The three of us

There are three of us in the house. There have always been three of us in the house. I am the one who never left.

Mom is Diane. Forty-two. She runs a calendar like it is a spine. Blazers. Quiet jewelry. Out before the coffee is decent, back after the kitchen has gone dark, and she will still say, “Sit up, please,” like I am on a call with her. She does not yell. She does not leave dishes. If something is wrong she puts it on a list. Last month she stood in my doorway with her bag still on her shoulder and said, “We need a plan for the year. I’m not doing this ad hoc.” Then her phone buzzed and the plan left with her.

Katie is twenty-two and treats the plan like a bit. Skinny in a way she hates. Straight hair she bleaches when a video tells her to. She films the same dance in the hallway until someone walks through the shot, then she groans, “Oh my God, can you not,” and starts over. A few hundred people follow her. She checks it like it might have changed.

She steals hoodies. She calls me “roommate” when she wants a rise. Yesterday she pushed my door with her foot and didn’t come in.

“You’re just going to sit there?”

“I’m busy.”

“You’re in bed.”

“Working.”

She filmed the side of my face anyway, dropped the phone, and said, “This is so embarrassing for you,” like I had asked to be in it. She didn’t post it. She never posts the ones of me. She just likes that I know she took them.

I am Evan. Twenty. I am supposed to be in school. I am not. I have a year I do not explain and a job I can do without standing up. I was already the soft one. Not pretty. Not built. I watch more than I talk. Katie talks enough for both of us. Mom talks like someone might be taking minutes.

That is the house. A woman who says please and means now. A girl who says embarrassing and means look at me. A son who says working and means leave.

Dinner

Mom made us sit down because she was actually home. Thai takeout already on plates so it would look like somebody had cooked. She had taken the blazer off and still looked like she might get asked a question. Katie was late. I was on time because I live twelve feet from the table.

“Sit up, please,” Mom said, before she even sat. Then, to the room: “Phones down. Thirty minutes.”

Katie dropped into her chair without putting the phone down. “I heard you. I’m in the middle of something.”

“You can be in the middle of dinner.”

I slid mine under the lip of the table until Mom looked at my hands. Katie set hers face-up next to the spring rolls, screen still lit. The TV was on mute behind her. Local news. Weather. A car lot. Then the headline changed and stayed changed.

WHITE WOMEN — UNKNOWN ILLNESS — CDC

Katie was turned around before Mom finished unfolding her napkin. “Wait. Wait, wait.” She got up, grabbed the remote off the counter, and hit volume in the middle of a sentence.

A woman at a desk saying it had a name now. BN-21. The anchor added Jungle Fever like she had lost an argument with somebody in her ear. White women. Arousal they could not shut off. An exclusive attraction to Black men. No vaccine. No treatment. Behind her: a clinic line, a map that looked like every other outbreak map, a hallway that could have been anywhere.

Mom set her fork down even with the plate.

“That’s enough.”

Katie did not sit. “It’s everywhere. Mom. It’s on my For You. Look.”

She shoved the phone across. A girl in a bathroom talking too fast. Cut. A girl laughing with her hand over her mouth. Cut. The same map. Comments already making the joke. Katie’s thumb did not stop.

“Katie.”

“What? I’m not— I mean that’s literally us. White women. That’s the whole thing.”

“We are not doing this at the table.”

“The table is in front of the TV.”

I had not said anything. Looking at either of them felt like picking a side, so I looked at the screen. The anchor said it could sit in you for four to six weeks before you felt it. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Stay home if you think you were around it. The words at the bottom of the screen said stay home again.

Katie snorted without looking at me. “Stay home. He’s got that part.”

“Katie.”

“What? I’m joking. He does.”

Mom stood, took the remote out of Katie’s hand, muted it, and put it on top of the fridge. She sat back down and lined the takeout box up with the edge of the table.

“We don’t have information. We don’t guess off television. If they publish something, I will read it. Sit. Eat.”

Katie sat. She ate two bites. Then she lifted her phone and filmed the silent TV over the rim of her plate.

“Do not post that.”

“I’m not posting. I’m—” She stopped. Started again. Stopped. “God, the lighting is disgusting in here.”

“Evan,” Mom said, because I had not picked up my fork. “You too.”

“I heard.”

“Then eat.”

I ate. On the silent screen the clinic line kept moving. A doctor in a navy suit came on and went away. Katie kicked me under the table, not hard.

“You’re being so weird,” she said, quiet enough that it was still for Mom to hear.

“I’m eating.”

“You’re staring.”

“The TV is on.”

“It’s muted.”

Mom closed her eyes for one second. When she opened them she was done with the subject.

“After dinner I will look at the CDC page. Until then this is a news story. It is not a household issue. Are we understood?”

Katie shrugged one shoulder. “Sure.”

I said, “Yeah.”

Katie lasted eleven minutes. Then she took her plate to the sink without rinsing it and started recording in the hallway.

“So apparently there’s like a freaky girl flu now? The news just said—” Delete. “Okay wait, start over. Don’t look at the laundry.” Delete. “Is this even a story if I don’t have it? That’s a terrible opener.”

Mom stood in the kitchen doorway with her own phone, already on a page with the blue header. She read. She did not read it out loud. At ten-thirty her door closed the way it always closed.

I sat on my bed and typed the name until it stopped looking made up. BN-21. Jungle Fever. White women. I watched the same bathroom clip Katie had shown us, and then I watched the next one, and then I told myself I was just catching up so I would not be the only person at breakfast who hadn’t.

That was the first night. Nobody in the house was sick. Nobody was locking anything extra. It was takeout, and a headline, and Mom putting the remote where Katie would need a chair, and Katie trying to make a video about it before she had anything to say.

Mom came home with it

For a week after the news nothing happened in the house except Katie refreshing and Mom saying she had read the page. She left at six-thirty. She came back after dark. She said “goodnight” from the hall and her door closed at ten-thirty.

Then she came home on a Thursday and did not do any of that.

I heard the garage a little after nine. Katie was filming in the hallway and did not pause for it. Mom’s bag hit the bench harder than it usually hits the bench. She stood in the kitchen with the light off and ran the tap and did not drink.

“You’re late,” Katie said, phone still up.

“I had a meeting.”

“You always have a meeting.”

Mom turned the light on. She looked like herself if you only looked at the blazer. The clip was still in. The jewelry was still quiet. She had taken her shoes off at the door and forgotten to line them up. She never forgets that.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“It’s nine.”

“I’m aware of the time.”

Katie lowered the phone. “Are you mad?”

“I am tired. Please do not film me.”

“I wasn’t—”

Mom was already in the hall. She did not say goodnight. The door closed at nine-oh-seven. I heard the lock.

Katie looked at me. “She never locks it.”

“I know.”

“Go ask if she’s dying.”

“You go ask.”

“I’m not asking. That’s your whole thing. You live here.”

I stood outside her door like an idiot. The house is small. You can hear someone sit down on a bed through a locked door. You can hear them not settle.

“Mom.”

“I’m fine, Evan.”

“You locked it.”

A pause that was too long to be nothing.

“I have a headache. I would like the house to be quiet. That includes Katie’s camera.”

Katie, from the hallway, not quiet: “I can hear you talking about me.”

“Goodnight.”

That was the first lock. In the morning she was in the kitchen before us with coffee and a full face and the shoes lined up, and she said, “I have an early call,” like the night had been a scheduling error. Katie rolled her eyes and stole my hoodie. I watched Mom’s hands on the mug. They were fine. They were too careful to be fine.

She was late again Friday. Saturday she did not come out until noon, which she has never done in this house. When she did come out she had changed into the weekend sweater and she still looked like she was waiting to be asked a question she did not want.

Katie said, “You look weird.”

Mom said, “That is not useful.”

She went back down the hall. The lock again.

Katie stood in my doorway with the hoodie sleeves over her hands.

“So is she like. You know.”

“She said a headache.”

“The news said four to six weeks.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“I’m just saying.” She filmed the closed door, then deleted it. “If she has the girl flu I’m putting it on my story. That’s actually content.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m joking. God.”

She was not only joking. I sat on my bed and did not look the name up again because I had already looked it up. I listened to the quiet behind the lock instead. Plastic, once. A drawer. Mom trying not to make a sound and making one anyway.

She told us at dinner on Sunday that she had a flu we did not need to catch. She said it the same way she says we are not doing this at the table. Katie laughed in her face. I looked at my plate.

She wouldn’t sit still

Mom kept going to work. Blazer, clip, shoes lined up. She also started leaving the table in the middle of sentences. She would stand at the sink with the water running and forget why. The lock started happening in the afternoon. Twenty minutes. Then the sweater pulled straight and “what do you want for dinner.”

Katie said, “You’re being so fucking weird.”

Mom said, “Language,” and left the room.

Saturday Katie didn’t come out. Door open. My hoodie. Face pink. Phone on her chest.

“Don’t be a creep.”

“You didn’t come out.”

“I feel insane. Is this what she has? Don’t answer. I know what she has.”

Mom stood in the doorway with the weekend sweater.

“You have a fever. You will stay hydrated. You will not post about this.”

Katie laughed and then didn’t. “You locked your door for a flu.”

“That is enough.”

“You look like I feel. That’s all I’m saying.”

Mom’s hand went white on the frame. She took it back. “Evan. Water. Do not stand there.”

I set the glass on the nightstand from a step away.

“It doesn’t go away,” Katie said. “I already tried. Go be a roommate somewhere else.”

Mom made us sit down that night. Takeout. She put the news on herself, volume up, remote in her hand.

A different anchor. Same map. They had a panel now. A doctor. A CDC slide with a bullet list she read like she wished it were flu steps.

White women only, as far as they knew. Onset after a quiet period. Then it did not stay quiet.

The first thing, she said, was that you did not come down. Not after sleep. Not after you took care of it yourself. The official word was persistent sexual arousal. She stumbled on it once and then committed. It did not answer to a partner you already had. It answered to Black men. Only that. They said exclusive. They said this was not a preference you could talk yourself out of. They said if you tried to go back to what you had before, it made it worse.

Katie made a sound and then put both hands over her mouth. Mom did not look at her.

The doctor said fertility was changing in some patients. Hair in some. Body in some. They showed a clinic hallway and a woman who would not give her name.

Then the program. Blue header. Sites opening for symptomatic white women. You signed. You showed ID. You left with a kit: a realistic device, their words, and cartridges of artificial semen, also their words. The anchor said the sentence like legal had approved it and hated it. Two to four hours of relief if you used it as directed. Not a cure. Not for men. Not to be shared. Supply was limited. Lines were already long.

Katie’s hands came down.

“They’re giving out dildos,” she said. “Black dildos. And fake cum. On television.”

“Katie.”

“Don’t Katie me. That’s what she said. That’s—” She laughed and it broke. “I can’t even think and they’re going to hand me one in a bag.”

Mom’s face had gone very still. Not composed. Still. The remote was shaking enough that she set it down.

“Turn it off,” Katie said.

Mom did not. The clip of the line kept going. A woman crying in a car. A man offscreen asking if his wife would be normal. The doctor said they did not use that word.

“I have to go there,” Mom said. It came out flat. Then, smaller, like she had not approved it: “I can’t work like this. I can’t—” She stopped. She never stops in the middle of a sentence.

Katie stared at her. “Oh my God. You already know.”

“I have a household to run.”

“You sat through that whole list. You sat through arousal. You sat through Black men. And you’re telling me it’s a flu.”

“We are not doing this at the table.”

Katie stood up so fast her chair hit the wall. “I have it. You have it. They just drew a picture of us. I’m not sitting here while she says fake semen.”

“Sit down.”

“I’m not sitting down. I’m going to throw up or I’m going to film this and I don’t know which is worse.”

“You will not film this.” Mom’s voice went up. It does not do that. “You will not put this house on the internet. In the morning I will go to the clinic and I will get what they are offering. You will wait until I see how it works. That is the process.”

“The process.” Katie wiped her face with the hoodie sleeve. “You need it tomorrow. I need it now. Don’t look at me like I’m the problem.”

Mom stood up too. For a second I thought she was going to leave the room the way she had been leaving rooms. She held the back of her chair instead.

“I am trying,” she said, “to keep us from coming apart in front of your brother.”

Katie looked at me like she had forgotten I was there.

“He’s fine,” she said. “It’s a girl thing. They’re literally only talking about us.” Then, meaner because she was scared: “Stop staring. You don’t get a kit.”

Mom muted the TV. The line kept moving without sound.

“Evan. Eat.”

I hadn’t picked up my fork. I picked it up.

Katie sat on the edge of the chair and did not eat. Mom stood at the sink with the water running and did not wash anything. In the morning she left before six-thirty with a bag that was not the work bag. Katie watched the door from the hallway and did not film it.

The house

Mom came back late morning with a paper bag from the clinic and a face that said do not ask. She went down the hall. The lock. Packaging. A pump bottle. Then the mattress, and her breathing through her teeth, and the wet sound of her fucking herself with what they had handed her. She came with her mouth closed. It still made it through the door. Twenty minutes. She came out in the blazer and started a sentence about rules and did not finish it.

Katie was on the couch. “Did it work.”

Mom put her keys in the dish and missed. “I came. I got a couple of hours. Then it starts crawling again. You will wait. They are backed up.”

“The dildo,” Katie said.

Mom looked at her and then at me and then at the wall. “I don’t know when they will have another. I can’t do this and you at the same time.”

That was new. She always knew.

She still left for work some mornings. Some days she didn’t make it out of the hallway. The lock happened whenever her body decided. I would be at my desk and hear the brass, the bottle, the toy going into her, Mom trying not to moan and doing it anyway. Once she said please through the wall. When she came out her mouth was tight and her thighs were careful and she asked if I had eaten. She stood too close to the counter and then too far from it.

Katie did not wait.

She took the kit while Mom was in the shower. Door open. I heard her laugh when she got the thing out of the bag, thick and black and shiny, and then the laugh stopped, and then she was on it, swearing into the pillow, coming loud enough that she had to bite the sleeve of my hoodie. Mom found her still sitting on the bed with it in her hand, the cartridge open on the nightstand, fake cum on her thigh.

“That is not yours.”

“I came. I’m still wet. That’s all your official cock does.”

“Put it back.”

“It’s fake, Mom. You know it’s fake. You just had it in you.”

Mom stood in the doorway holding the frame. She did not come in and take it for a minute.

“I can’t police you and myself at the same time,” she said. “Do not bring a man into this house. That is all I am asking.”

Katie said, “Okay.”

She went to the clinic the next afternoon. I know because she said it to her phone in the hallway.

“Okay so I went. The line is around the building. Women in work clothes. A girl crying in a Tesla. They said two hours if you’re lucky and they might run out of the fake cum before you get to the window. I’m not standing there holding a ticket for a dildo. That’s humiliating.” Delete. “Wait. Don’t say dildo. Start over.”

She left. She came back after dark. She started the video over with the door open.

“So I didn’t do the line. I found a guy. Black. That’s what all the comments are saying anyway, stop waiting for the CDC dildo and go get fucked.”

“The clinic one is a black cock they made in a factory. You fill it with the fake cum they hand you in little bottles. I used my mom’s. It stretches you, it feels stupidly good for like a minute, you come, and then you’re still dripping and your head is still buzzing and you want a person. The fake stuff doesn’t taste like anything and it doesn’t stay. It’s a toy with homework.”

“A real one is different. He put me on my back in the back seat and I didn’t care that it was a back seat. I was soaking through my shorts before he even got them off. He fucked me like he knew I wasn’t going to get this from a white guy anymore. Thick. Hot. I came on it and I still wanted him to keep going. When he came in me I felt it. That’s the part they don’t say on the news. You can feel it hit, and the noise in your cunt finally has somewhere to go. I could think. I could breathe. I wanted to thank him, which is disgusting, and I wanted him to do it again before I got out of the car.”

“The official kit is what you use when you’re scared. This is what actually shuts my body up. If my mom heard this she would kill me. Anyway like and follow or whatever.”

She posted some of it. Not that version. I heard the sound it makes when it goes up. Then she played the posted one back twice, laughing at her own face.

Mom was behind her door by then. I was on the bed between them. Katie talking about a man coming inside her. Mom on the other wall with the clinic dildo buried in her, the pump, her hips, a noise she tried to turn into a cough. She was fucking herself with the fake thing so she would not get in a back seat. She came anyway. She said sorry after, to the empty room, like that fixed it.

Katie knocked on my door with her foot.

“You can stop pretending you can’t hear her come on that thing. You can stop pretending you didn’t hear me talk about getting fucked.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re sitting there hard. Don’t be gross. It’s not about you.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“You were thinking it.” Phone already up. “If Mom asks, I stood in line.”

Mom did not ask. She came out later, looked at Katie’s shoes, not lined up, and left them. She opened her mouth. The official face lasted about a second.

Friday she still made us sit down. Takeout. She put the news on like the remote still meant something.

They talked about the lines. Women leaving before they got a kit. Women who had stopped coming back because getting fucked by a Black man worked better than the bottle. Then the graphic changed.

NEW MUTATION — WHITE MALES

A different slide. BN-21-S. Sissy variant, the anchor said, and hated saying it the same way she had hated Jungle Fever.

White men. The ones who got it were going soft. Muscle coming off. Faces rounding. Voices thinning. Their cocks shrinking and stopping. They could not get hard for white girls anymore, including the girls in their own houses. They were getting hard for Black men instead. Same exclusive pull. Same need. The doctor said some of them were already trying to use the women’s kits. The doctor said that was not authorized. The doctor said there was no male line, no male dildo, no official way to take the edge off.

The anchor said early reports. Do not panic. Then she read a list anyway. Loss of erection with women. Persistent arousal that pointed at Black men. Desire to submit. Prostate sensitivity. Stay home. Do not share a partner’s clinic cartridge. Report symptoms.

Katie’s phone was face-down for once.

Mom looked at me. Not the official look. The one she gets when a plan has a hole in it and she has not scheduled the hole yet. She did not say that is not this house. She just looked.

Katie looked too. She was already smiling, the mean small one.

“What,” she said. “You worried?”

Mom did not answer her. She was still on me.

Katie leaned back in her chair, amused, like the broadcast had been put on for her.

“Relax,” she said. “He’s fine.”

She did not sound like she believed it. She sounded like she wanted to watch and find out.

Fine

I told myself it was the house. You live between your mother coming on a clinic dildo and your sister talking about a stranger finishing inside her, your body is going to do something stupid. That was the story for about two days.

Then my jeans were loose in the thigh. My voice had that thin edge on a call and I cleared my throat and it was still there. Katie walked past in the hoodie that did not cover her ass anymore and I got hard in the hallway. Not for my sister. For the smell on her. Sex. A man. I went to my room and wrapped my hand around my cock the way I had since I was fifteen.

I came looking at Black men fucking white girls. I came looking at comments I should have closed. I came and it did not clear. I was still leaking. I was still aching. My cock looked smaller in my fist than it had last month. My balls sat tight and wrong. I told myself I was imagining that. I was not imagining that.

Katie noticed my face first. She always does.

“You’re pink,” she said from the doorway, eating yogurt. “You finally jerking off about it or did you catch the sissy thing.”

“Go away.”

“That’s not a no.” She looked at my lap. “The TV said it shrinks. Does it shrink. Show me.”

“Katie.”

“I’m joking.” She licked the spoon. “I’m also not. You look like Mom when she says she has a call and then goes down the hall to stuff that black cock in her pussy.”

Mom looked like Mom less and less.

She stopped making it to the office three days that week. Clip in, blazer on, keys in her hand, and then she would turn around and lock the door and fuck herself with the official dildo until her legs shook. Sometimes twice before noon. I heard the bottle. I heard the wet. I heard her come with her mouth against the pillow and still make a sound. Once she cried after, one ugly breath, then the sink, then, “I have to send an email,” like the email was why she was wet through her slacks.

The kit was not holding. Two hours became one. She stood at the stove and forgot the burner. She left a meeting on mute and a man on the other end said her name and she closed her eyes like he had put a hand on her. At dinner she kept shifting in her chair. Her nipples showed through the blouse. She caught me seeing it and yanked the blazer shut until a button complained.

“Do not,” she said.

I had not said anything.

Katie was getting worse the other way. The hoodie did not fit. Ass, hips. She filmed the new shape in the bathroom and kept some of it. Her hair was going darker and curling whether she bleached it or not. She came home with her mouth red and her shorts stuck to her and she talked over dinner about how many times he had come in her.

“Three,” she said. “I could think on the drive back. I could feel it running down my thigh in the seatbelt. Then I got in the door and my cunt started buzzing again. That’s the scam. You get an hour of being a person and then you need another load.”

“Katie,” Mom said. It did not have any weight.

“What. He can hear me through the wall. He heard me say he fucked me in a car and came in me. He’s hard right now. Look at him.”

“I am not.”

“You are.” She leaned on my chair. She smelled like cum and vanilla. “Does it even get all the way up anymore or is it just that sad little thing you hide under the laptop.”

Mom said, “Leave your brother alone.”

Katie waited to see if there was more. There wasn’t. Mom got up and went down the hall. The lock. The dildo going into her. A moan she did not bother to swallow.

Katie smiled at me, close.

“She’s not going to save you. She’s in there with that official black dildo in her cunt so she doesn’t go get fucked for real. Spoiler. She is going to go get fucked for real. She’s going to let a Black guy split her open and come in her until she can think, same as I did in that car. The fake cum is already boring her. I can hear it. She comes and she’s still dripping and she’s still empty. That’s how it starts. Next time she leaves the house it’s not for a meeting.”

She glanced down the hall, toward Mom losing it through her teeth.

“And you’re sitting here with your little dick in your hand listening to both of us. Don’t look at me like that. You want to know what it felt like when he came in me. That’s why you’re hard.”

I went to my room. I tried again. White girls did nothing. The old stuff did nothing. A clip of a Black man pulling out of a white girl and I was dripping on my stomach before I had a rhythm. I came weak, a dribble, and stayed aching. I opened the BN-21-S page and the list was just my afternoon. Softer. Smaller. Pointed at the wrong men. No clinic. No kit with my name on it.

Katie opened the door without knocking.

“Jesus. You’re already on the boy page.”

“Get out.”

“Make me.” She didn’t come in. She didn’t have to. “If you steal Mom’s dildo and fuck your ass with it I’m telling. That’s pathetic. Go find a Black guy and let him use you like I did. At least that’s honest.”

“I don’t have it.”

She looked at my hands. I had already pulled my shirt down.

“Sure,” she said. “You’re fine.”

Down the hall Mom came again, loud, wet, not sorry enough to be quiet. Katie laughed under her breath and left me with the page still open.

The page on the door

The update came through on a Saturday. Mom had the official site open on her laptop at the table like it was still a work problem she could put on a list. Chastity for infected white males. Observational data. Men who finished several times a day were changing faster. Lock the cock. No erections. No ejaculation. Remove only to clean.

She read it out loud. She did not look at me until the last sentence.

“They think if you stop coming it slows down,” Katie said. She was in the hoodie that was losing the fight with her ass. “That’s cute.”

“It is the guidance,” Mom said. She still said guidance. It just did not sound like it used to. She had the clinic bag on the chair next to her. She kept glancing at it. “Evan. We are going to follow it.”

“I don’t need—”

“You have been in your room with the door shut. I can hear you. I can hear what you are watching.” Her face went pink and she hated that I saw it. “I cannot have you making this worse while I am trying to keep this house from—” She stopped. Swallowed. “Please do not argue with me.”

Katie leaned her chin on her hand. “She’s going to put a lock on your dick, roommate. That’s so humiliating I might actually post it.”

“You will not post it,” Mom said. Then, weaker: “Katie. Please.”

Katie smiled and did not promise.

Mom ordered the cage the same afternoon. It arrived in a plain box two days later. She stood in my doorway with it like she was delivering a contract. Plastic, cheap, pinker than anything she would have bought on purpose. A little ring. A little tube. A little padlock.

“This is not a punishment,” she said. “This is medical.”

Katie, from the hall: “It’s a chastity cage for your baby’s shrinking cock. You can say it.”

Mom closed her eyes. Opened them. “Put it on. I will hold the key.”

I sat on the bed. My cock was already half up from the conversation, which made the whole thing worse. It took a minute. It did not take a big minute. There was more room in the tube than there should have been for a twenty-year-old. Katie watched from the frame and made a noise that was almost a laugh and almost a moan.

“Oh my God. It really is smaller.”

“Get out,” I said.

“Make me. You’re locked. What are you going to do.”

Mom told her to go. Katie went as far as the hallway. I heard her start a video and delete it.

The padlock clicked. Mom put the key on the same ring as the car key, which was an insane thing to do, and then she looked at my face and looked away.

“I am trying to help you,” she said. “Do not take it off. Do not use my kit. Do not do what your sister is doing.”

“I’m not her.”

“I know.” She did not sound sure. She left. Ten minutes later her door locked and I heard the dildo and her coming with her fist against the wall, and the key to my cock was in the kitchen in a bowl with the spare change.

The first night I thought I could wait it out. I could not. Everything in the house went straight to my prostate and stayed there. Katie in the shower, talking to herself about how wet she still was. Mom on the official cock. A Black man on my screen I was not allowed to finish to. The cage got tight when I swelled and then I swelled more because it was tight. I leaked into it. I turned over. I put a pillow between my thighs and that made it worse.

Katie opened my door in the morning and looked at the outline under the sheet.

“Did you sleep.”

“Go away.”

“That’s a no.” She sat on the end of the bed without asking. “Mom thinks if your dick can’t come, you won’t turn into a girl. The comments say the opposite. They say you start thinking about your ass. They say you start looking at the kit.”

“I’m not looking at the kit.”

“Yet.” She flicked the sheet, not hard, just enough that the plastic tapped my thigh. “Cute. Pink. Matches your energy.”

Mom tried to run breakfast. Coffee. Clip. “How did you sleep.” I said fine. Katie said he didn’t. Mom’s mouth tightened and she went down the hall with the bag before the coffee finished dripping. We ate to the sound of her fucking herself so she could come back and ask about breakfast.

Day three I could not work. I sat at the laptop and did not type. The ache had moved behind my cock, deeper, a pulse every time Katie laughed in the other room. I watched a clip of a Black man spreading a white girl and my hips tried to lift into nothing. I shoved a hand back, under myself, just to see, and the pressure made my mouth open.

I took the hand away like it had burned.

Katie was in the doorway. Of course she was.

“There it is,” she said, soft and delighted. “That’s the part they don’t put on the CDC page. Your dick’s in jail so your ass starts applying for the job.”

“Get out.”

“When you steal her dildo,” she said, already turning away, “don’t use the last cartridge. She’s unbearable when she runs out.”

Mom came out of her room flushed, keys in her hand, the lock on my cock still the only official thing she had managed all week.

Already wet

The cage had been on four days. I had not come. I had also not slept, not really. The house would not let me.

Mom in the afternoon with the official cock, coming into a pillow and still making that sound. Katie in the shower talking to herself, I’m still dripping, I need him to come back. Then Katie leaving in the shorts that did not cover her and slamming the front door.

I had a video open. I told myself I was only looking because everyone was looking.

A girl in a bathroom mirror first. Bleached hair. Queen of Spades on her hip. Talking like Katie talks.

“So I was going to dump him,” she said. “He’s white. He’s small. He kept crying about me fucking Black guys. I was like, fine, then get out. Then I felt bad. I told him if he hated it so much he should come see what made it so good instead of sitting on the bed being a bitch about it.”

Cut. A bedroom. Her on her back. A Black man in her, slow, deep. She is soaked. She keeps looking at the corner of the bed.

The boyfriend is there. White. Soft already. Sitting where she told him to sit. His cock is out and it is not doing anything useful. He has one hand on it and he looks like he is going to be sick and like he is going to come and cannot do either.

“See?” she says, and she moans on the cock when she says it. “That’s what I need. That’s what you can’t do. Watch him fill me up. Watch.”

He watches. The man fucks her through an orgasm and then another and then he pulls out and comes on her pussy and pushes it back in with his fingers. She laughs. She looks at the boyfriend.

“Your turn. Come here. Taste it. I want you to know why I’m wet all the time.”

He does it. On his knees. His ass is in the air without him meaning it to be. He licks her out while she holds his hair and tells the camera he is already better like this. The Black man is still hard. He puts a hand on the boyfriend’s hip like the question has already been answered.

The girl says, “You don’t have to. You can go pack.”

He does not go pack.

Cut. Same room, later. The boyfriend is on his back where she was. His cock is small and soft. The man is in his ass. The girl is next to them with two fingers in herself, talking over it.

“He said he only wanted to see. Then he said just the tip. Then he said he could feel it in his stomach. Now he texts the guy before I do. We’re both sluts. We go out together. We take turns. Sometimes we take it at the same time. He’s growing tits. His dick doesn’t work on me anymore. He doesn’t care. He gets off when he gets fucked. I get off watching my ex turn into another hole.”

She kisses the boyfriend’s mouth while he is getting railed. He makes a sound I felt in the cage. She looks at the lens.

“If your man is being weird about Jungle Fever, don’t dump him. Put him at the end of the bed and let him see what a real cock does. He’ll either leave or he’ll end up like this. Mine ended up like this.”

I watched it twice. Then I watched the part where the man first pushed into him. Then I watched the part where the girl said another hole. My hand went to the cage because that was the old move. The plastic was already slick on the inside from how much I had leaked. There was nothing to hold. I squeezed. It hurt. It did nothing for the ache behind it.

My other hand was on my stomach. Then lower. Then behind me, under the waistband, without me deciding it.

I was wet.

Not sweat. Slick. My hole was soft and open like it had been waiting, and when the pad of my finger touched it the muscle sucked instead of fighting. I pushed in. Easy. Too easy. Warm. I made a noise I did not like and bit the pillow. On the laptop the boyfriend was still getting fucked and the girl was still talking and I put a second finger in because the first one was not enough. Then a third. I was fucking myself on my hand to their video, dripping down my wrist, and I still could not get to the spot that was pulsing. Close. Not there. I dragged over it once and my whole body jerked and I almost cried.

Katie’s car was not in the driveway. I had heard it leave. Mom’s door was shut. The brass lock. The shower was running.

I stood up. My fingers were shiny. I wiped them on my shirt like that made me a person again and it did not.

The bag was in her nightstand. I knew because I had heard the drawer every day. I opened her door without knocking because if I thought about knocking I would go back to my room and put three fingers in myself until I went crazy.

She was not in the bed. The bag was on the floor like she had dropped it on the way to the shower.

Black. Thick. Heavier than it looked on the news. Cartridges in a row, one of them already half gone. I took the cock and one bottle and I left the door how I found it.

In my room the video was still playing. The girl saying they go out together now. I got on my knees because that was how the boyfriend had ended up. I poured the fake cum over the head of it and it ran cold down the shaft and over my knuckles. I put it against myself and I was still wet enough that it started in without me having to push like I thought I would have to push.

I did push. I took it. It went deeper than my fingers and when it dragged over that spot I had been missing I came in the cage without coming, a helpless pulse, a leak, a sound into the blanket. I fucked myself with my mother’s clinic dildo until my arms shook. The fake stuff did not feel like what Katie described when a man came in her. It still took the worst of the noise down. For the first time in four days I could think.

I pulled it out shaking. I wiped it on a shirt. I put it back in the bag and the bag back by the nightstand and the drawer most of the way closed. The shower was still running. On the screen the girl kissed her ex while he got used.

On the bed my hole stayed open. The cage was a mess. I told myself I would not do it again.

Katie’s car turned into the driveway while I was still washing my hands.

My own

I used it again the next day. And the day after that. Whenever the shower ran. Whenever Katie’s car left. The official cock and the bottle that did not smell like anything. On my knees. Then on my back with my feet up because that made it go deeper. I came in the cage every time, that useless pulse, and after each one my balls felt lighter. Emptier. Like something had been used up and was not coming back.

I noticed. I did not stop.

It felt good. That was the whole report. The ache went quiet. My head cleared. My hole stayed soft and I could work for an hour and then I would hear Mom through the wall and I would get the bag again. I wiped it. I put it back. I sat on my bed with my hand on my empty-feeling sack and I thought, fine. Whatever it takes. I can live like this.

My hair was already in my mouth when I bent over. It had been getting longer for weeks. I stopped pushing it behind my ears.

Wednesday Mom stood in the kitchen with the travel tote and the clinic bag already inside it.

“Dallas. Two nights. There is food. Katie, no people in this house. Evan, you will leave my things alone.”

She looked at me when she said things. She had the key on the car ring. She took that too.

I said, “Okay.”

I meant: do not take the bag.

She took the bag.

Katie lasted forty minutes. Then the shorts, the phone, the driveway. Target, she said.

The house went quiet. The quiet was worse than the wall. I lasted until dark. I put three fingers in myself on the bathroom floor and I could not get there. I cried, once, angry, and then I went into Katie’s room.

I did not take the shoebox. I took a dress. Tights. A bra that sat wrong and still made a shape. Her sandals. I did my mouth with a product I found on her sink. I did not need a wig. In the mirror my hair was already in my face, dark, long enough that the neckline looked like a choice. I looked like the boys on the page. I looked like I could stand in a women’s line if nobody asked me to speak.

The line was around the building. Work clothes. A girl crying in a car. A woman behind me saying they were already short on cartridges. A woman in front of me saying her husband would lose it if she brought a man home. I folded my arms over the bra and said nothing.

The window was a woman with a badge. She asked a name. I gave her one I made up in the lot. She looked at my throat. At my hair. At the way the dress sat on a body that had already gone soft.

“Kits are for symptomatic women.”

“I know.”

She slid the bag across. She had decided not to have the fight.

“Do not share. Next.”

I did not take the dress off in the car. I did not take it off in the house. I locked my door and sat on the floor and filled the official cock from my own bottle. I was wet before it touched me. I took it. I came in the cage in my sister’s dress with my hair stuck to my mouth and my balls pulled up tight and emptier again, and I did not care. It felt great. That was the sentence. It felt great.

I used the second cartridge before Katie got home. Still in the dress. Same pulse. Same lighter feeling underneath. I looked in the closet mirror after and I thought about Dallas and I thought about how I was going to hide the bag and I still had the dildo in my hand.

Her car. I shoved everything under the bed. I got the dress onto a chair. I sat at the laptop in a shirt like I had been working.

On the porch she laughed into her phone.

“Some of the girls in line don’t even look like girls anymore. Anyway I didn’t go.”

She paused at my door on the way past.

She did not open it.

Not yet.

Pretty pathetic

Mom came home Tuesday with the tote and a face that said the meetings had not been meetings the whole time. She put the clinic bag back in the nightstand. She did not ask me anything. She locked the door and I heard the bottle before she had even taken the blazer off.

Katie watched her go down the hall and then looked at me.

“You’re being quiet,” she said.

“I’m working.”

“Sure.”

I waited until she was in the shower. I got the dress on because I had started needing it, which I was not going to think about. My hair in my face. My own bag under the bed. The official cock slick with the last of a cartridge. I sat on it on the floor in front of the closet mirror because I wanted to see, and I bounced the way the boys in the videos bounced, and the cage clicked against my thigh, and I had my mouth open.

I did not hear the door.

I heard her laugh.

“Yeah,” Katie said. “This is how all white boys end up now. Pretty pathetic, right?”

I turned. Her phone was already up. I came in the cage while I was looking at the lens, that helpless pulse, the dildo still in me, the dress around my waist. I made the sound. She recorded the sound. She recorded me trying to get off it and not being able to, legs shaking, fake cum running out of me onto her old tights.

“Katie—”

“Hold on. That’s so good. Your face.”

“Don’t—”

She stopped the recording and did not put the phone down.

“Please don’t post that.”

“Why. It’s content. The comments would lose their minds. Locked baby dick, CDC cock, sister’s dress. That’s a whole story.”

“Please.” I was still on the floor. I could hear how I sounded. “I’ll do whatever. Just don’t put it up.”

Katie leaned on the doorframe and watched me wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Fine,” she said. “I won’t post it.”

I closed my eyes.

“If you talk to Mom.”

“About what.”

“About me bringing guys here. Black guys. She keeps saying not in this house and then she goes in there and fucks herself quiet. I’m tired of cars. I’m tired of pretending. You go tell her it’s fine. You live here. That’s your whole thing. She listens to you when she doesn’t want to listen to me.”

“She doesn’t listen to me.”

“She will if you look like that while you ask.” Katie smiled. “Get dressed. Or don’t. I don’t care. But you’re doing it tonight. If you don’t, I’m posting the bounce.”

Mom was in the kitchen with a mug she was not drinking. The clip was in. The blouse was losing. She looked at my hair and my mouth and she knew I had been doing something. She did not ask.

“Can I talk to you.”

“I have a call in ten.”

“Katie wants to bring men here.”

Mom’s eyes closed. Opened. “We have discussed this.”

“Black men,” I said. “She wants to get fucked here instead of in a car. She’s going to keep doing it anyway. If it’s here you don’t have to wonder where she is.”

I did not say: she has a video of your son coming on a clinic dildo in her dress.

Mom stared at the mug. Down the hall her bag was waiting. I could see her attention sliding toward it already, toward the lock, toward the hour she could think.

“I don’t care,” she said. Then she heard herself and tried to make it a rule. “She will not do it in the living room. She will not film me. I am not cooking for anyone.”

“So yes.”

“Yes. Fine. Yes.” She set the mug down too hard. “I have to—” She did not finish. She was already moving. The brass. The bottle.

Katie was in the hallway. She had heard enough.

“See,” she said, soft. “Pathetic works.”

She held up the phone, not playing it, just so I knew it was still there.

“I’m going out. When I come back I’m not coming back alone. You can stay in your room and listen. You’re good at that.”

I went back to the dress on the floor and the bag under the bed. I could still feel where I had been sitting on it. I sat on the mattress and waited for the front door.

The lot

Katie came back after eleven with a man who had to duck in the doorway. Black. Older than her. He looked at the house like he had been in houses like this. He looked at me in the hallway like I was part of the furniture.

“This the brother.”

“That’s the roommate,” Katie said. “He’s shy.”

The man smiled with one side of his mouth. “He’s staring.”

I said I was going to bed. My voice did the thin thing. He laughed, not unkind, and followed her down the hall. Her door stayed open because her door stays open.

I heard the mattress. I heard her tell him to wait, wait, and then not wait. I heard him fuck her the way the videos fucked girls, heavy, unhurried, her trying to talk on the phone about it and dropping the phone. She came loud. He did not stop. She said in me and he did, and she made the sound she had made in the car, the one about being able to think.

I was on my bed with the last cartridge on the official cock and I could not keep the rhythm because I kept listening. The cage hurt. I came anyway, useless, and the quiet lasted twenty minutes. Then I heard them start again.

He came out at two for water. I was in the kitchen because I had told myself I needed water too. He was in his underwear. He looked at the cage under my shorts the way people look at a joke they have already heard.

“She said you had a lock on it.” He drank. “That working out.”

I did not answer.

“You want to watch, you can watch,” he said. “She don’t care. You want to do more than watch, you say something. I’m not chasing a boy in a hallway.”

Katie yelled his name. He winked at me and went back.

The second one, two nights later, was younger. He called me sweetheart when I opened the door. He pinched the air near my hip and said, “Damn, they really do go like that.” Katie pulled him past me by the belt.

“Don’t tease him. He’ll come in his little cage.”

“I’m teasing him because he’ll come in his little cage.”

I used the last official bottle that night with my forehead on the floor and her headboard hitting the wall. In the morning the bag was empty and my balls felt like there was nothing left to empty and I still could not think.

The clinic line was shorter. That should have been good. At the window the woman with the badge did not even look at my ID.

“Cartridges are out. Devices too. Try Friday.”

“I need—”

“Friday. Next.”

I stood in the lot with the empty bag and Katie’s dress under my hoodie and I was going to get in the car and put three fingers in myself in the driveway if I had to.

He was on the low wall by the handicap spots. Black. Patient. He had been watching the door.

“They ran out,” he said.

I nodded.

“You one of the boys.” Not a question. “I seen you last week. Hair. Dress. You don’t have to go back in there.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking.”

He stood up. He did not touch me yet.

“You need it in you or you need it in your mouth first. Boys who come out of there empty usually need it in their mouth first. Takes the edge off. Then you can think about the rest.”

I told myself mouth only. Once. So I could drive home.

We went to the side of a van that was not his, or was. He opened his pants. He was already hard. Thick. The smell of him hit the same place Katie’s hallway hit. I got on my knees on the asphalt because my legs had decided that. I had not sucked a cock before. I did it like the girlfriend in the video had told her ex to do it. I choked. He held my hair, the long hair, and used my mouth until I stopped trying to do it correctly.

“That’s it. Take it. You came here for this.”

When he came it filled my mouth and I swallowed because I did not know where else to put it. Heat. Salt. It went down and sat in my stomach the way the fake stuff had never sat anywhere. My cage pulsed. My hole clenched on nothing. I could think. I could also feel something in me settle that was not going to unsettle.

He zipped up. He tapped my cheek with two fingers.

“You run out again, you don’t stand in that line. You come find me. Next time I’m not wasting it in your throat.”

I drove home with my mouth tasting like him and my dress stuck to my back. Katie’s door was open. She looked at my face and she knew.

She did not say I told you so.

She said, “Was it better than the bottle.”

I went to my room and shut the door and sat on the floor and did not answer her.

The mark

I went back to the lot on Friday. The window still had nothing. He was on the wall. I did not pretend I was there for the line.

Mouth only. Again. I swallowed. I drove home able to think. In the mirror that night my face was rounder. My chest was tender when the shirt dragged. I told myself that was the bra I had worn in line.

I went back again. And again. I stopped going to the window first. He started texting from a number I did not remember giving him. You empty? I was always empty.

Katie watched me come in the fourth time and tipped her head.

“You’re walking different.”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re glowing, roommate. That’s cum. I know what it looks like on you now.”

Mom looked at me over a mug and said, “Your hair,” and then lost the sentence. She went down the hall. The lock.

The mark showed up on a Thursday. Low on my belly, left of where the cage had been, a dark patch I thought was a bruise from the bed. I rubbed it. It did not fade. In the morning it had an edge. Not a full spade. The start of one. I had seen it on Mom when she reached for a mug. I had seen it on Katie when she wore the shorts.

I pulled my shirt down. I left it down.

Katie took the bag that afternoon. I know because I got on my knees for the official cock and put my hand under the bed and there was carpet.

She left a note on the desk.

Get it from him. That’s what you’re doing anyway.

Saturday the update came through. Mom read it at the table without any fight left in her. The chastity guidance was withdrawn. Observational data had gone the other way. Locked men were showing up at the same clinics, the same lots, the same bedrooms. Take the cage off if you want. It does not save you.

She put the key on the table. She did not look at me.

I took it off in the bathroom. My cock looked smaller than the last time I had seen it free. I sat on my bed with it in my hand and opened the old tabs, the girls I had used before any of this. Nothing. I opened Katie’s kind of video. Black men. White girls. White boys with their knees up. I got a weak stir and then nothing I could use. I stroked until it hurt. I stayed soft. I stayed aching.

Katie stood in the doorway and laughed until she had to hold the frame.

“Oh my God. You can’t even.”

“Get out.”

“You swallowed four loads this week and you thought your dick was going to work. That’s so sad I might film it.”

“Don’t.”

“I already have one video. Relax.” She wiped her eyes. “Go to the lot. That’s the only thing that gets you off. We can all hear it. Your little empty balls and your wet ass. Just go.”

I went.

Where it stays

He was on the wall. He saw my face and he did not offer his mouth.

“Told you,” he said. “Throat’s a tease. You want it to last, you take it where it stays.”

I said I needed to think.

“Then bend over.”

The van again. Or a different van. He pushed my shorts down. The cage was gone and there was still nothing there that mattered. He put two fingers in me and laughed.

“You’re soaked. You been walking around like this?”

I nodded into my arm.

He replaced his fingers with his cock and I stopped having an opinion. Thick. Hot. Deeper than the official thing. He fucked me like he had fucked Katie through the wall, unhurried, one hand on my hip, and when he dragged over the spot I had been chasing with my fingers I came without my cock doing anything, a full-body stupid shake, dripping on the dirt.

“There it is.”

He did not stop. He came in me. I felt it hit, the way Katie had said you feel it hit, and the noise finally had somewhere to go. He held me there so I would not lose it. Then he pressed a plug in after himself, thick enough that I gasped, and tapped it once.

“That keeps you quiet till morning. You pull it out tonight, you’re going to be on your knees in the kitchen at two. Leave it.”

I drove home sitting forward. Full. Plugged. Trying not to look like I was driving home full and plugged. Katie was on the couch. She looked at how I walked.

“He fuck you.”

I did not answer.

“He plug you.”

I went down the hall. Mom’s door was shut. I passed it dripping and she did not open it.

I slept on my side. I woke up still full. I woke up different.

Glad

The mirror in the morning was not a discussion. Hips. Chest with a real shape under it. Face. The mark on my belly had gone darker overnight, the notch of the spade filling in. My cock was a soft useless thing against my thigh. My hole held the plug like it had a job.

I thought about Mom seeing it. I thought about Katie seeing it. Then the thought finished itself. I didn’t care. I was glad.

I took the plug out in the shower and had to put my hand on the tile. What ran out of me was not fake. I put the plug back because I wanted to think through breakfast.

Katie stared at me over cereal.

“You look like a girl,” she said. Not mean. Interested.

Mom looked at the mark where my shirt had ridden up and she opened her mouth and closed it. She went to work with the clip in and the blouse losing.

I texted the number. You empty? I wrote back: come here.

He came here. In the afternoon. Katie was out. Mom was not. She passed us in the hall and she said nothing. She locked her door. I took him to my room and I got on my back and I let him use me on the bed I had grown up in. He came in me. He plugged me. He left.

I did it again the next day with a different one. And the next.

I stole one of Katie’s on a Thursday.

He was in the hallway looking at her open door and then he looked at me. I had the shorts on and the mark showing and the plug already in from the morning. He followed me instead of her. She stood there in the Queen of Spades shorts and watched a man choose the brother who used to hide.

“You bitch,” she said.

She still left her door open that night. The house only has so many rooms.

Mom still cooks. She still leaks when they go past her. The mark she hides is bigger than Katie’s. I have one I don’t hide. When I get hard now it is not for a woman and it is not for the reason I used to want.

I live here. They live here. The official kits are in a bag nobody bothers to hide.