Covenants and other Provisions
Chapter 68
Breakthrough
Ford had hoped that the day might pass without incident.
That they would finish the final segment of the portal frame, sign off on the tolerances, shut the lights off by six. That momentum—rare and fragile as it was—might actually hold. That he could go horizontal, close his eyes, and let his dreams claim him without resistance.
But the universe had never been especially interested in Ford’s hopes. And if not the universe, then it was accounting—his own overdue karmic ledger.
Fiddleford had screwed something up.
A calibration plate. Incorrectly installed in the bowels of the portal’s base. Days ago.
A kind of error that didn’t announce itself—too small to notice until it metastasized. Ford hadn’t caught it until a pressure readout spiked during a safety check; ten minutes before they were supposed to stop for the night.
Now, it was three in the morning, and Ford laid on his side beneath the portal’s foundation, both arms jammed shoulder‑deep into its guts.
He’d stripped down to his undershirt hours ago but it hadn’t helped much.
His back was slick with sweat and sore from the awkward angle he’d put himself in. Oil blackened him to the elbows—caught in the folds of his skin, beneath his nails, smeared across his cheek where he’d wiped without thinking.
His hair wouldn’t stay out of his eyes. Every time he shoved it back, it fell forward again.
And under it all, a deep, grinding tension lodged low in his gut—something unresolved that even exhaustion couldn’t blunt.
Fiddleford had stopped being useful hours ago.
He hovered now more than he helped—pacing, wringing his hands, apologizing very often. His concern flickered between the mistake itself and the well set in tremors. The edge of withdrawal he was trying, poorly, to disguise.
Ford didn’t offer him any relief.
“Quit with the shpilkes a minute and watch the monitor!” he snapped from beneath the chassis.
He didn’t look at Fidds when he said it.
Not with his patience ground down to nothing, his cock pinched tight and frustrated in his jeans, his body screaming for escape. For sleep. For Bill.
Bill, who had been a private, simmering presence all night, and had not spoken in several overtime hours. Though his silence still felt like attention—an audience that tasted everything.
Ford watched the readout for an extra full minute, waiting for the next anomaly. The next fuck-up that would demand another hour, another repair, another reason to keep him away from the only place he wanted to be.
Nothing came and for the first time, Ford was relieved to find no anomalies.
Fiddleford let out a breath. “Looks like that did it.”
“Don’t get too comfortable, Six,” Bill finally said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
The cheap reprieve folded Ford back into shape, like he’d been given a moment’s grace and then ordered to account for it.
He shifted out from under the chassis with a stiff grunt. His back cracked audibly as he stood, vertebrae popping down the line of his spine like a zipper, making him wince.
After a stretch, he crossed the lab in stiff, deliberate strides, pressing his hand to the bio-lock case.
Behind him, Fiddleford hovered again. He scratched at his arm. Wiped his palms on his jeans.
“Sit.” Ford instructed.
There was a beat of hesitation. Then Fidds nodded and did as he was told.
Ford checked the dial, pressed his thumb against the override notch. The light on the side blinked green. He didn't bother with the rope this time. He was too tired for theatrics. He just lifted the gun, tilted Fidds’ head with one hand, and fired.
Fiddleford sagged instantly. The gun went onto the table as Ford caught him under the arms in the pitch forward.
“Here we go,” Ford muttered.
He bent and hoisted Fidds into a fireman’s carry—the path of least resistance—then took him up the stairs.
“He’s lighter than usual.” Bill said halfway up. Ford responded with a soft hm.
Ford dumped Fidds onto his bed. The mattress took the hit with a bounce and Fidds flopped across it in a tangle of limbs and dead weight—not that it mattered much to him in this state.
Ford turned to leave as Fidds settled.
A hand caught his wrist.
“Where’ygoin?” Fidds slurred. His eyelids didn’t open, but the grip was firm. Not lucid—just instinct, maybe.
Ford stopped. For a long moment, he stood half-turned. His shoulder rose slightly as he inhaled. “To bed,” he said.
Fiddleford didn’t let go. Then he tugged slightly. Ford didn’t move with it.
“Y’mad at me?”
Ford hesitated. Then he pulled his hand free.
He stood in the hallway for a long moment after leaving Fiddleford’s room.
The house was quiet, and the work—at least for tonight—was done.
No more critical failures to chase through the wiring. No more postponements, interruptions, justifications.
Nothing to stop him now.
And he wanted it. His whole body wanted it.
That simple, chemical certainty bloomed low in his gut. The promise of surrender. Of release. Of laying down the weight of his own thoughts and becoming the thing he was built to be. The instrument. The vessel. The site of revelation.
He could already feel the twitch of the dream pulling him forward.
Until he looked down at himself—
Sweat cooled stiff against his body. Oil ground into the lines of his palms. A ruined undershirt clung to his ribs and jeans stuck unpleasantly to his legs.
He’d crawled into bed under some questionable circumstances before—but even he couldn’t justify this.
The shower came on hot and steamed the room quickly. He stripped the grease‑stained clothes, letting them hit the tile in dull, heavy thuds.
One hand braced against the shower wall as his head tipped forward. The water struck his shoulders in hard, hammering sheets, dragging grease from his skin in blackened trails.
His body responded immediately to how the heat sank in, the way the water streamed down his stomach and between his legs. He hardened outright, his cock lifting eagerly to meet the constant assault of sensation.
His body leaned into it, another low sound escaping through clenched teeth. His stance shifted ever so slightly, just enough to catch the pulse of water where it hit best.
He pressed his other hand against the tile and closed his eyes. Images rose unbidden—Bill’s hands, Bill’s mouth, the shine of spit on metal—
His hand drifted, stopping just shy of his arousal.
He could do it. It would be embarrassingly easy. Two minutes, maybe less—just a few strokes.
But Bill wouldn’t want that.
The thought tightened the vise. Bill would be…disappointed if he finished himself off like this—alone in the shower with no discipline to speak of.
He’d said as much, hadn’t he? Not in so many words. But it would be wasteful. Sloppy. Would blunt the edge he’d been so careful to build. What Ford was meant to keep.
He trusted Ford.
And Ford trusted him. Trusted the method. Trusted the hurt. Trusted that it was doing its work even now, keeping the equation incubated in the back of his mind.
Ford dragged the hand away and planted it flat against the tile again.
Let it hurt. Let his imagination run wild.
Equations swam behind his eyes—trails of variables wreathed in gold. They tangled with the shape of Bill’s legs wrapped around his hips. Logic gates and the taste of fingers pressed against his tongue.
Bill’s excitement pressed into the meat of his back, winding alongside his own. He felt observed. Anticipated.
And Ford wanted to be seen. Just like this. Keeping what he was meant to hold. Good.
He was good.
Breath bloomed across his ear, real enough to make his scalp prickle, to make the arches of his feet contract and his knees dip with sudden weakness.
He braced harder against the tile, the tendons standing out like cables along the backs of his hands. The shower still rained down over his shoulders, but became secondary to the haunting presence leaning in behind him.
“There he is,” Bill whispered, a faint smile curved into his voice.
Something feathered against Ford’s side—a ticklish static that passed for touch—grazing along the curve of his iliac crest.
“My scientist… my sage.”
Ford tried to bear the ache, but his cock jumped when feather touches traced across the shallow basin of his adonis.
“Can you see it?” Bill coaxed, his manipulations running like fingers along both of Ford’s hipbones. A ripple swept Ford’s skin, and the havoc in his mind bloomed into a prismatic cryptograph.
Spacetime curled open like petals. Seven dimensions fracturing around gravitational fissures, braiding the desponic scaffold of spacetime.
It was no longer overwhelming like it had been in the beginning. He was not swept up by the chaos of the tide, but capable of observing the pull—to see the mosaic of stone along the floor.
The more Ford focused on his breath, centered himself, the more he saw.
The topology became sensible. Seams between branes unzipped along calculated vectors. What had once struck like a migraine now assembled itself cleanly.
Chaos was singular, second-nature, open at his call.
Every breath drew out another space in the ether. The aperture took form—not as conjecture but as a complete construct. A thing. A place.
It was beautiful.
More fingers slid up the back of Ford’s neck, coming to rest against the notch at the base of his skull.
“You're gonna hold it all right here—” Bill whispered. “—just for me.”
Ford bit down hard on his bottom lip as a fresh rivulet of arousal spilled down his inner thigh, joining the water already running down his legs. Lost in the rush of the shower but not lost to him.
Ford’s fingers peeled away from the tile without him telling them to, each pad lifting with a faint tack off the porcelain.
His wrist rotated gently, guided by a light pressure in the joints. He watched his hand travel down his stomach, cutting a wake through the spray streaming over his skin.
His palm dragged over the soft plane of his belly. Through the dark hair at his navel, landing perfectly around the crux of himself
Ford gasped when Bill squeezed
“Shh,” came the answer—softer than breath, but infinite in its reach.
His left hand slid off the tile, followed the same path down his chest, mirroring the first. Two hands now, boxing him in.
Bill let him have just enough.
His hips rolled forward into the strokes. They were slow, perfectly timed, mercilessly controlled. The kind of cadence a man could only teach himself. Except it didn’t feel like masturbating. It was too cerebral.
Bill knew everything.
How Ford liked to be touched. Every seam of sensation mapped across his flesh. Every shift in breath that meant too much, not enough, right there. Knew when his groan changed pitch—that he was getting close.
But this pleasure wasn’t private. Bill felt it too; Ford felt the echo of it—the doubled feedback of their connection. It ricocheted, came back warmer, heavier. Bill’s satisfaction layered over it.
He stroked him like he’d built him.
Ford’s cock throbbed heavy in his own grip, flushed dark and leaking, the wet drag of water and slick making every pass obscene and slippery.
Small, desperate sounds started leaking out of him—half-managed moans catching in the steam. His skin went hypersensitive; sensation telescoped until every droplet that struck him registered.
Catastrophic pressure wound tight at the base of him. He knew this rhythm. Knew what was coming. Knew he couldn’t stop it—
Both hands froze. One clamped around the base, thumbing into him, a counter-lemma to the advancing rush, stalling it mid-wave and forcing it back into the reservoir.
Breathe
Bill’s instruction came as a wave, an impression ringing through every atom of him. Ford obeyed it—his chest heaved in an open mouthed gasp. A colorless chill shredding his skin from scalp to soles.
The orgasm rerouted—ricocheted, unspent, back into him; redistributed into his diaphragm, into the muscles behind his eyes, into the knot of his glutes.
And then the numbers came, burning white behind his lids as if chalked onto the insides of his eyelids:
𝑉(𝜙) = ½ k𝜙²
He felt the parabola fold under his skin, the way the system returned to equilibrium only to be nudged again.
“Deeper.” Bill encouraged.
𝑘 = 𝑚𝜔²
There it was: the spring constant—the parameter that decided how wide the well opened and how violently the mass would oscillate when displaced—an expression that stumped him for months, folding seamlessly into the chaos.
“Fuck, that’s brilliant,” Bill whispered from nowhere, from everywhere.
He moved one of Ford’s hands, sliding it up back up over his chest while the other remained clamped.
A thumb flicked over his nipple. Ford jerked reflexively, the sensation rippling through his body from the source.
“C’mon, your so close, Sixer,” Bill moaned. “So close.”
Ford followed through—
A = (m·ω/πħ)¹ᐟ⁴
The hand fixed around his abused cock resumed their strokes while the other pinched around the stiffened peak on his chest.
Ford couldn’t stop the sounds now—an obscene motet matching the cadence of his hands—no thought for the pipes, or the hall, or the man asleep across it.
Let him hear.
Let the whole world hear.
Water mixed with precome and thinned everything into a slippery heat; ringing his bell with a lacquered crackle, a metronome marking every iteration of Bill’s will.
Ford glanced down, half-detached and helpless watching his hands obey his tutor. He saw the script branded along his throbbing length strain with every pull, the totem tugging at the locus of sensation—
He observed firsthand all the ways Bill had extracted whatever he wanted from him. How he reduced Ford to a tool, an output. How he owned him. How Ford loved every bit of it.
Ford’s head dropped back against the tile as more cries ripped out of his open mouth, louder than he meant, but shame didn’t show its face here.
He felt a tectonic swell in the bowl of his pelvis radiate outward, filling his limbs with heat. His hands kept moving under Bill’s influence, subjecting Ford to long, wet strokes that moved as if they were being read from a manual.
“You gonna come?” Bill asked.
Ford barely managed the nod, the smallest jerk of his chin. “So much,” he rasped, the words barely faring the trip past his teeth.
The strokes sped up half a notch, a quarter-beat shaved from the pause between strokes. Ford felt the change instantly. It unlatched something vital inside him, some keystone of self control.
His hips jerked forward, his body offering itself up with no resistance, no dignity to defend, just a blind need to be used, fucking into the ghost of Bill’s grip with a violent desperation.
“Yeah?” Bill goaded, his voice honeyed and mean. “You gonna make a big mess?”
Ford nodded harder, his breath devolved into a series of ugly sounds he couldn’t swallow down.
He was going to come. He knew it with absolute certainty. Not as a hope, not as a theory—but as a law of nature. A foregone conclusion engraved into the vectors of his body, chiseled into the base of his spine. It swept up through his gut, locked down his thighs, curled his toes against the tile floor. It squeezed his belly, seized the cords of his neck. Every muscle in his frame began to pull inward and Ford swore—swore—he was coming.
He had to be. There was no way to survive the force that gripped him. No way to live past this moment.
He hung in that impossible stasis a beat, another, two too long—Bill had stopped them. Held them there. Firm at the base of his cock like an iron tourniquet, denying that final inch.
Ford’s body kept trying to tip forward into climax, breath stuttering out of him in broken, panicked bursts. But the finish line kept sliding further out of reach.
His teeth chattered from the frustration. A second noise tore from his chest, more pathetic than the first—his lungs pumping in tiny, useless bursts.
And in that unbearable suspension, that stretched, aching instant where his body hovered on the brink without falling—
Ψap = A · e{ −(½)·k·φ² }
—It crystallized across his consciousness. The final branch of the aperture slotted into place. And so did Bill.
The strokes resumed with all the mercy of a war drum. A rhythm that didn’t court pleasure but now demanded it—hands that knew every neural corridor and plundered them all at once.
Ford bucked so hard his spine left the wall entirely, his whole body arcing into the grip before slamming back again—the impact dislodging a full-throated wail.
Hot, viscous ribbons sliced through the downpour with the force of his long-awaited release, painting the opposite tile in thick, heavy arcs.
“There you go,” Bill cooed gently. “Let it all out, big guy.”
And Ford did, every wave striking porcelain with lewd finality—throaty cries yanked from him by Bill’s masquerade grip. Bill milked him dry, indulging in every contraction Ford’s body could offer.
When the last spasm passed and his limbs liquefied, Ford slid down the tile. He landed on the floor and tilted sideways against the wall, breathing like he’d run for miles.
He trembled all over. A hollowed thing. Radiant and utterly fulfilled.
Steam scrolled off his skin while his pulse steadied, each beat a little quieter than the last, each breath a bit gentler. The shower still roared overhead, but its heat felt calming now.
“Boy,” Bill drawled, voice bubbling up with a cum-drunk laziness, “You sure are easy to lead around by the dick.”
The corners of Ford’s lips turned upward and a wrecked little wheeze escaped despite himself.
“I just—” he panted, waving a shaky hand at the proof still glowing fresh in his mind—“unlocked the cosmic code for punching holes through the gravitational plane. Can you spare me the stand-up routine for five seconds?”
Bill made a thoughtful hum. “Wisecracks are one of my non-negotiables.” A beat, softer. “But you did good, hot-shot. Real good.”
The praise slid through Ford like warm syrup, filling the hollow places the orgasm had carved out of him. He sucked a long breath, then forced himself to sit upright.
“Wasn’t just me,” he mumbled. “There was the pushy little consultant in my head, too.”
“Pushy?” Bill sputtered.
“Mm.” Ford tipped his head back against the tile. “Or perhaps pulley is the proper mechanical term.” His voice went distant with fatigue. “Any more of that and the working end might’ve snapped off.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Sixer.” Bill crooned. “All that pulling got you into the end zone. One more test series and I’ll be on your side of the glass for good.”
Ford’s heart fluttered; he smiled, letting his eyes fall shut, exhaustion softening every line of his face. “We really did it.” he said quietly.
They sat in the quiet glow of that truth—the equation singing in their shared consciousness.
Then Ford exhaled, the practical part of him returning for a moment. “We’ve got to coordinate on a lie,” he said. “Publications will want methodology.”
“What for?” Bill said innocently. “Everyone’s got their little rituals. Some of us collect data the old-fashioned way—” a pause, then, with bright delight—“and you shoot yours all over the wall.”
“Bill!” Ford rasped, scandalized.
“What? I’m just saying—we should be transparent about our unconventionally messy peer review process.
Ford scoffed, but it came out soft. Spent.
“You gonna make me beg you to come to bed?” Bill asked, lightly.
Ford’s smile returned, small and tired. “No.”
He reached up and twisted the taps, standing and stepping out of the shower. The house was dim and still. Somewhere down the hall, Fiddleford slept—drugged, pliant, spared the sight of what Ford had become in the dark.
The last beads of water still clung to his skin, sliding slow along the ridges of his torso, vanishing into the fleece waistband that clung loose and low to his hips—the only thing he’d bothered to pull on between towel and bed.
When he went into the bedroom, the dream was already pressing at the edges of his vision. He fell into it before his body hit the mattress—a seamless crossing through a revolving door.
