Chapter 13: The Confession
Lewis didn’t go back to the party. He stood in the hallway, the bass from the music a dull thud in his chest that couldn’t compete with the memory of the shower stall, the unraveling threads, the cracking bench. His body thrummed with a residual energy that felt equal parts terror and elation. He watched the bathroom door from a distance, saw it open a few minutes later.
Professor Rygell emerged, dressed in clothes that were clearly not her own: a too-big hoodie pulled over a generic t-shirt, sweatpants rolled at the ankles. She’d found them somewhere, maybe from a lost and found bin in the garage. She looked ordinary, bundled up, her hair still damp. She walked past him without a glance, a ghost in borrowed cotton.
He followed, a few paces behind, out into the cool night. She didn’t head toward the faculty parking lot. She walked toward the science building, her sneakers—also borrowed, plain white—scuffing on the pavement. He kept following, a moth to a very dangerous flame. She didn’t acknowledge him until she’d swiped her keycard at a side entrance, holding the door open just long enough for him to catch it.
The corridors were dark, lit only by emergency exit signs. Their footsteps echoed. She led him to her usual lecture hall, room 214, and unlocked it. The air inside was stale, cool, smelling of old wood and dry-erase markers. She flicked on the lights. The fluorescents buzzed to life, their sickly glow flattening everything.
“Close the door,” she said, her back to him. He did, the latch clicking with definitive finality. She turned, leaning against her desk, arms crossed over the baggy hoodie. “You were supposed to go back to the party.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He shrugged, the gesture feeling useless. “You said I was a catalyst. I wanted to know what that meant. For you.”
A faint, bitter smile touched her lips. She looked younger suddenly, and tired. Not the imposing professor, not the primal force in the shower. Just a woman in ill-fitting clothes in a dark, empty room. She hoisted herself up to sit on the edge of the desk, her legs dangling. The posture was oddly girlish.
“You need to understand something,” she began, her voice quiet, stripped of its usual lecturing precision. She stared at a spot on the scuffed linoleum floor. “I didn’t choose this. It happened to me. A lab accident. Post-doc research. One minute I was calibrating a gamma spectrometer, the next…” She trailed off, flexing one hand. “It wasn’t a superhero origin story. It was a containment breach. A medical disaster. I’ve been terrified of it for years.”
Lewis stayed by the door, giving her the space. He’d never heard her say the word ‘terrified’ before. It didn’t seem to fit in her mouth.
“The anger thing, that was the first manifestation. Predictable. Stress, fear, frustration—boom.” She snapped her fingers. The sound was loud in the quiet room. “I spent years building walls. Control through repression. A life of quiet, meticulous calibration. No highs, no lows. Just… data.” She looked up at him, her black eyes gleaming under the harsh light. “But with you… it feels different.”
She uncrossed her arms, placing her palms flat on the desk behind her. “In the shower, that wasn’t anger. That was a focused application of desire. A chosen variable. It was messy, but it was… mine. I was in the driver’s seat for the first time. Not a passenger screaming as the car goes off the cliff.” She took a deep breath. “It felt like I was finally in charge.”
Lewis found his voice. “You were.”
“I want to show you what it’s really like,” she said, her gaze locking onto his. “The full transformation. No holding back. No clothes in the way. No context of sex or anger or a party. Just the thing itself.” She slid off the desk and took two steps toward him. The borrowed sweatpants whispered as she moved. “I want you to see it.”
She stopped within arm’s reach. Up close, he could see the faint tension around her eyes, the pulse in her neck. This was costing her.
“I want to show you,” she repeated, her voice dropping to a whisper laced with static. “But I need an anchor. A tether. Something to focus on that isn’t the raw feedback loop of my own biochemistry.”
She reached out and took his right hand. Her skin was warm. She turned it over, palm up, then slowly, deliberately, pressed it flat against the center of her chest, over the soft cotton of the t-shirt beneath the hoodie. He could feel the firm swell of her pectoral muscle, the ridge of her sternum beneath.
And beneath that, a deep, rhythmic thrum. Not a heartbeat. Something slower, more tectonic. A glow, not of light, but of sensation—a low-grade vibration that hummed up through his palm, into his wrist.
“Feel that?” she breathed.
He nodded, unable to speak.
“That’s the reactor idling. That’s what happens when I stop fighting it. When I just… let it breathe.”
Her body began to warm under his hand. The heat grew steadily, not feverish, but profound, like stone that has soaked up a day’s sun. The muscles of her chest and shoulder grew taut, definition emerging under his fingertips even through the fabric. A faint, emerald luminance seeped into the whites of her eyes, not a flash, but a slow rising tide.
“Tell me to stop,” she said, her voice thickening, gaining a gravelly resonance that vibrated in his own bones. “Say the word, and I slam the door shut. I lock it down. I will.”
He could barely process the offer. His world had narrowed to the heat under his palm, the pulse of green in her gaze, the terrifying trust she was handing him.
“But I’m hoping you won’t,” she finished, the words a low rumble.
He didn’t. He curled his fingers slightly, pressing his palm more firmly against her. An affirmation. A tether.
She closed her eyes. A sigh escaped her, part relief, part surrender. The change did not come in a violent surge. It unfolded.
The borrowed grey t-shirt was the first to go. The cotton simply darkened, the fibers carbonizing from the intense, internal heat. It flaked away from her torso in brittle, ash-like pieces, falling silently to the floor. The hoodie, its polyester blend, melted at the seams, sliding from her shoulders like black syrup.
Skin emerged, already deepening from peach to olive, then to the vibrant, living green of a deep forest shade. It wasn’t a sickly color. It was robust, vital. Her frame expanded, but with a strange, fluid grace. Bones didn’t crack; they reconfigured with soft, dense pops. Muscle layered upon muscle, not bulging cartoonishly, but sculpting itself into a topography of immense, restrained power. Her shoulders broadened, her neck thickened into a strong column, her ribcage expanded with a low, leathery creak.
He kept his hand pressed to her sternum, now a broad plate of bone over which powerful pectorals rose. The green glow was visible now, a subsurface radiance that pulsed in time with that deep, tectonic rhythm. It traced the pathways of her veins like bioluminescence in deep-sea coral.
The sweatpants dissolved next, the elastic waist and cheap cotton unable to contain the shift in her hips and the explosive growth of her thighs. They fell away in damp, disintegrating rags.
She stood before him, fully transformed. She was immense, a statue of emerald flesh and latent force carved in the sterile, fluorescent light of the lecture hall. She towered over him, over the desks. The air around her shimmered with waste heat. She opened her eyes. They were full, radiant pools of green light, intelligence burning fiercely within them.
She looked down at his hand, still resting on her chest. Her own hand, now large enough to cup his entire skull, came up and covered his. Her touch was searingly hot, but not burning. It was the heat of life, amplified a thousandfold.
“See?” she boomed, her voice the sound of boulders grinding together, yet somehow still her voice. “This is the substrate. The base condition. No narrative. No excuse.”
She leaned down, bringing her luminous eyes level with his. The heat of her breath was a desert wind.
“I’m not angry,” she rumbled. “I’m not horny. I’m just… me. At total capacity. This is what I am when I’m not pretending to be small.”
Lewis, heart hammering against his ribs, breathed in the ozone-and-warm-stone scent of her. The fear was there, a sharp, animal instinct in the face of such sheer magnitude. But it was tangled with a staggering, humbling awe.
“It’s… something,” he finally managed, his voice thin in the vast space she now occupied.
A low chuckle vibrated through her, through him. “That’s one word for it.”
She straightened, his hand slipping from her chest. She took a single step back, and the floor groaned in protest. She looked around the room, at the desks arranged in neat rows, at the blackboard with last week’s equations still faintly visible. The juxtaposition was absurd. A primordial force in a temple of tidy knowledge.
“I used to think this was a curse,” she said, her gaze sweeping the room. “A pathology to be managed. Now…” She flexed her hand, studying the play of muscle and tendon. “Now I think it might just be a different kind of physics.”
She looked back at him, the green light in her eyes softening just a fraction.
“And you,” she said. “You’re not a trigger. You’re a permission slip.”
She began to shrink. It was the reverse, a slow, controlled retreat. The green faded, the massive structure softening, receding, pulling back into the vessel of her human form. In less than a minute, Professor Rygell stood there, naked, pale, and shivering slightly in the air-conditioned chill. She hugged herself, her hair falling around her shoulders.
Wordlessly, Lewis shrugged out of his own jacket—a lightweight canvas thing—and stepped forward. He draped it over her shoulders. She pulled it closed, not looking at him.
“Monday,” she said, her voice human again, raspy with fatigue. “Quantum tunneling. Don’t be late.”
He just nodded. She walked to the door, his jacket hanging on her like a child’s coat, and left without a backward glance. Lewis stood alone in the silent classroom, the ghost of immense heat still lingering in the air, the smell of ozone fading, the imprint of her sternum still warm on his palm.