The operation was a success, and Lukas came home a few days later. He had to wear an adult diaper, until he got used to what they had done to him. As it was, Lukas couldn’t control himself. They had removed the catheter, but they said it might be weeks, even months, before Lukas was able to hold his piss, and control the new eye they had given him between his legs.

Lukas wouldn’t let Matthew see what they had done to him. He wouldn’t take the diaper off, and he wouldn’t show Matthew, he said, until the scar had healed.

Matthew supposed Lukas was afraid that he would think it was ugly, that Matthew wouldn’t want to know him anymore, but still, Matthew wanted to see it. If it had been like things had used to be, when he was on the tablets, Matthew knew that he would have made Lukas show him.

He didn’t feel like he could do that now.

It was summer, the middle of summer, and the weather was hot. Lukas got into the habit of walking around in his apartments wearing nothing but a diaper. He had a thing about shoes though. He wouldn’t walk around unless he had something on his feet. And most often he was wearing sandals, or runners, and with nothing but a diaper to cover himself.

Matthew thought it was funny. A few times he found himself smiling at the way Lukas looked, like he was a two year old, though somehow it was sexy, and Matthew wanted to do something with Lukas. He wanted to touch the place, or fuck him, but nothing like that seemed to be happening.

A few times, Matthew smelt something, though Lukas always got up and went to get changed when he had wet himself. Once, though, they had laid on the lounge together, Matthew behind Lukas, and Matthew had put his hand between Lukas’ legs. Lukas had tried to push his hand away, but Matthew had held it there, enjoying the feeling of touching the place, where he knew there was nothing.

‘You’ll make me piss,’ Lukas said.

Matthew had a hard on. He had it pressed up against Lukas’ arse, and he came, as he kept his hand there, just like it had used to be, when he was on the tablets, coming without even touching himself. Though as he was coming, he felt something wet on his hand. Lukas was pissing himself, and it was coming out of the side of the diaper, onto the inside of Lukas’ thighs.

Matthew moved his hand, and Lukas got up and went to get changed. When he came back, he was red in the face.

Matthew supposed Lukas felt pretty bad. He hadn’t liked it when he had small gear. He hadn’t liked it when he had a small cock and balls, and no pubic hair. He had been embarrassed about those things, and Matthew knew that, because he had been in Lukas’ mind. He supposed it was so much worse for Lukas now, having nothing, not being a man at all, and he felt sorry for Lukas, awful about what he had done.

Matthew’s cock had returned to normal, to pretty much how it had used to be before he started taking the tablets. It didn’t shrivel up as much as it had used to. It was pretty much full all the time, like it had been on the tablets, and it was over ten inches. There was nothing Matthew could do about that. He would have to live his whole life with an enormous cock, and balls like plums, simply because he had been taking those tablets for a few months. He didn’t suppose it would ever go back to what it had used to be, but he wasn’t hard all the time now, like he had been on the tablets. He had some control over it, though not much as he had used to have.

The tablets had changed him, physically, and forever. And there was a limit to how big you wanted your cock and balls to be. Matthew had been happy when his cock was seven and a half inches. That was normal, or close to normal. Now, he was a freak. And when he was out, at the mall, or in the street, there were always people looking at his groin, and most of them people he didn’t want looking at him. Strangers, raping him with their eyes.

Still, though, he was better off than Lukas. And when he thought of that, of what he had done to Lukas, Matthew felt physically ill. And yet, when he saw Lukas, in the diaper, and with a pair of sandals on, Matthew felt a desire for him that he had never felt. Even on the tablets, he had never felt so much like fucking Lukas, or being sucked by him, as he did now. But none of that was happening. Matthew slept in his own room, and Lukas slept in his.

‘Do you want me to sleep in with you?’ Matthew said one night, when they were playing Mass Effect.

Lukas shrugged, and Matthew could tell he didn’t want to.

And as it turned out, Matthew didn’t.

Lukas said no, in a few weeks, in a week or two, when it had healed.

Matthew knew he ought to phone his parents. He had been living at Lukas’ for weeks now, and hadn’t once been to see them. A few times, he picked up his phone, meaning to call them, but he couldn’t. He knew, the worst of everything, even if he was off the drugs now, was that he would have to tell his parents he was going to England, and ask his mother for his passport, which she kept somewhere, safe.

Still, though, it was months away. He could still go and see them, go and see his mother, alone, when his father was at work. But something stopped Matthew. And when he thought about it, he knew what it was. It was what he had done to Lukas, and the fact that the charges were still hanging over his head.

How could he ever explain that to his parents, if he ended up in jail, for years, for what he had done to Lukas?

The police weren’t dropping the charges, and when Matthew had phoned the solicitor, to speak to her about it, she said she wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t up to Lukas to decide if a crime had been committed. What was surprising, she said, and she seemed to find it almost impossible to understand, was that Matthew had been given bail, and allowed to contact Lukas, when Lukas was his alleged victim.

Matthew spoke to Lukas about the court case, and he spoke to him about it often. He was worried that Lukas would say something, that Lukas would change his mind, but Lukas kept assuring him, and reassuring him, that he wouldn’t do that.

As it was, everything was up in the air. A date hadn’t been set for the committal hearing, and the trial itself would be months away, most likely some way into next year, when Lukas was supposed to be England, and supposed to have started his course.

Matthew was depressed. Everything was a mess, and everything had been made a mess by Christian, and by those tablets, though Matthew supposed he ought to blame the tablets, more than Christian, and himself, for being stupid enough to take them.

Late one afternoon, three or four weeks after Lukas had come home, Matthew decided to finally tackle the boxes, which had been sitting in the corner of his room since the night he had come to Lukas’. He had left them there, because he had never really believed, not really, that he had come to stay.

It was raining outside, a dark, stormy, summer afternoon, and Lukas had gone to have a shower.

Matthew had pulled the first of the boxes over to the bed, and had started to go through it, when Lukas walked into the room. He was wearing a pair of jeans, and a T-shirt, and he wanted to know if Matthew wanted to go to the movies.

Matthew didn’t, but he didn’t want to say why. He didn’t like going out with Lukas, the way Lukas was now, because the diaper was so obvious under Lukas’ jeans. On the few occasions he had gone out with Lukas, he had seen people looking at Lukas, at the bulge under his jeans, and had even seen some girls point, and laugh, at the mall. Matthew had felt like hitting them, but still, he had been embarrassed.

‘We could see The Fall.’

‘I was going to do this,’ Matthew said, motioning at the boxes.

Lukas nodded, and looked into the box at Matthew’s feet. He bent forward and picked a pair of glasses up. The blackout glasses. The glasses that Matthew had used, when he had gone into Lukas’ mind.

Matthew swallowed at the sight of them. He had forgotten all about them. He had meant to give them back to Christian, for his cousin, but he had forgotten.

Lukas frowned at them. He turned them over in his hands.

‘What are these?’

‘They’re blackout glasses,’ Matthew said, ‘for sleeping on a plane.’

Lukas stepped over to the mirror, stupidly, and put them on. He wouldn’t be able to see himself.

Matthew had only just thought this, that it was a stupid thing to do, when he realised that Lukas was screaming.

He was clutching the back of his head, and he had fallen onto the floor, on his knees. And he was screaming.

Matthew’s first thought was that it was another one of Lukas’ headaches, which seemed to have disappeared since he had come out of hospital.

But it was obviously more than a headache.

Lukas was clutching his head, and screaming, and he didn’t seem to know where he was. Like he was lost in the dark.

Matthew stood up and tore Lukas’ hands away from his head, fighting with him, so that he could pull the glasses off his face. He ripped them free, and looked down at Lukas.

Lukas was clutching his head, and rocking forward on his knees, forward and back, forward and back. Matthew put his hand down to touch Lukas’ shoulder, but Lukas writhed away from him, as though he couldn’t bear to be touched.

Matthew turned the glasses over in his hand. He stared at them. And then, very slowly, he drew them up to his face.