Chapter 2: Rond

I am so glad I learned to stop doing any math in my head, or I’m sure that I would have absolutely bombed that test… Kelsey was lost in her thoughts as she made her way through the hallway leading to her apartment. Can’t let Viv be right about my grades being at risk… Gotta keep up the hard work… There’s only so many more terms I’ll need to take math, and then I’ll be home free…!

When Kelsey finally reached her door, she blinked. Waiting for her was a small package. It wasn’t oddly shaped, but she hadn’t been expecting anything like it, and Vivian usually gave her a heads up when something might be arriving. Most things ended up in the office for the building, but every once-in-awhile it would be delivered to their door instead.

Her immediate thought was that Vivian must have ordered it, but when Kelsey lifted it from the ground she saw it addressed not to Vivian, but herself. She quickly ran through all of the possibilities for what it might be, but nothing sprang to mind.

“Aren’t you a fun little mystery, huh…?” Kelsey shook the box, and it only emitted the faintest shuffling sound. “Let’s get you inside so we can find out just what you’ve got for me!”

Tucking the box under her arm she unlocked her door, threw the deadbolt once the door was shut behind her, and then immediately used her key to cut through the tape that held the box closed. It was a small box, but it was still filled with entirely too much packing material, and inside of it was a yet-smaller, black, lacquered box.

Quietly muttering about packing waste, she lifted up the small box and pulled it open with a bright, eager smile. Inside wasn’t anything she’d expected—though she still had no clue what it should be.

Whatever she’d imagined?

It wasn’t this.

Resting at the center of the small box was a small green sphere, the perfect size to fit in the center of Kelsey’s hand. She grasped it out of the box, and found the texture smooth and soft, not unlike that of a precious jewel. The texture was strange, but remarkably undetailed. Removing it from the box almost seemed as though it drained a small fraction of the light from the room, making it somehow darker. She knew that was impossible, but for just a moment it was as though the lights flickered. The room didn’t brighten again like it usually would after such a flicker, but she dismissed it as her own misbehaving perception and not reality itself.

Curiously, Kelsey reached for the orb and gave it a tight, firm squeeze. Unlike a jewel or other stone, the strange orb yielded, supple and flexible. The feeling in her hand was oddly compelling, somehow giving her a sensation of being powerful and invigorated, as though she were crushing something unyielding and unbreakable…

Released, the orb almost instantly returned to its previous round shape.

“A stress ball…!” Kelsey grinned proudly at deducing the small object’s purpose. “That must be what you are. A strange stress ball, but I could probably get some use out of a thing like you. These things are supposed to be good if you type too much, right…? When I need to type up everything I probably should have gotten one of these already…”

Kelsey tossed the ball up into the air, grabbing it dramatically as it fell with a tight squeeze that distorted its shape between her fingers.

Mmmm…

Something about the texture felt different, or rather, felt better than she was expecting. Squeezing it in her hand, feeling it yield… It wasn’t quite the thrill of feeling something unyielding bend, but the thrill of feeling something that shouldn’t be so supple giving way to her desire to squeeze it. Its original shape was somehow pure, proper, unsullied, and touching it like she was, forcing it to reshape, to bend to her desires, was an act that carried an intoxicating, almost sexual satisfaction.

Kelsey found her eyes hooding as she squeezed it again, her thumb pressing down against its center. Every little bit of give as it contorted around her pushing thumb sent another shiver down along her spine. She moaned under her breath, not even aware she’d made a sound at all. The effect of the orb was insidious and subtle, reaching below her conscious perception as it teased its influence deeper with each distortion of its shape.

It was so green, and it felt as though in its lacquered case it was so solid, but all of that changed for her. When she wanted it to bend, to reshape itself, the small sphere contorted helplessly to fulfil her desires. Its very nature twisted and deformed, contorting not in a way that it felt designed to do, but in accordance to her desires more than anything else.

She squeezed again, only dimly, vaguely aware of the way it made her thighs bring themselves together for a tight, lingering squeeze. Once they’d been together just long enough to savor the friction, they again drifted back apart. Kelsey’s eyes were faintly hooded, and her breath ever so faintly quivered as she squeezed the ball tighter, and tighter, until she were holding it as tightly as the strength of her grasp would allow.

The dark green orb resisted the force of her hand, but it felt less as though it were resisting because it could only yield its shape to such a degree, and more that it was resisting exactly as much as Kelsey wanted the orb to resist her.

Flattening the orb wasn’t what she wanted. It would grant her no satisfaction. It certainly wasn’t what she increasingly needed to feel as its alluring shape tingled its sensations through her hand. As she squeezed, her pale fingers sinking into the green that seemed to draw more light from the room the stronger she tightened her grasp, what she wanted was the satisfying feeling of the orb struggling and straining against her only to yield precisely as much as she wished.

Kelsey’s eyes fluttered, and she let out a slow, satisfied sigh before she placed it back inside of the box. “Phew… I do feel a lot less stressed now, I think…”

A heady, faintly dizzy feeling lingered behind, but it was the same sort of pleasant feeling one might have after the lingering calm from a nap, or the tingles of afterglow once one’s body was no longer quivering helplessly. It wasn’t enough to make her feel like she needed to rest, or as though anything were wrong. After a quick fluttering of her eyes the feeling had completely vanished.

With it gone, Kelsey felt remarkably refreshed.

“This’ll come in handy… but I should really get some of my homework done. Miss Baxter won’t go easy on me again, even if I have really good reasons for a bit of extra consideration…” Kelsey carried the lacquered box with her as she made the same walk to her bedroom she made day after day since she’d moved in with her sister.

Backpack settled down on her bed, she was soon booting up her computer in preparation for a long night of schoolwork. “I hope Viv’s long day goes alright. Our schedules have kept us both so busy lately. It’s too bad she’s going to be busy so much of this week, but at least we’ll have a little time together tonight… that sounds like a good thing to me, at least. I really do like when we have a bit more time to spend together, though… Not much more, just enough to bullshit a little more often… I think if we hung out too much more we’d just get on each other’s nerves…”

Kelsey’s blue eyes moved across the black box again as her computer booted. It was a quiet, gentle thought, passing by so quickly it would have been easy to dismiss if she had anything more pressing to consider. Without such, her mind could linger on the memory of just how satisfying the strange, green orb felt in her hand.

It really was satisfying… Makes me think of what it feels like to give Viv a nice solid hug. Should be seeing her tonight, so at least I won’t need to wait too long for one of those… Kelsey quietly giggled under her breath, but something inside of her quivered in a way that did nothing to disrupt her smile.

Vivian wasn’t anywhere near as yielding as that orb.

Not by half.

Compared to the quickly surrendering orb, Vivian was stubbornly pragmatic and mature. She was always doing the right thing, at the right time, and in the right way. Squeezing her sister into another shape wasn’t something that Kelsey often wanted to do, but even if she did, it often seemed impossible. She was polite, kind, and compassionate, but no one would ever call Vivian a pushover.

Unlike the stress ball, Vivian wouldn’t lose her shape no matter how hard I squeezed…

The thought passed quickly, but while it briefly lingered in Kelsey’s mind her lips pursed tighter, and her thighs were drawn together anew. A brief tremble quivered down her body.

“Ah! Finally!” Kelsey grinned as her computer showed its login screen, fully distracting her from the uncharacteristic thoughts that drifted idly through her mind. A cute picture of her own smiling face looked up at Kelsey beside the blinking cursor as it patiently waited for a password. “I swear, you take forever to boot up some days…! Get better at that, okay…? We have a lot of work to do!”

Entering her password to get to her desktop proper, Kelsey was only aware in the most detached, vague way that each key press felt oddly… unsatisfying and unfulfilling. It didn’t feel wrong like she was suddenly typing on the wrong keyboard, or as though her hands were resting atop the wrong keys. It was wrong because all too recently her fingers had felt a more satisfying sensation and they still knew how that sensation felt.

They’d experienced something better, and they wanted that again.

Everything she pushed down that yielded wrong, where wrong was not the perfect, seductive, corruptive sensation of the small green orb… It made a small part of Kelsey feel a growing, rumbling disappointment that silently gnawed away at places deep within her mind.

None of those feelings were enough to deter the college sophomore from her task. Soon enough she was working on her homework just as she had the night before, and she did so with no greater concern or care for her keyboard’s apparent deficiency than she’d ever possessed before. Her thoughts didn’t even linger on the strange way she was longing for a hug with her sister, or some other chance for closeness with something or someone else that felt firm and unyielding.

All of that could wait for another time. For now, Kelsey had homework to do before she could allow herself to be distracted by anything else.

Above all else, Kelsey needed to be a responsible adult.