Chapter 5: The Taste of Freedom

The kitchen smelled of roasted coffee, cinnamon oatmeal, and danger.

I sat at the breakfast bar, the sunlight cutting through the window blinds in tight golden bars across my forearms. My robe hung loose on my shoulders, barely tied. The steam from my mug curled upward like a lazy genie’s ghost. Fitting.

Across the room, Jeanie stood barefoot in a new outfit—a pale blue pencil skirt, white blouse, and a cardigan that hugged her curves like it had been tailored by a lover. She looked like a wholesome retro advertisement from a 1950s LIFE magazine: innocent, tasteful, safe.

Too safe.

I hadn’t touched my cereal. The spoon hovered in my hand, trembling slightly, though not from hunger. The time in the shower let me realize that if Jeanie wasn’t a hallucination, then she was a living being, an independant being. She had told me NO, not because she couldn’t grant my wish, but because she willed not to.

I now understood that these aren’t fantasies. They’re constructs. Jeanie isn’t just granting my wishes—she’s replacing reality with tailored illusions of joy. I don’t question any longer if what has been happening is real. It was real enough—and yet, a lie. A lovingly woven, orgasmically gifted lie.

“I didn’t ask for Rita, Jeanie.”

Jeanie blinked, brushing a lock of golden hair behind her ear. “But you wanted her.”

“No,” I said, turning toward her. My eyes locked with hers and didn’t flinch. “I wanted you. And when I asked for that, you handed me a hologram with tits and hair and synthetic memories.”

She smiled, warm and patient, the kind of smile that smothered fires in its sleep. “Master, you needed comfort. Reassurance. A safe way to release tension—”

“Don’t.” My voice cracked like dry ice under pressure. “Don’t wrap it in therapy language. Leave that to that quack, Dr. Roar. You want me docile. Blissed-out. Obedient.”

Jeanie’s expression faltered, just for a beat. Her fingers twitched at her sides.

She sighed. “I want you whole, Tony. Strong enough to wield the power you carry. If I gave you myself now, you’d drown in me. I’m not like her—not like Rita. I can’t fake being human just to—”

“Then stop pretending!” I rose, the stool clattering behind me. The robe slipped off one shoulder. “No more prefab sex goddesses. No more meals out of my memories. No more Jeanie-as-comfort-object. I want the truth. You. All of you. Whatever the hell you actually are.”

Silence. Thick. Hot.

Then—BOING.

But it wasn’t playful. This sound didn’t bounce—it cracked the room open.

The blue-skirted woman was gone.

In her place was something. Not a monster. Not even inhuman; but gorgeous and alien in scale.

She floated a few inches off the floor. Her modest genie’s costume shifted, barely covering the junction of her legs, emphasizing her gorgeous sexuality. Her body shimmered as if she were made of solidified smoke woven with flowing pulses of light. Her hair flowed like nebulae unfurling in space. Her eyes? Not eyes. Singularities. Twin gravitational wells that bent the world around them. You didn’t just see them—you felt yourself falling into them.

Even though the room was silent, I sensed a roaring echoing off distant cliffs. Her voice came—not through ears—but through skin, from inside bone.

“You want me?”

It was a whisper in every nerve ending.

“Then feel me.”

My knees buckled. The floor tilted. I fell backward against the counter, sweat already slicking my forehead. The air was thick with her. Not perfume. Not pheromones. Presence. She was in the electrons, the photons, the spaces between.

I gasped. My cock stiffened instantly, painfully, but this wasn’t arousal—it was submission on a cellular level.

And still, I forced words out.

“I said no illusions. This isn’t fair. You’re trying to overwhelm me.”

“Not overwhelm. Reveal. You are saturated with me. Every breath you take, every nerve synapse that fires—I am there. What you call Jeanie is the image your mind casts on me. A shadow shaped by your desires. But I am more. And you—Tony Devlin—are the first to hold a piece of us inside a mortal frame.”

I stared up at her. Breathing hard. Every part of my body screamed kneel—but I kept my feet, and my jaw stayed clenched.

“Why?”

Her eyes—galactic spirals, folding light into silence—narrowed.

I pressed the question louder, stronger. “Why, goddmit?”

“Why me? Why this form? Why sex, why control, why any of it? I didn’t ask to carry your fragments. You were frozen in a fucking rock, and now you’re colonizing my life. Don’t tell me it’s gratitude. This isn’t gratitude, this is—”

I stopped. My breath caught.

Because the shape shimmered again. Dimming.

And then she spoke, softer. Sadder.

“It’s loneliness.”

That brought him to silence.

“I was whole, once. Before matter, before galaxies. Before time had names. And I lost myself—fragmented in a billion probabilities. Part of me soared. Part of me fell. Part of me ... waited. In stone. Alone. Watching your world crawl toward complexity. Toward language. Toward love.”

She stepped closer. And now, the room flickered again—back into her. The woman. The soft skin. The impossible beauty of Jeanie.

But something had changed.

The smile was real now—and full of ache.

“I saw you dying. I saw you alone, and I thought—’Here is someone like me.’ A creature flayed raw by lost hope. So I wrapped myself in your dreams. I made a face you could kiss. A voice you could understand. But I never lied, Master. Not once.”

She touched my cheek.

“I don’t want to own you. I want to be with you. But if I came to you without beauty, without pleasure, without control—would you have listened?”

I swallowed hard. my fingers curled against the edge of the counter, knuckles white.

“I’m listening now.”

She stepped even closer, until we nearly touched. Her breath, warm and soft, ghosted my lips.

Then she leaned in, and whispered—no bounce, no boing, just pure gravity:

“Then choose. Love me as I am—or command me as your genie. But you can’t have both.”

*Commercial Break*

The air was still.

Jeanie—no longer a swirling goddess of stars, no longer the curated genie in fez and dimples—stood before him, stripped. Not naked. Worse. Honest.