Superbear Chapter 13:
The Conversion
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Weeks earlier...
The Den on a Tuesday was a kindness Arun did to himself, and most weeks he forgot why.
The dance floor was raised one step above the bar, edged in a strip of LED that cycled between purple and blue. Half the stools were occupied. Half the bodies on the floor were dancing and the other half were doing the slower thing men did when they wanted to be on a dance floor without committing to it.
Arun was at the bar, third stool from the wall, with a vodka soda he had ordered for the shape of holding it.
He watched. That was the part he was good at. He could usually call within ten minutes who in the room was leaving with someone and who wasn’t. He cataloged them with the practiced quiet of a man who had stopped expecting to appear in his own list.
He was twenty-eight. His shoulders were narrow. His jaw stayed smooth no matter what he did about it. The crowd in here was built for a different shape of man, and he knew it.
The purple light passed across the bar in a slow wash and made everyone look better than they were, which was the cruelest thing the lighting did. It made him feel like he was watching a film he hadn’t been cast in.
He gave himself one more song.
The door opened and the air in the room rearranged itself.
Arun felt it before he saw it. A pause in two conversations near the entrance. The bartender, who never looked up for anyone, looked up.
Then Arun saw him.
The man who had walked in was the biggest person in the room, and he was not trying to be. Tall, broad enough through the shoulders and chest to make the doorway look small behind him. Strawberry-blonde hair, longish and wavy. A full auburn beard, trimmed close. He was wearing a black sleeveless tank that fit him better than any garment had any business fitting anyone. The light caught the surface of it and slid off, high-gloss and almost wet-looking. Latex, Arun realized. Dark grey cargo trousers, a black belt, heavy lace-up boots.
He moved into the room without scanning it. He didn’t need to scan it. He took two steps in and the room had already noticed him and rearranged what it was doing to accommodate the noticing.
Arun looked away first, the way he had trained himself to look away first. He stared into his drink and told himself, very precisely, don’t. You know how this ends. It ends with you here at the bar and him with someone else, and the only difference between this Tuesday and the last is the specific shape of the ache.
He gave himself a few seconds. Then he looked up.
The man was looking directly in his direction.
Arun’s first thought was that he had misread the angle. He glanced at another man two stools down behind him. He was on his phone, oblivious.
He was looking at him. Direct and unhurried.
Arun’s stomach did something low and unfamiliar. He had been looked past more often than looked at. On three or four occasions in his entire adult life he had been looked at the way he was being looked at right now, as if he were the answer to a question someone had been carrying around. Each of those previous occasions had turned out to be a mistake.
This wasn’t a mistake. The man held his eyes, and after a moment that lasted longer than it should have, he tilted his chin in a small unmistakable gesture: come here.
Arun didn’t move.
The man waited a beat. Then he smiled, small and patient, and started toward him instead.
He arrived at the empty stool beside him and sat down. Sitting, he was still bigger than most people standing.
“Hey handsome,” he said. “Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”
His voice was lower than Arun had braced for, and warmer.
“You didn’t,” Arun said, which was not true.
“What’s your name?”
“Arun.”
“Arun.” He said it once, carefully, as if checking the shape of it. “I’m Nick.”
He held out his hand. Arun shook it. The hand was warm and dry, and the pressure of it was exactly correct, and Arun let it go a fraction of a second after he should have. Nick noticed and didn’t comment. The corner of his mouth moved.
“You here with anyone?”
“No.”
“Good.”
The word landed in the middle of Arun’s chest and stayed there.
Nick didn’t fill the silence after it. He let it sit. He looked at Arun while it sat, and the look was the same look it had been since the door, steady and certain, hungry without being ugly. Arun, who had spent eight years being looked past, did not have the equipment to defend himself against being looked at like that. He hadn’t built it. There had been no occasion.
Nick’s hand came to rest on Arun’s forearm. He let it sit there, loose and unhurried, more weight than pressure. Arun’s pulse jumped under the touch and Nick could feel it. Arun knew he could feel it. Nick’s thumb moved once, slow, along the inside of his wrist, and Arun’s breath went uneven enough that the bartender, two feet away, pretended not to hear.
“You want to get out of here?”
He already knew the answer.
“Yes,” Arun said.
Nick stood. His hand slid from Arun’s wrist to the small of his back as Arun got off the stool, and the contact was steady and proprietary, and Arun didn’t pull away from any of it. He left the vodka soda on the bar.
Nick guided him past the bathrooms to a service door propped open with a wooden wedge. The bouncer glanced up and went back to his phone. The hand at Arun’s back was the only thing in the building Arun was aware of.
The door swung shut behind them and the music dropped to a muffled bass through the wall, and they were in the alley.
It was cold. Narrow, dim, the smell of the dumpster against the far wall. A single security light buzzed above the service door. The brick was wet from earlier rain.
Arun registered all of it in one quick sweep and then stopped registering any of it.
Nick was looking at him again. In the blue light, with the music a low pulse through the wall behind him, Nick was somehow more, not less. The pale eyes had a tint to them that the club lighting had washed out, a violet undertone Arun would have called a trick of the bulb if he had been thinking about it, which he wasn’t.
“Come here,” Nick said.
Arun came here.
Nick’s hand found the back of his neck and brought his face up, and Nick bent his head and kissed him.
The kiss was warm and unhurried and entirely sure of itself. Arun’s back found the brick wall behind him without his having moved toward it. The full weight and size of Nick was against him now. The latex of the tank pressed against the front of Arun’s shirt warmer than skin had any business being.
Arun kissed him back. He had not kissed anyone in fourteen months. The part of him that kept track of that fact lost interest in keeping track of it.
---
Nick’s mouth moved from his lips to his jaw, and the words came low and close.
“Tell me you want to be mine.”
The wanting of it had lived in him quietly for years. To be chosen like this, by someone who meant it.
“I want to be yours,” he said.
Nick kissed him again, deeper. His hand pressed flat against Arun’s sternum. The palm felt wrong — cool and smooth, a texture that had no business being skin. Arun pulled back half an inch and looked down.
A black latex glove, seamless, the same material as the tank.
His mind went to the obvious place. The suit, the glove, the look of him — this was a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had done it before. The latex, the alley, the way he moved. Arun had fantasised about something like this. Being taken apart by someone who knew how, who had the props and the confidence to match. The thought sent heat down his spine.
“Would you give me everything?” Nick murmured against his mouth. “Let me have all of you?”
There was more weight in the words than the moment called for. Arun was past caring.
“Yes,” he said.
The heat under the palm changed.
Nick’s whole body shuddered against him. A sound came up from his throat, deep and wanting, and Arun, who had spent his whole adult life reading the shape of desire, understood what he was hearing. The urge was real. The wanting was real.
He just hadn’t understood what was being wanted.
That recognition arrived clean and complete, and was the last clean, complete thought Arun had.
The rubber reached his throat.
Something deep in his body let go of what it had been holding for a long time, and the chronic low ache he had carried, the everyday ache of being himself in a room, went all the way quiet. A volume dial turning down on a noise he had stopped noticing was there until it was gone.
The rubber was warm. That was the thing he hadn’t expected. It moved across his skin like a second skin being fitted over the first, tight and deliberate, and where it settled it held him, and the holding felt like being wanted in a language his body had always understood and never been spoken to in. He looked down once and saw the black of it spreading across his chest, high-gloss and seamless, catching the alley light and giving it back, and the sight of it on him sent a low pull through his stomach that had nothing to do with fear.
Then it went inside.
The warmth moved through him, under the skin now, filling him the way heat fills a room — from the centre outward, slow and total. It found his chest and pushed, and his pectorals thickened under the rubber in long rolling increments, the body he had never had assembling itself from the inside out. The tight black surface stretched with him and stayed tight. He felt it, the give and grip of it, snug against each new contour as it arrived.
It moved lower. Into his thighs, his calves, his backside. Fullness that built and built without tipping into pain, his legs packing out into something solid and his weight shifting down onto them differently — planted, heavy, certain. The rubber followed every inch of it, sealed black and gleaming, and he was aware of himself taking up more of the alley than he had a moment ago and the awareness felt like relief.
His shoulders pushed wide. His arms filled. Each part of him coming into itself in turn, and the rubber there already, waiting, fitting itself to what he was becoming as though it had always known the shape of it.
His jaw prickled. He brought a hand up — heavier than he expected, the arm doing it already foreign and familiar at once — and felt the beard coming in under his fingers. The beard he had never been able to grow.
It should have hurt. It didn’t. The rubber shifted against his new body, a slow tight adjustment, and squeaked — high and clean — as it sealed to the final shape of him. The body saying yes was louder than any other signal it had. Pleasure rolled through him in long structural waves that started in the bones, and the pleasure was indistinguishable from the changing, and the changing was indistinguishable from the simplification: fewer thoughts, smaller, the noise of being himself easing into a clean steady hum.
And Nick, the whole time, pressed against him — feeding him, shuddering with the pleasure of it.
Arun’s last moment of recognizable interiority was the awareness, dim and accepting, that the man holding him to the wall was being rewarded for what was being done to him, and that the reward and the doing were the same act.
Then the rubber closed over his eyes, and behind it the violet came on, and Arun was gone.
What stood against the brick wall was bigger than what had walked out of the club.
The full-body suit was seamless and glossy, neck to boots, every contour of a thickly built man rendered in high-shine black. The shoulders were wide enough now to fill the alley. The beard had come in dark and full along a jaw that was no longer narrow. The eyes were open and steady, the same cold violet as Nick’s, set in a face that wore the calm settled expression of a man who had been relieved of a burden he hadn’t known the weight of until it was gone.
He stood where Arun had stood. He was waiting to be told what came next.
---
The first thing Nick was aware of was the heat under his skin going slow and bright.
It rolled up out of his chest and along his arms and down his spine in long warm pulses, and he closed his eyes and let it. The suit was praising him. It did this every time and every time it was new. The pleasure was the whole of him, lit from inside, the body of a man who had done what he was made for and was being told so.
He breathed out, slow, through his nose. The urge was quieter now. He had done what it wanted.
He opened his eyes.
The new one stood against the brick wall, finished. Big and settled. The violet in his eyes was clean and steady, and the rubber on him caught what little light the alley had and held it the same as Nick’s own.
He reached out and lifted the new one’s chin, thumb brushing the new beard. There you are.
He looked down at his own hand. The glove was retracting, the glossy black surface receding up his fingers in a slow smooth pull, easing up his wrist, sinking through the skin where it waited. He flexed the hand once when it was done. The skin underneath was bare and unmarked.
He had done this before. He would do it again before the night was over.
He turned his head toward the new one.
“Wait,” he said.
The new one didn’t answer. He stood where he had been told to stand.
Nick turned toward the service door. The bass was coming through the wall in a steady low pulse he could feel in his boots. The urge was already starting to come back on a long slow timer, and he liked the feeling of it coming.
He pulled the door open. The music got loud again. He walked back inside.
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