Infiltration - part 1 (free version) (Patreon)

The walk over is when I know. The thighs I've been telling myself about all day, that's just water retention or the food here or whatever lie I'm using today, but the way the inside of the robe brushes my hip on the left side as I walk, the way the cloth slides over a curve that didn't have a curve in it yesterday, that's new. My stomach is doing something low and slow, the feeling that something is preparing to be wrong.

The morning is grey through the high windows. The air in the changing alcove smells like cedar and the soap they make on the south side of the compound, the one with the lye in it that takes the skin off your knuckles if you use it too long. Tomas is already in the water. Several others I don't know by name. The room has the close warm wet smell of the place and the conversation has the easy rhythm of men who've done this every morning for years.

I keep my back to them and untie the robe. I fold it on the bench, pick the towel off the hook and hold it in front of me and turn toward the pool.

Three steps to the edge. On the second step the thing in my groin moves.

I don't know what else to call it. Moves. There's a slipping shift inside me, a sensation of weight finding a new place to settle, and the skin underneath the towel registers it everywhere at once. The boxers I'd worn under the robe up till today aren't there, you go in bare, and there's only the tight trunks between the cloth of the towel and whatever's happening underneath it. I feel cool air where the towel doesn't quite cover. I feel the inside of my own thighs touching each other in a way they didn't touch yesterday, the contact slick somehow, faintly damp, and the dampness is mine, is coming from me, from the place that has just rearranged itself.

I keep walking.

I have to keep walking because if I stop here, three feet from the pool, holding a towel in front of myself with both hands and a look on my face that I can feel doing whatever it's doing, one of the men in the water will turn and look and the looking will be the end of everything. I have practiced this kind of walking. You learn it in the work. You learn how to carry a body that has just been hurt or just been compromised in a way the body across the room from you cannot know about, and you walk it through the door and you keep your face still until you are alone.

I get to the lip of the pool. I make myself look down at the water, not at myself, and I drop the towel onto the tile.

For the half second between the towel leaving my hand and my foot finding the top step into the water I look. I can't not look. The flatness, the whole geometry of someone else's body where mine used to be. The hips wider than the waist by an amount that makes the silhouette below my navel into something I don't recognize. My thighs touching all the way to the knee.

I see it and I feel it at the same time and the feeling is the worse of the two. There's a pressure, a fullness, and a faint pulse where the lips meet that goes through me and up into my belly and finds the slow-wrong feeling in my stomach and joins it. My knees want to fold. I don't let them.

I'm in the water in one motion. Maybe two. I don't remember the steps, only the moment my feet find the submerged bench and my hips come down onto the tile and the water closes over the new flesh and I am, for the first time since the walk over, hidden.

The heat of the water hits the skin in a way the old skin would not have registered. Finer. More everywhere. I feel it on the inside of my thighs and on the soft place between them and at the small of my back where the new curves press against the tile, and the soft place between my thighs does something when the heat reaches it, a small involuntary flutter, a clenching that releases on its own, and I make my face do nothing.

Tomas turns. Asks me something. I don't catch it the first time. He says it again, says I look pale, says the water will fix me. I say I didn't sleep. My voice comes out fine, and I make a small private bargain with whatever is doing this to me, leave me the voice, just the voice, for the next three weeks.

The water laps. The men go back to whatever they were saying.

I sit on the tile bench with my hands flat on my thighs under the surface and I think about how I'm going to get out of this pool.

The walk in was bad. The walk in I made it through because the men were already in the water and not looking at the door. The walk out will be different. The walk out is six men with nothing to do but watch a body cross the tile to the changing alcove, and the body has hips now that swing when it walks, and the towel that I dropped on the stone is six feet from where I'll need to step out, six feet of walking in the open before I can pick it up.

I think about staying in until they leave. The bath usually runs forty minutes. If I'm the last one out the room is empty and there's nobody to see. But the leader takes the bath after the novitiates do, and the leader's men come in first to check the room, and the leader's men will find me sitting in cooling water with a body the leader did not invite into his bath house.

The water moves. I keep my hands where they are. The pulse between my legs has not gone away, has settled into something lower and slower, and every time one of the men shifts his weight on the far bench the small current finds me and the pulse answers it. I close my eyes for a second. I open them.

Forty minutes. I have forty minutes to figure out how to walk out of this room as a man.

See part two here.