Inhabited - chapter 3 (with images) (Patreon)

The third day she wakes up and the resistance isn’t there in the same way, like a muscle that’s been used until it admits it’s a muscle. She gets up and showers and the hair routine is not effortless but it’s not a struggle either. She stands in the closet and her hands go to things without much deliberation: a blouse, the dark trousers again, the lower heels. She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror and calls it acceptable.

At the office Jess is already at her desk when she comes in and says good morning and she says it back and that’s it. Jess tips her head toward the kitchen and she goes and gets coffee and brings it back and sits down and starts reading, and it’s just the morning.

The project meeting is a status update on something called the Marin build. Six people, a timeline printout, paper cups. She sits and listens.

She doesn’t have enough on Marin to lead anything, and this is what she has to manage: the instinct to synthesize and push forward, to say the thing she can see sitting there unused while Tom walks the room through his case for accelerating the site delivery phase. She can hear the gap in the budget math a quarter of the way through his argument. The variance still open, the timeline assuming it resolves by end of quarter. She watches him finish. He looks at the table, satisfied.

She waits a beat.

“The variance on Marin,” she says. “Does the accelerated timeline assume that closes by end of Q4?”

Tom looks at his notes. “We’re assuming yes.”

“Might be worth a risk flag,” she says. She offers it as a flag, not a correction. She goes back to her notebook.

Maya Anand, the senior architect, glances over. “Good catch,” she says, and the meeting moves on.

After, Maya pauses at the door. She looks at her for a moment. Not unfriendly, not quite adding something up.

“You doing alright?” she says.

“Yes. Fine.”

Maya nods, a beat too long. “Okay,” she says, and goes.

Ryan comes to her desk mid-morning.

There is no project reason for this. He has a question about the Henderson drainage spec that is unambiguously an email question, but here he is, and she answers it. He doesn’t go immediately. He leans against the desk with the easy posture of someone who has decided he’s been invited to lean.

“The presentation was good yesterday,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“Daniel got there a little early.” He says it carefully, watching for her reaction.

“He did.”

“You came back clean, though.”

She looks up at him. He’s not quite sure what he wants from her. Agreement, she thinks, or maybe just the chance to have said it. She gives him a small nod and he seems satisfied by that and goes.

Jess is at her desk with the look of someone who saw every second of that.

“I didn’t say anything,” she calls over.

“I know,” Jess says pleasantly.

At lunch Jess comes to her desk and they go back to the deli and this time they’re barely through the door before Jess says: “He asked me about you again.”

“Ryan.”

“Ryan.” Jess orders without looking at the board, which means she comes here a lot. “He asked if you were seeing anyone. I said I didn’t know. Which I don’t.”

“I’m not.”

“I know you’re not, you told me yesterday. I just wanted you to know the information is out there.” She takes her change. “He’s not bad. He’s just very —” She thinks. “Present. Right now.”

“It’ll pass.”

“Probably.” They take their sandwiches to the same small table. Jess unwraps hers. “Maya also mentioned it. And Maya doesn’t mention things.”

She thinks about the conversation from yesterday. The question she asked, the listening she’d done, really helpful, thanks, and the distance between what she was doing and what Ryan was apparently receiving.

“I was just catching up on the project,” she says.

“I know.” Jess takes a bite. “That’s what you usually do.”

Something in her face goes still. She looks at her sandwich.

“Different week,” she says.

Jess looks at her for another second, nods, eats her sandwich. Doesn’t push.

After work she goes home first. The body wants the gym. A Thursday-evening pull she can feel in her calves before she can name it. She finds Cara’s gym bag and pulls out a sports bra, tank top, and leggings.

The sports bra is compressive in a way the soft bra is not, designed to hold and flatten rather than support, and getting into it requires feeding each arm through and pulling it down over her chest. It gets stuck halfway and she has to reach back with both hands to tug it free, and in the moment it releases and snaps down into place the weight pulls in hard against her ribs. Firm. Thorough. A little too tight. She breathes into it until it starts to feel like the resting state. The compression is firm and total. Even so, she can feel the weight distributed across the band, and when she moves to pull the tank over her head there’s a faint give and shift the bra suppresses but doesn’t stop.

The leggings are close in a way that accumulates from the first step. The fabric against the inner thigh, against the backs of the knees, and a continuous low awareness in the gusset she wasn’t braced for — pressure where she’s never had pressure when she’s just walking. A fact that’s going to be there for the duration. She checks in the mirror — a habit of Cara’s, she’s pretty sure, though she can’t remember having had the thought. The seam runs where seams on leggings run, no obvious crease. She leaves it alone.

She walks the two blocks to the gym in the workout clothes. A woman goes past on her phone, doesn’t look up. She hears heavier footsteps come up behind her and her chest is already turned a few degrees toward the storefront before she’s clocked why. The man passes, a full foot taller, and something low in her belly pulls tight until he’s past. She walks swiftly into the gym’s entrance.

She reaches for a dumbbell that’s lighter than she would usually lift but still more than what Cara’s body is able to handle. The muscle baseline is lower than she’s used to working from. She knows this, she prepared for this, and knowing it still doesn’t prevent the surprise of the arm barely moving where she expected it to. She adjusts down. The burn is real at the new weight. Different muscle groups than she expects are stronger or weaker: her grip unreliable, her legs more capable than her upper body.

She runs after. The body knows this pace. The feet find it before she decides, some Thursday-evening habit in the stride. The mechanics are different: knees tracking inward, the width of the hips affecting everything above them, the leggings seam moving with every step.

Then there’s the other thing.

The sports bra is doing its job — compressing, holding — but the breasts move anyway. A small persistent motion, rhythmic, timed to the stride, a weight just below her collarbone she is now aware of with every footfall. Not painful. Not nothing, either. She adjusts her posture, her pace, tries to find the stride that minimizes it, and finds one that mostly works. The motion doesn’t stop. She runs through it. After a while it becomes part of the background, like the leggings seam, but she doesn't stop knowing it's there.

The sweat comes earlier, more diffuse across more surface area. A man on the machine two down looks at her intermittently. She sensed he was there. Not quite looking. Not quite not. When she catches him in the mirror he looks away. She keeps running.

The locker room is where the day changes.

She comes in from the gym floor and the door swings closed behind her and everything shifts. Warmer, more humid, the smell of shampoo and body wash and clean sweat and something underlying all of it that is just the smell of women, close and bodily. Here it’s background. The smell of a room people use.

She has a sense that she left clothes and a towel in a bag in her locker from her workout the other day. She finds her locker and works the combination and tries not to look at anything she doesn’t need to look at.

This is harder than she expected.

The room is full of women, many of them athletic and desirable, casual about their nudity around other women. Two lockers down a woman peels off her sports bra, arms up, the fabric stretching pale across her ribs before it clears her head, and something responds. Not the blunt direct charge she knows from her own body. Lower. Warmer. A pulse inside the pelvis, a quiet gather of heat that arrives before she can step around it, and for a second she can’t quite catch her breath right. The woman has a long sweep of shoulder, a tan line that stops where a tank-top strap usually sits, the breast falling free of the compression and resettling with its own weight. The bra hits the bottom of the woman’s bag. She reaches for a folded shirt without looking up. She is doing nothing. She is just a person getting dressed.

She keeps her eyes on her locker. The dial. The door. The hooks. The pulse settles after a moment but does not entirely go.

Another woman comes out of the shower corridor wrapped in a towel, hair wet against her shoulders, talking to a friend about a restaurant two steps behind her. The towel is loose. It’s tucked above her breasts the way women tuck towels, a fold rolled in on itself, holding by friction. Mid-thirties, the body of someone who runs. The conversation is just a conversation and nothing is happening that requires any response from her whatsoever. She is a woman in a women’s locker room and she has as much right to be here as anyone. Her focus shifts back to the locker. She peels off the sports bra, the compression releasing, the weight of the breasts redistributing, the ribcage expanding back, and gets herself to the shower.

Under the water she tries to be just someone showering. This is mostly successful. The body is more familiar now than it was two days ago, the weight of her hair wet against her back something she’s already learned to account for. She washes and turns off the water and comes back to her locker with a towel.

The room has changed while she was in the shower, some women gone, new ones in, and the throughline is the same, the same unremarkable ease. A woman on the bench is putting on mascara in a small mirror with the unhurried focus of someone doing a thing she has done every day for twenty years. Two others are talking, one of them still in her gym clothes, the other in jeans and most of a blouse, a conversation about a rescheduled dinner. Across the row, a woman in her fifties is rubbing lotion into her calves with one foot up on the bench, unhurried, the body doing what it does without anybody looking at it. Nobody is looking. Nobody is performing. The room belongs to the women in it and to nobody else.

She gets dressed. She zips her jacket and picks up the gym bag and looks at the mirror above the sink — her own face, dark circles less bad than the first morning, the mole near the left corner of her mouth — and goes.

Late that night she lies in the dark and doesn’t try to be herself.

She lets the apartment be the apartment. The body be the body. She’s been in it for three days. She knows where the good knife is and which shelf in the fridge is coldest and the sound the heater makes at ten o’clock. She knows Keya’s voice in the texts even without opening them. She knows how the hair feels against her neck in the dark.

She thinks about the name on the notepad. About the deleted thread. About the community space, Philippa’s voice, a single question reorganizing twenty people’s attention. She doesn’t know yet what the next move is. She has a notepad with a name on it and a community space she doesn’t know how to enter as Cara yet and three days of this body and no idea when it ends.

She slides her hand down.

The warmth is already there, gathered, lower threshold than last time. Closer to the surface. Readier. The body more willing to be found. She doesn’t have to search for the clitoris now. Her hand goes to it. The pressure she needs, she knows. The rhythm that works, her fingers remember. She settles into it without thinking about it, and that’s the thing that’s different. She isn’t thinking about it. Not watching herself do it. Not running a checklist down the side of her own experience.

The warmth spreads faster than before, up into her belly, down along her inner thighs, and the t-shirt is dragging against her nipples with every breath and she doesn’t try to hold that detail. It’s just there. The breasts rising and falling under the cotton, heavy and alive. The skin on the inside of her forearm where her arm rests against her ribs. The small damp place that’s building in the cotton between her legs. All of it at once. Not a sequence, not a diagram, a whole body doing one thing together.

The gather begins. She can feel it arriving from further away than she could find the other night. A long low tightening, not in the clitoris but behind it, inside her, pulled up through the pelvis from somewhere deep. She stays with it. Doesn’t chase. Doesn’t try to pull it up faster. Her hand keeps doing what it’s doing and she keeps breathing and the tightening keeps climbing — larger than the one she knew, not a single peak waiting for her to arrive at it but a whole rising front of heat — and for a second she is afraid of it, the size of it, and then she isn’t.

It crests and it isn’t a line she crosses. The floor gives. The contraction isn’t in one place. It’s in something behind her navel she didn’t know could contract at all, and her thighs are answering it, and her toes have curled. A sound comes out of her, low in the throat, hers and not hers at once. The waves keep coming. She is entirely inside them. There is no watching left, no variables, no —

Darkness.

Not sleep. The bottom drops out of it, something the body knew and she didn't, and when anything comes back at all she is somewhere else. A different body. Not Cara. Still female. She looks up at a bedroom ceiling she has never seen before.

Manhattan. She knows this how she knew Brooklyn.

The wrongness arrives in a shape she half-recognizes, the way the second time you fall down stairs is still falling down stairs. She lies still for a moment with that knowledge before she moves.