“Here!” I got up and walked over to my mini-fridge, pulling out an apple. “I’ll try and grow this apple. I just need to… y’know…”
“Fluff?” Brandon smiled.
“Something like that.”
“Do you want me to… to go behind the screen or something?”
Well, this was certainly an in if ever I heard one. About eighty different dirty one-liners occurred to me, but I systematically chickened out of all of them. “Yeah, ok.”
Maybe I imagined it, but he looked just a little bit crestfallen as he went behind the screen. The thought that he wanted to see me rile myself up, so to speak, got me halfway there. I squeezed the apple in my hand, and then… I felt it push back.
“Brandon, come check this out!” I said quickly, and he emerged from behind the screen. The dark red apple in my hand was slowly filling out, becoming bloated with flesh.
“Fuck…” he whispered as we watched it grow to almost the size of a grapefruit. “Is it…?”
I took a bite out of it. It tasted perfectly normal. Not particularly tasty, but I was never a big red delicious fan anyway. I set the mutant fruit, with one meager bite out of it, on the desk. Brandon picked it up, looked it over, then took a bite himself.
“Jesus Christ!” he laughed with his mouth full. “I can’t fucking believe this!” He turned to me. “Come on, man, you gotta show me your junk.”