She was the test subject; I was control. For three months the aliens had me in that square room with walls that looked translucent but nothing on the other side to see even if you put your face right up to them. I remember their quality vividly—slightly pink and glossy, like they were made of lacquer. I often tapped my fingernails against their surface, especially during the third month when my nails had grown long, and I pretended that I was playing a tune on the piano. There was nothing else to do.

When we were deposited back on Earth, the talk show hosts all wanted to hear about the abduction, but neither of us remembered. One day we were going about our lives, going to work, buying our jars of peanut butter and rolls of toilet paper at the grocery store, and the next we were in our separate, pink-ish rooms, a warm metal cuff around each wrist. We weren’t cuffed to anything. I knew instinctively that the cuffs were monitoring devices, taking my heartbeat, taking my temperature, taking god knows what when I felt, unprompted, a sharp prick against my inner wrists.

I told the talk show hosts about the walls, the cuffs, the food. I told them about the boredom, but she had a different story. And hers was the only one people wanted to hear.

I don’t remember much of our return. I know that we came back with reports, but they were all data, no interpretation. When I first had the opportunity to talk with her (after days of giving our separate interviews to the various officials who had been put in charge of our “case”), I thought that we had been through the same thing. We talked about the cuffs, the needle pricks, and the rooms, but then her story diverged.

Bondage. Sex toys. Machines built to fuck. There was no one in the room—but she felt their eyes on her all the same.

I lied earlier. Even though I pretended there was nothing to do but chew my hair and walk in circles, they had put one thing in that room with me, something small and phallic and made of the same material as the walls. The dildo was vague enough in shape that I could pretend it was something else. I never used it, no matter how bored I got, because I had the same sense that she did. I knew they were watching.

We were abducted together for our similarities. Same sex, same age within the week, born in the same state, same education levels. We both majored in anthropology; we both earned similar salaries. We were both single. We both masturbated the same amount (approximately three times a week). The scientists who interpreted our data have speculated that we were selected because we were, relatively, average in most respects, but especially average sexually. ‘Moderate’ was the word one article used to describe our masturbatory habits. I was relieved to read this: I had always suspected I skewed too far toward one end of the spectrum or the other.

I stopped responding to the requests for interviews after the first month. No one ever really wanted to talk to me—I was only there to serve as contrast. After I stopped appearing regularly on television and in online articles, the requests for my side of the story dried up. The public forgot about me.

I received a sum of money from the government (I’m not quite sure why), and though it wasn’t a huge amount, it was enough that I didn’t have to get a job for about a year if I wanted. So I didn’t. I rented a new apartment and painted the walls a pale pink. I bought wide metal bracelets from a jewelry store. I bought loose dresses and wore them without underwear.

Online, I bought sex toys. Sleek glass creations with bulbous tips, vibrators with ten speeds and a dozen settings, dual density silicone dildos, nipple clamps, bondage devices advertised for ‘solo play,’ dildos curving in in a ‘U’ shape for double penetration, and a frightening selection of creations from Bad Dragon, things that looked like tentacles and were thicker than my forearm. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to fit them inside of me, but she had mentioned a “range of sizes” in her interviews.

In online forums, she was less coy.

Dildos as thick as a soda can and as long as a wine bottle. They didn’t start me there, thank god, but once they got me to that point, I never got to go back to something smaller. I don’t really know what the timeline was, I was too far gone for that, but I’d guess I was already ‘stretched out’ before the first month ended.

Of course, she had the matter taken out of her hands. She was almost always bound, a machine doing the penetrating. It’s harder to go up a size when you’re the one in control of everything, but it’s easier for me when I turn on one of her TV interviews, grab the lube, and relax.

I’m not the only one who masturbates listening to her tell the same story over and over: a whole online kink community has blossomed around her interviews. She even has an OnlyFans, but she only talks about her experience in greater detail there. She never shows any skin.

If I started a channel, would anyone watch? If they did, I’d put on a real show. I’d start with my smallest vibrator and work my way up to the tentacle dildo over the course of a single evening. I’d show them everything.