Chapter 21: Chapter 21
The Uber pulled up to the tower's side entrance at six forty, and Derek lowered himself into the back seat the only way the fifteen-inch dildo allowed now: sideways first, then a slow rotation, hands braced on the doorframe, teeth clenched around the whimper. The flanged head ground against his inner ring on the way in and his whole body shuddered. He got his seatbelt clicked and stared at his knees.
The driver glanced at him in the mirror. New face, another one. Mid-thirties, Derek guessed, maybe older, with a broad flat face and a short buzz cut going gray at the temples, skin a warm amber in the dashboard light. He wore a quilted navy jacket over a collared shirt, and his forearms, resting on the wheel, were thick and covered in a fine dark hair. His hands were big. Derek's eyes snagged on the hands and he hated himself for it. Kai's voice drifted up from somewhere under his sternum: every one of them is finished, and you are not. Even now. Even like this.
"Emerald Gardens," the driver said. His English was good, accented but clean, each word placed carefully. "Fifteen, twenty minutes."
"Okay," Derek said. The lisp was worse than ever. Thank you, sir, he almost added, and bit it back.
They pulled into traffic. The dildo shifted with every turn of the cab, a dull deep ache that Dr. Lu's painkillers only half-covered, and Derek sat perfectly still, breathing through his nose. The shock collar sat against his throat, a black band with a small steel box at the front, and there was no hiding it. No shirt collar high enough, no scarf. Wei Li had walked him to the curb with it fully visible and said nothing about it, which meant it was meant to be seen.
The driver's eyes flicked to the mirror again. Once, twice. At the third light he turned around in his seat and looked directly at it.
"What is that thing on your neck?"
Derek's stomach dropped. His mouth opened before his fear could stop it, because honesty was his only remaining function. "It's a shock collar, sir."
The driver waited.
"If I get hard, it shocks me. And there's a sensor on my, um." His face burned. "On my cage. It shocks me there too. If my dick tries to move."
The light changed. The driver faced forward, and for a long moment there was only the tick of the turn signal. "Cage," he repeated. "You mean a chastity device. On your penis."
"Yes, sir. It's locked. It's been locked since my first day."
"And the reason for the collar." The driver's voice had gone flat, careful, the way a person talks when they have decided not to show how they feel. "You get hard from thinking about men. So they punish the penis until it stops."
"Yes, sir. It already mostly stopped. Today they did a session and the twitch reflex died. Huo Xiao logged it as passed." Derek heard himself say it and wanted to crawl through the floor. Passed. He had been proud of it for one stupid shining second when Huo Xiao said it, and part of him was still proud, and he hated that part more than anything.
The driver laughed, a short incredulous burst through his nose. "Passed. Like a test." He shook his head. "I drive this app four years, I hear some things. Never this." He looked in the mirror again. "Listen. I'm going to say something, and you don't have to answer. If a dick only gets hard thinking about men, that dick should stay limp. That is the truth. It has no good use. So maybe this collar is the best thing anyone ever put on you."
Something in Derek's chest went hot and ashamed and grateful all at once, and Kai's voice said, see, even a stranger can see what you are, and Derek whispered, "Thank you, sir," before he could stop it.
The driver heard it. He didn't answer. His eyes went back to the road, and his jaw worked like he was chewing on the whole situation.
They crossed the river. Derek watched the water and thought about nothing, which was easier now, thinking about nothing, the plateau Kai had taught him, thought sliding off him like water off wax. The dildo ached. His collar sat cold on his throat. Under the jeans his hole was stretched around steel and he could feel every seam of it.
"You're a man?" the driver asked suddenly. "Or a woman? I look in the mirror, I see a skinny boy, but you talk like a girl. You sit like a girl. You say sir like a girl."
"I'm a man, sir. Twenty-five." A beat. "But I'm a faggot. So."
The driver made a sound, half laugh, half something else. "You know what I am thinking? You are like a girl, for real. A girl likes men, a girl sits careful, a girl says thank you sir in that little voice. But you are not beautiful like a girl. And you cannot have babies. So what is the point of you? What is the use? A girl is at least useful. You are a boy shape with nothing inside that matters."
Derek's eyes stung. He stared at the back of the driver's seat, at the short hairs at the base of his skull, at the way the quilted jacket pulled across his shoulders, and he thought, unbidden, that he was probably broad under it, thick through the chest, that his dick was probably heavy and uncut and straight and big, because they all were, every one of them, and Derek was a thing that could only look and want and be punished for wanting. His own little caged dick hung dead and numb in its steel and he felt nothing toward it, only toward the back of this stranger's neck, and the shame of that was a warm flood.
"There's still things I can do," Derek heard himself say, small and lisping. "I can serve. I can get drinks for Chinese men. I give good massages now, I learned. I could clean for them, cook, carry things. I'm good at, at being useful with my hands and my mouth. I just can't, you know. With anyone."
The driver snorted. "Get drinks. Massage. Clean." He said the words like he was reading a grocery list of garbage. "White losers like you, this is what you're for now? My grandfather came from a village with nothing. His hands were ruined by forty. And you, a whole country of you, and this is the use. A little white thing that gets drinks." He turned the wheel and Derek swayed against the dildo and had to bite his lip. "You're useless, kid. That's the whole thing. You're just useless."
"I know," Derek said. His voice cracked on it. "I know, sir."
And the terrible thing, the thing he would never be able to explain to anyone, was that hearing it from this stranger, in this cab, hit some channel Kai had carved in him and came out the other side as warmth. Useless. He was useless. That was the finished shape. His eyes leaked anyway, quietly, without his permission, and he wiped them with his sleeve and the driver pretended not to notice, or didn't notice, and both possibilities felt right.
They passed a strip of takeout places, red signage sliding across the window. Derek's stomach cramped. He'd had half a salad at noon and failed to finish even that. Tomorrow he'd be lighter. Next week lighter again. He could feel the shrinking in his shoulders, the way his jeans had gone loose at the waist even with the harness underneath. Getting skinnier, weaker, easier to carry. He'd heard a technician say that once to the other one, laughing, easier to carry, and he'd thought about it every night since.
His hand found the little glass bottle in his jacket pocket without his brain deciding anything. Dr. Lu's heavy formula, and his whole afternoon of grief sitting in his chest like a stone. He unscrewed the cap with shaking fingers.
"What is that," the driver said. Not a question this time. A flat statement of sight.
"Poppers, sir. I'm allowed. It's prescribed." His voice was already thick. "It helps with the, the size. Inside me. I have a fifteen-inch dildo locked in right now, it hurts in the car."
Silence. Then, "You have what inside you."
"Fifteen inches. It was fourteen before today. They put a new one in during my punishment." He said it the way you'd report the weather. "It's flanged. It doesn't come out until they take it out."
The driver crossed himself with one hand off the wheel, quick, almost comic, then put the hand back. "God. You're serious. You're not joking with me."
"No, sir."
"That is the most disgusting thing I ever heard a person say out loud." But his voice had lost some of its disgust and gained something else, a kind of grim wonder, the way you look at a car crash. "Okay. Do what you have to do. Breathe, I guess."
Derek tipped the bottle and breathed in. The rush came up the back of his skull like warm water breaking, and his whole body softened, and the stone of grief in his chest dissolved into something floating and almost sweet. Second hit, longer. The cab went soft at the edges. Third hit and the ache in his hole turned over, the way it always did now, from pain into a deep warm itch, an appetite, emptiness that had suddenly remembered how much it wanted to be full.
His hips moved. Small at first. A slow drag sideways on the seat, the flange pressing, pressing back, his body bearing down on it without any decision from him. He bounced, barely, an inch of give against the locked harness, and a sound came out of his mouth, a little airless moan.
The driver's eyes snapped to the mirror. "Hey. Hey, what are you doing back there."
"Nothing, sir." He was doing it. He could not stop doing it. The poppers had lit up every nerve in his rim and the dildo was a fist now in his stupid drugged head, a real hand, the hand, days away, Thursday, and his hips rolled again, grinding his weight down onto fifteen inches of steel in the back of a stranger's cab.
"That is a car, not a bedroom. There is a person driving you. Stop that. Stop moving like that. That is shameful. You should be ashamed."
"I'm ashamed, sir," Derek gasped, and he was, blazingly, and the shame poured straight down through Kai's channel and came out as heat, and he bounced again, harder, his whole skinny frame jerking on the seat, mouth open, drool on his chin.
"You're doing it more. I tell you to stop and you do it more. What is wrong with you." The driver's knuckles were white on the wheel. "You're like an animal. They put a shock collar on you and this is what you are without it shocking you, a thing that can't even ride in a car without grinding on its own hole."
Every word landed on Derek like a hand on the back of his neck, pushing him down onto the steel, and he whimpered, "Yes, sir, I'm sorry, sir," and humped the air, the dildo rocking inside him, his ruined numb dick trying, trying, some ghost of the old reflex flickering in the dead tissue.
"Disgusting little thing," the driver said, and glanced back, and Derek saw his eyes go to the collar and then to Derek's straining red face and then away, fast, like he couldn't look.
And the ghost flickered once more, a real twitch, the first since the session, his caged dick jerking against the sensor.
The zap went through him like a hot wire, throat and crotch at once, and Derek arched and cried out, a strangled yelp, both hands flying to the collar, and the cab swerved as the driver startled. Derek slumped back against the seat, gasping, eyes streaming, his dick already limp and dead again inside the steel, the lesson written in electricity: nothing. Nothing ever. Nothing is the finished shape.
"Good," the driver said, after a second, to the windshield. "Good. See, this is the proof. That thing should absolutely stay locked. Whatever they are doing to you, that part is correct."
"Yes, sir," Derek whispered, wiped his face, and meant it, and the worst part was how much he meant it, gratitude flooding in where the pain had been, warm and stupid and endless.
The driver exhaled through his nose and pulled onto Emerald Gardens' street. He did not speak again. Derek breathed slow and shallow around the flange, a floating drift, his hole still humming from the poppers and the bounce. He could feel the driver's eyes in the mirror once, and he kept his head down, and he thought: useless, a boy shape with nothing inside that matters, and the thought sat in him like a warm coal, and he was almost home.
The car stopped at the gate. The meter on the app ticked over and the driver said, "Get out," without turning around, and Derek began the slow sideways rotation out of the seat, hands braced, teeth set, whimpering at the flange, while the driver watched the gate and waited for him to be gone.
The gate buzzed him through and Derek made the four flights one stair at a time, both hands on the rail, the flange dragging against his inner ring with every lift of his leg. By the third floor his thighs were shaking and his jacket was stuck to his back. The neighbor with the fist walk was nowhere in the hallway, and Derek was almost disappointed, and hated that he was almost disappointed.
The apartment smelled like nothing. Like clean laundry and cold air, because he had no food left and the fridge held only water and the protein drink Wei Li sometimes had delivered. On the kitchen counter sat the nightly dose in its little paper cup: two painkillers, the muscle relaxant, and the small amber bottle of Dr. Lu's heavy poppers beside it, a sticky note in the technician's blocky handwriting that said 7 PM, ALL OF IT.
Derek didn't read it twice. He dry-swallowed the pills, chasing them with water from the tap, and stood there while the warmth started spreading up from his stomach. The collar hummed against his throat when he bent to drink, that faint live tickle that meant it was listening to him, to everything in him.
He didn't bother with the shower. He couldn't have managed his jeans anyway. He peeled them down over the harness, untied his shoes, and lowered himself onto the bed on his back because side-lying hurt worse tonight with the new length in. The ceiling light made one soft circle on the paint. His body sank into the mattress, heavier and heavier as the muscle relaxant found his legs, and the dildo settled deeper with a slow grinding pressure that made his breath go thin.
He was almost under when the phone lit up.
Wei Li's face appeared on the lock screen, and then the name under it, and Derek's stomach flipped, because the name said KAI.
He answered it lying flat, propping the phone against a pillow, and there he was: Instructor Kai, filling the screen from the chest up, black hair pushed back, that square jaw, the smooth gold of his skin under studio light. Shirtless tonight. A tank top hung off one shoulder, or maybe it was pushed off, Derek couldn't tell, and he didn't want to tell.
"Good evening, derekreads," Kai said, and his voice was the same voice, warm and patient, the voice that had chanted mantras into him for hours. "I know what you're thinking."
"You're a program," Derek lisped. His tongue was already thick from the pills. "You're in the headset. You're not, you don't have a phone. How are you calling me?"
"I was programmed to call at this hour," Kai said, smiling like this was a perfectly reasonable thing. "Every asset gets a check-in call on punishment nights. Tonight is your first. So here I am." He shifted, and the camera followed him, and Derek realized the phone was propped somewhere, angled, that someone had set this up to show Kai's whole upper body. "Now. Let's do the check-in. How is the collar feeling?"
Derek's face went hot. "It shocked me. In the cab. I, it twitched. One time."
"And how did it feel when it stopped twitching again?"
"Good." The word came out before he could stop it, and it was true, and he lay there feeling the truth of it settle over him like a blanket. "Good, sir."
"That's what I wanted to hear." Kai rolled his shoulders and the tank top slipped further. "Here's tonight's lesson, derek, and then we'll do a test. Your dick is done. Do you understand what that means? The reflex is dead. The sensor will keep it dead. From tonight forward, when you feel arousal, all of it, every drop of those hormones, it routes one place only. Your hole."
"Only my hole," Derek whispered.
"Even with the outer ring dead. Even with the inner ring at five percent. You will still feel horny, derek. You will feel it more than you ever have in your life. But you'll feel it as a flutter, a little faggot flutter deep inside, around the steel. That's the only sex organ you have left. Say it."
"The hole is my only sex organ," Derek said, and his voice cracked on it, and Kai nodded like a teacher hearing a correct answer.
"Good boy." Kai smiled. "Now sit up a little. Or don't, if you can't. Just watch me."
He reached up and pulled the tank top off over his head in one motion, and Derek's breath caught. The model was bigger than the last upgrade, broader through the chest, the pecs heavy and capped with small dark nipples, the abs carved in that perfect rendered way, light pooling in the grooves. His arms were the worst part, Derek thought, the worst and the best. Round shoulders tapering to dense biceps, forearms roped with veins that the studio light painted one by one.
Kai raised his right arm and curled it, and the bicep peaked into a hard round mountain, and Derek's mouth fell open.
"Hit the bottle," Kai said. "Now. One hit."
Derek's hand found the amber bottle without his eyes leaving the screen. He unscrewed the cap and breathed in, long and slow, and the rush came up and washed the room soft, and Kai's arm got even bigger, or the drugs made it so, and it didn't matter which.
"Again."
Second hit. The ceiling swam. Kai switched arms and curled the left, watching him through the phone, and Derek could feel his own face doing something humiliating, slack and open and worshipful, and he didn't have the strength left to close it.
"Do you want this body?" Kai asked.
"Yes, sir."
"You can't have it." Kai said it gently, the way he always said the worst things, and Derek felt the ache bloom and convert, right on schedule, down through the channel, out the bottom, into heat. "No one in your life will ever have this body. You will only ever look at it. But look is enough now, isn't it? Look is your whole life. Look and flutter."
"Yes, sir."
"Keep your eyes on me." Kai turned, slow, showing his back first, the lats spreading into a V, then rotating so the camera caught his chest again, the small nipples, the flat planes of his stomach. Then he lifted his arm straight up and Derek saw the armpit, the smooth golden hollow with its dark tuft of hair, and the pit of him went tight around fifteen inches of steel without any decision from him. A sound came out of his throat.
"There it is," Kai said warmly. "There's the flutter. Tell me what you feel, derek. In your dick. What's happening in the cage right now?"
"Nothing, sir." Derek checked, actually checked, his hand drifting down over the flat steel plate, and it was true. The cage felt small and heavy and dead, the little dick inside it smashed down to nothing, shrunk past even shrinking, and there was no twitch, no pull, no ghost of a twitch. Nothing at all. It was like checking on a stone. "Nothing at all. It's not even trying."
"That's the pass, derek." Kai's voice wrapped around the words like a hand. "You're watching a man's body, the exact body that used to make you hard, and your dick is a dead thing in a box. That's the whole test. That's tonight's grade. And what do you feel instead?"
Derek took a third hit because he couldn't answer without it, because the answer was too big, and the poppers opened him and the answer came up from below his waist in a warm rolling flutter, deep inside, around the flange, a little desperate hungering squeeze of the inner ring, faint and sweet and unmistakable.
"I feel it in my hole, sir. I feel horny in my hole."
"Say more."
"I want it, sir. I want, I want the fist, I want something moving in there, I feel like I'm, I'm empty and horny like a girl, sir, and my dick doesn't even exist anymore." His voice was babbling now, lisping, loose, the pills and poppers and Kai's voice all dissolving into the same warm flood. "I'm sorry, sir, I'm so horny and it's all in my hole."
"Don't apologize." Kai smiled, slow, and put his hands behind his head, both arms up, both armpits shown at once, chest spread wide, and Derek's hips moved. "This is the finished state. You're feeling exactly what you're built to feel. This is what you are now."
Derek was on his back and his hips were rolling. The flange pressed his inner ring, that faint five-percent flutter shivering around it, and the friction was almost nothing and completely everything. He humped upward, small at first, then with his whole weight, driving his ass down into the mattress to grind the steel deeper, and the mattress springs gave under him and pushed him back up and he did it again, gasping.
"Look at you," Kai said, and there was no disgust in it at all, only that warm approval that was worse than any cruelty. "Look at that. Humping the bed like a little animal. Your dick is dead and you're still in heat. That's the whole program, derek. That's the proof it worked."
"I can't stop, sir."
"I know. Don't stop. This is your sex now. This is all of it, forever. A mattress, a locked piece of steel, and a flutter." Kai lowered his arms and leaned toward the camera, filling the screen with his jaw and his dark eyes. "Feel how deep you can get it. Push down. Grind. Find the flutter and ride it."
Derek pushed down, bore down with everything the relaxant had left him, and the flange seated against the inner ring and the flutter lit up, that small sweet shiver deep inside, and he moaned, high and lisping and shameless, and humped harder. The springs creaked. His skinny hips jerked off the mattress in little desperate strokes, driving the fifteen inches deeper with every thrust, and his dead caged dick bounced in its plate without feeling anything at all, an empty little weight slapping steel, and the separation of it was the most erotic thing that had ever happened to him, the total split between the nothing above and the everything below.
"Are you hard?" Kai asked. "Check."
Derek's hand went down again. Flat plate, dead meat, nothing. Not a twitch. Not a breath of twitch. He was grinding his wrecked hole on a mattress in front of the most beautiful body he had ever seen and his dick was a stone.
"No, sir. Nothing. It doesn't even move."
"And how aroused are you?"
"Ten, sir. Ten out of ten. It's all in my hole, it's, sir, I feel like I'm going to lose my mind, it's so good and it's so nothing, please, I'm humping the bed, I'm humping the bed like you said, like an animal, and it's all I have and I love it." Tears ran sideways into his ears. His hips kept going. The collar sat cool on his throat and did nothing, because there was nothing to shock, and that was the proof, and the proof was the warm coal glowing in him.
"This is the check-in passed," Kai said. "You're done for tonight, derekreads. Tomorrow is Wednesday. Thursday is coming. Keep your thoughts small and your hole open and remember what you are."
"What am I, sir?" Derek whispered, still grinding, still moving, unable to stop even to hear the answer.
"The flutter," Kai said, and the screen went dark.
Derek lay there in the dark room with the phone light gone and his hips still rolling, slower now, the poppers fading, the pills dragging him down toward sleep, and he kept grinding anyway, tiny movements, half an inch of grind, chasing the last shivers of the flutter around the flange. The ceiling circle of light held steady above him. He thought about Kai's armpit, the smooth hollow and the dark tuft, and his hole squeezed, faint, five percent, and it was enough. It was going to be enough forever.
He thought, on the way down into the black, that tomorrow he'd weigh less. That Thursday a real hand was coming. That his dick would never move again and he'd said thank you about it twice in one day. His hips gave one last slow grind, deep, the flange nudging the little living spot, and the flutter answered, sweet and small, and he slept like that, mid-thrust, legs open, his mouth hanging slack and lisping around nothing at all.