Chapter 9: On the Record

We didn’t come apart.

Jo had the seam half-open and her hand on it and every reason to peel us out right there — the win was called, the day was as good as done, her monsters were cooked. And in the dark of the wings Reese reached back and stopped her a second time, caught her wrist off the zipper the way she’d caught it an hour ago, except now there was no belt to blame.

“Leave it.” Out the vent, bright, wrecked, a stranger’s voice. “They want the winners out front. Zip me back up, Jo.”

“It’s over, Reese. You won.” Jo’s hand stayed on the zipper, not pulling it up and not pulling it down. “You came off that stage shaking, the both of you. Let me get you out of there.”

“I know. Zip me up anyway.” A breath. “We’re not done.”

And the fear went out of me. All day it had driven me — the one terror, that somebody would see — and now there was a camera somewhere out front and four hundred people and the win turning every eye in the hall onto us, the best chance all day for the whole thing to come apart, and I reached for the fear and it wasn’t anywhere. What came up where it had been was simpler and worse. I didn’t want out of her. I wanted to walk back into all those eyes exactly like this — seen and not seen, the whole hall looking straight at it and never once seeing it — and I was done telling myself the suit was the reason.

Jo zipped me back into the dark, and led us out.

The floor came up for the winners the way it never had for second place. Hands on the shell, flat palms thumping the foam like they could feel the animal through it. Phones. A kid hauled up onto a dad’s shoulders to see over the crush, shrieking. Somebody chanting the name of the thing. Reese worked all of it out the vent — thank you, thank you, yeah, get the whole monster in, back up a step — turning us, waving the creature’s arm, holding us still for one camera and then the next, and every pose and every turn I was seated in my sister to do it, and somewhere in the first few minutes of being loved by four hundred people I started going hard again inside her, slow, swelling back up the length of her until she had to feel every inch of it come back, the day’s soreness still all over me, and this time I didn’t press it down. Under the cover of one big slow monster-wave I rolled up into her — a long deliberate drag of my cock up the raw of her — and felt her breath snag out the vent in the middle of a thank-you, felt her clamp down helpless around me once before she caught it, with the dad and the kid on his shoulders and the whole ring of phones three feet off.