Rebirth - part 13 (free version) (Patreon)

The pool is busier at seven than it would have been in the afternoon - the family rush, kids in from a day of sightseeing, a few couples, a group of men at the far end who've brought drinks from the bar. The air thick with chlorine and sunscreen and the noise of an enclosed pool space, shrieks bouncing off the tile.

I'm in the trunks I've owned for years. They fit differently now - the waistband sitting on hips that have moved, the fabric pulling across the seat, the legs gapping at the inner thighs.

Emily is already at the steps.

I go to the steps and put my foot in and the water hits cold - cooler than expected. Everything below the waist contracts immediately, the same reflexive clench as the gym shower. I stop on the first step.

"Cold," I say.

"It's heated," Emily says, already waist deep.

"Not enough."

I go in. The water rises to my waist and the trunks float slightly loose around the thighs, the fabric drifting away from where it used to sit. I go deeper and the water reaches my chest and I let the cold stabilize.

Then I start to move and the trunks move with me in a way I'm not prepared for.

The water pushes the fabric. With each stroke, each shift of weight, the loose crotch panel gets drawn inward - the water pressure doing what water pressure does with loose material and an anatomy that now has folds to catch it. I keep swimming and try to ignore it and can't. By the second lap the fabric is fully bunched against the most sensitive skin, moving with every kick.

I stop at the wall and reach down under the water. Try to fish the fabric out discreetly, working blind, the trunks resisting because the water pressure is still holding them. I get fingers on the fabric and pull and it shifts and I let go. Not resolved.

Emily floats past on her back. The group of men at the far end are talking. A child cannonballs somewhere behind me.

I give up and swim to the ladder.

The climb out drives the fabric further in with each rung, the wet weight of the trunks pressing everything against everything, and I get to the top and step onto the pool deck and catch my reflection in the long mirror panel along the far wall.

I stop.

The trunks are wet and conformed to the anatomy beneath them - the fabric pulled taut, the outline defined through the nylon, visible from the front in a way that leaves nothing ambiguous.

I get my hand into the pocket opening of the left leg before I've fully processed what I'm doing - fingers working through the mesh, trying to pull the crotch panel forward, the wet fabric resisting. The woman on the nearest lounger looks up from her magazine, the sequence taking less than two seconds, and goes back to it.

I walk to our loungers and sit down and finish the adjustment under the towel.

Emily drops onto the lounger beside me. She wrings her hair. Doesn't say anything.

"I need different trunks," I say.

"Yes," she says. She picks up her book.

---

Back in the room. I peel the trunks off in front of the full-length mirror - the waistband leaving red marks on the hips where it's been sitting wrong for two hours.

I stand there and look at it.

The shoulders still broad, the chest flat, and then the waist going in where it didn't used to, the hips going out - I stop there. The hips and what they've become, the outer curve of them, the way the thighs meet now when I stand with my feet together. I've been avoiding this, I realize. The partial views of the bathroom mirror, the deliberate management of angles.

I make myself look up.

The thighs touching. The whole silhouette below the chest belonging to a different category than the one above it, the month of looking at pieces now assembled into a whole in the long glass of a hotel room. This mirror is tall and the room is lit and there's nowhere for the eye to go except the full length of it.

Turn slightly to the side. Turn back. The body not performing anything, just standing there being what it is now.

Emily comes out of the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a towel. She stops beside me and looks at my reflection - not managing it, just looking - and then puts her hand on my shoulder, warm and dry, and doesn't say anything.

---

The accessory comes out of the bag after dinner, when the hotel room has settled into the quiet of a Friday night with nowhere to be. Emily sits on the bed and watches me hold the gear. I turn it over trying to understand the geometry.

"You're holding it upside down," she says.

I turn it the other way. It doesn't help much.

"Step in," she says.

I step in. She draws it up and settles it on my hips and adjusts the waistband.

I look down at it.

The weight of it is familiar - the way it hangs, the angle, the gravity of something at the front of the body that wasn't there a moment ago. Something happens that I'm not prepared for - a spatial awareness, an orienting around the extension.

Emily is looking at me.

"Okay?" she says.

"Yeah. It's strange."

"Which part."

"The weight. I know what to do with this weight. I didn't think I'd still know."

She nods. She lies back on the bed.

---

The cramps come properly about twenty minutes later.

Post-exertion, lower and duller than the period cramps, settling into the abdomen and radiating into the tops of the thighs. I find the ibuprofen in my toiletry bag and go to the bathroom.

Hotel bathroom, white and bright. I sit on the toilet and wipe and press my fist into my lower abdomen where the ache has settled. I clean up with the white hotel washcloth, warm water from the tap, front to back. Rinse the cloth and fold it over the edge of the tub. Wash my hands.

The mirror above the sink. Hair damp, the red marks from the pool trunks still faintly visible on the hips. This one just the face and shoulders. I look at it for a moment. Then I turn the light off and go back to bed.

---

Emily is on her side facing me when I get back.

She waits until I've settled. Then: "Jenny mentioned the blockers could help with the cramping." A pause, carefully placed. "Have you thought about it."

"No," I say.

It comes out faster than I intend. Faster than thought, which means the answer has been sitting there already.

Emily doesn't leave it there. "Mike." Quiet, but something underneath it that's been waiting longer than tonight. "I need you to actually think about it."

"The job," I say. "The cognitive effects. Aldermere isn't signed yet. I can't afford to be slower right now."

"I know," she says. "But that's not all of it."

I look at the ceiling.

"People are going to start asking questions," she says. Not an accusation. Just a fact she's been living with. "I don't know what I'll say."

"What kind of questions."

She doesn't answer that directly. "I love you," she says instead, which tells me everything about what kind.

I turn toward her. In the lamplight her face is open in a way it rarely is. "I'm not going anywhere," I say.

"I know." A pause. "That's not what I'm afraid of."

The cramps pulse low and steady. I think about Jenny's email, still on my phone on the bathroom counter. The bloodwork from last month. The marker she couldn't fully characterize, the phrase uncertain efficacy, the careful way she said she wanted me to know before I talked to anyone else. I found out this morning.

"There's something I should tell you," I say.

She waits.

"Jenny called. About the bloodwork." I find the words slowly. "There's a marker she flagged. Something she can't characterize yet. She's not sure the blockers would work the way they're supposed to — not in my case. She wanted me to know before I made any decisions."

Emily is very still.

"I found out this morning," I say.

"Before the pool," she says.

"Yes."

She looks at me. Takes in the information and the fact of me carrying it through the afternoon, through the water, through everything after.

"Okay," she says. Not absolution. Just the word.

"I'm still going to think about it," I say. "I'm not using it as a reason not to."

She nods, but she's watching me with something that knows there's still more underneath — the refusal, not just clinical now, to participate actively in a future I haven't agreed to yet.

I'm not ready to agree.

Emily reaches over and turns the lamp off.

In the dark she moves closer and I put my arm around her and she settles against me, her head on my shoulder, her hand flat on my chest. Her fingers spread slightly.

The cramps a dull background note. The city outside doing whatever it does on a Friday night.

---

Sunday morning. The hotel room in the flat light of checkout day, the weekend folding back into ordinary time.

Emily is in the bathroom. I make the bed - not because housekeeping won't, just something to do with the hands.

She comes out and starts packing her side without comment. We move around each other in the small room, handing things across, neither of us talking much. She finds a hair tie that had made it under the bed somehow. I zip the suitcase.

We check out at eleven. Coffee in the lobby while we wait for the car - two cups, black, sitting across from each other at the small table by the window. The lobby doing its Sunday morning thing around us, families with luggage, a man on his laptop, the transience of a hotel lobby at checkout time.

She's stirring her coffee, not drinking it. Her other hand resting flat on the table between us.

I put mine over it.

She looks up.

Nothing is said. There isn't anything that needs to be. The coffee cools. The car comes.

---

The Premium Patreon version of this section includes images of Mike at the pool and in the hotel room after with Emily, and the written content includes an explicit sex scene between Mike and Emily.