Chapter 15: Eventual Comeback
The kiss was a detonation. It shattered the last pretense of objective study, of clinical distance. What remained was raw, gasping need, echoing in the wet sounds of their mouths and the relentless, humming chorus of the machine.
Simon didn’t pull away for long. He broke the kiss only to snatch up the fallen tablet, his fingers flying across the screen with renewed, fervent purpose. The automated ten-minute increment timer, previously bypassed, was re-engaged and locked. A new protocol, written in the flush of their shared breath.
“I need more,” Simon breathed against Jason’s lips, his voice thick. “I need to see all of you.”
He confirmed the command.
The first increase hit exactly six hundred seconds later.
Jason felt it in his bones. The vibration threading through the seat’s core deepened from a resonant note to a penetrating drone. The rollers at his hips and thighs didn’t just press; they sought, their oscillations becoming more complex, tracing maddening, irregular patterns against his oversensitized skin. The six digits on his chest tightened their formation, the fluttering intensifying to a rapid, pinpoint pulse centered perfectly on each nipple. The shift was profound, systemic. It wasn’t more of the same. It was a deeper layer of the same madness.
“Fuck, Simon!” Jason cried out, his head thrashing back. The new intensity collided with the lingering heat of the kiss, overloading every circuit. His laughter returned, but it was broken, edged with a sharp, mounting desperation.
“I know,” Simon murmured, his eyes fixed not on the screen but on Jason’s face. He had resumed his perch on the chair’s edge, one hand resting on Jason’s heaving belly, feeling the muscles dance and clench under his palm. “Just feel it. Give it to me.”
The machine was merciless. It counted the seconds with digital precision. Every ten minutes, a soft, chiding tone would sound, and the world would tilt again. The sensations would amplify, mutate, and deepen. The vibrations became currents. The tickling became a peeling back of layers, leaving his nerves exposed and singing.
Jason lost all sense of time, of place. There was only the chair, the feeling, and Simon’s blue eyes anchoring him to a self that was rapidly disintegrating. He came the first time not long after the second increase. It was wrenched from him, a shocking, full-body convulsion that had little to do with pleasure as he knew it and everything to do with sheer, untenable overload. His back arched violently, a raw shout torn from his throat, his release pulsing onto his stomach and the humming leather beneath him.
The machine did not stop. The rollers at his hips, now slick, continued their relentless circuit. The sensitivity didn’t fade; it sharpened, a live wire jamming into a fresh wound.
“No, no, no, too much, too—ah! Ah, God!” Jason babbled, tears streaming freely. He was shuddering, oversensitive to the point of pain.
Simon’s hand smoothed over his abdomen, gathering the evidence of his climax, spreading it. His touch was possessive, grounding. “Shhh. Minimal brakes. That’s the protocol now. We ride it through.” He leaned down, his lips brushing Jason’s temple. “You can take it. For me.”
And Jason, wired into the very system that tormented him, found he could. Because it was for Simon. The trust was absolute, a final surrender that transcended the agony of his nerves.
The cycle repeated. The ten-minute chime was a Pavlovian bell of dread and awful anticipation. Each new level forced another searing, brutal climax from his spent body. He came again, a weaker, shuddering thing, his hips twitching helplessly against the straps. Then again, a dry, agonized pulsing that was just his body screaming into the void.
Simon was everywhere. His hands were on Jason’s ribs, his throat, his face, wiping away sweat and tears. His voice was a constant stream—low praises, whispered obsessions, technical observations that sounded like love poems. “Look at that galvanic response… you’re so beautiful like this… completely mine… your autonomic system is in symphonic overload… perfect, Jason, perfect.”
He drank the responses, the broken screams and slurred pleas, as if they were water in a desert. He watched the biometric feeds spike and crater with each wrenching orgasm, but the data was just an echo now. The truth was in the wrecked, beautiful creature beneath him.
The third hour blurred into a smear of white noise and piezoelectric torture. Jason’s laughs had long since decayed into wheezing, open-mouthed gasps. His body was a map of tremors, his skin flushed and feverish. The sensations had transcended tickling, beyond pleasure, beyond pain. They were a state of being, an atmospheric pressure crushing him into the chair.
After what felt like an aeon, the ten-minute chime sounded once more. A fresh, jagged wave of vibration crested through him, focusing with terrible precision between his legs. His hips gave a feeble, automatic jerk, but there was nothing left to give. No climax. Just a hollow, aching spasm that felt like his spine might fuse.
The numbness hit then. A profound, echoing stillness that began in his extremities and flooded inward. The machine’s efforts were still registering—he could feel the buzzing, the movement—but it was as if a thick pane of glass had slid between the stimulus and his ability to process it. The signal was there, but the receiver was fried.
His eyes, glazed and red-rimmed, found Simon’s. His voice, when it came, was a cracked, dry whisper, almost inaudible over the hum. “Simon.”
Simon was on him in an instant, cradling his face. “I’m here.”
“Vesper.” The word was a breath, a final exhalation. “It’s… it’s done. I’m… blank. I can’t… feel anything.”
The change in Simon was instantaneous. The fervent inventor vanished, replaced by a look of stark, adrenalized concern. He lunged for the tablet, his fingers stabbing the master kill switch.
The silence was absolute.
The sudden cessation of the omnipresent hum was a shockwave in itself. The lab felt dead, hollow. The only sounds were Jason’s ragged, shallow breathing and the soft, frantic clicks of Simon releasing the restraints.
The thigh cuffs unlocked. The ankle straps fell away. The chest harness loosened with a hiss. Simon worked with a frantic, tender urgency, his hands trembling slightly. He carefully guided the various tools away from Jason’s body, retracting them into the chair’s housing.
Finally free, Jason didn’t move. He lay boneless, a sculpture of spent exhaustion, staring up at the fluorescent lights. A fine, continuous tremor ran through his limbs.
“Okay,” Simon whispered, more to himself than to Jason. “Okay, okay.” He slid his arms under Jason’s back and knees. He was slim, but Jason was lighter, and the adrenaline coursing through him lent him strength. In one smooth motion, he lifted Jason from the chair’s embracing, tormenting leather.
The cool air of the lab on Jason’s sweat-soaked skin was a new sensation, sharp and real. Simon carried him across the room to a worn, cushioned couch shoved against a wall of schematics. He laid him down gently, arranging his limp limbs, fetching a coarse lab blanket to drape over him.
Simon sank to his knees on the concrete floor beside the couch. He took one of Jason’s limp hands in both of his, chafing it gently. He watched Jason’s face, the flicker of his eyelids, the slow, returning awareness in his hazy eyes.
“Talk to me,” Simon said, his own voice rough with spent emotion. “Just a word. Tell me you’re in there.”
Jason’s head lolled to the side. He looked at Simon, at the genuine fear etched in the lines around his mouth, the love stripped bare of all its mad-scientist disguises. A weak, ghost of a smile touched his swollen lips.
“Hi,” Jason breathed.
The single syllable broke Simon. A shudder ran through him, and he lowered his forehead to their clasped hands. His shoulders shook once, silently. When he looked up, his blue eyes were bright. “Hi.”
For a long time, they just stayed like that. Jason swimming slowly back to the surface of his own body, Simon holding onto him like a lifeline, in the silent, fluorescent aftermath of everything.
The silence pooled around them, thick and strange after the hours of mechanical song. Jason’s breathing evened out, the sharp little tremors in his legs gradually subsiding into a deep, bone-melting fatigue. He felt hollowed out, scoured clean, like a shell left on a beach after a storm.
Simon’s thumb was tracing slow circles on the back of his hand, a grounding, human rhythm. The concrete floor had to be biting into his knees, but he showed no sign of moving.
“I think my nervous system filed for divorce,” Jason whispered, his voice raspy from disuse and screams.
A laugh punched out of Simon, tight with relief. “It signed a full exclusivity contract with me. No take-backs.” He looked down at their joined hands, his expression turning serious. “I need to get you cleaned up. And hydrated. And probably fed, though I doubt you can keep anything down.”
“You doubting my iron stomach?” Jason murmured, but he made no effort to rise.
Simon finally stood, his joints popping. He moved around the lab with a quiet efficiency, gathering supplies: a warm, damp cloth, a bottle of electrolyte water, a soft towel. He returned to kneel again, his movements deliberate and gentle.
The cloth was a shock of warmth. Simon started with Jason’s face, wiping away the dried salt tracks of tears and sweat. The care in the action was profound, almost ceremonial. He worked his way down, over the throat, across the trembling chest, cleaning away the physical evidence of the marathon. His touch was clinical but infused with a reverence that made Jason’s breath catch.
When Simon’s hands, guiding the cloth, moved lower, Jason flinched. The skin there felt brand new, hyper-real. Simon paused, his blue eyes flicking up to meet his.
“Okay?” Simon asked, the single word loaded.
Jason nodded, swallowing. “Just… really aware.”
“I know.” Simon’s touch became even lighter, a ghost of pressure, meticulously cleaning the sensitive skin of his abdomen and thighs. It wasn’t arousing. It was necessary, intimate in a completely different way. A tending. When he was done, he draped the soft towel over Jason’s lap and uncapped the water bottle, holding it to his lips.
Jason drank greedily, the cool liquid feeling like life itself flooding back into parched ground. He drank until Simon pulled the bottle back. “Slow. Or you’ll be sick.”
Jason sank back into the cushions, the simple act of drinking exhausting him. He watched Simon, who was now just watching him back, a quiet, awed tension in the line of his shoulders. The lab felt different. The chair in the center of the room no longer hummed with predatory potential; it just sat there, a weird piece of furniture, its purpose fulfilled.
The weight of everything that had happened—the laughter, the torment, the confession, the brutal, cycling peaks—settled over them. It was a quiet, heavy blanket.
Jason’s mind, slowly rebooting, replayed the last clear moment before the numbness swallowed him. Simon’s voice in the dark, whispering mine. The way his own body had answered, not with resistance, but with a total, shattering surrender. He looked at his friend, the mad scientist, who had built a entire machine just to tell him the truth.
A strange, giddy bubble of clarity rose in his chest.
“Can I kiss you?” Jason asked.
The question was rather absurd. They had just spent what had to be five or more hours kissing between laughter and breath. However, Simon leaned over to him, not initiating the kiss this time, just moving close enough that Jason could.
The contact was soft, slow; nothing like the claiming fervor during the last five hours. It was a discovery. A confirmation in the quiet. Jason’s lips were chapped, Simon’s were bitten. It tasted like water and stillness. It lasted only a few seconds, a gentle press, a shared inhalation.
Jason pulled back just enough to speak, their breaths mingling. “Just wanted to make sure it was still a thing I could do. Without the machine on.”
Simon’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “The machine was never the point. It was just… the amplifier.”
“It was a really loud amplifier.”
“You’re a really receptive subject.” Simon’s smile faded into something more vulnerable. “Are you… are we okay?”
Jason considered it. He felt physically ruined. He was pretty sure he’d need to be poured into his bed. He had just been subjected to the most intense, bizarre, and revealing experience of his life by his best friend, who was in love with him. He looked at Simon’s anxious face, the clever hands that had built and destroyed him, now fidgeting with the damp cloth.
A real, easy smile spread across his own face. “I think we’re better than okay. I think we’re completely insane.” He reached up, his arm feeling like a lead weight, and brushed Simon’s hair from his forehead. “But yeah. We’re okay.”
Simon caught his hand, pressing a kiss to his palm. The gesture was so tender it made Jason’s chest ache. “I have to run diagnostics on the chair. And the data is… it’s going to take weeks to parse.”
“Good,” Jason said, his eyelids growing heavy. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a tidal wave of exhaustion in its wake. “Parse later. Now, I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything.”
“Carry me to your bed. I’m not walking upstairs. And then sleep for a year.”
Simon laughed, the sound bright and clear in the sterile room. “Your wish is my command.” He slid his arms under Jason again, lifting him with a grunt. Jason let his head loll against Simon’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of ozone and skin. As Simon carried him toward the basement stairs, Jason’s last conscious thought was that the hum he felt now wasn’t from any machine. It was the steady, reassuring rhythm of Simon’s heart, beating against his own.