Replication - chapter 14 (with images) (Patreon)

The dashboard clock reads 2:14 AM. The green digital numbers cast a weak glow over the steering wheel. My hands rest on the leather curve of the wheel. In the dashboard light the skin is bone-white, the blue veins showing through the back of them. The heater has been off for an hour to save gas. The cold radiates from the glass of the windshield. I pull the wool sleeves of the heavy sweater down to my palms.

I’m parked halfway down the block from Kate’s apartment building. Third floor, four windows facing the street. The lights in her unit are dark. They went out at eleven-forty. A gray sedan sits parked three spaces ahead of me. Mark’s car. The engine block is cold by now. He’s asleep in her bed.

It was a Saturday when I sent the photograph, from the café across the street, and watched her read the screen and go flat and gather her coat and walk out. It was clean. I walked away feeling like something had been finished.

The project ended. I kept watching.

Then the thing that finished it didn’t finish in me. I keep coming back to the street. Her windows, the garage, the schedules. I sit in the dark and wait to see what’s left standing.

The seat presses up against the wide spread of the pelvis. There’s more flesh here to sit on and sitting still for hours pushes the blood out of it, a grinding ache working up the lower spine. I shift my weight. The breasts drag against the cotton of my shirt, heavy and unmanaged.

I lean my head back against the headrest. The street is empty. A stray fast-food wrapper scrapes across the asphalt, pushed by the winter wind. I can’t see the reconciliation directly. It happens behind the brick and the glass on the third floor, the arguments and the confessions and whatever Mark says to make it smaller. I get the version that reaches the street and build the rest of it from there.

Mark stays some nights. On Monday, he walked out to his car at six in the morning. He carried his leather briefcase. His tie hung loose around his neck. He unlocked the gray sedan and sat in the driver’s seat for four minutes before starting the engine. He stared at the steering wheel.

He doesn’t stay other nights. On Thursday, he left the building at nine in the evening. The streetlamps caught his face. None of the proud posture left in it, just the walk of someone who’s been asked to leave and has nothing left to bargain with. He slammed the door and drove away too fast, and I watched the taillights turn the corner in satisfaction.

A police cruiser turns onto the street at the far intersection. The headlights sweep across the parked cars.

I go still and slide lower in the seat.

The cruiser rolls down the block, the engine a low hum in the quiet. The spotlight mounted on the side of the police vehicle clicks on. A beam of white light washes over the row of cars. It hits my windshield.

The light illuminates the cabin, hits the pale skin of my face, catches the dark hair falling around my shoulders, highlights the bulky sweater wrapping a female frame.

I stare straight ahead, refusing to look at the cruiser, my heartbeat fast and shallow against the ribs.

The spotlight moves on. The cruiser doesn’t slow down. It rolls past my car and continues down the street, eventually turning right and vanishing.

I exhale. The breath clouds in the freezing air of the cabin.

A man sitting alone in a parked car at two in the morning outside an apartment building would have drawn questions. A man is a problem that requires a badge and a flashlight and a series of sharp questions. A pale woman in an oversized sweater sitting in a dark car is invisible. Nobody reads a threat in the slope of these shoulders, in this face.

I press my thumb hard into the palm of my other hand. The skin yields. The stark white of it glares in the shadows. The color of my father’s hands is gone. The brown I fought to hold, the color I forced up to fake my own self back into the mirror, takes too much to maintain in a freezing car. So it’s gone. I try to think of the Zapotec word for cold, the one my mother used.

I lost the word somewhere between the hospital and this street. A few words a year, bleeding out into the ether, and the physical anchor for them is gone. The pale woman in the rearview mirror has no claim to the language.

I twist the cap off the thermos in the passenger seat. The coffee is lukewarm and bitter. I drink it anyway. The caffeine does nothing for the exhaustion, but it gives the hands a task.

The female bladder signals its limits. The sensation is different from the male anatomy. The pressure sits lower, wider, a blunt ache pressing against the pelvic floor rather than a localized urgency. I’ve been fasting for twelve hours to avoid the necessity of leaving the car, restricting water intake, rationing the coffee. I ignore the discomfort.

The sun begins to lighten the eastern edge of the sky around six-thirty. The gray light bleeds into the street, turning the brick facades of the buildings a washed-out red.

Kate walks out of the building at seven-fifteen.

She’s wearing the wool coat. Her hair is pulled back in a tight knot. She carries a canvas tote bag over one shoulder and a travel mug in her right hand. She walks toward her car, parked a few spaces behind mine.

I slump down, hiding behind the headrest. I watch her through the side mirror.

The lines around her eyes are cut deep and her face is drawn. It’s been a long year for her, and I know the shape of most of it because I’m the one who started it.

She unlocks her car and drops the tote bag into the passenger seat. She gets in and shuts the door. She rests her forehead against the steering wheel for ten seconds before starting the engine.

I watch the slump of her shoulders through the side mirror.

She drives away. I stay in the parked car until the street wakes up, the commuter traffic filling the lanes, the city erasing the isolation of the night. Then I turn the key, start the engine, and drive back to my empty apartment.

I return on Friday evening.

The temperature has dropped. A thin mix of rain and sleet falls from the black sky, coating the street in a slick sheen. The wipers smear the moisture across the windshield. I leave them off. I watch through the blurred glass.

Mark’s gray sedan turns onto the block at eight-twenty.

The headlights cut through the sleet. He parks in an open space near the streetlight. The engine cuts. The headlights go dark.

I wipe a circle of condensation away from the inside of the glass with the sleeve of my sweater.

The driver’s side door opens. Mark steps out, wearing a dark overcoat, and opens an umbrella, a black canopy, then walks around the front of the car to the passenger side and opens the door.

Kate steps out onto the sidewalk in the gray coat.

He holds the umbrella over her head. They begin to walk toward the entrance of the building.

The streetlamp illuminates them.

They don’t touch. There’s about a foot of air between their shoulders and neither of them closes it. A few weeks ago Mark would have had a hand at the small of her back, would have put his own body between her and the sleet. He’s a man who takes up room. Tonight he keeps it to himself.

Tonight, his posture is rigid. The institutional ease is missing.

They reach the glass doors of the building lobby. Mark reaches for the brass handle and pulls the door open.

He turns toward her, holding the umbrella, gesturing for her to enter first.

Kate stops on the threshold. She doesn’t look at his face. She looks at the brass handle of the door and shifts her weight. She reaches up and adjusts the strap of her bag on her shoulder.

Mark says something. The sound doesn’t carry through the sleet and the closed windows of my car, but I can read the shape of his jaw. He’s speaking quietly, offering an assurance.

Kate nods once. A sharp motion. She steps through the door into the lobby. Mark collapses the umbrella, shakes the rain from the fabric, and follows her inside.

I watch them through the glass of the lobby. They stand near the elevator bank, not looking at each other. Mark watches the digital numbers above the elevator doors count down. Kate stares at the tiled floor.

The elevator arrives. The doors slide open and they step inside. The doors close.

I lean back against the car seat. The sleet taps a rhythm against the roof of the car. The cold sinks through the floorboards, creeping up through the soles of my boots.

I replay the thirty seconds at the door: the gap between the shoulders, the adjustment of the bag, the failure to make eye contact.

They’re uneasy. Whatever they put back together this week, it isn’t sealed. I can see it in the way she wouldn’t look at him and in the foot of cold air she left between them. They’ve covered the crack. They haven’t closed it.

I should turn the key, drive away, and never look at this building again. But the crack is there, a thing you can get a hand into.

I reach forward and turn the key in the ignition. The engine turns over, coughing once before settling into a steady idle. I turn the heater on high. The vents blast stale air into the cabin. The heat hits the pale skin of my face, stinging the cold cheeks.

I put the car in gear and pull away from the curb. The tires hiss against the wet asphalt. I drive away from the building, taking the long route back to my apartment, the wiper blades slapping a steady beat against the glass.

I know the crack is there.

The kitchen tile is cold under bare feet. I stand at the counter and watch the coffee drip into the glass pot. The heating element clicks. The morning light through the window is the flat gray of a bruised sky.

I reach for a mug on the upper shelf, extending my right arm. My weight shifts to the left leg. The hip joint pops outward, the pelvis tilting to catch the center of gravity, resting the load on the bone. The left knee locks. The right bends, dropping inward.

It’s not a stance I chose. The weight just went there, the way it’s been going there for weeks now, the hip taking the load.

I freeze with my hand on the ceramic handle and look down at my legs, at the sharp jut of the hip under the cotton sweatpants.

I didn’t decide to stand this way. Julian Reyes stands with his weight distributed evenly across both heels, shoulders square, spine neutral. Julian doesn’t break his posture into a curve.

I force the spine straight and square the shoulders. I plant both feet flat on the tile.

The lower back begins to ache. The muscles around the lumbar vertebrae protest the neutral alignment. They’ve grown accustomed to the tilt. They’ve spent the last few weeks holding the forward pull of the breast tissue and counterbalancing the wider pelvic bone. The body’s been quietly relearning how to stand.

But it’s more than just physics. The stance belonged to her.

I pull the mug down and pour the coffee. The dark liquid steams in the cold air.

Leila was a tool. I built her in a changing stall at a high-end spa. I gave her the copper-brown skin and the asymmetric cheekbones, the low, unhurried cadence and the open attention that makes a man believe he is being heard. I wore her to get close to Mark, take the photographs, and end the thing he had with Kate.

The project ended on Saturday. I dropped the disguise in the car. I let the brown melanin bleed out of the skin. I let the face melt back into the pale woman the mesh rendered on the first night.

The mask came off. But something stayed.

I take my coffee to the small table and sit down. I cross my right leg over my left. The thighs slide against each other. The calves press together. The ankles align.

I stare at my legs. Another unprompted realignment.

Leila is still running underneath. The body kept her: the tilt of the chin when I’m listening, the small softening around the eyes, the hands folding loose in the lap instead of gripping the armrests.

I went to the grocery store yesterday afternoon. The cashier, a man in his early twenties, handed me the receipt. He made a mild joke about the weather.

I laughed. It wasn’t the flat, polite exhalation I would have given as Julian. It was Leila’s laugh. A breathless sound that landed just ahead of the social calculation. I tilted my head, caught his eye, and smiled.

The cashier flushed. His posture straightened. He stumbled over his next sentence.

I walked out with the groceries and something turning over in my stomach. I hadn’t meant to flirt with him. The face and the voice just ran the thing they’d learned, the same warmth they’d practiced on Mark, aimed now at a kid bagging groceries because he’d offered me a small social opening and the body knew what to do with it.

I set the coffee mug down on the table. The dark surface ripples.

It’s gotten into the nerve endings somehow, settled there.

I try to ignore the warmth in the lower abdomen. It’s been there since I woke up. It was there yesterday. It was there the day before.

But the arousal has a shape. It has a memory.

The skin remembers the weight of Mark’s hands.

The thought makes me nauseous. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. I dig the knuckles into the orbital bones. I want it out of me, whatever it would take to get it out.

The body got the unhurried rhythm of a man who pays attention, his mouth on the collarbone, the weight of his hips, the slow way he went. I despised Mark. The body answered him anyway, ready and eager and well underneath anything I had a say in.

And now, three days later, alone in a quiet apartment, the body wants it back.

I stand up. The chair legs scrape against the floorboards. I walk into the bathroom. I turn the shower dial all the way to hot.

The air is cold against the bare skin as I strip off the sweatpants and the t-shirt. I step into the stall and the water hits the shoulders, runs down the pale chest. The heat blooms across the skin, turning the white to a blotchy pink. I grab the bar of soap and lather a rough washcloth and scrub the arms, the neck, the stomach, pressing the cloth hard against the skin like the feeling is something I can scrub off.

The friction over the breasts is a mistake.

The rough cloth drags across the nipples and the response goes off at once, low and immediate, reaching the pelvic floor before I’ve registered the mistake.

My breath catches.

The labia swell against the running water, heavy and demanding. The ache is loud enough to block out the sound of the shower.

I drop the washcloth. It hits the fiberglass floor with a wet slap.

I lean against the wet tile wall. The hot spray beats against my back. I close my eyes.

I’m not going to touch it. I refuse.

I stand there for five minutes. The water runs over the hair, plastering it against the skull. The ache in the groin does not subside. If anything it gets worse. The pressure builds in the lower pelvis. The slickness between the legs is thick and constant, washing away down the drain and then coming back.

The body makes me pay for the refusal. The cycle’s high, the tissue swollen and insistent, everything down there ringing.

I reach down.

I mean to get it over with. Find the threshold, cross it, end the distraction. I press two fingers against the clitoral hood, hard and fast.

The body recoils.

The hard, fast motion hurts. The tissue protests the blunt force of it. The nerve endings transmit a static that kills the heat. The slickness dries up. The arousal pulls back into a knot behind the pubic bone.

I stop moving my hand. I breathe through the stinging discomfort.

The flesh won’t operate on Julian’s terms.

I keep my hand between my legs. I let the fingers rest flat against the swollen folds. I feel the pulse beating against my palm. The steady rhythm of a heart trying to pump blood through a bottleneck.

The fingers slide downward. A fraction of an inch.

The touch softens. Without a conscious command from the brain, the hand alters its pressure. The pads of the index and middle fingers find the exposed node of the clitoris. They don’t rub. They circle.

Slow. Unhurried. Thorough.

The exact rhythm Mark used in the dark of his apartment.

The body opens to it like a lock turning. The heat surges back, twice as hot as before. The warmth radiates up through the lower abdomen, sinking deep into the thighs. The pelvic floor relaxes, yielding to the slow, circular motion.

The slickness returns in a flood.

I’m masturbating, and I’m not using my own rhythm. I’m using his.

The slow circles continue. The pressure increases, teasing the nerve endings, building the tension rather than rushing it. The body arcs into the hand. The hips tilt forward, seeking deeper contact.

A sound breaks out of my throat. A breathy sigh. It sounds like the noise Leila made when his mouth moved over her collarbone.

I bite down hard on my lower lip to stop the noise. The metallic taste of blood floods my tongue.

The wave gathers momentum. It spreads, swallowing the lower half of the body. The thighs tremble. The muscles of the stomach pull tight. The circles speed up, matching the demand of the engorged tissue.

The climax breaks through the pelvis, the contractions pulling the breath all the way out of me, white behind the eyes.

I grip the edge of the soap dish with my free hand. The knuckles turn white. I gasp for air, swallowing the hot steam.

The contractions slowly fade, rippling out into a throbbing aftershock in the inner thighs.

I pull my hand away. The hot water rains down on my back.

The pressure is gone. The mechanism is cleared.

But it wasn’t mine. I couldn’t do it as Julian. Julian tried and the body shut him out. I had to let Leila do it, had to let Mark’s ghost into the shower to get what the body was demanding. The body learned a preference and then made me keep it.

I turn the water off. The legs are shaky. I step out of the stall and wrap a towel around the pale skin. I don’t look in the mirror. I walk into the bedroom and put on dry clothes.

The apartment is silent. The coffee in the kitchen is cold.

The dashboard clock reads 10:14 PM. The heater is running on low. The cabin smells of old upholstery and stale winter air.

I’m parked across the intersection, giving myself a wider angle of the block. The street is lined with cars covered in a thin crust of urban snow. The bare branches of the oak trees scrape against the brick facades in the wind.

Kate’s apartment windows are dark.

I’ve watched the building for three hours. The cold seeps through the floorboards despite the heater. The denim of the jeans cuts into the waist. The compression tank I forced myself to put back on this evening binds the chest, the elastic band digging a red line into the ribs.

I needed the armor, needed the body bound down and quiet. The flat chest and the held posture give me something to hold onto.

At 10:22 PM, headlights sweep across the intersection.

Mark’s gray sedan turns the corner. The tires crunch over the frozen slush.

He drives slowly down the block and pulls into an open space directly in front of the lobby doors.

I lean forward over the steering wheel, wiping a circle of condensation from the glass.

The engine cuts off. The driver’s side door opens and Mark steps out onto the pavement, wearing a wool coat and a dark scarf. The streetlamp casts a yellow cone of light over his shoulders.

He doesn’t walk toward the lobby doors.

He walks to the rear of the sedan. He presses a button on his keys. The trunk pops open.

He reaches inside and pulls out a bag.

It’s a leather duffel. Heavy, packed full. The handles strain against the weight.

It’s an overnight bag.

My hands grip the wheel until the leather creaks. I stop breathing.

He kicks the trunk shut and shifts the duffel bag to his left hand, walking to the glass doors of the lobby. He punches a code into the keypad. The doors unlock, and he pulls them open and steps inside.

I track him through the glass. He stands by the elevator bank. The doors open. He steps in. The doors close.

I look up at the third floor.

Three minutes pass. The street is dead quiet.

The dark windows of Kate’s apartment flare with light. The living room. Then the kitchen.

I stare at the yellow rectangles of light cut into the brick.

The photograph of a woman lying in his bed, the city glowing behind her. The proof of a lie. I watched Kate walk out of the café. I watched the relationship implode.

I waited for it to settle. I expected him gone, cut loose, standing in the wreck of the thing he’d built. Instead I’m watching him carry a bag upstairs to stay.

The lights in the kitchen turn off. Ten minutes later, the living room goes dark.

A warm light switches on in the window on the far right. The bedroom.

I sit in the freezing car and stare at the bedroom window. The heater fan hums a low note.

The light in the bedroom burns for twenty-five minutes.

At 11:04 PM, the window goes dark.

The third floor is black.

He doesn’t come back down. The lobby doors remain closed. The gray sedan sits parked on the street, covered in a fresh dusting of snow.

I let go of the steering wheel and lean back against the headrest. Whatever he told her worked. He took the hit and stayed and waited it out, and she decided to let him.

I start the engine and put the car in gear, pulling away from the curb, leaving the gray sedan in the rearview mirror.

I hurt him and he stayed, and now he’s up there mending it.

I drive through the empty streets with the wipers clearing the snow. I need more than a photograph. I need something he can’t talk down with an apology and a patient voice, something that goes at the thing holding them together, not just the surface of it.