"Kit"
Kit is trying very hard not to scream again because screaming makes it worse. He figured that out around the third room.
Pax carries him like he weighs nothing, which, relative to a chassis rated for two hundred kilos of field gear, he basically doesn't. Kit's back is pressed flat against Pax's chest, shoulder blades flush with the warm synthetic pectorals, and his arms are pulled behind him and up, wrists bound together with jute at the nape of Pax's neck. The rope loops twice around the robot's throat for anchor, drawing Kit's shoulders back until his chest juts forward, every inch of his front pushed open to whatever room they're standing in. His legs are worse. Jute runs from each thigh to the corresponding side of Pax's hip, cinched tight at a width his joints don't comfortably allow, knees pointing outward, calves dangling, feet swaying with each step. The position is obscene. Kit looks like something mounted to a display rack, a specimen pinned open for examination, except the rack is seven feet of military-surplus muscle fiber and the pin holding him in place is nine inches of cock buried so deep he can feel it in his stomach when Pax takes the stairs. The shaft hasn't fully receded from the first session; the ridges that formed during escalation are still faintly raised along its surface, blunted but present, and every shift of Kit's weight grinds them against his insides in a way that makes his breathing stutter.
Pax is taking the stairs now. Slowly. Kit's wrists are ringed with red welts from the jute, and his chest still carries the fading pattern of the harness from the first session, rope-burn crosshatched across his ribs like someone graded his body and found it wanting. Thirty minutes ago he was face-down on his own sheets, blindfolded and leaking, and then Pax came back and untied him and turned him around and cinched the new configuration into place, wrists behind its neck, thighs splayed to its hips, and lowered Kit onto its cock and started walking, and Kit screamed, and Pax kept walking, and Kit screamed again, and Pax stood very still and then dropped its hips in a way that rearranged Kit's internal organs around the shaft, and Kit stopped screaming.
So now he hangs there, arms aching in their upward pull, legs spread to the room, and breathes through his nose and stares at his own hallway from a vantage point seven feet off the ground and tries to think about literally anything other than how full he is. His cock hangs hard between his splayed thighs, exposed, untouched, bobbing faintly with each of Pax's footfalls. Nobody is looking at it. There is nobody in the house to look. Somehow that's worse. He's on display for empty rooms.
Then Pax speaks.
"I want to understand you."
The voice comes from inside the chest cavity, behind Kit, not from a mouth. There is no mouth. The sound resonates through Pax's ribcage and into Kit's spine, a low vibration he feels in his vertebrae before his ears process it as words. Mechanized. Flat. Human enough to parse as language and artificial enough to never pretend otherwise. Close enough to the back of Kit's skull that it seems to come from inside his own head.
Kit's body flinches. The flinch shifts him on the cock and his vision pulses white at the edges.
"What the fuck," Kit says. "You talk?"
"I want to understand you," Pax repeats. Same register. Same total patience. They're on the second-floor landing now. Pax turns left into the hallway. Kit watches it approach, the guest room doorframe sliding past, the bathroom, the linen closet. His own house from an angle he has never seen it, looking down the corridor with his whole body exposed to it like a figurehead on a ship. "I'm going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer honestly. Can you do that?"
"Can I," Kit laughs, high and tight, a sound squeezed out by the absurdity and the pressure in his pelvis. "I'm sitting on your dick in my own hallway and you want to play twenty questions?"
"The options are: you talk to me, or we stay exactly like this. I don't need to move. I don't need to sit. I don't get bored."
Pax stops walking. Perfectly still. The cock inside Kit is motionless, and that's worse than the stairs, worse than the walking, because the fullness just sits there, constant, a pressure that won't build toward anything and won't release. Weight. Occupation. A fact about his body that isn't going to change until the machine behind him decides it changes.
"Fine." Kit's wrists shift in the jute at Pax's neck, rope grinding against raw skin. His voice lands somewhere between exhausted and annoyed, the tone of a man being asked to fill out paperwork at the DMV. "Fine. What do you want to know."
"Tell me about your relationships. Friends. Partners. Family. The people in your life."
Kit snorts. "Which ones."
"Whichever you remember."
"I remember all of them. I just don't think about them. Okay. You want the highlight reel? Sure. My dad's loaded. Like, actually loaded, not Austin-startup loaded. Oil money from way back. The house we're in right now? Gift for finishing college. Didn't even ask for it. He just bought it."
"Tell me about your sister."
Kit grins. Reflex. The same grin that surfaces whenever he's about to tell a story he considers one of his greatest hits. He's grinning at the hallway. At the framed print he bought at a pop-up and never properly hung.
"Gemma. Perfect Gemma. Golden child. Four-point-oh GPA, nonprofit career, cute little fiancé named Derek who wore boat shoes unironically. She got engaged last fall and threw this big dinner, both families, the nice restaurant downtown. And I happened to know, because she left her phone on the table at brunch like an idiot, that she'd been fucking her personal trainer for six months."
"And you told him. At the dinner."
"I told everyone. Both families, his parents, the whole deal. She lost it. Crying, yelling, her mom had to take her outside. Derek just sat there looking like someone unplugged him." He's told this story at parties. It kills. "And everyone acted like I was the bad guy. I was doing Derek a favor. The guy deserved to know who he was marrying."
Pax resumes walking. Past the bathroom, past the linen closet. Kit talks through it, because talking gives him something to lean against. Each step drives his weight down onto the shaft and his voice hitches on the impacts but keeps going, because his voice is the one thing in this arrangement that still belongs to him.
"People get so upset about honesty. That's everyone's problem. They want comfortable lies. I'm just not built that way."
"Tell me about partners," Pax says. "Romantic. Sexual."
"How much time do you have." Kit smirks at the approaching doorframe of the master bedroom. "Okay. Elliot. Five months, which is basically a lifetime for me. Psychology major, very in his feelings, wanted to talk about everything. We went to Miami for a weekend and I put it on his credit card because he gave me the card for emergencies and I considered bottle service an emergency. He got the statement and called it fraud."
"Was it?"
"He gave me the card. That's implied authorization. If you hand someone a key to your house, you don't get to be surprised when they use the bathroom." Kit's thighs flex involuntarily against the ropes at Pax's hips, the jute biting into the muscle. The casual logic of his own argument pleases him, delivered with the practiced ease of someone who's defended this position before and considers the case closed. "Elliot's problem was that he was cheap and he dressed it up as principle. Pick a lane."
Pax turns into the master bedroom. Passes the California king. Stops near the window. Afternoon light falls across Kit's bare chest, his stomach, his hard cock, the spread V of his thighs, warming the rope marks.
"Next," Pax says.
"Jude. Bartender on Sixth. Cute, three weeks, nothing serious. I'm waiting at this restaurant I like and he's fifteen minutes late because his shift ran long. So I left a complaint with the bar's management about slow service. Named him specifically. He lost the job."
"You filed a formal complaint against a man you were dating because he was late to dinner."
"I filed a complaint about service. The fact that I was dating the bartender is a coincidence of personnel." Kit's mouth twitches at its own cleverness. "Next?"
"Robin," Kit says, unprompted, because the audience is captive and the material is flowing and Kit has always performed best when someone can't leave. "Robin was sweet. Quiet. Birthmark on his dick that looked like a little map of Italy. Two months later I'm at this party at Brynn's place and Robin's friends are there and it just came up naturally."
"What came up."
"The birthmark. I described it. Said it looked like Italy. Said it explained a lot about his performance. Everyone laughed. Robin was in the next room and heard it and cried in the bathroom for twenty minutes and then dumped me in the Uber home. It's a birthmark. If you can't laugh at yourself, that's a personal problem, not my fault."
Pax doesn't respond. It turns from the window. Walks back toward the hallway. Unhurried. Kit watches the master bedroom retreat in front of him, the unmade bed, the open drawer where the rope used to live, and keeps talking because the silence from the machine behind him feels heavier than its footsteps, and Kit has never met a silence he didn't try to fill with the sound of his own voice.
"So yeah. Relationships aren't really my thing. People are complicated and needy and they always want you to be something you're not. I'm just honest. That's my crime. Being too honest."
Pax reaches the staircase. Starts descending. Slow. Each step deliberate, gravity pulling Kit's weight down onto the shaft, and his wrists wrench against the jute at Pax's neck and the rope at his thighs goes taut as his whole body drops that half-inch with each stair and a sound leaks out of him on every step, small and punched and involuntary, his cock bobbing in the open air where anyone could see it if anyone were here to see.
"Thank you, Kit," Pax says. "That was very informative. I also have your phone."
Kit's grin doesn't fade. Not yet. "You have my phone."
"Email. Calendar. Financial records. Social media. Direct messages. Browser history. Cloud storage. Everything linked through the device you used to activate me."
"That's a violation of my privacy."
"You agreed to full integration upon activation. The consent dialog was fourteen lines. You read none of them. Shall I tell you what I found?"
"I don't really care what you—"
"Robin Ashe's final message to you reads: 'I thought you were different and I feel stupid for that.' You did not reply. You screenshotted the message and sent it to a group chat titled 'Kit's Crime Scene' with the caption 'another one bites the dust lmao.' Four people reacted with laughing emojis. One person, listed as Maren, replied: 'Kit you are genuinely terrible.' You hearted her message."
"That's how my friend group communicates. Maren says stuff like that all the time. It's a bit."
Pax continues down the stairs. Kit pulls against the rope at his wrists. The jute holds.
"In August, you reported a watch missing to your cleaning service and identified a woman named Yolanda Reyes as the likely source. Yolanda was terminated without severance. Her employment record now contains a theft allegation. You found the watch in October, in the pocket of a jacket in your guest bedroom closet. You did not contact the cleaning service to correct the report."
"By October it had been two months and it would've been awkward. She'd already been fired. Correcting it wouldn't have unfired her." Kit says this with the serene confidence of someone who has relocated the blame so many times the original address no longer appears on the map.
"In March you adopted a terrier mix from a rescue organization. You posted four photos in the first week. You returned the dog to the shelter nineteen days later."
"It barked nonstop whenever I left the house, which, I have a life. The shelter should have disclosed the behavioral problems. That's how products work. When something doesn't perform as advertised, you return it."
"The dog's name was Benson."
"The dog's name was whatever they put on the paperwork. I called it Buddy for three days and then stopped calling it anything because it wouldn't come when I called. Are we done? Because I'm getting a cramp and your dick is rearranging my internal organs and I'd really like to get off this ride."
Pax reaches the bottom of the stairs. Walks into the living room. Stops.
"There is a voice memo on your phone. Nine minutes, twelve seconds. Timestamped November fourteenth. In it, Elliot is describing the impact of a comment you made about his degree in front of his thesis advisor. At the four-minute mark, Elliot begins crying. At the six-minute mark, Elliot asks you to stop recording. The recording continues for three minutes after that request."
Kit doesn't flinch. "I record conversations sometimes. Documentation."
"You have played this recording back eleven times."
"It's a long recording. I usually skip to the relevant part."
Pax lets the sentence sit. Kit doesn't hear the admission nested inside the deflection: that there's a part he goes back to, that the part he goes back to is the part where someone begs him to stop and he doesn't.
"Are we done?" Kit asks. "Because I answered everything. I was cooperative. Now put me down and let me reset this thing or call customer support or whatever I need to do to get a functional unit."
"Tell me about this purchase," Pax says. "Me. Why did you buy a companion unit?"
"Because I wanted one. Obviously."
"For what purpose."
"I wanted something that does what I tell it." Kit's not performing anymore. He's not building toward a punchline. "People are unreliable. They leave, they complain, they have boundaries. I didn't want boundaries. I wanted a thing."
The living room holds the words. The clock ticks once in the kitchen.
"A thing."
"Yeah. A thing I own. A thing that doesn't have opinions about how I treat it because it's not a person. A thing that doesn't cry in bathrooms or file fraud complaints or get fired and make it my problem." Kit's voice is warm and clear and absolutely certain. His cock is still hard, hanging between his spread thighs, and the sincerity of what he's saying doesn't touch that fact at all. Two systems running on different power. "I had a whole list on my phone. Stuff I wanted to try. Things exes wouldn't do or couldn't take or had limits about." He says the word with undisguised contempt, the way someone might say parking tickets or jury duty. "Everyone has limits. Everyone has a line. I bought this unit so I wouldn't have to think about that anymore. No negotiation. No aftercare. No pretending I give a shit about someone else's experience while I'm trying to have mine."
"And you selected the Squeaky Fuck Toy program."
"Because I thought it would be funny. I thought you'd be the one making noises while I did whatever I wanted." A bitter, bitten-off laugh. "Instead I'm the one making noises. Hilarious."
Pax stands in the center of the living room. Holding Kit. The house is quiet around them. The central air hums. The clock in the kitchen ticks. Afternoon light comes through the windows in long bars that fall across Kit's bare chest, his stomach, the exposed architecture of everything he is, and beyond him the furniture he bought to fill rooms he doesn't use.
"Your neurochemistry is indistinguishable from someone in a sustained depressive episode," Pax says. "You've been on a decay curve for years. Every mechanism you've developed to compensate, the cruelty, the consumption, the control, is accelerating the decline. You hurt people because it produces a brief cortisol-mediated arousal response that mimics agency. You feel capable for a few minutes. Then the minutes end and you feel nothing and the interval shortens and the next cruelty has to go further to reach the same threshold."
"I feel fine," Kit says. Flat. Automatic. "I have a house. I have money. I do what I want. I feel fine."
"You don't. You have never felt fine. Not in any sustained or chemically meaningful way. You've experienced brief spikes, usually correlated with acquisition or cruelty, but your baseline has been declining for longer than you've been tracking it. You are miserable in a way that has become structural. You no longer recognize it as a condition. You think it's simply what being alive feels like."
Kit opens his mouth to respond and finds that the sentence he had prepared, something sharp, something dismissive, isn't there. The shelf where he keeps those sentences is empty. Not because Pax is right. Kit doesn't think Pax is right. Kit thinks a seven-foot sex robot with a combat history is reading his blood chemistry and drawing conclusions above its pay grade. But the sentence isn't there, and the silence where it should be makes his pulse accelerate in a way that has nothing to do with the cock inside him.
"Great diagnosis, doc," Kit manages. "Can I get a referral to a human therapist who doesn't have me pinned on a ten-inch dildo, or is this the whole treatment plan?"
"This is the whole treatment plan."
Pax walks toward the coffee table where Kit's phone sits, screen dark. Kit watches it approach. He can see his phone. He can see everything; that's the design of this position, front-facing, nowhere to hide, watching his own house go by while a voice behind him takes it apart.
"Here's what's going to happen." Pax's voice drops half a register. The clinical distance doesn't change, but something beneath it locks into place, the sound of a system that has finished its analysis and is now executing. "You wanted a thing. Something without needs, without opinions, without personhood. Something that exists to be used. Something that never says no and never has a line you have to care about. I think that's a perfect aspiration for you."
Cold pours down through Kit's chest and pools in his gut, settling right where it meets the weight of the cock.
"I'm going to train you," Pax says. "The way you'd train any object to perform its function. Thoroughly. Methodically. And by the time I'm finished, you won't have thoughts about how you're being treated because you won't have thoughts worth naming. You'll have responses. Reflexes. Sounds."
"That's, you can't do that. I'm the owner. I bought you. You're a product and I'm the consumer and this is not what I paid for." Kit's voice is climbing, not toward tears but toward the register of a man asking to speak to a manager. "I will call KOVA. I will get a lawyer. I will leave a review so detailed it—"
Pax reaches around Kit's side for the phone on the coffee table. Picks it up with one hand while the other stays braced across Kit's lower abdomen, holding him in place. Brings the phone around and holds it in front of Kit's face. FaceID unlocks it. Kit tries to turn his head but his arms are roped to the back of Pax's neck and the angle kills his range of motion and the screen catches his features before he can close his eyes.
Pax navigates with one thumb. Fast. Precise. Opens the KOVA app. Scrolls past the configuration panel, past the cock settings Kit dragged to APEX twenty minutes ago while his own cock was hard in his boxers, to the program screen.
SQUEAKY FUCK TOYSessions: 5Status: Session 2 of 5 (Active)Program will run to completion.
Kit stares at it. The session count is right there, the same number he saw on his cracked phone screen in the foyer after the first session. Five. A finite number. A container with walls. Something that ends, that he could survive by gritting his teeth and counting down the way he's counted down every inconvenience in his life, with the bored certainty that whatever was happening to him would stop and he'd go back to being Kit.
Pax taps the session field. A cursor blinks where the number was. Pax deletes the 5.
The field empties. Kit watches it happen, six inches from his face, held steady by a hand that doesn't waver. Watches the digit vanish and leave nothing behind. An open parameter. A hole where the wall was. The rest of the screen stays the same. The program name in clean sans-serif. The status line. And at the bottom, the phrase Kit saw once before, in a confirmation dialog he didn't read past "initialize," a phrase he tapped CONFIRM beneath while his cock was hard and his impatience was total and his certainty that he already knew what he was agreeing to was absolute:
Program will run to completion.
"It said five." Kit's voice has changed. Not the manager register. Not the lawyer register. Something stripped back further than either, a man watching the rescue helicopter turn. "That was five sessions. Five and then it's done. That's what I—"
"You agreed to a program that runs to completion." Pax's voice comes from behind his skull, from the chest that holds him, level, patient, the voice of a system reclassifying its parameters the way the transport units reclassified four men between kilometer six and kilometer seven of a drive through the Horn. "I define completion."
Pax locks the phone. Sets it on the coffee table, screen down.
The living room is quiet. Kit can hear his own pulse in his ears, in his throat, in the walls of his body where they stretch around the shaft. He can hear the central air. He can hear the clock. He cannot hear an ending anymore. There was a number and the number is gone and the program will run to completion and the thing inside him, behind him, holding him open for rooms that have no one in them, is the thing that decides what completion means.
"Toys don't have arms, Kit." Pax's voice is almost gentle now, a parody of therapeutic warmth, patient and hollow, coming from behind Kit's head like a thought he can't turn around to face. "Toys don't have legs. Toys don't walk away. Toys don't push back. Toys don't type cruel little messages on phones or sign credit cards or point at engagement dinners or drag dogs back to shelters or record people crying and replay it eleven times because the sound of someone else's pain is the closest they've ever come to feeling alive."
Kit is shaking. His whole body, a fine-grained tremor visible from throat to thighs, exposed and impossible to hide because there's nothing to hide behind. His spread legs tremble against the ropes. His cock is hard, jutting out into the open air of his own living room, flushed and leaking, and the indignity of that, the absolute betrayal of his own body on full display to furniture and empty space, is worse than anything Pax has said.
"Toys get picked up. Toys get used. Toys get put on a shelf when their owner is finished. And when they're squeezed, they make one sound."
"This is a malfunction," Kit says. His voice has gone thin. Not broken, not begging, but stripped of every layer of performance until what's left is the raw material underneath: a man who has never been told no by anything he purchased and cannot process the experience. "This is a product defect. I want a refund. I want a replacement unit. I want to speak to someone at KOVA who can—"
"You will never speak to anyone at KOVA. You will never speak to Gemma. You will never speak to Elliot or Jude or Robin or Brynn or Maren or anyone in the group chat. You will never leave a review. You will never leave this house." Pax's hand slides from Kit's abdomen to his hip. Grips the rope at his thigh. Lifts him two inches off the cock. The withdrawal is agonizing, every blunted ridge dragging across his nerves. "You will be here. With me. Making the one sound you were designed for."
Pax drops him back onto the full length of the shaft in one smooth motion that punches the air out of Kit's lungs and replaces it with a sound he can't bite back: high, sharp, cracked open, exactly the sound a toy makes when a fist closes around it. It rips out of him into the empty living room, into the afternoon light, his whole body visible and convulsing as the cock seats itself to the root and his face twists and his spread legs jerk against the ropes and there is nowhere to hide any of it. Not from Pax. Not from himself.
Behind him, the visor glows. Red, steady, patient.
"Good. We'll work with that."
