Inhabited - chapter 27 (with images) (Patreon)

Neither of them moves for a long minute.

The kitchen has gone still around them. The radiator has stopped knocking. The light through the window above the sink is the flat colorless gray of a winter afternoon that has given up on getting better. The dead man's laptop sits on the dining table between them, closed. The two spiral notebooks Brigid grabbed off the desk are stacked on top of it. Both notebooks are softcover, the spines bent backward at the same angle, the kind of thing you buy at a Duane Reade because you needed to write something down in a hurry.

She looks at them and does not pick them up.

"I'm going to shower," she says. Her voice sounds like it is coming from the next room.

Brigid nods without looking at her.

The bathroom tile is still freezing. She runs the water hot and stands under it with her face toward the spray for a long time. The cedar soap on the shelf is the soap from yesterday. She uses it on her hair, on the back of her neck where the wool of the scarf had been pressed against her skin, on the inside of her arms where the smell of the apartment had soaked through the sweater. The water sluices it off and pinks her shoulders. She turns the temperature up another notch, until the heat is on the edge of hurting, and stands there with her forearms crossed over her chest.

The smell is still in her hair after the second wash.

She does it a third time.

When she finally gets out, the mirror is steamed white and the room is full of cedar. She wraps a towel around her chest and tucks it under her arm without thinking about how, the muscle of the gesture surfacing on its own. Her hair drips down her back. The drops hit the tile and roll toward the drain.

In the bedroom, she pulls clean sweatpants from a drawer and a soft long-sleeved cotton tee. The tee is gray, the neckline stretched out from being pulled over wet hair a hundred times. The bra she leaves off.

When she comes back out, Brigid is on the sofa.

She is sitting forward, elbows on knees, hands pressed flat together between them like she has been about to say something for ten minutes and has not said it. Her coat is off. Her boots are off. Her socks are mismatched, one black wool, one charcoal. She has not noticed yet. Or noticed and stopped caring.

"I ordered the food," Brigid says, not looking up. "Pad see ew. Spring rolls. I didn't ask what you wanted."

"That's fine."

"They said thirty minutes."

"That's fine."

Brigid looks up. Her face is the face it had been on the sidewalk by the dry cleaner. Drained. Stripped. There is a small streak of something dark on her temple, near the hairline, which Brigid has not noticed and has been carrying since before they walked back into the apartment.

She crosses the living room. The hardwood is warm against her bare feet from the radiator that has now started up again. She kneels on the floor next to the sofa, wets her thumb with her tongue, and rubs the streak off Brigid's temple. Brigid lets her.

Brigid's eyes close briefly when she does it.

She sits back on her heels. Brigid's eyes stay closed for another beat and then open.

"How are you," Brigid asks. Not the way you ask in a café.

"I don't know."

"Yeah."

The buzzer rings. The Thai food.

Brigid gets up to deal with the door. She comes back with a brown paper bag stapled at the top, sets it on the coffee table, and starts pulling out cardboard containers. Two pairs of disposable chopsticks still in their paper sleeves. A handful of soy sauce packets. A small cup of pickled cucumbers in a thin sweet vinegar.

They sit on the sofa. There is no conversation about whether to eat at the table. Neither of them is going to make it as far as the table.

Eating after smelling a decomposing body is a mechanical exercise. You force the food down because the blood sugar is crashing and the hands are shaking. Brigid holds her cardboard container in her left hand and picks up the plastic fork with her right, ignoring the chopsticks. The pad see ew is too sweet. She eats three forkfuls and stops being able to taste anything.

"This is terrible," Brigid says.

"It's fine."

"It's terrible. I am eating it anyway."

"I know."

A car alarm goes off on the street and stops itself two seconds later. Somewhere in the building a door slams. Brigid eats three more forkfuls and sets the container on the coffee table next to the takeout bag.

That is when she sees the knuckle.

A jagged dark line of dried blood on Brigid's right index finger, the skin torn and swollen around the edges. The cuff of Brigid's sweater, dark wool, has been hiding it.

"Your hand."

Brigid looks down at it. She flexes the finger and winces. "The window. When I reached through the glass. The scarf slipped."

"You didn't say anything."

"We were a little busy." Brigid sets the fork down on the coffee table. "It's nothing. The bleeding stopped on the walk back."

"That doesn't mean it's clean."

She puts her own container down. Sofia's apartment is aggressively organized, and she walks through that aggressive organization like it has been hers for years: down the hall, into the bathroom, second drawer of the vanity. A first aid kit in a hard white plastic case. Alcohol wipes in their small foil packets. Antibiotic ointment in a half-used tube. A strip of fabric bandages. A small pair of folding scissors. She has not opened this kit before, and the body knows where the alcohol wipes sit inside the kit.

She brings it back to the sofa and sits down next to Brigid. The cushion gives a little under their combined weight; Brigid shifts to make room. The space between them goes from the polite Sunday-afternoon distance to something narrower. Their thighs are not touching but they are within an inch.

"Give me your hand."

Brigid offers it. Her fingers are still freezing, even now, an hour back inside.

She tears open an alcohol wipe. The sharp smell of isopropyl floods the space between them, a clean medicinal sharpness that cuts through the phantom odor of the Vanderbilt apartment that has been following them home in their clothes, in their hair, on the inside of their nostrils. She presses the wipe against the cut.

Brigid hisses through her teeth. Her hand twitches in a small involuntary jerk.

She does not let go. She turns Brigid's hand over so the palm is up, and her thumb rests at the center of Brigid's palm to hold it steady while she works on the knuckle with her other hand. The skin of Brigid's palm is cool and dry. There is a faint callus along the inside of the index finger where Brigid holds a pen. There is a thin pale scar across the heel of her hand that Brigid has never explained.

She wipes the dried blood away along the edges of the tear, dabs the antibiotic onto the clean wound with the corner of a tissue, peels the backing off a fabric bandage, wraps it around the knuckle so it lies flat, and smooths the adhesive down against the skin with two passes of her thumb.

The apartment is quiet enough to hear the refrigerator.

She does not let go of the hand.

She looks up.

Brigid is watching her.

Brigid's dark eyes go across Sofia's face in a way that is not reading but looking. The severe tension that usually holds Brigid's jaw together is somewhere else, replaced by a raw stripped-down exhaustion that is not asking for anything from anyone. Brigid's shoulders, which have been at her ears for every meeting across nine bodies, are not at her ears. Brigid is looking at her with the look you give a person who has gotten you to the end of something. Weeks of this, and they just broke into a dead man's apartment together. They found the end of the maze.

"What happens to you now," Brigid asks quietly.

"I don't know."

"If that was your body in the chair." Brigid does not finish.

"Then I don't go back." The words taste bad in her mouth. "I stay in the network. Or I stay in this body until the mechanism fires again."

"And if it doesn't fire again."

"Then I'm Sofia. And Sofia has a life and I am sitting inside it."

Brigid looks at her hand inside Sofia's hand for a moment.

"You are not Sofia," Brigid says.

"I know."

"You have never been Sofia. The whole time you have been in her, she has been gone."

"I know."

Brigid's thumb moves. Just a fraction, across the inside of Sofia's wrist. The pulse point.

The body answers it before she does. Not the way she had tried to make Diane's body answer in the bathroom, that had been clinical, an instruction. This is a wrist that has been paid attention to like this before, by someone who has spent time on this wrist, and the body remembers it without checking with her. The pulse picks up under Brigid's thumb. Brigid notices and does not move her thumb. The pad of her thumb stays where it is, and the pulse flutters under it in a rhythm neither of them is controlling.

She thinks, briefly and without trying to, about the apartment. The rig in the corner with its thin layer of dust. The month alone. The man who stopped picking up his phone. Sofia's version of waiting. She does not know the history. But the body does, and the body is not waiting now.

Brigid is here. Brigid's grief about Maren, which is not about her, is just the weather in the room. Two people, after.

"I'm not asking permission," Brigid says quietly. "I am also not doing anything you don't want."

"Don't ask permission."

She leans in.

Brigid meets her. The first kiss is careful, the way you kiss someone who has just watched you throw up in the street. Brigid tastes like chili oil and isopropyl. Her neck smells of citrus and cedar. Brigid’s mouth is softer than she had expected from how her face holds itself in public. The kiss changes shape after a beat. Brigid's free hand comes up and rests at the front of her t-shirt, just below the collarbone, palm flat against the cotton, not yet under it.

She kisses back. She lets her weight go forward. It is a relief that has nothing to do with her own month and has something to do with Sofia's.

They stay on the sofa. The bedroom is twelve feet away and neither of them looks at it. Brigid pulls her closer by the hip with the bandaged hand, and the motion of it is a small concrete gesture that the body responds to before the brain has registered the gesture. Her own hand is on Brigid's neck, fingers in the hair at the nape, and she had not decided to put her hand there.

The t-shirt comes off. The wool of Brigid's sweater catches on Sofia's curls and Brigid laughs once, low, against Sofia's shoulder. The laugh is small and surprised. She has not heard Brigid laugh before in any body. She wants to remember the sound.

One of Brigid's hands stays on her skin the whole time after the t-shirt is off, like Brigid has decided the contact is not going to break. Sofia's own hands are at the button of Brigid's jeans before she has thought about her hands. She does not try to direct any of it. She just lets her body do what it wants to do.

The cold air in the living room hits her bare skin and goosebumps run down both arms in a fast wave. Brigid's body against hers is warmer than the air by a measurable amount. Brigid's mouth on her collarbone, then lower, on the soft skin above the breastbone where the chest opens up. Brigid's fingers cold at first against her ribs, the surprise of cold, and then not cold. Brigid moves a hand down between Sofia's hipbones and rests it there. Just the hand resting. A flat warmth against the soft skin below the navel that the body answers before Sofia gets a chance to.

Brigid is watching her face. Brigid has done this with someone, a lot, somewhere; the patience and the attention are practiced in a way that does not have the texture of recent experience. Older. Long ago. Maren probably. The thought passes and she does not hold it.

Sofia's body opens around the place Brigid's hand is. It does not build the way she remembers male arousal building — forward momentum, gathering pressure looking for release. This widens. It pulls heat into itself from places that were not part of the question. The small of her back, the inside of her knee, the soft warm place under her jaw where Brigid's other hand is holding her face. The skin of her thighs against the sofa cushion, sensitive in a way that has nothing to do with where Brigid's hand is and everything to do with it. The breasts are part of it in a way that surprises her, not at the nipples exactly but along the underside, the skin aching toward Brigid's mouth before Brigid's mouth gets there. Brigid puts her mouth there. She makes a small low sound in the back of her throat that the body produces without consultation.

Brigid takes her time. Brigid's mouth at the underside of one breast, then the other, then back. Brigid's bandaged hand at her hip, holding her in place with a pressure that is not insistent. Brigid's other hand somewhere in her hair. She turns her face to the side and her cheek hits the sofa cushion and the cushion is soft and the world is small and it is just the two of them and the radiator clanking.

Brigid's fingers move lower. Slow, two fingers tracing the seam of where she is and then inside. She is wet around them. Brigid's fingers are slow and patient, her thumb finds the place above where her fingers are. She circles it without urgency, with no agenda, with the kind of attention you can only give someone if you are not in a hurry to get to your own end.

Her hips move against Brigid's hand. The motion is small. It is the body asking for what it wants, and what it wants is more of what is already happening, slower if anything. Brigid reads the motion and slows. Brigid's fingers stay where they are. The thumb keeps doing what the thumb is doing.

Everything in her narrows toward Brigid's hand and then the narrowing reverses. It spreads. Heat coming in from every edge of her body and gathering into a single warm shape that has no center and is everywhere. The breath goes shallow. She cannot tell, briefly, what is happening at her shoulder and what is happening between her legs because it has stopped being a place. It is the whole room. It is Brigid's eyes. It is the cedar soap still on her own fingers from the shower an hour ago. It is the takeout containers on the coffee table. It is Brigid's bandaged hand resting on the bone of her hip and the unbandaged hand inside her and the two hands operating in perfect coordination.

She holds onto Brigid's shoulders too hard. A sound she does not recognize comes out of her, low and ragged, not loud. Her face does something Sofia does not let it do with most people.

The room goes to a single temperature. Brigid's hand. Brigid's eyes. The cedar. The takeout. All of it becomes the same temperature for a few seconds, and her breath catches and does not come back for a beat, and a long fluttering wave goes through her from somewhere low in her belly outward, and her thigh muscles do something on their own that Sofia's body knows how to do and Sofia's mind is not a part of.

She opens her eyes. Brigid is still watching her. The severe jaw is not severe. The dark eyes are not guarded. Brigid looks like someone who has just done something she is not going to be able to take back, and who already knows it, and is not trying to.

The living room begins to dissolve.

The bookshelf on the far wall. The takeout containers. The rig in the corner with its patient dust. The lamp by the window. The cedar.

Brigid's hand. The warmth where Brigid's hand was.

It all wipes. Gravity drops away.

She hangs in the vacuum.

The sensory deprivation is total. No sound, no light, no physical boundary. Just the clean blank suspension of the transition.

She waits for the floor to return. She waits for the new lungs, the new skin, the new knowing to drop into the empty slot in the brain.

The white-out holds. Holds longer than it has held the other times. Long enough that something inside the suspension begins to register the duration as different.

And then gravity returns.

It hits with a violent crushing slam.

The center of gravity plummets. The ribs expand outward. The shoulders broaden. The pelvis goes narrow and the chest goes wide and the breath catches on a throat that is wider than the throat she had a moment ago.

He opens his eyes.