Disclosure (caption) - part 1 (Patreon)

Part 2 is available here.

The granite edge of the kitchen island presses cold into the base of my spine, the stone digging into vertebrae that feel prominent. The morning sun cuts through the unshaded window in a bright beam that hits the floorboards and bounces up, filling the room with flat light. I cross my arms, pulling the bunched fabric of the t-shirt down with my forearms, trying to cover the waistband of the sweatpants.

Sloane stands three feet away. She wears a faded tank top and heavy hiking boots. She bartends for a living and shoots photography on the side. Her hours are loose. Usually she's in my apartment at midnight, or two in the morning, the lights low, the bourbon out. Now she's here at nine-thirty on a Sunday, smelling like wet asphalt and dark roast coffee, wide awake.

Her dark ponytail swings slightly as she tilts her head. She's looking at the flare of my hips under the cotton sweatpants.

I'm Wes Brennan. I'm thirty-two years old, a wealth manager for a mid-size advisory firm. I spend my days in glass-walled conference rooms, leveraging the unearned authority of being six foot one with a baritone voice. I run three miles every Tuesday and Thursday without thinking about it. I manage people and steer conversations.

My center of gravity drags downward, an alien fullness in a pelvis I don't recognize.

She sets her coffee cup on the counter. The paper cup makes a dull scraping sound against the stone.

"What's going on with you?" she asks. Her voice is level.

"Nothing." I sound like a man who's been screaming for days.

"You're standing in your kitchen at nine-thirty on a Sunday looking like you haven't slept in four days, and your hips don't look like your hips." She crosses her arms. The muscle in her forearm flexes. "I'm not an idiot and I'm not in the mood to be managed. What is it?"

I look at the dust motes floating in the harsh shaft of sunlight. I've spent the last four days locked in this apartment, sweating through a fever I thought was a stomach bug, feeling my bones ache and my skin stretch. I woke up an hour ago and found my male anatomy gone, replaced by a vulva and hips that don't fit my pants.

I'm trapped in the flat morning light with a woman who came here to take pictures of flowers.

"If I show you," I say, "you can't freak out."

"I don't freak out."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. Show me."

I don't move. I press my back harder into the granite, wishing the stone would give way and let me fall backward out of the room. I think about the municipal bond yields I discussed with Vance and the emails I haven't responded to yet in my inbox. None of it applies to the cold air blowing across the wetness between my thighs.

Sloane doesn't wait. She steps forward, her hiking boots squeaking on the hardwood, and takes the hem of my t-shirt in both hands.

She pulls it up.

The draft from the hallway AC vent hits my bare stomach. The skin there is paler than it was. The hair that used to trail down from my navel to my waistband is gone, leaving a stretch of soft skin. Above the hem of the shirt, my chest is exactly as it has always been. Flat, the dark hair undisturbed. I have four days of dark stubble on my jaw. I look down at her hands, then down at myself.

Sloane looks at my stomach. Her eyes track downward to the waistband of the sweatpants.

The gray cotton pulls taut across the new flare of bone.

She hooks her thumbs into the waistband.

I stop breathing. I keep my hands frozen at my sides, my fingers curled against the granite overhang. Her knuckles brush the soft skin of my lower stomach, sending a jolt of heat straight down into a groin I've only possessed for an hour.

She pulls the sweatpants down.

The elastic drags over the jut of the new hip bones. The fabric slides over a thick layer of fat that wasn't there when I did deadlifts last time at the gym. She pushes the pants down past my groin, down to my ankles, and stops. The bunched fabric traps my legs together.

The cold air hits the slickness between my legs.

I close my eyes. My chest tightens until I can barely pull air into my lungs. The unearned deference and the assumption of control are piled around my knees with the gray cotton.

"Wes," she says.

I open my eyes.

Sloane is looking down.

The flat light from the window hits my lower half. The outer folds are slightly parted, a slick dampness catching the light. It's a functional female reproductive system grafted onto the bottom of a man who still has a five o'clock shadow.

Sloane crouches down. The leather camera bag shifts on her shoulder, the strap cutting between her small breasts. She sets it down on the tile, resting her weight on the balls of her feet, her boots planted on the floor. Her face is inches from my crotch.

She wears the exact same expression she uses to adjust the aperture on her camera, calculating light and depth of field.

My chest rises and falls in shallow, rapid jerks. The draft from the vent blows across the sensitive tissue of the inner labia. Every nerve ending fires. My legs are pinned by the sweatpants, the soft cleft open to her gaze.

"Holy shit," she says softly.

She leans in a fraction of an inch closer. I can feel the warmth of her breath against the hairless skin of my upper thigh.

"It's been like this since I woke up," I say. My voice sounds wrong in the room. Too deep.

"Just today?"

"The fever's been going since Wednesday. I thought it was food poisoning. Then I woke up this morning and..."

Sloane tilts her head. The dark ponytail falls over her shoulder, the ends brushing the bunched cotton of my sweatpants. She looks at the hood of the clitoris, the slight swelling of the inner lips.

A heavy, liquid warmth pools low in my belly. I'm running on an unfamiliar physical logic now, my conscious mind bypassed.

She extends her right hand toward my left hip, a faint smudge of dark ink on the knuckle of her index finger.

I tense, locking the muscles in my thighs.

She touches the skin just below the hip bone. It's thinner now, softer. The warmth of her fingers presses into the new layer of fat. She slides her hand down, tracing the wide curve of the thigh, her palm smoothing over the hairless surface.

"You're telling me this happened overnight?" she asks, her eyes tracking the movement of her own hand.

"I don't know how to explain it. I don't know what it is."

She moves her hand inward.

I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. Her fingers brush the crease where the thigh meets the groin. I grip the edge of the granite behind me, the stone biting into my palms. The kitchen island is solid behind me and my legs are bound.

She runs her thumb lightly along the top edge of the outer lip.

The shock travels straight up into my spine. I clench my jaw and stop breathing, feeling a sudden tightening deep inside the pelvic floor, a space I didn't possess yesterday. A fresh wave of clear slickness pushes out, coating the inner folds.

Sloane sees it. She stops her thumb, resting it just above the cleft, and looks up at my face.

"You felt that," she says.

"Sloane. Stop."

She maintains the light pressure of her thumb, watching my face.

I stare at the smooth white plaster of the ceiling. I try to pull my mind away from her thumb resting against the swollen tissue, forcing myself to think about the suit I left at the dry cleaners and the email I need to send to HR about my sick days.

The new wiring between the groin and the brain is louder and more insistent than the dull, localized sensations I lived with for thirty-two years.

She moves her thumb a fraction of an inch, brushing the hood of the clitoris.

I shift my hips forward. My pelvis tilts into the friction. I realize what I just did a second later, shame burning the back of my neck.

Sloane withdraws her hand. She rocks back on her heels, still crouching, and looks at her thumb. The skin is damp. She rubs her thumb and index finger together, then looks back at the cleft.

I swallow hard. The granite is freezing against my back. The draft from the AC vent continues to blow across my wet thighs. I want to pull the sweatpants up, turn around, lock myself in the bathroom, and stand in the scalding shower until the water runs cold. Instead, I stay exactly as she left me, the sweatpants pinning my ankles, open.

"Has anyone else seen this?" she asks.

"No."

She stays crouched for another long moment. Her eyes sweep over the geometry of the new hips, the white contrast against the dark stubble on my face. She looks at the exact point where the male torso gives way to the female pelvis, studying the seamless transition of the skin.

Her shoulders are loose. To her, it's a locked room swinging wide open, a chance to look at the other side of the divide.

She rises to her full height, coming eye-level with my chest. She looks at my face. My jaw is tight, my eyes dark with the exhaustion of the fever and the stress of the last ten minutes.

"Come here," she says.

She commands it softly, knowing I have nowhere else to go.

I reach down with trembling hands to grip the waistband of the sweatpants. Pulling them up drags the fabric over the wetness and the wide flare of the hips. The elastic snaps into place, binding tight across my lower stomach. I pull the t-shirt over the waistband.

The shape is there. She knows what's underneath the cotton.

I walk toward her. My balance is still wrong, the stride shorter, the knees brushing together in a way that forces my hips to roll slightly with the movement.

She watches me take the three steps.

We stand in the center of the living room, next to the couch where the blanket is still bunched from my fever sleep. The morning sun has moved, the rectangle of light stretching longer across the floorboards.

She reaches down and grabs the hem of her faded blue tank top. She pulls it over her head in one efficient motion and drops it on the hardwood floor. Then she unclips her bra. Her breasts are small, pale, the nipples dark in the cool air of the apartment. She kicks off her boots, steps out of her cargo shorts. Her underwear comes off last, plain cotton.

"Take your shirt off," she says.