Chapter 12: The Morning After Inquiry
The party had been a thumping, sweat-soaked mistake. Someone’s off-campus house, beer soaked into the carpets, a bass line vibrating up through the soles of Lewis’s shoes. He’d gone out of a vague sense of obligation to campus social life, a notion that felt increasingly absurd as he leaned against a sticky wall. He was about to leave when he saw her.
Professor Rygell stood near the back sliding door, a silhouette of quiet detachment amidst the chaos. She wore a red shirt, a synthetic material that clung to her torso and arms like a second skin, and black pants that hugged her legs before tapering at her ankles. On her feet were green Adidas sneakers, absurdly mundane, almost defiantly normal. She held a plastic cup of clear liquid, ice long melted. Her eyes found his across the crowd, and she didn’t smile. She just tilted her head toward the hallway.
He followed, the music fading to a dull throb. She led him past a line for a bathroom, down a narrower hall to a door she simply pushed open. It was a shower, the kind in a cheap rental: a plastic stall with a mildewed curtain, a rusted metal frame, cracked tiles. It smelled of damp and cheap body wash. She pulled him inside and let the door groan shut.
The fluorescent light buzzed and flickered, painting her face in stuttering frames. “You left quickly the other night,” she said, her voice barely above the distant bass.
“You said to go.”
“I did.” She set her cup on the edge of the sink. Her movements were precise, but there was a charge to her, a live-wire tension he recognized. Her black eyes held his. “I’ve been thinking about control. The variables. Anger was predictable. Mutual… passion, that was a useful datum. But what about sheer, unilateral wanting?”
Before he could process the question, she was on her knees. The cramped space made the movement startlingly intimate. His back pressed against the cold tile. She looked up at him, and there was nothing submissive in it. It was a challenge.
Her hands worked at his jeans, efficient and sure. When she took him into her mouth, it was with a focused intensity that shattered every thought. Her tongue was flat and hot, her rhythm relentless from the first second. It wasn’t seduction; it was a focused experiment in applied sensation. He gasped, his head thumping back against the wall.
That’s when he saw the first change.
A low sound vibrated through her, through him. The material of her tight red shirt began to protest. A seam at the shoulder, strained taut across the swell of her deltoid, gave up. It didn’t rip jaggedly; it unspooled, the thread curling away like a withering vine. Then another seam along her ribs, the fabric stretching, paling, before splitting with a soft, wet snick. The sound was of thick paper tearing. Green, not red, bloomed beneath the gaps.
She didn’t stop. Her pace increased, a furious, consuming rhythm. The shirt now strained against a back that was broadening, the synthetic material sheening with a strange sweat. The seams along her spine surrendered one by one, each pop a tiny gunshot in the tiled room. The fabric, now a torn husk, hung from her swelling frame. With a final, deeper groan from her, the remaining threads gave way. The red shirt fell in two limp pieces from her shoulders, revealing skin the color of deep forest moss, muscles carving themselves into existence in real time.
His hands, which had been gripping the shower frame, reached down, tangling in her dark hair. She growled approval, the vibration traveling straight through his core.
The black pants were next. They strained at the thighs, the tough material groaning. The sound was of leather stretched too far. A seam at the hip split open, then the inner thigh. The fabric didn’t give all at once; it fissured, revealing more of that impossible green, the powerful contours of her quadriceps. The button shot off, pinging against the metal stall door. The zipper teeth parted, not from a pull, but from the sheer expansion beneath. The pants shredded downwards, becoming tattered flags of black cloth around her colossal, green calves.
Her sneakers were the last bastion of the ordinary. The green nylon and suede strained, the laces snapping like small firecrackers. Pop. Pop. Pop. The adhesive holding the soles to the uppers gave a sighing peel. The shoes didn’t come off so much as they were expelled, falling from her broadening, green feet with twin, wet thuds.
She was fully transformed now, a monolith of emerald muscle kneeling in the wreckage of her clothes. The flickering light played over the vast terrain of her shoulders, the powerful column of her neck. She pulled back for a second, breathing hard, her eyes now glowing with a faint, ferocious light.
“See?” she rasped, her voice layered, gravel over thunder. “It’s the wanting. The pure, focused want of it.”
She took him again, and this was different. Before, in her bedroom, there had been a chaotic, shared frenzy. This was deliberate, a display of controlled power. Her mouth was hotter, the pressure overwhelming. His legs trembled. The plastic bench beneath her knees cracked with a sound like a bone breaking.
He was helpless, unmoored, spectacularly undone. The sensation built, a critical mass, and when release came, it was a silent, white-out shock that left him sagging against the wall, seeing stars in the flickering gloom.
She rose. The shower stall, which had felt cramped before, now seemed a ludicrous prison for her form. Water from a previous shower dripped from the tap behind her, beading on her skin. She looked down at him, a giantess in a tomb of tile and mildew, her expression one of grim, satisfied focus. The data was collected.
Slowly, the green began to recede. It drew inward from her extremities like tide pulling back from sand, leaving pale, human skin in its wake. The awesome scale diminished, muscle softening back into a slender, powerful woman’s frame. Soon, it was just Professor Rygell standing there, naked amidst the shredded fabric and broken sneakers, breathing heavily. She ran a hand through her dark hair.
“Hypothesis confirmed,” she said quietly, mostly to herself. She stepped over the wreckage of her clothes, nudging a torn sneaker aside with a bare foot. She turned on the sink’s tap, splashed water on her face.
Lewis struggled to get his breathing under control, to put his world back in order. It was impossible. “What does that mean?” he finally managed.
She turned off the water and looked at him in the mirror, her reflection pale and stark. “It means the trigger is amplifiable. It means I can choose the variable.” She turned, leaning back against the sink, completely unselfconscious. “It means you’re a remarkably effective catalyst, Lewis.”
He zipped his jeans, hands fumbling. “And now?”
“Now,” she said, grabbing a frayed black towel from a hook and draping it around herself, “you go back to the party. I’ll leave in a minute. Monday, we have a seminar on quantum tunneling.” She wrapped the towel tighter. “Don’t be late.”
She opened the stall door. The music and laughter from the party washed in, a wave of banal reality. He stepped out into the hall, the sounds assaulting his ears. As he walked back toward the pounding bass, he could still feel the phantom pressure, see the slow, deliberate unraveling of every stitch. He didn’t look back. He knew he wouldn’t see her again until Monday, in a room full of people, where she’d speak of particles and barriers, and he would understand, in a way no one else could, exactly what it meant to tunnel through a wall that seemed utterly solid.