Chapter 14: The Survey of the Opened
The headset lifted away and the room came back white and hard, and Derek hung in the straps with the machine's dildo still seated to the hilt, not moving, holding him open at full depth. His hole winked around the base of it without his permission. The poppers fog sat behind his eyes like warm gauze.
Zhang Ming pulled a stool to the foot of the chair and sat with his clipboard, and Derek catalogued him through the gauze, the square glasses, the rolled sleeves, the tendons of his forearms as he wrote, the thin elegant neck rising out of his checked shirt. Derek imagined the chest under the cotton, the flat brown nipples, the heavy cock he must have, big the way all of them were big, straight the way all of them were straight, and the shame came and converted, heat in, heat out. Zhang Ming didn't look at him as a person. He looked at him as a column of data that happened to talk.
"Zhang Ming closed the clipboard and set it on his knee.
"No survey today," he said. "The interactive program gives us better data than the questionnaire. Your responses in the module are recorded directly. Nodding, crying, the sounds you make. All of it is logged." He looked at Derek over the square glasses, a flat clinical look that nonetheless went through Derek like a hand through water. "So you can rest your voice. Or not. It makes no difference to the schedule."
Derek's stomach dipped. He hadn't realized how much he had come to need the survey, the ten questions, the ritual of being made to say what he was out loud in front of this man. Something in him reached after it and found nothing there.
"You're disappointed," Zhang Ming observed. He didn't sound interested. He sounded like he was noting a reading on an instrument.
"A little, sir," Derek heard himself admit.
"That's the conditioning doing its work. You wanted the humiliation because it felt like attention." Zhang Ming stood, and Derek's eyes dragged over him involuntarily, the thin waist above the slim hips, the flat front of his slacks, and Derek's brain drew the body under the clothes without asking permission, the fine dark hair he imagined on the chest, the heavy soft cock he imagined hanging there, big because all of them were big, because Kai had said so and because the world kept confirming it. Straight men. Untouchable men. Men who would never look at him once. He hated the wanting the way he hated the salad, and he swallowed both every day.
"Instead there's an upgrade," Zhang Ming said.
He walked to the wall cabinet and opened it, and Derek craned his head against the headrest to see. The thing Zhang Ming lifted out was black silicone, like the machine's, but thicker at the crown and long, long in a way that made something in Derek's pelvis go hot and cold at the same time.
"The plug you've been wearing is inadequate now," Zhang Ming said, carrying it toward the foot of the chair. "Your training has outpaced it. You'll wear this instead. Ten inches long. Nine around. It replaces the plug entirely. It stays in at all times between sessions, exactly like the plug did. Locked in the same harness."
Derek's mouth opened. "Ten inches. Sir, that's bigger than what the machine just used."
"It's one inch longer and one inch wider than the training dildo. You took the training dildo to the hilt for forty minutes." Zhang Ming set it on the trolley beside the chair, and it lay there gleaming under the fluorescents like something landed. "You can take it. This is standard protocol. Assets before you have worn this exact model. Your hole is on schedule, and the schedule says you wear it."
The word schedule did something to Derek that no touch could have. He was a row in a spreadsheet and the row said ready, and he glowed at it, glowing at being a row, and Kai's voice came up through the fog like warm water: you're a vessel, vessels get filled, thank them, and Derek's hole winked hard around the machine's seated shaft, twice, shamelessly, and Zhang Ming watched it happen with the dispassion of a man watching a gauge.
"Huo Xiao's notes say the emptiness bothered you yesterday," Zhang Ming said. "Good. Appetite is the correct state. This will keep you full, and full is the state we want you in when a real fist arrives. Which is soon. Your measurements put you there within days, not weeks."
"Days," Derek repeated, breathless.
"Days." Zhang Ming pulled on a fresh pair of gloves, and the snap of latex went through Derek's spine like current. "Now. The machine withdraws first. Then I insert this by hand. The cannula stays in. You'll be dosed through the insertion. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Say what's about to happen to you."
Derek's face burned and his hole bloomed. "A ten-inch dildo is going in my ass. You're going to put it in me by hand, sir, and I'm going to wear it. All the time."
"Correct." Zhang Ming pressed the button on the machine's arm, and the piston began to recede.
The drag of it leaving him was long and slow and merciless, nine inches of hard silicone pulling backward through him inch by inch, his rim clutching at it, his inner ring relaxing around it with a wet reluctance, the poppers still sitting behind his eyes making every sensation wide and soft and enormous. The tip stroked the deep spot on the way out and Derek arched against the belt and made the melted sound, the one Kai had called the real him. Then the flare of the head pushed through his rim and was gone, and he was empty.
Empty was a pit. Empty was a mouth-shaped ache in the middle of his body, clenching on cool air, winking at nothing, and he heard himself whimper at it, actually heard the sound, high and small and humiliating, and Zhang Ming did not react at all, which was its own kind of enormous weight.
Zhang Ming unzipped Derek’s tight jeans and slid them down to his mid thigh, followed by his tight briefs. He took the new dildo off the trolley and coated it slowly with lube, his gloved hand working the sheen up and down the shaft, and Derek watched the man's wrist turn, watched the tendons shift under the rolled cuff, and thought, uselessly, helplessly, about what that wrist would look like holding a cigarette, holding a steering wheel, holding another man's hips, and hated himself for it, and Kai's remembered voice said, hate it and keep watching, watching is what you're for.
"Breathe deep, more poppers,” Zhang Ming said, and the cannula hissed into both nostrils.
The bloom rose up through Derek's skull like a tide, and the white room went syrup-soft at the edges, and Zhang Ming's glasses went soft at the edges, and the black silicone in his hand went from object to destiny.
"Push out," Zhang Ming said.
Derek pushed out. He had been taught to push out, there was no wrong moment to be open, and the crowned head of the ten-inch dildo pressed against his rim and the rim opened for it, groaning, spreading wide around the wider girth, and the first inch went in.
It was bigger. He felt it immediately, the stretch a band of burning fullness across the tightest part of him, and the poppers wrapped the burning in warm fog and turned it into a different sensation, into fatness, into being stuffed, into the feeling his reels had been teaching him every night to call yes. Zhang Ming pressed and held, letting the rim seat itself around the crown.
"Breathe. Again."
Hit. The second dose broke over him and his body went boneless in the straps, and Zhang Ming pushed, and another three inches slid into him with a slow obscene glide, and Derek's eyes rolled up under the fog, his mouth open, drool at the corner he couldn't be bothered to close. The shaft was thicker than the machine's and every centimeter announced itself, dragging across his inner walls, opening him along a length he had never held inside himself while conscious and still.
"Halfway," Zhang Ming said, clinical, noting it. "Push out. Don't clench. Your body knows this. You just did it for forty minutes."
"Yes, sir. I did it. I took it." Derek was babbling and knew it and didn't care, the praise of the schedule running through him like a drug alongside the poppers. "I can take it."
"You can," Zhang Ming said, and there was nothing warm in it, only accuracy, and the accuracy went through Derek like a lover's hand.
More inches. Zhang Ming worked it in with short patient strokes, in a quarter inch, back a hair, in again, the classic choreography, and Derek's hole sang around it, stretched to its widest ever in its life, the burn living at the edge of what he could hold and the fog holding his hand the whole way. On the walls of the white room, in the afterimage of the training videos, he could still see the generated fists punching into generated white boys, and he understood them now from the inside, understood the flex of those faces, the wrecked gratitude.
"Deep spot in one inch," Zhang Ming said. "Push."
The crowned head pressed through his inner ring and folded it open and slid past, and Derek's whole body shuddered, a long rolling tremor from shoulders to feet, and he cried out, not pain exactly, something past pain's border, an opening so deep it registered like being spoken to.
"There," Zhang Ming said quietly. "You've never been this full."
"No, sir. Never." Derek's voice was ruined, sanded down to a whisper. "Thank you, sir. Thank you."
The last inch. Zhang Ming set his gloved palm flat against the base and pushed, one long even press, and the dildo traveled the final distance and seated itself, base flush against Derek's stretched rim, ten inches of silicone living inside him, filling him to a depth that made his breath come shallow and small, every part of his lower body aware of every other part for the first time.
Derek hung there and trembled and loved it. That was the thing he couldn't say to anyone in the world except these men, who had made a place where saying it was unnecessary. He was full past the border of full into something else, and the something else hummed.
Zhang Ming peeled his gloves off and took a new pair from the wall, and Derek watched his elegant fingers roll the latex down and thought about the fingers without the latex, and then Zhang Ming picked up the leather harness, the same one from yesterday, heavy straps and steel rings and small locks.
"It secures the same way," Zhang Ming said. "Straps around the waist, down between the cheeks, the ring seats against the base so it cannot migrate. The dildo's base flares slightly wider than the plug did, so the fit will be firmer. You'll feel it with every step."
"It's already so deep, sir," Derek whispered.
"That's the point. Walk-level fullness means your body never gets to forget." Zhang Ming moved around the foot of the chair and began fitting the harness under Derek's hips, lifting him a little with one hand under the small of his back, and the hand was brief and strong and completely without tenderness and Derek's caged dick ached at it, dripped at it, a bead of fluid he felt slide down his shaft inside the steel. The wide waistband buckled snug over his belly. Then Zhang Ming drew the rear strap up between his cheeks, and Derek felt the steel ring press against the flared base, and Zhang Ming worked the base through the ring one slow grinding millimeter at a time so the ring cinched behind the flare and locked the whole ten inches in place against any retreat.
"There is no out for this," Zhang Ming said, threading the strap that ran forward and clipped to the front of the chastity cage, linking harness to steel, so that Derek's whole pelvis was one closed system, caged in front, stuffed and locked behind. "Your body can push on it as much as it likes. The harness answers pressure with pressure. Some assets find that pleasurable. Maybe you do too.”
Derek pushed on it, immediately, testing, and the dildo answered by pressing deeper into the deep spot, and a low helpless moan fell out of him, and Zhang Ming wrote something on the tablet he had picked up, and Derek glowed at being data. Zhang Ming slid Derek’s briefs and jeans back up, over the leather harness.
"Stand test in a moment," Zhang Ming said, undoing the ankle cuffs. "When we stand you'll feel the full weight of it settle. Gravity is part of the design."
The wrist cuffs came off. Derek sat up slowly, and the world swam with poppers fog and new fullness, and then Zhang Ming's hand was on his elbow, steadying him to his feet, and gravity arrived exactly as promised. The ten inches dropped another fraction deeper inside him, driven by his own body weight, the steel ring holding the base fast, and Derek gripped the edge of the chair and made a sound through his teeth and stood there, swaying, stuffed, locked, transformed.
"Good," Zhang Ming said. "Walk three steps."
Derek walked. Each step was a small earthquake, the girth shifting, the depth shifting, his rim working around the flare, the cage swinging its tiny weight, and by the third step his knees were soft and his breath was thin and he had the dizzy understanding that he would take thousands of steps like this, every day, to the cafeteria, to the Uber, around his apartment at Emerald Gardens, full of ten inches of black silicone at all times because a schedule said his hole was ready.
"You'll take pain medication tonight as prescribed," Zhang Ming said, packing the clipboard under his arm. "And continue with the cannabis and poppers, too.”
The door hissed open behind him and Zhang Ming was gone, his footsteps crisp and fading down the corridor, and in his place came the two technicians, grey scrubs moving through the white light like they had been stamped from it.
The taller one, the one with the buzzed scalp and the ropy forearms, tapped the chair's armrest twice. The shorter one with the bowl cut stood at the door holding it open, planted, his thick neck rising out of the scrub collar like something poured.
Derek tried to walk toward them and his body betrayed him on the first step.
The ten inches shifted. The steel ring cinched against the flare and the whole weight of the dildo tipped forward off its base and pressed down onto the deep spot, and Derek's spine curved before he chose anything, an involuntary arch, hips tipping back, chest lifting, the exact posture of a man offering himself to a room. He caught himself against the chair. Tried again. Arched again.
"Sorry," he said, to no one, because they weren't looking at him as a person who could be sorry.
The taller technician took his elbow without a word and steered him. The shorter one walked ahead, opening doors. They moved him down the corridor the way two men move a piece of equipment, and Derek bounced.
That was the humiliating thing, the thing he would think about tonight with the poppers bottle under his nose. He bounced. Every step landed, gravity drove the girth down, his rim worked the flare, and his pelvis answered with a small helpless hop, a dip and lift, like his hips had their own stupid rhythm now. His back arched. His ass tipped out. He walked the corridor of the firm like a cartoon of a faggot, and he could not stop it, and the worst part, the part Kai would have called the real him, was that he didn't want to stop it.
"Sorry," he said again, and laughed, a thin breathless stupid sound, and the shorter technician glanced back at him and said something to the taller one in Chinese, low, two syllables, and they both made a short sound that was almost a laugh. Not at Derek exactly. About Derek, the way you talk about something you're transporting. Derek's face burned and his hole clenched gratefully on the shaft and he loved the sound of their voices in a language he would never own.
He catalogued them as he bounced between them because it was the only thing left in his head besides the dildo. The taller one's long neck, the tendon running down into his scrub top, the flat planes of his chest under the cotton, and Derek drew the body under it without asking, the hard little nipples, the taper of his waist, the heavy cock he must have packed into his shorts, big, soft and heavy even at rest, the way all of them were. The shorter one's shoulders made the scrub top look poured over a form. His hands were thick. His wrists were thick. Derek thought about those wrists wrapped around the base of a fist, pushing it into someone, and his own knees went soft and the taller technician's grip on his elbow tightened to keep him upright and Derek whispered thank you without meaning to say it out loud.
The locker room smelled of soap and clean steam. They walked him to the bench where his day clothes waited, jeans and a t-shirt folded flat. The taller one pointed at the clothes. That was the whole instruction.
Derek reached for his waistband and then understood the problem. The harness. In his current state, still high on poppers and adjusting to the massive dildo inside him, the challenge of pulling his tight jeans down over the leather harness was just too much for him. He looked up helplessly and the taller technician sighed through his nose, a small exhale of labor, and stepped behind him and worked the jeans down over the harness himself, unbuckling nothing, just dragging the denim down Derek's slim hips past the leather and steel, past the flared base, and Derek stood in front of two fully clothed strong indifferent Chinese men with ten inches of silicone locked inside him and his tiny caged dick swinging in the air, and neither of them looked at it. Not one glance. Their eyes were already elsewhere.
The swap of clothes happened in pieces. He couldn't pull jeans up over the harness and the flare on his own, not without unseating everything, and the taller one ended up doing that too, guiding each leg, then drawing the tight denim up Derek's thighs and working it over the steel ring at the back, hauling the waistband closed with one hand while Derek braced on the bench. The jeans were tighter than he remembered. Maybe it was because of the harness, or maybe they had downsized once again. he was losing weight still, so he could probably squeeze into a tighter pair. his body had been shaped now, whittled and stuffed, into something that fit the program. Fifty-nine point four kilos and falling. The fabric clung to his hip bones like it was holding him together.
He stood and the bounce came back immediately. The taller technician said one word to the shorter one, Chinese, and the shorter one took a small brown bottle out of a zip pouch and uncapped it and held it under Derek's nose.
"Other nostril," the taller one said, in English, flat, and Derek obeyed like a machine with a button pressed, one nostril, then the other, and the tide came up through his skull and the locker room went syrup and his spine arched and his mouth fell open and he bounced on his heels twice, small stupid grateful hops, and the shorter technician watched him do it with the mild professional attention of a man checking a dosage took.
Then they walked him. One on each side now, hands not quite touching him, just hovering, herding, and Derek bounced down the corridor toward the cafeteria with his ass tipping out with every step and his breath thin and his head full of nothing but the shaft shifting inside him and the men around him.
The corridor was full of them. It always was.
A pair of executives came the other way, tall, both in charcoal suits cut close, one with his tie already loosened and the other wearing glasses with thin gold frames. The one with glasses had a jaw like a model and a way of walking that owned the floor tile. Derek's eyes did the thing they always did, dragged down the suit jacket to the shoulders, imagined the chest under the shirt, the flat stomach, the heavy cock hanging soft in expensive boxer briefs, big, huge, the way a body that size had to be built. Straight. Married, probably. Powerful men who went home to wives and let off steam somewhere else, somewhere that employed a fifty-nine kilo white receptacle with a ten-inch dildo locked in his pelvis. That was him. That was the steam vent. He bounced past them with his back arched and they did not look at him once, and Kai's voice said, they never will, and that's the gift, and Derek's rim fluttered on the flare.
"Cafeteria," the taller technician said at the double doors, which was the only English he'd spent since the chair, and then he took the brown bottle and pressed it back into Derek's hand, folding the smaller man's fingers around it. "Yours. Corner table. Salad station first."
Then they were turning around, both of them, walking back toward the training floor without a backward glance, already talking to each other in Chinese about something else entirely, some lunch, some show, some life Derek would never see. He stood there holding the bottle and watched them go, the tall one's long stride, the short one's rolling shoulders, and hated that his eyes followed them all the way to the turn.
The cafeteria was bright and loud with lunch.
The salad station sat against the far wall like a punishment built into the architecture, a cold steel counter, bins of chopped romaine and cucumber and tomato, a line of dressing bottles with the calories printed in small type. The man behind it was the same one as always, mid-thirties, shaved head, light blue scrubs stretched over a chest that made the scrub look like a misunderstanding, his arms brown and veined below the pushed sleeves, a small scar across one eyebrow. He didn't acknowledge Derek. He took the tray, built the salad with fast exact hands, romaine, cucumber, tomato, no dressing, and slid it across the steel. Not one word. Not one glance up. Derek said thank you, sir, very quietly, and the man was already serving the next person, a young Chinese analyst in a pale blue oxford who got a nod and a smile and a heavier scoop of something.
Derek stood there holding his tray with his rim working around ten inches and understood the difference between a nod and no nod, and carried his salad to the corner table with his back arched and his hips doing their stupid dip.
The room was a wall of them. Executives at long tables, shirtsleeves rolled, jackets off, eating rich food, noodles glistening with oil, rice mountains, braised pork with the fat still on. Two men by the window were laughing over their trays, one broad and square with a crew cut and forearms like dock rope, the other lean and long-faced with his hair swept back and a wedding ring catching the light. Derek looked at their hands. Their hands were things, thick-knuckled, veined, and he thought about those hands fisted in his hair, those fists, the actual knuckles of them, going into him where the silicone was, and the heat went through his whole pelvis and he had to grip the table edge when he sat down.
Sitting was an event. The denim hauled tight, the flare pressed by the chair seat, the shaft driven up and in, and his spine curved and his mouth opened and a thin sound leaked out of him that he strangled with his fist. Nobody at the surrounding tables even paused. The boardroom men from the videos had watched their white thing get fisted with bored power. These men didn't even give him boredom. He was furniture. He was a corner.
He ate.
The salad was cold and green and nothing, water pretending to be food. Each bite was a subtraction. That was the arithmetic now, he understood it completely, romaine and cucumber and tomato every day while the men around him ate pork fat and noodles, and his body would keep burning down, fifty-nine becoming fifty-eight becoming fifty-seven, his arms thinning, his strength going soft, until he was exactly as light and weak as the lift teams wanted, easy to carry, easy to position, a small pale thing that didn't fight its own weight. Kai's voice: you eat what keeps you light. Their meals build them. Yours unbuilds you. That's the arrangement, and you signed it, and thank them. And Derek chewed the watery cold leaves and whispered, under the noise of the room, thank you.
Across the cafeteria the kitchen pass window glowed and the cooks moved behind it in white, two of them visible, the tall one with the dragon neck tattoo curling up out of his collar, sweat at his hairline, forearms glistening over the wok burners, and the compact younger one with the scar on his cheek working a cleaver with a rhythm like breathing. Derek's eyes went to them and stayed. He remembered the dream, the rope, the belt, the way his dream body had taken both of them and woken leaking, and his face went hot in the bright room and he looked down at his romaine and then looked back up anyway, because watching was what he was for. Under those whites, he thought, the tall one would be slick with sweat, hard-muscled, heavy between the legs, and the compact one's ass would be solid as a sprinter's, and their dicks would be big, thick, straight men's dicks, and they would never in their lives think of Derek except as the small thing in the corner eating leaves.
He sniffed the poppers.
Just a little, bottle angled, one short inhale under the table edge, and the tide rolled up and the cafeteria smeared warm and the shaft in him felt bigger, felt alive, felt like it was breathing with him. He ate another forkful of cucumber. His hips dipped on the chair. He bounced a little in the seat without meaning to, small hops of his pelvis, grinding the depth, and somewhere Kai's voice said good, and he pushed out on the shaft the way the reels had taught him, push, always push, open on empty and open on full.
The salad was half gone when the bottle came up again. He didn't even decide it. His hand just went under the table and the cap was off and the fumes hit and his eyes rolled and his back arched off the corner chair and a drool of nothing slid down inside him along the silicone and he was, for four or five seconds, exactly the stupid wrecked faggot on the training room walls, the ones in the videos who weren't him yet.
Days, Zhang Ming had said. Days, not weeks.
A real hand. A real wrist. One of these men, some thick-knuckled veined forearm from one of these tables, rolling on a glove or not even bothering, and pressing in where ten inches of machine silicone was only the rehearsal. Derek looked down the bright room at all of them eating, the crew cut, the wedding ring, the dragon tattoo flexing over the wok, and picked none of them and wanted all of them, and bounced on the chair with his salad dripping dressingless water down his chin, and hit the bottle again.
The shaved-head salad man glanced over once, finally. Just once, flat, a data check, the way you check a gauge. Then he turned back to the line and smiled at the next man in it.
The shadow fell over the corner table before Derek heard the voice. Then the chair across from him scraped back and Wei Li sat down, and Derek's whole body did its stupid catalogue before he could stop it.
Wei Li in a white oxford today, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the fabric pulling across his compact chest. Mid-twenties, built solid, that friendly open face with the neat black hair and the warm brown eyes. His forearms were smooth and dense, the tendons visible when he set his tray down. Derek imagined the body under the oxford, the heavy pecs, the flat stomach, the thick cock that had to be swinging soft and heavy in his boxers, big the way all of them were big, and the shame rose up hot in his face and converted, heat in, heat out.
"You're bouncing," Wei Li said, and smiled.
"I can't help it, sir." Derek's voice came out small and honest. "The new one's ten inches."
"I know. I read the log before I came over." Wei Li picked up his chopsticks. He'd bought noodles, oily and glistening, pork sliced across the top, and Derek watched him take the first bite with a helpless animal attention. "Zhang Ming's notes say you took the full insertion in one session. First try."
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. Thank the schedule." Wei Li pointed his chopsticks at Derek's half-eaten salad. "Finish that. You're behind."
Derek looked down at the cold green remains. Romaine going soft at the edges, cucumber sweating in its bin chill. He thought of the arithmetic, each bite a subtraction, fifty-nine point four becoming fifty-eight, his arms thinning to string, his strength dissolving until some lift team could position him like a pillow. Kai's voice came up through the fog: you eat what keeps you light, and he speared a forkful and chewed and whispered thank you into the room noise.
"Good." Wei Li ate another bite of pork, the fat of it shining, and Derek's mouth watered at the smell and he hated himself for the watering and hated the salad more. "Now. The bottle."
Derek's hand went under the table on autopilot, found the brown glass. "Here, sir?"
"Of course here. You think the table is private? Nothing about you is private, Derek. That's the whole arrangement." Wei Li's voice was warm and easy, the voice of a friend giving directions. "Two hits. Deep ones. You've earned the reward and the log already knows what you're going to do, so do it properly instead of sniffling at the bottle like a thief."
Derek's face burned. He'd thought he was being subtle. He'd thought anything was subtle anymore. He uncapped the bottle under the table edge and the fumes climbed up already, sweet and sharp, and he took the first hit slow and deep and held it.
The tide came. The cafeteria smeared warm and gold. The shaft inside him swelled in his perception, ten inches becoming eleven in the fog, breathing with him, and his rim worked the flare and his hips dipped on the chair and he heard himself make a small melted sound into the lunch noise.
"Second one," Wei Li said, watching, and there was nothing bored in the watching, there was the mild pleased attention of a man watching a plant he'd watered come up green. "Deeper."
Derek took it deeper. The second hit broke over his skull like warm water and his eyes rolled and his back arched, actually arched, off the corner chair in the middle of the bright crowded cafeteria, and a drool of pure appetite slid down inside him along the silicone, and he bounced, small grateful hops of his pelvis on the seat, three of them, four.
He surfaced with his mouth open and drool at the corner and Wei Li still watching him, eating his noodles with his other hand, patient, and Derek's face went incandescent with shame and his hole clenched hard on the shaft and he wanted to die and he wanted to do it again and both feelings arrived together and he'd learned to let them.
"There he is," Wei Li said. "That's the guy the reports talk about."
"The reports, sir?"
"Zhang Ming's. Huo Xiao's. The program's." Wei Li set down his chopsticks and leaned forward on his forearms, and the rolled cuff tightened on the muscle and Derek stared at it and thought about the wrist, the hand, the fingers, what a fist from that forearm would weigh going into him, and his breath went thin. "You're ahead of schedule. Way ahead. The plug phase was supposed to take a month. You did it in days. Zhang Ming says the real hand is close. Like, close close."
"Days," Derek whispered. "He said days."
"Days." Wei Li smiled, that friendly genuine smile, and it went through Derek like sunlight through water. "And when it happens, Derek, I want you to remember something. You're going to be scared, right, even now, even with everything. Your head will do the old thing, the old Derek thing, the data-entry guy going, what am I doing, this is insane. And I want you to come back to this table in your head. This exact feeling right now. Bounced out of your skull on a bottle in a cafeteria, full of ten inches, wishing it was a wrist."
"It is a wrist," Derek heard himself say. "I mean. I want it to be."
"I know you do." Wei Li picked his noodles back up. "That's the whole job. You want it, they give it, everyone's happy. Fifty thousand a year plus bonus structure, by the way. That went through last night. You'll see the deposit."
Fifty thousand. Derek's head swam and he couldn't tell how much was poppers and how much was the number. The old Derek would have done the math on rent, on the old data-entry salary. That Derek was a costume now too. What he felt instead was glow, pure glow, being valued, being budgeted for, a line item that said ready.
"Hit the bottle again," Wei Li said. "One more. Then finish your salad and we'll walk."
Derek took the third hit with the bottle barely hidden now, didn't care who saw, and no one saw, that was the thing, no one in the whole bright room looked at him once, the executives at the long tables laughing over their pork, the two cooks visible behind the kitchen pass, the dragon tattoo flexing over the wok burner, sweat at the tall cook's hairline, the compact one's cleaver keeping time. Straight men eating rich food and building their bodies with it while Derek unbuild himself with leaves and poppers. He loved them. He loved every one of them with the whole hopeless size of the appetite and it bothered none of them, ever, and Kai's voice said that's the gift, and Derek hit the bottle a fourth time without being told.
Wei Li laughed, one short syllable. "Okay. That's enough or you'll be no use to anyone. Salad."
Derek ate the rest of the salad in the fog. Cold water pretending to be food. His hips dipped on the chair the whole time, small rhythm, grinding the depth, and Wei Li checked his phone and ate and didn't mind and didn't watch him either, really, and the not-watching was its own touch.
Then Wei Li stood. "Come on. Uber's downstairs."
The walk to the elevator was the bounce walk, Wei Li ahead of him, and Derek bounced down the corridor with his back arched and his ass tipping out with every step and Wei Li glanced back once and said, "Stop clenching. You're fighting it. Push out when you walk. Let it move."
Derek pushed out when he walked, and the shaft answered the steps with slow internal rolling motion, the base tilting, the crown dragging the deep spot, and a low continuous hum went through his pelvis the whole way to the lobby that made his breath come in little hitches. The lobby was full of suits coming back from lunch. Tall men, broad men, charcoal and navy, gold-frame glasses, tied and untied, every one of them a chest under a shirt, a heavy soft cock Derek's brain drew without permission, straight, married, untouchable. They moved around him like water around a post. Wei Li held the door and Derek bounced through it into the sun.
The Uber was waiting at the curb, a grey sedan. Wei Li walked him to the door and stood there with his hands in his pockets, the oxford pulling across his chest, and Derek looked up at him, at the friendly face, the solid jaw, the hair neat over his forehead, and wanted to say something enormous and stupid and true and said instead:
"Thank you, sir."
"Night routine," Wei Li said, ticking it off with his fingers. "Painkiller by seven. Shower. Weed, clean stuff, the pouch on the counter. Then the reels, and poppers while you watch, push out on every fist you see. The dildo’s staying in tonight, Zhang Ming's orders, no exceptions, so lie on your side if it's intense. It's going to be intense. It's ten inches."
"Yes, sir."
"And Derek." Wei Li's face did the warm thing again. "You're doing great. Everyone says so."
The door closed. The city slid by outside the window and Derek bounced gently on the seat with every turn, the flare working, the depth working, his eyes closed, his hand resting on the leather harness strap under his jeans, feeling it. Fifty thousand. Days. A real hand. He whispered sir to no one and the driver didn't look in the mirror once.
Emerald Gardens received him with its clean carpet smell and its furnished beige competence. He unlocked the door and stood in the living room and gravity pulled the ten inches down into their deepest arrangement and he gripped the kitchen counter and stood there swaying, huffing small breaths, until it settled.
The pill bottle was on the counter where it always was, white plastic, no label beyond a printed code. Two pills had been left out on the corner of the counter beside the weed pouch, which was a detail his foggy brain took a moment to parse. Pre-sorted. Someone had decided tonight's dose for him.
It was seven by the time he'd stood there swaying long enough. He swallowed the painkillers with tap water, dry-mouthed, the pills bitter on his tongue.
Shower. He stripped the jeans off with the harness problem solved the way the technicians solved it, dragging denim down over leather and steel, and stood under the water with ten inches of silicone locked in him and looked down at his own body. Skinny. Smaller every week. His ribs showed when he lifted his arms, his pale chest narrowing to a waist the harness cinched, his tiny caged dick hanging its small steel weight between his legs. Fifty-nine point four kilos and falling. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the flare seated between his cheeks, the black base flush against his stretched rim, and thought, that's mine now, that's what I am now, and the thought didn't hurt the way it would have two weeks ago. That was the scary part. That it didn't hurt.
He dried off, and pulled on some briefs and soft shorts over the leather harness. The weed pouch opened with its familiar dry sweet smell and he rolled a joint with clumsy fingers and smoked it on the balcony, the evening air cool on his skin, the city lit up below with men in it, thousands of men, Chinese men, tall ones, all of them straight, all of them heavy, and he bounced gently on his heels on the balcony and hit the joint and let the smoke do its warm work.
Inside, the reels were waiting.
He got into bed on his side the way Li Wei had said, ten inch dildo pressing deeper in that position immediately, a new angle of fullness that made him gasp, and he pulled the phone in and opened Instagram and the algorithm was already there, already loading, already knowing.
The first reel was the pull-up man. The generated giant, shoulders like a doorframe, veins standing in his forearms.
Derek hit the poppers.
The tide arrived, and Derek pushed out, on the bed, on his side, on ten locked inches, pushing exactly the way the video's rhythm asked, and the fog went syrup and his hips started their little hump, grinding the depth, humping the harness like a stupid dog.
"Thank you, sir," he whispered at the screen. "Thank you."
Derek hit the poppers so hard his sinuses burned.
The night thickened around him. He lost track of reels. The fourth hit, the fifth, the bottle sweat-slick in his hand, the screen a bright rectangle in the dark room, fists clenching around dumbbells, fists that could stretch Derek’s worn hole and give him purpose; biceps flexing— biceps that could fill Derek in ways he had never dreamed of before— and his body sank deeper into the mattress with every minute in a way that slowly stopped feeling like relaxation.
It was the painkiller. He understood it distantly at first, a heaviness in his limbs beyond the weed's, a thickness coming into the fog that wasn't poppers, wasn't cannabis, something with more gravity to it, pulling him down through the syrup. The pills had never done this before. The nights before, the painkillers had been a background hum, a dulling of the harness ache. Tonight they were an anchor.
The seventh reel was playing, the pull-up man again, and Derek's eyes were closing against his will between hits. He forced them open. He hit the bottle again, one last long deep inhale, and the tide came up and the man’s biceps bulged on the screen and Derek pushed out and
and then he was underwater. Not asleep exactly. The heaviness had him by the ankles and was drawing him down through the warm layers, the reels still playing somewhere above him, bright and tiny and far away, a muscle flexed, a dumbbell lifted, and his body was still pushing out on the rhythm, he could feel it doing it without him, his rim working the flare in the dark, obedient, trained, practicing the choreography while he drowned.
The last thing he registered was the thought, slow and enormous and almost peaceful: the pills are stronger this time, they changed the pills, because days, because a real hand, because they need me adjusted, rested
The screen glowed on without him. The generated man did bench presses with enormous dumbbells, fists extending up and down, up and down, patient as a tide, and Derek lay full of ten inches and forty milligrams of something new, bouncing on nothing, pushing out on a rhythm no one was watching, breathing shallow and small around the deepest thing he had ever held, while the night did with him exactly what the schedule said.