Kristen was losing interest, that much Troy was sure of. Where they’d gotten together almost every night for the first year or so, it had over the past six months slowly dwindled; first to weekends only, then to every other weekend.

The attraction was still there but the passion was largely gone, sapped by time and (Troy figured) the occasional slip each of them had probably made. At least, he could think of a few times something she’d done had sat badly with him, the kind of badly where you sit and stew on it for a couple of weeks despite yourself. He wasn’t dumb enough to assume that kind of thing was all one-way. It never was.

The problem was that they were, outside of their sex life, fairly incompatible; it had taken them over a year to start to notice, though, by which stage they each knew most of the other’s friends, they’d been included in group plans, even double-dated occasionally with others, and their lives had become entangled.

It was sort of a shame, he thought, that they hadn’t kept to being fuckbuddies and no more, but that had only even been the plan for about the first week. Maybe it had just been quick bonding, accelerated by hormones and the buzz of endorphins; maybe there had been something more. Either way, they’d both seen something more, or at least believed it existed.

These were not thoughts that all occurred to Troy at once. For all that it’s possible to lay them out in something like a rational order, these came to him disjointedly, with different layers of insight at a time, and in some cases his first conception of a given point set out above was the inverse of his final conclusion. It took him days to first identify the source of his growing discontent; once he had, it took him days more of mulling it over to realise that their connection had in fact never been that deep.

It was easy to confuse a strong bond for a deep and lasting bond. It was also, he thought, going to get in the way of finding a solution.

As was the fact he didn’t know what a solution would be. He didn’t really know what he wanted, except that he would be very happy if it still involved his cock inside Kristen as often as possible, with as much enthusiasm on her part as possible.

He didn’t think he would be happy at all if it turned out that privilege was now reserved for someone else’s cock. Or tongue. Or fingers. Or strapon, depending.

That might count as caring, he thought. Or it might be jealousy, either rearing its head before it was called for or responding to some subtle cue he hadn’t registered yet.

Whatever the case, Troy knew that the done thing here would be to let it happen; maybe even to hasten it along. Call Kristen. Have a conversation. Be the bigger man, acknowledge the problems - she had to realise, too, right? - and let them both go on their way.

He just didn’t want to. He knew, realistically, that this was a weakness on his part, but he couldn’t find it in him to work on that weakness, try and fix it.

At least not at the same time he was also facing losing his girlfriend, his lover, his utterly reliable opportunity to get his rocks off. Whatever you wanted to call her, she mattered to him. He mattered to her.

But he didn’t matter to her enough anymore.

Troy had no idea what he wanted to do to fix that.

*

If Troy wasn’t willing to bring up his fears with Kristen, it should be no surprise that he wasn’t talking openly about it with his friends, either. Doing so would make it real; besides, some of them might take her side.

He’d been trying to figure out what to do about the situation for the best part of a month after working it out before a solution more or less fell into his lap.

At college, Liam had been one of his closest friends; the two of them had moved to different cities after graduating, but they’d kept in touch, and made a point of hopping on a train to visit each other once or twice a year. Privately Troy suspected that one of them would grow tired of that arrangement before too long, would allow contact to dwindle away to nothing. He just didn’t want it to be him.

Troy had grown habituated to a certain amount of fear about the stability of relationships he could perhaps have put greater trust in. The little inkling he had of this he ascribed to his parents.

Liam’s flat was within a pretty easy walk of the train station, so Troy just walked it, his backpack slung over his shoulder with a couple of days’ worth of clothes. He felt a little self-conscious about not bringing Kristen, but then she and Liam hadn’t exactly got on last time, either.

It wasn’t Liam who answered the door. A blonde, her hair a traditional bob, standing not much above five feet, short and curvy and wearing only her forest green panties, opened up and looked at him with a placid smile, not quite seeming vapid but certainly incurious.

Troy was blushing but she wasn’t. Big, heavy tits hung almost magnetically; he couldn’t keep his eyes away from them. She didn’t seem self conscious about them, didn’t seem self conscious; he wouldn’t have been confident that she was conscious she had a self. Which was a strange idea, one that seemed to have suggested itself through her presence; an absence so evident one couldn’t help but take notice.

Whoever she was, she was gorgeous. Well above Liam’s league, if he did say so himself.

Shit. Did Liam even still live here? It wasn’t 100% beyond his friend to have forgotten to give Troy an updated address, even knowing Troy would be visiting shortly…

“Um… hi?”

She didn’t answer for a few moments, looking back at him steadily, big empty eyes in a docile, happy face. “Hi,” she said, and waited.

“Is… Is Liam here?”

She tilted her head, looking at him from another angle, still smiling. “Yes.”

“Can I see him?”

She tilted her head again, to the other side. The smile hadn’t changed and nor had the eyes, but something in her abnormal body language seemed to Troy to say she was thinking, something that shouldn’t take so long before he got an answer.

Further into the flat was the sound of a flushing toilet, and a few moments later the door opened and Liam looked out.

“Oh! Shit!”

Liam came scrambling over to the front door. “Get back in the living room, you,” he told the blonde, and she straightened up, coming to attention with a blissful bounce, before wheeling on her heel, moving toward the open living room door with a rhythmic steadiness that make it come across like a march.

“Sorry about that, man,” Liam said, frantically buckling up his belt. “I’d forgotten you were coming today or I’d have stored her in the laundry room until you were off.”

Troy stared. “You’d lock your girlfriend in the laundry room?”

Liam looked back at him, and Troy could see his friend mentally recalibrsting, realising his assumptions weren’t matched. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just used to it. She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a doll.”

“What, like, you bought one of those crazy Japanese gadgets?”

“No. Besides I don’t think they have gadgets like her yet. And would you expect some sex robot to answer the front door?” He had, by now, steered Troy inside and closed that same front door, secure against anyone else listening.

“I don’t think you did expect her to answer the door.”

“Yeah, yeah. But you know what I mean. Why make a robot for fucking able to answer to callers?”

Troy was feeling pretty lost by this point and elected not to answer. It wasn’t necessary. Liam continued. “No, she’s alive. Like, regular organic human. But she’s a doll.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“No personality,” he said, and gave up on standing in the corridor. Instead he went through into the living room, where there were places to sit, and where the ‘doll’ stood beside the sofa, quiet, smiling. “No self-awareness. No real intelligence or motivation. But she gives great head, and she can cook, and she’s never upset.” He grinned at her. “Right?”

The doll smiled, but otherwise didn’t answer. Unless, perhaps, Troy wasn’t imagining things and her nipples had got even harder.

He was probably imagining things.

“So who is she?”

“That’s not really a question that makes sense here,” Liam said. “There’s no ‘who’ left. She used to be my friend, but, I mean, friends have to be able to carry on a conversation without two-minute lag time to think.”

“What’s her name?”

Liam’s head snapped back to Troy. “Don’t ask that,” he said firmly. “Not in her hearing. She doesn’t have a name.” A pause. “But let’s just say there’s a name out there where if she heard it I’m not sure what would happen, OK?”

This didn’t feel right to Troy, but his friend knew more about it than he did, so Troy decided to treat it as being provisionally OK. “Sure.”

*

“I’m not gonna say it’s embarrassing, exactly,” Liam said, “but, like… you’ve gotta be in a pretty low place to break someone’s will. I was… but I don’t know if I can fairly say I was low enough to justify it.”

Troy wasn’t at all sure how to answer that. He nodded.

His friend had told him that the plan had been to keep the doll out of sight throughout his stay. Liam knew Troy had to have questions, and it sounded like he’d wanted to avoid ever having to answer them.

But he’d screwed up; Troy had come face to face with her, and for long enough to get a sense of what was going on. And the result was that Liam now had all of those questions to at least acknowledge, even if it seemed likely he wouldn’t be giving answers for all of them.

The benefit to that was that the doll no longer needed to be kept secret, and so Liam had her fetching drinks, preparing food, even settling down on hands and knees, staying motionless, to act as a table for those same drinks.

Frankly, Troy thought this was a little eerie, discussing someone while they knelt, to all appearances absent and uninterested even as the story was told of how they got that way. Yet Liam didn’t seem to register that; he’d got so used to it he didn’t care. So used to his doll, in fact, that Troy had looked up from his phone a couple of times to see Liam fondling his toy’s thighs or ass or tits, and it was only if he noticed his friend watching him that he got embarrassed and stopped. Groping her was just a privilege he had, clearly.

“So how did you do it?” Troy asked, and he wasn’t really interested to know but what else made sense as a question?

But Liam was suddenly sitting upright, alert, eyes wide; his head was shaking slowly. “No,” he said. “No, man. I don’t know what you’re thinking, don’t know what you’re planning, but believe me, it’s not going to be worth it, whatever it is.”

“OK, man, sure,” Troy said. “Sure. I won’t.” He’d leaped to reassure his friend on reflex, talking before he even realised what he was promising, let alone thinking through the implications.

And he really hadn’t had anything in mind, any plans, when he asked.

They changed the topic, and Troy was honestly glad to do so; they ordered in pizza and watched movies and laughed and joked, and by the time the two of them went to bed a living, breathing unthinking doll, available for her owner’s pleasure, speaking only when required to, seemed like a natural thing. Troy had stopped finding the doll unsettling, and though he would never have admitted it, he now felt jealous of his friend.

When at last they stumbled off to their separate beds, Troy lay awake, staring through the twilight at the ceiling, wondering how he’d come to this stage in his life, and feeling the edge of a hangover wanting to form.

Then the sounds of sex began.

This apartment’s walls were not big enough for everything not to be clear. The doll, who had been so silent for so long, was abruptly very vocal, her moans and squeals of ecstasy easily loud enough to echo through his room. The bed itself thumped rhythmically, and there were moments where Troy was sure he could hear flesh slapping against flesh. Impossible to ignore. Impossible not to picture the doll humping Liam.

In his minds eye Liam, reduced to a vague figure by a conscious refusal to imagine, lay back on the bed, arms up behind his head. Liam had always been a lazy man, and this was a perfect illustration of that; all the same he could imagine the doll straddling him, her thighs doing all the work of riding him up and down, her pace and intensity all the same dictated by what Liam liked.

He could picture her clearly, from that same almost-empty expression with the unchanging smile to the way her tits would bounce as she rode him. Seeing her up close and personal through the evening, completely bare-chested, he’d built up a certain… understanding… of how her body moved, how motion could cause delightful ripples across her ass, what it took for her nipples to seem to jump, just slightly, as she rose or fell.

Since he wasn’t going to get to sleep anyway, he allowed his hand to creep down under the covers. Lying back on the pillow, his other hand tucked under the pillow for a little more support, Troy began to stroke, his mind away imagining what it might be like to have a perfectly compliant doll just lying around, completely and perfectly available.

The closer he got, the less the doll he was picturing looked like Liam’s nameless doll. Instead she’d taken on aspects of Kristen, aspects of his ex Isa, aspects of that woman wrestler he liked - her hair, in particular, the undercut with the mane of golden ringlets descending down the other side, and her ass; one of the things he still really enjoyed about Kristen was just how amazing her ass was, even if she never did anything to show it off.

Liam had disappeared out of the equation early on.

When he was, finally, done, he drifted off to sleep before he could really think through the flight of fancy that had got him there. He had just about decided that the idea of having a doll wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He just didn’t want to be as embarrassed as Liam clearly was; the idea of skulking through life trying to keep it secret wasn’t one that filled him with excitement.

*

Troy never slept well when he was sleeping in someone else’s bed, and he never slept well when he and Kristen were on the outs. Taken together, it was no surprise he gave up on sleeping before it was light outside.

Knowing he wasn’t getting back to sleep, he moved himself into the living room, where he turned on the TV and the Playstation, muted the TV, and spent a while at play, killing time and allowing his brain to relax and unwind, even if sleep wasn’t coming for him.

It was past dawn before any other movement in the flat. The door to Liam’s bedroom opened and the doll emerged. She wore red leather bands on her wrists, each one about two inches across, and on the inner wrist of each was a silvery metal clip, as if they attached to something; Troy took a little longer to notice that she wore something similar across each ankle. By that time she had walked past him, and even in the low light of the TV, his eyes registered a flash of something, a sudden reflection, once she was past.

Turning his head to follow, he saw coloured glass, blue and cut like a gemstone into the shape of a heart, caught in a gleaming silvered rod, emerging from her ass. It was the first time Troy had seen a buttplug, and while he recognised what it was, he didn’t know what to make of it.

The doll padded into the kitchen. Afterwards, Troy would wonder why he’d got up and followed her through, wondered what thought had prompted it. It must have been buried in the complex thoughts and theories he’d been juggling since he woke, the ones that a burst of gaming were meant to distract him from. It must have been buried in those because it happened as naturally and automatically as when he went to grab a drink, not propelled by a decision so much as an awareness he needed to do something.

“Morning,” he said, and the doll smiled at him and said nothing. He’d seen this a couple of times the previous night; her expression mostly stayed exactly the same as if she was an actual doll. But from time to time there would be a twitch, or perhaps a tic; some reaction that was actually visible.

He grabbed a glass from the cupboard and headed for the fridge-

“Morning,” the doll said, and he jumped nearly out of his skin in shock.

“You can talk?”

Silence reined for a few moments, long enough that he felt foolish even for asking, before the doll spoke again. “Yes.”

Troy stared at her for a long, long moment, trying to understand these pauses. Was she somehow… thinking at half speed?

Her response to Liam’s orders was much faster. Perhaps there was something else going on, some aftereffect of…

…well, of whatever Liam had done.

“I didn’t think dolls talked,” he said, and he felt stupid just for having said it. To stop himself from feeling to embarrassed he went on. “It’s cool you do, I guess. Whatever happened to you, you still have your voice.”

“Yes,” came the reply, after a while.

“You know,” Troy said, licking suddenly dry lips, “Liam didn’t say what he’d done to you. But I’m guessing you know, right?”

The wait for this answer was agonising. “Yes,” the doll said. “I remember.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No,” was the eventual reply. There was a sense of wonder in the tone, though Troy wasn’t sure what she was wondering; maybe she wondered why she didn’t regret it, or maybe she wondered why he’d ask such a dumb question in the first place.

He didn’t know enough even to guess with confidence.

“Will you tell me?” he asked. “What was done?”

“Yes.”

He had time, before she could collect her thoughts enough to begin, to start his phone recording.

Which was the point where he had to admit to himself that he wasn’t asking purely out of curiosity. If you were going to record something like this, you had to at least be interested in using it for yourself.

The doll started to talk, and it went on, in a slow pace, for a long, long time.

*

Heading home on the train, Troy stared out of the window, deep in thought, and the expression he wore was troubled.

Was he really thinking about this?

What even gave him the right to consider it?

But what did rights mean, anyway? If he was going to turn Kristen into a doll… that wasn’t an action taken by someone who worried about what they had the right to do.

If he did it, he was putting himself above that judgement in any case. He was making a statement about what kind of person he was, even as he turned her into a statement.

So that was that… wasn’t it?

Or would he feel guilty? A tell-tale heart hidden away from the rest of the world, but there every time he looked at her beautiful face, now as placid and ever-smiling as the slow-thinking doll Liam kept secret in his flat?

The train journey was too long for this. He regretted not having brought along better distractions. The more he thought about it, he knew, the less likely he was to have the courage when the time came, whatever he decided…

*

He stepped in the door and went to find Kristen, heading over to where she was sat at work. After a few moments pause - right, no speaking, she wasn’t wearing her headphones, so there wasn’t any kind of work meeting going on - he went from her doorway to her desk and leaned over, kissing her on the cheek. Kristen gave him the briefest of smiles, the kind that never reached the eyes, and went back to what she was doing; Troy headed off to his own room, where he sat for a while and stared past his laptop screen, not even registering the password prompt.

It was too petty a thing to decide on, he told himself. Her focus was on work, he told himself. It was unfair to make that his decision point.

All the same, he got up and he left the house to buy the four or five things the doll had told him he needed.