Chapter 12: Chapter 13
The locker room was quiet when the technicians left him. Derek stood in front of his locker for a full minute before he could make his hands work the combination, because every small motion of his hips dragged the plug inside him, and the plug dragged the harness, and the harness dragged the cage, all three of them locked together in one steel and leather system that turned walking into a negotiation. He breathed through the nose the way Kai had taught him. In for four. Out for six. His hole fluttered around the thick base of the plug and he hated that it knew how to do that now, that his body had learned a trick he never would have taught it.
He pulled the blue skinny jeans up his legs, the normal ones without any special openings. They fit snugly across his narrow frame, highlighting his slender hips and thighs. The leather straps of the harness were buckled at his thighs and running up over his hips to meet the waistband in front, creating a subtle but distinctive outline against the denim. Anyone looking from the front would see nothing unusual. A skinny white kid in tight jeans, a thrift store T-shirt with a faded auto shop logo, ratty Converse. From the back the harness straps were visible beneath the fabric, betraying the system beneath. He tucked the cage down and let the denim hold it flat, and the cold steel of the harness rings pressed against his pubic bone like a hand reminding him whose hand it was.
"You'll wear the plug at all times between sessions," Zhang Ming had said, an hour ago, glasses catching the light of the training room monitor while Derek sat split open on the nine-inch dildo and answered questions about what he was. A small white faggot hole for Chinese men. He'd said it out loud. It was in a file somewhere now, next to a graph of his progress.
He took a breath, squared the T-shirt on his narrow shoulders, and walked out into the hall.
The first thirty feet were the worst. The plug shifted with each step, the flared base rolling against his rim, the shaft nudging that deep spot Kai had spent a whole session teaching him to love, and his knees went soft for half a stride before he caught himself. Keep your head down in hallways, Kai's voice said, pleasant and absolute, from the treadmill in his memory. You're not here to be looked at walking. You're here to be looked at working. Derek's eyes dropped to the polished concrete and he counted tiles until the cafeteria doors slid open.
Sunlight was cutting through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long bright blades, laying stripes across the empty tables. It was late in the lunch rush. Maybe a dozen men remained, scattered at the long tables, still in their suits, plates of noodles and braised beef and glistening roast duck in front of them. The smell hit Derek and his stomach clenched, hungry in a way the salad would never fix, and Kai's voice arrived right on schedule to make the hunger useful. Your appetite is not yours to feed. You eat what keeps you small and light and easy. Hunger is your body learning its place. Derek's dick tried to stir in its cage and couldn't, and the frustration settled into his belly like warm water.
He went to the salad station first. Tradition. Safety.
The attendant stood behind the counter in his light blue scrubs, arms crossed, shaved head gleaming under the fluorescents. The stubble on his chin had silver threads in it, and his forearms below the rolled sleeves were thick and roped with tendon, a network of veins running from wrist to elbow, the kind of arms that came from years of real labor or real lifting. He was maybe thirty, stern-faced, mouth a flat line. He didn't greet Derek. He never had. He reached into the cold well, pulled out the pre-portioned container of greens and pale cubes of tofu, set a little plastic cup of vinaigrette beside it, and pushed both across the counter.
His hands were beautiful. Wide palms, blunt fingers, short clean nails. Derek stared at them for a moment too long and then made himself pick up the container. What would those hands feel like on him? What did the rest of him look like under the scrubs, the chest, the heavy thighs, and the cock that had to be big, that a man built like that would carry like an entitlement? Derek hated himself for the thought even as it finished itself in his head, a full-color image of the attendant standing over him, scrubs peeled off, hanging heavy between thick legs. Kai's voice laughed at him gently. See how quickly your little mind goes where it belongs. You look at a man's hands and you think of them inside you. That's not shame, faggot. That's orientation.
Derek carried the salad out and found a seat at the end of a table near the pass-through window to the kitchen.
The dream came back so fast it felt like being grabbed. The shaved head, the dragon tattoo winding up the side of his neck, its tail curling toward his jaw, its head disappearing under the collar of his whites. Derek had seen that tattoo in a dream that wasn't a dream, had watched that neck from his knees, had felt the belt come down. In the dream he'd been roped to a steel table and this man had beaten him with a wide leather belt and Derek had cried and come anyway, leaking against the rope. Now here the man was in real life, twelve feet away, tossing a wok with one hand, his whites stained at the cuff, his face flushed and shiny with steam, completely unaware that Derek existed at all. The younger cook was at the prep station beside him, the compact one with the square face and the scar through his eyebrow, chopping scallions with a rhythm so fast the knife blurred.
They were both, in the flesh, exactly what Derek's dreaming mind had made of them. Broad shoulders, strong waists, forearms slick with sweat. Under those whites they'd be hard-bodied and heavy-cocked, thick even soft, the kind of dicks that didn't ask permission. Derek's throat went tight. They don't know your name, Kai said in his head. They don't think about you at all. That is the correct order of things. You think of them. They don't think of you. He wanted to crawl under the table. He wanted to walk into the kitchen and kneel. He did neither. He picked up his fork and ate.
The salad was cold and bitter and deliberate. Romaine shredded fine, a few shreds of red cabbage, four cubes of tofu, no dressing unless he used the little cup, and he always used half. Each bite was mostly water and fiber, the food of something being kept rather than fed. He thought about his body the way he now always thought about it, clinically, as property under management. He'd lost eleven pounds since the interview. His shoulders were narrower. His jeans, which had been tight in a cute way when they issued them, now hung loose at the waist except where the harness buckles filled the space. Every day on this food he'd get smaller, weaker, easier to handle, easier to lift onto the chair, easier to open. Kai's voice, warm as ever: Every pound you lose makes room for us. Your body is being edited. Don't grieve the draft.
Derek ate and watched the alphas.
Three of them sat at the nearest table, executives by the cut of their suits, all tall enough that even seated their shoulders filled Derek's whole field of view. The one closest to him was maybe forty, heavy through the chest, with a jaw like a carved block and a watch whose face caught the sunlight every time he lifted his hand with his chopsticks. His hair was shaved close at the sides and swept back on top, black with a single gray wing at the temple. He ate with unhurried authority, elbow on the table, and his suit jacket pulled across his back whenever he leaned forward, the fabric straining over lats that had no business being on a man who worked at a desk. Derek imagined unbuttoning that jacket from behind. Imagined the shirt underneath sticking to a hot, muscled back. Imagined the man's cock, thick and uncut and heavy, the kind that would never even look at Derek without contempt, and Derek was right, because when Derek's fork scraped his container the man glanced over for half a second, registered nothing, and looked away. Derek was furniture. Derek was a salad wrapper someone had left on the table.
He was so hard it hurt, and his dick stayed perfectly soft in its cage, and both things were somehow true at once. The plug pressed forward when he shifted his weight, and a wave of heat went up his spine, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a second behind his glasses.
Your fullness is your purpose, Kai said. The plug trains you between sessions so we don't waste session time. Every hour it sits in you, you're being made. Derek sat with the cold salad in his belly and the warm steel in his ass and understood, in the dumb, floating way the poppers residue still allowed, that he was being made right now, at this table, with vinaigrette on his chin.
"Hey, Derek."
Derek flinched hard enough to drop his fork. Li Wei was standing beside him with a tray, smiling that easy smile, in his navy dress shirt with the sleeves still rolled and his expensive watch sitting loose on a thick wrist. Li Wei was only twenty-something, solid and compact like a rugby player, black hair pushed up carelessly off his forehead, a face that was friendly before it was anything else. Derek's heart did the embarrassing thing it always did around him, the hopeful flutter, the only flutter any of these men had ever caused that felt like warmth instead of terror.
"Hi," Derek said, voice cracking.
"Mind if I sit?"
"No. No, please."
Li Wei set his tray down across from Derek, noodle soup and a mountain of rice and two pieces of roast pork glistening with fat, and dropped into the chair with the comfort of a man whose body had never been negotiated with. Up close his forearms were dense and dusted with fine black hair, his knuckles wide, his shoulders stretching the shirt seams. Derek looked at his soup and not at the pork, not at the man, definitely not at the man's crotch under the table where Derek's imagination helpfully supplied a heavy outline and he shut that thought down too late, way too late, again.
"How's the harness feeling?"
Derek's face went hot. Li Wei asked it the way he'd ask about a new chair, casual, kind, and that made it worse. "It's. Okay. It hurts a little when I sit down."
"Yeah, the first couple days are like that." Li Wei slurped his soup, unhurried. "The pressure's supposed to sit on your prostate, not your tailbone. If it's bone pain, tell the techs tomorrow and they'll adjust the angle. If it's just deep pressure, that's normal. That means it's where it should be."
"It's deep pressure," Derek said quietly, and his hole clenched on the plug as he said it, betraying him, and Li Wei nodded like this was good news, which maybe it was.
Li Wei reached into his pocket, pulled out a small amber bottle, and set it on the table with a soft click. "Quick hit? Makes the plug easier." He uncapped it before Derek could protest. "No one cares." He held it under Derek's nose. "Inhale. Three. Two. One. Hold." The chemical rush flooded Derek's system, and suddenly the deep pressure in his ass felt like pleasure. The world sharpened and softened at once, his pulse hammering in his ears as the plug seemed to swell inside him, pushing against that perfect spot that made his legs tremble. His eyes watered and he could smell the sweet, chemical tang of the poppers mixed with the lingering scent of pork from Li Wei's meal. He wanted to say something, to beg for more, but all he could do was hold his breath and feel the heat spread through his body, the cage around his dick suddenly feeling like a cruel joke when his whole being was screaming for release.
Li Wei watched him, his expression unreadable. "That's it," he murmured, his voice low and intimate. "Just like that." He capped the bottle and slipped it back into his pocket as Derek exhaled, the world rushing back in a dizzying wave. The cafeteria noise returned, but it sounded distant now, muffled through the chemical haze. Derek's gaze dropped to the table, his cheeks burning with shame and something else, something that felt a lot like arousal. Li Wei's fingers brushed against his wrist as he reached for his chopsticks, a brief, electric touch that sent a jolt straight to Derek's core. "Better?" Li Wei asked, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Derek could only nod, his throat too tight to speak. The plug inside him seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat, a constant, insistent reminder of what he was becoming.
Li Wei smiled. “Did you eat yet?”
Derek looked down at his half-finished container. "Eating."
"You're getting skinny, man." Li Wei said it without judgment, just observation, and Derek couldn't tell if it was sympathy or approval or both, and hated how badly he wanted it to be approval. "That's the program. Just don't skip the maintenance stuff tonight, okay? First night with the plug is the hard one. Take one of the painkillers around seven, before the ache really sets in, not after. Poppers if it gets bad, like, one or two hits, lie on your side, let it settle. Don't fight it. Fighting it just makes your muscles grip all night."
"Okay," Derek said. "One or two hits. Lie on my side."
"And the weed helps, honestly. Smoke like you normally do." Li Wei grinned. "Which is a lot, from what the logs say."
Derek went scarlet. The logs. Someone tracked how much he smoked. "I, um."
"I'm not judging. It's literally your prescription." Li Wei ate a piece of pork, chewing thoughtfully, and Derek watched the muscles of his jaw work and thought about nothing else for two full seconds. "Look, it's like this. Tonight your body's going to say something's wrong and it won't shut up about it. The meds make the volume go down. The poppers make the muscles stop arguing. The weed makes you not care, which is honestly the main event. By night three you won't sleep without it. By next week you'll feel empty without the plug, and that's not a brag, it's just how the body learns. Same as the machine, same as everything else."
Derek stared at his tofu. "Do you, um. Do you know what they're training me for? Like, actually. How long until."
"Until an actual fist?" Li Wei said it so plainly, no coyness at all, and Derek's whole body shivered. "I don't know your chart. Nobody tells me that stuff. But I know the program. It doesn't move you forward until the numbers say you're ready, and the numbers move faster than guys expect, because the training's good." He shrugged his dense shoulders. "You're doing well, is what I hear. Zhang Ming's reports on you are basically glowing."
"Glowing," Derek repeated faintly. Glowing. A report about him was glowing. Warmth spread through his chest like he'd been praised by his father, and he despised himself for it and basked in it anyway, and Kai's voice nodded along. See. Approval is oxygen now. That's not a flaw. That's a design feature.
They ate in silence for a minute. Around them the cafeteria was emptying, the executives rising in ones and twos, straightening jackets, carrying trays to the return. The tall one with the gray wing at his temple passed close to Derek's table and Derek caught the smell of him, warm wool and skin and something faintly like sandalwood, and he had to close his eyes.
"Hey." Li Wei's voice softened. "You're doing fine, Derek. Seriously. Most guys white-knuckle this phase and make it miserable. You're just, like, quietly eating your salad with a big plug in, doing your job. That's the right attitude. That's what the clients notice." He leaned forward slightly, his forearms resting on the table, the muscles in his arms bunching. "Hey." Li Wei's voice softened. "You're doing fine, Derek. Seriously. Most guys white-knuckle this phase and make it miserable. You're just, like, quietly eating your salad with a big plug in, doing your job. That's the right attitude. That's what the clients notice." He leaned forward slightly, his forearms resting on the table, the muscles in his arms bunching. Li Wei's fingers brushed against his wrist as he reached for his chopsticks, a brief, electric touch that sent a jolt straight to Derek's core. He pulled a small amber bottle from his pocket again and uncapped it. "Quick hit to take the edge off. Helps you remember what you're here for." He held it under Derek's nose, and Derek inhaled deeply, the poppers flooding his system, washing away the shame and leaving only the hollow, aching need to be a perfect hole. The chemical rush burned through his veins, his muscles relaxing around the plug, his mind going soft and pliant, his body surrendering to its purpose.
Derek nodded, throat too tight to speak, the plug pressing deeper with every breath, his body already learning to crave the pressure, the emptiness, the purpose. His hole fluttered around the thick base, a traitorous muscle that knew exactly what it wanted, and the cage felt both cruel and necessary as his dick strained against its unyielding steel.
Li Wei finished his soup, stacked his bowl on his tray, and checked his watch. "Come on. I'll walk you out, it's my run anyway." He stood, and Derek stood, and standing after twenty minutes of sitting was its own event, the plug rotating inside him, the harness tugging the cage, and Li Wei watched him do the small involuntary stiffen and didn't laugh, didn't even smile, just waited with patient kindness while Derek got his legs under him.
The walk to the lobby was long and sunlit and full of men. A pair of technicians crossed the atrium ahead of them, the tall lean one with the buzzed scalp and the wiry arms, his white coat unzipped over forearms like braided cable, the other one shorter and thicker through the chest, and Derek catalogued them the way he now catalogued everything, chest, arms, and the cock he assumed hung heavy in every one of their uniform pants, because Kai had taught him that his first thought about a man should be about what that man could do to him, and his thoughts obeyed the training now even in the lobby, even in daylight.
At the curb the Uber was already waiting, a gray sedan idling. Li Wei opened the back door for him.
"Hey." He caught Derek's shoulder, the same brief warm touch as always, and Derek's whole nervous system lit up around that one hand like a pinball machine. "Tonight. Meds at seven. Side-lying. Smoke. One or two hits of poppers if you need it… or more. Honestly as much as you need to pass out.”
"Okay," Derek whispered.
"You've got this. First night's the summit. After that it's just Tuesday." Li Wei patted his shoulder once and closed the door, and through the glass Derek watched him walk back toward the tower, shoulders rolling, sleeves rolled, the watch flashing, a whole solid confident life moving away from him without a backward glance.
The car pulled out. Derek sat carefully on one hip, then shifted to the other, then gave up and let the plug have its way, pressing full and deep as the city slid by the window. His body ached and throbbed and held. His salad was settling cold in his stomach and he was already planning how to be smaller by Friday.
At Emerald Gardens he'd take the pill at seven. He'd lie on his side. He'd smoke until the walls went soft. And somewhere in the warm dumb middle of the night, when the plug woke him with its deep patient pressure, he knew already what he'd do, lying in the dark with his caged little dick leaking against the steel. He'd push out, like Kai taught him. He'd open for it, and thank it, and sleep.
The Uber dropped him at the gate of Emerald Gardens at 4:40. Derek walked the long path to his building slowly, because walking fast was no longer possible. Every step rolled the plug against the deep spot, and by the time he got his key in the door his forehead was damp and his caged dick was leaking a thin clear string into his briefs.
The apartment was exactly as they kept it. Clean, minimal, humming with conditioned air. On the kitchen counter sat the week's maintenance tray, laid out like hotel amenities. A amber bottle of poppers. A blister pack of painkillers. A fresh pouch of weed with pre-rolled joints in a glass jar. A printed card with the schedule Li Wei had described, meds at seven, and beneath the schedule a sticky note in neat handwriting: First night. Side-lying. You've got this.
Derek wondered which of them had written it. Li Wei, probably. He touched the note with one finger and felt something pathetic bloom in his chest, gratitude toward an invented kindness, and Kai's voice said, warm and fond, Look at you. A sticky note and you're wet. Approval is oxygen, faggot. Breathe it.
He took the pill early. It was barely five but the ache had already started, a deep bruised pressure in his pelvis that made him want to pace and made pacing unbearable. He swallowed one painkiller with tap water, then thought about the night ahead and swallowed a second. Then he showered, which was its own ordeal, the harness buckles slick under the water, the plug solid and indifferent inside him, and stood dripping in front of the mirror looking at what was left of his body. Ribs showing. Hip bones sharp. The harness straps crossing his pale flesh like bindings on something small being packed for shipment. Eleven pounds gone. Every pound you lose makes room for us.
He dried off, put on the soft cotton shorts they'd left in the dresser, and rolled a joint.
The weed was clean this time. He could tell from the smell, green and simple, none of that strange sweet undertone from the night before. He smoked half a joint standing on the balcony watching the parking lot, and by the time he stubbed it out the edges of the world had gone soft and the plug's pressure had gone from enemy to companion. He sat down and he caught himself shifting his weight to find his g spot and stopped, disgusted, and Kai laughed at him. Caught yourself, did you. Too late. The body votes first. The mind just writes it down after.
He got into bed at seven with the lights low and his phone in his hand, and he was horny. Not the abstract, chronic, caged horny he'd learned to live with. This was urgent, insistent, the weed stripping away the shame-suppression like paint thinner, the pill loosening the last of his muscles so the plug sat in him like it belonged there and his body kept clenching around it anyway, greedy, automatic. His little dick strained uselessly in its cage, dripping through the gaps, and his hole fluttered and fluttered around the steel.
He needed to see something. Needed it like water.
He picked up his phone and opened a browser to search for porn, and the browser wasn't there.
He stared at the blank space on his home screen where the icon used to be. He swiped through the pages of apps twice, three times. No browser. He tried to search for a browser in the app store and got a screen that said THIS FEATURE HAS BEEN ADMINISTERED BY YOUR ORGANIZATION, with a small company logo beneath it, polite as a nameplate. His phone, which he'd owned for years before any of this, had been enrolled in something. He checked his email app and it opened to an empty inbox with the same administered banner. His text threads were gone. His photos were gone. All that remained was the phone function, the clock, and a short row of approved apps.
They hadn't told him. They'd just done it, sometime, quietly, while he slept or trained or ate his cold salad twelve feet from a man with a dragon on his neck.
Kai's voice arrived before the panic could. You don't need the internet, faggot. The internet was other people's fantasies. Now you have ours. Now your fantasy life is managed, like your diet, like your body. Isn't it better? Isn't it kinder?
His thumb, on its own, opened Instagram.
His account was gone. Not his, exactly. The handle was the same, the one he'd made in college, derekreads, with the little avatar of him squinting in front of a bookshelf. But the profile had been rebuilt. The bio read: property. no DMs. The profile picture was a blurry frame of him from the training room, pale and small and strapped into the contoured chair, taken from the side, clearly by one of the techs. The account had no posts. It followed two hundred and forty-one accounts, and Derek, with the drunk-slow dread of a man reading his own autopsy, scrolled through them.
Every single one was a Chinese man.
Not photographs. He could tell within seconds they weren't photographs. They were AI-generated, flawless in that particular flawless way, skin with no pores and no history, bodies assembled from the average of ten thousand gym hours, jawlines drawn by something that had never met a jaw. But they were beautiful. They were beautiful the way the men in the cafeteria were beautiful, the way the technicians were beautiful, tall and dense and heavy-shouldered, in tank tops and compression shorts and nothing, on beaches, in locker rooms, in front of gym mirrors, and every one of them looked like he could wrap one hand around Derek's thigh and lift him like luggage.
Someone had curated this. Someone at the office had sat at a desk and built his entire visual world for him, followed for him, chosen what he would see for the rest of his employed life, and the contract allowed it, he'd signed the page that allowed it, he hadn't read that page either.
His first reel was loading before he decided to watch it.
A generated man in a black tank top, maybe six-four in the way the image implied height without needing to prove it, doing heavy shrugs in a gym with red lighting. The shoulders rose and rose, traps climbing toward his ears, veins standing in his neck, and the body beneath the tank was a slab of groomed muscle, chest and lats and a waist cinched narrow, and Derek's brain did what it always did now, what Kai had trained it to do, undressed him, estimated him, imagined the cock under the compression shorts as heavy and thick and swinging soft the way a confident man's cock swings when it has never once been worried about. He's not real, Derek told himself. He's math. And his hole clenched on the plug anyway, and the mattress accepted him.
He ground into it. He didn't decide to. His hips rolled, slow, and the plug pressed into the deep spot and a sound came out of him, a small humiliated moan into the pillow, and he did it again, dragging the steel over the place Kai had taught him to love, his caged dick weeping into the shorts.
The next reel was a beach. Three generated alphas at golden hour, shirtless, one of them laughing at the camera with water running down his carved abdominals, another flexing lazily, the third on his knees in the sand doing something with a surfboard that made his back and shoulders spread like wings. Derek watched the one kneeling and thought, helplessly, that's where I'd be, and hated himself with a clean hot hate, and Kai's voice poured over the hate like oil over water, smoothing it flat. See how right it looks. A big man on his knees is a posture. A small man on his knees is a home.
The next was a locker room. The next was a dance reel, a tall generated man in grey sweatpants moving to music Derek couldn't hear because the account had muted it, and the sweatpants did what sweatpants did, showed the heavy outline of everything, and Derek's mouth actually opened watching it, his breath gone shallow, his hand pressed flat over his caged and leaking little dick like he could warm it back to life through the steel.
He reached for the poppers bottle on the nightstand.
The rush hit him in a wave, blood thundering up his neck into his skull, and suddenly the reel was enormous and the room was far away and the plug felt ten pounds. He ground harder, pressing his ass down into the mattress, rolling the flared base against his rim, pushing out the way Kai had taught him while the plug pushed in, opening around steel alone in a dark room on his stomach, humping a bed for AI men because his phone had been emptied and rebuilt for him by people who did not think about him at all.
The shame should have killed the wanting. Instead the shame fed it, fed it precisely, the way a bellows feeds a fire, because Kai had spent eleven sessions teaching him that the shame was the point, that a hole that hated itself opened deeper than a hole that loved itself, and Derek lay there hating himself in long shuddering pulses timed to his hips and the reels kept loading, an algorithm he hadn't chosen feeding him exactly himself.
A generated man benching, in a tank top gone translucent with sweat, his chest a pair of heavy plates behind damp fabric, his face serene with power. Derek imagined being under the bar instead of the weight. Imagined that chest bare, imagined the smell of it, imagined the cock that would hang above his face when that man straddled him to use him, big and uncut and indifferent, and Derek would take it soft into his mouth, the way you take something that doesn't need to want you.
Another hit. The room tilted pleasantly. His ass ground down and the plug went deeper, as deep as its shape allowed, and he sobbed once into the pillow, quietly, from pure frustrated need, because his dick couldn't get hard and nothing could get him off and the only orgasm left in his life was the one they'd promised him at the deep spot, and the reels kept coming, flexing, dancing, lifting, beach, gym, locker room, gray sweatpants, red-light barbell, and every man on the screen was math and every man was perfect and every man was straight, surely, the way they were all straight, the way the whole tall confident world of them was straight, and none of them, not one, would look at a scrawny caged white faggot in a leather harness and think anything at all.
They don't think about you, Kai said, gentle as a lullaby. That is the gift. You can want them without limit because they will never want you back. Unrequited is unlimited.
Derek sniffed again, longer, until his eyes ran.
The reels blurred into each other. The men blurred. Somewhere in there his phone slipped low on the pillow and he watched the last one crooked and sideways, a generated alpha on a beach at sunset lifting his shirt over his head, slow, a sliver of ridged stomach, a happy trail vanishing into a waistband, and Derek ground his hips in small desperate circles, pushing out, open for it, thank it, and the pill and the weed and the poppers and the harness and the plug all agreed with each other.
The next reel auto-loaded before the beach one finished fading. A gym again. The generated man was doing pull-ups in a doorway frame bolted into raw concrete, and the camera sat low so that every rep brought his body down toward the lens, chest first, a wall of plated muscle descending like weather. His tank top was black and soaked. His face was calm, almost bored, lips slightly parted with breath, and his arms on the pull were impossible, biceps swelling into hard round peaks, veins mapping his forearms like roots of something old.
Derek's hips kept moving. Small circles, slow, ashamed, delicious. The plug's base rolled over his rim and the shaft leaned into the deep spot and his whole pelvis seemed to glow around it, bruised and warm and full.
"Fuck," he whispered into the pillow. His voice came out slurred, half melted. He reached for the bottle without looking. His hand knew where it was now. His hand had learned.
The rush hit like a fist of warm water. His skull filled up, blood roaring, heart slamming, and the man on the screen swelled to fill the room, descending toward him rep after rep, and Derek arched his back and pushed out the way Kai had taught him, pushing the plug deeper into his own surrender, and a long stupid groan came out of him that he didn't recognize as his own voice.
You sound like that when you're honest, Kai said, fond as a hand on his head. Remember that sound. That's the real you. Everything else was a costume.
The reel ended. Another loaded. A generated man in a pressed white dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, standing at a boardroom window with the city below him, and he was turning his cuffs, the fabric pulling across shoulders that could not have been drawn by anyone who respected shoulders. Derek stared at the forearms. Dense, hairy, the veins standing where the rolled sleeve bit into them, the hands broad and sure, the hands of a man who signed things and ended things. Under the slacks, Derek's mind supplied instantly, helplessly, a heavy cock swinging with each shift of weight, thick even soft, the confidence of a dick that had never been told no.
"I'm disgusting," Derek mumbled, and his hips rolled anyway, and he was crying a little, tears sliding sideways into the pillow, and his hole fluttered and clenched and fluttered around the steel, greedy, and none of it contradicted anything anymore. The shame and the hunger had married each other. They had one body now, and it was his.
Another hit. Longer. The room went to syrup.
The next reel was a locker room, rendered in that poreless perfection, tiles gleaming like teeth. A tall generated man stood at a locker pulling a compression shirt over his head, and the camera watched the fabric climb, revealing the enormous architecture of him in pieces, lats, the deep valley of his spine, obliques carved like shelving. His chest came free and hung heavy and solid, nipples small and dark against slabs of pectoral, and between his legs, in the shadow of his shorts, the outline was everything Derek's imaginings had always promised. He was peeling the shirt over his face with his arms raised, and the raise of them opened his body like a door, armpits dark with groomed hair, and Derek moaned again, deeper this time, and ground his straining caged dick into the mattress and got nothing from it, nothing but the ache, which was somehow the best thing he had ever felt.
They don't want you, Kai reminded him, gentle, in the rhythm of the pull-ups, of the reps. Not one of them. Not the cooks, not the executives, not the math men on your screen. And so you can want them with everything you have. No one is watching you want. Isn't that freedom? Isn't it the kindest thing anyone ever built for you?
"Yes," Derek said out loud, to no one, to the phone, to the dark. "Yes, sir."
The word sir fell out of his mouth on its own, aimed at a reel, at an algorithm, and he heard himself say it and a hot wave of humiliation washed through him and turned into pleasure halfway through, converting cleanly, like the body had installed a converter for exactly that exchange rate. Humiliation in. Pleasure out. He was a machine too. He was the little machine they kept at Emerald Gardens.
Another reel. Another hit. The cap was getting easier to find. His world narrowed to screen and steel and scent, the sweet chemical tang, the faint coconut smell of the lube the technicians used still ghosting out of his own body, the clean cotton smell of the pillow he was humping like a desperate teenager. His glasses had gone crooked. He didn't fix them. Fixing them would have required being a person.
The reel was a barbell now. Squats. A generated man in grey shorts lowering himself under a weight that bent the bar across traps like motorcycle handlebars, thighs so massive they touched, and when he sank into the hole of the squat his ass pressed the fabric taut and Derek's mouth fell open and stayed open. He thought about being under that man. About being the ground he lowered himself onto. About the weight of him settling down, all that mass, chest on Derek's back, breath on his neck, and Derek would lie there and take it and thank it, open for it, and the words had stopped being Kai's words and started being his own, running in his head in Kai's voice but his, his liturgy now.
I'm a small white faggot hole, he thought, humping the mattress, crying, high, pushing out around the plug. For Chinese men. I belong in straps and screens. I eat salad so I stay easy to lift. My dick is a mistake they fixed. My hole is the point. This is me. This is, and another hit, and the thought dissolved into light before it could finish itself, and that was fine, that was better, thinking was the costume too.
The reels kept coming. The algorithm had read him completely in one night, or had been pre-loaded, had been issued, and every man it served was taller and wider and heavier than the last. A wrestler, flexing in a singlet, the fabric stretched over a chest like armor plating. A construction type on a scaffold, tank top, sweat, a forearm wiping his brow, veins like hoses. A swimmer's shoulders. A dancer's control. A man laughing at a table with friends, one hand raised, and even the laugh looked strong, and Derek imagined the hand, imagined those fingers, imagined them inside him, and he didn't even flinch at the thought anymore, he welcomed it like weather, and Kai's voice said, There. Do you feel it? No disgust. Just appetite. You're nearly done.
The poppers were going fast. He'd lost count. Four hits, five, six, the little bottle warm from his hand, and each rush came faster and hit deeper and lasted shorter and left him a little dumber than the one before, a ladder of small descents, and he climbed down it eagerly, rung by rung, away from the person who had sat at that desk and done data entry and read sci-fi paperbacks, down toward the thing on the mattress that humped and leaked and pushed out and whispered sir at a telephone.
His hips were moving constantly now, a slow helpless rolling, the plug working his rim in and out by fractions, the flared base catching, pressing, catching, pressing. Precome or whatever his body made now leaked steadily through the cage's gaps and the front of the soft cotton shorts was dark with it, a wet stain spreading, and he pressed his palm over it and rubbed the steel through the fabric and got the ache, only the ache, and the ache was worship, the ache was the whole point, the ache was his dick now.
Another reel loaded. It was different.
A generated office. Boardroom, long table, tall men in suits, five of them, and the camera moved like a hand drifting through the room, and every man at that table was a version of the men Derek had eaten his salad in front of today. The heavy-chested one with the block jaw. A lean one with a watch. One leaning back with his arm over the empty chair beside him, jacket open, shirt pulled across a hard belly, crotch a heavy suggestion beneath wool. They were talking about nothing the audio didn't bother to carry. They were powerful and bored and straight and enormous, and Derek lay there with his ass full and his face wet and wanted them with his whole ruined body, and the wanting didn't feel like a perversion anymore. That was the scariest part. Somewhere in the last hour the wanting had stopped feeling like a thing being done to him and had started feeling like a thing he simply was, the way he was short, the way he was pale. A fact. A nature.
Faggots are not made unhappy by wanting, Kai said, and the voice was almost tender now, almost inside his own voice. They're made unhappy by pretending they don't. You stopped pretending about an hour ago. Feel how light that is.
"I stopped," Derek whispered to the pillow. His tongue was thick. His thoughts arrived slow and round, like stones rolling through honey. "I stopped pretending."
The boardroom reel ended. He didn't want it to end. His thumb scrolled before the feeling could fade, hunting the next one like a fix, and the next one came and he hit the poppers again, deeper, until his eyes rolled, until the room was a warm dark ocean with one bright rectangle in it, and he ground and pushed and thanked it, and the man on the screen, a generated giant curling dumbbells, veins in his neck, veins in his hands, a dick-shaped heaviness in his shorts, watched nothing, knew nothing, was not real and would never know Derek had ever existed, and Derek loved him so much his chest hurt.
That's it, Kai said. That's the correct size for your love. All of it, aimed at men who will never turn around. You were built for unrequited. Unrequited is unlimited.
His hips were a blur of small shame now. The wet spot under him had spread to his thighs. He was saying something into the pillow, he realized, in a cracked whisper, over and over, matching the rhythm of his grinding, and it took him a moment to hear his own words.
"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."
To the plug. To the algorithm. To the men in the phone, all of them math, all of them perfect, all of them straight, all of them forever out of reach, which meant forever available to a hole like him, who could want without limit because wanting was all he would ever be allowed to do.
The next reel was a generated man in a grey suit walking toward the camera down an office corridor, and the walk was confident, unhurried, and the suit fit him like a poured thing, and Derek pushed out around the steel and lifted his hips and brought them down and pushed out again, fucking himself on the only cock-shaped thing he would ever be given, open for it, thank it, and the pill and the weed and the poppers and the harness and the plug and the reels all agreed with each other, and so, for the first time in his life, did he.
His phone buzzed.
He barely surfaced for it. The notification banner slid down over the video, small and neat.
HUO XIAO: First night is always the hardest. Don't fight it. The reels are part of the program. Watch as many as you want.
Beneath it, a second bubble arrived before Derek could even form a thought.
HUO XIAO: You're doing great, derekreads. Property looks good on you.
Derek stared at the screen through a haze of chemical warmth and tears and a wet pillow, caged and plugged and humping the mattress, and the shame rose up in him one more time, the old shame, the person-shaped shame, and it crested, and it broke, and it washed through him and out of him and converted itself, cleanly, perfectly, into heat.
He turned the phone face down. He turned back to the reels already loading on the sound. He hit the bottle one more time, the longest hit yet, until the room disappeared entirely, and gave himself to it, completely, stupidly, gratefully, the way a thing gives itself when it finally stops pretending it was ever anything else.