Chapter 4 He woke the next day hungover, but thankfully without any lingering swelling or pain between his legs. Kate was back in the office regalling the team with her story of traversing the ghetto to find Kiyah and get her signed to a contract with the label. He continued trawling the internet for potential talent, wondering if he could one-up Kate and find someone with even more promise than the nubile, commanding young beauty from Memphis.
He was sorely disappointed when the next day the team got an email from Denise instructing them to drop all work tasks and focus on Kiyah’s debut single for the label, which they’d be co-writing and workshopping along with its music video. They’d secured Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion for features on the track. Denise made it clear that WAP (Wet Ass Pussy) by Cardi B and Nicki Minaj should serve as their model: raunchy, vulgar, clever, confident, titillating, and unapologetic in its vision of girl power. Leaning into Kiyah’s viral low blow lines, Denise’s email even said: “Think WAP meets America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
Denise also shared that Kiyah and Kate already had a title and chorus. The song would be called “I LIKE” (a nod to Chief Keef’s viral ‘I Don’t Like’ from 2012) and center an earworm chorus that went as follows:
I like money, I like clothes, I like twerking with my hoes, Ever since I was girl I’ve liked the way my pussy felt When I see a silly boy gettin’ hit below the belt I like Hermes, I like Gucci, I like playing with my coochie I got a perfect body and so do all my besties We like tying niggas up and beatin’ up they testes
Denise opened the meeting by playing the beat and even Seth came to nodding his head and tapping his feet: very catchy, danceable, fun, but with a heavy bassline that would lend a sinister edge to what he imagined would be 3-4 minutes of sexual boasts and innuendos about the masculine weak spot he’d drunkenly verified last night.
“I see you’re all excited,” Denise said. Unlike Kate, Marilyn and Ayesha, Seth wasn’t fluttering with glee, and he mentally lectured his boss on the difference between ‘all’ and ‘most’.
She continued, “So let’s channel that energy into a productive brainstorm. I can’t stay, I’m off to another meeting, but I do want to kick this off and get us into the rhythm and texture of the song. Let’s go around and sing-rap our chorus over the beat, one at a time.” Around the table each girl obliged, smiling and chanting the lewd refrain, stressing different words and syllables as they felt fit. Seth, on his turn, morosely said the words of the chorus but without much enthusiasm.
“Okay. Seth. Look, I get it,” said his former friend Denise. “We came up in a different era, cutting our A&R teeth at indie rock shows. But this is where the culture’s going, this is where the money’s going, and this is where the label’s going. I ask that you please participate and bring your talent to the room. Plenty of essentially feminine songs have been written by men– didn’t your uncle ghostwrite for Britney Spears? You don’t need to answer. Just get on board or get moving. I value your presence on the team so if you truly feel like you have nothing to offer this particular project, feel free to return to your cubicle at any time. But I’m handing this meeting over to Kate now. Good luck team!”
With that, she grabbed her coat from the back of her chair and left.
“Okay giiirrrlllllsss,” cooed Kate, “and Seth,” she tacked on flatly. “Let’s get the creative juices flowing. We want sex and we want power. Girl power. Think bubbly and sparkly. Think that scene from the James Bond movie, you know the one, but it’s a bouncy girl in a tennis skirt wearing a buttplug swinging the rope into 007’s ballsack. Think sequins! Let’s just spin up some scenarios and then try to craft verses from them.”
“Remember Jackass,” said Ayesha. “Like getting randy from watching those idiots beat on their balls.”
Marilyn giggled, “Getting WET you could say.”
“On my phone watching Steve-O get hit in the crotch,” said Ayesha, “with some nigga beneath me, he gon’ need an umbrella!”
“Yaaasss,” shouted Kate, cackling. “Ohh, then it goes, it goes: ‘See when I was in school I crushed so many nuts, that all of my friends called me princess nutella!’”
Seth felt that Denise had given him an out, but for about twenty minutes he sat stone-still as the girls happily ignored him and dreamed up bars of increasingly spectacular cruelty and cartoonish violence. Kate kept a running log of their lyrical ideas on a whiteboard:
“On my phone watching Steve-O get hit in the crotch with some nigga beneath me, he gon’ need an umbrella. See when I was in school I crushed so many nuts, that all of my homies called me princess nutella!”
"Oh he got that dog in him? Yeah this nigga’s my pet, Kept on a leash, I kick his balls and get wet"
“I’m a bad bitch and my friends bad too. They hold apart your legs, then your nuts meet my shoe. Your girl saw it happen now she’s purring like a whore, It makes her get wet to see you curled on the floor.”
“Me and my bitches we’re all from the ghetto, leave niggas down and they’re singing falsetto”
“This man likes my peach, ya he wanna bite it. Let’s spread his legs, oww I’m gettin’ excited. Kick in the balls, wow that’s gotta hurt, but I’m digging his girl, got my hand up her skirt.”
Seth vibrated with anger (his hangover didn’t help) but he eventually tried to muster a smile and chime in with the occasional, “Yeah, that’s good.” The last thing he wanted was an interrogation from these bitches about his discomfort. He tried to dissociate and stare out the window but he came back to the room a moment later as the session was devolving into absurdity.
“Cock rhymes with cinderblock,” Marilyn pointed out.
“Yeah, and?” said Kate.
“No, I’m just thinking like our rappers still wanna fuck and suck, they might be bisexual but they’re not full-on dykes. So maybe something about liking big fat cocks but also dreaming of testicles crushed by cinderblocks. Too graphic?”
“Not too graphic, no, we want outrageous. But it’s just… it doesn’t pop, it doesn’t sparkle,” said Kate.
“Maybe we reference dick size?” suggested Ayesha.
Marilyn pretended not to notice Seth bringing his hand to his brow in frustration. He’d always been insecure about his less than average 4-incher. Thankfully, Kate genuinely didn’t notice him or she might have pounced.
“Hmmm, that’s an idea. Cinderblocks is so absurd. Like… cinderblocks, baseball bats, sledgehammers, fireworks,” said Kate.
“Niggas got some dirty minds, always dreaming of my knockers, I be laid up with my toys, thinking bout’ some firecrackers in his boxers!” Ayesha almost shouted.
The girls enjoyed a fit of giggles before Kate suggested, “Ok but let’s try one involving baseball bats, I like that for some reason.” Seth again spaced out and by the time he returned the whiteboard had not one but two full-fledged verses on it:
Meg Thee Stallion: Got this goofy ready with his legs tied apart, My boots laced up and I'm just about to start. But here comes Cardi and I know she called first, In high heels and a thong with her bra about to burst. Hanging over her shoulder is the baseball bat- I can feel the vibrations coursing through my kitty cat. Watch her bring the bat back and take a big swing, For a grand slam homerun nut bust in her g-string!
[chorus x2]
Cardi B: I like diamonds, I like gold, I like dancing on the pole, When I need to have a laugh, I find a man that I don’t like, Then I whisper in his ear “Daddy lemme ride you like a bike.” So then he’ll take me to his crib, And I’ll be teasing his erection. When he thinks he’s ‘bout to fuck, I kick him in the nuts and tell him that he should’ve worn protection
Marilyn, Seth noticed, had been increasingly taken in by this sex-positive man-hating hothouse brainstorm. She had never been particularly cruel, like Kate, or indifferent and dismissive, like Ayesha. He and Mare had even enjoyed some friendly banter until she’d recently gotten so friendly with Kate. He felt wounded when she came upon a particularly (he had to admit) effective little verse:
Certified baddie cus I’m freaky and I’m pretty my kick brought him to his knees, now he worshippin’ this kitty!
On hearing it from her cute little mouth, Seth must have audibly groaned because the room, finally remembering his existence, turned its full attention to him.
“Seth. Bro, what’s going on?” asked Ayesha.
“Are you triggered, Seth? Did some mean girls drop an anvil off a roof onto your crotch?” Kate followed up.
Marilyn laughed, “How would that even work?”
“He was laying on the sidewalk trying to look up some skirts.”
Unprepared for this assault Seth stammered and said nothing.
“For real though, who hurt you?” asked Ayesha, with only half-mocking concern.
“N-no one hurt me,” Seth managed, as he realized that he was the only one to ever injure his testicles, just the day before, in a fit of gendered anger and bizarre biological research. “But you girls are killing it. Great work, truly. I’ll just leave you to it.” He grabbed his things and rushed out of the conference room. White hot anger inside him prevented him from hearing whatever parting barbs they might have sent him.
Furious about leaving with his tail between his legs, even complimenting the cunts as he left, he stomped back to his cubicle. He sat for only seconds before rising again to pace around, head spinning with fury. Suddenly, an idea struck him. He knew the code for his uncle Simon’s corner office, which was only used once or twice a month. Seth’s uncle was too busy hobnobbing in LA, attending his various doctor’s appointments, and enjoying the fruits of the labor that had made him president of the organization. He’d pop in to sign Kiyah’s contract over the weekend. But for now, inside that office, sat the vital document, which would only become official with Simon’s signature.
Sneaking into the office before he even knew what he was doing, he found the contract right in the middle of the big mahogany desk. Without a moment’s hesitation, he altered the contract to replace Kate’s name with his. This would entitle him to the “finder’s fee” – a percentage of Kiyah’s proceeds that went directly to the agent responsible for her signing. Of course, her success would raise all boats at the label, but Seth’s urge to punish his bullying colleague compelled him to steal Kate’s bonus commission. Noticing this compensation sat at a mere 5% of Kiyah’s proceeds, and feeling emboldened by his masculine act of domination, he decided that the ghetto bitch from Memphis wouldn’t notice if he juiced up the commission: 50%. Besides, that’s the kind of cut these agents took from artists in the good old days. In his prime, his uncle Simon had taken at least that much from the pop stars he discovered and catapulted to fame.
Stepping out of the office unnoticed, Seth breathed a sigh of relief and came back to himself. His ego restored by this act of assertion and risk-taking, he happily spent the rest of his day looking at small-time punk bands on Bandcamp. He knew the label wouldn’t bother to sign any of these holdovers from a different era, but so what? He’d discovered Kiyah, he was about to get rich personally, and make a whole lot of money for the label at large. At least that’s what the contract said. His teammates could laugh about Kiyah’s mean girl lyrics all day long. It didn't bother him, he told himself, money is money, business is business.
He walked past the conference room and noticed the girls had the projector fired up. Apparently researching for the music video, Ayesha had an anime clip on the screen, where some teasing schoolgirl buries her pointy shoe into a villain's private parts, prompting a comic sequence of his ridiculous faces overlaid with an image of two eggs cracking. Seth smirked.
Chapter 5 The next month passed for Seth in a dreamy and relaxed fashion. His uncle had signed the contract, so he’d see some small royalties from Kiyah’s social media accounts, which the label had helped her monetize (the ‘gas station freestyle’ video had just touched a million views). The big windfall would hit his account once the label dropped ‘I LIKE’ with its A-list guest verses from Cardi and Megan. At work he continued to opt-out of his colleagues’ research and planning for the song and its video, continuing to toil away looking for cool alternative bands that he already knew the label would never sign to a deal in 2026. Amazingly, the mean-spirited banter and experimentation of his sluttish coworkers didn’t get under his skin at all, now that he stood to more directly gain from their success. One day he walked past the conference room and briefly observed them slamming a meat mallet into different cuts of meat, searching for the ideal “splat!” sound to accompany an animated kick in the nuts. They had an iconic attack from Family Guy or Futurama on the projector, and right when the cartoon foot met the cartoon groin, Ayesha smashed the mallet into a juicy porterhouse on a cutting board. They’d recorded the sound with a contact mic and now they were going to re-run the clip with the sound effect. He saw Marilyn preparing ground beef on a platter in case, he assumed, they decided they wanted a squishier sound. He raised an eyebrow bemusedly, hoping that whatever sound they landed on would be the most lucrative for him.
After their next payday, he knew Kate noticed her lack of commission. She must have immediately talked to Denise, and they had to have discovered his treachery. Instead of needling him in passing, Kate began to ignore him entirely. Ayesha and Marilyn followed suit. Denise was absent enough that while he figured she was upset with him, they all must have decided they couldn’t do anything about it, with his uncle still acting as label president. The irony, Seth smiled to consider, was that Simon never thought much of him. In fact, he knew his uncle felt disappointed that he couldn’t pass his business down to a capable family member, which Seth resented. Simon had promoted Denise over Seth because of his nephew’s sheer prickliness. So much of the business was maintaining relationships, but Seth couldn’t stay on good terms with anyone. He specifically struggled to be cordial with the female pop stars that were the label’s bread-and-butter.
Regardless, he’d collect his royalties and the rest of these bitches would have to suck it up and be good team players. Another delicious irony, Seth observed, given the way they tried to “team player” him into celebrating sexualized violence against men’s private parts. In short, Seth was coasting. Not working too hard, enjoying his takeout dinners, masturbating furiously at night. He’d taken up Photoshop and found his colleagues' social media profiles. He’d been trying to stitch their faces onto pornographic images of women in degrading positions, but he could never get the lighting right. Ah well. He had scant idea that under his nose, in and about the office, a plan was afoot. If Kate couldn’t get back at Seth through the proper channels, stymied by the label’s good-old-boys family patronage network, then she’d have to pursue revenge through other means. Ayesha and Marilyn were only too happy to help.
Seth usually got to the office later than his teammates, and this particular Thursday was no exception. Given his nepotist privileges and his late night routines, he allowed himself to regularly sleep in and waltz into the office around 9:30, as the girls searched the internet for unrealized pop potential, or, lately, built mood-boards of slutty outfits and nutshot physics for the upcoming ‘I LIKE’ video. Today they were in the office open space around the water cooler, dressed differently and doing nothing that looked like work. Blood stirred in his pants and his eyes feasted on Ayesha: black belly exposed between a matching brown too-tight lycra set. One bare foot up on the water cooler she bent forward, breasts barely contained by her top, her bend stretching the fabric around her large and almost perfectly circular buttocks. He thought he saw the contours of her labia as he continued walking around her, towards the cubicles. Next to her, Marilyn sat on the floor in a little white t-shirt and green yoga pants, in a splits position, spread legs prompting him to imagine the tightness of her pussy. He always marvelled at her thinness and today he fully appreciated her pert little buttcheeks as he imagined splitting them open with his dick. Finally, Kate, in her skintight blue bike shorts and matching sports bra, broke from her bent-over cock-teasing toes-together hands-on-the-floor position to greet him, “You okay numbnuts? Don’t leak precum in your khakis, we’re just having some office yoga to get grounded this morning.”
Stunned at this resumption of office bullying, Seth scrambled for a response but was saved by Ayesha.
“You didn’t get the memo, Seth? It’s yoga on Thursday mornings, starting today,” she said, straightening up.
“Memo?”
“Well, not a memo, I guess,” Marilyn clarified, rising to her feet and approaching him. “I just think it’s so important to be centered and flexible, especially at work, you know?”
Still at a loss but regaining his composure, Seth said nothing. This was the crucial moment. Kate had coached her blonde coworker. Come on too strong and Seth would know that trouble awaits. But a touch of flirtation would grease the path of Seth’s descent into their trap, and she tried not to fumble. She brushed his forearm with her hand, stopping short of grasping his hand, and said, “C’mon you should join us, and next week you can wear something more appropriate for yoga.”
Seth’s half-mast member and his relief at what felt like a return to kindness from Marilyn spoke for him, “Of course, yeah I can try it… I guess…” Kate would always resent him, but he liked the idea of keeping it cordial with Ayesha and Marilyn. Maybe he could even articulate for them, at a later date, why all the nutshot business made him so uncomfortable. Maybe he could get one or both of them out for drinks and back to his apartment to choke on his dick, he briefly fantasized, realizing he was getting ahead of himself but still under the spell of his pornography addiction.
He gingerly walked into the middle of the room and Marilyn asked Ayesha, “Ayesha, boo, what’s a good yoga pose for beginners?”
“He could try downward dog,” she suggested with a shrug. Seth noticed Kate rolling her eyes and walking away, apparently displeased to see that her little minions had allowed Seth into the activity. “Do like this,” said his stacked black coworker, sticking her ass in the air and placing her hands on the ground some feet ahead of her feet.
Seth gingerly complied, leaning forward and walking his hands out in front of him. He deliberately positioned himself behind Ayesha, so he could still crane his neck up and ogle her bottom. He confirmed the presence of a cameltoe and studied it now from this strange position.
“That’s pretty good Seth, but can I help you correct your form a little?” asked Marilyn.
“Sure, Mare,” Seth said. Riding high, he used the nickname that Kate had for Marilyn, which he’d never tried before.
The blonde smiled at Kate across the room and laid her hands on Seth’s knees. “Just try to keep your legs straight, Seth, and make sure to spread the legs too.” She pushed his ankles apart and he happily shuffled his feet wider, a little wider than his shoulders. With equal parts amusement and disgust, Marilyn noticed Seth’s little hard-on tenting his khakis as he shamelessly inspected the fabric wrapped around Ayesha’s holes in front of him. The perfect distraction. Ayesha even wiggled it for him.
From behind Seth, Kate swiftly made three big strides. Left, right, left. She then madly rifled her right foot into a front kick that had all her body weight behind it. Aiming for the ceiling panels, her shoe was abruptly stopped by its impact with Seth’s scrotum. His khakis and briefs offered little armor, and he was especially exposed by the yoga position and his at-attention cock. Kate didn’t get her great ass without repeated leg days in the gym, and her kick lifted Seth’s lower half a few feet into the air, as his arms gave out and he fell face-first onto the floor. The sound of impact, Marilyn observed, biting her lip, sounded more like a cannonball connecting with a hanging cow carcass than a little hammer pounded into some store-bought beef.
As the kick landed, Seth had a flicker of awareness, hearing loud steps behind him, but his attention to the gluteal masterpiece before him, and his general aloofness, prevented him from doing anything fast enough. The catastrophe was immediate. Crumbling on his hands and face, his legs fell behind him, once his torso slid off Kate’s foot . He involuntarily squealed and his feet shook spasmodically. He unconsciously assumed the customary post-racking fetal position and rocked back and forth trying to catch his breath, squeaking like a bitten dog’s toy. In reality he was back on his feet after an hour, but for Seth it could have been seconds or days. The full-force testicular trauma erased from his mind any notion of place or time, reducing him to a single sensation: suffering.
The profound agony was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He transcended his knowledge of himself and his whereabouts. He knew only pain. Later, he’d reflect on all of the dim perceptions that he had not internalized at the time. Ayesha and Marilyn exploded in laughter and high-fived Kate, the kicker. Ayesha grabbed her phone from the water cooler where she had discretely propped it up and started a video recording prior to assuming her downward dog position. She reviewed the clip, since her role in the plot prevented her from witnessing it firsthand. “Damn my ass do look good in this joint,” she said. She reached down and loosened the fabric around her snatch, her deliberate wedgie having already served its purpose. “Oh!! Look at that recoil!” she said to Kate, as the video continued. “GodDAMN the way your ass jiggled when you made contact with his nuts,” she giggled, slapping the Asian’s behind.
The girls continued laughing and sing-rapping Kiyah verses. At one point Marilyn grabbed a mug she kept at her desk from her college days at a feminist campus newspaper. In bold font, the mug read: “MALE TEARS”. The girls posed over and around Seth, formerly the man, currently the broken puddle. A shot of Kate with one foot on his back, smiling and holding the mug. A shot of Marilyn and Ayesha in their yogawear poking butts out and making seductive faces for the camera. A handful of shots of the girls in the iconic injured male pose: faces contorted, knees together, hands over their groins.
An hour, a day, an eternity. However long it was, by the time Seth gathered himself and limped out of the office, the girls had already gotten back to work in the conference room. He did not announce his departure. Back in his home, Seth sat icing his package, terrified to move even a muscle.
While Ayesha and her husband tried to make a baby, while Marilyn sat at dinner smitten with her hunky Hinge date, while Kate welcomed an illicit hookup into her condo (she had seduced a married man), Seth devoured medical information online about his injury. Spread eagle and naked on his couch with a plastic shopping bag full of ice over his massively swollen scrotum, he feared making any move at all. The all-over full-body aches had subsided, and the debilitating nausea only came in waves, but the discolored fleshy mass between his legs still whimpered in pain, and the slightest touch or movement ratcheted the whimper up to a scream. After enduring a dizzy, excruciating journey back to his apartment, delirious and bow-legged from the pain, upon gently stripping his clothing, he thought he perceived that he still had two distinct masses in his scrotum, both the size of billiard balls when they should have been grapes. As long as he could confirm that impression once more, he figured he could avoid an ordeal at an emergency room. He would call off work tomorrow and then have the weekend to continue recovering.
While waiting for the courage to audit the contents of his ballbag, he reflected on his earlier humiliation. Strangely enough, Marilyn’s cruel couplet came to his mind: “Certified baddie cus I’m freaky and I’m pretty // my kick brought him to his knees, now he worshippin’ this kitty!” In his semi-spiritual experience of pure suffering, he had been brought to a religious state of consciousness, or something like it at least. In that hour on the ground, he would have prayed to the altar of the feminine, would have humbled himself before the divine cunt of Kate, or Marilyn, or any woman really. He had been utterly devastated and made aware of his inferior masculinity, and would have readily supplicated before womanness in exchange for even a second’s reprieve.
He prepared to re-inspect his genitals, and slowly, carefully reached to move the ice bag. Grabbing it, he started to pull- “AHHRRGHH!”
Seth choked out a garbled scream of pain. No, not yet. He’d ice and wait.
Meanwhile he pondered his next course of action. He considered the obvious response: make a police report and a call to Denise. “Umm, boss? So my coworkers just assaulted me. Yeah, that’s right. Well, it was a physical assault. It was, um, my privates… my balls are as big as tangerines right now.” Besides the humiliating prospect of telling cops or his manager what the girls did to him, another difficulty occurred to him. He was already profiting handsomely on his 50% of Kiyah’s social media revenue, and when ‘I LIKE’ dropped his proceeds would move him up a tax bracket or two. If he reported his assault to anyone, surely his commission theft would come out. Not only would he lose his ill-gotten finder’s fee, but Simon would certainly let him go. He might even run into some legal trouble of his own. He wasn’t too sure about that last part, but he ruled out telling any kind of authorities about this incident, to protect his dignity and his paycheck.
Trying again, he moved the bag of ice. “HHNNNGGH” he groaned. He saw that his scrotum had thankfully stopped swelling. It looked like a purple and blue half-deflated volleyball. He grit his teeth and reached. “EEEEEHHH” he squealed as he swiftly felt the contours of two hellishly swollen balls inside the sack. He grunted as he returned the ice to his groin. Everything he found online indicated that if his balls were still intact, and didn’t seem to be twisted around each other, he could ice, rest and pray. So he resolved to tough it out.
He’d lost the battle, but the war was won, he told himself. Those whores toiled away for weeks on a soon-to-be hit song that would line his pockets with half of its total revenue. He’d suffer the weekend and get back to the office on Monday. They could giggle and cackle and snicker, but he’d laugh all the way to the bank. He just hoped he’d be able to jerk off again soon.