Replication - chapter 11 (with images) (Patreon)

The second date happens on Friday. She cooks.

I arrive at her apartment at seven. She moved here to put distance between herself and the life we had, and you can feel that in the place. Third floor. A long hallway with a carpet that absorbs the sound of my boots.

I stand outside her door for two minutes before I knock. I run the inventory: brown skin locked, jaw squared out, the stubble forced up, the arms thickened, the chest flattened with the glandular tissue packed over the muscle. Holding it is a thin whine at the base of the skull. Most of what I’ve got goes to just standing here as this.

I knock. She opens the door.

She’s wearing dark jeans and a gray sweater. Her hair is pulled back in a loose knot. She smiles, stepping aside to let me in. The apartment smells like roasting garlic and olive oil.

“You found it,” she says.

“I found it.” I step inside. The living room is small, ordered, full of light from a tall window facing the street. There are books stacked on the coffee table. A green velvet chair I don’t recognize. None of the furniture is from our old place. She started over.

“Wine?” she asks, walking toward the small kitchen.

“Please.”

I take my jacket off and hang it on the back of a dining chair. I’m wearing a dark blue button-down shirt. I sit at the edge of the sofa.

She brings two glasses of red. She hands me one and sits on the opposite end of the sofa, tucking one leg under herself.

“I’m making pasta,” she says. “It needs another twenty minutes. If you’re starving, I have bread.”

“I’m fine. This is good.”

I take a sip of the wine. The alcohol hits my stomach and threatens the concentration required to hold the face. I clamp down, reinforcing the jawline.

We talk. The conversation goes the same easy way it did at the restaurant last week.

“The Portuguese novel is fighting me,” she says. “I spent three hours today on one paragraph. One.”

“What’s the fight?”

“The editor wants me to resolve an ambiguity in the original. The narrator says something that could mean he forgives his brother, or it could mean he’s just tired of being angry at him. In Portuguese you don’t have to pick. In English you do. Every verb makes you commit.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That the ambiguity is the intent.” She laughs, short, not quite happy. “He hated that.”

“Did you change it?”

“No.” She looks at me. “I don’t think I’m going to.”

I don’t steer the topic or offer an unsolicited solution. I let her talk.

The space I leave open in the conversation is new to her. She steps into it, filling the room with her own weather. She looks at me with an unguarded warmth that I rarely saw in the last months of our relationship.

I watch her over the rim of my wine glass, and the arithmetic starts running in my head.

Tonight the delay tactics expire. Two adults, a second date, dinner at her apartment. The trajectory is obvious. I have three options.

I can confess. Put the glass down, look her in the eye, and tell her I am a pale woman wearing a counterfeit face built from sheer willpower. Tell her the hospital didn’t cure me. The exposure erased me. That ends the night. It likely ends the relationship.

I can try to manage the encounter in the dark. Keep the lights off. Keep my clothes mostly on. Use my hands. Steer her away from the zipper. It requires a passive partner, and Kate has never been passive. It requires luck.

Or I can gamble. I can let the night go as far as it goes and see what survives the crash.

I drink the wine. I choose the gamble. I am too greedy for the warmth in this room to shut it down myself.

“You’re quiet tonight,” she says.

“I like listening to you.”

She smiles, looking down at her glass. A flush rises on her neck. “Mark hated hearing about the translation. He said it sounded like making a puzzle out of something that should just be instructions.”

His name lands wrong in my chest. “Mark prefers instructions. They don’t require him to interpret anything.”

“He likes security. He likes things to be predictable.” She traces the rim of her glass. “It was safe. For a while. After everything that happened with you, safe felt necessary.”

“And now?”

She looks up. Her eyes meet mine. “Now I think safe is a little suffocating.”

She stands up, setting her glass on the coffee table. She walks to the kitchen to check the stove. I watch her move. Heat gathers low before I’ve decided anything, the tissue filling against the cotton, and I cross my legs to crush it down and only make the friction worse.

We eat at the small table by the window. The food is good. I force myself to eat slowly, chewing carefully, keeping the jaw rigid. If I relax the muscle tension, the bone structure will melt back into soft curves.

“This is good, Kate.”

“I had time to practice cooking for one.”

The quiet accusation hangs over the plates. I deserve it. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing for the hospital, Julian.”

“I’m not apologizing for the hospital. I’m apologizing for the months before it.”

She stops with her fork halfway to her mouth. She lowers it slowly, searching the face I’m barely holding together.

“You were so angry all the time,” she says. Her voice is barely a whisper.

“I was. I didn’t know how to let you in. I just managed you.”

“You managed everything.” She reaches across the table. Her hand covers mine. Her palm is warm. She strokes my knuckles. “You feel different now. You feel like you’re sitting at this table with me.”

I’m running this body from somewhere far back inside it. The performance is giving her what she’s wanted for two years.

“I’m here,” I say.

We finish the wine. I help her clear the plates. We stand in the small kitchen, side by side, rinsing dishes in the sink. Her shoulder brushes my arm and the contact runs down my flank, the skin lit up everywhere at once the way it is now.

She turns off the faucet. She dries her hands on a towel. She drops the towel on the counter and turns to face me.

We are standing inches apart. The kitchen is quiet. The hum of the refrigerator. The sound of traffic on the street below.

She looks up at me. Her eyes are dark, dilated. The space between us closes without a word.

She kisses me.

Her mouth is soft, tasting like red wine and garlic. My hands go to her waist and I pull her against me harder than I mean to. Her chest presses to my sternum and the flattened tissue under my shirt protests the pressure, the nipples crushed against the fabric throwing the heat low.

The body floods. I’m at the top of the cycle, the timing lining up with everything else going wrong tonight. The wet comes fast and heavy, soaking into the underwear, a drag against the denim. I gasp into her mouth and she takes it as encouragement.

She kisses me harder. Her hands slide up my chest. She feels the forced muscle of the pectoral wall, and the soft give of the breast tissue above it, and she doesn’t stop, her hands moving over my shoulders, gripping the fabric of my shirt.

I kiss her back. My hands slide up her back, feeling the curve of her spine, the heat of her skin through the sweater.

She pulls back, breathing hard. “Come here,” she whispers.

She takes my hand and leads me out of the kitchen.

We walk down the short hallway. Her bedroom is dark. The blinds are drawn, blocking the streetlights. A small lamp on the dresser casts a low glow across the bed.

She turns to me at the edge of the bed. She reaches for the hem of her sweater and pulls it over her head. She tosses it onto a chair. She’s wearing a dark lace bra. Her skin is pale in the low light. I look at her chest, her stomach, the dip of her waist. My throat goes dry.

She steps close and reaches for the buttons of my shirt.

If she gets the shirt off she’ll see the flattened spread of the breasts, and I move before I’ve thought about it.

I catch her wrists. I hold her hands still against my stomach.

“Leave it,” I say. My voice is ragged. I force the pitch down.

She looks up.

“Julian?”

“I don’t… the hospital.” I swallow. “The weight loss. I don’t look the same. I don’t want you to see it yet.”

Her face softens.

“Okay,” she says. She leans up and kisses my jaw. She feels the forced stubble. “Okay. Whatever you want.”

She reaches around me and clicks off the lamp on the dresser.

The room plunges into darkness. A sliver of streetlight bleeds through the edges of the window blinds, just enough to see shapes.

I exhale. The dark is my only cover.

We fall onto the bed. I keep myself on top, managing the geometry. I have to control the angles. I press my legs together, keeping the denim tight against my crotch, denying her hands access to the empty space.

She pulls me down. She kisses my neck. Her hands move over my back, over the musculature I’m holding together by will, the jaw, the chest, the skin all wanting to let go at once, and I’m sweating through the shirt.

I slide my hands down her sides. I unhook her bra. I touch her skin. The physical memory of her body aligns with the reality under my hands. I know how she reacts to pressure. I know the rhythm she likes. I use my fingers, tracing the line of her stomach, moving lower.

She arches against my hand. She breathes my name into the dark.

But Kate isn’t a passive partner. She never has been.

She shifts her weight, rolling her hips, trying to pull my body flush against hers. She wants the friction. She wants the weight of a male body pressing down. I resist, keeping my hips angled away, propping myself up on one forearm.

She makes a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. She reaches down between our bodies.

I try to catch her hand. I’m a fraction of a second too slow. The fatigue in my brain slows the reflex.

Her hand brushes past my wrist. She touches the metal button of my jeans.

“Kate, wait,” I gasp.

She ignores me. She is lost in the momentum of the dark and the heat. Her fingers slip over the button. She reaches for the zipper.

I stop breathing.

She slides her hand flat against the front of my jeans. She presses down, seeking the hard ridge of an erection. She expects the biology of the man she lived with for two years.

Her palm meets flat, yielding denim. She pulls my jeans down below my waist, then presses again.

Her fingers graze the swollen shape of the labia. She feels the void. She feels the female architecture.

Her hand stops moving.

The room goes silent. The heat goes out of it.

She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t move her hand right away. Her fingers stay pressed to the denim, working over what they’re touching.

Then her hand comes back fast, the way it would off a hot pan.

She scrambles backward, pushing her spine against the headboard. The mattress shifts. I hear her breathing, fast and shallow.

“Julian?” she says. Her voice is high. Terrified.

I sit up. I pull my knees toward my chest. I don’t say anything. There are no words left.

She reaches out. Her hand fumbles against the dresser in the dark.

A click. The lamp flares on.

The light floods the bed.

She looks at me.

I force the jaw to hold. It takes everything I have. The panic screams through my nervous system, begging the muscles to drop the tension, but I lock the cartilage and the bone into place. I pull up my jeans and sit there on the edge of the mattress, sweating through the blue shirt, breathing in ragged gasps.

Her eyes go to my face, down to the flat denim at my crotch, and back up.

She's putting the pieces together. The hospital. The exposure. The recovery. The softness of my chest under the shirt. The refusal to take my clothes off. The empty space between my legs.

“You aren’t cured,” she whispers.

I swallow. The muscles in my throat seize. “Kate.”

“You lied to me.”

It isn’t the body that breaks her. It’s the lie. She’s working back through all of it, the bookstore, the dinner, the clothes, the hand on her knee, and finding the same thing under each one: a man who hid the truth and ran a version of her life past her to get what he wanted. The exact thing that drove her out the first time, done again, worse.

Her expression shifts. The confusion drains away, replaced by a cold stare.

“I couldn’t tell you,” I say. My voice cracks. I try to pitch it low, but the panic pulls it higher. “I couldn’t lose you again.”

She looks at my face. She shifts further away, pressing her spine against the headboard. She sees the sweat pouring down my forehead.

“You haven’t changed at all,” she says.

“I have. Kate, please. I just wanted…”

“You wanted what you wanted.” She shakes her head. Small, sharp movements. “You hid this. You sat across from me at dinner and you lied to my face.”

“I was afraid.”

“I can’t,” she says.

“Kate.”

“I can’t.” Her voice is dead. She points a trembling finger toward the bedroom door. “Get out.”

“Please…”

“Get out!” she screams. The sound tears her throat.

I stand up. My legs are shaking. I don’t look at her again. I can’t bear what is written on her face.

I walk out of the bedroom, down the short hallway, and grab my jacket from the dining chair. I open the front door and step out, pulling it shut behind me. The lock clicks into place.

I stand in the carpeted hallway. The wetness in my underwear is cooling against my skin, a sticky reminder of the body I’m trapped in.

I walk to the stairs. I don’t take the elevator. I walk down three flights staring at the concrete steps, hands on the metal railing.

The drive across the city takes twenty-four minutes. I keep both hands on the steering wheel. The knuckles are white. The skin over them is pale, the veins running thin and blue beneath the surface. The brown I held onto is gone.

I stop at a red light on Fourth Street. The intersection is empty. A stray piece of newspaper blows across the asphalt, catching in the glow of the streetlight.

I don’t look in the rearview mirror. I know what is there. The bone structure collapsed the second I left the apartment. The jaw softened. The eyes widened, the brow lifting, the masculine angles melting into the slope of a woman’s face.

The light turns green. I press the accelerator.

The denim of my old jeans cuts into the waist. The crotch is flat. The cotton of my underwear is damp. The wetness is cooling now, turning tacky against the labia. The leftover of the kiss in the dark. I’d been panicking the whole time, and underneath the panic the body had been responding, the blouse, the weight of her against me, flooding the pelvis, getting ready for the thing my mind was busy trying to stop.

My own body, against me, all the way down.

I pull into the parking structure beneath my building. The concrete pillars slide past the headlights. I park in my assigned spot. I turn the engine off.

I sit in the dark for a long time. I don’t reach for the door handle. I breathe the stale air of the car.

I built the man she left, smoothed the anger out of him, gave her the partner she’d asked me to be for two years. The second she understood it was a performance, she looked at me the way she did in the bookstore in reverse.

The only thing that makes me unlovable to Kate is being Julian.

Julian is the man who lies to keep control. Julian is the man who hides the damage. If I tell her the truth, the uncanny horror of the body drives her away. If I hide the body, the deception drives her away. There is no route through the maze. The maze is closed.

I pull the keys from the ignition. I get out of the car.

The walk to the elevator is cold. I don’t force the stride. I let the pelvis roll, the center of gravity sitting lower, the hips taking the weight naturally.

I ride the elevator to my floor. I unlock the apartment door.

The living room is dark. The air smells like dust and the sour tang of old coffee. The succulent sits on the windowsill, bathed in the orange light from the streetlamp outside. The grease splatter marks the window glass above the sink.

I lock the deadbolt behind me. I drop my keys in the bowl.

I don’t turn on the lights. I walk into the bedroom. The curtains are open, letting the city light bleed across the floorboards.

I take off the gray jacket. I drop it on the floor. I unbutton the dark blue shirt. My fingers lack the thick, calloused pads I used to have. The nails are clean, the cuticles smooth. I pull the shirt off my shoulders and let it fall.

I reach down and unbutton the denim. I pull the zipper down. I push the jeans over my hips and let them drop around my ankles. I step out of them.

I hook my thumbs into the waistband of the damp underwear and strip it off.

I stand naked in the middle of the room.

The air touches every part of the skin. I don’t look in the mirror. I don’t need to. I know the geometry of the flesh. The pale surface. The flare of the hips. The dip of the waist. The curve of the breasts, the areolas tight from the cold.

The wetness between my legs is a cold distraction. The evidence of the kitchen, of the hallway, of the bed.

I walk into the bathroom. I turn on the overhead light.

The tile is white. The mirror reflects the truth I spent three days fighting.

Dark hair falling around the shoulders. Pale skin, a white that never saw the sun on a construction site. Brown eyes. My mother’s father looking out from a skull that belongs to a stranger. The jaw is soft. The neck is slender. The collarbones sit fine and close to the surface, over a chest that marks the body as female.

I look at the woman in the mirror.

I don’t try to change her. I don’t reach for the brown skin or flex the jaw or flatten the chest.

I just look at her.

She looks exhausted. The skin under her eyes is bruised with purple shadows. The lips are slightly swollen from the kissing. The chest rises and falls with a steady rhythm.

This is the bottom of it.

Julian Reyes tried to claw his way out of this room. He built a mask, went to the bookstore, sat at the table, bought the wine, played it as well as it could be played. And it took everything off him anyway.

I step into the shower stall. I turn the water on hot.

The spray hits my shoulders. The heat blooms across the pale skin, turning it pink. I stand under the water and let it run over the hair, down the back, pooling at the curve of the spine before running down the cleft.

I pick up the soap. I lather my hands. The slickness of the suds against the palms.

I wash the chest. The breast tissue is tender. I run my hands over the curves, feeling the weight. The soap glides over the nipples. The touch sends a shiver down my flanks. The body is wired for this. Every nerve is packed tight, close to the surface, demanding input. I wash the stomach. I wash the thighs.

I move my hand between my legs.

I touch the labia. The folds of skin are slippery, the dried arousal rehydrating under the hot water. I wash the area with a clinical detachment.

My fingers brush against the clitoral hood.

The heat is instant. My knees go for a second, the thighs shaking under it.

The arousal from Kate’s apartment never left. It just cooled down, hiding in the vascular tissue of the pelvis, waiting for a spark. The hot water and the friction provide the spark. The blood rushes back. The vulva swells against my fingers.

I pull my hand away. I lean my forehead against the wet tile of the shower.

The water beats against my spine.

I don’t want the arousal, or the pooling ache in my groin. I want my old body, the mechanics of it. I want Kate. I want the life I threw away.

None of those things are in this shower.

The only thing in this shower is a female body demanding resolution.

I press my forehead harder against the tile. The cold ceramic grounds me.

I reach down again.

I don’t close my eyes, don’t picture Kate, don’t construct a fantasy to make the touch acceptable to my ego.

I just touch the flesh.

I press two fingers against the slick node of the clitoris. I apply a circular friction.

The body arcs into the touch on its own. My hips roll forward looking for the pressure before I’ve sent any instruction, the heat spreading through the lower abdomen, out from the bone.

The sensation lacks the focused build of the male climax. It’s a spreading flood, a saturation of the nervous system. The breasts ache. The skin flushes hot. The breath hitches in my throat, breaking into short gasps.

I increase the pressure. I rub faster.

The body takes it the rest of the way and I’m just along for it, the buildup pulling the breath out of me, dragging everything down into the center. The thighs shake. The toes curl against the wet floor.

The wave breaks.

It rips through the pelvis, a series of contractions pulling the pelvic floor up and tight. It flashes behind my eyes, white, erasing the bathroom, erasing the tile, erasing the memory of the bookstore. A sound tears out of my throat, a noise that doesn’t belong to a man, pulled straight from the female vocal cords. The contractions ripple outward, echoing down the thighs and up into the stomach, a release that leaves the muscles weak and trembling.

I drop my hand.

I lean back against the shower wall, sliding down the fiberglass until I am sitting on the floor of the stall. The hot water rains down on my head, plastering the dark hair against my face.

The climax drains the last of the adrenaline from the bloodstream.

I sit on the shower floor and listen to the water hit the drain. The body is sated. The demand in the pelvis is gone, replaced by a throbbing warmth. The biological machine ran its sequence. It functioned.

I pull my knees up to my chest. I wrap my arms around my legs and sit with the wreckage of the night.

I put his face on and his clothes and ran his script, and Kate saw through all of it anyway. The same control that lets me hold a face in the mirror is the thing she can’t stand to be near. No version of him left gets me back into the room.

I sit under the hot water until the tank runs out and the spray turns lukewarm. I stand up. My legs are heavy. I turn the faucet off.

I step out of the shower. I take a towel from the rack. I dry the hair. I dry the pale arms, the breasts, the curve of the hips. I dry the legs. I don’t look in the mirror again.

I walk into the bedroom.

The pile of clothes is still on the floor. The blue shirt. The denim jeans.

I walk past the clothes. I pull the covers back and climb into the bed.

The sheets are cold. I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling. The light from the streetlamp casts long shadows across the plaster.

I’m not going to spend three more days fighting the cartilage in my jaw, or force the brown back to the surface to lie to someone who remembers it, or build that face again for anyone. There’s nothing left to win by it. I stop the resistance, the inventory, the effort of holding a man together with willpower. I let it go. I let it fall away into the dark.

Tomorrow I’ll wake up and not put on the jeans or fight the mirror. I’ll find a way to exist in the world that doesn’t require holding a ghost together with willpower and panic, a use for this body that doesn’t require anyone to love it.

I breathe in the quiet air of the apartment.

The man who walked into the bookstore this morning is gone. He went down the drain on the floor of the shower with the soap and the water.

I fall asleep in the female body, and I don’t dream of the hospital. I don’t dream of the lake. I don’t dream of Kate.