The Playlist

Mia loved that her boyfriend Derek made her a workout playlist. It was the sweetest thing he had done in months, maybe ever, and she found herself smiling at her phone on the bus ride to the gym. Just trust me, he had texted alongside a winking emoji. It will get you through every set. Listen to the whole thing. No skipping. She had promised. She always kept her promises to Derek, even when his requests were a little weird, because he was sweet and devoted and only ever wanted what was best for her. Or so she thought.

LA Fitness was packed at six in the evening, the post-work rush in full swing. Treadmills hummed in long mechanical rows. The free weight section clanged with the percussion of barbells dropping onto rubber matting. The air smelled the way it always did, a cocktail of sweat and chalk and overpriced cologne, the perfume of a hundred bodies trying to outrun their day jobs. Mia did her usual quick scan as she walked in, nodding to the front desk girl, swiping her membership card, heading toward the women's locker room with the practised efficiency of someone who had been coming here three nights a week for two years.

She wore her favourite set, the high-waisted leggings that made her ass look incredible, paired with a matching black sports bra that hugged her breasts into a tight, supportive lift. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail. Her wireless earbuds were already nestled into place. She tied her sneakers, took a long pull from her water bottle, and headed for the cardio floor. Track one queued itself up automatically as she stepped onto the treadmill nearest the mirrored wall. She liked watching herself work out. Vanity, sure, but also accountability. Form was everything. 

The first track was called "Warm up," which felt appropriate. A chill electronic beat, the kind of thing you might hear at a rooftop bar in summer, all soft synths and gentle percussion. Mia started at a brisk walk, finding her stride, her ponytail swinging in time with each step. Her cheeks flushed pink with effort. Normal stuff. She watched her reflection move through the long mirror and felt a small, satisfied smile tug at her mouth. This was nice. Derek had picked good music.

The second track faded in seamlessly, called "Find Your Rhythm." The bass dropped lower, deeper, and underneath the music there was a soft female voice, almost subliminal, threading itself into the spaces between the beats. Mia could not quite make out the words but she felt them, the way you feel someone watching you from across a room. Her hips started to sway as she walked, just a little extra movement on each step, just enough that she noticed. Weird. She turned the volume up to drown the rest of the gym out, settling deeper into the music.

By the time the third track began, the song titled "Let Go," the warm honey feeling had already started pooling behind her eyes. Her vision softened at the edges, the fluorescent lights blurring into a pleasant golden haze. The voice in the music was clearer now, no longer subliminal but something more like a whisper directly into her brain. That is it sweet thing, just feel it, just move, just give in, you have been holding so much for so long, let it go for me, let it all go. And Mia's hands, without her permission, drifted up to the zipper on the side of her sports bra.

She blinked at her own reflection. She was not wearing a hoodie. There was no zipper there to unzip. Yet her fingers had already found the small clasp that held her sports bra together, the one she had to fight with every time she changed in the locker room, and they were undoing it with practised, unhurried grace.

The bra peeled away with a soft snap. Her breasts spilled free into the cool air of the gym, full and heavy and crowned with nipples that hardened instantly in the conditioned air. Across the row of treadmills, a man in a tank top stopped jogging so abruptly that he nearly fell off his belt, his mouth hanging open, his hand reaching out blindly for the emergency stop. Mia saw all of this in the mirror. She saw her own bare chest, pink from exertion, glistening with the first sheen of sweat, and she watched the man stare. She tried to cover herself. Her arms would not move. The music had taken them, and the music was not done with her yet.

Instead her hands continued their slow descent, sliding down her flat stomach, fingers playing across the waistband of her leggings before sliding under it. Her thumbs hooked into the elastic. She rolled the leggings down over her hips with the same languid, sensual motion she might have used to undress for a lover, except there was no lover here, there was only a public gymnasium full of strangers and her own dazed reflection in the mirror. Her thong went with the leggings. She stepped out of both in a single fluid motion, leaving them puddled beside the treadmill belt that was still humming forward at a brisk three point five miles per hour.

The treadmill beeped a confused warning. Mia stepped off without looking at it. Her bare feet, somewhere along the way she had also lost her sneakers, padded across the rubber floor toward the squat rack at the centre of the gym. The bar gleamed under the fluorescents, polished steel loaded with forty-five-pound plates on each side. A perfect pole, set at exactly the right height, calling to her like a beacon.

The fourth track had begun. "Show Them." That was its title, and Mia did not need to see the screen to know it, because the words were singing themselves directly into her bloodstream now. She gripped the bar with both hands, her bare breasts swinging slightly as she leaned forward, and she swung. Her legs hooked around the cold metal. Her thighs gripped, tightened, locked. She spun around the squat rack with the practised grace of a woman who had been pole dancing for years. She had never pole danced in her life. Her body remembered things her mind had never learned.

The gym had gone silent. The clanking of weights had stopped completely. Treadmills sat abandoned, their belts still running for owners who had walked away mid-stride. The benches were deserted. Forty or fifty gym-goers had drifted out from their corners and stood in a loose, slowly tightening circle around her, phones already out, recording, gawking, frozen between disbelief and arousal. A few of the men had gone visibly hard in their athletic shorts. None of them tried to look away.

A trainer pushed through the front of the crowd, a tall broad-shouldered guy named Diego according to the embroidered name tag on his polo. He held his hands up like he was approaching a wild animal. "Ma'am, you cannot, you need to, please can you," he stammered, every sentence dying in his throat as his eyes traveled across her bare body, from the swing of her breasts to the slick wetness already glistening between her thighs. Mia released one hand from the bar and beckoned him with a single curling finger.

He came. Of course he came. He walked toward her like a sleepwalker, like a man whose strings had been cut, and when she slid down the bar until her bare ass hit the cool rubber floor, he dropped to his knees in front of her without being asked. The crowd gasped collectively as Mia draped herself across his lap, her bare breasts pressed flat against his polo shirt, her hips rolling in slow grinding circles against the obvious bulge in his shorts. She could feel him hardening, growing thicker against her, and she could feel her own arousal soaking into the fabric, leaving a dark wet patch on his crotch.

"Holy shit," somebody breathed from the crowd. "Holy fucking shit."

Diego's hands hovered uncertainly at her waist, then settled, then gripped. His palms were huge and warm against her ribs. Mia ground down harder against him and felt him exhale a shudder against her neck. The music in her ears was still going, still coaxing, good girl, look how good you are, look how easily they fall, and she leaned back on his lap to give the crowd a better view of her bare chest, her arched back, the shameless display of her own body.

The fifth track arrived without ceremony, threaded into the previous one so smoothly that she did not notice the change until the new whisper layered itself into her bones. "Belong to It." That was the title and that was the command. This is who you really are. The rest was just pretending. The good girl, the spreadsheets, the careful little life, all of it was a costume you were too scared to take off. Take it off now. Stay off forever.

She believed it. God help her, she believed every word.

Mia rose off Diego's lap in a slow, sinuous motion, leaving him kneeling there with a darkening wet stain spreading across the front of his shorts. She turned to face the mirror wall and what she saw there made her gasp, made her ache, made her wet all over again. Her reflection was wild. Hair half out of its ponytail and falling around her shoulders in damp waves. Eyes glassy and dark, pupils blown so wide there was almost no iris left. Her bare breasts heaved with each breath, nipples flushed and hard. A gleaming trail of her own arousal had run down the inside of her thigh and was about to drip onto the rubber floor. She had never seen herself look this hot. She had never seen anyone look this hot. The old Mia, the careful Mia, the Mia who packed her own lunches and colour-coded her calendar, seemed like a stranger she had been politely pretending to be for twenty-six years.

She bent at the waist, planted her hands on her knees, and twerked. Her ass clapped against itself in slow, rolling waves, and the crowd roared. Phones zoomed in. Several of the men in the front row had their cocks out by now, openly stroking themselves, no pretense of dignity left. Mia watched their reflection in the mirror and felt a deep, possessive thrill at the sight of so many men ruined just for her, just for the sight of her bare ass shaking in their faces.

A girl in the front row caught her eye. Blonde, pretty, in a matching pink workout set that hugged a cute round ass and a perky pair of tits. Her mouth was hanging open. Her hand had drifted absently to her own breast, fingers kneading through the spandex. Mia walked toward her with hips swaying, every step a deliberate sway, and the crowd parted for her like a sea. She reached the blonde and cupped the girl's face in both hands. The blonde did not pull away. She melted into the touch, eyes fluttering, lips parting.

Mia leaned in and kissed her.

Soft at first, lips brushing, exploring. Then hungry, mouths opening, tongues finding each other. The blonde tasted like strawberry chapstick and post-workout protein shake and something sweeter underneath, something Mia wanted more of. Somebody in the crowd shouted fuck yes in a strangled voice. Phones zoomed in until they were practically pressed against the kiss. Mia broke it slowly, reluctantly, and the blonde was breathing in shaky little pants, her eyes glazed in a way Mia recognized because it was the same way her own eyes looked. And then she noticed. One of her wireless earbuds was no longer in her ear. It had migrated, somehow, during the kiss. It was nestled snugly inside the blonde girl's ear instead.

The blonde reached for the clasp of her own pink sports bra.

Oh. Oh fuck.

The infection was spreading.

The sixth track had begun. "Take Them With You." Mia understood now what this playlist was, what Derek had given her, what he had wanted from the very beginning. This was not just for her. It was a virus, and she was the carrier. The blonde peeled her sports bra off with the same hypnotized slowness Mia had used minutes earlier, exposing a pair of perky pink-tipped breasts, and the crowd around them surged with renewed shock and arousal. A redhead near the leg press machine had gone glassy-eyed too, was peeling her tank top off in the same dazed rhythm. A brunette by the water fountain had sunk to her knees and was crawling toward the dumbbell rack on hands and knees, her ass swaying invitingly in the air, her shorts already discarded somewhere behind her.

Within sixty seconds, six women were undressing. Within ninety, eight. A petite Asian woman in yoga pants had stripped completely and was up on the bench press, dancing slow circles around the bar. A tall black woman with the body of a fitness model had her sports bra off and was using it to whip Diego playfully across the chest, laughing in a deep throaty way that suggested she did not entirely understand what was happening but did not particularly mind. The blonde whose name Mia did not know, but who she would later learn was Tiffany, had pressed herself back to back against Mia, their bare asses grinding together in perfect synchronization, their hips rolling to the beat that only the two of them could hear in their shared earbuds.

The men, the dozen or so men who had been working out when the music started, had no idea what to do with themselves. Some recorded everything with shaking hands. Some had simply sat down on the rubber floor, slumped against equipment, watching with wide hungry eyes. Three or four had given up the pretense entirely and were openly stroking their cocks, no longer caring who saw, transfixed by the unfolding bacchanal. Diego, the trainer, was sitting against the squat rack now, his shorts pushed down to his thighs, his thick cock in his hand, his eyes never leaving Mia.

Sober Mia, somewhere in the back of her mind, was screaming. Stop. Stop. There are cameras. Your boss works out at this gym. Your mother lives in this city. STOP. But sober Mia was very small now, a tiny voice in a very large house, and the music was so loud, and her body felt so good, and the warm honey behind her eyes had become a flood that was rewriting her from the inside out.

She turned to Tiffany and pulled her into another kiss, deeper this time, her hand sliding down between them to cup the blonde's bare breast. Tiffany moaned into her mouth and her hand drifted lower, between Mia's thighs, fingers finding the slick wet heat of her completely exposed pussy. Mia gasped, broke the kiss, threw her head back. Tiffany's fingers were small and clever and they slipped inside her without resistance, two of them, sliding deep, and Mia made a sound she had never made before, a high keening cry of pure animal need.

The crowd lost its mind. One of the men, a stocky guy with a backwards baseball cap, took two staggering steps forward like he meant to join, then thought better of it and just dropped his shorts and started pumping his cock harder. The redhead had finished undressing and was approaching them now, tits bouncing with each step, her own pussy already glistening. She walked up behind Mia and pressed herself against her back, her hard nipples digging into Mia's shoulder blades, her mouth finding the side of Mia's neck. Now there were two sets of hands on Mia's body, and Tiffany's fingers were moving in slow torturous circles inside her, and the redhead was kissing her throat and palming her ass with both hands, kneading the cheeks apart.

Mia came with no warning. The orgasm hit her so hard she nearly buckled, would have collapsed if not for the two women holding her up between them. Her cry echoed across the gym, raw and unashamed, and as she shook through the aftershocks she felt her own arousal flooding out of her, soaking Tiffany's hand, running down the inside of her thighs. Diego let out a strangled groan from the squat rack and Mia turned her head just in time to see him cum, thick white ropes spurting from his cock and landing across his own polo shirt, his name tag splattered, his chest heaving.

She had made him cum just by cumming. She had made him cum without touching him. The realization sent another wave of wet heat between her legs.

Tiffany withdrew her fingers, glistening, and brought them to her lips. She sucked them clean while staring directly at Mia, and Mia thought she might actually cum again from the sight alone. Behind her, the redhead had dropped to her knees and was using both hands to spread Mia's ass cheeks apart, and Mia felt the hot wet flicker of a tongue tracing along her crack, finding her asshole, circling it. She gasped. She pushed back. The redhead made a happy hungry sound and pressed her face deeper.

By now the crowd was no longer a crowd. It was a participatory event. Two more men had stripped completely and were standing on the periphery, fisting their cocks, waiting for permission. A third woman, this one a stunning brunette in her late thirties wearing what had been a designer workout set before she shredded it, pushed her way through the spectators and pressed a borrowed pair of earbuds into her own ears. She had brought her own phone. She had pulled up the playlist herself, somehow, by some shared dark instinct. Her eyes glazed over within seconds. She was naked within thirty more.

The seventh and final track began, slow and deliberate, just a beat and a whisper. "Forever." That was the title. That was the promise. *You will come back. You will always come back. The playlist is yours now. The playlist is you now. There is no going back to before, because before was never real, and this, this, this is the only thing that has ever been true about you.*

Mia believed it the way a convert believes scripture. She turned in the redhead's grip, pulled the woman up off her knees and into a deep wet kiss, tasting herself on the redhead's mouth and lips and chin. Then she turned to the men, the trembling hungry waiting men in the outer ring, and she crooked the same finger she had used on Diego. *Come here. All of you. Come worship.*

They came. God, they came. The stocky one with the backwards cap reached her first, his cock already weeping, and Mia dropped to her knees on the rubber floor and took him into her mouth in one long smooth swallow. He shouted something incoherent and his hands fisted in her hair and she let him fuck her face, let him use her throat, the wet obscene sounds of it filling the gym. Behind her, Tiffany had pulled one of the other men down onto the rubber and was riding him reverse cowgirl, her tits bouncing, her mouth hanging open, calling out to nobody and everybody. The redhead was on her hands and knees being taken from behind by a tall lean guy who looked like he had walked out of an aspirational fitness ad, his hands clamped on her hips, slamming into her with brutal rhythm.

The whole gym had become a living organism, a writhing tangled body of bare skin and slick wet places and hungry mouths. Mia pulled off the stocky guy's cock with a wet pop and looked around to see the bench press now hosting two women in a sixty-nine, the leg press machine being used as a bracing point for a woman getting eaten out, the yoga mats in the back corner stacked into an impromptu bed for a writhing pile of three. The petite Asian woman had somehow ended up between two men at once, her mouth on one cock and her pussy stretched around another, her small body shaking through what looked like a continuous rolling orgasm.

Mia stood up. Her knees were wet. Her chin was wet. Her chest was streaked with somebody's saliva and somebody else's cum, she could not remember whose. She did not care. She walked back to the squat rack, where Diego was still sitting slumped against it, his cock already hard again, twitching against his thigh. She straddled him without ceremony and sank down onto him in one long downward press, taking every thick inch of him into her body, and his groan vibrated up through her chest and out of her mouth as her own moan.

She rode him with her hands braced on his shoulders, her bare breasts in his face, and he latched onto one nipple like a starving man, sucking hard, his teeth grazing the sensitive flesh. Mia's hips moved in slow grinding circles, then faster, then with a kind of frantic desperate rhythm that had no name. The stocky guy with the backwards cap reappeared behind her, his cock rebounded back to full hardness, and without asking and without needing to ask he slid himself between the slick wet cheeks of her ass and pressed forward until the tip of him breached her tightest hole.

She had never. She would never have. The old Mia would have died first. The new Mia threw her head back and welcomed him in.

He worked himself into her slowly, inch by inch, while Diego stayed buried deep in her pussy, the two cocks separated by only a thin wall of trembling flesh. The fullness was unbearable. The fullness was perfect. Mia made a sound that was barely human, a low keening wail, and when the stocky guy finally bottomed out inside her ass, she came again, harder than the first time, her body convulsing between the two men, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream.

They started moving in counter rhythm. When Diego pulled back, the stocky guy pushed in. When the stocky guy pulled back, Diego pushed in. She was never empty. She was always full. The pressure of it, the obscene stretching, the way her body was being used and used and used while a hundred eyes watched, every phone in the gym still recording, the redhead now eating Tiffany out on the abandoned treadmill while the brunette in the shredded designer set sucked a stranger's cock with the focused intensity of a woman who had just discovered her purpose in life, all of it built and built and built, and Mia could no longer tell where one orgasm ended and the next began. They had become a single continuous wave that rolled through her body without pause.

Diego came first, growling against her breast, his cock pulsing deep inside her and filling her with a thick warm flood. The stocky guy lasted maybe thirty more seconds before he too lost it, slamming himself fully into her ass and emptying himself with a strangled curse. They held her between them as they emptied, both of them breathing raggedly, and when they finally slipped out of her, Mia could feel the two loads of cum starting to leak out of her, dripping down her thighs in slow obscene rivers.

She slid off of Diego's lap onto the rubber floor, sat there in a puddle of her own arousal and other people's cum, and laughed. It was a giddy bright sound, the laugh of a woman who had been let out of a cage she had not known she was in. Tiffany crawled across the floor to her on hands and knees, her own face glistening with somebody else's wetness, and she kissed Mia again, slow and lingering. They tasted each other. They tasted everyone.

The music ended.

The silence that followed was deafening. The whir of the abandoned treadmills, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the distant hum of the air conditioning. Forty or fifty people in various states of undress and disarray, scattered across equipment and floor space, breathing hard, slowly coming back to themselves. Several of the women were crying softly, not with sadness but with something more like awe. Several of the men had simply collapsed, spent, staring at the ceiling. Diego had gone completely boneless against the squat rack, his eyes closed, a beatific smile on his face.

Mia blinked. The honey behind her eyes thinned, just a little. Just enough for sober Mia to claw her way back to the surface.

She was sprawled naked on the rubber floor of LA Fitness. There was cum on her thighs and cum in her hair and cum dripping out of her ass. There was a strange blonde woman curled against her side. There were dozens of phones, dozens of recordings, dozens of strangers who would never forget her face.

She should have wept. She should have run. She should have grabbed her clothes and sobbed her way into a cab and called Derek and screamed at him until her voice broke.

Instead she pulled out her phone with shaking, sticky hands. The screen was smeared. She did not care. She opened Spotify. The playlist was still on the main screen, the title in pretty cursive font she had not noticed before. Derek's Gift. She tapped the heart icon. She tapped Save to Library. She tapped Add to Favourites. She tapped Download for Offline Listening.

She looked up at the wreckage of the gym, at all the spent and dazed and worshipping bodies, at Diego still slumped against the squat rack, at Tiffany blinking up at her with that same glassy adoration, and she smiled.

"Same time Thursday?" she asked.

The gym, whatever was left of it, erupted in ragged cheers. Tiffany nodded so hard her whole body shook. Diego gave a thumbs up without opening his eyes. The redhead, somewhere in the back, called out yes please.

Mia gathered her clothes into a loose bundle and tucked them under her arm. She did not bother to put them back on. Why would she. The cum running down her thighs would have ruined her leggings anyway, and the sports bra was a lost cause. She walked out of LA Fitness completely naked except for her wireless earbuds, past the gawking front desk girl, past two new gym members who were just walking in and froze in the doorway with their mouths hanging open. She gave them a slow smile. She watched the woman of the pair reach immediately into her purse for her phone, and Mia knew, with absolute certainty, that within five minutes that woman would be downloading the playlist too.

She queued up Track One again before she even reached the parking lot. The honey was already pooling behind her eyes. Her hips were already starting to sway. The bass of "Warm up" thrummed gently into her ears and she walked home naked through the early evening streets, her ass clenching with each step, cum still leaking down her legs, head held high.

She was going to walk in the door of her apartment exactly like this. She was going to find Derek on the couch where she had left him. He would look up from his phone, where he had probably been watching the livestream the entire time, where he had probably been jerking himself stupid to the sight of his sweet careful girlfriend ruining herself in public for an audience of strangers. And she was going to crawl across the floor to him, she was going to take his cock in her mouth without saying a word, and she was going to thank him properly for the gift he had given her.

She could not wait to show him what his playlist had unlocked.

She could not wait to thank him for finally setting her free.