Inhabited - chapter 6 (with images) (Patreon)

The refrigerator in the galley kitchen makes a high, whining hum when the compressor cycles on. She has never heard it before. The apartment is quiet enough now to hear it.

Anthony left the French press sitting on the counter. Beside it, a single ceramic mug with a residue of black liquid dried to a ring near the bottom, hers from yesterday morning. It has been sitting there since. The small evidence of two people who have stopped cleaning up after each other.

She stands in the hallway wearing the gray sweatpants and the large heathered cardigan, and the air feels thinner. The apartment takes up more space when it's empty. The walls push out a little further. The silence is different from yesterday's silence. Yesterday he was in the next room. This is the silence of a place that has stopped waiting.

There is also a smell she keeps catching at. Anthony's, a wool-and-soap residue in the bedroom doorway that has nothing to do with him being there. The body knows the smell better than she does. Her chest registers it before she registers it. A familiar press, a tightness in the breastbone, gone by the time she names it.

She walks into the bedroom. The closet door is pushed ajar. The gap on the top shelf where the duffel used to sit is a clean rectangle of bare wood. She didn't mean to end it. She didn't know how to be in the marriage. She did the only thing she could think of and the whole thing collapsed.

She pulls the heavy cardigan tighter around her ribs. The wool scratches against her bare forearms. She has to fix it. The investigation has to keep moving. Halston's name and the suppressed memo and the connection to the foundation. But first she has to fix what she did to this marriage, or at least try. She has to give Diane something to come back to. She picks up the phone.

The phone is lying face-down on the nightstand. The screen wakes, and the fingerprint sensor reads the pad of Diane's thumb without hesitation. Anthony is at the top of the favorites. The photo attached to the number shows him standing on a dock somewhere, squinting into a bright sun, wearing a faded blue t-shirt with a hole near the collar. He looks younger. He looks like a man who expects to be happy.

She taps the name. The phone rings against her ear. One ring. Two. Three.

The voicemail is going to pick up. She starts to lower the phone.

"Yeah."

His voice is completely flat. The background noise sounds like a television running a daytime sports broadcast, distant and muted. The squeak of sneakers on a court.

"Hey," she says.

Silence on the line.

"I didn't want you to leave." The words feel like dry wood in her mouth. She is trying to use Diane's voice, trying to inject the warm, capable tone she used in the donor emails yesterday, but it comes out thin.

"You didn't say anything when I packed the bag, Diane."

"I was in shock."

"Were you?"

He isn't angry. He isn't anything. He sounds like someone reading a letter to himself that he has already read.

"Anthony, we need to talk about this. You can't just go stay with Mark and leave it like this."

A long exhale through the receiver. The television noise in the background shifts. A commercial break, a sudden spike in volume, then muffled as if a door swung closed.

"I'm not leaving it like anything," Anthony says. "I just asked you a question last night. You answered it. I don't know what else there is to talk about right now."

There is no script for this. Diane's life gives her subway lines and bank passwords and nothing about how to have this conversation with her husband.

"I just think," she starts, fumbling for a foothold on a sheer cliff. "I think maybe taking a breath is okay. It's probably good we have some space right now. To just... let things settle. Without the pressure."

She means it as an olive branch. A concession to the reality of the morning. A way to say take your time, come back when you're ready.

The silence from Anthony stretches out. It gets unbearably tight.

"Space," he says. The word drops like a heavy stone into deep water.

"Just for a few days."

"Yeah," he says. The exhaustion goes out of his voice. "You sound lighter already."

"What?"

"You actually sound relieved. I can hear it."

"Anthony, no, I meant..."

"I'll come by on Saturday for the rest of my stuff," he says, talking right over her. "You can go to the gym or whatever. You don't have to be there."

"Anthony."

The line clicks dead.

She lowers the phone. The screen goes black in her hand.

The silence of the apartment comes rushing back in. The high whine of the refrigerator. A distant siren from an ambulance outside.

She ended it.

The temporary distance, the cooling-off period she was trying to negotiate to buy herself time, just snapped into a permanent decision. He heard relief. And the worst part, the part that makes the bile rise hot in the back of her throat, is that he wasn't entirely wrong. The relief was there. She was relieved not to have to perform the terrifying intimacy of a wife anymore. Anthony heard the truth. He hung up.

She throws the phone onto the unmade bed.

The stillness of the apartment starts to rot. It presses against her eardrums.

She walks to the corner of the living room. The rig sits there. Matte black halo. Thick braided umbilical cord trailing to the wall outlet. She picks up the headset. Sits on the edge of the couch, fits the array over her temples, pulls the heavy visor down.

The white ring, expanding. The dull, familiar thud of the pulse against the skull.

The lobby environment loads. The polished concrete, the warm, diffuse artificial lighting. Avatars mill around a central fountain that sounds like actual rushing water. She bypasses the public areas entirely. She finds the navigation interface and keys in the routing path she found two days ago. The unlisted community board.

The text prompt loads. Same prompt as before — describe a session anomaly. She types a description from Diane's perspective. A foundation director who's been told dissociation events are user-end hardware issues but has now seen otherwise. The cursor blinks. The request clears.

The environment renders around her. The basement room. The rough, gray-green walls. The sourceless lighting that makes everything look slightly submerged. She spawns near the entrance.

She doesn't move toward the center of the room. She stays near the edge, stepping back until her digital shoulder blades rest against the texture of the wall, and just watches. There are more people here today. A Saturday afternoon crowd. Maybe twenty-five avatars clustered in small groups on the ambiguous gray seating arrangements. The ambient noise is a low murmur of overlapping conversations.

Philippa is holding court near the back.

Her avatar is the same as before. Tall, severe, completely unadorned. She is listening to a man in a generic default skin talk about a latency drop he experienced during a high-stress architectural simulation. Philippa nods, asking short, surgical questions. She never wastes a word.

She watches Philippa. The authority the woman wields in this space is absolute. She controls the flow of information. If the investigation is going to move forward, it has to go through Philippa. But Philippa won't talk to a stranger. Diane's avatar stays against the wall, still.

After a while, her mind shifts frames, sliding into an older, more deeply ingrained habit.

She starts mapping the network topology of the room. She looks at Philippa and sees a routing node handling localized packet requests. She looks at the gray walls and estimates the bandwidth cost of hosting an unlisted subnet on secondary infrastructure. She traces the invisible logic gates that govern who can spawn here, reverse-engineering the authentication protocols required to keep the room hidden from NovaSphere's main directory. She wonders, quietly, whether she could spoof an admin token to read Philippa's encrypted message logs. She is building an architecture diagram in her head while sitting in a room full of people who have been hurt by it.

She maps the layout, watches the flow of conversation, tracks who defers to whom, how the groups merge and separate. She learns the rhythm of the space, burning it into memory.

After two hours, she pulls the headset off.

Her body is tight. The hours sitting still have compounded the panic in the back of her mind. She needs to move. She pulls open the bottom drawer of the dresser and roots until she finds workout clothes. Black leggings. A heavy-duty sports bra. A long-sleeved thermal running top.

Getting the sports bra on is its own small ordeal. Cara's chest had been manageable, easily flattened. Diane's isn't. She pulls the thick elastic over her head and reaches into each cup to settle herself in by hand, the skin still tender from the underwire all yesterday. The compression, when it finally locks down, squeezes her ribs hard enough to change her breathing. Air comes shorter, lower, pushed down into her diaphragm. It feels armored. It feels like wearing a binding she doesn't fully approve of and is grateful for anyway.

She pulls the leggings up. Diane's hips and thighs are solid, built differently from Cara's narrow frame. The fabric grips the muscle. She finds running shoes in the closet and laces them up. She leaves the apartment and takes the elevator down.

The winter air hits her face as she walks out of the building. Sharp, hovering right around freezing. She heads west, toward the Hudson River greenway.

She starts at a slow jog. Diane's body finds the pace before she does. The thighs know this — the push-off, the roll through the foot, the hip dropping slightly on each stride in a way that is not wrong, just different from what she has been. She is not driving it. She is just inside it, and for maybe thirty seconds on the path along the water, before the thinking catches up, that is enough.

Then she notices the chest. Despite the compression she still bounces. A heavy, rhythmic jolt with every footfall that pulls uncomfortably at the ligaments near her collarbone. She tries to alter her stride, shortening her steps, trying to glide rather than pound. It barely helps. She accelerates anyway. She wants to be tired. She wants the lungs to burn loud enough to drown out the memory of Anthony's flat voice on the phone.

The greenway is busy. Cyclists wrapped in neon windbreakers. People walking dogs. Other runners.

It starts slowly. The ambient attention.

It isn't just the men. It's everyone.

She passes a man stretching against a railing. Mid-thirties, beanie pulled low. His eyes track her. Face, chest, hips, past. A full pass. Not quick. Standard sidewalk static. From inside Diane's body it lands differently. The shoulders start to come in before she thinks about it. The stride shortens a fraction. The body has been doing this calculation for thirty-four years and it is very good at it.

She fights the draw. Pushes the shoulders back. Lengthens the stride. She is not going to shrink on her own run.

A woman in coordinated winter gear jogs past going the other direction and looks at her. Not long. Just a look. Assessment. Her body registers it as slightly warmer than the men's. Not threat but still catalogued. Something in her registers it back. A small private yes there too. Then it is gone, taking the stride with it, and the running gets harder. The bra is doing its job but the band is starting to dig in under her ribs where the heavy fabric has sweated through. Every footfall pulls somewhere near the collarbone. Her lungs hurt and her back hurts and the body underneath her is still Diane's, still running its quiet threat calculus under every stranger's glance, regardless of what she wants it to do.

She runs angry. She runs until her legs are shaking.

She rides the elevator up in a daze, leaning her sweaty head against the metal wall. Her heart is hammering against the tight band of the bra.

She steps into the apartment. The bruised, dirty yellow winter light is spilling across the floorboards.

She walks straight to the bathroom. The air is cold. She peels the wet thermal top off. The sports bra fights her. She has to cross her arms, grip the thick elastic at the bottom, and heave it up over her shoulders. The release of the compression is sudden and staggering. Her ribcage opens. Her chest comes loose, hot from being held, and the band's print is visible in her skin in a wide red horseshoe under each breast and along her sternum. She strips off the damp leggings and underwear, leaving them in a dark pile on the tile. She steps into the shower and turns the heavy brass handle.

The water hits her scalding hot.

She stands under the stream, closing her eyes. The contrast between this body and Cara's is impossible to ignore here, isolated in the heat and the steam. Cara's frame had been compact, tight, breasts noticeable but manageable. Diane is bigger everywhere. Heavier. She drags the soap across her chest and the soap slips under one breast and she has to lift it slightly to clean underneath. The skin there is hot and unfamiliar. The crease feels deeper than she expected. The ridiculous private observation that nobody warned her about that crease, about the small daily attention it requires, surfaces and dissolves.

The water sheets down over her collarbones, over her skin, pooling briefly in the dip of her stomach before running on. The skin is flushed from the run. Her nipples have gone tight from the temperature change and the friction of the soap and her own wet palm passing across them. The contact is louder than she expects, and there again on the way back, and she stops moving the soap and stands with her arms at her sides for a second, letting the water do the work.

She moves her right hand briefly towards her left breast, then stops. Not yet.

She turns off the water.

She dries off. The towel is rough on her shoulders, soft over her chest. She doesn't put the sweatshirt and sweatpants back on. She doesn't put anything on. She walks down the hallway naked. The cool air of the apartment raises goosebumps on her arms and thighs. The skin on her back is still hot from the shower; the skin on the front of her, exposed to the apartment, is starting to cool. The mismatch is a sensation in itself. She stops in the hallway for a moment. Not to do anything. Just to feel the two temperatures at once, the hot back and the cooling front, and Diane's skin registering both of them without complaint.

She enters the bedroom. The king-sized bed looks enormous. The unmade side has not been touched. Anthony's pillow still has the dent.

She doesn't fix it.

She climbs in on Diane's side. The right side. The sheets are freezing against her skin. She pulls the duvet up. She lies flat on her back and stares at the ceiling.

She doesn't try to sleep. She doesn't try to do anything. She drifts for a few minutes, or maybe a few hours. Then she stirs.

The apartment is so quiet. The wood floor in the hallway gives a small contracting tick somewhere as the heat shifts. The streetlamp outside throws a pale yellow bar across the ceiling and she watches it and watches her own breath even out.

She thinks, without meaning to, about the woman on the greenway. The brief assessment. The small private flicker that had gone off in her chest, the warmer-than-the-men's reading. She doesn't follow the thought anywhere. It just sits there for a moment and then it is the man at the scaffolding instead, then it is Anthony's face when he turned the lamp on. Her mind is unable to settle.

She has been carrying things all day. The underwire, the cold, the scaffolding man, the sex with Anthony that did not finish, the run, the woman on the path. Now in the dark, with no one watching, she lets some of it go.

A slow heat starts low in her belly without her asking for it. She doesn't move. She lets it.

The clock on the nightstand reads 5:47 AM.

She turns her face into the pillow. Anthony's pillow, actually. She has rolled toward the middle without noticing, and his smell is faint in the cotton, soap and whatever shaving cream he uses. Her body recognizes it before she does. Her chest tightens, a dim ache, complicated. Not desire for him. Something older. The marriage as a body memory, separate from the man.

Her hand goes down without her deciding it should.

She is wet. She doesn't think about it. She doesn't catalog. Her fingers find her clit and stay there, very lightly, the lightness an accident at first and then a discovery: that the body responds better to the lightness, that it had been bracing all day against pressure and now wants to be barely touched.

She moves slowly. There is no audience. There is no Anthony. There is no script.

The heat builds the way warm water rises in a tub, one inch at a time, and somewhere along the way she stops being able to track where her hand stops and where she begins. Her other hand goes up and rests flat on her own breastbone, palm-down, the warmth of her hand banking the warmth that has begun to climb out of her hips. Her breasts are heavy under her own forearm and the weight is no longer foreign.

She thinks, briefly, of the woman on the path. The look. Catalogued, slightly warmer than the men's. The quiet acknowledgment that she had responded to that one. She lets the thought stay. It doesn't sharpen into anything explicit. It just sits, warm, behind everything else.

Her breath has gone deeper. She can hear it.

The heat is bigger now. It has spread up her belly without her tracking it, and down the inside of her thighs, and the muscles of her thighs are starting to do the small involuntary flutter that means she is past the threshold of management.

Her hips lift slightly off the mattress to meet her own hand. She doesn't decide it.

The wave starts to gather. She doesn't drive it. It does itself. Her fingers stay light because heavy isn't what this wants. She is breathing slow, mouth open. The sound is small. She isn't trying to be quiet. There just isn't much sound in her.

Then it is bigger than her, and her hips lift again, and she is not deciding any of it. The hand on her own chest clamps down, painfully, and she does not let go. Somewhere far down she feels the slow seizing pull go on for longer than seems possible. It doesn't crest the way Cara's had, it doesn't break, it deepens. A heavy, low tide pulling the breath out of her. Her toes curl into the sheets. Her jaw stays loose.

The sound that comes out of her isn't a sound she would have chosen. It is too soft and not soft enough.

She comes, and the room goes.

The white-out hits. The total sensory vacuum. The concept of the body ceases to exist.