He's Fine

"There's healing and there's whatever the lagoon does. They called it treatment. I didn't have a word for it that I could say out loud."

The journey to the lagoon was a waking nightmare.

Every jostle, every uneven step, every shift in Chris and Karen's grip sent fresh waves of sensation through my body — pain from my wounded leg, nothing from the other, and a growing dread that sat in my stomach like a tumour, malignant and spreading. The sun beat down on us with an indifference that felt almost cruel, its warmth a mockery of comfort when everything inside me had turned to ice.

I tried to speak. Tried to beg them to turn around, to take me back to the tent, to let me recover like a normal human being with bed rest and bandages and time. But the words kept dying in my throat, strangled by shame and the knowledge that nothing I said would change their minds. Glenda had decided. The lagoon was the answer. And my objections were just noise to be ignored.

The landscape passed in a blur of ochre dust and pale sky. I kept my eyes mostly closed, unable to bear the sight of where we were heading, unwilling to watch as each step brought me closer to the water that had already humiliated me once. The memory of that first encounter played on loop behind my eyelids — the overwhelming pleasure, the loss of control, the mortifying aftermath with Jamie standing right there, pretending not to notice what had happened to me.

And now I was going back.

Not by choice. Never by choice. But going nonetheless, carried like cargo toward a fate I couldn't escape.

The sound reached me before the sight did — that gentle lapping of water against shore, soft and rhythmic, almost peaceful. Under different circumstances, it might have been soothing. A creek in the Tasmanian bush, maybe, or waves on a quiet beach. But here, in this place, the sound was a warning siren, an alarm bell that set every nerve in my body screaming for flight.

Karen and Chris lowered me onto the bank with care that I couldn't appreciate. The ground was hard beneath my back, gritty with sand that immediately began working its way into my clothes, my hair, the bandages wrapped around my wounded calf. I lay there staring up at the sky, my chest heaving with breaths that couldn't seem to fill my lungs.

"Please," I managed, the word scraping past my dry lips. "Take me back to camp. I can recover there. I don't need—"

But no one was listening.

My eyes found Glenda as she moved toward the water's edge, her posture businesslike, her attention focused on the task at hand rather than the patient who was silently screaming at her to stop. She crouched at the shore, her fingers extending toward the crystal surface.

Don't, I wanted to shout. Don't touch it. Don't let it in.

Too late.

Her fingertips broke the surface, sending ripples cascading outward in ever-widening circles. And I watched — watched her body react, watched the visible shudder that ran through her frame as the lagoon's influence made contact with her nervous system. Her shoulders tensed, her breath catching audibly, her eyes widening with something that might have been surprise or might have been the first flutter of unwanted pleasure.

She knew. She had to know. The water had touched her, and she had felt something, and yet she was still going to make me go in there.

The betrayal of it burned in my chest like acid.

Glenda turned back toward me, her expression carefully neutral, professionally blank. Whatever she'd felt, she wasn't going to acknowledge it. Wasn't going to admit that the lagoon was anything other than a medical tool, a treatment option, a means to an end.

She reached for my leg.

"Wait—" I started, but her grip was already firm around my calf, her fingers digging into flesh that screamed in protest.

And then she plunged me in.

The water swallowed my leg to mid-thigh, and the world stopped making sense.

I'd been bracing for it. Had told myself I knew what was coming, that I could prepare, that forewarning would somehow lessen the impact. I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong that the reality of it made a mockery of my expectations.

The pleasure didn't build — it detonated.

One moment I was a person, a coherent entity with thoughts and feelings and some semblance of control over my own body. The next I was nothing but sensation, every nerve ending in my submerged leg igniting simultaneously in a cascade of ecstasy that bordered on agony. It roared up from my calf, my knee, my thigh, a tsunami of feeling that crashed through my groin and kept going, flooding my stomach, my chest, my brain.

I couldn't think. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything except experience, a vessel being filled past capacity with something that didn't care about the structural limits of the container.

A sound tore from my throat — halfway between a groan and a scream, pleasure and pain so intertwined that I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. My body twisted, muscles spasming, back arching off the ground as I writhed like something possessed. The sand scraped against my shoulders, my hips, my skull, but the discomfort barely registered against the overwhelming flood of sensation that had hijacked my nervous system.

Hands grabbed me. Arms wrapped around my torso, my legs, pulling me backward with a force born of alarm. Karen and Chris, I realised dimly — hauling me out of the water like they were rescuing a drowning man, which in a sense they were. I was drowning. Drowning in pleasure, in sensation, in a feeling so intense it threatened to dissolve the boundaries of my self entirely.

The water released me reluctantly, the lagoon's surface rippling in what almost seemed like disappointment as my leg emerged. The sensations didn't stop immediately — they lingered, echoing through my body in diminishing waves, aftershocks of an earthquake that had nearly levelled everything I was.

I gasped for air, my lungs burning with the effort, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. The world slowly reassembled itself around me — the sky above, the sand below, the concerned faces of the people who had no fucking idea what they'd just put me through.

"He's fine," Glenda said, her voice maddeningly calm.

Fine. I wanted to laugh. Wanted to cry. Wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she understood that what had just happened wasn't fine, wasn't normal, wasn't anything that belonged in a medical procedure. She'd watched me writhe and moan and lose control of my own body, and her professional assessment was fine.

The rage mixed with the residual pleasure still humming through my veins, creating something volatile and unstable in my chest. My cock was hard — achingly, obviously hard, tenting my shorts in a way that everyone could see if they bothered to look. Another layer of humiliation to add to the pile.

I bit my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, fighting against the sensations that refused to fade completely, the echoes of pleasure that kept pulsing through my groin like a heartbeat.

"I want to be alone for a while," I managed, my voice hoarse and wrecked.

"Don't be such an idiot. You can't be alone right now," Karen scoffed, her tone sharp and dismissive.

The words hit like a slap. Don't be such an idiot. As if my request was unreasonable. As if wanting privacy after having my body hijacked by supernatural forces was somehow childish or foolish. She hadn't felt what I'd felt. Hadn't experienced the complete dissolution of self-control, the terrifying intimacy of having your pleasure centres manipulated by something external. She had no fucking right to judge.

I turned to Glenda, my eyes wet with tears I couldn't hide, silently begging her to understand what I couldn't bring myself to say aloud. The turmoil was written across my face, I knew — the shame, the fear, the desperate need for some scrap of dignity in a situation that had stripped me of everything.

Her expression didn't change.

"Karen's right," Glenda affirmed, her voice flat and final. "It's not safe for you to be alone out here."

Not safe. Of course not. There were shadow panthers and god knows what else prowling the landscape. But the danger inside the lagoon felt far more immediate than anything lurking in the dunes, and no one seemed to understand that except me.

"Then take me back—" I started, the words rushing out in a desperate plea.

"I'll stay here with him," Chris interjected, his voice cutting through my protest. He looked down at me, and there was something in his gaze that the others' lacked — a flicker of recognition, perhaps, or at least compassion. "I can clean his wound."

The offer hung in the air.

One person. Just one witness to whatever came next, instead of three sets of eyes cataloguing my every reaction, my every loss of control. It wasn't what I wanted — what I wanted was to be anywhere else, to have never come to this fucking place, to wake up in my own bed with Brianne beside me and discover this had all been a nightmare. But given my options, one observer was better than three.

I swallowed the objections that rose in my throat, the dark thoughts about what might happen with only Chris present, the knowledge that I was trading one form of vulnerability for another. Whatever followed, at least Karen and Glenda wouldn't be there to witness it.

Glenda shrugged, the gesture casual, indifferent. "As long as you make sure his leg gets submerged for a reasonable amount of time."

At the mention of another submersion, my leg jerked involuntarily — a reflexive flinch that I couldn't control, my body reacting to the threat before my mind could process it. A reasonable amount of time. How long was reasonable? How many minutes of that overwhelming flood of sensation was I expected to endure?

I can't, I thought, the words echoing in the hollow space behind my eyes. I can't go through that again.

But even as I thought it, I knew I would. Had no choice. The alternative was losing my leg, and as horrifying as the lagoon's effects were, amputation was worse.

"Regardless of how much he groans about it," Glenda added, her grip tightening briefly on my wounded calf before she released it.

Groans. She thought the sounds I'd made were groans of pain. Or maybe she knew better and was choosing to pretend otherwise, to maintain the polite fiction that this was a normal medical treatment and not something far stranger and more invasive. Either way, her words made clear that my protests would be ignored, my pleas dismissed. Chris had his instructions. The submersions would continue regardless of my reactions.

Chris nodded silently, his expression solemn.

Glenda rose to her feet, her figure blocking the sun for a moment before she stepped aside. The warmth returned, but it felt hollow now, incapable of reaching the cold place that had taken up residence in my chest.

Karen's face betrayed her uncertainty, her brow furrowing as she glanced between Chris and me. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

"We're sure," I interjected, the words coming out fast and urgent.

I needed them gone. Needed the women to leave before anything else happened, before the lagoon demanded another submersion and I lost control again with all three of them watching. The desperation must have shown in my voice, because both Karen and Glenda turned to look at me with matching expressions of surprise.

Chris shrugged in response to Glenda's questioning gaze, offering nothing more than that noncommittal gesture.

"You could lose your leg if you don't let the water help you," Glenda warned, her voice carrying the sharp edge of admonition. She moved past me, reaching for Karen's hand and pulling her to her feet.

The threat landed where it was meant to — square in the centre of my fear. Lose my leg. Become a cripple. Spend the rest of my life hobbling around on a prosthetic, unable to work construction, unable to run, unable to teach my daughter to ride a bike or kick a football.

Is Glenda truly oblivious to what the lagoon does? The question burned in my mind as I watched her guide Karen toward the first sand dune. How could she not see? How could she not understand?

Maybe she did see. Maybe she understood perfectly and had decided that the trade-off was worth it — a functioning leg in exchange for some temporary loss of dignity. Easy calculus when you weren't the one losing the dignity.

The two women began their ascent, their figures growing smaller with each step, their forms wavering slightly in the heat that rose from the sun-baked earth. Part of me wanted to call out, to beg them to stay, to not leave me alone with Chris and the lagoon and whatever was about to happen. But I clamped down on the impulse, bit my tongue until it hurt, and watched them go.

They crested the dune and disappeared from view.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Just me and Chris and the gentle lapping of the water against the shore, the sound that had once seemed peaceful now laden with menace. The lagoon waited, its surface deceptively calm, its depths hiding powers I didn't understand and couldn't control.

"Come on," Chris said, his voice gentle as he crouched beside me. His hand reached for my leg, the touch tentative, almost hesitant. "Let's get you cleaned up."

I looked at his face — kind, concerned, utterly oblivious to what the water had done to me, what it would do again. He thought this was about cleaning a wound. About rinsing away dried blood and applying whatever passed for first aid in this place. He had no idea what he was really asking me to submit to.

"It's fine, I can do it myself," I retorted, pushing his hands away with what remained of my strength.

But even as I said the words, I knew they were a lie. I couldn't do anything myself. Couldn't stand, couldn't walk, couldn't escape. I was trapped at the edge of this cursed water with a body that had betrayed me and a future that held nothing but more surrender, more submission, more loss of the self I'd thought was mine.

The lagoon waited.

And I had nowhere else to go.