Chapter 24: The Interrogation
‘
The metal was cold against Bobby’s palm. He hadn’t been looking for it. He’d been searching for the backup key to her bike lock, a mundane task that felt husbandly. His fingers had brushed against the velvet of her jewelry box, and the small, hinged lid had sprung open. Nestled beside a pair of pearl studs and her grandmother’s jade pendant was the jewelled plug, its garish pink silicone and fake rhinestone base a violent alien presence among her heirlooms.
He stood perfectly still in the center of her sterile room, the object weighing nothing and everything. The late afternoon sun glinted off its cheap facets, casting tiny, mocking rainbows on the wall. He heard the shower running down the hall, the sound of her routine. His own breathing became very loud.
“Leah?” he called out, his voice strangely calm.
The water shut off. A moment later, she emerged from the steamy bathroom, a towel wrapped around her torso, another twisted in her hair. Her smile was automatic, then it froze. Her eyes went from his face to his hand. The color drained from her cheeks, leaving her looking wan and utterly exposed.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, holding it up. The plug dangled from his fingers.
“It’s a…” Her voice was a dry rustle. She cleared her throat. “A gag gift. From a bachelorette party last semester. I forgot I had it.” The lie was pathetically flimsy, born of pure animal panic.
He took a step forward. The floorboard creaked. “You forgot you had a butt plug in your jewelry box? With your grandma’s stuff?” His calm was fracturing, a hairline crack in his tone. “Do I look fucking stupid to you, Leah?”
“No, Bobby, I just—”
“You’ve been a ghost for weeks.” He cut her off, his words gaining speed, gaining heat. “You jump when I touch you. You fake every goddamn orgasm. I can feel you thinking about grocery lists when I’m inside you.” He threw the plug onto her neatly made bed. It landed with a soft, obscene thud. “And now I find this? Who is this for?”
The accusation hung between them, solid as the plug on the bedspread. Leah’s mind, usually so precise, scrambled through a dozen worse lies before snagging on a brittle piece of truth. She wrapped the towel tighter, a flimsy shield. “It’s for me.” The words were a whisper. She forced her voice louder, though it cracked. “I was always kinda curious about it. I thought maybe you would help me explore that.”
Bobby stared. His anger didn’t dissipate; it mutated. Confusion and a raw, wounded suspicion twisted his features. “Help you explore,” he repeated flatly. “By hiding it? By lying to my face just now?” He ran a hand through his hair, his laugh a short, harsh burst. “Jesus Christ, Leah. What else are you ‘exploring’ that you need to hide?”
This was the pivot. She saw it. His anger was molten, but it was flowing away from infidelity and towards betrayal of a different kind. She had to channel it, to shape it into something she could use. To make him the instrument of her hunger, not its victim. She let the towel drop.
It pooled at her feet. She stood naked in the slanted light, her skin still damp and pebbled from the shower. She didn’t cover herself. She presented her body—the body he worshipped, the body she despised—as both an apology and a provocation. “There’s nothing else,” she lied, her eyes wide and glistening. “Just this. It’s a stupid, embarrassing thing. I was ashamed.” She took a step toward him, then knelt on the rough dorm carpet. The posture was one of absolute submission. “I’m sorry I hid it. Please.”
Her "Please" dissolved into the sterile air, a whispered plea that seemed to magnify the silence. She remained on her knees, the rough carpet digging into her skin, her body offered up like a flawed sacrament. Bobby didn't move toward her; he took a full step back, his shadow lengthening across her.
He looked at her, at the deliberate vulnerability of her pose, and his eyes held no desire, only a dawning, exhausted comprehension. The cheap jewel of the plug winked from the bedspread, a garish clue to a room in her he could never enter.
“I’m sorry Leah.” His voice was drained, all the earlier heat gone. “I’m not in the mood. This is way too much.” He ran a hand over his mouth, his gaze skipping from her naked form to the object between them. “I told you I would never do anal. And now I find that thing.” He turned, grabbing his keys from her desk with a sharp, definitive scrape of metal. “I need to leave.”
The door clicked shut behind him, a sound as final as a bone snapping. Leah didn’t move. The cold from the linoleum seeped up through her knees, anchoring her in the humiliating pose. She heard his footsteps recede down the hall, quick and deliberate, never faltering.
Any other man, she thought, her mind a shrill, hysterical static. Mike at the cabin, a stranger in a bar, WreckingBall from the forum—any of them would have been on her in a heartbeat. They would have used her nakedness, her kneeling submission, as an invitation to take. They would have grunted their approval, called her a good slut, fucked her raw right there on the floor. Bobby saw it and left. He saw her most vulnerable, most exposed offering, and he treated it like a problem he couldn’t solve.
A low, wounded sound escaped her throat. She rocked back onto her heels, her hands coming up to cover her face. The tears were hot and shameful. He’d left. Just like he’d left her emotionally gasping in the cabin after Mike, offering platitudes instead of passion. Now he’d left her physically, kneeling and naked, with the evidence of her corrupt desires glittering on the bedspread. The conflict was a nausea in her gut: she craved the very thing that repulsed the man she’d promised to marry.
She stood on unsteady legs. The room felt alien, a diorama of a life that didn’t fit. She picked up the plug, its silicone cold and vaguely tacky. She didn’t put it away. She carried it to her desk and set it beside her laptop, a perverse paperweight. Her reflection in the dark monitor was a blur of pale skin and tangled black hair.
“He doesn’t want me,” she whispered to the empty room. The truth of it was an icepick to the sternum. Not like this. Not the real, hungry, deviant core of her. Bobby wanted the curated Leah, the one who did Pilates and aced biochem and fake-moaned into his shoulder. The part of her that needed to be called a fat whore and split open on a stranger’s cock? He’d just walked out on that.
Her fingers, moving with a will of their own, opened the laptop. The screen lit her face. She didn’t go to the forum; that account was ash. Instead, she opened a private browser window. Her breathing was shallow. She typed a different site, one she’d glanced at with terrified curiosity before. A location-based hookup app, crude and efficient.
Her profile was blank. She used a cropped photo of her mouth, the same one from the forum. Her username was a random string of letters. She set her search parameters: men, 25-45, within 5 miles. The grid filled with faces. Smiling, scowling, shirtless in gym mirrors. Her heart hammered against her ribs. This was insanity. This was consequence.
This was consequence. The grid of faces was a gallery of potential endings, each one a door slammed shut on the fragile future she was supposed to want. Her thumb scrolled, a numb, mechanical motion. A guy with a beard and a dog. A torso in a locker room. A smirk in a car. Her stomach churned. This was pathetic. This was rock-bottom scraping. She slammed the laptop shut, the sound violent in the quiet room.
Disgust was a hot, sour tide in her throat. She stood up, pacing the three steps to her bed, her naked skin pebbling in the chill. She was better than this. She was Leah Chen, pre-med, 4.0, engaged. She grabbed her robe, wrapping the terrycloth around herself like armor. She should text Bobby. She should apologize. She should explain in some way that didn’t sound insane.
But the silence of the room was a taunt. It echoed with Bobby’s retreating footsteps, with the absence of the brutal noise she craved. The jewelled plug on the desk gleamed, a winking, accusatory eye. Her hands were trembling. Before her mind could form another coherent thought, her fingers were prying the laptop open again. The app was still there, on the screen. The private browser window, her shameful portal.
She reopened it. The grid reloaded. A new notification glowed at the top of the screen: "1 person within 0.1 miles of you." The proximity was an electric jolt. Her breath caught. It had to be another student in the dorm, someone else lonely and prowling in the late afternoon. A flare of connection, of shared depravity, shot through her. She clicked.
The profile loaded slowly. The main picture was not a face. It was a cock. Her brain processed the image in disjointed, shocking fragments. Enormous. It had to be eight and a half inches, thick and veiny, with a pronounced curve to the left. The head was a monstrous, purplish mushroom, glistening under harsh light. She stared, her mouth going dry. It was the most aggressively ugly, intimidating cock she had ever seen.
She scrolled down. Another photo. A bare, massive belly, pale and sprawling, covered in coarse dark hair, the waistband of grey sweatpants visible below it. The next: a mirror selfie in a dingy bathroom, the reflection capturing a wide, heavy face, a thick neck, a security guard’s shirt straining over a vast chest. The shirt badge was blurred, but the uniform was unmistakable.
Recognition arrived like a sucker-punch to the diaphragm. Bronson. The night security guard for her building. He sat in the ground-floor lobby from eight PM to four AM, a mountain of a man stuffed into a tiny plastic chair, his radio crackling with static. She passed him every evening, always offering a polite, tight smile as she swiped her keycard. He’d grunt, his small eyes following her to the elevator. He smelled of old sweat and cheap microwave meals. His presence was a dull, background fact of dorm life, a piece of furniture.
Here he was, on her screen. Bronson. His username was a crude pun involving his name and the word "gun." His bio read: “Hung security looking to patrol your tight holes. Discreet. On duty now.” The “0.1 miles” wasn’t a student. It was him, right now, sitting in the lobby directly below her room. On duty. His profile was a map of grotesque, ugly masculinity. And her body, traitorously, was reacting. A low, throbbing heat ignited between her legs, completely divorced from her mind’s revulsion. This was the forbidden fruit, rotten and overripe. This was the absolute negation of everything Bobby represented. This was the degrading truth she’d been hunting for.
A direct message bubble popped up on the screen. He’d seen her view his profile. The text was already there.
Bronson: see something u like, sweetheart?
Her fingers froze over the keyboard. She could see the faint, greasy imprint of a thumb on her screen, overlaying the image of his distorted, mammoth cock. The air in her room, usually smelling of laundry detergent and protein powder, seemed to suddenly carry the phantom odor of his unwashed uniform and stale breath. The quiet was no longer empty; it was thick with the hum of the building’s fluorescent lights, with the sound of his heavy breathing in the lobby, with the implicit, crushing weight of his body. Her engagement ring felt like a band of ice. She looked from the sparkling jewel of the plug to the pixelated, meaty head of his cock on her screen. The distance between her sterile life and this raw offering was exactly 0.1 miles, and one single, keystroke reply.
The cursor blinked. Bronson’s message was a concrete block of text in the sterile silence of her room. see something u like, sweetheart? Her whole body recoiled, a physical flinch that pulled her back from the screen. She snapped the laptop shut, the sound final and sharp. The grey metal lid reflected her own wide, frightened eyes back at her.
Leah stood up so quickly her robe belt came undone. She retied it with jerky, inefficient motions. She needed to reset. This was a madness born of Bobby leaving, of shame curdling into something reckless and toxic. She walked to the window, staring down at the rain-slicked parking lot below. Her engagement ring caught the watery light. She twisted it, the diamond scraping against her knuckle.
Her phone was on the nightstand, face down. She picked it up. The lock screen was a picture of her and Bobby from six months ago, smiling in front of a lake, his arm around her waist, squeezing. She tried to will the device to life, to feel it buzz with a notification, to see his name appear with an apology, with understanding, with anything. The screen remained dark and inert. He didn’t call. He didn’t text.
The silence in the room became a weight on her eardrums. She crossed to her tiny mini-fridge, its hum suddenly loud. She pulled out a bottle of cheap Pinot Grigio, half-full. She poured a generous glass, the liquid pale and cold. She didn’t sip it. She drank half of it in one long, desperate swallow, the acidity making her throat constrict. She set the glass down hard on the desk, right beside the glittering plug.
She looked from the plug to the closed laptop. The wine spread a low warmth in her stomach, but it did nothing to dull the sharper, more demanding ache between her legs. It was a relentless, throbbing hunger. She contemplated playing with herself ferociously, right there on the chair, to try and quench this lustful craving she had. Her hand slipped under her robe, fingertips skating over her belly. She imagined working herself to a swift, violent climax, thinking of nothing, just sensation.
But her mind wouldn’t empty. It supplied the image of Bronson’s cock, the dirty bathroom mirror, the strained security uniform. It conjured the smell of the lobby—industrial cleaner and old pizza boxes. The fantasy wasn’t clean or solitary. It was filthy and involved him. Her own fingers would be a pitiful substitute for the brutal, degrading reality she was flirting with. The craving wasn’t for release; it was for annihilation.
Her fingers, damp from where they’d brushed her own skin, opened the laptop again. The app was still there. His message was still there. The wine and the shame and the utter silence from Bobby fused into a single, decisive impulse. Her hands shook, but she typed.
Leah: maybe.
His reply was instantaneous.
Bronson: no maybe. ur the asian girl from 3rd floor. in the yoga pants. i watch u walk to the elevator.
The words glowed on the screen, an accusation that turned the sterile dorm room into a fishbowl. He knew her. He watched. Heat flooded Leah’s face, a shame so acute it felt like sunburn. Her fingers hovered, icy and numb. She thought of her polite, automatic smiles in the lobby, the way she and her roommate Jenna sometimes whispered a pitying “god, that guy” after passing his station. The air left her lungs.
Bronson typed again. The bubbles appeared, then his text.
“UR THE ASIAN BITCH WITH A FAT ASS AND MELON TITTIES. I JACK OFF TO YOU ALL THE TIME. I’VE ALSO HEARD YOU MAKING FUN OF ME WITH YOUR FRIENDS. NOT REALLY NICE.”
A violent shudder racked her body. The crude words were a physical slap, but they landed on skin already primed for degradation. Fat ass. Melon titties. The exact currency of her self-loathing, now being used as tender by a man she considered a furniture. He’d heard them laughing. Her mind spiraled, scrambling for a defense that wouldn’t form. This wasn’t a fantasy from a screen. This was consequence, living and breathing directly below her floor.
She should type sorry. She should log off. She should throw up. Her hand, moving with a will that seemed separate from her brain, typed a reply.
Leah: I didn’t mean it.
Bronson: yeah u did. u think ur better. little pre-med cunt. but ur on here talking to me.
She had no retort. The truth of it was absolute. Her eyes flicked to the jeweled plug, then to her dim reflection. The part of her that needed this, that had craved it since Bobby walked out, now clenched tight. This was the real degradation, far more potent than any forum roleplay. This was with a man she had to face tomorrow.
Leah: what do you want?
Leah: what do you want?
The reply came without delay, the words stark and brutal on the screen.
BRONSON REPLIES, “I WANT TO FUCK ALL YOUR HOLES, I WANT TO SPANK THAT ASS, HAVE YOU GARGLE MY BALLS, I WANT TO SUCK THOSE FAT TITTIES AND EAT YOUR ASS.”
LEAH FELT HERSELF GET IMMEDIATELY WET, WETTER THAN BOBBY EVER MADE HER. A shocking, humiliating rush of heat soaked through her robe, a direct physical capitulation to his filthy inventory. SHE KNEW THIS WAS WRONG. Her mind screamed it, a shrill alarm over the roar of her own pulse. SHE SHOULD CLOSE THE LAPTOP AND TAKE A COLD SHOWER.
Her hand shot out, not to close the laptop, but to grab her phone. SHE TRIES TO CALL BOBBY. It rang once, twice, three times. Each tone was a heartbeat. He answered on the fourth ring. His voice was muffled, distant. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said, her own voice thin and strained. “Where are you?” She could hear faint music and the low murmur of another voice in the background.
A pause. “I’m just… out. Getting some air.” Another pause, filled with static and her own ragged breathing. “I’m talking to Samantha. We ran into each other at the coffee shop.”
THIS UPSET LEAH. Samantha was her friend, technically, from her organic chemistry study group. She was willowy, sarcastic, and had always been a little too interested in Bobby’s opinion on her art projects. SHE KNEW BOBBY WAS VENTING TO HER ABOUT THEIR RELATIONSHIP. The betrayal was a double helix, twisting tighter. He was sharing their private rupture with a woman who had once called Leah “adorably earnest” in a tone that stripped the word of all warmth.
On her laptop screen, another message bubble from Bronson appeared. She didn’t read it. Bobby’s silence stretched, waiting for her to speak. The two realities—the crude, beckoning text and her fiancé’s polite alienation—collided in her skull.
LEAH THEN SAYS, “CAN YOU COME BACK TO MY DORM? SO WE CAN TALK?”
The silence on the line was heavier now. She could picture his face, the cautious downturn of his mouth, the way he’d be glancing at Samantha for some kind of cue. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea right now, Lee. We’re both really upset. I think we need some space tonight.”
Space. The word was a void. It was permission. It was an abandonment. “Okay,” she whispered, the sound barely making it past her lips.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and the line went dead.
She lowered the phone, staring at the black rectangle. The glow from the laptop painted her hands a sickly blue. She looked at Bronson’s unread message. The wetness between her legs was a palpable, shameful truth, a slick protest against Bobby’s retreat. He was getting “space” with Samantha. She was alone in her dorm with a security guard’s explicit fantasy and a body that was screaming for it.
Her finger touched the trackpad, scrolling the screen up. Bronson’s new message was simple.