Chapter 1: The Lab, After Hours
The fluorescent bulb above the lab table flickered like it was having a seizure, and Hervi watched it with the kind of hatred she usually reserved for pop quizzes and group projects.
She shouldn't be here.
She should be home, buried under a mountain of AP Bio flashcards, not standing in an empty school lab at dusk with her blouse and skirt folded on a bench and her arms crossed over her chest like she was auditioning for a role she didn't even want.
The assignment was ridiculous. Absurd. A sex ed project that some sadist on the school board had decided would be "educational" and "promote responsibility." She'd read the rubric three times, hoping she'd misunderstood. She hadn't.
Natural Insemination Observation and Analysis.
Yeah. Someone was going to get fired for that one. Eventually. After everyone stopped pretending it wasn't happening.
Ced sat on a stool across from her, looking like someone who'd just been told he had to perform surgery with a butter knife. His blond hair was messier than usual, sticking up in places like he'd been running his hands through it. He probably had been.
He was trying very hard not to look at her.
Hervi didn't blame him. She was standing in a bra and panties. Black bra. Plain panties. Nothing special. She'd told herself a thousand times on the walk over that this was practical. A strategy. Nothing more.
The lab smelled like bleach and something sour underneath—old experiments, ancient chemicals, the ghost of every frog they'd ever dissected. The overhead light buzzed. Somewhere down the hall, the HVAC system hummed like a dying animal.
"You're staring," Hervi said.
Ced's head snapped up. "I'm not."
"You are."
"I'm looking at the wall behind you."
"The wall behind me is a tiled surface with a crack near the corner. Nothing interesting."
Ced's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "You're the one who showed up in—" He gestured vaguely at her entire body.
Hervi felt heat crawl up her neck. She ignored it. "Strategic decision. Less laundry."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Neither does this assignment." She uncrossed her arms and walked toward the table. Her bare feet made soft sounds against the cold tile. The floor sent a chill up through her soles, up her spine, settling somewhere in the base of her skull. She hated this floor. She hated this room. She hated the little plastic cup sitting on the table between them with its clinical label and its sterile promise.
Seminal Fluid Collection (Human Male).
Someone had actually typed that. Printed it. Slapped it on a specimen cup like it was no big deal.
Ced's hands were trembling. Just slightly. She noticed because she noticed everything—that was the problem. The way his fingers traced the edge of the lab report. The way his throat moved when he swallowed. The way he kept his eyes fixed on the paper like it might save him.
"You don't have to do this," Hervi said.
"I know."
"I mean it. I can tell Ferguson I couldn't make it. Family emergency. Migraine. Sudden onset of plague."
Ced laughed. It was a small sound, nervous and breathy, but real. It caught her off guard. "You'd lie to a teacher?"
She sat down on the stool beside him. Not across from him. Beside him. The metal was cold against her thighs. "I'd lie to the pope if it got me out of something."
"That's sacrilege."
"So's this assignment."
They sat there for a moment, both of them staring at the cup. The fluorescent light flickered again. The shadows on the counter shifted like they were alive.
"Look," Ced said finally. "I know this is weird. I know you didn't exactly sign up for this. I know you think I'm—"
"I don't think anything."
"You think I'm a disaster."
Hervi snorted. "I think you're in the same boat I am. Stupid assignment. Stupid school. Stupid administration that thinks two eighteen-year-olds in a lab with a specimen cup is somehow a good idea."
Ced was quiet. Then: "So why'd you come?"
The question hung there. She could have lied. She should have lied. It would have been easy—mumbled something about grades, about her GPA, about needing the A. All true. All complete bullshit in the way that mattered.
Instead, she looked at him. Really looked. The nervous hands. The messy hair. The way he was trying so hard to be respectful even when she was sitting next to him with her thighs exposed and her bra strap slipping down her shoulder.
She fixed the strap. "Because," she said slowly, "I wanted to know."
"Know what?"
"If it's as disgusting as I think it is."
Ced's eyebrows shot up. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"No. It's the truth." Hervi reached for the specimen cup, turning it over in her fingers. The plastic was smooth. Cold. Impersonal. "I've spent three years of health class learning about this stuff in theory. Diagrams. Videos with weird music. I've read every textbook. I've memorized every term. And I still don't—" She stopped.
"You still don't what?"
She put the cup down. "I don't know what it feels like. Not the physical part. The... the actual part. Where it's real."
Ced stared at her. His pupils were dilated—probably the dim lighting, probably adrenaline. His breathing had changed, shifted into something slower and more deliberate.
Hervi turned on her stool so she was facing him fully. The lab report crinkled under her thigh. "Show me."
"What?"
"Your hand. Show me how you do it. How you normally—"
"Hervi—"
"I'm not going to write about this for the assignment if that's what you're worried about. This is... research." She pulled the strap of her bra back up, though it had stayed put this time. "Curiosity. Whatever. I want to understand."
Ced swallowed. She watched his Adam's apple bob. He looked at the door, then at the windows and the half-drawn blinds. Slivers of fading orange sunlight cut across the floor. It seemed like it had been dusk for hours.
"You're serious," he said.
"I'm always serious."
"That's not true. You laugh at people."
"Only when they deserve it."
He laughed again. Short, sharp, disbelieving. Then he unzipped his jeans, and Hervi stopped breathing.
Not because she was scandalized. Not because she was horrified. Because she was watching, and her body had apparently decided that breathing was optional.
Ced pulled himself free, and she got her first real look at him. He was hard already. She wasn't sure when that had happened—sometime between the cup and the question and the way she'd looked at him like he was a puzzle she was halfway to solving.
He wrapped his hand around his shaft, loose-fingered, and started to move. Slow strokes. Deliberate. The kind of rhythm that had a purpose.
Hervi's mouth went dry.
"This is so weird," she whispered.
"You think?"
"Stop talking."
He stopped talking. She watched his hand move. Watched the way the skin stretched and relaxed with each pass. Watched the way his breathing changed. Watched the small bead of fluid at the tip catch the fluorescent light.
Revulsion was the first thing she felt. It rose in her throat like bile, visceral and automatic. That was the word she'd use in her notes: visceral. Because watching a boy touch himself in a dusty lab was objectively disgusting. There were no two ways about that.
But beneath the revulsion was something else. Something she didn't have a word for yet. Fascination, maybe. The same feeling she got when she opened a body in biology lab—that weird cocktail of horror and wonder, the realization that all this messy, ugly stuff was what people were made of.
"You're doing it wrong," she said.
Ced's hand stopped. "What?"
Hervi reached out before she could think better of it. Her fingers brushed his, and he flinched. They both flinched. But neither one pulled away.
"Here," she said. "Let me—"
She took him in her hand.
The first thing she noticed was the heat. Skin should not be that warm. It was like touching a stove that was only just cooling down, a low burn that spread through her palm and up her wrist.
The second thing she noticed was the texture. Smoother than she'd expected. Soft. Velvety, almost, but with a firm core underneath. The kind of contrast that made her brain short-circuit.
"How do I—" She stopped. Started again. "How do I stroke it? Properly."
Her fingers were wrapped around his shaft—her, a virgin, a high school senior, holding a boy's erection in an empty lab, asking for instructions like she was asking about a calculus problem. The absurdity of it clawed at her. And she didn't care.
Ced was staring at her like she'd just sprouted wings.
"You—" He cleared his throat. "You hold it like that. At the base. Not too tight."
She adjusted her grip. He inhaled, sharp and quick.
"Not too loose either," he said. "There's a... a pressure. You'll feel it."
Hervi began to move her hand. Up. Down. Slow. The motion felt foreign, awkward, like learning to write left-handed. But she watched Ced's face, noted the way his mouth went slack, the way his eyes fluttered shut, and she adjusted. Tightened. Slowed.
"Like this?" she asked.
"Y-yeah. Like that."
The word disgusting kept floating through her mind. It was disgusting. The smell of latex and sweat. The flicker of the dying light. The fact that she was half-naked, that he was half-naked, that the specimen cup sat forgotten on the table and neither of them had mentioned it in minutes.
It was all disgusting.
But her hand kept moving.
Ced reached out and caught her wrist. Not hard. Just a touch—a pause. His eyes were open again, dark and steady.
"Not like that," he said. "You're... you're going too slow."
"I thought that was the point."
"Not for the collection. For—" He let go of her wrist. Let his fingers trail down her forearm. Let them rest on her knee. "For me. I want to feel it."
Hervi's breath caught. His palm was warm on her bare skin. The contact sent something electric up her leg, through her stomach, coiling in her chest.
"You're really weird," she said.
"You're the one in your underwear."
"Strategic."
"Bullshit."
She almost smiled. Almost. "Fine. Maybe I was curious."
"Curious about what?"
"About whether all of this is as awful as it looks."
"And?"
Hervi looked down at her hand. At his cock nestled in her grip. At the way his skin flushed pink where she touched him.
"I don't know yet," she said. "Keep going."
So he did. And she did. And the sample cup sat on the table, empty, waiting, while the fluorescent light flickered above them like it knew exactly what was happening and wanted everyone to know it was so much more interesting than it had any right to be.