The Contract

Chapter 15: Chapter 15

Derek woke face-down with the pillow soaked under his mouth and the dildo already moving.

Not moving, exactly. His body was moving around it. His hips rolled in small, sleepy circles, pushing his ass back and then tipping forward so the ten inches slid a fraction deeper, then pulled at the ring of the harness, then slid again. He had been doing it in his sleep. His body had been doing it all night, he realized, in whatever state the stronger pills had dropped him into, working the huge thing like a livelihood, like a chore his muscles had learned to love.

He lay still and took inventory. The ache from last night was gone. In its place was a fullness so deep and so constant it had stopped reading as an intrusion and started reading as architecture. Something had been built inside him and he was the building built around it.

Kai's voice, from a hundred sessions ago, flickered up out of memory: A real man's fist will feel like coming home, and you will wonder how you ever lived empty.

"Okay," Derek whispered into the wet pillow, and his voice cracked high on the second syllable.

He noticed that. He noticed a lot of things as he rolled carefully onto his side and sat up, the dildo shifting inside him with a weight that made him gasp. He noticed his shoulders were rounded and rolled forward, that his lower back curved in a deep, exaggerated arch to counterbalance the load, so that even sitting alone in his bedroom he was posed like a cartoon of a fag presenting himself. He noticed his wrists. Both of them were hanging limp off the ends of his arms, loose and swanned, and he hadn't told them to do that. He stared at his own hands the way you'd stare at an animal that had moved into your house.

He stood. The bounce was immediate. Every step landed on the dildo's base through the harness and rebounded up through him, and his walk came out as a rolling, hip-swinging strut that he could not flatten no matter how hard he concentrated. He tried walking across the bedroom like a normal person, stiff-kneed, hunched. It looked worse. He looked like a scarecrow with a broom handle problem. He let go and bounced instead and immediately felt better, and hated that he felt better, and Kai's remembered murmur said, Let the walk be honest, and something warm and filthy unspooled in his chest.

He caught himself in the bathroom mirror and stopped.

The harness under his clothes pushed his shirt out at the front where the dildo's base sat, a slight rounded bulge, wrong in a way no one could name but everyone would sense. His back arched. His chest was pushed out and his belly pulled flat, his skinny ribs showing through the cotton. His wrists dangled. His lips were parted. And his face, his pale, sharp little face, had softened around the eyes into something pliant, something waiting.

"I look like such a fairy," he said, and it came out in a higher register than his real voice, with a faint sibilant lisp on the s that he could not locate the off switch for. He tried again, deliberately, dragging his pitch down. "I look like such a fairy." The lisp stayed. His voice climbed back up on its own like a bird returning to a wire.

He thought about the word faggot the way Kai had taught him to think about it, as a name for a thing he was becoming rather than an insult, and his caged little dick tried to swell against the metal and got nowhere, and the pulse of that nowhere went straight down and clenched him around ten inches of silicone, and he had to grip the sink.

He washed, he weighed himself on the bathroom scale out of habit, 58.9, another half kilo gone, another half a person shaved away, and Kai in his head said, lighter is closer, and he brushed his teeth, thinking about how he could be prettier, rocking heel to heel, bouncing on the toy.

The Uber was waiting downstairs at 8:40, pre-paid, as always.

The driver was Chinese, maybe fifty, with a broad flat face and reading glasses pushed up into thinning hair, wearing a quilted vest over a button-down shirt. His forearms were thick where they rested on the wheel, dense with old tendon, and Derek sat in the back seat and catalogued him the way he had been trained to catalogue every Chinese man he saw, without meaning to, the way a recovering smoker catalogs ashtrays. Those hands. Those hands would be heavy and sure. Under that vest there would be a soft solid chest and a belly like a drum of a man who had been strong his whole life, and between his legs, Derek thought, flushing, would be a cock that made Derek's own caged inch look like a misprint.

Stop it, he thought. He's a cab driver. He's fifty. He doesn't think about you at all.

He doesn't have to, said Kai's voice, warm as a heat lamp. You think about him enough for both of you.

The city slid by. The dildo rocked with every turn of the car, every brake, a slow deep pendulum, and Derek's whole pelvis rode it, and after three blocks he couldn't sit still. His hand went into his jacket pocket where the little brown poppers bottle lived now, always, because Li Wei had told him it lived there, and he unscrewed the cap and sniffed, openly, in the back seat of a car, in daylight, and the rush bloomed up the back of his skull and his hole softened and swallowed another half inch and he exhaled a long fluttering sigh that sounded like nothing a man makes.

The driver's eyes came up in the rearview mirror.

Dark, flat, unhurried eyes, taking in the little pale guy with the arched back and the wet eyes and the little brown bottle. And then the smirk. Not shocked, not disgusted, not interested in the way a man is interested in another man's body. Amused. Knowing. The smirk of a man who has seen this exact passenger before, or a hundred like him, and knows precisely what they are, and finds it a fine way to start a Tuesday.

Derek's face burned. His asshole pulsed around the dildo, one deep involuntary clench, and he was sure the man could hear it, could smell it, and he sat there with his wrists hanging limp over his knees and took a second hit because the humiliation was doing something to him that shame used to do the opposite of, and Kai said, that's the rewiring, baby, that's the program working, and the driver watched in the mirror for another block and then went back to the road, whistling something low through his teeth.

At the tower, the lobby guards didn't look at him. They never did. Derek bounced across the marble floor, past the glass turnstiles, his gait rolling, his reflection chasing him in the black stone, and he rode the elevator up with two young analysts in slim gray suits, both of them tall, both of them with that dense black hair and that golden skin and those elegant hands, and Derek stared at the carpet and imagined their bodies the way he always did now, the smooth brown chests, the heavy soft packages in their tailored trousers, the cocks that must hang thick and low, and one of them laughed at something on his phone and the sound went through Derek like electricity and he clenched so hard the harness straps creaked.

Huo Xiao was waiting at the locker room door.

Huo Xiao was in his usual business clothes today: a tailored charcoal suit that couldn't hide the breadth of his shoulders, a crisp white shirt open at the collar revealing a hint of the smooth, golden skin beneath, and trousers that hugged his powerful thighs. His black hair was immaculately styled, his jaw sharp with the shadow of a five o'clock beard, and his presence filled the room like a physical force. Derek stared, his hole clenching around the dildo as he imagined those hands on his body, measuring him with more than just tape.

"Derek." Huo Xiao's voice was always flat, always busy, never cruel and never kind. "Locker room. Strip. Scale."

Derek undressed in the change area, peeling his shirt up over the harness, stepping out of his jeans with the dildo shifting heavily inside him, and he felt Huo Xiao's eyes on him the whole time, not hungry eyes, assessing eyes, the eyes of a man checking a shipment. Naked except for the leather harness and the tiny steel cage, Derek stepped on the scale.

"58.9," Huo Xiao said, writing. "Good pace. Turn around."

Derek turned. Huo Xiao took his wrist and lifted his arm and measured, cold tape against his ribs, his hip, his thigh, each touch of those thick fingers leaving a hot ghost behind. He worked in silence for a while, and Derek stood with his wrists dangling and his back arched and his chest out, the pose the dildo imposed on him, and hated it, and was drowning in how much he loved being seen in it.

"How did the night go?" Huo Xiao asked, not looking up from his clipboard.

"It was, um." Derek's voice came out high and breathy and lisping and he heard it and cringed. "The pills were stronger. I was asleep but my body wasn't. It just kept, like, working on it. Pushing."

"Pushing out?"

"Pushing out." Derek's face went scarlet. "I don't even decide to anymore."

"That's the point of the pill." Huo Xiao wrote for a moment. Then he stepped back and looked at Derek, all of him, the whole posture, top to bottom, the way you look at a building you're inspecting for cracks. "Look at yourself."

Derek looked down at himself. Wrists limp. Shoulders rolled. Back arched like a drawn bow. He tried to straighten and his body refused, rebalancing itself around the ten inches instantly, and he made a small frustrated sound.

"You're standing differently," Huo Xiao said. "Walk for me. To the bench and back."

Derek walked. The bounce was obscene, hip-swinging, pelvis rolling, every step a little ridden wave, and he could hear it in his own footfalls, the rhythm of it, and behind him he heard Huo Xiao's pen moving.

"Voice too," Huo Xiao said. "Say something."

"What should I say?" The lisp hissed through the whole sentence. Derek clapped a hand over his mouth.

"You hear it?" Huo Xiao came around in front of him, arms crossed over that heavy chest, looking down at him from a full head higher. "Last week you sounded like a scared little clerk. Now listen to you. Pitch is up. You lisp. You breathe from your throat. You can't help it?"

"I can't help it," Derek whispered, lisping, and his caged dick ached uselessly and he wanted to die and he wanted Huo Xiao to never stop looking at him.

"It's not damage," Huo Xiao said, in the same tone he'd use for a weather report. "Understand that. Nothing is broken. What's happening is the mask is coming off. The way you walked before, the voice you had before, that was a costume a scared little boy wore so nobody would look at him. The body you have now can't carry the costume. The posture, the voice, the wrists. That's your true state coming through."

"Is it going to get worse?" Derek asked, and heard the want in the question before he could strangle it.

"It's going to continue." Huo Xiao made another note. "The more weight you lose, the lighter you get, the more the harness moves you instead of you moving it. The more depth the module takes, the more your pelvis adapts. In a month you won't be able to walk any other way if you tried. In three months you won't want to."

Kai's voice, soft, resonant, right inside his skull: Wanting forever is a gift, Derek. Some people spend their whole lives never wanting anything.

Derek's eyes had gone glassy. He felt it happen, the overwhelm, the room getting too bright and too close, the huge presence inside him and the huge presence in front of him pressing on him from both sides, and Huo Xiao saw it, because Huo Xiao saw everything.

"Bottle," Huo Xiao said.

Derek fumbled it out of his folded jeans.

"In. Slow. I'll count you down. Four seconds in."

Derek put the bottle under his nose and Huo Xiao's voice dropped into a slow, even rhythm, that deep gravelly count, and Derek sniffed as instructed.

"Hold it. Three. Two. One. Breathe out."

The rush detonated. Derek's knees dipped, his hole bloomed, the dildo settled another impossible fraction deeper, and he swayed and Huo Xiao's big hand steadied his shoulder without ceremony, one brief point of heat through the whole trembling length of him.

"Again. In for four."

Derek sniffed.

"Hold. Four. Three. Two. One. Out."

The second rush folded into the first and the locker room went soft and golden at the edges and Huo Xiao's shoulders filled Derek's whole visual field, the sweat-darkened cotton, the meat of him under it, and Derek thought, hopelessly, shamefully, about what that chest looked like bare, the slabs of pec, the flat brown nipples, and lower, the heavy bulge in those shorts, the cock that must be a forearm's length of thick uncut meat, and his mouth watered and his hole ate the dildo and he made a tiny whimpering sound he couldn't have stopped with a gun to his head.

"You're overwhelmed," Huo Xiao observed, writing.

"Yes sir," Derek breathed, and didn't remember deciding to say sir.

"Good. Overwhelmed is where the change happens. One more. In for four."

Derek huffed. He was flying now, wrists dangling, back arched to its maximum, standing in front of a fully dressed Chinese man twice his weight who was looking at him with exactly as much interest as he'd give a scale reading, and that nothing, that total absence of desire in Huo Xiao's flat dark eyes, was the most arousing thing Derek had ever stood inside of. This man will never want you, Kai murmured, gentle as a lullaby, and isn't it beautiful, that you get to want anyway?

"Hold. Three. Two. One. Out."

Derek exhaled and his legs buckled slightly and he caught himself on the bench, giggling, actually giggling, a high fluttering sound, and hid his face.

"Don't hide it." Huo Xiao's pen tapped the clipboard once. "Face is data. Get up."

Derek pulled his hand down off his face. The locker room was still swimming, gold at the edges, and Huo Xiao stood in front of him like a wall that had decided to wear a suit. Derek looked up at him and his heart did something pathetic and enormous, a whole collapsing star of feeling, and he thought, he's going to think I'm pathetic, and Kai's voice said, he already does, baby, that's the arrangement, and Derek's hole squeezed the dildo and another giggle leaked out.

"There it is," Huo Xiao said, flat. He made a note. "The giggle started yesterday?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I was alone." Derek's lisp smeared the sentence. "I think it started with the reels."

"You weren't alone. The program was with you." Huo Xiao uncapped his own marker, wrote something short, circled it. "Sit on the bench. Bottle out."

Derek sat, bouncing on the dildo's base, and the bounce put him right back into the shimmer. He got the little brown bottle out and held it up like an offering. His hands were trembling and his wrists made it worse, the bottle wobbling, and Huo Xiao took it from him, unscrewed the cap himself, and handed it back with the precision of a nurse.

"We're going deeper today. You have schedule space." Huo Xiao looked at his watch, then at Derek, and Derek held his eyes and thought about the throat behind that beard shadow and nearly moaned. "Inhale with me. Eight counts. Ready."

"I'm ready, sir." Sir again. It came out of him like a reflex now, like breathing.

"Eight. Seven. Six." Derek sniffed, following the deep gravel down through the numbers, the liquid cold in his nostril, his chest filling. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Hold it."

Huo Xiao raised one hand, palm flat, and started the hold count. "Ten. Nine. Eight." The rush climbed. Derek's vision tightened down to a tunnel with Huo Xiao's crossed arms at the end of it, charcoal wool and white cotton and the promise of the body underneath. "Seven. Six. Five." His heart was a bird in a paper bag. "Four. Three. Two. One. Out. Slow."

Derek exhaled and the exhale turned into a long, high, wobbling sound, almost a whine, and the dildo inside him seemed to swell to meet the rush, or his hole seemed to dissolve around it, he couldn't tell which, and he swayed on the bench with his mouth open.

"Good," Huo Xiao said. He wrote. "What do you feel?"

"Horny," Derek whispered, honestly, hideously. "And dumb. Like my brain is, um." He searched and the search itself was slow, wading through honey. "Like it's smaller than it was this morning."

"That's the dose working." No judgment in it at all. That was the thing about Huo Xiao, Derek thought, the thing he was already obsessing over, the thing he was going to be replaying tonight on the balcony with the weed and the poppers: Huo Xiao never mocked him, never flattered him, never did anything at all with him except record him, and it made Derek want to perform, want to be the best number on that clipboard, want to be the softest, dumbest, most open little specimen this man had ever processed. "Again. Eight counts in."

"Eight. Seven. Six. Five." Sniff. His nostril burned beautifully. "Four. Three. Two. One."

"Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven." The hold was longer this time, an ocean of it. Derek's thighs fell open on the bench, knees wide, without his permission, presenting the harness bulge and the caged little dick above it, and he felt the pose and couldn't close his legs and didn't want to. "Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Out."

He exhaled and slumped and caught himself on the bench with both limp wrists and giggled again, brighter, dumber, the sound bouncing off the tile.

"There's the faggot," Huo Xiao said, in the same voice he'd said 58.9 in. He wrote. "Say it."

"What?"

"Say faggot. I want to hear it in the new voice."

Derek's whole body flushed, scalp to cage. "Faggot," he said, and it came out lisping and fluttery and perfect, a tiny performance, and his dick tried so hard against the steel that his hips rolled forward on the bench.

"Again."

"Faggot, sir."

"Good." Huo Xiao capped the marker, uncapped it. "Stand up. We're fixing the walk."

Derek stood. The room tilted agreeably. He was deep in it now, three big hits stacked in his skull, and everything Huo Xiao said landed on him like scripture.

"You're slouching into it instead of owning it." Huo Xiao walked a slow circle around him, close enough that Derek could smell his cologne, something cedar and dark, and under it, warm skin. Derek's eyes followed the man's feet, then his calves, then up the back of his trousers to the heavy shape of his thighs, and he thought, I bet his ass is rock hard, I bet his hole has never even tingled, and the envy was a flavor in his mouth. "Shoulders back. Chest is an offering, not a secret. Push it out."

Derek pushed his chest out. His skinny ribs flared under the pale skin.

"Chin up. Wrists stay limp. Good. Now the hips. You've been walking like the harness is embarrassing you. It's not. It's your center now. Walk from it." Huo Xiao stopped in front of the tiled wall and pointed along the length of the locker room, bench to shower door, maybe twelve meters. "Bench to the showers and back. Let each step land on the base. Don't fight the bounce. Sell it."

"Sell it," Derek repeated, lisping, and took a step.

It was worse than his natural walk and better, everything worse was better now, that was the algebra the last two weeks had taught him. He rolled the hip, landed on the base, felt the deep internal kiss of the ten inches, let the rebound swing the other hip. His reflection came at him in the long mirror panel across from the lockers and it was grotesque and gorgeous, a scarecrow-shaped little white guy strutting naked down a corporate locker room in a leather harness with his cage swinging, wrists swanning, back arched like a question mark.

"Don't watch yourself," Huo Xiao said. "Watch me in the mirror."

Derek's eyes jumped to Huo Xiao's reflection. Huo Xiao stood with his arms crossed, watching Derek's walk the way he'd watch a conveyor belt, and Derek, poppered and naked and bouncing for this man, felt his obsession reach a whole new floor of the building. He memorized the reflection. The way the suit jacket sat on those shoulders. The flick of Huo Xiao's eyes down Derek's body and back to the clipboard, utterly unbought. This man goes home to somebody, Derek thought, or to nobody, but either way it's a life where I don't exist, where I'm a Tuesday errand, and Kai murmured, isn't it beautiful, and Derek whispered, "yes sir," out loud, mid-strut, to no one.

"Turn," Huo Xiao said. "Again. Bench to showers."

Derek turned. The turn itself was a lesson, a slow pivot on the ball of one foot with a little hip flourish he had absolutely not planned, and he heard himself go "oop" softly as he did it and wanted to crawl into the floor drain, and bounced harder on the next step.

"Hips looser. You're bending at the waist. The arch is in the lower back. Feel the dildo as the pivot, not the load."

Derek felt for it. He found it, the huge presence as a fulcrum, and his walk changed, got smoother, sluttier, the pelvis leading and everything else trailing behind, and Huo Xiao's pen moved and that sound, pen on clipboard, was the applause Derek was living for now.

"Voice while you walk," Huo Xiao said. "Count your steps. Out loud."

"One, two, three," Derek lisped, prancing, the numbers climbing up out of him in that stolen high register, and each number was a confession. "Four, five." He reached the shower door, pivoted again, oop, and came back. "Six, seven, eight." His dick ached in its little steel jail. His hole was a hand's width of pure sensation. "Nine, ten."

"Stop. Face me."

Derek faced him, chest heaving, poppers high, slightly cross-eyed with arousal, dripping onto the tile from somewhere he couldn't identify.

"You walked like that into a bar, every man in the room would know what you are before you ordered," Huo Xiao said. "Is that a problem for you?"

"No, sir." It came out instantly, sincerely, and Derek heard the truth of it land in his own ears and a tear slid hot down his cheek, not sadness exactly, more like pressure leaving a valve.

"Good. Because it's not a costume you can take off anymore. Understand that too. This is the shape now. Your little clerk voice is gone. Your old walk is gone. You've been decommissioned from all of that." Huo Xiao checked his watch. "We have time. Bottle."

Derek's hand shook getting it out. Huo Xiao didn't take it this time; he just stood there, big and patient and devastating, while Derek fumbled the cap.

"Longer set this time. Eight in. I'll count."

"Eight, seven, six, five," Derek sniffed, chasing the man's voice down into the dark. "Four, three, two, one."

"Ten. Nine. Eight." The world went to syrup. "Seven. Six." Huo Xiao's face hung in front of him, that flat inspecting gaze, the black eyes with nothing given away, the five o'clock shadow Derek wanted to feel rake across his neck, his inner thighs, the inside of his cheeks. "Five. Four." Derek thought about that chest bare. He built it in the hold, plank by plank, the pecs, the flat nipples, the trail of hair he imagined down a hard stomach, and lower, the heavy package, the thick uncut cock he was sure hung there, bigger than the dildo, that made the dildo look like practice. "Three. Two. One. Out."

Derek exhaled and his knees actually buckled this time and Huo Xiao's hand caught his upper arm, a brief brutal grip, and let go, and Derek almost came from that alone, almost, the cage twitching, a bead of fluid clinging to the steel.

"You like when I touch you," Huo Xiao observed, writing.

"I think about it," Derek babbled, too high to filter. "All day, sir. When you measure me. When you hold my wrist. I think about your hands." His face was soaked and burning. "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize to data." Huo Xiao finished the note, looked at him. "It's normal. Stage four. Every asset your sizefixates on its handler. It passes into something more useful."

Every asset. Derek took that in, poppered and wet-eyed, and it should have shattered him and instead it braided itself into the obsession, because if every asset felt this then this was a stage of a journey, a rung, and Kai's voice said, everyone you'll ever love goes through the same door, Derek, welcome to the queue, and Derek giggled, wetly, helplessly.

"Posture set," Huo Xiao said. "Walk again. Showers and back. This time no counting. Say yes sir at every turn."

"Yes sir." Derek bounced to the shower door, pivoted, "yes sir," bounced back, "yes sir," and the words and the walk braided together until the walk was a sentence and the sentence was a walk, and by the fourth length he wasn't deciding anything anymore, the harness was walking him, ten inches of the firm's property conducting a pale little orchestra of hips and wrists and lisped sirs, and he loved it, he loved it so much his chest hurt.

"Faster," Huo Xiao said.

Derek went faster, the base hammering him with each stride, his breath coming in pretty little gasps, and he was aware of nothing except the mirror, where Huo Xiao watched, and the man himself, standing solid as a load-bearing wall, and Derek thought with the last coherent corner of his mind: I would sign everything again. I would sign twice.

On the fifth length his legs simply quit.

Not decided to quit. Quit, the way a fuse quits. Derek's knees folded and he dropped straight down onto the tile at Huo Xiao's feet, the dildo slamming its full depth through him on impact, and the pain-pleasure of it shot up his spine and out through his mouth as a high, cracked moan. He knelt there, swaying, wrists hanging over his thighs, staring up the length of the man towering over him: the charcoal trousers creased sharp over hard thighs, the flat stomach under the white shirt, the heavy drape of the jacket across those shoulders, the jaw with its five o'clock shadow, all of it a cliff face he had fallen off of.

And below the cliff, at the level of Derek's eyes, the front of Huo Xiao's trousers. The subtle, heavy weight of the package behind the wool.

Derek's mouth opened before his brain did.

"Please," he said, and the word came out lisping and ruined. "Sir. Please can I. Can I suck your dick. Just, just once, just to see it, please sir, I'll be so good, I just want to see it, please."

Huo Xiao looked down at him. The pen stopped moving.

"What did you just say to me?"

"Your cock." Derek's face was soaked, from tears, from the poppers, from everything. "I want to see your cock, sir. I think about it every day. Please. Please let me suck it. I'll do anything. I just want to look at it. One look."

Huo Xiao's expression did not change into anger. It changed into something colder, something Derek had never been aimed at him before: the flat disgust of a man who has found something on the bottom of his shoe.

"Stand up."

"I can't, sir, please, I'm sorry, I just, you're so, please, I'm begging you."

"Did I tell you to beg?" Huo Xiao's voice stayed level, which made it worse. "Did I tell you to open your mouth at me? You're an asset in stage four having a dysregulated episode. That's what this is. That's all this is. And you're making it my problem, on my floor, in my locker room."

"I'm sorry." Derek's hands came up, hovering, not daring to touch. "Please, sir, I'm sorry for being such a desperate faggot, I'm sorry, I just, when I look at you I can't, my brain stops, please, please can I just see it, one second, please."

"Look at yourself," Huo Xiao said. He pointed with the clipboard at the long mirror panel. "Go on. Look."

Derek turned his head. In the mirror was a scarecrow of a man kneeling on the tile of a corporate locker room, naked except for a leather harness and a steel cage, back arched, wrists limp, face red and wet, mouth open, begging a dressed man twice his size to show him his dick. The image went through him like a blade and his hole clenched and he moaned again, quietly, and hated himself, and Kai's voice said, that's you, baby, that's the true thing, and Derek's eyes rolled.

"Please," he whispered, staring up at Huo Xiao now, really staring, drinking in the thick neck above the collar, the smooth golden skin, the dark eyes that held nothing for him. "Please sir. Just to see it. I'll never ask again."

"You're asking again right now," Huo Xiao said. "While I'm telling you to stop."

Derek couldn't stop. The begging had its own engine now, fueled by poppers and two weeks of conditioning and the whole starved architecture of his life, and it kept running with him strapped to the hood. "Please. Please. Sir. Please."

And then his body did the thing his body did now, the thing it always did, the thing he no longer commanded: it went lower. His hands came down flat on the tile. He bent forward over them, ass hiked in the air by the arch the dildo enforced, and lowered his face to the floor, to the black leather toe of Huo Xiao's dress shoe, and pressed his lips to it.

The leather was warm. Huo Xiao's weight was in it, the whole dense living mass of him transmitted down through the sole, and Derek kissed it, a soft wet smacking kiss, then another, his cheek flattening against the toe.

"I'm sorry," he said into the leather, the words buzzing against it. "I'm sorry for being such a desperate faggot, sir. I'm sorry I begged. I know I'm not supposed to want things for me. I'm sorry." A pause. A breath of the shoe's smell, polish and street and locker room. And then the begging engine, unstoppable: "But please can I see your cock, sir. Please. I'm kissing your shoe and I'm still asking, I can't help it, please."

Huo Xiao exhaled through his nose. It was the closest thing to a sigh Derek had ever heard from him.

"Sit back on your heels."

Derek sat back. The dildo's base ground into him and he whimpered.

"Listen to me, because I'm only saying this once." Huo Xiao crouched, actually crouched, bringing that big frame down level with Derek, and up close he was worse, better, devastating: the pores of his skin, the beard shadow like iron filings, the smell of cedar cologne and beneath it clean sweat. "Your mouth is for the program. Not for me. Not for any staff. You don't ask for things, Derek. You get assigned things. Do you understand the difference?"

"Yes sir."

"Say it back."

"I don't ask for things. I get assigned things."

"Good." Huo Xiao straightened up to his full height and Derek's neck craned to keep him. "But you're too stupid with want to hear instructions right now. I can see it. So we're going to fix the level first, and then we're going to fix the behavior. Bottle."

Derek fumbled the little brown bottle off the tile where it had fallen. His fingers were useless, wrists swanning, and Huo Xiao took it from him, uncapped it, held it under Derek's nose himself, pinching one nostril shut.

"Four counts in. This one's for the begging. Ready."

"Yes sir."

"Four. Three. Two." Derek sniffed, hard, the liquid cold and blazing up his nose. "One. Hold it. Ten. Nine. Eight." The rush came up like a flood behind his eyes. "Seven. Six. Five. Four." Huo Xiao's face at the end of the tunnel, flat and unforgiving. "Three. Two. One. Out."

Derek sagged on his heels, mouth open, dumb waves of it rolling through him.

"Again. Four counts."

Sniff.

"Hold. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Out."

The locker room went soft and far away and Huo Xiao stood at the center of it like a mountain standing in a lake, and Derek looked up at him from the floor with his jaw slack and nothing behind his eyes but want and fog.

"There he is," Huo Xiao said, looking down at him. "Too stupid to beg. Stay there."

Derek stayed. He knelt on the tile with his knees aching and the dildo enormous inside him and the poppers roaring, and he looked up, and up, the way you look up at a building, and he was happy, horribly, ruinously happy, and Kai murmured, see how good it feels when you stop asking and just receive.

"Now," Huo Xiao said, and he shifted his weight, and Derek watched one black leather dress shoe slide forward on the tile until its sole faced the ceiling, dirt side up. "You begged with your mouth. So your mouth works. Bottoms. Lick them clean."

Derek stared at the sole of the shoe. The treads were packed with the day's city: gray grit, a curl of paper, the dark sticky line of something walked through, and around the edges the paler halo of locker room floor, which meant, Derek realized with a lurch, the trail between the toilets and the showers, which meant everything that trail carried.

"Sir," he whispered. "Please not that. Sir, please."

"You don't ask for things," Huo Xiao said. "You get assigned things. This is an assignment. And it's a punishment, so if it were pleasant I'd have picked a different one. Tongue out."

"Sir, it's dirty, it's, people walk, the bathroom floor, please, I'll do anything else, please not the shoe." The begging engine tried to restart and stalled against the flat wall of Huo Xiao's face.

"Tongue out," Huo Xiao repeated, "or I write tonight up as refusal, and refusal goes in the file that goes to Mr. Chen. Your choice. Ten seconds."

Derek's whole body shook. He thought of the file, of Mr. Chen's calm dark amusement, of the contract with everything in it he'd signed. He thought of the $50,000. He thought of the fist that was days away. He stuck his tongue out.

"Lower."

Derek bent. The sole came up toward his face and the smell hit first, genuinely foul, a day of tower floors and one unlucky step in something in the garage level, over a base note of warm leather and, faintly, unmistakably, the ammonia ghost of the men's room. His stomach folded. His caged dick twitched.

"Touch the heel first. Work forward."

Derek's tongue touched the leather sole at the heel. The taste was bitter, grainy, wrong, leather and floor scum and salt and that faint piss tang, and a sound came out of him, a high broken whimper that turned into a moan halfway through because Kai's voice was saying, good boy, look how much you can take, and Derek's hips rolled forward on the dildo's base all by themselves.

"Long strokes. Heel to toe. Don't miss the treads."

Derek licked. He licked the dirty bottom of a Chinese man's dress shoe on his knees on a locker room floor, long flat strokes of his tongue up the channels of the tread, grit scraping his taste buds, his eyes streaming, his wrists hanging, his whole skinny poppered body rocking gently on the ten inches as he worked. Huo Xiao stood over him with his weight even and unhurried, distributing himself between both feet, occasionally lifting the shoe being cleaned a few centimeters to give a better angle, the way a man adjusts an object he's inspecting.

"The middle. You're skipping the middle."

Derek licked the middle. The sticky dark line. His tongue came away coated and he swallowed before he could stop himself, and the swallow was the most humiliating thing his body had ever done, and he did it again on the next stroke, and Kai said, there, that's the program swallowing, that's the new you being built.

"Sir," Derek panted between strokes, cheek pressed to the floor, ass in the air. "Thank you, sir."

"For what?"

"For correcting me." It came out without a single thought behind it, pure reflex, and it was true, it was horribly true, the truth of it scared him more than the shoe did.

"Switch feet."

Huo Xiao lifted the cleaned shoe and set the other one's sole up. This one was worse; it had the wet smear near the toe, garage-level something, and Derek whimpered and lowered his face and licked it, and the whimper turned into the giggle, the new giggle, high and fluttering and half-insane, bubbling up through the poppers and the degradation, and Huo Xiao's pen scratched on the clipboard above him and the scratching was applause, was the only applause Derek wanted in the world.

"Still giggling. Bottle."

Derek surfaced from the shoe, tongue slicked with grime, face a disaster. He fumbled for the bottle and Huo Xiao already had it, cap off, held to his nostril.

"Eight counts. Big one. This closes the episode."

"Eight. Seven. Six. Five." Derek sniffed until his nostril burned hollow. "Four. Three. Two. One."

"Hold. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven." The world dissolved. There was Huo Xiao, there was the tile, there was the enormous thing inside him, and none of it had edges anymore. "Six. Five. Four." Derek swayed, kneeling, mouth open, and Huo Xiao watched him with the total disinterest of a man watching a machine complete a cycle. "Three. Two. One. Out."

Derek exhaled and the exhale emptied him of everything, the desperation included. The begging engine was gone. The want had been burned down to a low sweet ember, warm and shapeless. He knelt on the floor of the locker room, stupid and open and dripping somewhere, and he felt, absurdly, lucky. Lucky to be here. Lucky to be the one kneeling at this particular pair of feet, under this particular clipboard, being processed by this particular enormous man who would never once in his life think about Derek after five o'clock. Everyone gets through the same door, Kai said, soft and warm as bathwater, but not everyone gets to go through it on their knees.

"Better?" Huo Xiao asked.

"Yes sir." The lisp fluttered. "Much better, sir."

"Good. Because I have notes on the episode and you're going to hear them, and you're going to hold still for them." He read from the clipboard, flat as a weather report. "Begging for staff contact, first occurrence. Attempted initiation of sexual service, first occurrence. Noncompliance during correction, brief, resolved. Recovery after dosing, fast. That's the whole page."

"Thank you for logging me, sir," Derek whispered, and meant every lisping syllable, and his hole squeezed the dildo and his cage ached and the shoe's taste still sat bitter on his tongue, and he knelt there in the wreckage of himself and thought, they're going to assign me a fist soon, and then more, and then everything, and I get to be assigned it, and he looked up at Huo Xiao with wet shining eyes and waited, patient as furniture, for whatever came next.

A knock, and the door opened. The two technicians filled the frame, grey scrubs, the taller one's buzzed scalp shining, the shorter one's bowl cut and painted-on shoulders. Neither looked at Derek kneeling on the tile. They looked at Huo Xiao, who nodded once, and that was the whole conversation.

"Up," the taller one said.

Derek rose on shaking legs, wrists hanging, and let himself be taken by the elbows. The technicians were warm and dense through the grips, roped forearms and veined hands, and Derek catalogued them the way Kai had taught him, chest, arms, the heavy shapes he imagined under the scrubs, big everywhere, big where it counted. They didn't think about him. His hole squeezed the dildo anyway, and he hated himself for it, gratefully.

The douching room was warm and wet-smelling. He was bent over the tiled table, knees on the padded rest, before he'd even registered being moved. The harness straps were unclipped and the ten inches drew out of him with that slow blooming pull, and he made the small melted sound he always made now, and the shorter technician laughed his one short syllable.

Warm water flooded him. Three rounds, the cannula hissing poppers into both nostrils before the second, the taller technician's steady hand flat on his lower back like a man settling a plank. Derek floated, rim soft and winking, rinsed out and ready, and the two men spoke over his open body in their language, unhurried, bored.

Then the clothes. Back-access briefs, a wide open crotch with a drawstring rear, and jeans with a buttoned flap over his ass. His hands were too stupid for any of it. The taller one worked the fabric up his thighs and seated the fresh ten-inch plug, clipped it to the cage through the briefs, cinched the harness. The flap closed over the base like a hatch over machinery.

They walked him down the corridor, one on each side, and Derek bounced, hips rolling, wrists swanning, past a window where two tall businessmen stood talking, charcoal suits, gold-frame glasses, chests like wardrobes. Derek's gaze did the catalogue, the imagined pecs, the heavy soft cocks, the straight married weight of them, and they never once glanced down at the prancing little harness faggot between the technicians.

The training room door opened and Derek saw it and his stomach dropped.

The machine was the same frame, same chair, same straps. But the dildo on the piston arm was new. Longer. Thicker. Eleven inches of glossy black silicone, nine around, the flare of the crown bigger than his fist could close around.

"That's bigger," Derek lisped. "Sir, that's bigger than."

"Today it's bigger," the taller technician said, flat.

They strapped him in. Ankles, wrists, the wide belt. No Zhang Ming anywhere, no survey clipboard, no voice asking questions. Just the chair and the walls and the cannula seating into both nostrils and the headset coming down over his eyes, and the room dissolving into the program's warm light.

The cannula hissed, and the warm light resolved into depth.

Kai stood in the center of the program, shirtless in grey gym shorts, and he was closer than he had ever been. Close enough that Derek could see the grain of his golden skin, the flat nipples, the shelf of his pectorals rising and falling with real-seeming breath, the black hair pushed back off that square jaw. When Derek's eyes moved, the view moved with them, smooth as a head turning, and Kai looked back at him and smiled.

"There he is," Kai said. "The voice of the day."

The machine woke at the same moment. The eleven inches pressed forward against his rim, slow, a steady hydraulic insistence, not a thrust, an arrival, and the poppers were already climbing the scaffolds of his sinuses, sweet and blazing.

"Hit," Kai said. "Big one. Four counts in."

Derek inhaled on the count. The room went syrup.

"Hold. Ten. Nine. Eight." Kai raised both arms and laced his fingers behind his head, and the pose opened his whole torso like a display case: the chest fanning, the lats flaring, the soft dark hair under his arms. "Seven. Six. Five." Derek stared at the chest and pushed out on the dildo and the crown slid past his outer ring and settled, enormous, into the first inch of him. "Four. Three. Two. One. Out."

The exhale left him in a long high flutter and he sagged into the straps.

"How did you sleep, Derek?" Kai asked. His voice was exactly the voice, warm as a bath, patient as tide. "And tell me honestly. The log has it, but I want your version."

"I slept, sir." Derek's voice came out higher than his voice, thin, lisping at the edges. "I don't remember when. The pills were stronger."

"They were." Kai said it without ceremony, a fact of maintenance. "The firm adjusted them. Your body needed rest before this phase. Did you dream?"

"I think so. I don't remember." The dildo pressed deeper, a slow implacable millimetering, and Derek's hips rolled against the belt. "I woke up full."

"You woke up full," Kai repeated, pleased. "Good. Now breathe again. Two counts in. Go."

Sniff. Hold. The walls of the program shimmered and behind Kai, faintly, the reels were there, curved around the warm light, generated fists sinking into generated holes, and Derek pushed out on the rhythm and the silicone pressed deeper and a sound came out of him, a high girlish uh, and Kai smiled wider.

"There it is," Kai said. "I want to talk about that sound."

"Sir."

"That voice. Those wrists I can see from here, hanging over the straps. The arch in your back that the machine didn't put there. Tell me how you feel today, Derek. In your own words. Stupid words are fine. Stupid words are preferred."

Derek's face burned inside the foam. The dildo sank another fraction and his rim worked the shaft, obedient, and he felt the shape of the answer already assembled in him, waiting for permission.

"Stupid, sir," he whispered. "And, um. Faggy. Really faggy. Like, I woke up and I did my hair and I bounced and I talked and it was all, it was all like this." His wrists circled on the straps, limp, demonstrating. "I can't stop it."

"And how does it feel, when you can't stop it?"

"It feels..." Derek hit the wall of it, the honest place. "Natural. Sir. It feels natural, that's the scary part. It feels like the thing underneath."

"Say the underneath part."

Kai dropped his arms and curled one, a slow deliberate double bicep, the muscle balling up under golden skin, a vein mapping across it, and Derek's breath went thin and his hole clenched and pushed and the dildo took another inch.

"I'm a faggot, sir," Derek said, and the lisp made it worse and truer. "Like, deep down. Before the firm, before any of it. The data-entry guy was a costume. The straight-acting gay guy who read sci-fi, that was a costume. This is," the crown dragged his inner ring and he gasped, "this is the actual thing. A little fag. A stupid little white faggot."

"Look at me while you say the last part."

Derek looked. Kai was flexing again, both arms now, chest bunched, a posed slab of superiority, and he held the pose while Derek spoke.

"I'm happier like this, sir."

"There's the whole session," Kai said softly. "That's the sentence the program exists for. Now, tell me what natural felt like this morning. Walk me through it. Slowly. The machine has all day."

The dildo withdrew a fraction, teasing, then resumed its patient depth, and Derek breathed poppers on Kai's counted rhythm and talked. He told him about the mirror in the apartment, how he'd caught himself standing with one knee soft, hip cocked, weight tipped. How his hands had lain on the counter with the wrists folded down like sleeping birds. How when he'd said good morning to the doorman his voice had come out up here, airy, sing-song, and he'd heard it and instead of correcting it he'd leaned into it, added a little lilt, and the doorman hadn't looked up.

"And when he didn't look up," Kai said, "what happened in your chest?"

"It felt right, sir. Being invisible to him. Being a little something he doesn't have to see."

"Because?"

"Because I'm not for men to see, sir. I'm for men to use. Seeing is for equals."

Kai let out a warm breath of a laugh. "The reports undersell you." He crossed his arms behind his back and rolled his shoulders, and Derek watched the wings of muscle move under the skin and imagined the chest naked and slick in a locker room, imagined the weight of that body settling onto him, and his cage wept its small dull ache. "Now breathe. Three counts. Deep."

Sniff. The bloom came down over his eyes like gold paint.

"Hold. Ten. Nine." The dildo pressed its slow way into the deep third of him, past the place yesterday's ten inches had marked as the end of the world, and the pressure turned over into that sweet inverted appetite. "Eight. Seven." Kai rolled his chest, a bodybuilder's slow spread, pectorals flaring under flat nipples. "Six. Five. Four." Derek pushed out, stupid, complete. "Three. Two. One. Out."

"How stupid do you feel, one to ten?" Kai asked.

"Nine, sir."

"Good. Nine is where the work happens. Ten comes when the fist is real. Tell me, Derek, do you feel like you're fighting it right now? The faggy voice, the wrists, the way your hole is eating that shaft without your permission?"

"No, sir." He tested the truth of it and found it solid. "I'm not fighting anything. I can't even find the part of me that would fight it. It's like it got, decommissioned."

"Your handler used that word. Good. It's accurate." Kai crouched in the program, bringing his face level with Derek's headset gaze, and the proximity was unbearable, the pores, the jaw shadow, the dark eyes with nothing but warmth in them and the warmth itself a form of ownership. "Listen carefully, because this is the thesis of today. Effeminacy in an asset is not a side effect. It's not damage. It's the actual shape of you emerging once the pretending muscles relax. Every faggot the firm processes arrives fatter with pretending than with anything else. Two weeks of diet, training, and a heavy locked dildo, and the pretending atrophies like any unused muscle. What's left is you. Small. Weak. High-voiced. Wrist-down. Open."

"Yes sir," Derek whispered, and his hips humped the air a small grateful hump.

"And the shame you feel saying it," Kai said, "hold that up for me. Look at it."

Derek looked. It was there, the old hot hand of humiliation around his throat, the data-entry boy screaming somewhere far under the poppers. But the hand had gone weak. Its fingers slipped off the throat they'd held and lay there, feeble, and beneath it the shame converted, like everything converted now, into heat that ran straight down his spine and into the stretched rim gripping eleven inches.

"It's still there, sir. But it's small. And it makes me harder. Cager. It makes my cage ache, sir, it makes me push out."

"That's the conversion working. That's what we installed." Kai stood and turned, slowly, presenting the back of him, the wide golden lats, the taper into the shorts, and Derek made a sound and Kai turned back and smiled at having made it. "You're allowed to want this body. You know the rules."

"I want it, sir." Greedy, immediate, no beggar's apology this time, because wanting was assigned and wanting was safe. "I think about chests all day. Your chest. My handler's chest. The technicians'. Every suit in the lobby. I imagine what's under and it's always big and it's always straight and it never thinks about me and I love it. Sir. I love all of it."

"And does the loving bother them?"

"Never, sir. Not one of them."

"Isn't that the gift?"

"It's the gift, sir." His eyes were wet and the poppers had eaten the edges off the world and Kai's golden body was the only fixed point in the syrup. "Thank you, sir."

"Breathe. Four counts."

Sniff. His nostrils burned hollow and he loved the burn.

"Hold. Ten. Nine. Eight." Kai flexed again, slow, savoring, one arm then both, the biceps peaking, the chest rising. "Seven. Six." The dildo bottomed out. Eleven inches, seated, the flare spreading his inner ring around its widest circumference and holding there, and Derek's mouth dropped open and the sound that came out was not a sound the old Derek had ever owned, high and warbling and ruined, and Kai said, "Five. Four," through it, unbothered, letting him cry. "Three. Two. One. Out."

"Tell me where it is," Kai said.

"All the way, sir. All eleven. It's in the deep spot. It's," he panted, wrists swanning over the straps, hips straining the belt to grind down onto the last inch, "it's more than yesterday. It's in past where yesterday stopped."

"Because your body read the reels last night. Because the pills let it practice while you slept. Because it's yours now, the choreography, it doesn't need the conscious you anymore." Kai's voice dropped into the register he used for the deepest instructions, the bathwater register. "So let's check the conscious you. One more question. When you picture your life, Derek, your actual future, what's in it?"

"Fists, sir." No pause at all. "Chinese fists. Being carried. Being weighed. Salads. The reels at night. Being assigned things."

"Anyone in it?"

"Men, sir. Tall ones. Every one of them straight. None of them knowing my name." His eyes rolled and he giggled, the fluttering giggle, half-insane. "That's the best part, sir. That they never know me."

"Say the whole identity. The way I taught you. Full sentence."

"I'm a small white faggot whose mouth and hole belong to the program," Derek recited, lisping, bouncing slightly against the straps, "and I get skinnier and weaker and stupider every day, and Chinese men use me to relax and never think about me, and I love them all and it doesn't bother them ever, and it's the only life I want. Sir."

Kai nodded, slow, like a judge confirming a form.

"You'll notice," he said, "that you said all of that without one flicker of the old voice. No data-entry man hiding in the vowels. He's gone, Derek. He was never going to be loved and he knew it and now he doesn't have to know anything." He stepped closer, and in the program the tip of his finger came up and traced the air where Derek's cheek would be, a phantom touch Derek felt anyway, a shiver laid on the skin outside the headset. "You did beautifully today. This was the check-in the fist was waiting on."

"The fist, sir?" Hope flared, huge and stupid, through all the syrup. "Is it, sir, is it soon?"

"Soon," Kai said, warm, and flexed one last time, the bicep peaking at Derek's eye level, close enough to see the striations, and Derek pushed out on eleven inches and moaned. "Rest tonight. Reels as prescribed. Eat every leaf. Keep the voice, it suits you now, and don't you dare catch it and flatten it back down. If it tries to flatten, hit the bottle and let it stay up."

Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.