Reconstruction - chapter 3 (with images) (Patreon)

The hook on the locker door is loose. It rattles when I hang the polo shirt. The AC’s down as far as it goes, the way it always is, cold enough that the deep heat rub smells sharper than usual. I got here an hour early so I could do this part with the room empty. I sit on the bench and stare at the floor tiles. The grout is stained gray. I pull the heavy compression shorts up over my thighs.

I bought them yesterday at a big box store out by the highway, avoiding the club’s equipment manager. They’re a size smaller than I usually wear. The spandex is dense and unforgiving. I stand up and hike them the rest of the way, settling the waistband over my hips.

The fabric compresses everything. It presses the slick lips flat against the pubic bone. I feel the friction right away. The seam of the shorts rides up into the cleft. I shift my weight. The fabric drags across nerves that are wired too close to the surface, throwing a bright jolt of heat up into my stomach. I bite the inside of my cheek and reach down through the fabric, adjusting, trying to find an angle where the pressure doesn’t light me up. There isn’t one. I pull my training shorts on and reach for my boots.

The door swings open and Chad walks in. He drops his duffel bag on the floor. It lands with a dead sound.

“Skip,” he says. He looks at me, then at my right leg. The scars are visible, pink seams running down the thigh. He doesn’t look away fast enough.

“Chad,” I say. I sit back down. I grab a roll of tape and start wrapping my left wrist. “Ankles holding up.”

“Yeah. Fine.” He unzips his bag. He looks tired. The whole squad has looked tired since August. They dropped four games on the bounce while I was on a couch doing straight-leg raises. You can smell the losing in the room. It sits in the corners.

Danny comes in a few minutes later. He stops in the doorway when he sees me at my locker. He’s twenty-two and his face does what his brain is doing. He looks relieved, and he looks gutted. He took my job for two months and he couldn’t keep it.

“Cole,” Danny says. He walks over. He doesn’t sit. “You’re cleared.”

“Ben sent the paperwork to Doyle yesterday.” I tear the tape with my teeth and smooth the end down against my clammy skin. “Leg is good.”

“That’s great man. Really.” He rubs the back of his neck. “We need you.”

He means he needs me to take the pressure off. He wants the understudy job back.

“Get your boots on,” I tell him. “We have work to do.”

Doyle’s office is at the end of the tunnel. I knock once and push the door open. He’s sitting behind his desk with his feet up, tapping a pen against a clipboard. He looks at the door, sees me, and drops the pen.

“Ben says you’re jumping eight percent higher than preseason,” Doyle says. No welcome back.

“That’s what the force plates said.”

“It makes no sense. You shattered your femur in three places.”

“Meridian built a good mesh. I put the work in.” I stand there with my hands on my hips, shoulders filling the doorway. “Everything above the belt is what it was in August. I’m ready for Saturday.”

Doyle stares at me for a long time. He’s looking for the hesitation that ruins keepers after a trauma.

“You take the first rotation in the scrimmage,” he says. “If you pull up short, if you favor the right side even a fraction, Danny starts on Saturday.”

“I won’t favor it.”

He grunts and waves me out.

The heat outside hits like a wall. The humidity hasn’t broken yet. The grass smells like wet soil and chalk dust. I walk out to the training pitch with the rest of the squad. My cleats sound dull against the thick grass. The right leg feels dense, rooted to the earth. The hum is down there in the bone, a low vibration that only I can feel.

I jog to the goalmouth and stand in the six-yard box. The turf here is chewed up, full of dirt and divots. I scrape my studs across a patch of loose dirt to level it out.

We run a passing drill to warm up, then split into attack and defense. I’m in the near goal. The back four lines up in front of me. Chad is playing center half. They look disorganized.

The whistle blows.

The reserve squad brings the ball down the right flank. Their winger cuts inside. Chad steps up too late. The gap opens.

I don’t think about the leg, or the compression shorts, or the chafing heat between my thighs. The game slows down. You stop reacting and start predicting. The winger drops his shoulder. I read his plant foot. I know he’s going near post.

I take one stride and launch.

The right leg fires. The power transfer is clean. I leave the ground, body parallel to the grass, seventy-nine inches of reach, and my gloves meet the ball at the top. The impact stings my palms through the latex. I push the ball wide of the post.

I hit the ground hip first, then shoulder. The impact’s a dull pressure. The femur takes the shock and gives nothing back.

I push up to my knees and yell, voice gone to gravel. “Step up. Push the line. You’re giving him too much space.”

Chad turns and backpedals, waving his arm to drag the defense higher.

The next forty minutes are just work. The ball comes, I move, I stop it. My breath rasps in my throat. Sweat runs down my neck and into the collar of my jersey. The tiny black rubber crumbs from the turf stick to my gloves.

A cross floats in high toward the back post. Three steps, plant the right foot, drive the knee up to protect my ribs. I catch the ball at the highest point. I come down hard. The joint is solid.

“Mine,” I shout, tossing the ball out to the right back.

I run sequences I know cold. I dive and land and get up barking, and the box belongs to me.

But inside the gear, the soaked jersey, the spandex pulling tight, I can feel it. Every time I plant and pivot, the seam of the shorts grinds against the soft tissue. The pale lips, the heat of the opening. My chest heaves with the exertion. My heart hammers against my ribs.

Doyle blows the whistle to end the session.

The squad scatters toward the coolers by the bench. I walk over slowly. My calves are tight. I peel the right glove off and grab a bottle out of the ice and drink half and pour the rest down the back of my neck.

Danny is standing a few feet away, wiping his forehead with the back of his glove. He leaves a smear of dirt above his eyebrow. He watched me the whole scrimmage.

“You didn’t lose a step,” Danny says.

“No.”

“I thought you were done. When I saw the leg on the grass.” He looks at the water bottle in my hand. “I heard the bone snap.”

“It healed.”

Danny nods.

I leave him there and walk back to the tunnel.

The showers are the problem. I knew they would be the problem since I woke up. I pull my boots off at my locker. The tape comes off my wrists. My skin is pale and clammy underneath. I throw the tape in the trash can.

The room is full of noise. Guys pulling off wet gear, slamming locker doors, arguing about a foul call during the scrimmage. The smell of sweat and damp cotton. I sit on the bench and unlace my boots slowly.

I can’t take the shorts off in here. I can’t walk to the showers bare. The architecture is gone. If I strip down, the lie ends.

Chad walks past me toward the showers with a towel slung over his shoulder. He slaps my shoulder. “Wall out there today, skip.”

“Yeah.”

I wait until the room clears out a little. Most of the guys are in the shower room or the physio area. I grab my towel. I keep the compression shorts on and walk into the shower block.

The water is running hard, steam filling the tiled room. I pick a showerhead in the corner, facing the wall. I turn the tap to scalding. The spray beats down on my back.

I reach down and push the spandex shorts down my thighs, letting them drop to the wet tiles. I keep my back to the room. I stand close to the wall.

I run soap over my chest. The thick hair, the hard pectoral muscle underneath. My hands move down my stomach. The flat ridges of my abs. And then the map ends.

I wash my thighs first. I trace the surgical scars. The water runs down my legs. I have to wash the rest.

I reach between my legs. The touch is flat and open. My calloused hand, rough from the turf and the latex gloves, scrapes against the wet folds. The soap stings the inner tissue. I clean myself fast. I don’t explore, don’t linger.

A guy laughs over the sound of the running water. It echoes off the wet tiles.

I finish rinsing. I grab my towel and wrap it around my waist before I turn around. I secure the tuck at my hip. The terrycloth is rough. I walk back out to the locker room.

The air hits my wet shoulders. I go straight to my locker and pull clean boxer briefs on under the towel. I drop the towel and pull on my stiff jeans. I pull a gray t-shirt over my head.

I sit on the bench and look at my hands. They are large hands. They know how to grip a ball, how to deaden a cross. They know how much force to apply.

I’m cleared. The machine works. I’m going to start on Saturday against Memphis.

I pick up my duffel bag and walk out to the player lot. The pavement shimmers in the heat. I climb into my truck. The steering wheel burns. I sit a minute before I start it. The crumb’s still in the cup holder from this morning. I leave it there and pull out, and the thing in my femur picks up the rhythm of the tires and rides along.

The neon sign in the window of Tally’s Cafe buzzes with a high frequency that gets under the skin if you listen to it too long. I’m sitting in a booth in the back corner. The vinyl seat is cracked. Someone patched it with a strip of silver duct tape that’s peeling at the edges, the adhesive turned black with dirt.

It’s a little after eleven on a Thursday night. I’m eating my third meal of the day. A double order of chicken fried steak, three scrambled eggs, a plate of hashbrowns soaked in grease and hot sauce. The training session this afternoon emptied the reserves. My shoulders ache with a satisfying heaviness. The rebuilt right femur holds a low thrum, the vibration of the mesh settling after being asked to handle explosive loads for the first time in two months.

The rest of me is a different problem.

I sit with my knees spread wide. It’s the geometry I’ve used my whole life, making room for a physical mass that no longer exists. The front of my jeans sags inward. The denim is stiff. Every time I shift my weight, the thick seam of the crotch rides up and grinds against the tucked folds between my legs. The heat down there is wrong. The slick friction is an alarm going off in the back of my brain. I take a bite of the steak and chew it slowly. The diner smells like old coffee and bleach.

I’m cleared to play. The club thinks I am whole. I sit here in a public space carrying a female body under my clothes, lying to the waitress, lying to the guy reading a newspaper two booths down.

The bell over the front door rings.

A woman walks in. She lets the glass door swing shut behind her and stands on the rubber mat for a second, looking around the bright room. She’s wearing faded eggplant-purple scrubs and a gray zip-up hoodie. A plastic hospital ID badge is clipped to the pocket of the scrubs, but it’s flipped backward so all I see is the white plastic and a barcode. She has dark hair pulled back into a messy knot. She looks to be in her early thirties, and she looks exhausted. The kind of tired that sits in the marrow.

She walks past the counter and slides into the booth across the narrow aisle from mine. She drops a heavy canvas tote bag onto the seat next to her.

Brenda is the waitress tonight. Her name tag is crooked. She walks over with a stained plastic menu and a coffee pot.

“Just the coffee, hon?” Brenda asks.

“And a grilled cheese. With fries. Please.” The woman’s voice is raspy. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands.

Brenda pours the coffee and walks away. The woman reaches across the table for the sugar packets. The little ceramic caddy is empty. She rattles it, looks inside, and drops it back onto the formica. She sighs.

I reach across the aisle. I have a full caddy on my table. I hold it out.

She looks up. Her eyes are dark brown. She looks at my hand holding the ceramic container, then up to my face. She doesn’t have the flicker of recognition I usually get in this town. She just sees a large man in a gray t-shirt sitting in a diner.

“Thanks,” she says. She takes the caddy. Her fingers brush mine. Her skin is cold.

“Long shift,” I say.

She rips two sugar packets open and dumps them into the black coffee. “Twelve hours. It felt like forty.” She stirs it with a spoon. The metal clinks against the thick diner mug. “St. John’s ER. Thursdays are usually quiet. Tonight everybody decided to try out their amateur carpentry skills at the same time.”

“Nail guns.”

“Table saws mostly.” She takes a sip of the coffee and winces at the heat. “I’m Mari.”

“Cole.”

She looks at my plate. The massive pile of food. “You work construction or something, Cole? That’s a lot of calories for eleven at night.”

“Something like that.” I cut another piece of the steak. “I play for Arkana. The soccer club.”

Mari nods slowly. She doesn’t feign interest or excitement. “Right. The guys who play out at the stadium by the university. You guys any good?”

“We’re dropping points lately. But we manage.”

“Must be hard on the joints,” she says. She’s looking at my hands now. I have my left hand resting on the table. The knuckles are thick, the skin pale and calloused from years of the gloves and the turf.

“It is. You spend half your life throwing yourself at the ground. The body keeps a ledger of everything you do to it.”

Mari laughs, a dry sound. “Tell me about it. I spend my whole week putting people back together because they thought their bodies would just put up with whatever they did to them. We’re stupidly resilient right up until the second we aren’t.”

I stop chewing and swallow. The neon sign buzzes in the window.

“Bodies lie to you,” I say. I keep my voice flat. I look at my coffee mug. “You think you know how it works. You rely on it. And then it just changes without asking.”

Mari looks at me. The exhaustion in her face shifts, replaced by a clinical observation. She’s a nurse. She reads people for a living. She’s looking at the broad span of my shoulders, the thick neck, the heavy jaw.

“They don’t lie,” Mari says. She leans back against the vinyl booth. “People just stop listening to them. Or they don’t want to hear what the body is actually saying. It’s always just chemistry and physics, Cole. Action and reaction. You just have to read the chart.”

I shift in my seat. The denim pulls against the new cleft. The jolt of wrong sensation flares again. Chemistry and physics. The mesh working toward a fixed architecture. It isn’t lying. It’s doing what it was programmed to do. I’m the one trying to ignore the chart. Nothing in the chart says broken. That part’s me.

“Maybe,” I say.

Brenda comes back with her food. A greasy plate with a flattened sandwich and a pile of pale fries. Mari thanks her and pulls a bottle of ketchup from the end of her table. She hits the bottom of the glass bottle with the heel of her hand. Nothing comes out. She hits it again, harder.

“Here,” I say. I slide my plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup across the aisle.

She catches it. “You’re a lifesaver tonight.”

“I do what I can.”

We eat in silence for a few minutes. I like her. She isn’t performing. She isn’t asking me about the clean sheet record or whether Doyle is going to get fired. She’s just eating her fries.

“You always eat this late,” Mari asks around a bite of the sandwich.

“Double sessions today. My first full day back with the squad after an injury. I didn’t get enough calories in at dinner.”

“What did you break?”

“Right femur. I smashed the knee.”

She stops chewing. Her eyebrows go up. “A shattered femur and you’re back playing. Who was your surgeon?”

“Aris. The club doctor. We used a new protocol. Experimental hardware.” I don’t want to talk about the mesh. “It worked fast. I’m cleared for Saturday.”

“You shouldn’t even be walking normally yet,” she says. Her nurse brain is working the problem. “Femurs take months. The bone density alone.”

“I heal quick.”

She watches me for a second longer, then lets it drop. She’s seen enough weird medical anomalies in the ER to know when a patient doesn’t want to explain their chart.

“Well. Try not to break it again on Saturday. The ER’s understaffed on weekends.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Brenda comes around with the coffee pot. She tops off Mari’s mug and offers me a refill. I shake my head. I have to sleep. The body needs eight hours.

“You live around here,” I ask.

“Midtown,” Mari says. “I have to relieve the sitter by midnight.”

“Sitter.”

“Yeah. I have a twelve-year-old boy at home. Santi. He’s probably asleep on the couch with the TV on.” She smiles when she says his name. The harshness around her eyes softens. “He plays soccer actually. Youth league. He’s terrible at it but he loves the uniform.”

“What position?”

“He just runs in a pack around the ball mostly. Sometimes he stands in the back near the net and watches airplanes.”

“A goalkeeper,” I say. “A natural.”

She laughs again. A real laugh this time. “I’ll tell him a professional said that. It’ll make his week.”

“Tell him the secret is to let the ball do the work. Don’t dive if you can step.”

Mari looks at her watch. A black digital thing with a rubber strap. “I have to go. The sitter charges time and a half after midnight.”

She pulls her wallet out of the canvas tote, a worn leather clutch. She takes out a ten dollar bill and slides it under the edge of her coffee mug. She stands up.

I stand up too. You stand up when a woman leaves the table. The left leg takes the primary weight, the right leg bracing. The movement shifts the compression shorts underneath my jeans. I feel the friction flare. I grit my teeth and keep my face neutral. I push my hands into my pockets to hide the way I’m standing, the slight widening of my stance to keep the denim from cutting into the soft folds.

“It was nice meeting you, Cole,” she says. She slings the tote bag over her shoulder.

“You too, Mari.”

She turns and walks toward the door. I watch her go. She walks flat-footed. The stride of someone who’s been on her feet for twelve hours on hard hospital linoleum.

I drop a twenty on my table for Brenda and follow Mari out.

The air outside is cooler now, the heat breaking a little in the dark. The streetlights throw long yellow shadows across the asphalt parking lot. Moths circle the bright bulbs.

Mari is walking toward a faded silver Honda Civic parked under a streetlight.

“Hey,” I say. My voice carries in the quiet lot.

She turns around. She has her keys in her hand.

I walk over to her. The pavement is uneven. I don’t look down. I know where my feet are.

“You want to get a drink sometime? Sometime that isn’t midnight on a Thursday.” The words feel rusty. I haven’t done this in a long time. Lauren and I were together for three years before she packed her boxes and left her keys on the counter. And since the injury, since the surgery, I haven’t been anything but a patient.

Mari looks at me. She holds the keys tight. She’s a single mother working ER shifts. She doesn’t have time for casual mistakes.

“I don’t really do the bar scene, Cole. I barely have time to do laundry.”

“We can get coffee. Or I can buy you another grilled cheese.”

She smiles a fraction. The neon light from the diner catches in her dark eyes. “OK, coffee. Daytime. Sometime next week.”

“Okay.”

She pulls a pen out of her tote bag. A cheap plastic hospital pen. She reaches out and takes my left hand. She uncaps the pen with her teeth and writes a phone number on the pale skin of my wrist, right above the heavy pulse point. The ink is blue. Her fingers are cool and rough from washing them all shift.

“Text me so I have yours,” she says.

“I will.”

She opens the door of the Honda and gets in. The engine turns over with a whining sound before it catches. She puts it in gear and pulls out of the lot.

I stand there under the streetlight, looking at the blue numbers written on my skin.

A car drives past on 11th Street. The sound fades. I walk over to my truck and climb in. The cab smells like old leather and the faint, dusty scent of the chalk from the training gear in the back.

I sit in the driver’s seat. I leave the engine off for a minute.

I met a woman. A real woman with a job and a kid and capable hands. I got her number. It’s the most ordinary male thing I could do on a Thursday night.

But as I reach forward to turn the key, the denim bunches at my lap. The empty space above the zipper. The slick reality hidden underneath the compression shorts.

I start the truck. I put it in gear and drive out into the dark.

The condensation ring on the glass coffee table is starting to pool and drip over the edge. I watch a single drop cut a track through the dust on the glass. Lauren took the coasters when she left. I never bought new ones.

Mari is sitting sideways on the low leather sofa with her legs tucked under her, wearing a faded gray t-shirt and jeans. She smells like cheap vanilla soap and the cold night air. It’s been a week since the diner. We got coffee twice. We walked around the reservoir park yesterday afternoon while her kid was at a friend’s house. Tonight she came over after a shift. She looks exhausted, the kind of tired that sits in the jaw.

The apartment is quiet. The AC cycled off ten minutes ago.

I take a drink of my Lone Star. The beer is getting warm. I set the bottle on the table.

Mari shifts on the leather cushions. Her knee bumps my heavy thigh. She leaves it there.

“You’re somewhere else tonight,” she says.

“I’m here.”

“Your head isn’t.” She reaches out and touches the back of my left hand. Her fingers are rough. The pads are calloused from gripping bedrails and opening ampules. “You’ve been staring at that table for five minutes.”

I look at her. The dark eyes, the hair pulled back into a knot. I like her. I like the way she occupies a room without trying. It makes what I have to do worse.

I turn my hand over and catch her fingers. My palm dwarfs hers. I trace the line of her thumb.

She leans in. The distance closes. I meet her halfway.

Her mouth is warm. I kiss her, letting my right hand slide around to the back of her neck, my thumb resting just under her jaw. My chest tightens, the heavy pectorals engaging, but below the waist the reaction scatters. No hydraulic rush. No forward shift in gravity. Just a diffuse pooling of heat in a space that used to hold a familiar weight. The compression shorts bite into the soft flesh.

She makes a quiet sound in the back of her throat and presses her chest against my arm. She’s ready to move this down the hall.

I pull back and drop my hand from her neck.

I stand up from the sofa. The movement breaks the air between us. I walk two steps toward the kitchen island, stop, and turn around. The right femur hums, the low vibration in the bone.

Mari watches me. She doesn’t look rejected. She just looks alert.

“I have to tell you something,” I say. My voice sounds harsh. “Before we go anywhere else.”

“Okay.” She sits up a little straighter. “Tell me.”

I lean my hips against the counter and cross my arms, trying to build a wall out of my shoulders.

“The injury in August,” I say. “The femur. I told you we used a new protocol. An experimental mesh.”

“Meridian’s sub-dermal mesh,” she says. “I looked it up after the diner. It’s supposed to be for crush trauma.”

“Yeah. That’s the one.” I look at the bare floorboards where the rug used to be. “It heals by reading mechanical strain. You train, it builds structure. It put the leg back together in two months.”

I stop. I read bodies for a living. I know how to articulate a pulled soleus or a torn meniscus. I have no language for this.

“Cole.” Her voice is steady. “What did it do?”

“It didn’t stop at the bone.” I look up at her. I force myself to hold her eyes. “It works toward a fixed architecture. And what it decided to build isn’t mine.”

She frowns. The clinical gears turning.

“It changed me,” I say. I can’t dress it up. “Below the waist. It remodeled me.”

The silence in the room gets heavy. A car drives past outside, tires hissing on the asphalt.

Mari stares at me. She looks at my broad chest, the thick beard on my jaw, the corded muscles of my forearms. She looks at the man she has been sitting next to for two hours.

“Remodeled,” she repeats. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning female.”

She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t recoil. She uncrosses her legs and plants her feet flat on the floor. She looks down at her own hands, then back up at me.

“Are you in pain,” she asks.

“No.”

“Is it still changing?”

“I don’t know.” I hate not knowing. “The leg is done. The rest of it hasn’t moved since the first month. It’s just there.”

She stands up and smooths the front of her t-shirt. She walks across the living room until she’s standing right in front of me. She’s five foot four. I tower over her.

“Bodies are stupid,” she says. “They do what they’re told by whatever chemical or mechanical garbage is running the system that day.”

She reaches out and puts both hands flat on my chest. Her palms are warm against the cotton of my shirt.

“Show me,” she says.

I swallow. My throat clicks.

I turn and walk down the hall to the bedroom. I don’t turn on the overhead light. The streetlamp outside throws a long yellow rectangle across the floor, catching the edge of the mattress.

I stand at the foot of the bed. I grab the hem of my t-shirt and pull it over my head, tossing it onto the floor. The cool air hits my skin. My chest is a solid wall. Thick ridges of muscle, the dark line of hair running down the stomach.

Mari stands in the doorway. She watches me unbuckle the belt. The metal clasp clicks in the quiet room. I unzip the stiff denim and push the jeans down over my hips, stepping out of them.

I’m left in the compression shorts. The dark gray spandex.

I hook my thumbs under the waistband. My hands are shaking. A tremor in the fingers. I push the shorts down and kick them away.

I stand there bare in the dim light.

Above the waist, the body that’s filled a goal for fifteen years. Below the line of hair, the smooth descent. The soft rise of tissue, the pink seam of the folds tucked closed. No weight, no heaviness. Just skin that doesn’t answer to me anymore.

Mari walks closer. She doesn’t hesitate. She stops a foot away and looks down. She just looks.

She reaches out.

Her hand is small. She places it flat against my right thigh, just above the knee, right over the surgical scars.

Then she slides her other hand up.

Her fingers brush the coarse hair, then move lower, finding the soft tissue. It jolts up my spine, all wrong, nothing like the old dull pull, too much of it and too sharp, and my breath catches loud in the quiet room. Every nerve is sitting right on the surface with nothing to shield it.

I shift my hips backward.

“Hey,” she says. “It’s okay. Just tell me what hurts.”

“It doesn’t hurt. It’s just… loud. The nerves.”

She nods. She understands the chart now. She presses her thumb lightly against the top of the cleft, where the nerve sits under the hood.

My right leg gives out.

I catch my balance, my hand grabbing the edge of the dresser, an uncoordinated stumble.

Mari grabs my arm to steady me. She guides me backward until the back of my knees hit the mattress. I sit down heavily. The springs groan.

She steps between my knees.

I’m used to being the one planted flat on the floorboards, bracketing hips, driving the pace. Now I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, my heavy legs spread wide, exposed, while she stands in the center of my space.

She pulls her t-shirt off. Her bra follows. Her breasts are full and heavy, the dark areolas catching the faint light. She unbuttons her jeans and shucks them off.

She pushes me back. I let her. I lie flat on my back. My shoulders span the mattress. My chest rises and falls.

Mari crawls onto the bed. She settles herself lower, kneeling between my spread thighs.

She leans down. She places one hand flat on my stomach, the fingers tracing the edge of the abdominal muscles, and uses her other hand to part the folds.

I feel my own wetness, a hot fluid pooling against her fingers. The sensation of it leaking out of me is humiliating and consuming. The body provides the output whether I want it to or not.

She slides one finger inside.

I’m tight around her finger. Searing hot. A groan tears out of me. I grab fistfuls of the sheet and hold on.

“Shh,” Mari says. She leans her weight forward. “You’re fine. Just let it work.”

She starts to move her finger, a slow friction inside, while her thumb finds the slick knot at the top of the seam. She presses down and rubs it in a tight circle.

I short out. I don’t know how to track it. There’s no linear buildup. No pressure in the groin waiting to empty out. The heat radiates outward, running down my inner thighs, pooling in my lower stomach. It feels like a fever breaking inside the muscle tissue.

My hips lift off the mattress, spine bowing, trying to push the nerves harder against her thumb.

She increases the pressure. The wet sound of her fingers moving against the slick tissue fills the room.

I’m unanchored. The body I built to absorb collisions with strikers at full tilt is being dismantled by two fingers and a thumb. My jaw is locked so tight my teeth grind. Sweat breaks out on my forehead, running down my temples into the sheets.

“Mari,” I say. I don’t know what the word is asking for.

She doesn’t answer. She lowers her head and replaces her thumb with her mouth.

Her tongue, wet and hot, slides over the hood.

A shiver rips through my heavy legs. The rebuilt right femur tenses, the mesh taking the strain of the locked muscle. The buildup peaks without warning. There’s no calculated stroke to push me over the edge. The edge just crumbles underneath me.

The release hits.

A rolling contraction that starts deep in the pelvic floor and ripples outward. My thighs lock. My toes curl. My hips buck upward, pressing against her mouth. I groan, a ragged sound that gets swallowed by the dark. The spasms pulse through me, milking the slick tissue.

I drop back onto the mattress. The bedframe knocks once against the baseboard.

I lie there, my chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. The fan clicks on every rotation.

The sweat cools on my stomach. The air feels freezing against the wetness between my legs.

Mari pushes herself up. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She looks at me in the shadows. She doesn’t say anything soft.

She just crawls up the length of my body and lies down next to me.

She rests her head on my chest, right over my heart. The thick hair scratches against her cheek. She drapes one arm across my stomach.

“You need water,” she says. Her voice is raspy.

“Yeah.”

Neither of us moves.

I turn my head and look at her. The dark hair spread across my shoulder. The solid weight of her against my side.

I close my eyes. The low hum in the bone is still there, working. But the apartment is quiet, and the space next to me is full.