Inhabited - chapter 5 (with images) (Patreon)

The silk blouse is a problem immediately.

It hangs in the closet, a pale liquid cream that requires an entirely different physical vocabulary to wear. She pulls it off the hanger. It feels like water running over her knuckles. Getting it on involves working her breasts into the underwire from yesterday, fastening the clasp with hands that are still learning their own reach, and then letting the silk settle over her shoulders. The fabric offers zero friction. It slides against the skin of her arms, cool and indifferent. She tucks the hem into the high waistband of the wide-leg trousers.

There is a donor lunch at one o'clock.

The details surface the way a familiar phone number does. Davis. A foundation representative. He knew Diane at her previous job, which means there is a shared history she has to pretend to remember.

She takes the subway to midtown. Diane takes up room. Her shoulders are broader, her hips solid. She sits on the orange plastic bench of the F train and doesn't feel the need to cross her legs tightly at the knee. She leaves them slightly apart, the wide hem of the trousers resting against her ankles. A teenager in a puffy jacket sits down next to her, bumping her arm. She doesn't shrink away. Diane's body holds its ground automatically.

The restaurant is one of those places designed to muffle the sound of money changing hands. Thick carpet, heavy velvet curtains dividing the dining areas, tables spaced far enough apart that you can't hear the next conversation.

Davis is already at a booth in the back. He is fifty, maybe older, wearing a navy blazer over a collared shirt with no tie. He has the relaxed, ruddy face of a man who spends a lot of time on golf courses.

He stands up when she approaches the table.

"Diane," he says. He leans in.

She braces slightly, tensing for a fraction of a second before something smooths it out— a hug, an air-kiss near the cheek, her hands going where they go. She manages it, smelling expensive cologne and dry-cleaned wool.

"It's so good to see you," she says. The voice comes out right. Warm, pitched up slightly at the end of the sentence. She is deploying the exclamation points from Diane's emails in real time.

They sit. A waiter appears instantly and pours sparkling water.

The lunch is an exercise in exhausting, high-wire improvisation. Davis talks about a recent trip to Aspen, and she nods, smiling, pulling on the faint surface memories of Diane's previous job at a larger, older conservation fund. Davis is with Bennett now — the foundation whose money has been on the desk all morning. She uses the words synergy and capacity building and long-term metrics. She eats a heavy, complicated salad with roasted beets and goat cheese. The mechanics of eating in a professional setting as a woman require a bizarre amount of peripheral processing. Make sure the dressing doesn't spot the silk blouse. Chew with a closed mouth while maintaining eye contact and looking engaged. Wipe with the heavy linen napkin without smearing whatever tinted lip balm Diane applied in the bathroom mirror that morning.

"The board was really impressed with your Q3 numbers," Davis says, cutting into a piece of salmon. "Halston actually mentioned the clean-water initiative specifically."

The name hits the air and she stops chewing.

Halston. The signature on the suppression memo.

She swallows the bite of beet. It tastes like dirt and sugar. "He did?"

"Yeah. You know Hal. He likes a clean metric." Davis takes a sip of his water. "Anyway, the foundation is happy. You don't need to worry about the renewal."

She manages the rest of the lunch on autopilot. She smiles. She thanks him. She lets him pay the check, doing the polite half-reach for the wallet that she knows he will wave away. They walk out of the restaurant together and do the air-kiss again on the sidewalk.

"Let's not wait another six months," Davis says.

"Absolutely," she says.

He turns and walks toward Sixth Avenue. She turns toward the subway.

The transition from the carpeted warmth of the restaurant to the street is jarring. The wind off the Hudson cuts straight through the wool coat. The sky is the color of wet concrete.

She walks fast. Diane's stride is long, driven by the muscles in the thighs. The underwire presses firmly into her ribs with every step, a constant low-level restriction she is still not used to. She waits at the crosswalk on 42nd Street. The crowd is thick. Delivery bikes weaving through the idling cars. The smell of roasted nuts and exhaust.

A man in a jacket is leaning against the scaffolding to her right. He is smoking a cigarette, holding a crumpled paper cup of coffee. He looks at her. His eyes hit her face, drop to her chest, track the line of her waist under the open coat, and come back up.

"Smile for me," he says.

The voice is raspy, casual. It isn't a request. It is an instruction.

Two reactions hit at the same time, going in opposite directions. The first, an immediate, aggressive rage. The instinct is to turn. To square the shoulders. To tell the guy exactly what he can go fuck.

But the body doesn't do that.

Before any command goes out, Diane's body overrides it. The chin drops. The shoulders pull inward, narrowing the presented surface. The eyes lock onto the pavement. Her legs accelerate, pushing her into the crowd, putting three people between her and the scaffolding in a matter of seconds.

She makes it to the subway stairs and stops halfway down, leaning against the cold tiled wall. Her heart is hammering against the underwire. Her breath is coming fast. The adrenaline in her bloodstream is thick and sour. It isn't fear, exactly. It is a suffocating, trapped energy. The rage is still there, burning behind her eyes, completely impotent. The body handled the threat by shrinking. She hates the physical compliance. Hates that the guy at the scaffolding got exactly what he wanted: a woman lowering her eyes and hurrying away.

She rides the train back downtown in a foul, buzzing mood. The adrenaline takes hours to metabolize. It leaves a film of exhaustion over everything.

The apartment is empty when she gets back. She takes off the coat, takes off the silk blouse, and throws them on the bed. She pulls on a heavy gray sweatshirt with a torn cuff and sits at the desk, staring blindly at the screen.

At six-thirty, the front door opens.

Anthony.

He walks into the hallway, drops his keys in the bowl, and takes off his coat. He is wearing dark jeans and a heavy wool sweater. He looks tired.

"Hey," he says, stopping at the edge of the living room.

"Hi."

He doesn't go straight to the kitchen. He stands there for a second. The cold war they have been fighting since yesterday seems to have shifted slightly, the ice cracking just a fraction.

"I ordered sushi," he says. "It should be here in ten minutes."

"Okay. Thanks."

They eat at the small dining table. The silence isn't quite as oceanic as the night before. It is still heavily mined, but Anthony seems to be trying to navigate around the explosives rather than just standing perfectly still. He asks about her day. She mentions the lunch with Davis, keeping it vague. He nods, pouring soy sauce into a tiny ceramic dish.

After dinner, he doesn't retreat to the armchair. He sits on the couch.

She sits on the other end, holding a glass of water. A documentary about coral reefs is playing on the television, the volume low. The blue light flickers across the walls. About twenty minutes in, he shifts his weight. He slides closer.

His hand comes to rest on her knee.

Through the thick fabric of the sweatpants, the heat of his palm is sudden and heavy. She freezes.

She runs a rapid, panicked calculus. The marriage is failing. Anthony has been a ghost in his own home. Now he is initiating. If she pulls away, she cements the rejection, maybe ruins something for Diane. If she goes along with it, maybe it fixes something. It could buy her the space she needs to keep using the rig without him asking questions, or transition her back to her own body.

She doesn't pull away. She lets it stay.

Anthony takes it as permission. He leans in.

His mouth presses against hers. The beard stubble scrapes the sensitive skin around her lips. The smell of him is overwhelmingly male, soy sauce, clean sweat, a faint metallic tang of winter air still clinging to his sweater. The body knows him. That is the strangest part. Her nervous system recognizes the pressure, the angle of his jaw, the heavy weight of his arm sliding around her waist. The physiological machinery begins to boot up automatically, running on years of biological memory. The blood flow changes. The skin warms.

They move to the bedroom.

The mechanics of it are a disorienting, entirely alien education.

She lies on her back on the mattress. Anthony pulls the sweatshirt over her head. He unhooks the bra. Her breasts fall sideways against her ribs, hot, exposed, and she tries not to flinch from her own weight. He touches them, and the nerve endings fire, sending signals to her brain that she registers but doesn't feel connected to. He pulls off her sweatpants. He is naked now, his weight pressing the mattress down.

The thought arrives a beat later, the kind of thought that should have arrived before: unprotected. Then, underneath it, quieter, the knowledge that it isn't a problem. A five-year IUD, replaced eighteen months ago. The body has been managing its own risk for a long time without asking him. 

When he enters her, the shock of it almost makes her gasp. 

It is an intrusion. The physical reality of being on the receiving end of a man's body is entirely outside any framework she has ever possessed. The pressure. The slow stretch. The blunt mass of him moving above her. The air is driven out of her lungs with every downward thrust. She lies there gripping the bedsheets, trying to find a rhythm to breathe through. Her own wetness, produced automatically, as betrayal, by a body that has done this with this man hundreds of times, eases the friction without easing anything else.

It isn't awful. Anthony is not aggressive. He is careful, methodical, holding his weight on his forearms so he doesn't crush her. The body is cooperating, providing the necessary lubrication, accommodating the movement. But the whole thing is hollow all the way through.

There is no connection. There is no spark. She is trapped inside a biological process that is performing a required maintenance cycle. She stares at the ceiling over Anthony's shoulder. She notices a slight crack in the plaster near the smoke detector. She tracks the rhythm of his breathing, waiting for the cadence to change, waiting for it to be over.

It takes about eight minutes.

His breathing hitches. He speeds up, his hips snapping forward, his grip tightening on her shoulders. He lets out a low, muffled sound against her neck. He stops moving. He holds for a few seconds, his chest heaving against hers, sweat slick between their skin.

Then he rolls off.

He lands heavily on his side of the bed, pulling the sheet up over his waist. He stares at the ceiling.

"Okay," he says quietly. It doesn't sound like a question. It sounds like a door closing.

She doesn't say anything. The room smells like sex, a dense biological odor that makes her feel slightly sick.

Anthony turns over, facing away from her. Within ten minutes, his breathing evens out into the deep, rhythmic pull of sleep.

She is wide awake.

The sex has left her in a state of unresolved low-level arousal, the machinery started, never finished, blood pooled heavy and unattended low in her belly. The sour, trapped feeling she is used to being able to close the loop on. She lies there counting Anthony's breaths. One two three four. Four seconds in, six seconds out. The silence in the apartment is absolute. The radiator ticks. A car goes past on the street below and its headlights move across the ceiling in a slow diagonal sweep and are gone.

Five minutes.

She pulls her own side of the sheet up, covering her chest and turns slightly on her side, facing away from Anthony's back. She slides her hand down under the sheet.

She finds the wetness left over from the sex and the way it has gone slightly cold at the surface, the dried tackiness at the edges of her thighs where his weight pushed it out. She wipes the worst of it away with her thumb, disgusted by the texture, and finds her clit. She starts to work. It is mechanical, a necessary release to drain the tension from her body so she can sleep. She presses hard, moving in fast tight circles, completely detached. She breathes through her mouth, trying to keep the sound of the friction muffled against the mattress. The heat builds quickly, driven by the residual blood flow. She chases the peak, narrowing focus, bringing the sensation up to a sharp, localized point.

The mattress shifts.

The bedside lamp clicks on.

A sudden blast of yellow light hits the wall.

She freezes. Her hand stops.

She turns her head slowly.

Anthony is sitting up, leaning on one elbow, looking down at her. He isn't angry. His mouth is loose. His eyes are not looking where she expects them to look. He looks at her hand under the sheet. He looks at her eyes.

The quiet in the room is crushing. It presses against her eardrums.

Anthony sits back against the headboard. He runs a hand over his face, dragging the skin down around his eyes. He looks older than he did ten minutes ago.

"How long has this been the situation," he asks. He isn't whispering exactly. His voice is just very tired.

She pulls her hand out from under the sheet. She sits up, pulling the fabric up to her collarbone. She has nothing. No script. The secrets have breached the hull.

"Anthony," she starts.

"Don't," he says. He holds up a hand. "Just tell me. How long?"

She looks at him. She has nothing for this. The marriage has been over for longer than Diane or Anthony have admitted, and she is the one in the room when the admission has to land.

"I don't know how to talk about it," she says.

He stares at her for a long time. The silence stretches out, filling the corners of the bedroom, settling over the furniture.

He nods slowly. Once.

He turns off the lamp. He lies back down, pulling the sheet up to his chin. He turns his back to her again.

Nobody sleeps. They lie there in the dark for six hours, listening to each other breathe, two people separated by an ocean of unsaid things.

When the gray light of morning finally starts to bleed through the blinds, Anthony gets up.

He doesn't speak. He goes to the closet. He pulls down a black canvas duffel bag from the top shelf.

She sits up in bed, the sheet clutched to her chest. She watches him.

He opens a drawer and takes out underwear, socks, a few t-shirts. He shoves them into the bag. He goes to the bathroom and she hears the clatter of a razor, a toothbrush hitting the bottom of a dopp kit. He comes back out. He zips the duffel closed. The sound is loud and final.

He hoists the strap over his shoulder. He looks at her sitting in the bed.

"I'm going to stay with Mark for a few days," he says.

"Okay."

"I'll come get the rest of my stuff later this week."

"Anthony."

He turns around and walks down the hallway.

The front door opens. He steps out. The door swings shut behind him. He doesn't slam it. He pulls it closed and lets the latch click.

The apartment is entirely silent.