Chapter 20: Chapter 20
The tower rose out of the dusk, glass and gold, and Derek stood across the street with a sock packed in his mouth and drool shining on his chin. His legs shook under him. The fourteen-inch dildo shifted with every step, and the holeless jeans scraped his hips, and strangers on the sidewalk looked at him and looked away. He bounced when he walked. He couldn't help it anymore. Kai's voice lived somewhere behind his eyes now, warm and patient: embarrassment converts, derek. Let it convert.
He crossed at the light. The side entrance was two hundred feet away. He counted the feet like a man counting steps out of deep water.
Wei Li was standing next to the service door with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
Derek saw him before Wei Li saw Derek, and the sight went through him like a hook. Wei Li was tall and lean through the shoulders, black hair swept back off a clean widow's peak, gold skin, forearms corded and dusted faint with dark hair at the wrist. He wore charcoal trousers and no tie, top button open, and Derek's traitor brain did what it always did: it stripped him, imagined the heavy chest under the shirt, the thick uncut cock, the balls hanging low and heavy between powerful thighs. Big. The word landed in Derek's head and his caged little dicklet gave one tiny pulse in its plastic house before the shame could even arrive.
"Stop right there." Wei Li's voice carried across the loading lot. "Do not come one step closer until you explain what is in your mouth."
Derek stopped. His lips were stretched around the grey sock, Jake's sock, fifty dollars, and a thread of drool swung from his chin and dripped onto the pavement. He tried to speak. It came out as a wet hum.
Wei Li crossed the lot in four strides. He looked at Derek the way he looked at paperwork. Then he hooked two fingers into Derek's mouth, past the sock, dragging it out slow, and the sock came free with a wet pop and a long string of spit that hung off Derek's lip and off the fabric both.
"Derek." Wei Li held the sock up between them like evidence. "Whose is this."
"Jake's, sir." His voice came out in its permanent high lisp, ruined soft from hours of disuse and popper burn. "The substitute driver. I told you about him on the report channel, sir. He. He filled in today."
"He is not your driver today." Wei Li turned the sock over. "It is nine at night. Your session ended at four. Your check-in ping never fired." He pulled his phone out with his free hand, thumb moving, and Derek stood bouncing lightly on the spot, hands hanging, watching Wei Li's forearm flex and thinking, horribly, happily, nothing at all.
"Look at me." Wei Li put the phone away. "Tell me the whole day. In order. Do not skip anything to make yourself look better."
So Derek told him. The detour. Jake's apartment. The beers fetched, the chips, the bare feet, the massage with both hands, the fifty dollars for the sniff, the fifty for the sock itself, the order to pack it and keep it all the way home. He told it honestly, because honesty was his only remaining function, and each honest word made his face hotter and made something warm roll through his gut that was not shame anymore, not entirely, and Kai's voice purred somewhere under his skull: good. honesty converts.
"Two hundred dollars of detour," Wei Li said, typing. "Beer, chips, two fifties. Four plus hours." He looked up. "You missed your evening dosing window. You missed the file upload. And you walked through the city with a man's sock in your mouth like some kind of stray."
"Yes, sir."
"Where is your bag."
"I. I think I left it at Jake's, sir. He said I could get it Thursday."
Wei Li exhaled through his nose, the closest thing to a laugh Derek had ever gotten from him. "Thursday. You have a fist scheduled Thursday." He pushed the door open. "Inside. You are late, derekreads, and the desk does not close for three hours."
The service corridor was white and cold. Wei Li walked ahead and Derek followed, sock crumpled in his own fist because Wei Li hadn't told him he could drop it, and his mind ran its usual filthy background loop as he watched the man's shoulders move. Under that shirt. Under those trousers. Chinese men are finished, Kai had said, and white faggots are unfinished, and Derek had stopped arguing with it weeks ago. His dicklet tried to twitch again at the thought of Wei Li's cock, heavy and soft and huge in grey boxer briefs, and something in him braced for shame that never fully came.
The locker room was empty at this hour except for the two technicians.
Derek had watched them for months and could not stop watching them. The taller one, the one everyone called Technician One, was stripping off his green coveralls top by the lockers, and underneath he was built like a swimmer gone heavy, broad flat pecs under gold skin, small dark nipples, a soft trail of hair descending into grey sweatpants that left nothing to imagination. The shorter one sat on the bench lacing his shoes, forearms like cable, jaw square, hair cropped tight to the skull. Neither of them had ever spoken a full English sentence to Derek. Neither of them had ever looked at him with anything but the mild boredom you give a machine that works. Derek imagined them both under the sweatpants, imagined the cocks swinging heavy between their legs, imagined those hands, those enormous hands, and hated himself and got hard in the cage at the same time, the familiar double beat.
"He is here," Technician One said in Mandarin, not looking up.
"He is late," Wei Li said in the same language, and both technicians' heads came around, and something in the room changed temperature.
"In here," Wei Li said. "Shoes off. Jeans down to the knees. Stand at the scale."
Derek stripped from the waist down, lace thong on full display, dildo harnessed and locked, and stepped onto the scale while Wei Li watched. Fifty-seven point one kilos. Down again. Derek did the math without wanting to: a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The salad had stopped happening days ago and his body was eating itself, and some drugged, placid part of him thought, good, lighter is better, lighter is easier to hold open. Then the counterthought, Kai's voice: thinking is a closing muscle, derek. Let it close.
"Sit on the bench. Hands on your thighs." Wei Li made his call from the wall phone, short, unhurried, in Mandarin. Derek caught his own name in it and the word Huo Xiao, and his stomach dropped, and his hole, trained traitor that it was, tightened greedily around fourteen inches of flanged steel.
Huo Xiao arrived twenty minutes later.
He came through the door already reading a tablet, tall and neat in a black quarter-zip over a white shirt, hair razor-parted, face young and unreadable. Twenty-five and already the one who wrote the reports that decided when fists happened. Derek bounced to his feet without being told, hands at his sides, chin down, and Huo Xiao let him stand like that for a full ten seconds before speaking.
"Sit back down."
Derek sat.
"Read me today's log," Huo Xiao said to Wei Li, and Wei Li read it. The detour. The hundred dollars. The sock. The missed dosing. The missed upload. The two hundred dollars of unlogged service rendered to an unvetted night-shift worker, in a private apartment, unsupervised, with Derek's full honest disclosure of the program to a stranger.
Huo Xiao listened with his eyes on the tablet the whole time. When Wei Li finished, the room was quiet except for the vent hum.
"You told him everything," Huo Xiao said. It wasn't a question, but Derek answered it.
"Yes, sir. He asked and I. I can't not answer now, sir. It comes out."
"I know it comes out." Huo Xiao set the tablet down. "That was not the question. The question is what he does with it. A straight man with money problems knows a white faggot who pays cash for degradation and belongs to a firm with a fifty-thousand-dollar salary." He looked at Wei Li. "He could sell this."
"He will not," Derek said, too fast, and then went red. "Sir. He. He liked it. He called it easy money. He said Thursday he wants."
"He said he wants what."
Derek's throat worked. "He wants to know if he can watch Thursday, sir."
The two technicians, folding towels across the room, both turned their heads.
Huo Xiao and Wei Li looked at each other, and something passed between them in Mandarin, three words, and Huo Xiao's mouth twitched at one corner.
"So the deviation has a dividend." Huo Xiao picked the tablet back up. "A night-shift Chinese-American with hands like that, already using the product for free, already wanting a seat at Thursday." He typed something. "Send me his file. The substitute driver pool is vetted on-paper; pull his references." He looked down at Derek. "Whether he becomes a client is above your head, derekreads. Do not think about it. You have proven you are bad at thinking."
"Yes, sir."
"Now." Huo Xiao crossed the room and stood over Derek, close, so close Derek could see the fine grain of his skin and the neat black stubble on his jaw, and Derek's eyes dropped to Huo Xiao's crotch without permission, imagined the slim heavy cock under the black fabric, and hated himself, and converted it. "You were late by five hours and eleven minutes. You rendered two hundred dollars of service to a man outside the program. You walked the city drooling with a sock in your face." A pause. "You also obeyed a Chinese man all day without one refusal."
"Yes, sir."
"That last part is the only reason we are having this conversation instead of a different one." Huo Xiao turned to the technicians and said something short, and the taller one left the room. "Obedience to any Chinese man outranks the schedule. Disobedience to the schedule is still disobedience. So you get both. Approval and punishment. Tonight."
Technician One came back carrying a black hard case. He set it on the bench and opened it, and inside, coiled on foam, lay a collar, matte black, rubber-sheathed, thick as a watch strap, with a small steel box at its front, and beside it, second item, a sensor no bigger than a stamp on a lead wire.
"Stand," Huo Xiao said.
The taller technician fitted the collar around Derek's throat and ratcheted it snug with a click Derek felt in his molars. The sensor was taped with medical adhesive directly onto the plastic of the chastity cage, dead center over the little locked-up sliver of him inside, and the wire ran up his stomach and clipped to the collar's steel box.
"Contract schedule nine," Huo Xiao said. "Annex seven. You signed it. Do you remember what you signed?"
"No, sir." Honest. His only function.
"You signed sensation management." Huo Xiao held up his own phone. On the screen was a green dot and a flat line. "The sensor reads any erectile response. Any. The collar delivers correction." He tapped the screen and a setting page opened. "You are being conditioned toward a goal tonight, derekreads. Your dicklet has been decorative for months, but it still twitches. It twitches when you see men. It twitched in this room in the last ten minutes, twice, because you were staring at my technicians and imagining their bodies. Do not lie."
"No, sir," Derek whispered. "It did."
"Good. Honest. That is why we keep you." Huo Xiao lowered the phone. "The goal is this. By the end of tonight, your dicklet will learn that twitching costs more than twitching earns. In time, it will never twitch again. Not for a man. Not for a reel. Not ever. Your arousal will have one remaining exit." He looked down at Derek's crotch, at the harness, at fourteen inches of locked steel with its flange seated deep. "That one. The fist exits through the hole, not the Dick. A hole is a useful place to feel. A dicklet is not."
The shorter technician said something in Mandarin, quiet, and both of them smirked, and Derek felt the smirk land on his skin like a hand.
"Bench," Huo Xiao said. "On your back. Legs up. Technician One holds them."
They arranged him fast and practiced. Derek lay on the padded bench, thong stretched aside, legs hoisted into the taller man's grip at the ankles so his knees were pinned back toward his chest, which pressed the flanged head of the dildo hard against his second ring and made him gasp. From this angle Technician One was all chest and forearm above him, gold skin shining under the fluorescent strip, and Derek's caged dicklet gave a throb at the sheer fact of the man's body, and the collar barked.
The shock hit like a nail through his neck. His whole body jumped on the bench, heels kicking in the technician's grip, and he yelped, high and lisping, and the yelp dissolved halfway into something that was horribly close to a moan.
"Log it," Huo Xiao said. "One."
The shorter technician unlocked the harness tool from the wall kit, released the flange, and drew the fourteen-inch column out of Derek in one long steady pull, and Derek's empty hole fluttered wide, gaping at nothing, cold air on his inner walls. Then the tech selected the next size, a fifteen-inch with a broader crown, and coated it in the numbing-and-opening gel, cold and then burning-warm.
"Poppers," Huo Xiao said, and uncapped the heavy-formula bottle himself, and held it under Derek's nose. "This is the test, derekreads. Technician works the new one in. You breathe. Your body is going to feel very good. Some of that feeling will reach the dicklet. When it does, the collar corrects. Your job is to teach it. Understand?"
"Yes, sir. I. I think so, sir."
"Breathe in."
Derek inhaled. The heavy formula went off behind his eyes like a warm grenade, everything loosening, walls softening, the room going dream-gold at the edges, and into that softness the fifteen-inch crown pressed against his ruined-open outer ring and slid through without resistance and found the inner ring and kept going.
The taller technician's hands were iron on his ankles. The shorter one fed the column in inch by inch, wrist turning, and Derek's mouth fell open and the sound that came out of him was shameless, a high cracked ohhh, and the pleasure rolled down through his guts like poured honey, and deep in the plastic cage his little dick, that poor starved stub of him, twitched.
The collar hit him and he screamed. His spine bowed off the bench. The poppers made the shock feel miles long, electric gold spreading down his neck and shoulders, and underneath the pain the pleasure did not stop, it kept coming, the crown pushing past the second ring and seating, and his dick twitched again, reflexive, starving, and the collar hit him again.
"Two," Wei Li said, watching the phone's log. "Three."
Derek was crying inside ninety seconds. Tears ran sideways into his ears. His body couldn't decide what was happening to it, the huge slow crown working in and out over his prostate like a fist in training, the poppers, the shocks detonating through his neck every time the smallest pleasure flickered down into his cage. And that was the design, he understood through the tears, that was the whole design: the dick and the hole had been one circuit his whole life and tonight they were being cut apart with electricity. Every twitch cost him. Every twitch got logged. His body was learning arithmetic at a level below thought.
"Breathe," Huo Xiao said, and gave him another hit, and the world roared soft again, and the technician bottomed out the fifteen inches and ground the crown against the deep spot, and Derek's wrecked hole clamped and rolled, and he felt it, he felt the twitch start down in his cage like a doomed little fish, and he sobbed, "no, no, please," and the collar nailed him anyway.
"Four."
"It won't. I'll. Sir, it does it by itself."
"Of course it does it by itself." Huo Xiao's voice was warm, almost kind, the voice of a man watching a plant grow. "That is why it takes all night. Breathe."
They worked him for over an hour. The shorter technician varied it, slow grinding strokes, then fast shallow ones over the ring, gel reapplied twice, poppers every few minutes, Wei Li logging numbers off the phone in a flat even voice, seven, eight, nine. Derek's dick twitched eleven times before the twitches started coming with a half-second delay, then a full second, then ragged and weak, the reflex dying under correction like a limb going to sleep. His cries thinned to whimpers. Drool ran off the bench edge. His hole had gone completely stupid around the column, opening and rolling without him, and that was where everything good lived now, all of it, and his cage sat dark and cold and punished below like a dead thing on a wire.
"It's stopping," Wei Li said at some point, sounding almost surprised. "The response curve. Look."
Huo Xiao looked. Then he unbuttoned his cuff and rolled his sleeve, once, neat, and Derek, ruined and streaming tears, watched the flex of the man's forearm and waited, instinctively, for the twitch that had come all his life at the sight of a strong man's body.
Nothing came.
His dicklet lay dead in its plastic house. The line on the phone stayed flat. The collar stayed silent. And what flooded Derek then was not grief, it was relief, huge and warm and terrible, rolling through his stretched-out guts alongside the slow grind of fifteen inches, and Kai's voice said, soft as a lullaby: this is the finished shape, derek. this is where you live now.
"Log it as passed, first session," Huo Xiao said. He rolled his sleeve back down. "Leave the fifteen in and the gear on him. The collar stays for a week. Feed him his night dose." He picked up his tablet and looked down at Derek one last time, at the sobbing, gaping, flattened-flat-line mess of him, and something almost like approval moved behind his eyes.
"If you see that driver again," he said, "and he wants a seat Thursday, give him my card. The firm handles all negotiations. If he demands that you serve him again, of course you do— you must submit to all Chinese men. But if that causes you to be late or not meet our expectations, of course you will be punished. If that leaves you no way out of punishment, that’s the cross you’ll have to bear”
"Yes, sir," Derek whispered, and meant it with everything left of him.