Replication - chapter 19 (with images) (Patreon)

The rain hits the bedroom window in sheets, driven sideways by a cold front coming off the lake. It's a Saturday in March.

I'm standing in the kitchen.

The apartment smells of coffee and the citrus cleaner Kate uses on the counters. The radiator in the corner rattles, a metallic knock that repeats every few minutes, pushing dry air into the room.

Kate is at the stove, nineteen weeks pregnant.

She wears a faded gray t-shirt that used to be mine. It hangs over the waistband of her black leggings. The physical evidence of the child is no longer something you have to know to look for. The uterus has expanded well out of the pelvic cavity. The lower abdomen pushes the cotton fabric outward in a hard, undeniable curve.

She shifts her weight to her right foot, stirring eggs in a skillet. She presses her free hand against the small of her back. The lumbar spine is adjusting to the new forward load, the center of gravity slowly shifting, demanding compensations from muscles that haven't been asked to carry this kind of weight before.

I watch her from the kitchen island.

I am leaning against the granite counter, holding a ceramic mug with both hands. The heat from the coffee bleeds through the thick glaze into my palms. My fingers are pale, the nails filed short. The olive skin tone I hold is locked into the tissue, a continuous background process I no longer have to actively manage with the front of my brain. It runs on its own now, holding the copper in the skin, the jaw soft, the cheekbones wide, without my having to think about it.

I've been in this apartment for three days. I haven't gone back to my own place since Wednesday. I brought a duffel bag with a few changes of clothes, the compression tanks I no longer wear, the right bra, the dark jeans. I left the bag in the corner of her bedroom. She hasn't asked when I'm leaving. I haven't offered a timeline.

We exist in a current that pulls us forward without requiring any navigation.

"I was thinking a pale yellow," Kate says. She scrapes the wooden spatula across the bottom of the pan. "For the second bedroom. Not a bright yellow. Something washed out. Almost cream."

"Yellow works," I say. My voice sits in the middle register, soft, unhurried. "It keeps the light in the afternoon. That room gets dark by three."

"Exactly." She turns the burner off. She divides the eggs onto two plates.

She doesn't mention Mark. Mark has been excised from the geography of this apartment. The plastic bin of his files and his shoes and his chargers went into the trunk of her car two weeks ago. She met him for a dinner she didn't return from until late, and when she came back, she locked the door, leaned against it, and exhaled a breath that seemed to empty her lungs.

She told me it was done. She told me she'd told him about the child, and told him he wouldn't be living any part of her daily life.

I set my mug down. I open the drawer to get the forks.

I pull two forks from the organizer. Kate always uses a salad fork, I remember. I get the dinner fork for myself, the salad fork for her and shut the drawer. I breathe in the citrus smell of the kitchen.

I have to be careful. The boundary between the performance and the reality is eroding, the two lives bleeding into each other. I'm living in the center of the world I used to own, performing the role of a guest, and my nervous system keeps reaching for things it already knows.

I bring the forks to the small table by the window and sit down. She pulls the chair over and sits next to me.

The rain smears the glass, blurring the brick buildings across the street. The apartment is warm.

She eats the way she has for weeks now, the pregnancy taking everything she gives it. I get through half my eggs. This body wants less food than the old one did and I'm still not used to it. I push a piece of toast across the plate.

"Renata called last night," Kate says. She picks up her water glass. "She wants to throw a shower. I told her it's too early. She said venues book six months out."

"She likes to manage logistics."

"She likes to manage me." Kate smiles over the rim of the glass. "I told her I didn't want a big thing. Just a few people. At her house, maybe. If I let her rent a restaurant she'll invite my mother's entire bridge club."

"I can run interference. If you want."

She sets the glass down. She looks at me. The look is direct, warm, stripped of any defensive architecture.

"I'd like that," she says. "You're good at dealing with her. You don't get rattled."

I don't get rattled because Renata is a puzzle I solved two years ago. I know how to agree with her while giving her nothing she asks for. Julian used that skill to keep Renata out of our apartment. Claire uses it to protect Kate's energy.

We finish breakfast. She takes the plates to the sink.

I stand up to clear the mugs.

Something tears loose in the center of my skull. The kitchen tilts and the floor seems to go out from under me.

I grab the edge of the table. My fingers slip on the smooth wood.

The mesh. The mesh is stuttering.

I feel the cartilage in my nose shift. A wet popping sound inside my own skull. The olive skin tone I have held locked in the dermis for weeks drains, rushing backward like a retreating tide, leaving a sickly white.

The jaw muscle spasms. It attempts to square off, reaching for Julian's hard angle, then collapses, then tries to find Claire's rounded warmth.

The conflicting instructions tear through the tissue. It feels like needles swarming under the skin of my face.

My vision fractures. I see two of the kitchen window, overlapping, blurring.

I stumble backward. My hip slams into the counter.

The ceramic mug in my left hand slips from my grip. It hits the linoleum floor and shatters. A crack that bounces off the kitchen walls.

"Claire?"

Kate's voice. It sounds far away, muffled by the roaring static in my ears.

I can't answer. I can't get air. The chest locks down, the breasts heavy against it. I try to force the olive skin back, force the jaw. The mesh refuses.

My hands fly to my face. I press my palms against my cheeks, trying to physically hold the bone structure in place. The skin under my hands is freezing, clammy with instant sweat.

"Hey. Hey, look at me."

She's right there.

She grabs my shoulders. Her grip is strong. She steps into the broken ceramic, her bare foot missing a jagged shard by an inch.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I can't let her see the face. If the face is caught in the transition, if the male geometry is visible under the pale skin, the lie is over.

"I'm dizzy," I choke out. The voice is a ragged rasp. It doesn't sound like Claire. It sounds like an animal caught in a trap.

"Okay. Okay, you're okay." Her voice is tight with adrenaline.

Her hands slide from my shoulders to my arms. "We're going to sit down. Come on. Down to the floor."

She pulls me down and my knees go out from under me. I hit the linoleum hard. The cold floor shocks my nervous system.

Kate drops to her knees beside me. She ignores the broken mug. She wraps her arms around my torso and pulls me against her.

"Keep your head down," she says. She presses her hand to the back of my neck.

I bury my face in the curve of her shoulder. I press my forehead against her collarbone. The faded cotton of the gray t-shirt. The smell of the citrus cleaner and the vanilla lotion and the sleep-heavy scent of her skin.

I'm shaking. The tremors rock my entire frame.

The mesh stops fighting. The spasm breaks. The tissue settles heavily into the Claire persona. The olive warmth floods back into the dermis. The jaw rounds out. The cartilage stops grinding.

I can't stop shaking.

I'm sitting on the floor of the kitchen. Kate's arms are wrapped around my back, holding me against her chest. She's rocking me, a slight sway.

"Just breathe," she whispers. Her breath stirs the dark hair at my temple. "You're okay. I've got you. Deep breaths."

She runs her hand up and down my spine. The friction, steady and slow.

She's tending to me.

In two years of living together, Kate never comforted me like this.

She never pulled me to the floor, never held my head against her chest, never ran her hands through my hair and told me I was going to be okay.

She didn't do it because I never allowed her to do it. Julian Reyes didn't have panic attacks in the kitchen or show physical weakness. If I felt sick, I managed it in isolation. If I felt overwhelmed, I shut the door, went cold, and pushed her away until it resolved. I punished her when she tried to find a crack in the wall.

I starved for this tenderness. I tore the relationship apart because I couldn't figure out how to ask for it.

And now, wearing a counterfeit face, trapped inside a female body, I'm receiving the devotion of the woman I love. She is giving it freely, desperately, to a ghost.

A ragged sob breaks out of my chest.

It comes up fast, nothing like the slow thing it used to be, spilling hot against her skin and into the collar of her shirt.

"Shh," she murmurs. "It's okay. It's just a panic attack. I've got you."

I wrap my arms around her waist. I grip the fabric of the t-shirt and pull her tighter against me.

I bury my face in her neck and sob until my throat is raw, the whole chest convulsing with it, and I let it hollow me out, let the body cry the thing the man never would.

She doesn't rush me, doesn't ask me to explain. She stays on the linoleum, holding the weight of me, her hand moving across my back.

The rain ticks against the window glass.

The sobbing subsides into shaky breaths. The tears cool on my cheeks. The exhaustion sets in, a heavy fatigue sinking into the muscle tissue.

I loosen my grip on her waist. I tilt my head back, pulling my face away from her shoulder.

She looks down at me.

We're inches apart. Her face is flushed, her eyes searching my face.

She lifts her hand from my back. She touches my cheek.

Her thumb brushes away a wet streak of tears. The pad of her thumb traces the rounded line of Claire's jaw. The jaw I built. The jaw that almost broke.

The touch is gentle.

The body takes the touch and turns it, fast and mindless, into hunger. The grief gets shoved aside. The warmth of her palm, the smell of her skin, and the whole lower half of me answers before the rest has caught up, swelling against the cotton, slick in seconds, aching for her with the grief still wet on my face.

My breath hitches. My lips part.

She sees the shift. She feels the tension in the muscles of my neck under her fingers.

She doesn't pull away.

Her gaze drops from my eyes to my mouth.

The safety of the kitchen gives way to the gravity of the bedroom. We've been sleeping in the same bed for days.

She leans down. She kisses me.

The collision is soft, tasting of salt from the tears.

I close my eyes, surrendering the remaining resistance.

I bring my hands up from her waist and slide them up her back, feeling the line of her spine, the warmth radiating through the cotton. I cup the back of her head, tangling my fingers in the loose hair at the nape of her neck.

I kiss her back.

She shifts her weight on her knees, leaning forward, pressing me backward until my spine hits the lower cabinet doors. The wood is hard against my shoulder blades.

She opens her mouth. The kiss deepens. The pressure increases.

Her hand moves from my cheek down my neck. She traces the line of my collarbone. She rests her palm flat against my chest, right over the sternum.

The heat of her hand bleeds through the fabric of my blouse. The breast tissue beneath aches. The nipples contract into tight knots against the soft cups of the bra.

She slides her hand lower. She cups the curve of the left breast and my hips jerk forward on their own against the seam of my jeans.

A breathy sound escapes my throat. A sound that I still don't recognize as mine.

She kisses the sound away. She presses her body flush against mine.

The hard swell of her pregnant stomach presses against my lower abdomen. She breaks the kiss. She's breathing hard.

"Are you okay?" she whispers. Her voice is ragged. The concern is still there, woven into the desire.

"I'm okay," I say. My voice pitches low, steady, the tone she needs to hear. "I'm okay now."

She rests her forehead against mine. She keeps her hand on my breast, her thumb brushing the sensitive peak through the layers of fabric. Every movement of her thumb sends a pulsing wave of heat through the pelvic floor.

"You terrified me," she says.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't do that again."

"I won't."

She lifts her head and looks at the broken mug on the linoleum, a foot away from her knee. The brown coffee pooled in the grout lines.

She looks back at me. A tired smile touches the corners of her mouth.

"I should clean that up," she says. She doesn't move.

"Leave it," I whisper. I slide my hand around to the back of her neck and pull her mouth back down to mine.

I kiss her slow. I pour the grief, the panic, the devastation of the morning into the pressure of my mouth against hers. I kiss her with the starving need of a man who knows how little time this can possibly last.

She yields to it. She lets her weight settle against me.

—

The rain clears out sometime before dawn on Sunday, leaving the city washed clean.

I wake up in her bed.

The gray light from the window cuts across the sheets. Kate is asleep, facing away from me, her breathing steady and deep. She took most of the comforter in the night. The cold air of the bedroom bites at my bare shoulders.

I lie still and let the body tell me what it needs. The breasts ache faintly, settled sideways against the mattress. The bladder's full, low and blunt in the wider pelvis. The labia rest against each other, a soft continuous fact.

I get out of bed without waking her. The hardwood floor is ice against the soles of my feet.

In the bathroom, Claire's olive-toned face looks back at me from the mirror. The jaw is soft. The dark eyes hold a quiet patience. The trauma of the kitchen floor yesterday morning left no visible residue on the flesh. The mesh locked the cartilage into this shape and stopped fighting.

I wash my face. I pull on a pair of dark jeans and a t-shirt.

By the time Kate comes into the kitchen, I have the coffee made. She's wearing the oversized gray t-shirt and gray leggings. The hard curve of the nineteen-week pregnancy pushes the cotton fabric outward.

"I need to buy the crib," she says. She stands in the doorway, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. "I was looking at it online last night. If I don't order it now, the shipping takes six weeks."

"We can buy it in a store," I say. "Let's take your car."

She drops her hand. She looks at me. "You want to spend your Sunday hauling flat-pack furniture?"

"I don't have anywhere else to be."

The drive to the retail park on the edge of the city takes forty minutes. The heater blasts dry air into the cabin. She connects her phone to the audio system and plays a playlist I've never heard before. Folk music, acoustic guitars, a woman singing about a river.

In two years of sharing a vehicle, I dictated the audio. I played the news. I played classical music when I needed to think about a clinical case. I never asked her what she wanted to listen to. I assumed the passenger seat was an extension of my territory.

Today, she plays the folk music while I drive her car, and I listen to it.

The baby furniture store is a warehouse smelling of particleboard and synthetic carpet. We walk down the wide aisles. The strollers, the car seats, the high chairs. The entire industrial apparatus designed to process a human life into the world.

She stops in front of a crib made of unfinished birch.

"That one," she says. She touches the wooden rail. "It doesn't look like a hospital bed."

"This one is better," I say.

We find the corresponding flat-pack boxes in the warehouse aisle. There are two of them. They are long, wrapped in nylon straps, and they weigh roughly sixty pounds each.

I grab the nylon strap of the first box, plant my feet, and pull. It barely shifts. The wrists give out before the box does.

I drop the strap. It thuds against the concrete.

"I got it," Kate says. She reaches for the other end.

"You're pregnant. Don't lift it."

"I'm pregnant, not disabled. Grab the other side."

We lift it together and carry the box to the flatbed cart. We go back for the second.

We load the boxes into the trunk of her car.

We eat lunch at a diner a mile down the road. The vinyl booth is cracked. The coffee tastes like burnt copper.

She orders a club sandwich and fries, hungry all the time now, and I order a salad.

She talks about her sister. She talks about the translation project. The Portuguese novelist.

I eat the salad. I watch her face.

She finishes the fries. She wipes her mouth with a paper napkin. She looks at me across the scuffed Formica table.

"Thank you," she says. "For doing this. I know it's a Sunday."

"I like doing this."

It's true. I like sitting in a cheap diner with her, hauling cardboard boxes, the absence of the fight.

We drive back to the city. We carry the boxes up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, taking breaks on the landings.

The second bedroom smells of fresh pale yellow paint. The room is empty, waiting to be claimed.

We lay the cardboard boxes flat on the hardwood floor. I cut the nylon straps with a pair of kitchen scissors.

We sit cross-legged on the floor. The wider sit bones settle into it in a way the old body never could. I sit opposite her. The instruction manual lies open next to me.

We sort the hardware. The screws, the wooden dowels, the metal locking nuts. They're sealed in a strip of blister packaging.

"Step one," she says, reading the booklet. "Attach the side rail to the headboard."

I hold the wooden headboard upright. It's heavy, solid birch. She slots the side rail into the pre-drilled holes.

I take the hex key. I insert the metal bolt and begin turning.

The small L-shaped tool digs into my palm. My hands lack the toughened skin I used to have. The skin is soft. The metal leaves a red indentation in the flesh. I tighten the bolt until the wood creaks.

We work in tandem. The process is methodical.

A dowel snaps because Kate forces it at the wrong angle, but I don't sigh. I don't close my eyes in frustration.

"We have spares," I say. I dig a replacement out of the plastic blister pack.

She laughs, a short sound. She wipes a smear of sawdust from her cheek. "I'm useless at this."

"You're doing fine. Just hold the base level."

The afternoon light slants through the window, turning the pale yellow walls a bruised gold. The radiator knocks in the corner.

We assemble the base. We attach the mattress support. We bolt the front rail into place.

The crib stands in the center of the room. It takes up space now. It's waiting.

The child growing behind her abdominal wall. The boy or girl who carries my father's hands and my mother's eyes.

The child will sleep in this wooden box. I sit on the floor, looking at the birch slats.

"It looks good," Kate says. She is sitting on the floor beside me, her knees pulled up, resting her arms on the curve of her stomach.

"It does."

She leans her head against my shoulder. The physical contact is unprompted, casual.

Her hair smells like the citrus shampoo she uses. The heat of her skin bleeds through her t-shirt into my arm. The body answers it, low and quiet, growing slick and warm.

I don't pull away or fight it. I let it pool.

"I need a shower," she says. She doesn't move.

"You have cardboard dust on your neck."

She turns her face toward me. We're inches apart.

"Come with me," she whispers.

I stand up. My joints pop. I reach down and offer her my hand. She takes it. I pull her up from the floor.

We walk down the short hallway into her bedroom.

The afternoon light comes through the half-open blinds, casting slanting yellow stripes across the unmade bed. The room smells of the particleboard sawdust we carried in on our clothes.

She doesn't close the door. She stops at the edge of the mattress and grabs the hem of the gray t-shirt. She pulls it over her head and drops it on the floor next to her shoes.

I watch her undo the front clasp of the maternity bra, unselfconscious.

I pull the t-shirt over my head. I unbutton the dark jeans, push them over my hips, and step out of them.

When I climb into the bed beside her, the mattress sinks under our combined weight. The sheets are cool against my thighs. She rolls toward me and drapes her leg over my hip.

There is no frantic desperation today. The panic of our first time in the dark is gone. The afternoon stretches out, a wide, open space with no schedule demanding our return. We have nowhere to be.

She kisses me. Her mouth is warm, tasting of the diner coffee.

I slide my hand up her back, feeling the line of her spine, the flushed skin above the waistband of her leggings.

The body answers slow this time, a heavy pooling instead of the violent spike from before, swelling gently against her thigh. It knows whose bed it's in.

I trace the curve of her waist. The hard swell of the pregnancy presses against my stomach, the same small body settled between us again. My child, growing in the amniotic fluid just inches beneath my skin.

The body lets her settle against me, soft to soft, yielding, receiving instead of demanding. I don't set the pace. I let the afternoon set it.

She runs her hand down my side, her fingers tracing the flare of my hip. The touch goes low and warm and I breathe into her neck and let the body answer her.

We move together in the slanting yellow light. The rhythm is unhurried. The room is quiet except for the rustle of the sheets and the sound of our breathing. I learn the pressure she wants, the cadence.

When it arrives it rolls through the lower abdomen in a long, steady wave and leaves everything heavy and warm.

She exhales a shuddering breath and rests her forehead against my collarbone.

We lie there for a long time. The sweat cools on my skin.

She traces idle circles on my shoulder with her thumb. Her breathing slows until it falls into the same tired rhythm as mine.

The apartment is quiet. The radiator clicks in the corner.

A Sunday with no agenda.

I stroke the dark hair at the nape of her neck. She shifts her weight, pressing closer to my side.

I don't want to leave the persona.

The thought forms whole. I've stopped looking for an exit. I've stopped imagining ever getting the old body back.

This is my life.

I'm going to live in this apartment, wake up in this bed every morning, wear this face, and help raise the child growing behind her abdominal wall.

I'm going to be Claire.

I hold the woman I love in the fading afternoon light, and the fact that the thought doesn't frighten me is exactly what worries me.