Version Control - part 6 (with images) (Patreon)

She's already home when I get there.

I hear her inside before I open the door — the sound of her at the kitchen counter, the tap running. I stand outside for a second with my key in the lock. I haven't figured out what I'm going to say. I haven't had time, or I've had time and I've spent it not figuring it out. I open the door.

She comes around the corner from the kitchen and sees me and stops.

It's not gradual. She doesn't take me in piece by piece — jeans wrong, shoes loose, Carhartt pulling across hips that have widened since morning. She sees all of it at once, the whole shape of what I've become today, and what crosses her face is something raw that she doesn't manage in time. A flash of something between distress and recognition, and then she manages it and it's gone.

"Declan," she says.

"Yeah," I say.

She comes into the hallway. She stops a few feet away and she's looking at me like she looked at the pages on the table the other day when she was running a problem — all the way in, nothing held back. The reading look. Her eyes go to my face and then to my chest and then to the hips and then to the shoes, which are flopping at the heel with each step, and she makes a sound that isn't quite a word.

"How much," she says.

"All of it."

She closes her eyes for a second. Just a second. When she opens them she's steadier but not all the way steady. "When."

"During class. I was teaching and it just — it did what it did."

"You were standing in front of students."

"I was sitting, mostly."

She looks at the jeans. Then at my feet in the shoes. "Take the shoes off," she says. Not unkind — just, they're wrong to look at. Or wrong to be wearing. Both, maybe.

I kick them off. They land sideways, one against the other, and I stand in my socks. The shoes are too big now in every way that matters — heel sliding, toe box with room in it that wasn't there before. I don't pick them up.

"Show me," she says. "All of it."

We go to the bedroom. I drop the Carhartt on the chair, pull the flannel over my head, the t-shirt coming with it. The jeans take some work — the denim's gripping where the hips are wider now, doesn't want to move. I get them down. Step out of them and the boxers and just stand there.

She walks around me. Once, slow. It's the same thing she did last night when she touched my chest — that total attention, like she's running a comparison against something she already has filed away somewhere. She stops in front of me.

"Okay," she says. Barely. It's not to me, it's to herself — the word people use when they need a second before they can be somewhere.

She puts both hands on my hips. Holds them there a moment, then lifts them away and puts them on her own hips instead. Looks back and forth between us. Her mouth opens. She doesn't say whatever it was.

"We're the same height," I say.

"Yes."

"And the hips."

She looks at her hands on her own hips. "Yes."

"Sera."

She drops her hands. She looks at my face for a long moment. She's working at something and I can see her working. "I don't have an explanation," she says.

"I'm not asking for an explanation."

She turns and sits on the edge of the bed. She sits there for a moment looking at the floor. This is new — she doesn't usually need a moment like this. She's usually the one ahead of the moment. "Something is modeling you on me," she says finally. "I don't know how or why. Through the sync, through the system, some interaction between them. I've been — " She stops. "I've been thinking about it since last night and I don't have a better answer than that."

"I know you don't have a better answer," I say. "I'm not asking for a better answer."

She looks up, then back at the floor. She puts her hand flat on the bed beside her and then takes it back. "What are you asking."

I think about this. "Nothing," I say. "I just need clothes."

She looks at the shoes on the floor by the door. Something in her face does something small and then it's gone.

She's gone long enough that I sit down. When she comes back she's carrying a pile — linen trousers, a shirt, the long cardigan, a bra. Underwear on top, plain cotton. She holds it out and then doesn't quite let go. We're both holding it for a second. Then she lets go.

I look at the underwear.

She doesn't say anything and I don't ask her to.

I put the underwear on and the difference is immediate. The fabric sits flush against the tissue the way it was built to — no bunching, no architecture arguments, the cotton curved close and holding the warmth there, a contact that is constant and intimate and, unlike everything I've worn today, designed for what it's against. Everything held and quiet. I stand there a moment.

Then the bra. She shows me the clasp without making a thing of it and I reach back and fumble and she steps behind me and does it, her fingers quick. The band hugs my ribs and I take a breath and discover I can't take the breath I'm used to taking. The air has to go somewhere else. Into my back, apparently. I exhale and try again and this time I find the shape of it, the ribcage working differently, the breath shallower in front and fuller under the shoulder blades. It's not uncomfortable. It's just different physics. The cups settle around the breast tissue and the weight is held — distributed, the pull on my chest wall that's been present since Tuesday gentled into something manageable.

The linen trousers sit at the waist without the denim's complaint about my hips. Her shoes: plain canvas flats, simple. They fit.

I look in the mirror on the inside of the closet door. The cardigan falls over the chest and hips in a long soft line. What I see is not normal exactly but is, for the first time today, a body the clothing was made for.

Sera is in the doorway watching me.

"How does it feel," she says.

"Strange," I say. "But better than the jeans."

We eat a late dinner and share a bottle of wine and she talks about the clinic, what to ask when I go, whether to contact the manufacturer directly, and I listen and respond and we keep it practical because the alternative is too large to look at directly. The wine goes to my head faster than it should — faster than it ever has — and by the end of the bottle I'm aware of a warmth and looseness that I'd normally need considerably more to reach. My mouth is slightly loose in the corners. I haven’t felt this way since college, and never on this little wine. She's flushed too, her eyes brighter.

We move to the couch. She puts the television on — something procedural neither of us is watching — and she puts her legs across my lap like she always does, her feet tucked against my thigh. I put my hand on her ankle.

The weight of her legs on my thighs is different now. The pressure of them, and the way my own thighs are pressed together beneath them, and the warmth of it — the fabric of the linen trousers against the underwear against the tissue underneath — starts to do something I'm not anticipating. A low arousal, ambient, spreading outward from where her weight is resting. Not something I decide. Something the body decides.

I'm aware of it and I'm aware of the wine and I'm aware that the last two days have had a weight to them that I haven't let myself feel yet. I want to be close to her. That's the other thing — underneath the arousal, which is new and strange, is the older and more familiar wanting of her, the three-year wanting that knows the shape of her shoulder and the way she smells and what she sounds like when she's almost asleep. I want to be close to her in that way, which has been there the whole time and is unchanged.

I lean toward her and put my mouth against her temple.

She goes still.

Not pulling away — just still. The stillness of someone who has been caught off guard and is deciding what to do about it. I pull back enough to look at her face. She's looking at the television. Not watching it. Looking at it.

"Hey," I say.

She turns. There's something in her face I can't read — some negotiation happening behind her eyes that I'm not part of.

"Sorry," I say. "I didn't — "

"No." She puts her hand on my arm. "Don't apologize." She's quiet for a second. "I just — I'm trying to — " She stops. She looks at me. Whatever she was trying to say, she sets it aside. "Come here," she says instead.

She leans in and kisses me, and it's her who's moving now, her who's decided something, something from tonight tipping over into needing to know.

What happens next is different from the sync.

The sync was feeling her body through a channel with a half-second delay, mediated, translated — sensation arriving from outside myself, information about what her body did. This is not that. There's no channel. What I have now is this body, directly, mine in every sense that matters tonight: the breast tissue responding to her hands, the diffuse warmth building between my legs, the whole landscape of sensation that is new and is also real and is entirely present without delay.

She knows this body intimately — the geography of it, where the sensitivity pools and where it goes quiet. She touches my breast and her thumb finds the nipple immediately, without searching, and the flare that goes through me is the same one I've been encountering these last two days but chosen this time, aimed, someone who knows exactly what they're doing doing it. I make a sound. She does it again.

I reach for her the way I've always reached for her and find that the knowledge I've built over three years was built outward from my own body and my own body has changed. I'm inside different circuitry now. The feedback I'm used to isn't there — or it is, but differently, requiring me to learn again what I can and can't infer. She guides me without making it instruction, a small movement of her hand over mine, a breath that tells me when I've found the right place, and I find it and feel her feel it and I understand for the first time what it means to touch a woman from inside the same kind of body.

She slides her hand between my legs and I feel the warmth there meet her palm and the outer lips are soft and full against her hand and I am feeling this directly, without channel, without delay — my own body reporting back in real time, the heat gathering under her fingers. The body's answer to her being yes, complete and distributed, present across the whole of the tissue.

She moves her fingers and the sensation rises and what I feel is the tissue growing warmer and fuller under her hand, swelling, a slickness I can feel from inside now just as I felt it from outside through the channel, except now it's mine, my body producing it, and her fingers moving through it are a direct signal with no translation needed.

She makes me come with her hand and the wave when it comes is the same one I felt through the channel — the flooding, the warmth rolling outward in every direction, slow and thorough, going on longer than I expect.

After, she lies beside me for a moment. "I want to keep going," she says. "If you want."

"Yes," I say.

She reaches to the nightstand drawer and comes back with a small vibrator — compact, quiet, something she's had for years, familiar to her in a way that tells me without telling me that she knows exactly what she's doing. She moves back over me and turns it on and the low hum of it registers through my thighs where she rests it first, not inside, just close, and the sensation spreads immediately, the tissue responding to the vibration in a way my body has never responded to anything.

She moves it slowly, and I understand after a moment that she isn't searching — she's returning to something known. The places that make me catch my breath are the places that would make her catch hers. She finds them without hesitation. I watch her face above me — this view I have never had, looking up at her in the dark — and she is watching my face the whole time, not for cues but for confirmation of something she's already certain of. She finds the clitoris with the device and holds it there and what happens next is not gradual. A signal goes through me like a current, bright and total, and she keeps the pressure steady and I feel myself coming apart for the second time, differently this time, harder and more concentrated, the flooding wave arriving fast and deep.

She turns the vibrator off. She stays above me for a moment, not moving, looking at my face in the dark. There's something in her expression I don't have a word for yet — not tenderness exactly, and not triumph, but something between them that requires both. Then she sets the device aside and lies with her head on my chest. The warmth subsides in gradual waves, lapping rather than surging, going on longer than I'd have expected. Her hand is flat on my sternum and I can feel her breathing slow.