Expanded (caption) - part 2 (Patreon)

Buffed linoleum all the way back to the lab doors. I keep my eyes on the seams. The coat is loose cotton and it moves against bare skin with every step, coarser than I ever noticed when there was a shirt under it. I cross my arms and press it flat, which pulls my shoulders forward and rounds my back.

At my bench I open the bottom desk drawer and pull out the gray t-shirt I keep for spills. It goes on tight, immediately, the hem riding up off my waist. I button the coat over it.

My phone's in the same drawer. I think about it. Who I'd call and what I'd say - that there's a peptide in me I can't name and I'd like somebody to come look. Occupational health shut at five. Grieve is in Basel until Thursday. And under all of that, the part I'd rather not write down, is that I want to know what it is before anybody else does. I put the phone back face down and shut the drawer.

I have to spread my knees to balance on the flat wooden seat of the stool.

Phlebotomy kit out of the top drawer. Tourniquet around the left bicep, end of the tubing in my teeth, pull. Three squeezes of the fist and the median cubital comes up under the skin. I tear open an alcohol pad and wipe the site. The isopropyl goes up sharp and for about two seconds it's the only thing in the room smelling like it's supposed to. Underneath it is me. Sweat, and something warmer than sweat that I don't have a word for and don't go looking for one.

Needle in. The blood jumps into the vacutainer dark. I swap tubes and take three. My chest is resting on the edge of the bench, and the hard edge of the table is pushing straight up into the underside, shoving the mass toward my collarbone. It aches all the way through the chest wall. Needle out, cotton ball, elbow bent to hold it.

Vials into the rotor, blanks to balance, lid down, start. Ten thousand rpm, and the motor settles into the drone I stopped hearing three years ago. Cells at the bottom when it's done, yellow plasma on top. Plasma into an autosampler vial, vial into the LC-MS, run.

Readout at fifteen minutes. There's a peak at 4.2 that shouldn't be there. I isolate it and run the fragmentation against the local library and get nothing, zero matches, not even a bad one. So I pull the raw structural data onto the second monitor. Lipid-based vector, a delivery mechanism, carrying a synthetic peptide sequence built for one receptor. The stereochemistry is artificial. The binding affinity is too clean to have happened.

Somebody made this.

Footsteps squeak in the next aisle over. I'm off the stool and into the kneehole of the desk before I've decided to be.

"Leah?"

Jack. He stops near my bench. I hold my breath. The space under there forces my knees up and everything on my chest is compressed into my own face, the t-shirt digging in along the top, the cotton rough. A heavy, wet pulse throbs between my thighs. I bite down on my knuckle.

"Leah." Not a question the second time. Brown leather shoes pivot on the tile. He taps a pen on the benchtop twice, waits maybe five seconds, and goes.

I crawl out.

By seven the place is empty. The corridor overheads shut off on their timer and the only light left is the fluorescent strip over my bay.

It hasn't stopped. Slower now, a steady accumulation, more skin required every hour. F cup, easily. They stick out far enough that I have to work with my arms extended just to reach the rack.

I run the structural data through the modeling software and design against the binding pocket. A high-affinity analog that sits in the site without triggering it, in enough excess to crowd out what's already bound. Block the signaling cascade, arrest the growth. Reagents out of the minus-eighty, powder onto the analytical balance. The readout flickers. 45.0 mg. 50.0.

Reaching up to the high shelf for saline pulls the shirt tight enough that the seams groan at me. The weight takes my center of mass forward and I have to brace a hip on the bench edge to keep from going over.

I dissolve the compound. The flush in my skin hasn't gone anywhere. It rolls in and out and takes my concentration with it every time. I drag a hand down my face. Molarities, half-lives, elimination curves, while fighting the urge for friction. I grind my thighs together under the desk. The slick wetness soaks into the cotton of my underwear. I grip the bench and put my eyes back on the beaker.

I push the solution through a 0.2-micron filter into a sealed glass vial. It comes out clear.

Fresh syringe, ten CCs. I catch my reflection in the dark glass of the tissue culture room window on the way past. The coat is at its structural limit, buttons pulled flat against the holes. The shirt underneath has gone sheer from the tension.

Alcohol pad on the thigh. Needle into the vastus lateralis, deep, plunger down.

I pull it out and drop the syringe on the bench. Then I wait.

The heat in my chest flares and levels off. The throb drops to something I could carry around. The crawl under the skin stops. I let out a breath that empties me.

I stopped it.

Then the heat comes back up and it's hotter than anything before it. The analog isn't an antagonist. At my receptors it's a full agonist, and I built it to bind harder than the thing that was already there.

The tissue goes out. Density and volume in seconds.

The bottom button of the coat pops off and pings across the floor tiles. The t-shirt tears around each of the massive breasts. The coat parts.

The weight comes down against my ribs with nothing holding it. Skin stretched tight enough to mottle red. The arousal crashes over me. Dropping the empty syringe onto the floor, my left hand cups the heavy underside of the flesh while my right hand dives between my thighs, pressing against the slick folds of my vulva. A sharp cry escapes my mouth. I know I should step back and formulate a new chemical pathway, but my fingers are already kneading. My knees give out. I slide down the front of the cabinets, landing on the cold floor, my hands moving over my body in ecstatic surrender.