, still bent over the couch arm, her shorts around her ankles. Chris, his pants pooled at his feet and his softening cock glistening, could only stare in paralyzed horror at the widening slice of hallway light.The figure that stepped through was not one they knew.
She was young, perhaps early twenties, with a riot of vibrant red hair that fell in loose waves past her shoulders. Her frame was slight, almost delicate, but this was contradicted by the pronounced, heavy curve of her breasts straining against a simple black tank top.She carried a small velvet pouch in one hand. Her eyes, a bright, inquisitive green, swept the room and landed on them.
The three of them stared at one another in a silence so profound Chris could hear the blood rushing in his ears. The scent of sex and sweat in the sun-warmed room felt suddenly vulgar, inescapable.
“Oh,” the young woman said.Her voice was surprisingly steady, lightly laced with an accent Chris couldn’t place. Her gaze didn’t flinch from the intimate tableau.It was analytical, not shocked. “You must be Christopher and Beatrice. Professor Blackwood said you’d be… assimilating the data.” A faint pink hue colored her freckled cheeks, the only sign of any discomfiture.Bea, with a grace that stunned Chris, slowly straightened up. She didn’t pull her shorts up. Instead, she turned to face the newcomer, allowing the evidence of their recent act—the slick sheen on her inner thighs, the raw redness of her backside—to remain fully visible.“And you are?” she asked, her voice husky but composed.
“Lily,” the young woman said, her eyes flicking down Bea’s body for a millisecond before meeting her gaze.“I was the professor’s lab assistant. Before she… retired to private research.” She held up the velvet pouch.“She sent me. With phase two.”
Chris hurriedly yanked his jeans up, the denim scraping against his oversensitive flesh. The movement drew Lily’s attention. Her eyes tracked him with a frank, assessing curiosity that made his freshly-spent cock give a reluctant, interested twitch.“She couldn’t come herself?” he managed, his voice rough.
“The feline metabolic rebound was more taxing than anticipated,” Lily explained, stepping fully inside and closing the door behind her with a soft click. The normalcy of the action in the midst of such abnormality was jarring.“She’s sleeping it off. She anticipated you’d be ready to proceed.”
Bea finally pulled her shorts up, wincing slightly as the fabric made contact. She didn’t bother with her underwear, leaving it discarded on the floor. “Phase two,” she repeated, a hungry smile touching her lips.She eyed the pouch in Lily’s hand. “And what does that entail, exactly?”
Lily approached, her movements quiet and precise. She placed the pouch on their coffee table, beside a half-empty mug of cold tea. The rich velvet looked alien against the worn wood. “The professor felt your initial trials, while fruitful, lacked… directed synergy,” she said, her words clinical.“These are more advanced. For coupled use.”
She opened the drawstring and carefully tipped out three candies.Each was distinct. One was a pale, fleshy pink, shaped like a small tongue.Another was a deep, glossy black cube. The third was a swirl of gold and silver, like a liquid galaxy trapped in hard candy.
Chris felt a coil of his old anxiety tighten in his stomach, but it was smothered almost instantly by a pulsing, low-grade thrill.The thrill won.“What do they do?”
Lily pointed to the pink one. “That one enhances oral dexterity and tactile sensitivity in the mouth and tongue. Dramatically.” Her finger moved to the black cube.“This is a temporary multiplication pastille. It doesn’t just increase size, it… creates multiples.For a short duration.” She finally indicated the swirling candy. “This is a synesthetic synchronizer. It creates a temporary, empathetic feedback loop of physical sensation between two consumers.”
Bea sank onto the couch next to the candies, her earlier exhaustion gone, replaced by riveted fascination. “You mean, if I take that, and Chris takes that, we’d feel what the other feels?”
“To a degree,” Lily nodded, tucking a strand of fiery hair behind her ear.“It’s not a perfect mirror. But primary tactile sensations—pressure, heat, friction—are shared. The professor thought it might… deepen the collaborative aspect of your research.” Her blush deepened.“She also sent me to observe and record. If you consent.”
The room was silent again, but the quality of the silence had changed. It was thick, charged, humming with potential. Chris looked at Bea, saw the raw, eager want in her eyes, the same look she’d had when guiding him into Blackwood’s ass. He looked at Lily, standing there with her scientific detachment and her devastating, knowing eyes. He felt the ghost of the pump’s power in his veins, the memory of unimaginable size and potency.
His cock, utterly traitorous, was now fully hard again, straining against his zipper.
“Observation,” Bea said slowly, her eyes locked on Lily. “What does that involve, exactly?”
Lily met her gaze unflinchingly.“Documentation.Notes. Possibly… participation, if required to calibrate the synchronizer’s effects. The professor was… emphatic about collecting data from all possible variables.”
Bea picked up the swirling gold-and-silver candy, holding it up to the light. It refracted tiny rainbows across her palm. She then looked at Chris, her expression softening into something like an apology, and a promise.“You wanted adventure,” she whispered.
She popped the synchronizer into her mouth.Her eyes fluttered closed as she crunched down. Chris, his heart hammering, picked up the other synchronizer—there were two—and followed suit. The taste was indescribable, like ozone and honey, a static charge that spread across his tongue and down his throat.A wave of warmth, not his own, washed over him. He felt a sudden, phantom pressure around his cock, a tight, wet embrace that he knew was Bea’s memory of being filled.He gasped.Bea’s eyes flew open. “Oh, fuck,” she breathed, her hands flying to her own chest.“You… you feel that? My nipples are so hard, and it’s… it’s like they’re yours.”
The connection was fuzzy, blurred at the edges, but overwhelmingly present. Chris felt a echoes of the pleasant soreness in her ass, a ghost of the stretch. He felt her heartbeat, fast and excited, overlaying his own.“Yeah,” he choked out. “I feel it.”
Lily had produced a small, leather-bound notebook and a pencil.She was watching them intently, her head tilted. “Describe it,” she said, her voice a soft prompt.
Before either could answer, Bea snatched the pink, tongue-shaped pastille. “Let’s clarify the data,” she said, and shoved it into her mouth.The change was immediate and visible. Her lips seemed to flush a darker, plumper red.Her tongue, when it darted out to wet them, looked… different. More mobile, more supple. She looked at Chris, then let her gaze travel deliberately down to the prominent bulge in his jeans. “I want to taste you,” she said, and her voice had a new, hyper-clear resonance. “But not just you.”
She turned her head slowly toward Lily.“Come here.”
Lily blinked, her clinical composure cracking for a single, revealing instant. A sharp intake of breath. Then, meticulously, she set her notebook and pencil down on the table.She walked over to where Bea sat on the couch. Bea’s hands came up, circling Lily’s waist, pulling her down until she was standing before her, her thighs brushing Bea’s knees.
“The dexterity enhancer needs a baseline,” Bea murmured, her new, impossibly sensitive tongue tracing the line of Lily’s lower lip through the air. “A control sample. Don’t you think?”
Through the synchronizer’s link, Chris felt it—the thrilling, terrifying pulse of Bea’s dominance, her hungry curiosity. He felt his own arousal, reflected and amplified through her.He was rock hard, aching.
Lily nodded, a short, sharp movement.“For the dataset,” she whispered, her voice now unsteady.
Bea’s hands slid up under Lily’s tank top, pushing the soft cotton up and over the astonishing swell of her breasts. They were heavy, pale, tipped with nipples that were already pebbled tight.Bea leaned forward and took one into her mouth.
The sensation that crashed into Chris through the sync was blinding. He felt the soft, giving weight of Lily’s breast against his own mouth, the nub of the nipple pressing against his enhanced tongue. He felt the wet heat of Bea’s mouth as if it were his own, the incredible, detailed topography of Lily’s skin. He groaned, his knees buckling slightly, and clutched the back of an armchair.
Lily cried out, her hands flying to Bea’s head, fingers tangling in the wild red curls. “Oh! God… the sensitivity… it’s…”
Bea swirled her tongue, laved, sucked deeply.Chris felt every rotation, every pull. He was simultaneously watching his wife service this beautiful stranger and feeling it happen to him.The duality shattered him. He fumbled with his belt, his zipper, freeing his throbbing erection.
Bea pulled back, leaving Lily’s breast glistening.She looked at Chris, her eyes blazing with shared sensation. “Now her cunt,” Bea commanded, her voice thick.“I want to know how she tastes. And you’re going to feel it with me.”
Lily, her breath coming in quick gasps, undid her own jeans with trembling hands. She pushed them, along with her plain cotton panties, down her hips.She was shaved bare, her lips already plump and shining with wetness.
Bea guided her to turn around, to brace her hands on the back of the couch. Her perfect, round ass was now level with Bea’s face.Bea didn’t hesitate. She leaned in, burying her face between Lily’s thighs.The synesthetic floodgate burst.
Chris’s world dissolved into sensation. The musky, clean scent of Lily’s pussy filled his nose.The soft, wet heat of her labia surrounded his mouth. He felt the flick of Bea’s powerful, preternatural tongue as it parted folds, seeking the clit. He felt the precise, rapid circles she drew around the swollen bud.
A wave of pleasure that was not his own—sharper, brighter, female—crashed into his nervous system. Lily’s pleasure.It mixed with the physical feedback of giving the pleasure. Chris staggered, bracing himself against the wall, his own cock weeping helplessly.
“Fuck, right there, oh god, your tongue!” Lily sobbed, grinding back against Bea’s face. Her knuckles were white on the couch fabric.Chris felt it all. The building tension in Lily’s core, the fluttering inside her channel, the electric focus on her clit. He felt Bea’s jaw working, her tongue plunging shallowly into Lily’s entrance before returning to its dedicated torment. The dual sensations—of giving and receiving, of being both perpetrator and victim of this exquisite attack—drove him to the edge.
His own hand was on his cock, stroking in frantic, ragged time with Bea’s licking. He was feeling his own touch, Lily’s impending orgasm, and the fierce, focused satisfaction of his wife’s expertise.It was too much. It was everything.
“She’s going to come,” Bea moaned, the vibration singing through Lily and into Chris.“I can taste it.Feel it. We can feel it.”
Lily’s cry was a sharp, broken sound.Her body locked, shuddered violently. The orgasm ripped through her, and through the synchronizer, it detonated in Chris and Bea simultaneously. Chris saw white. His own release ripped from him in hot, pulsing stripes across his own stomach and the wall, a secondary, subordinate echo to the feminine cataclysm they were all sharing.
The connection fractured, then faded, leaving behind a spent and trembling silence.
Lily slowly sank to her knees, then crumpled onto her side on the rug, breathing heavily. Bea leaned back on the couch, her face gleaming with Lily’s arousal, a look of dazed, profound triumph on her features.Chris slid down the wall to sit on the floor, physically and mentally ravaged.
Lily was the first to move. She pushed herself up on one elbow, reached for her discarded tank top, and used it to clumsily wipe her face. Her movements were slow, wrecked.She looked at the black cube candy, the multiplication pastille, still sitting on the table.
Her green eyes, clouded with spent pleasure but already sharpening back into focus, found Chris’s. “The next dataset,” she said, her voice raspy, “will require more direct participation from you, Christopher.”
She picked up the black cube.
LILY ENTERS.
Lily’s fingers closed around the black cube. The movement was deliberate, a scientist selecting a key reagent. She held it up, the glossy surface swallowing the afternoon light. “The professor theorized synergistic potential between the synchronizer and the multiplier,” she said, her voice regaining its measured tone though her breath still hitched. “A shared experience of… unprecedented physicality.”
Bea watched, rapt, licking the residual taste of Lily from her lips. Chris, still seated on the floor with his own drying release cooling on his stomach, felt a jolt of pure, adrenal fear. It was quickly dissolved by the relentless, pharmaceutical need throbbing in his groin. His cock, flagging for mere seconds, hardened again with a painful twitch. The pastilles didn’t allow for downtime. They demanded escalation.
“How does it work?” Chris heard himself ask, his voice sandpaper-rough.
“Ingestion triggers a transient mitotic division in erectile tissue,” Lily recited, her eyes fixed on him. Then she blinked, shook her head slightly, and translated. “You swallow it. Your cock splits. Temporarily.” She rolled the cube between her thumb and forefinger. “The synchronization will allow us to feel the effects from your perspective. All of us.”
Bea stood up, her movements fluid and charged. She walked to Chris, offering a hand to pull him up. Her touch sent a fresh wave of shared sensation through the fading link—his exhaustion, her relentless hunger, a ghost of Lily’s shuddering climax. “Think about it, Chris,” Bea murmured, her enhanced tongue tracing the shell of his ear. “You’ll get to feel what it’s like to be fucked by you.”
The concept was so profoundly alien it short-circuited his anxiety. A dizzying, vertiginous curiosity took its place. Lily approached, holding out the black cube. He took it. It was cool, inert. He looked at Bea, at her wild, encouraging eyes, then at Lily’s clinical, expectant gaze. He put it on his tongue.
It tasted like nothing. Then it tasted like lightning.
A crackling, bitter energy flooded his mouth, sharp as ozone and powdered glass. He convulsed, swallowing reflexively. The effect was not a slow heat like the size pastille. It was a violent, internal reconfiguration. A searing pressure built at the root of his cock, a feeling of tearing and duplication deep within his pelvis. He cried out, stumbling back against the wall.
“Observe,” Lily whispered, notebook forgotten.
Chris looked down. The single, thick shaft he’d known his entire life was… dividing. It was a horrific, mesmerizing sight. The skin at the base darkened, stretched, and began to separate along a seam that hadn’t been there a second before. The head cleaved into two distinct, glistening crowns, each swelling to full, autonomous size. The transformation rippled down the length, a bifurcation of vein and sinew, until he was holding not one, but two fully erect cocks.
They were identical. Each was as thick and long as his normal, unaugmented state. They lay against each other, hot and heavy, a twin embodiment of impossible virility. The sensation was overwhelming. He felt double the ache, double the weight, a confusing flood of dual tactile feedback. He gripped the bases in each hand, disbelieving.
“Fucking hell,” Bea breathed, her clinical detachment vaporizing. She dropped to her knees before him, her enhanced tongue darting out to swipe at the twin drops of precum already beading at the tips. The contact sent twin jolts of pleasure through him, a stereo effect of raw sensation.
Through the lingering synesthetic link, the shockwave reverberated. Bea gasped, feeling the echo of double stimulation. Lily, across the room, let out a soft moan, her hand flying to her own stomach as if she’d been softly punched. “The feedback loop is active,” she managed, her cheeks blazing. “I can feel… duality.”
“We need data on functionality,” Bea said, her words slurred with want. She looked back at Lily.“You. Get over here. Now.”
Lily obeyed, moving as if in a trance. She stood beside Bea, both women now on their knees before Chris’s grotesque, magnificent arsenal. The sight of their upturned faces, one freckled and curious, the other fiercely possessive, shattered the last of Chris’s conscious thought. He was a vehicle for the experiment.
“Take one,” Bea commanded Lily, wrapping her hand around the shaft on the left. She guided the broad, slippery head to her own lips, opening wide. “I’ll take the other. Synchronized sampling.”
Lily, after a heartbeat’s hesitation, mimicked her. She opened her mouth, allowing Bea to guide the right cockhead past her lips. They took him in simultaneously.
The sensation that obliterated Chris’s mind was not of being blown. It was of being two separate men, receiving two separate, exquisite blowjobs. He felt the detailed, devastating skill of Bea’s enhanced mouth on one cock—her tongue swirling around the corona, her throat relaxing to take him deep, her suction a perfect, rhythmic pressure. Concurrently, he felt Lily’s less practiced but wildly enthusiastic efforts on the other—her tentative flicks of the tongue growing bolder, the scrape of her teeth, the warm, wet clasp of her virgin throat.
“Oh, God… fuck…” he choked, his head thumping back against the wall. The shared sensation flooded back into the women. Bea moaned around his shaft, the vibration traveling through him into Lily, who shuddered in response. Lily’s guttural gasp echoed back into Bea’s nervous system. It was a closed circuit of escalating pleasure, a feedback loop with his dual cocks as the conductors.
Bea pulled off with a wet pop, her lips swollen. “Now we fuck,” she declared, her eyes glazed with shared sensation. “We need to test penetration. Dual vectors.” She stood, pulling Lily up with her. She pushed the younger woman onto the broad, worn arm of the couch, on her back, legs spread. Her freshly-fucked cunt was still puffy and glistening.
Then Bea positioned herself above Lily, lowering herself onto her face in a reverse straddle. “You get her ready,” Bea ordered, grinding her still-sensitive pussy down onto Lily’s mouth. “I’ll take him.”
Lily’s hands flew to Bea’s ass, pulling her down harder, her tongue already lapping at Bea’s swollen folds with a desperate intensity born of the synesthetic fire in her veins. Bea, meanwhile, reached behind herself, grasping both of Chris’s cocks. She guided them, her hand slick with spit.
She aligned the first with her own dripping entrance. The second, she pressed against Lily’s untouched, tight rosebud. “Both,” Bea grunted, looking back at Chris over her shoulder. “On my count. Fill us both up. Now.”
She sank down.
Chris felt his world split into two distinct, parallel realities.
One cock plunged into the familiar, soaking-wet heat of his wife’s cunt, sheathed in velvet muscle that clutched him with possessive familiarity. The other met the fierce, staggering resistance of Lily’s anal virginity, a tight, hot ring of muscle that fought then yielded with a soft, internal tear. He was inside both women at once, in different holes, feeling both sets of sensations separately and simultaneously.
Bea screamed, the vibration traveling through her body into Lily’s mouth. Lily’s cry was muffled by Bea’s pussy. Chris could feel it all: the lush, giving depth of Bea and the searing, constricted tightness of Lily. He could feel Bea’s internal flutters and the frantic pulse of Lily’s panic turning to blinding, unexpected pleasure.
He began to move. A shallow thrust. The dual feedback was incomprehensible. Pleasure squared. Pain as pleasure. He found a rhythm, rocking into them, his hands gripping Bea’s hips. Through the sync, the women felt each other’s penetration. Bea felt the brutal stretch of Lily’s ass. Lily, drowning in Bea’s taste, felt the deep, fulfilling slide of a cock in a welcoming pussy.
“Harder!” Bea demanded, riding him fiercely, impaling herself and Lily in tandem. “Fuck her little ass open! I can feel it!”
Chris lost all control. He pistoned into them, a machine of pure fuck. The living room air vanished, replaced by a haze of sweat, sex, and shared nerve endings. The couch groaned in protest. Lily’s muffled sobs became fervent, hungry moans. Bea’s commands dissolved into wordless shrieks.
The climax, when it came, was a tripartite explosion. It began in Lily, her body seizing as an anal orgasm, brutal and unfamiliar, racked her from the inside out. The shockwave of it blasted through the sync into Bea and Chris. Bea followed, her cunt milking his left cock in violent, rhythmic spasms. That sensation, fed back into the loop, triggered Chris’s own release.
He came. Not once, but twice. Two separate, volcanic eruptions from two separate sets of balls. He flooded Bea’s pussy with thick, hot pulses at the same instant he emptied deep into Lily’s bowels, claiming both passages in a single, monstrous act of possession.
The synchronization snapped, a cord cut. The feedback vanished, leaving them in sudden, isolating silence.
Chris collapsed backward onto the floor, his dual cocks already softening, retracting, the flesh crawling and merging back into a single, spent organ. Bea slid off of Lily, rolling onto the rug beside the couch, a boneless heap. Lily lay on the couch arm, legs splayed, a slow trickle of white already leaking from her used ass onto the fabric.
For a long time, the only sound was the ragged symphony of their breathing.
Lily moved first. She slowly, painfully, sat up. She looked at the mess between her legs, at the vivid proof of the experiment on her skin and inside her. She looked at Chris, then at Bea. There was no clinical detachment left in her eyes. Only a raw, awestruck vulnerability.
“The dataset…” she began, her voice a shattered whisper. She shook her head, abandoning the pretense. She touched her stomach, wincing. “I’ve never… felt anything like that. It was like being two people. Being all of you.”
Bea reached a trembling hand out, intertwining her fingers with Lily’s. “Welcome to the research,” she said, her smile exhausted and real.
Chris stared at the ceiling, the phantom sensations of duality still echoing in his nerves. He thought of Blackwood’s cluttered office, of the pump’s hum, of the professor’s feline yowl. This was different. This was deeper, more intimate, more terrifying. He hadn’t just lost control. He had multiplied it, and shared it.
Lily stood on unsteady legs, found her notebook, and limped to the table. She picked up the remaining pastilles—the dexterity enhancer, the synchronizers. She looked at them, then at the two spent forms on the floor.
“The professor…” Lily said, her new, unguarded eyes meeting Chris’s. “She has more. Phase three. She called them the ‘ego-dissolvers.’” She swallowed. “She wants us to come to the lab. Tonight.”
She tucked the pastilles back into the velvet pouch. The invitation hung in the air, thick as the smell of sex. It was no longer an academic request. It was a summons.
LILY JOINS THEM.