Chapter 11: The Interrogation
The car door slammed with a finality that echoed in the empty street. Travis stood on the cracked sidewalk, the weight of the USB drive in his pocket feeling like a lead ingot. His apartment building loomed, a silent monolith of brown brick and darkened windows. Inside, no HR team, no Don, no fragile corporate lie waiting to be pricked. Just the stale scent of his own life, and Mavis.
He climbed the stairs, each step a grinding effort. His mind was a frozen reel of Don’s flat, cold eyes, the threatening quiet after the word “fraud.” The offer of a raise felt like a door slamming shut behind him, a gilded trap he’d narrowly sidestepped.
The apartment door groaned open. The familiar gloom welcomed him, a cocoon of scattered laundry, the jagged neon stars casting their sickly green glow. The center of it all, the focal point of this strange universe, was the hole in the wall. The silicone sleeve, a smooth, flesh-toned tunnel, pulsed faintly with a soft, internal light. A playful, beckoning energy radiated from it.
Travis shrugged off his jacket, the USB drive clattering onto the floorboards. He didn’t pick it up. He stood in the middle of the room, still in his work clothes, the tension from the office a rigid armor around his shoulders.
A tiny head, crowned with wild, dark hair, peeked out from the silicone-lined opening. Mavis’s eyes, sharp and discerning, took him in.
“You look like a man who tried to swallow a hornet,” Mavis announced, his voice a dry rustle in the quiet room.
“Feels like it,” Travis grunted, running a hand through his own tangled hair.
“Did he sting?”
“He offered honey instead. A whole hive’s worth.” Travis finally moved, sitting heavily on the edge of the unmade bed. “He knew about the HR email. He’d already talked to her. Contained it.”
Mavis slipped fully out of the hole, landing on the bedside table with a soft pat. He was bare-chested, wearing loose trousers made from what looked like a handkerchief. “But you pulled the other thread. The P.O. Box thread.”
“Yeah.” Travis managed a ghost of a smile. “His face went… empty. Then he told me to give him the drive. Promised me a promotion to forget it.”
“And you said no.” It wasn’t a question. Mavis began to pace the length of the table, a tiny general surveying a map. “So now he is cornered. A cornered animal is more dangerous than a proud one. He will not offer honey again.”
“I know.” The dread was a cold pool in Travis’s stomach. He flopped back onto the bed, staring at the glowing stars stuck to his ceiling. “What do I do? Send everything to everyone? The news? The police?”
Mavis stopped pacing. He tilted his head, considering Travis from his vantage point. “Later. Not tonight. Tonight, you are a live wire. You are thinking with your panic, not your brain.” He jumped from the table, landing on Travis’s chest with a soft thump. “Your heart is beating like a trapped bird.”
Travis looked down at the small creature standing on his sternum. “I feel sick.”
“You need to feel something else.” Mavis’s voice lost its analytical edge, softening into something more familiar—mischievous, intimate. He walked down the plane of Travis’s stomach, his tiny feet leaving faint impressions through the cotton of the shirt. “You need to get out of that big, worried head of yours.”
Travis closed his eyes. “Mavis, I don’t think I can—”
“Hush.” Mavis had reached his belt. Small hands, surprisingly strong, worked the buckle open, then the button of his jeans. The sound of the zipper lowering was deafening in the silent room. “You do not have to think. You do not have to do anything. Just be here. In this room. With me.”
There was a gentle pressure, then a cool, slick feeling as Mavis applied a generous dollop of stolen hand lotion. The sharp, clean scent of aloe cut through the room’s staleness. Travis gasped, his back arching off the bed involuntarily.
“See?” Mavis murmured, his hands working with a practiced, knowing ease. “Already, you are here more.”
Travis was trapped under a weight of dread and a different, gathering tension. Mavis’s touch was an anchor, pulling him from the churning sea of his thoughts into the acute, undeniable reality of his body. His cock, half-hard and twitching, was a simple problem with a simple, promised solution.
Mavis didn’t rush. He explored with a torturous, scientific curiosity. When Travis was fully hard, Mavis positioned himself, kneeling on the bed beside his hip. He didn’t climb on immediately. Instead, he leaned forward, his small mouth parting.
The sensation was impossibly precise, a focused, wet heat that made Travis cry out, his hands fisting in the sheets. Mavis hummed against him, the vibration traveling straight to the base of Travis’s spine, scattering the last coherent images of Don’s face from his mind.
When Travis was trembling on the edge, Mavis pulled back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a sly look in his eyes. “Now,” he said, his voice thick. “Now we get properly acquainted.”
He swung a tiny leg over Travis’s shaft, straddling it just below the head. The lotion made everything slippery, effortless. Mavis sank down, seating himself with a possessive sigh, his tiny thighs gripping the flushed, sensitive skin. He was so small, his body a warm, living band around Travis’s girth.
Travis whimpered, a broken sound. The intense, enveloping pressure was a perfect counterpoint to the vague, diffuse terror of the day. It was a pain that was not a pain, a demand that was also a gift.
Mavis began to move. Slow, rolling undulations of his hips, a lazy, owning grind. Each movement dragged Travis’s foreskin back, exposed the glistening head, then covered it again. Mavis watched his own handiwork, a faint, proud smile on his lips.
“That’s it,” Mavis whispered. “Just this. The heat. The slide. My weight on you. Nothing else exists.”
And for moments, it was true. Travis’s world narrowed to the five inches of exquisite friction, to the sight of Mavis riding him with deliberate, decadent slowness. The office, the emails, the threat—they blurred, receding like a tide.
But a particularly deep grind, a clench of those powerful little thighs, sent a shock through him that also jolted a thought loose. “The drive,” Travis gasped. “He’ll know where I live. He could—”
Mavis stopped. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on Travis’s abdomen, and squeezed tightly with his legs. The sudden, vice-like pressure made Travis yelp.
“No,” Mavis said, his voice flat and firm. “Not here. Not now.” He resumed his movement, this time with a sharper, more insistent rhythm. “In this house, in this room, you are mine and mine alone. Your boss, his threats, his money… they are ghosts. I am real. This,” he punctuated his words with a deliberate roll of his hips, “is real.”
He was marking his territory, not with a scent, but with sensation. Each movement was a claim, an erasure. Travis could only moan, his head thrashing side to side on the pillow. The fear was still there, a cold stone in his gut, but it was being surrounded, heated, and smoothed by the relentless waves of pleasure Mavis was pulling from him.
Mavis’s own breath was coming in short pants now. Reaching out, he snagged a tiny, downy feather that had been tucked into his makeshift waistband. He traced the very tip of it along the slit of Travis’s cock, where a bead of clear fluid had welled.
The feather-light touch on that hypersensitive point was the final key. Travis shattered. A raw, ragged shout tore from his throat as he came, his hips buckling off the bed, his vision whiting out. The release was a convulsive tide, washing everything else away—the dread, the calculation, the hollow feeling in his chest. For a few, eternal seconds, there was only blinding, shuddering emptiness.
When he floated back, gasping, Mavis was still perched on him, softly panting. He was watching Travis’s face with an expression of deep satisfaction. He carefully dismounted, then crawled up Travis’s spent body, coming to rest in the hollow of his throat. He was warm and solid, a grounding weight.
Travis’s breath slowly evened. The silence of the room was no longer oppressive, but soft. The neon stars glowed quietly. The hole in the wall was just a hole.
“Feel better?” Mavis asked after a long while, his voice a sleepy murmur.
“Yes,” Travis breathed. It was true. The fear was still present, but it was compartmentalized, held at bay by the profound physical release and the warmth of the small body curled against him.
“Good.” Mavis nuzzled into his skin. “Tomorrow, you will be smart. You will make copies. You will send the files to people whose job it is to care. You will be a stone in Don’s shoe he cannot remove.” He yawned, a tiny, squeaking sound. “But tonight, you are my mattress. And I am tired.”
Travis’s arm came up, his hand gently cupping around Mavis. He felt a deep, exhausted gratitude that had nothing to do with what had just happened and everything to do with the simple, unwavering presence. In the dark, with Mavis’s steady breathing against his neck, the future didn’t seem like a cliff’s edge. It seemed like a problem that could, with patience and a strange ally, be solved.
He lay there, listening to the sounds of the sleeping house, the weight of the USB drive on the floor forgotten, the chill of Don’s final warning replaced by the warm, claiming memory of Mavis’s thighs. Sleep pulled at him, heavy and deep. For the first time since walking out of that office, he felt safe.
For the first time since walking out of that office, he felt safe. The feeling lingered into a deep, dreamless sleep that glued him to the mattress. It was broken not by an alarm, but by a slow, wet warmth circling the very tip of his left nipple.
Travis grunted, shifting in the sheets. The sensation shifted to his right side, a persistent, intimate rasping that pulled him up from the depths. He blinked open gummy eyes to see Mavis, kneeling on his chest in the grey dawn light.
“Awake?” Mavis asked, not stopping his work.
“What are you doing?” Travis’s voice was a sleep-thickened croak.
“Waking you up properly.” Mavis leaned down and gave one last, slow lap. “You have a big day. Can’t have you fuzzy.” He patted Travis’s sternum. “Now get up. You know where to go.”
Travis groaned, the memory of the previous night’s tension seeping back into his muscles. He pushed back the covers and shuffled, naked and half-hard from the early morning attention, to the wall. The silicone-lined hole awaited, dark and inviting. He pressed himself into its welcoming, snug warmth.
It was just deep enough to hold him securely. The nubbed texture inside was a familiar, electric contrast against his sensitized skin. He let his forehead rest against the cool drywall, eyes closed.
“There,” Mavis said from somewhere behind him. “Now you’re plugged in. Anchored.”
Travis heard a soft rustle, then felt the slightest disturbance in the air near his hip. Mavis was moving around, preparing something. The fear from yesterday was a muted background hum now, quieter than the blood pulsing where he was embedded in the wall.
“Time to prep you for the meeting with HR properly,” Mavis announced.
A new sensation began—not the previous night’s demanding friction, but something utterly different. It was a soft, fluttering touch, like the wings of a dozen tiny moths, dancing and skittering across the most exposed, tender parts of him that protruded slightly from the wall. It was Mavis, using the stolen feather with a maddening, expert lightness.
Travis jerked, a sharp gasp escaping him. “Mavis—”
“Quiet,” Mavis commanded, his voice focused. “This isn’t for finishing. This is for focusing.” The feather-touch danced up one side of his shaft, traced a torturously slow circle around the rim, then feathered down a prominent vein. “It’s to make all the noise in your head go quiet. To make all your nerves point here, and only here.”
It was working. The looming meeting with Cynthia, the ghost of Don’s fury, the precarious stack of evidence—they all blurred, washed away by the exquisite, razor-sharp sensitivity the feather elicited. His knuckles were white where he braced against the wall. Every muscle in his body was pulled taut, not in panic, but in a breathless, straining anticipation for the next delicate, unbearable stroke.
Mavis worked in silence for long minutes, orchestrating the symphony of Travis’s nerves. Then the feather stopped. Travis shuddered, bereft.
He felt Mavis’s small, firm hands then, not teasing, but grounding. They pressed against him, one on either side, holding him steady in the hole. “Listen,” Mavis said, his voice close now. “You walk in there holding onto this feeling. The feeling of being on the very edge. You understand?”
“Y-yes,” Travis managed.
“You are in control of the edge. You know exactly where it is. You know what it takes to step back, or to go over.” Mavis’s grip tightened momentarily. “She will try to calm you. She will use reason. She will represent the company, which is a machine that hates messes. You are a mess. Your evidence is a mess.”
Travis nodded, his cheek scraping against the rough drywall.
“So you stay here,” Mavis whispered, giving him a soft, almost imperceptible squeeze. “In this sharp place. You don’t get angry. You don’t get scared. You just present your mess. You show her the P.O. Box, the invoices, the loop. You tell her she can clean it up, or it will spill out onto the sidewalk for everyone to see.”
He slowly pulled back, leaving Travis achingly empty and hyper-aware. Travis carefully extracted himself from the wall, turning to find Mavis standing proudly on the rumpled bedsheet, holding the tiny feather like a scepter.
“I don’t have your knack for threats,” Travis said, his whole body feeling finely tuned, humming.
“You don’t need it.” Mavis tossed the feather aside. “You just need to not care about being polite anymore. The facts are the threat. Now go get dressed. Wear the grey shirt. It makes you look like a storm cloud.”
An hour later, Travis stood outside the corporate headquarters, the USB drive a hard rectangle in his pocket. The feeling Mavis had carved into him that morning was still there, a live wire under his skin. He wasn’t calm. He was poised.
He rode the elevator up, the mirrored walls reflecting a man who looked tired, but whose eyes held a strange, unsettling clarity. He walked to the HR department, gave Cynthia’s name to the assistant, and was shown into a small, sterile meeting room with a glossy table and no windows.
Cynthia entered a moment later, a file folder in hand and a practiced, neutral smile on her face. “Travis. Thanks for coming in. Can I get you some water?”
“No,” he said, remaining standing. “I’m fine.”
She sat, gesturing for him to do the same. He didn’t. He placed the USB drive on the table between them with a quiet click.
“Don briefed me on your concerns,” she began, her tone soothing. “It seems there was a miscommunication regarding the executive project codes. These things happen, especially with the new vendor onboarding system. We’re drafting a clarification memo.”
Travis felt the edge Mavis had given him. He leaned forward, placing his palms flat on the cool table. “Cynthia,” he interrupted, his voice quiet. “I’m not here about memos. I’m here about a fraud scheme. I’ve linked the shell vendor to a shell employee. The P.O. Box is the same. The money trail is a circle.”
Her neutral smile froze, then melted away. “Travis, those are very serious allegations.”
“I know.” He nudged the drive toward her. “It’s all there. Don already threatened me. He offered me a promotion to drop it.” He saw the flicker in her eyes—surprise, then a dawning professional dread. “I’m not interested in a promotion. I’m interested in you doing your job. I’ve already forwarded the initial findings to my personal lawyer as of this morning. This copy is for you.”
The room was silent. The hum of the overhead lights was suddenly very loud.
Cynthia looked from his face to the drive and back again. The last of her placating corporate demeanor vanished, replaced by a stark, weary calculation. She understood. He wasn’t an employee with a grievance. He was a lit fuse.
“I see,” she said finally, her voice devoid of all its previous softness. She picked up the USB drive, holding it as if it were radioactive. “This will require a formal investigation. You understand that will involve external auditors. Legal. It will… become a thing.”
Travis straightened up. The live wire under his skin buzzed, clean and sharp. He felt absolutely certain.
“Good,” he said. He turned and walked out of the room, leaving her sitting there with the grenade in her hand. He didn’t look back. The momentum carried him down the hall, into the elevator, and out through the glittering lobby. The morning sun hit his face, and he took a deep, shaking breath.
He had done it. He had let the mess spill. Now he had to wait and see what would try to clean it up. He put a hand in his pocket, feeling for his phone, thinking of the small, fierce creature waiting in a room full of neon stars. He had a feeling Mavis would approve.