Inhabited - chapter 15 (with images) (Patreon)

Third morning. She wakes before the nausea, which she hasn't managed before. She lies still for a minute, testing it. The bladder is the loudest thing now. The nausea is still there, but lower in the queue.

She gets up carefully. The slide-step routine is automatic. She drinks tap water from the heavy glass. It still tastes of pipes.

She stands at the butcher-block island. The kimchi is in the trash now, double-bagged, but she can still smell it from the kitchen if she stands too close to the can. She doesn't.

The phone sits face down near the knife block.

She doesn't turn it over. She saw the screen light up in the middle of the night, a bright blue rectangle in the dark bedroom. Two more missed calls. A text message preview that she caught before she could look away: Meg please just tell me if.

She didn't open it. The damage is done. Meg will wake up in it.

She rests her forearms flat on the cold butcher block and lets her head hang. She can hear her own heart. Everything she has is going somewhere low inside her, and there's nothing left for anything else. Her breasts feel heavier this morning than they were yesterday morning.

She pulls the laptop toward her and flips it open.

Sarah Lin.

The name from the tech press source. The mid-level coordinator who pushed back against the shadow-banning.

She pulls up a blank text document. She starts typing out the access parameters. If Sarah Lin was managed out three months ago, her active directory credentials are dead. Standard corporate offboarding. But the developer API has a secondary authentication layer for legacy projects, a loophole in the token refresh cycle that engineers sometimes use to keep old environments running without requesting new admin permissions. She maps the command-line syntax required to spoof a legacy token. She traces the server pathway in her head, visualizing the exact node where Sarah Lin's old access keys might still trick the system into opening the communication logs.

She writes out a string of code, backspaces, adjusts the port routing. She stares at the terminal syntax on the screen, satisfied that the logic holds.

She closes the laptop and slides it into the canvas tote.

The check-in with Brigid is at noon.

The same place.

She goes to the bedroom and pulls on a clean pair of cotton briefs, the wide-leg black pants, a gray cashmere sweater she finds folded in a drawer, soft and worn at the cuffs. She pulls it over her head. The friction against her nipples makes her suck in a breath through her teeth. She puts on a thick wool coat and the scuffed leather boots.

The air outside is brittle. The sky is a flat, cloudless white.

She walks toward the F. A garbage truck is grinding down the block, two men in high-vis vests tossing bags into the hopper. The smell of crushed plastic and rotting food hits her. The nausea surges instantly, a violent upward rush. She stops, leaning her shoulder against the wrought-iron fence of a brownstone, breathing through her mouth. She waits for the stomach to settle. The truck rolls past. She keeps walking.

On the F train she is too tired to track anything. She closes her eyes and lets the rocking move through her. A man further down the bench shifts, gets up, gets off at a stop she doesn't register.

The G is empty in the middle of the day. She gets off at Nassau Avenue.

The block is the same. The ghost lettering. The two steps. The heavy door. Inside, the same narrow room, the same dark green ceiling, the same hardwood worn pale down the middle.

Brigid is at the back table.

Brigid tracks her approach. Her eyes find Meg's face and stay. It isn't yesterday's reaction; she was ready for it this time. But her jaw is set tight, and she doesn't hide it. Looking at her estranged sister's face, knowing the body sitting down across from her is carrying a child.

She pulls out the wooden chair and sits.

"You made it," Brigid says. Clipped.

"Yes."

Brigid looks at her. At the gray cashmere sweater. At the dark circles under Meg's eyes, deeper today than they were yesterday. The exhaustion is surfacing, painting itself clearly on the skin.

"Have you eaten?"

It isn't a question about the investigation. It's logistical, blunt and practical.

"Crackers. And ginger."

Brigid nods once. She doesn't offer sympathy. She doesn't reach across the table. But the question itself is a shift. A millimeter of movement. Brigid is factoring the biology into the equation.

"What do you have," Brigid says, dropping the personal immediately, pulling out the small notebook.

"Sarah Lin, a comms employee." She keeps her voice low. The marble table next to them is empty, but the room is quiet. "Mid-level coordinator. Pushed back against the shadow-banning. They managed her out."

"Where is she now?"

"Working freelance PR for a startup in Dumbo."

Brigid writes this down. Block letters, severe, pressing hard into the paper. "I have a contact at a tech incubator near the Navy Yard. I can get an introduction to the startup. A back channel."

"She might not have taken the documentation with her," she warns. "But she knows the internal directives. She knows who gave the order."

"If she pushed back, she's a liability to them," Brigid says, tapping the pen. "And she knows it. She won't talk to a journalist pitching a story."

"No."

"But she might talk to someone who already has the pieces and just needs her to confirm the shape of the puzzle." Brigid looks up. "I'll make the call this afternoon."

The business of the check-in is concluded. The data is transferred. The vector is established.

Brigid caps the pen. She places it precisely in the center of the notebook.

Usually, this is the moment the meeting ends. Brigid gathers her things, issues a final directive, and leaves.

Brigid doesn't move.

She looks at the ceramic mug. She turns it a quarter inch to the right. The room hums around them. The hiss of the milk steamer, the low murmur of a conversation near the front.

"She didn't tell anyone," Brigid says.

The statement hangs.

"No."

"Not the father?"

"I told him yesterday."

Brigid's eyes snap up. The clinical detachment fractures. "You what?"

"He called." She feels the sheer, idiotic weight of what she did, saying it out loud to the woman who actually knows the context. "I thought he should know. I didn't know she was the one who ended it."

Brigid stares at her. A complex, rapid sequence of emotions plays out across her face. Incredulity. Anger. And then, surprisingly, a dark, sudden exhaustion. Brigid rubs her temple.

"He called and you answered." Brigid lets out a breath that's almost a laugh, but devoid of any humor. "And just told him."

"Yes."

"How did he take it?"

"Badly. He was shocked. Then angry. I hung up."

Brigid shakes her head slowly.

"I didn't know," she says. It's a weak defense. It isn't a defense at all.

"Of course you didn't." Brigid looks back at her. The anger is gone. What's left is much heavier. "You're just driving the car. You don't know where the dents came from."

Brigid reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a twenty. She slides it under the edge of the coffee mug.

"Has she been to a doctor?"

"I don't think so. There's nothing in the calendar."

Brigid nods. She doesn't offer to make an appointment. She doesn't offer to be there when Meg wakes up. But she asked the question.

"Tomorrow," Brigid says. "I'll tell you if I have a read on Sarah Lin."

She stands. She wraps the scarf tighter around her neck. She looks down at the face one last time.

"Eat something besides crackers."

She turns and walks the length of the room toward the door. The bell jingles as she goes.

She sits at the marble table for a long time. The twenty sits under the mug. Brigid is doing the work. She is also grieving the sister sitting across from her.

She walks back to the G.

The ride is long. Her thighs are trembling by the time she climbs the stoop, unlocks the heavy wooden door, and climbs the stairs to Meg's floor.

She drops the tote in the hallway.

The kitchen is quiet. The afternoon light is graying out, turning the corners of the room to shadow.

She opens the refrigerator. She forces herself to look past the fermented jars. She finds a plastic container of plain white rice. She scoops some into a bowl and microwaves it.

She eats it standing at the butcher block. She reaches for the soy sauce without looking, her hand going straight to it on the shelf to her left, third from the end. She didn't think about where it was. Her hand just went. She stands there with the bottle for a moment before she pours.

It is bland, warm, and the stomach accepts it without immediate rebellion.

She doesn't look at the phone.

She doesn't open the laptop.

The investigation is in Brigid's hands for the moment. The Sarah Lin vector is active. There is nothing else she can force today.

She walks into the bedroom.

She takes off the boots. She strips off the wool coat, the cashmere sweater, the wide-leg pants. She leaves them in a pile on the floor. She strips off the underwear.

She stands naked in the fading light.

Her breasts are heavy, sore along the sides. She brings a hand to her belly, fingers spread. The flesh feels different from yesterday. Or she's imagining it. She can't tell.

She finds the oversized cotton sleep shirt and puts it on. It falls to her mid-thigh.

She climbs into the bed.

The sheets are cool. She lies on her back. She stares at the ceiling. The plaster is cracked in a thin, jagged line above the ceiling fan.

She isn't thinking about the escape mechanism. She isn't trying to force the floor to drop. Yesterday, she'd tried to use Meg's arousal as a tool, a lever to pry open the door, failed. The nausea shut it down.

This evening, she doesn't try to direct anything.

She is just tired. She is tired of carrying the nausea, tired of the heavy, bruised ache in her chest, tired of the damage she did to Dom and the complicated, painful space she occupies with Brigid.

She slides a hand down under the hem of the sleep shirt.

It isn't urgent. It's a slow, almost absent-minded movement. A seeking of comfort rather than a demand for release.

Her fingers find the slick, heavy wetness. There's so much of it, dense, the lips swollen and warmer than the skin around them. Her fingers move easily. She doesn't press. She traces the outer edges, slow, just learning what's there. The skin is incredibly warm. With her hand easy like this, it doesn't fight her. It just feels like heat.

A low, deep thrum starts in her pelvis.

She breathes out, a long, slow exhale. She lets her shoulders drop into the mattress. She stops calculating the investigation. She stops worrying about the phone on the kitchen counter.

She lets herself inhabit the quiet of Meg's apartment. The safety of the locked door. The heavy reality of this body.

She moves her fingers in a slow, rhythmic slide along the outside, then up to find her clit. It's already swollen, exquisitely sensitive, and she has to back off the pressure almost as soon as she finds it. Smaller circles. Lighter. The heat builds. It isn't Cara's sharp spike or Diane's furnace. This is dense, spreading, low. Pooled in the lower belly and radiating out into the thighs.

She brushes her free hand across the cotton of the sleep shirt. Her nipple is hard under the fabric, and the touch pulls a line straight down through her, all the way to where her other hand is working. She does it again. The line lights up again. She'd felt it before — a wire running straight through her — but never quite like this.

She arches her lower back slightly.

The wave is building from a very deep place. It doesn't feel like climbing a hill. It feels like sinking into warm water.

She doesn't chase it. She waits for it. She keeps the rhythm steady, slow, listening to what the tissue wants. The breathing changes, deepening, pulling air all the way down into the diaphragm.

The pelvic floor begins to tighten. Small involuntary contractions, rhythmic.

She lets her head roll to the side on the pillow. Her hair sticks to her temple. She can smell her own skin. A warm, faintly salt smell, slightly different from the other women, sweeter. And the clean cotton of the pillowcase, and very faintly the wool of the sweater she dropped on the floor. A car goes by on the street. A horn, distant, somewhere on Seventh Avenue. She can feel the cold edge of the room against the warmth of the bed.

The warmth crests. It doesn't snap. It rolls over her, slow and dense. Everything low clamps down. A long, deep squeeze that holds longer than she would have thought possible. Her breath stops. The pleasure goes all the way into her hip bones. Her free hand has come up and is pressing flat against her own chest without her telling it to, fingers spread, holding her own weight.

She lets out a soft, ragged sound.

The aftershocks come in slow, the muscles releasing in waves she can't predict. Her thighs are shaking, just slightly. The wetness is everywhere, on her hand, on the inside of her thighs, soaking the sleep shirt where it bunched. The body is offering her a long, soft exhale, asking nothing.

The ceiling fan above her stops making sense as a shape.

The cracked plaster dissolves.

The walls of the apartment fall away. The weight in her body goes with them.