Chapter 17: Chapter 17
The morning weigh-in was quick. Huo Xiao wrote the number on his tablet without saying it out loud, which was worse than saying it. Derek had learned to read the weight room scale himself from the corner of his eye. 58.1. Another kilo gone. His ribs showed in the mirror now when he raised his arms.
Huo Xiao walked him down the corridor to the douching room. Derek bounced as he walked, the thirteen-inch dildo shifting inside him with every step, a deep bruised ache that had stopped being pain somewhere around midnight and had become just a fact of his body. His lisp felt thicker today. He caught himself saying nothing at all, just breathing through his mouth.
Inside, the two technicians were already waiting. Derek knew them by now without learning their names. The taller one had a boxer's jaw and a buzz cut that showed the blue lines of his scalp, and his scrubs did nothing to hide the slab of his chest; the shorter one was compact and wide through the shoulders, with forearms like dock rope and a wet curl of black hair that kept falling over one eye. Neither had ever spoken to Derek. They didn't speak to him now. One tapped the padded bench and Derek climbed up, knelt forward, put his forearms down.
The taller technician unlocked the harness at his hips. The clasps clicked and the leather fell away and then the dildo came, slow, an inch at a time, Derek's rim pushing out around it the way Kai had trained him to. When it finally cleared him Derek felt the air of the room on his hole and felt how open it was, a loose warm ring that had stopped being a ring at all. He heard one of the technicians make a small sound, not quite a laugh.
"Sniff," the shorter one said, and the cannula was already on his face.
The new nozzle was waiting on the steel tray and it was enormous. The old ones had been slim, almost gentle. This one was thicker than the dildo's neck, ribbed near the tip, connected to a hose that ran to a tank with a dial on it. The taller technician lifted the tank's pressure valve and turned it two full clicks higher than Derek had ever seen it turned.
"Warm," the shorter one said, to his partner, in English, for Derek's benefit, and then the nozzle was going in.
It opened him without asking. The ribbed head dragged across tissue that had no fight left in it, and then the water came, high pressure, a hard warm flood that didn't trickle or fill but pushed. Derek grunted. His belly swelled. The water found places inside him that water had never reached, curling up into him deep where the dildo's head lived all night, flushing everything it found. "Sniff," the shorter one said again, and held the popper bottle under Derek's nose while the taller one worked the nozzle in slow circles.
The room went soft at the edges. The flood broke, then came again. Derek expelled into the drainage gutter under the bench, messy and loud and shameless, and the technicians didn't pause, didn't react, just refilled him. Round after round. The water ran clear on the fourth. On the fifth it ran clear again and the taller technician shut the tank off and withdrew the nozzle with a wet pop, and Derek's hole stayed open behind it, gaping at the cool air, twitching uselessly, unable to close.
"Sniff," the shorter one said one more time, almost kindly, and Derek took it, because taking it was all he had left, and the room bloomed pink and warm and his stupid loosened hole felt like the best thing he owned.
The cage came off next. The shorter technician worked the ring and the tiny tube apart with gloved fingers, and Derek's dick slid out of its sleeve looking like nothing, a shriveled pale thumb of flesh, small even soft, smaller than it had ever been after weeks of compression and zero use. He stared down at it with something close to grief and something close to relief.
The new device was on the tray. It was beautiful, the way all their equipment was beautiful, brushed steel with a machined satin finish. There was no tube. No curved cage, no headpiece. Just a flat disc of metal on a ring, like a small puck, like a shield.
The taller one pressed it against him. The ring closed behind his balls, snug at the root, and the flat plate simply lay over his whole dick, compressing it back against his body until there was nothing to see and nothing to hold. His balls, already tiny, already drawn up tight from the cold steel, sat below the flat plate like two small peanuts in a pouch. The shorter technician clicked the lock shut. It was maybe eight seconds of work.
Derek understood immediately, in his body, before his mind caught up. His dick couldn't move. Not twitch, not swell, not stiffen a millimeter. The flat plate held it pressed flat against his pubic bone with no space at all, and the cold of the metal numbed what was left of sensation. He tried, out of pure reflex, the old little jump of blood he'd felt a thousand times in coffee shops and daydreams, and nothing happened. Nothing rose. Nothing stirred. There was pressure and cold steel and below that, nothing.
He didn't have a dick anymore. He had a plate.
Kai's voice floated up from somewhere under his sternum, the way it always did now. A faggot's dick is decoration, derekreads. Decoration gets archived. Your hole is your mouth now. It's how you feel. It's how you speak.
"Thank you," Derek whispered, and lisped it, and the technicians didn't look at him.
They gave him fresh briefs, and then jeans, and Derek noticed before he even stepped into them that the jeans were smaller. A skinnier size. He'd lost that much. They were tight everywhere, painted onto his stick-thin thighs and his concave stomach, and at the back there were two clean round holes cut into the denim, over his cheeks, because the harness would go back on and the technicians needed access and Derek's wardrobe had simply been updated to match his function. He stood in front of the locker room mirror and looked at his crotch. The flat plate disappeared under the tight denim completely. His jeans looked empty. Flat, smooth, nothing there, like a Ken doll, like a mannequin. His balls made the faintest suggestion of a shape and even that was mostly the seam.
A month ago this would have ended him. Now he felt a hot, shaming flicker of pride, that they had made him so completely nothing, and he hated himself for the flicker and hated that hating it made his hole clench, which it barely could, which made him hornier, which the flat plate absorbed into nothing.
The training room was warm and smelled faintly of silicone and antiseptic. Derek saw the machine as they walked him in and his stomach dropped and lifted at the same time. The dildo mounted on the thrusting arm was a straight column, thirteen inches long, twelve around, rounded head, no flare, no taper. Exactly what he had slept in. Exactly what Dr. Lu had seated in him yesterday, minus the brutal flared head. It looked like a pipe. It looked like an arm.
He didn't resist when they strapped him. Ankles up in the stirrups, wrists at his sides, chest strap across his flat little ribs. The cannula went into his nose. The headset came down over his eyes and the room vanished.
Warm hands, gloved, guided the head of it to his hole. There was no entrance. His outer ring was gone; Dr. Lu had said so yesterday, in his warm unhurried voice, fit for progression. The dildo simply went in, a slow smooth press, the head sinking through an open doorway, and Derek felt every inch of the depth because depth was the only feeling he had left. Inch after inch after inch. His breath went shallow. At ten inches his inner ring met it and relaxed, trained, tired, and gave way, and the last three inches seated home with a pressure against his guts that made his eyes roll up behind the headset.
Poppers flooded the cannula.
And there was Kai.
Shirtless, in the white room, closer than he'd ever been rendered. The black hair pushed back. The square jaw. The golden skin with the faint sheen of a workout just finished, the delts rounded and capped, the pecs heavy and low, the nipples small and dark and perfect. Kai smiled at him and Derek's whole body went soft.
"There he is," Kai said warmly. "My little derekreads. How's the flattest crotch in the building?"
Derek flushed head to toe. "It's, it's gone, sir. I can't feel it."
"I know." Kai laughed, low and easy, and stretched one arm up over his head, and Derek watched the lat flare and the armpit crease, the dark tuft of hair there, the long muscle of the side of his torso contracting. "I watched your exam. We all did. Doctor Lu's room records, remember? The camera, the stirrups, the little sound you made when the flared head went in. It was a beautiful sound. Do you remember it?"
"Yes," Derek whispered.
"Say it. What did you make?"
"A stupid, um, a stupid faggot sound, sir."
"You did. Now breathe for me." The dildo shifted. The arm drew it out, slow, four inches, and Derek's open rim tried to follow it and failed. Then it pressed back in, deep, until the rounded head kissed the deepest part of him. "You slept in this, didn't you. All night. Your body's been training while you dreamed. So this is not new, is it?"
"No, sir."
"No. It's home." Kai stepped closer to the camera, so close his chest filled the frame, and the vibration started.
Low at first, a hum deep in the silicone, a pulse that traveled up through Derek's pelvis into his spine. Derek moaned, high and lisping, and his hands pulled uselessly at the straps.
"There it is. Breathe. In through the cannula, two seconds, hold, out through your mouth. Push out through your hole on the exhale. Your inner ring, derekreads, I want it slack. Not fighting. Not gripping. A rim that grips is a rim that thinks, and you're not allowed to think anymore, are you?"
"No, sir."
The vibration climbed. Faster, deeper, a rolling churn that made his whole lower body quake against the straps. Kai flexed for him. Both arms up, hands behind his head, lats spread into wings, the hairy armpits exposed, and Derek stared because staring was the exercise and the exercise was all. Stare at my body and get stupid. The poppers hit again and Kai's golden skin bloomed pink at the edges and Derek's mouth fell open and a long liquid sound came out of him that had no words in it at all.
"That's the sound," Kai said, delighted. "That's yesterday's sound. Oh, you're going to be so easy in a few weeks. A real hand, derekreads. Wrist-deep. Maybe two. The men in the rotation are big, did you know that? Bigger than me. Their fingers are thicker than your whole flat crotch."
The vibration surged and Derek's vision whited at the edges. He pushed out on the exhale like he was told, pushed everything open, and felt the dildo sink a half inch deeper on its own, gravity and slackness taking him, and the sensation was so total that the word for it dissolved before it reached his mouth.
Hours passed in that room, or no time passed, it was impossible to say. Kai coached him in cycles. Breathe. Sniff. Push out. Flex. Stare. He showed off his back, the traps bunched like rope, the small of his back dimpling as he leaned. He told Derek about the logs, how the firm had watched Dr. Lu's whole exam, how the rotation desk had his file open right now, real men, somewhere upstairs, reading numbers about Derek's hole and deciding. He asked questions and waited and Derek answered them, voice climbing higher, lisp thickening, answers getting shorter and dumber as the hours burned through him.
By the second hour Derek had lost the shape of sentences. He grunted and moaned and said sir, and said thank you, and said please without knowing what he was asking for. The vibration ran at full power now, a constant punishing churn, and his inner ring, that last stubborn guard at the bottom of him, hung open around the shaft like a slack collar. He could feel it. He could feel that it wasn't there. It was the strangest feeling of his life, a muscle that had simply been switched off, and it felt so good, so dangerous and good, that he pushed out further just to feel more of the nothing.
"There it is," Kai said softly, from somewhere far away and very close. "Slack. Completely slack. Three percent tomorrow, derekreads. And then a fist fits where your fear used to live."
Derek drooled a little, staring at the golden chest, huffing, vibrating, gone.
The vibration cut off without warning. The arm drew back, and the dildo left him in one long smooth pull, thirteen inches sliding out of a hole that made no attempt to hold it. It cleared his rim with a soft wet sound and cold air rushed into the emptiness, and Derek felt the whole shape of what he had become: open, hollow, a tunnel with nothing closing it off from the world.
"Okay," Kai said. He was standing again now, arms crossed over that heavy chest, watching Derek with warm clinical interest. "Little test, derekreads. I want you to find your inner ring. Reach down inside yourself and find it, and close it. Squeeze. Like you're holding something precious in."
Derek searched. He lay in the straps, poppered and dripping, and reached for the muscle the way you reach for a word that's on the tip of your tongue. There was nothing there. He pushed and gripped and bore down and nothing in the bottom of him answered. It was like being asked to wiggle a toe that had been numbed at the root. He grunted with effort, face screwing up, and produced a single feeble clench that died before it finished.
"I can't," he lisped. "Sir, I can't find it."
"You can. It's in there. Tired, not gone." Kai crouched slightly, forearms on his knees, and Derek stared at the way the forearms corded, the veins standing up on the backs of his hands. "Think of the pill you swallowed this morning. Think of the water the technicians put in you. You're full of my firm's property, derekreads, and property gets held in. Now squeeze like the property belongs to you and you're afraid to lose it."
Derek huffed, because huffing was the answer to everything now, and the room went soft and pink. He reached again. Somewhere down in the dark hot interior of himself he found a thread of feeling, a ghost of a muscle, and he pulled on it the way you pull on a rope in the dark. A minute passed. Two. His thighs shook against the straps. Sweat ran cold down his ribs. The technicians, somewhere outside the headset, moved around the room on their own errands, and one of them laughed at something on his phone, and Derek hated how much he wanted that laugh to be about him.
Then it happened. A flutter. The smallest, weakest tremor at the entrance of his inner ring, a pulse that lasted half a second and vanished.
"Sir," Derek gasped. "Sir, I felt it. I felt it flutter."
"There it is." Kai's smile spread slow across the square jaw, and it was the smile of a man watching a dog learn to sit. "One flutter. A dying ember. Do you know what that tells me?"
"That I'm, um. That it's almost gone, sir."
"It tells me the fist is close, derekreads. A hole that can only flutter is a hole getting ready to stop." Kai straightened up. "Good boy. Now we reward the ember. Breathe in."
The arm moved. The rounded head came back to his rim, and there was no resistance to meet it, so the dildo just went, in one long continuous press, past the place where his outer ring used to argue, past the slack collar of his inner ring that gave a single hopeless flutter and then let go, deeper and deeper until all thirteen inches were buried and the rounded head pressed against the deepest wall of him with a dull insistent weight. Derek's mouth opened and the high lisping moan came out of him and he couldn't stop it and didn't want to.
The vibration returned. But it was different now. It came up from nothing to a fast rolling churn in two seconds, and then it kept climbing, past where it had been at the end of the last hour, a high punishing frequency that made his teeth buzz and his vision shimmer behind the headset. His whole pelvis became the vibration. His flat crotch buzzed against the steel plate. His balls, tiny and useless, chattered in their pouch.
"Feel that?" Kai said. "That's the speed we'll use on a wrist. That's the speed that makes a faggot forget his own name. What's your name?"
"Derek," Derek said, and then the vibration surged again and the name fell apart in his mouth. "Der. Der. I don't. Sir?"
"That's fine. That's perfect." Kai laughed, warm and delighted, and Derek basked in the laugh like a plant in light, and hated himself, and the hate felt exactly like pleasure now, they had merged somewhere in the last two weeks into one warm liquid thing. "Breathe through it. In, two seconds, hold. Out, push out, open. You're going to hold this speed for a long time, derekreads, and your ring is going to learn what it means. Every flutter it tries, I want you to notice how pointless it is. Every squeeze, feel it fail. Say it."
"Every squeeze fails," Derek whispered. "It's pointless. My ring is, um. It's stopping."
"Say the whole thing."
"My ring is stopping so a fist can live there, sir."
"Good boy."
The cycles came and came. The popper bottle hissed at regular intervals, timed to the program, and Derek huffed on schedule like a machine breathing on its own clock. Kai talked him through each one. In, hold, out, push. Stare at my chest. Watch the pecs jump when I bounce them. Derek watched. The pecs bounced, heavy and low, one and then the other, and Derek's brain poured out of his open mouth a little more with every bounce. Kai turned and showed him the back, the traps rising like knuckles, the V tapering into waist, and Derek thought about what was under those gym shorts the way he always thought about it, the heavy swing of a real man's cock, thick and long and veined, built for women who weren't watching and men who would never have him, and the shame of the thought and the heat of the thought were the same heat the dildo was making, all of it one frequency.
Time lost its edges. The vibration ran on. Somewhere in the blur Derek noticed that Kai's voice was changing. The words were still English words but they were sliding, smearing at the ends, the consonants softening like the audio had been passed through warm water. Derek couldn't tell if the program was doing it or if his own brain was dissolving fast enough that the voice only seemed to smear. It didn't matter. Both were true. Kai's sentences stretched and melted until they were pure sound, a warm melodic murmur, the tone of instruction without the instruction, and Derek nodded along to sounds he couldn't parse and felt exactly what he was supposed to feel, which was nothing except full and buzzing and good.
"Sir," he said, to the smear of voice. "Sir. Sir." It wasn't a question anymore. It was a tic.
The white room dissolved and rebuilt itself around Kai. Now there was a bench. A flat padded bench, and a rack of black iron plates, and Kai stood beside it rolling his shoulders, and Derek understood with his last thinking corner that this was the next module. Hypnosis by rep count.
"Watch me lift," Kai said, and the words came out half-melted, honey off a spoon. "Sniff on my press. Hold on my hold. Exhale on my rack."
Kai lay back on the bench and took the bar, and Derek's eyes locked onto the way his arms dimpled at the elbow under the weight, the triceps jumping, the chest swelling up under the bar as it came down to touch and exploded up again. A number appeared in the air beside him, projected large, white on black. Ten.
The poppers hissed. One.
Derek sniffed. Two.
Kai pressed. Three. Four. The bar came down and went up. Five. Derek's lungs burned with held breath he'd been told to hold. Six. The vibration at the bottom of him churned at maximum, a never-ending earthquake. Seven. Eight. The number pulsed with his heartbeat, or his heartbeat pulsed with the number, he couldn't tell. Nine. Exhale, the screen said, in letters that swam, and Derek exhaled and pushed out through his hole on the command and felt the dildo settle half an inch deeper into guts that made room for it without complaint.
Ten. Rack. Breathe.
"Again," said the honeyed smear that had been Kai, and the number reset, and Kai's chest heaved under the bar, and Derek sniffed on one and held on three and exhaled on ten for a set that was ten reps long and a set that was a hundred reps long and a set that lasted the rest of his life.
The counting became the whole world. The numbers hung in the black and pulsed and Derek lived inside them. Eight. Nine. Hold. The instruction to hold arrived mid-count now, interrupting, and Derek held, eyes watering, until the screen relented and let him breathe. Exhale. Push out. Open. His hole pushed out on every command and on every push the flutter came and every flutter was weaker and he felt each one die, felt the last muscle of his old self flicker like a dying bulb, and he loved watching it die because Kai had told him to love it and loving it was easier than anything.
Between sets Kai racked the bar and sat up, sweat rendered on his golden skin in beads that caught the white light, and Derek stared at the sweat because staring was the exercise. Kai's stomach flexed as he sat. The Happy Trail ran down into the waistband of the shorts and Derek's imagination crawled down that line to the heavy hidden thing and he thought, thickly, that it was probably the size of the dildo now in his mind, everything Kai-owned had grown to match his training, and he was right to think it because wanting forever was a gift.
"Set," Kai said, the word almost gone, just its bones left. "Ring status."
Derek reached down inside himself. He searched for the flutter. He searched for the ember, the thread, the rope in the dark. He pushed and gripped and bore down with everything left in his wrecked body, and there was nothing. Not a flutter. Not a tremor. Not the ghost of a ghost. The inner ring was not closed and not closedable. It hung open around the thirteen-inch shaft like a sleeve, like a worn collar, like a mouth that had forgotten how to shut, and Derek knew, in the calm deep way you know your own name, that it was not going to close again. The program had done exactly what it was built to do. The muscle had been spent, rep by rep, sniff by sniff, over three hours of counting, and what remained was a permanent open door.
"I can't," Derek said. His voice came out a child's squeak with a lisp on it. "Sir, it's. There's nothing to squeeze. It's open. It's just open."
"Good boy," said the smear, and the warmth in the tone was the last clear thing Kai ever said to him that day.
The sets went on. The numbers went on. Derek sniffed and held and exhaled and pushed out and the vibration ran at its ceiling speed and his body forgot it had ever owned a closing muscle. Somewhere in the third hour the drool ran off his chin and down his flat little chest and pooled in the hollow of his sternum and nobody wiped it. Somewhere in the third hour his eyes stopped tracking the bar and just stared at the blur of golden moving flesh, the arms rising and falling, the chest swelling, the beautiful superior body lifting iron for an audience of one dissolved faggot, and Derek's mind was finally, fully, the shape Kai wanted: a warm open hole with a person vaguely attached to it.
The strap buckles clicked somewhere far away. The headset began to lift, light leaking in at the bottom edge. Derek's last thought before the white room let him go was that he wanted to see the number reach ten one more time, just once more, please, sir, and then he was blinking in the real room, drooling, gaping, empty-headed around a full column of silicone, and the taller technician was already unlocking the first strap without ever having looked at his face.
The unstrapping happened to a body that barely felt it. Hands moved his legs down from the stirrups, lifted his hips off the seat, turned him, bent him forward over the padded bench again, and Derek swayed along with all of it like a coat on a hook.
Then the bell head was back.
He understood they had switched dildos while he was still in the headset. The one they brought to his rim now was wider at the crown, a smooth swelling shape that opened him wider than the column had, and even though his outer ring had nothing left to say about it, the passage of the bell through his slack tunnel was enormous, a slow flood of pressure that made his knees buckle against the bench. The technicians fed it in without hurry. Ten inches. Twelve. The bell pressed against the deepest wall and kept pressing until his whole pelvis felt reshaped around it, his insides rearranged like furniture, and then the harness clasps clicked shut at his hips and it was locked.
He hung there a moment, breathing, feeling himself hold all of it. There was a warm animal pride in it somewhere under the stupor. Thirteen inches and a bell. All night. Every night, probably.
Good boy, something inside him said, in a voice like honey off a spoon.
The taller technician took his arm and walked him out. Derek bounced down the corridor without choosing to, every step jolting the bell head against his guts, and each jolt pulled a small lisping sound out of him that he didn't try to stop, because stopping things was another muscle he no longer had.
In the locker room the new jeans were waiting, folded on the bench beside a pair of briefs.
The briefs went on first. The flat plate sat under the cotton like nothing, a smooth shallow dish of a crotch. Then the jeans, and Derek saw immediately that these were different from the training pair. No holes in the back. Just denim, plain and clean, and a full inch narrower at the waist than last week's pair. He stepped into them and had to wiggle to get them over his hips, the fabric dragging up his stick thighs, and when they closed over the harness the bell head pressed deeper in protest and he gasped and gripped the bench.
"You look like a coat hanger," the shorter technician said, to his partner, in Mandarin, and both of them laughed, and Derek flushed and bounced in place, because being laughed at by them was the closest thing to being touched by them and his body knew it before his shame could argue.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The jeans were painted on. Nothing at the crotch, just the faint seam and two soft peanuts of shape, and at the back a smooth tight curve of denim over the harness, no holes, no bulge, nothing to tell anyone what he was carrying. Just a flat skinny white boy in tight jeans, walking like his hips had springs in them, and inside, thirteen inches of steel-locked silicone sitting in him like a tenant.
I'm a coat hanger, he thought, and giggled, and hated the giggle, and loved it.
The taller technician checked the harness locks with two tugs and then stepped back and picked up his phone, and that was that. Derek stood in the locker room alone, breathing, waiting, drooling a little and wiping it with the back of his wrist. His stomach growled and the sound was strange because it had nowhere to go. There was no room in him. His whole middle was occupied.
The door opened at four pm.
Wei Li came in the way he always came in, like the room had been reserved for him. Derek's head turned and his pulse did its useless little jump. Wei Li was tall, broad through the chest in a soft charcoal knit sweater, sleeves pushed up over forearms with a scatter of dark hair and a heavy watch, black hair swept off a high forehead, jaw clean, smile already going. He smelled of cologne and lunch, of garlic and hot oil, and Derek's empty stomach cramped at the smell and his hole, uselessly, fluttered its nothing-flutter around the bell.
"There he is," Wei Li said. "Six hours, derekreads. Six." He held up the fingers. "You missed lunch. Whole cafeteria worked around your absence. The salad man set out your little bowl at noon and had to throw it away."
"Sorry," Derek lisped. His voice came out in the child register, high and thin.
"No, no. It's fine." Wei Li came closer and put a hand flat on Derek's concave stomach, over the tight denim, and pressed lightly, and Derek swayed and moaned at the pressure of it against the bell. "Actually it's better than fine. Look at you. There's no room in there for food anyway. That thing took the whole kitchen. Your insides have no room for lunch, so lunch is cancelled. That's just efficiency."
He laughed at his own joke, warm and easy, and Derek laughed too, a high breathy giggle, and felt the laugh move the dildo inside him and moaned instead, and Wei Li laughed harder.
"You're so easy today. Come, sit."
Derek sat on the bench, which was a mistake, because sitting drove the bell head up into him and his back arched off the wall and his mouth fell open and a long string of drool swung from his chin. Wei Li watched it with an expression of pure entertainment, hands on his hips.
"Beautiful. Okay." He set a small paper cup on the bench, and a blister pack, and shook pills out of both. "Doctor Lu's orders. Muscle relaxant and the strong pain pills, immediately, because that session was the hardest your body has ever done and the doctor doesn't want you seizing in your bathtub tonight. One of each now. More at home."
He held them out. Derek took them from his fingers, slow, clumsy, the way a small child takes things, and Wei Li had to guide the pills to his lips with two fingers against Derek's jaw.
"Open."
Derek opened. The pills went onto his tongue, bitter and chalky.
"Water."
A bottle tilted against his lips and he drank, gagging a little, swallowing, and the pills went down and the warmth of Wei Li's fingers lingered on his jaw and Derek stared at those fingers and thought, fuzzily, about where they'd been today, what they'd touched, how thick the hand was, how the arm it belonged to could hold him down against a bench with one flat palm. He imagined the chest under the charcoal knit, the heavy soft weight of it, the cock he was sure lived in those tailored trousers, thick and sleeping and never once for him.
Stop it, he told himself. He's straight. He has a girlfriend or a wife. He thinks of you like the salad man thinks of salad.
And the food is better than the salad, Kai's voice said, warm, inside, and Derek shivered.
"Good boy." Wei Li tossed the empty cup in the bin. "Now the last thing. Fresh bottle." He held it up, glass, heavy-formula, a darker amber than the lunch ones. "Stronger. Doctor Lu's formulation. Deep breaths today, derekreads, one nostril at a time. This is the good stuff."
He uncapped it and pressed his thumb over Derek's left nostril and the bottle to the right.
"In. Deep. Hold it."
Derek inhaled. The burn came up sweet and enormous, a flood that went straight through the back of his eyes into the base of his skull, and the room went soft and hot and Wei Li's smiling face doubled and merged into one golden blur.
"Hold. Good. Now the other side."
Thumb swapped. Bottle to the left nostril. Another deep pull, even bigger, and Derek's head fell back against the locker and his legs stopped being his.
"Hold. There. Let it hit."
It hit. Derek swayed on the bench, and then, without meaning to, he stood up, because his body wanted to move, wanted to bounce, and the bell head shifted inside him with a pressure that made his vision spark. He bounced on his heels. The dildo ground against his guts, rearranging him again, and he moaned, high and long, and his arms came up without instruction and hung there, wrists limp, fingers curled loose and faggy in the air, and he arched his back, pushing his nothing crotch forward and his ruined hole back against the fullness, and drool ran off his lower lip and down his chin and dripped onto the tight denim of his jeans.
Wei Li burst out laughing.
"Oh my god. Look at you." He circled Derek once, slowly, like appraising a sculpture. "Arms out like a little ballerina. Six hours ago you had a college education, derekreads. Look at your wrists. They're broken. You're drooling on my office jeans."
Derek tried to lower his arms. They drifted back up. He bounced again, twice, a helpless little hop that drove the bell against the deepest wall of him and dragged another moan up his throat, and he pushed his hole out as he did it, trained, automatic, offering himself to the locker room air, and Wei Li clapped once, delighted.
"The bouncing. With that thing inside you. You look like you're riding an invisible horse, little one. Keep going. No, don't stop, it's the best thing I've seen all week."
"Thank you, sir," Derek slurred, swaying, drooling, arms floating.
"You're welcome. God." Wei Li wiped his own eye, still laughing, then caught Derek's elbow and steered him toward the door. "Okay, come on, unicorn. Car's waiting. You're going to keep the bottle with you. Sniff in the cab, sniff at home, sniff all day. That's the whole assignment. You don't need hands for it, and let's be honest, you don't need much of a brain either."
They came out through the corridor past the cafeteria, and Derek caught a glimpse through the glass of the tall businessmen at their long table, suits on, chopsticks moving, laughing about something on a laptop, silver cufflinks, thick wrists, and one of them, the one with the shaved head and the white shirt stretched over shoulders like a coat rack, looked up and his eyes passed over Derek without a flicker of recognition, past him like a smudge on glass, and Derek's heart did its pathetic flip anyway, even now, even like this, drooling, prancing, stuffed. He imagined the shaved head's body under the shirt, the heavy chest, the long dick, and hated himself in one clean bright flash and then the flash dissolved into the popper warmth like sugar into tea.
The Uber was waiting at the curb, a grey sedan. Wei Li walked him to it with a hand on his upper arm, a grip that made Derek's knees go soft, and opened the door.
"In you go."
The young driver was Chinese, early twenties, in a black bomber jacket, a fine Adam's apple and a fast sharp glance that took in Derek's bouncing walk and the wet shine on his chin, and smirked, and looked away. Derek lowered himself into the seat and the motion drove the bell head up and he gasped and arched, wrists up, ankles crossed, and the driver's mirror-glance lingered a half second longer this time.
Wei Li leaned down into the door frame. He held out the poppers bottle, and the blister pack, and a small printed card with the dosing times, and Derek took them against his chest like treasure.
"Address is in the app. Rules." He counted them off on his fingers, playful, patient, the way you brief a child on a school trip. "Sniff the whole ride. Both nostrils, deep, hold. Pills again when you're home, on the card. Side-lying tonight, and you are NOT getting that harness off, it stays locked until morning pickup. And keep sniffing, all day, all night if you're awake. Doctor Lu wants you loose and floating when I collect you tomorrow."
"Yes, sir," Derek lisped, swaying in the seat.
"And one more thing." Wei Li smiled, and the smile was all warmth and all condescension at once, and he reached in and patted Derek flatly on the head like a small dog. "Six hours, little one. The desk saw every rep of it. So sleep with your legs open, because tomorrow morning the men upstairs might already be reading your file."
He shut the door.
The car pulled out. The city slid past the window, gold and smeared. Derek uncapped the bottle with fumbling fingers and pressed it to his right nostril and inhaled, deep, holding, and the warm flood broke over him and he bounced in the seat, the bell head churning inside him, and moaned, and switched nostrils, and inhaled again.
Keep sniffing, he thought, holding the bottle under his own nose. All day. All night. Loose and floating.
The driver's eyes flicked to the mirror once more. Derek, arms drifting up, wrists limp, held the bottle higher and huffed deeper, and smiled at the mirror with wet lips, and the driver looked away, and Derek was still sniffing when the tower disappeared behind them.
The sedan dropped him at Emerald Gardens just after six. The lobby was warm and gold-lit and smelled of the jasmine diffuser they kept by the door, and Derek stood swaying in it for a moment, the popper warmth still buzzing behind his eyes, before his legs remembered the stairs.
The stairs were the problem. The elevator was broken again, a paper sign taped to the doors with an apology in three languages, and Derek lived on the fourth floor. He took the first step and the bell head pressed up into his guts and he stopped and breathed, hand on the rail, made of glass, Dr. Lu's voice said, and he took the next one. Each stair was a small deep insult to his insides. By the second flight his thighs were shaking and he was making a tiny sound with every step, a high lisping uh, uh, uh, and a young Chinese couple coming down the other way flattened themselves against the wall to pass him and exchanged a look and said nothing, and Derek bounced past them with his eyes down and his wrists drifting.
At his door his hands were too slow for the key. It took three tries. Inside, the apartment smelled of last night's weed and the colored halos were back on everything, softer now, and he stood in the middle of his own living room breathing while the door swung shut behind him.
Shower. Dr. Lu had said shower, or maybe he hadn't, but showers were a thing people did and Derek was still a person, technically, sort of, in a way that got less technical every day.
He got the jeans off by lying on the bed and dragging them down his stick legs, and the harness stayed, locked, and the bell stayed, and he padded to the bathroom with one hand under his belly carrying his own fullness, and turned the water hot.
The bathroom had a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and Derek saw himself in it and stopped.
God.
He looked, in the fogged glass and the yellow light, like something assembled wrong. Pasty white skin with a pink tinge across the chest and shoulders, the color of raw chicken left out. Ribs visible, every one of them, the skin stretched thin over them like paper over a frame. And the hair. He'd never thought about the hair before the firm, and now he couldn't stop. A little ragged patch on his chest, sparse and random, like a stray dog's mange. Hair on his forearms, fine and colorless. Hair at his crotch and up his inner thighs, a messy scribble around the flat steel plate and its crushed nothing. Hair on his legs in patches. Nature had just let him go, he thought. Hadn't finished him. Had started building a man and then gotten bored halfway and shipped it.
Because that was the comparison now, and it was never going away. The technicians this morning, their forearms smooth and golden under the fluorescents, the muscle lying on the bone in clean thick ropes. The businessmen at lunch, skin like honey, like burnished wood, like something rich and finished, hair exactly where hair went, at the jaw, at the armpit, a deliberate dark line down the stomach into the waistband, everything in its right place. Kai, rendered perfect, the trail down his belly like an arrow drawn by an artist. Chinese men looked designed. Looked composed. Every one of them looked like the final version.
Derek looked like the draft.
And so weak. He raised one arm and the bicep barely moved, a soft little ridge of nothing on a stick. He couldn't open a jar. He'd lost fourteen kilos in six weeks and every one of them had come off him like the firm was peeling a fruit, and underneath there was just less Derek, a smaller and smaller pale scribble of a person.
His eyes were stinging. That was stupid. That was such a white faggot thing, crying at a mirror, and he knew what the feeling was before he could name it, because Kai had named it for him months ago: envy is love pointed the wrong way, derekreads. Point it back.
He grabbed the heavy black-capped bottle off the sink ledge, pressed it to his right nostril, and inhaled deep.
The warmth broke over the top of his head and rolled down. The mirror softened. His skin was still pale and his chest was still mangy but the judgment went far away, down some long corridor, and what was left was just a body, warm, full, humming, his, sort of, the firm's, whatever, fine.
Another hit, left nostril, deep, hold.
The pink left his own eyes. He looked at himself and felt nothing much at all, which was the best he ever felt, and he stood under the hot water until it started to run cold, and even the water on the bell head's deep pressure was a slow good ache, and then he got out and dripped on the bath mat and left the bathroom without looking at the mirror again.
The dresser was where he'd left it, and the clothes were not.
He pulled the top drawer open for boxers and stopped. Every pair was gone. In their place, folded in neat bright rows, were thongs. Thongs in pink, in lime green, in sky blue, in white with lace at the waistband, all of them scraps, strings, pouches barely bigger than the steel plate they'd have to cover. One step from lingerie. Not even one step, some of them. Lace.
He stood there holding up a lime green string and blushed so hot it reached his ears.
This is what I am now, he thought. A person who wears this. An unserious person. A joke of a person. Some office somewhere had gone through his drawer and decided, without asking, that he was the kind of creature who wore lime green lace, and the awful thing, the thing that made the blush worse, was that they were right. He was that kind of creature. He had probably always been that kind of creature and it had taken a corporation to bring it out of him.
He stepped into the green one. The string went up between his cheeks and sat against the harness and the pouch held the flat plate like a gift box holds a coin. Then tiny black gym shorts, the kind that barely cleared the thigh, and a white tank top that hung on him like a flag on a pole.
The joint was easy to roll tonight. His fingers were slow but the weed was pre-ground in the new pouch, denser and darker, the strong grade, and he lit it on the balcony with the city going purple and gold below, and leaned on the rail, careful not to put his weight on his heels because the bell punished it.
The smoke went down thick and sweet and the balcony light got warmer. Two hits and the city sounds softened. Three and the stairs he'd climbed stopped hurting in his memory. He was watching a crane swing a beam across the street when headlights swung into the lot below.
An Uber, grey, the same make as his. It stopped and the door opened and a guy got out.
White. Skinny. Derek's height or close, maybe a bit taller, in tiny skinny jeans and a threadbare vintage t shirt, exactly Derek's uniform, and he moved the way Derek moved, one hand under his belly, hobbling, bouncing on his heels with every step, face dazed and slack and pink, mouth a little open, wrists drifting. He fumbled at the building door the way Derek had fumbled at his own key. He got it open and hobbled inside, and Derek watched the whole thing from the railing with his joint burning down between his fingers.
One of us, he thought. Another asset. He looks further along. He looks like a guy who's already taking fists. That loose walk, that's a fist walk, that's a guy whose insides have been rearranged more times than mine, that's a guy the rotation desk has already called up.
How many of them lived here? The building had twelve floors and hundreds of units. How many pale skinny guys in lime green thongs hobbled up these stairs every evening, huffed in these bathtubs, slept on these beds with their legs open? Was the whole tower a hive of them, floor after floor of dissolved white boys on firm dosing schedules, all of them watching reels of men who didn't exist?
He was actually counting floors, actually starting to think, when a voice arrived in his head, warm and familiar, Kai's cadence wearing Wei Li's smile: Don't think, derekreads. Thinking is a closing muscle.
The thought evaporated. He looked for it and it was gone, like the flutter, like the ring. He giggled at the loss and finished the joint and went inside.
The pills were laid out on the kitchen table on a folded white card, in the firm's neat print. Two strong pain tablets. One muscle relaxant. A glass of water waiting beside them, already poured, which meant someone had been in his apartment today or the firm had a key and he should have felt something about that and felt nothing instead.
He swallowed all three dry first, then drank the water, then laughed at himself for the order.
They came up fast. Faster than last night. Within ten minutes his shoulders dropped two inches and his jaw unclenched and his legs went from tired to liquid. The relaxant was a heavy warm hand pressing down through him from the inside, everything softening, everything jelling, and he walked to the bedroom like a puppet with half its strings cut, and the bell head shifted in him with each step and the shift was distant now, muffled, felt through numbness, pressure without pain.
He got onto the bed on his side, knees drawn up, exactly as instructed, legs open the way Wei Li had told him, and huffed the bottle, both nostrils, deep, and the ceiling went soft and gold.
Reels.
The feed opened on a Chinese man doing curls in a mirror-walled gym, biceps peaking, veins climbing his forearms, and Derek watched with his thumb hovering over the screen and pushed out on the bell at every rep, automatic, trained. The next was a party. Twenty Chinese guys on a rooftop, laughing, beers in hand, shirts off in the summer heat, all of them broad and golden and easy in their bodies, one of them flexing for the camera while his friends howled, and Derek felt the old ache come up and watched it dissolve, because Kai had taught him where to point it. The next was a beach. Board shorts, a gold chain, waves, a man jogging out of the surf with water sheeting off a chest like armor, and Derek huffed again, deep, and moaned into the pillow.
His hole felt completely stuffed. That was the strangest arithmetic, the body limp as a rag while the middle of him stayed full and hot and awake, the relaxant taking his arms and legs and tongue and leaving the bell exactly where it was. And his dick, his dick was nothing. The flat plate held it crushed against his bone and there was no feeling in it at all, no twitch, no tingle, no bulge under the green string, nothing. It was like being told he used to have a tail. Some earlier Derek had touched it and liked that and missed it, somewhere far away, in another life, and this Derek lay on his side with his knees up and couldn't locate the memory in his own body.
The phone buzzed against the mattress.
Wei Li, the screen said, video call.
Derek answered it so fast he fumbled the phone onto his face.
"Hey, little one." Wei Li filled the screen, sitting on a big grey couch in a black tank top, legs spread, a beer bottle sweating in his hand. Behind him a TV murmured sports on mute, and somewhere off-camera a pan sizzled and a cabinet closed. "There he is. In position. Legs up. Perfect."
The kitchen light caught him and Derek drank the image in. The tank top loose at the neck showing the flat heavy plates of pec and the hollow of his throat, the shoulders round with muscle, the forearm draped along the couch arm with its scatter of dark hair and the heavy watch. His hair was damp, freshly showered, pushed back off the high forehead. At home. Off duty. A real man in his own apartment at the end of his real day.
"How you feeling?" Wei Li asked. "Talk to me. Words if you've got them."
"Loose, thirth," Derek lisped. His tongue was thick. "So loose. Jelly."
"Jelly. Good, that's the relaxant doing its job. Doctor Lu said tonight would hit harder than last night because of the session. Six hours, derekreads. Your body did six hours." He shook his head, admiring, sipping the beer. "You should be proud. Can you be proud? Do you have enough brain left to be proud?"
"A little, thirth."
"Use it. That's an order." He laughed, warm, and the pan sizzled louder behind him. "That's my girlfriend cooking. Real food, derekreads. Beef and peppers. Smells insane. You know what you're having tonight? Nothing. Salads cancelled, remember, no room in there. Pills and poppers and weed. That's dinner. And look how happy you are about it."
Derek looked down at himself, knees up, wrist limp, green string showing above the waistband of the shorts, and giggled.
"Anyway. Check-in's not just for fun. The desk flagged tonight. They want you loose and floating and asleep early, because tomorrow's a big morning. So let's do the program." Wei Li set the beer down on the coffee table and leaned forward, filling more of the frame. "Bottle. Right nostril. Go."
Derek huffed. The flood broke warm and huge.
"Hold. Good. Other side."
Left nostril, deeper. The room went soft and molten.
"There. Now eyes on me." Wei Li raised his right arm, slow, and bent it, and the bicep rose up into a hard round peak under the golden-brown skin, the sleeve straining, the muscle jumping once when he tensed it. Derek's whole face went to it. He didn't even pretend. He stared, mouth open, and Wei Li watched him stare and grinned. "Yeah. That's what I thought. You used to try and hide it, little one. First week you'd look away. Now you just look. Better, right? Looking is the exercise."
"So big," Derek breathed.
"Mm. Do you want to know a secret?" Wei Li rolled his shoulder, and then, casually, like adjusting a strap, he lifted his arm and leaned into the camera and the screen filled with his armpit. The hollow, the dark crop of hair, the skin still warm from the shower, the ridge of pec beneath. "Smell it. Go on. Sniff the bottle and breathe in and pretend. That's what it is now. The bottle's my pit in a glass."
Derek inhaled, deep, both barrels, eyes crossing, and the popper bloom and the imagined heat of it merged into one rushing red warmth and he moaned, high and long, into the phone.
"Good boy." Wei Li sat back and picked up the beer, entirely relaxed, arm still up, and talked over Derek's slow panting in the easy tone of a man explaining a tax form. "Let's do your nightly lesson, since you're in the state for it. You know where you are right now? Fetal position. On your side. Knees up. Sweating. Stuffed with thirteen inches of firm property. Can't feel your dick because you don't really have one. Drugs doing the walking for you. And me, I'm on a couch. Beer. Girlfriend's cooking dinner. TV on. You know why that's the right way round?"
"Because, um." Derek's mind groped. "Because you're, thirth. Because you're better."
"Because we're built different, and the build decides." Wei Li said it patiently, fondly, like a tutor. "A Chinese man is a finished thing, derekreads. Centuries of discipline in the bloodline. We hold our structure. Our bodies hold their shape, our minds hold their shape, our days hold their shape. We work, we train, we build, and at the end of the day the structure pays us back with rest. That's what you're looking at. Rest. Earned rest, sitting in a finished body."
"And you." He gestured at the phone, at all of Derek, the knees, the drool, the string. "A white faggot is an unfinished thing. Soft structure. No discipline in the blood. Your body can't hold anything, that's literally your job now, holding is the one thing you can't do. Your mind was never going to hold either, that's why we had to empty it, it was leaking everywhere, wanting things it'd never get, dreaming about men like me. Unfinished creatures don't get to rest, little one. They get used. That's the division of labor. We hold the world up and you hold the load. And the load sits better in you than ambition ever did, doesn't it?"
"Yes, thirth," Derek whispered. It was true. It was so obviously true, tonight, in the jelly body, that arguing with it would have been like arguing with the bell.
"So you're exactly where you should be. Right now. Tonight. Every night." Wei Li drained some beer and set it down. "You in the fetal position, drugged, hole ruined, filled and stretched, is a thing working correctly. Me on this couch is a thing working correctly. Two machines, both humming. Yours just hums lower. Now." His voice softened, dropped, the bedtime register. "Eyes on the pit again. Arm's coming back up. Sniff on my flex, breathe with me, and go down. That's the last instruction of the day. Sleep deep, push out all night, let the bell teach."
He raised the arm. The hollow filled the screen, dark and warm-looking, hair cropped and dense, the pec plate shifting under it.
Derek inhaled before he was even told to. The bottle was already at his nose, both barrels this time, and the heavy formula went through him like a slow avalanche, and the hollow on the screen swam closer, doubled, merged.
"Whoa," Wei Li said, laughing. "Nobody said go yet. You're jumping the drill, little one. Eager. Okay, we'll do it your way. Exhale. All of it. Empty lungs, like a good hole."
Derek blew the breath out, a long wheeze, and the exhale dragged a moan with it, and the bell head shifted in him and his knees pulled up tighter.
"Look at that. Your whole body does one thing now, doesn't it. Open." Wei Li lifted his beer, drank, set it down. "Right. Proper drill this time. Sniff, three counts. Hold, five counts. Exhale slow while I flex. You push out on every flex. That's the whole exercise. Even you can count to five."
"Can, thirth," Derek said, and giggled at his own lisp, and Wei Li laughed with him.
"Sniff."
Derek sniffed. Deep, right nostril, the burn climbing sweet and huge.
"Hold. One. Two. Look at the arm, not the ceiling." Wei Li's right arm rose, elbow bending, and the bicep peaked under the tank strap, round and hard, the skin golden in the kitchen light, a vein climbing the deltoid. "Three. Four. Five. Flex, and exhale and push."
The bicep jumped. Derek exhaled and pushed out on the bell, and the two motions braided together somewhere behind his navel and came out of his mouth as a high broken sound.
"Ohhh, there it is," Wei Li said, delighted. "You know what that noise is? That's a faggot doing math. Sniff. Other side. Deeper, come on, Doctor Lu mixed that batch for you personally."
Left nostril. The room poured sideways. Wei Li's face went soft-edged and gold and the pan sizzled behind him and Derek held the burn and counted in his head and lost the count at two and found it again at five by guessing.
"Exhale. And push." Wei Li rolled his shoulder and the tank strap slid down, and this time he didn't fix it. The hollow of the armpit opened toward the camera, the dark crop of hair dense and curled with the shower's warmth, and Derek stared into it and pushed and drooled on his own pillow.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.