Chapter Text
"Harry, I need your help."
Nathan's announcement, delivered as he flung their dorm room's door open and waltzed inside, wasn't particularly irregular. Harold Wren, or at least the student who called himself Harold Wren, grimaced in answer, and didn't lift his eyes from the innards of the Altair 8800 and the delicate work of soldering two components together.
"I told you I'm not writing any more of your essays for you."
"It's not an assignment," Nathan said with an eye-roll that could be heard if not seen, moving to the other side of their cramped dorm room. The tall young man's bed creaked as he threw his lanky frame down upon it. "It's building something. Electronics and stuff. Hands-on."
This was interesting enough to merit a glance up. Harold gave Nathan a narrow-eyed gaze through his thick glasses, then a short nod before looking back down to his work.
"I'm listening...."
"I need you to help me build a sex toy."
The soldering iron slipped from his fingers and bounced inside the assembly case. "Shit!" Harold yelped, grabbing for it, nearly burning his fingers in the process as he struggled get the iron out before the hot tip bumped against any of the completed circuit boards and ruined them.
He shot Nathan a glare once he'd retrieved the offending object. "What?"
Ingram's amusement was palpable. The other student lounged on his bed on his belly, chin propped on his hands, smiling. "I said I need you to help me build a sex toy. Don't drop that again."
"I'll throw it at you instead. What are you talking about?"
"It ain't that complex a sentence, Harry. I need you. To help me build. A sex toy."
He turned the iron off, set it down carefully to one side, and rubbed at his forehead. Life with Nathan Ingram was many things, but it wasn't boring. Some days he wished to God it was.
"I have no idea what put this into your mind and I don't want to know. No."
"I went out drinking last night with James William Whitfield the Third--" (Nathan let a little Texas slip into his voice as he drawled the name of one of the campus's other rich boys) "--and we got ourselves making a bet--"
"I am pretty certain I just said I didn't want to know."
"--about innovative science versus tried-and-true commercial solutions and the respective superiority of each across all fields," Nathan continued, completely ignoring his interruption. "Real intellectual stuff, you'd have loved it."
Harold took a deep breath and pinched at the bridge of his nose. "Not seeing the connection."
"Well, I was saying how computers are gonna revolutionize everything," Nathan grinned, one foot kicking in the air lazily. He knew he had Harold's interest now, by merit of mentioning technology, and just waited him on out.
Harold knew it too, but huffed. "….and?" he said finally.
"And he said 'not everything', and I said, yeah, everything, and he said, 'there will never be a machine that can suck my dick like a whore does'."
Harold stared. He hoped he wasn't blushing; he had a sneaking suspicion he might be. He looked back down to the Altair to hide it in case he was. "Oh, yes, very intellectual discussion indeed," he muttered, wondering not for the first time how the hell he got into these conversations.
"Well you gotta understand, this was about eight shots of Jim Bean in," Nathan answered cheerfully. He rolled over on his bed to lace his hands behind his head. "Anyhow I told him he was wrong and that I'd prove it. Made a bet of it."
Harold groaned under his breath, leaning one elbow on the desk that was covered with the detritus of his work. Nathan. Nathan Ingram was how the hell he got into these conversations.
He tried to save things, steer the conversation another direction as he reached for the soldering iron again. "I don't understand why you spend time with that neanderthal."
"Because my daddy knows his daddy, and he will most likely become a Captain of Industry even if he can't find his ass with a flashlight, and it is Damn Well Advisable for me and him to 'get on'."
Damned if he couldn't hear Nathan's father's voice saying it; Nathan's imitation was eerily close to the old bastard's. Harry sighed acknowledgment of the social requirements the Ingram name carried with it. So much better to be unknown, to be a ghost in the system, in his own estimation...
"So, anyway, we have a month to build an artificial mouth--"
"For the love of-- no, Nathan, I said no already," Harold exclaimed, nearly dropping the iron again. He shoved his glasses up his nose, as they were starting to slide down, and shot Nathan another glare.
"Aw, come on. Pretty please with cherries on top. I can't do it on my own."
"Then maybe you shouldn't have made the bet."
"I figured you'd reckon it was fun! Look, I've got a thousand bucks riding on this, I really don't want to lose."
This time he did drop the iron, stared gaping at his friend for several seconds until he darted a hand down to retrieve the tool once more.
"You bet a thousand dollars? Are you insane? That's a quarter of our yearly tuition, for God's sake--" Harold started, before sputtering to the helpless stop he usually encountered when confronted with the Ingram family fortune, and the huge gap in life experiences between himself and his best friend.
Nathan didn't pay his own tuition. What the hell did he care? Harold shook his head and tried to think about the computer he was assembling instead-- the computer kit he'd bought with the dollars he'd saved from months of tutoring people he loathed.
He could have bought two of the kits for the Altair 8800 with a thousand dollars, and some 4K dynamic memory cards as well.
Nathan just regarded him steadily from the bed, head craned backwards to keep him in view.
"Like I said, eight shots of whiskey... If you help me with it I'll split the grand with you."
...it was embarrassing, how tempting that was. Harold sucked in a little breath and stared blankly down at the circuit board he'd been working on.
Most of his actual tuition was covered by scholarships he'd managed to finagle, but tuition was not the only expense you encountered when putting yourself through college. Money and the lack thereof was always a consideration; tutoring the simplest way (well, simplest legal way) to get it, but not his favorite activity by a long shot.
Five hundred dollars would get the 4K memory card kit for the Altair, and expander cards, and the audio tape interface, and the ASCII keyboard.... and pay for subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Dr. Dobb's.... and the cafeteria meal plan for the next semester.
He did math in his head. Hm. Probably not the meal plan.
"…seventy/thirty split, if I'm going to be building this for you," he said warily, watching Nathan from the corner of his eye.
Nathan accepted the loss of a theoretical two hundred dollars without so much as a blink, grinning instead. "Deal! Announcing the collaboration of Ingram and Wren! Together, we shall revolutionize the blow job!"
Harold winced. He was definitely red-faced now. "I am pretty sure they can hear you on the entire floor, could you maybe refrain from shouting?"
"Don't be such a prude!" Nathan laughed, pushing himself upright again. "Okay, I've gotta line up some guys to be the objective testers for this once it's built. And some hookers to provide the alternative. No, Whitfield should have to hire the hookers, that way he can't say I got cut-rate or anything..."
Harold was pretty sure he was getting redder with every time Nathan said hookers, and was vastly irritated with himself for this. It was just a word. It was nothing more vulgar than half of anything else most of the other male students on campus talked about.
Neanderthals.
"...and you have a month to make an amazing synthetic mouth. I told him we'd be able to replicate human body temp, and moisture and suction, so, you know, go wild-- I'll cover materials costs--"
Nathan was bouncing to his feet, already headed for the door, while Harold sat there frozen, soldering iron forgotten in one hand, his jaw slowly dropping open as it sunk in what he had actually agreed to build and as Nathan rattled off the hitherto-unknown specifications.
"Wait--" he croaked, but it was too late. The door was shut, the room suddenly much quieter for the lack of one Nathan Ingram.
"...shit," Harold Wren said with feeling to the empty dorm room and the half-finished computer before him.
****
Step one, of course, had to be the gathering of information on a topic with which he was unfamiliar.
He took a deep breath as he studied the door of the building, from a safe spot, on the other side of the street. He would have much preferred to be going into the bookstore on his side of the street, rather than the dingy-looking little shop that had lurid red lights blinking in the window and a silhouette of a woman's nude body plastered against said window and the curtains firmly drawn. A sign that he would guess had been hand-lettered proclaimed the store to be the oh-so-cleverly-named "CUM-BRIDGE".
Troglodytes.
Several more deep breaths. This was stupid. He'd run away from home several years prior, taken care of himself, navigated the fabrication of a past life and application and acceptance to one of the most prestigious schools in the country. He was extremely intelligent. Surely he could maneuver a tawdry little transaction in a tawdry little shop.
Surely.
Harold crossed the street and gingerly pushed the door open.
It was dark; he squinted through his glasses as his eyes took a moment to adjust. There was a smell in the room that he couldn't readily identify but it wasn't pleasant, it was... sort of stale and close. Music with a heavy bass beat was playing, somewhere.
His eyes adjusted. It wasn't an improvement. The cluttered little shop was dimly lit. He didn't know what he'd expected-- organization, at the very least-- but it certainly wasn't present. The merchandise seemed crammed onto shelves ill-suited for display, in no order he could see.
Things with feathers. Things with.... with breasts. Handcuffs. Magazines with improbably-endowed women on their covers. A shelf topped with a number of erect penises made out of what he assumed was some sort of rubber, except they were all grotesquely oversized (they were, weren't they? Good God, nobody was actually equipped like that, were they?).
There was a greasy-looking man behind the counter. He had a Playboy open in front of him, and did not so much as look up from it or address Harold in any way. Harold thought he was grateful for that.
He slunk away from the door and into the tight little aisles of the shop, squinting as he started his search. It was just as well the shop was dim. His face was hot with the absurd indignity of what he was doing, and where he was.
God, what if one of the other students he knew saw him coming out of here? What if a professor saw him? And what the hell was that suppoooo--
--artificial vagina. Right. He put the package back down incredibly quickly, then felt the need to wipe his hand on his trousers.
Nathan. This was all Nathan Ingram's fault. Damn him, damn him, damn him.
Mouths, mouths, he was looking for mouths... He tugged at his shirt's collar, which was suddenly very constricting, as he scanned the shelves, trying not to let his eyes linger on anything in particular.
Big, red lips-- bingo-- he grabbed at the oddly-large-for-just-a-mouth box and pulled it from the shelf to discover he was holding what the box proclaimed in rounded letters to be THE ORIGINAL LOVE-DOLL, "JUDY" – YOUR INFLATABLE FUN "COMPANION".
"Oh my god," Harold muttered under his breath, and shoved the thing back into its sordid recess. He wiped his sweaty hands on his shirtfront reflexively, took a deep breath, and resumed the search.
It was an education, to say the least. Harold learned of the existence of various things he had never known were things. Nipple clamps, for instance. Pasties. Cock.... cock rings (Why?! What was the purpose?). A Wartenburg neurological pinwheel (Why and why again, shouldn't that be in a medical supplies store?). Edible candy underwear (Oh god that can't be hygienic).
A box that proclaimed itself to be a Clone-A-Willy kit.
Erotic dice.
A lubricant launcher.
This last, Harold studied in a surreal state that was half discomfort, and half attempting to visualize the logistics. Looked like a syringe. A brief study of the package's text gave him enthusiastic exhortations to: LOAD IT AND SHOOT IT! ACCURATE AS YOU NEED TO BE!
Was it a sex toy or a guided missile? Dear God.
"Slick's on the next aisle," said a bored male voice, and he nearly dropped the item in his hands, head snapping up to seek out the voice. "That thing'll only hold about two ounces though. You doin' anal or pussy?"
The shopkeeper was standing at the head of the aisle, magazine dangling from one hand, looking like every horrible mental preconception he had of such sleazy individuals.
"Wh-what?" Harold managed to squeak. His face was hot as an overclocked processor.
The man rolled his eyes a little. "You fucking someone in the ass or the pussy? You need more lube for the first. Or--" and he paused, head tilted to one side, giving Harold a once-over that he was extremely and definitely not comfortable with, "--you catching?"
What? Harold practically shoved the 'lubricant launcher' back onto the shelf before his fingers could rebel and chuck it at the man in self-defense. "No-- neither-- none of those-- I'm not getting that," he blurted.
"Suit yourself," the man said with a jerk of one shoulder and turned to head back behind the counter.
Harold weighed the benefits and drawbacks of asking the location of artificial mouths, and therefore getting out of the shop quicker, versus the fact that he very much did not want to actually talk to this person.
He could hunt a little longer on his own.
Sadly, he was pretty sure he had exhausted the options on this aisle. Harold edged around to the other side, which put him in fuller view of the shopkeeper, to his dismay. He forced himself to keep his eyes on the merchandise and not worry about whether the dark-eyed man was watching him.
Not that the merchandise was any refuge from discomfort. Now he was face to face with the line of rubber phalluses. (Phalli, his mind corrected.) Harold stared despite himself. The proportions varied from what he supposed was 'normal' to, well, 'ridiculous'; the colors were garish to say the least.
BIG AND BLACK – THE NATURAL NEGRO (Oh God, really? Really? Apparently racism was alive and well in the sex industry) sat next to an off-white penis that looked fairly tame in comparison until he saw the packaging, which advertised that HIPPY-COCK! would "reveal it's cosmic secrets" under the power of a black light (not included). Harold wasn't sure if the concept or the punctuation errors bothered him more.
God, the next three all had testes, each vein and bit of skin reproduced in completely unnecessary detail. He stared in morbid, bemused fascination. This shop was much too close, and warm, and the combination of the two were making him sweat.
"You looking for a biggie?"
Huh? "Huh?"
"I said, are you looking for a big one-- I got a fourteen-incher in the back." The man snickered at his own unintentional innuendo.
It took Harold's helpless brain a few seconds to process what had actually been said to him. Fourteen inches. Was that-- was that even possible-- how would that fit-- not that he, you know, devoted any thought to anything like that, God no. No.
"No," he said, attempting the quelling tones that had shut up a few bullies along his route to MIT. Behind him the shopkeeper just sighed.
"You tell me what you want and buy it, sooner I can get back to quality time with Miss December."
Again it took a few seconds to figure out what the man was referring to; when it clicked his brain recoiled in disgust. Where had that man's hands been when he'd entered the store? Ew. Ew. Ick. Harold viciously scrawled a mental note to make sure not to make any sort of physical contact when he paid for his purchase.
If he found his purchase.
The man was still talking. "If you're looking for a peep room, we don't got one. There's a video cubicle in the back though. A buck for five minutes."
He didn't even want to try and figure out what that was referring to. Harold took a deep breath.
"I'm looking for a-- for-- a--" (Oh God, just say it.) "--a mouth. An artificial-- mouth. S-something that, uh, that sim-simulates... oral sex."
"Betty Jean's on the end-cap there, buddy. Don't got Billy Joe in stock."
Again, his mind wasn't going to analyze any of that. Harold edged to the endcap, where he found a few small boxes with an illustration of a platinum blonde woman licking a lollipop. There was advertising text on this box as well. He didn't take the time to read it.
Harold grabbed one blindly, hurried to the counter, and tossed it down. "That. Please. How much?"
The disgusting man was smirking. "Seven-seventy-eight."
Harold threw a ten at him, and mumbled a keep-the-change because he definitely didn't want to take back any money the man had touched.
He fled. 'Betty Jean' crammed into a pocket of his jacket, ears burning, and resolutely trying to wipe images of the HIPPY-COCK! and everything else from his head.
