Chapter 2: The Bathroom Transformation
The silence after the flood was brittle. We just sat there, breathing in the damp, fertile reek of what had happened. The drip from the ceiling was a metronome.
“So,” I said, finally. My voice was wrecked. “You gonna just lie there, or are we gonna try to… I don’t know. Hose off?”
N flinched. He pushed himself to his elbows, looking at the sodden ruin of his room, at me—drenched, my clothes plastered to my skin. His face did this complicated thing, cycling through shame, exhaustion, and a dull, residual awe. “My bathroom,” he muttered. “It’s… it might be worse.”
“Worse than this?” I gestured at the biblical mess.
He didn’t answer, just heaved himself off the bed with a wet sound. He was normal-sized, but he moved with the careful deliberation of someone whose body had recently been a different continent. He padded, naked and gleaming, towards his bedroom door. I followed, my shoes making awful squelching noises on the soaked floorboards.
The short hallway was dim, the air cooler. The bathroom door was ajar. He pushed it open and the smell hit me first—not the aftermath of sex, but something chemical, bitter, and wrong. Like burning rubber and hot metal. Underneath it, the humid scent of growth, of dank soil and swollen roots.
He flicked the switch. The fluorescent tube overhead buzzed, flickered, and caught, casting a sickly jaundiced light.
“Jesus,” I breathed.
It wasn’t a bathroom anymore. It was a containment unit for a failed experiment.
The tiles weren’t just grimy; they were cracked, bulging upward from the floor in places as if something had tried to push through from below. The porcelain sink was spiderwebbed with fractures, the mirror above it a crazed cataract reflecting back a thousand broken fragments of our stunned faces. The shower curtain was shredded, hanging in translucent plastic ribbons.
But the toilet.
The toilet was a monument. It was utterly destroyed. The bowl was shattered, leaving a gaping hole in the floor. The tank was blown apart, chunks of ceramic scattered like shrapnel. The pipes beneath were exposed, bent and mangled. A slow, rusty drip of water fell from a severed line.
“That,” N said quietly, pointing a shaking finger at the wreckage, “was two days ago. Just a standard… evening. I got a little worked up watching a movie.”
I walked closer, my stomach tightening. The scale of the damage was violent. This wasn’t from a flood. This was from an explosion of mass. “You just… grew right through it.”
He nodded, leaning against the ruined sink. It groaned under his normal human weight. “It happens fast. The bones, the muscle, the… other stuff. It doesn’t wait for convenience. Things get in the way, they break.” He ran a hand over his face. “The landlord thinks I’m into extreme plumbing. I’ve paid for three toilets out of pocket.”
A weird, hysterical laugh got stuck in my throat. This was the reality of it. Not just the mind-blowing, terrifying climax, but the mundane, expensive cleanup. The daily reality of a body that betrayed physics on a regular basis.
I looked at him in the shattered mirror. Our eyes met in the fragments. “How long?” I asked.
“Since puberty,” he said, the words flat. “Started small. A growth spurt that wouldn’t stop during… you know. Then it got worse. Every year, a little more. The last six months…” He trailed off, looking at the destroyed toilet. “It’s accelerating.”
I reached out and pressed my palm to his back. His skin was warm, ordinary. But I remembered the feel of it expanding under my hands, the tectonic shift of his shoulders. “And the horniness? Is that a cause, or an effect?”
“Yes,” he said, helplessly. “It’s a feedback loop. The arousal triggers the growth. The growth, the sheer physical intensity of it… it fuels the arousal. It’s a closed circuit. I can’t have one without the other. Trying to suppress it just makes the next time worse. The pressure builds.”
I turned him around to face me. He looked exhausted, hollowed out. But even now, in the aftermath, with the bathroom in ruins and the smell of ruin in our noses, I felt that pull. That insatiable curiosity was tilting into something darker, more possessive. I’d seen the cathedral. I’d been drowned by the flood. The terror had scoured me clean, and what was left was a sharp, focused hunger.
I wanted to see the wires. I wanted to understand the machine.
My fingers went to the hem of his torn, sticky t-shirt. “Take this off.”
He didn’t resist. He pulled it over his head. In the flickering light, his torso was just a man’s torso. Pale skin, a dusting of hair. But I looked closer. Fine, silvery stretch marks fanned across his ribs and lower back, like cracks in glaze. Old scars.
I traced one with a fingertip. “From before?”
“From last week,” he said softly.
A chill that had nothing to do with temperature went through me. The reset wasn’t perfect. It left marks.
I pushed him back gently until he was braced against the broken sink. The cool, cracked porcelain kissed his skin. I leaned in, pressing my mouth to the center of his chest. I felt his heartbeat kick—thump-thump—a little harder, a little faster. I licked a salt trail from his skin.
“Nina,” he warned, but it was a whisper.
“I want to see it,” I murmured against his sternum. “Not the show. The process. I want to see the in-between.”
My hand drifted down his stomach, through the coarse trail of hair, to the soft, spent flesh between his legs. It was limp, vulnerable. Normal. I cupped him, feeling the weight, the latent heat. He shuddered.
“It’s too soon,” he breathed. “The system’s drained. It needs time to…”
“To refill the reactor,” I finished, looking up at him. His pupils were wide. The fear was there, but so was the fascination. He was a scientist watching his own plague. “What jumpstarts it? After the reset.”
After the reset.”
He was quiet for a long time, just the buzz of the broken light and our breathing. My hand stayed where it was, a grounding weight. His eyes were fixed on a crack in the ceiling.
“A memory,” he finally said, the words slow and careful like he was pulling them from deep mud. “A strong one. A specific touch. The anticipation of… possibility. It’s like a pilot light. It just needs a spark.”
“Give me a memory,” I whispered.
He closed his eyes. “Sixteen. My voice had just finished cracking. I woke up one morning and my bed was… it was too small. My feet hung off the end. I thought I was dreaming.” He opened his eyes, but he wasn’t seeing me. He was seeing a past version of his cracked bathroom. “I’d get these… episodes. During gym class. In the locker room. Just from a thought, from the steam. I’d have to hide in a shower stall until it went down.”
A faint, pained smile touched his lips. It looked alien on his face.
“My dad slapped my shoulder, said I’d be a lady’s man. He had no idea.” The smile vanished. “He was right, though. Word got out. Not from me. From them. Girls would whisper, they’d stare in the hallways. They talked about my body, my… growing dick, to everyone. It was like a rumor that was physically true. They wanted to see it. They wanted to be the one who caused it.”
His breath hitched. I felt a tiny, tense jump under my palm. A spark.
“I lost my virginity to a senior in the back of her car. She was so excited, so aggressive. She’d heard the stories. But when it started… when I started to change under her hands, get bigger, hairier… she freaked. Called me a freak. She was mad it was growing. She thought it was for her, but she hated the reality.” He swallowed hard. “Afterward, when it reverted, she was even madder. Like I’d stolen the showpiece. The body hair shed, it came out in patches on her seats. She cried.”
The air felt thicker. The buzzing light seemed louder.
“That became the pattern. The wanting, then the revulsion. The begging, then the screaming. Some women, later, they’d just beg. They didn’t care about the aftermath, the broken furniture. They just wanted the experience. They’d call for months after. They still do.” He looked at me then, his gaze sharpening, focusing. “You’re the first one who didn’t run. Who came back for the wiring diagram.”
My own heart was hammering now. It wasn’t just arousal. It was a dreadful, swallowing empathy. His life was a series of traumatic, bizarre explosions where intimacy should be. I leaned forward and kissed him, hard. It was a seal, a promise.
His mouth opened under mine. The spark caught.
A deep, resonant thrum traveled from his core into my hand, a vibration like a cable being plucked. I broke the kiss, looking down.
The soft flesh in my hand was twitching, thickening. Not the catastrophic surge from before, but the insistent, undeniable beginning of it. The skin darkened, tightening. Veins surfaced like ink spreading under parchment.
“Nina,” he whispered, a plea and a warning woven together.
“I see it,” I breathed, fascinated and terrified. I watched the slow, relentless expansion, the forging of that brutal monument from its base materials. The hair on his stomach seemed coarser, darker. “It’s the memory. The anticipation. That’s the fuel.”
His hands came up, gripping the shattered edges of the sink. The porcelain groaned. His biceps tightened, the definition deepening, the muscle fibers knitting themselves into thicker cables. A low groan escaped him, part pain, part relief.
The growth was steady now, measurable. He was already halfway back to the giant I’d kneeled before. The top of his head neared the buzzing light fixture. His shoulders began to fill the space between the broken sink and the wall.
I stepped back, giving the transformation room, but I couldn’t look away. This was the in-between. The terrifying, beautiful mechanics of his curse. The air hummed with that familiar ozone scent, the smell of a storm building inside a man.
He turned his head to look at me. His eyes were full of a helpless, hungry apology. “It’s you now,” he managed, his voice already dropping, deepening. “You’re the memory. You’re the spark.”
He was right. I was the new circuit. The obsession that had driven me through our thin wall had become the essential trigger for his biology. The responsibility was absolute and horrifying.
And I wanted nothing more than to watch it burn.