Reconstruction - chapter 10 (free version) (Patreon)

The frost on the plexiglass of the home dugout is thick enough to obscure the far touchline. I scrape a clear patch with my thumbnail. The ice shavings gather under my nail and drop onto the nylon of my stadium coat.

I sit on the far end of the bench. The plastic seat is freezing. I have the oversized coat zipped all the way to my chin, the collar standing up around my jaw. Underneath the coat, the dark gray tracksuit of the substitutes. Underneath the tracksuit, the men’s number one keeper kit. And underneath the kit, the black sports bra and the women’s compression shorts.

The layers trap the heat of my body against the cold air of the stadium. My skin itches. The breasts rest against my ribs, locked down by the elastic band, a dull heat. The mesh works in my right femur, the way it does now, just holding what it built.

Out on the frozen grass, Danny is wearing the neon yellow jersey. He stands near the penalty spot. He looks small from here. The opposition is the squad from Kansas City. They’re fast, cohesive, and they don’t care that our season is a write-off. They’re fighting for a playoff seed.

The sleet from yesterday turned into a dry wind that cuts across the pitch. The stadium is mostly empty. A few thousand fans huddled under the aluminum awnings, drinking expensive coffee and waiting for the ninety minutes to be over.

Kansas City controls the midfield. They play a possession game, the ball moving in tight triangles. Chad is exhausted. He’s been chasing shadows for forty minutes. His shoulders slump every time the ball goes out of bounds.

A Kansas City winger cuts inside. He drops his shoulder, fakes a pass to the top of the box, drives a low shot toward the near post.

My brain does the math. I read the plant foot.

The fast-twitch fiber twitches under the heavy tracksuit pants, a phantom impulse to throw myself across the chewed dirt of the goalmouth.

Danny reads it a fraction later. He takes a lateral step and dives. Extends his arms. His gloves meet the synthetic leather just inside the post. He pushes it wide for a corner, hits the frozen turf hard, slides into the side netting.

A clean save.

I let out a breath. White vapor in the freezing air.

Doyle stands in the technical area with his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He doesn’t clap. He turns his head and watches the Kansas City center halves jog forward for the set piece.

I sit back against the hard plastic.

I’m not the immovable object anymore. Not the wall. I’m a person occupying a seat on a bench. The relief comes down so hard, it almost hurts. I don’t have to throw myself at the frozen ground. I don’t have to demand wattage from thighs the estrogenic cascade softened.

The corner kick comes in. Danny punches it clear. The referee blows the whistle for half-time.

The squad walks toward the tunnel. They look like a beaten army. Shoulders hunched against the wind, heads down. I stand up. The joints glide. The widened pelvic tilt shifts my center of gravity forward. I follow them into the concrete corridor.

The locker room is silent. Gary set out trays of orange slices and paper cups of water on the center island. Nobody touches the oranges.

I sit at my locker in the back corner. I don’t take my coat off. Nobody looks at me longer than a glance. The face isn’t the one that captained them and the voice has gone wrong for the room, but they’ve dressed next to this body for five years and watched it change by degrees since the fall, and a thing you watch happen slowly stops being a thing you flinch at. I’m not a woman who walked into their room. I’m Cole in a package that kept moving while they pretended not to watch. Not kindness. Just that the guy they buried in November still answers to his own name, and there’s a goal to claw back, and nobody’s got attention left for the keeper on the bench. I’ll take it.

Chad sits two stalls away. He bends over and unties his boots to relieve the pressure on his arches. He rubs his face with a dirty towel.

“They’re overlapping on the right,” Chad says to the floor tiles. “I can’t cover the wing and the center channel.”

“Tell the holding mid to drop back and plug the gap,” Doyle says. He’s standing by the whiteboard. He doesn’t bother drawing the formation. He just looks at the tired men. “Keep the shape tight. Don’t give them cheap fouls near the box.”

That’s the entire tactical adjustment.

We go back out into the cold. The second half is a grinding war of attrition. The wind picks up, blowing dry dirt across the center circle.

In the sixty-eighth minute, Kansas City breaks the deadlock.

Not a mistake by Danny, not a collapse by the defense. Just a clean sequence by a better team. Their central midfielder plays a blind through-ball that splits Chad and José. The striker takes one touch to settle the ball on the frost and strikes it with his laces from twelve yards out.

The shot is rising, uncatchable. It goes bar-down, hitting the underside of the crossbar and slamming into the back of the net.

Danny doesn’t even dive. He just turns and watches it go in.

One-nil.

The away supporters in the upper deck make a ragged, cheering noise.

I watch Danny retrieve the ball from the nylon mesh. He kicks it toward the center circle, then grabs the back of his right thigh.

He tweaked his hamstring on the frozen turf trying to plant for the shot. He tries to stretch it out, but three minutes later, he collapses after a routine clearance. He stays on the grass.

Ben runs out. A minute later, he makes the rolling motion with his hands. Substitution.

Doyle turns around. He looks at the bench. He looks at me.

I stand up and unzip the stadium coat, drop it on the plastic seat. Strip off the gray tracksuit pants.

I’m wearing the men’s number one kit. The jersey pulls tight across the sports bra, the contour of my chest visible under the stadium lights. The compression shorts dig into my widened hips. I pull my gloves on, lock the velcro.

I step onto the pitch. The cleats bite into the frost.

The PA reads the change. Number one. Brenner. There aren’t many people left under the awnings, a dead game in the sleet at the back end of a dead season, but the name lands. A ripple goes through the home side. Fans who used to drive out here to watch me punch crosses out of the air lean over the rail, trying to line up the keeper on the team sheet with the shape walking to the goal line, and not getting there.

Kansas City smells blood. They know I’m coming off the bench cold. They know my own team has spent a month avoiding me. For the final fifteen minutes, they throw everything forward.

A winger cuts inside. He drops his shoulder, ignores Chad’s sliding challenge, drives a low shot through traffic.

I don’t try to launch. I sink my weight into my widened hips, letting the new Q-angle drop my left knee down to the frozen dirt. Build a wall with my shin.

The ball skips up and slams into my chest.

The impact flares. The synthetic leather crushes the glandular tissue flat against the elastic of the sports bra. A nerve spike shoots up into my collarbone, a blinding pain I was never built to feel. I let out a harsh grunt and fold my upper body forward, smothering the ball into the frost.

I push up to my feet. My quads are already trembling.

Kansas City figures it out fast. They see I’m not coming off my line to dominate the airspace. On the next corner kick, their center-back, a guy who looks two-twenty, jogs into the six-yard box and plants himself on my toes. He backs his shoulders into my chest to screen my vision.

Six months ago, I would have put a forearm in his spine and moved him. I push back now, and my upper body yields. He bumps me again, easily displacing my footing. The compression shorts dig into the tucked folds between my legs as I stumble backward.

I stop trying to fight him in the chest. I widen my stance, dropping my center of gravity into the female pelvis, using the heavier mass of my hips to anchor myself to the dirt. When the cross floats in, he jumps to head it. I don’t. I stay rooted, occupying the slice of ground he needs to land on. He comes down off-balance, his cleats tangling with my calves, and shanks the header wide.

Chad is standing at the near post. He watches the whole exchange. He doesn’t say a word, but on the next set piece, he steps in front of the Kansas City center-back, screening the guy off my body. A quiet shift in the weather.

Five minutes later, a scramble in the box. A loose ball pinballs off two shins in the mud. A striker turns blind and rifles it point-blank.

My legs are empty. I can’t dive the old way. I throw my body sideways, letting gravity drag my frame down.

My hip takes the impact, then my shoulder, hitting the frozen turf with a dull thud. But the reach is still long enough, and my body still knows what to do with it. My hands lock around the leather just as it reaches the chalk line.

I lie in the dirt, lungs burning, the bruised tissue of my chest throbbing under the tight nylon of the kit. I hold the line.

The referee checks his watch. He blows the whistle three times. We lose one-nil, but they don’t score on me.

The season is over.

The players shake hands on the pitch. I stand in the goalmouth for a second, feeling the burn in my thighs, then turn and walk toward the touchline. My cleats crunch on the frozen earth.

Danny’s sitting on a cooler near the tunnel entrance, a heavy coat draped over his shoulders and an ice pack strapped to his hamstring.

He watches me walk off the pitch. He looks at the tight fit of my jersey, the female shape I’m no longer trying to bury under stadium coats.

“Good save in the first half,” I tell him. “You read the plant foot.”

He looks at my face. He just watched me hold the line he couldn’t.

“You used the ground,” Danny says. “You didn’t even try to jump for the low ones.”

“The geometry changed,” I tell him. “But the math is the same.”

He nods. “He hit it perfect off the crossbar. I couldn’t get the angle.”

“Nobody gets that angle. You played well.”

He looks down at his taped leg. “Thanks, Cole.”

I nod and walk past him into the tunnel.

The home dressing room is a graveyard of damp wool and wet mud. Guys strip their gear off in silence. They throw their stained jerseys into the mesh laundry bins in the center of the room. Gary collects the bins with a neutral expression.

I go to my locker and sit on the wooden bench. Unzip the stadium coat, pull it off and fold it, set it on the top shelf. I’m wearing the gray tracksuit. I don’t take it off. Reach down and unlace my boots. My fingers are stiff. Pull the boots off and drop them into the bottom of my duffel bag.

I peel the athletic tape off my left wrist. The adhesive catches on the pale hairs. I toss the gray strip into the trash can by the door. It lands with a soft tap.

Doyle walks out of his office. He holds a clipboard. He stands at the end of the center island.

“That’s it,” Doyle says. “The year is done. Clean your lockers out today. Exit interviews start on Tuesday. You have the schedule in your emails.”

He looks around the room. At Chad, at José, at Danny. At me sitting in the corner in my gray tracksuit.

“Rest your legs,” Doyle says. He looks at me for a long second, a single brief nod. Then he turns and goes back into his office. The door shuts.

The men start leaving. They pack their bags. The silence is different now. Heavier. Exhausted, not hostile. I held the box.

Chad slings his duffel bag over his shoulder. He walks down the aisle. He stops for a fraction of a second near my bench.

He doesn’t look at my chest. He looks me in the eye. “Good hands today, skip,” he says.

He walks out the double doors.

I sit there until the room is empty. The air conditioning hums. The smell of deep heat rub and damp towels fades.

I pull the gray tracksuit jacket over my head and drop it into the locker.

I’m wearing the dark blue Arkana kit. The number one printed in white on the chest.

I grab the hem of the jersey and pull it up. The fabric catches on the bulk of the sports bra. I pull the shirt over my head.

I fold the jersey into a square, the club crest facing up. I place it on the wooden bench.

I pull a gray cotton t-shirt out of my duffel bag and put it on. It settles over the breasts. The contour reads under the fluorescent light of the empty room.

I stand up. The joints glide. I pick up my duffel bag. Heavy with the boots and the gloves.

I walk out of the locker room. I don’t look back at the folded jersey.

The carpeted hallway of the administrative wing is quiet. The receptionist is gone. I push through the glass doors and walk out into the freezing parking lot.

The wind hits my face. The sky is dark now. The yellow sodium lights cast long shadows across the asphalt.

My phone buzzes in the pocket of my sweatpants.

I stop walking. I shift the bag to my left hand, pull the phone out.

The screen glows in the dark. A text from an unknown number.

Roster finalized. Training starts Monday at 8 AM. Bring your own tape. - Tasha

I stare at the letters. The cold wind bites at my bare knuckles.

I read the message again. Lock the phone and slide it back into my pocket.

I’m a goalkeeper. I’m thirty-two years old and I know how to read the geometry of a cross.

I walk across the uneven asphalt. Bypass the section of the lot where the men park their trucks and sedans. Walk toward the chainlink fence that separates the main stadium from the indoor facility and the secondary pitches.

The gate is unlocked. I push it open. The metal hinges squeal in the quiet night.

I walk onto the property of Arkana Women.

Toward my truck, breath pluming white in the air, alone and exactly where I belong.

The carpet in the arcade lobby is a pattern of neon green triangles and dark purple squares. Designed to hide stains. It smells like stale floor wax and hot dust, something sweet underneath. Burnt sugar, maybe spilled soda.

I stand near the air hockey tables with my hands shoved in the pockets of my canvas coat. The building is a wall of noise. Electronic bells, sirens, digitized voices overlapping in a grating static.

Santi is thirteen today.

He’s on the other side of a glowing plastic table, holding a red mallet. He’s wearing a dark gray hoodie and jeans that are an inch too short for his ankles. He hit a growth spurt over the holidays. Getting taller, the soft edges of his face starting to stretch into the angles of a teenager.

He slams the mallet forward. The puck hovers on the cushion of air and rockets across the table. Ricochets off the side rail and misses the goal slot.

His opponent is a kid from his middle school. The kid laughs and hits the puck back.

Mari stands next to me, holding two winter coats over her arm. She wears a faded wool sweater and her dark hair is pulled back into a loose knot. She looks tired. She worked a twelve-hour shift at the hospital yesterday and traded a morning rotation to get today off.

“He wanted to invite six kids,” Mari says. She doesn’t look away from the table. She raises her voice to cut through the noise of a simulated motorcycle game roaring behind us. “Only two of them showed up. The others had club soccer tryouts this weekend.”

“Two is enough,” I tell her. “A pack of seven thirteen-year-olds is unmanageable. They just spend the whole time trying to establish a hierarchy.”

“He was disappointed.”

“He’ll forget about it in ten minutes.”

Santi blocks a shot, the puck clacking against his mallet. He leans his weight over the table and strikes it back. It goes down the middle and slots into the narrow goal. The table flashes red and plays a blaring siren.

Santi pumps his fist. He doesn’t look around to see if we’re watching. He’s focused on the game.

I watch him pull the puck out of the return slot. He’s starting to understand how to occupy his own footprint. He isn’t shrinking away from the contact anymore.

“I’m going to get the drinks,” I say.

Mari nods. “Diet Coke. No ice.”

I walk away from the game floor. The canvas of my coat brushes against a group of kids crowding around a claw machine.

The concession stand is at the back of the building, separated from the arcade by a low wall of synthetic brick. A line of five people waits in front of the cash registers.

I stand at the back. The air smells of cheap pepperoni grease and cardboard.

The heat lamps over the pizza display cases hum with a low buzz. I watch the kid working the counter. Maybe sixteen. He wears a terrible red paper hat and a black polo shirt untucked on the left side. He has an acne breakout along his jaw. He uses metal tongs to transfer a slice of pizza onto a paper plate, moving with the agonizing lethargy of a teenager earning minimum wage on a Saturday afternoon.

The line moves forward slowly.

I step up to the register. The laminate counter is sticky. A puddle of orange soda near the receipt printer.

“What can I get you,” the kid asks. He doesn’t look up from the touchscreen monitor, just taps a clear plastic square on the grid.

“Two large Sprites and a Diet Coke,” I say. The voice that comes out is the one I have now, lighter than the kid behind the counter would guess from the size of me. “No ice in the Diet Coke. And a large pepperoni pizza.”

The kid punches the buttons. The machine beeps three times.

“Twenty-two fifty,” he says.

I pull my wallet out of my front pocket. The leather is worn soft at the corners. Take out a twenty and a five. Hold them out.

The kid finally looks up to take the cash.

He looks at the canvas coat. He looks at my face, the one the mesh finished sometime in the last month, a woman’s face built off the old one. Same starting material, different person.

He takes the bills from my hand. The register drawer pops open with a mechanical clank. He pulls out two dollar bills and two quarters.

“Here’s your change, ma’am,” the kid says.

He hands the money across the sticky counter.

The word hangs in the hot, greasy air.

I take the money. The coins are cold against my calloused skin. The rough ridges of my knuckles brush against his palm.

“Thanks,” I say.

I drop the change into my pocket.

He hands me a plastic buzzer with a red light on top. I step to the side and wait by the pickup counter.

The ice machine behind the registers clatters. A sheet of frozen cubes drops into the metal holding bin. An older woman in an apron scoops the ice into three waxy paper cups, presses them against the soda fountain levers. The carbonation hisses as it hits the plastic. She snaps flat lids onto the cups and pushes them across the counter toward me.

I take them. The condensation wets my fingers.

The red buzzer vibrates against the laminate. I hand it back and take the cardboard pizza box.

I walk back out onto the arcade floor.

I balance the drinks against my chest, carrying the pizza box flat in the other hand. My shoulders are still broad, the physical capacity still there even if the explosive wattage is gone.

I find Mari sitting alone in a vinyl booth near the back wall. The booth is ripped in the corner, yellow foam padding showing through the red synthetic leather.

I slide the pizza box onto the center of the table. Set the Diet Coke in front of Mari.

“They were out of napkins,” I tell her.

“We’ll use the plates,” she says. She opens the cardboard box just as Santi and his friend slide into the booth opposite us.

Santi is holding a pile of yellow paper tickets. They’re folded back and forth like an accordion.

“I won the jackpot on the cyclone machine,” Santi announces. He sets the tickets on the table next to the pizza. “It was five hundred tickets.”

“What are you going to buy with them,” Mari asks. She pulls a slice of pizza onto a paper plate and hands it to him.

“The foam glider.”

“The foam glider is garbage,” his friend says. He’s a skinny kid with glasses. “You should get the laser pointer. You can shine it at the ceiling.”

“I don’t want the laser pointer.”

Santi looks at me across the table.

“The foam glider breaks in ten minutes,” I tell him. I pull my own slice of pizza from the box. The grease soaks into the paper plate. “The wings are held on by cheap glue. The second time you hit a wall, the fuselage snaps.”

Santi frowns. He looks at the yellow tickets. “But I get to throw it first.”

I take a bite of the pizza. It tastes like salt and burnt flour.

“That’s true,” I say. “If you know it’s going to break and you just want the ten minutes of throwing it, then buy the glider. Just don’t complain when it snaps.”

Santi nods. He folds the tickets back up and shoves them into his hoodie pocket. He wants the action.

We eat the pizza. The noise of the arcade washes over the booth, a wall of sound that makes quiet conversation impossible. Just eat and watch the kids running past our table holding plastic light-up swords and stuffed animals.

Mari touches my wrist. Her fingers cool against the sleeve of my coat.

She doesn’t say anything. Anchors me to the table for a second.

Santi finishes his slice. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Cole,” Santi says.

I look at him.

“My spring season starts in three weeks. Coach moved me to the older age bracket because of my height.”

“You’re going to see harder shots,” I tell him. “The older kids can actually strike the ball with their laces. They won’t just toe-poke it.”

“I know.” He leans his elbows on the table. “Are you playing for the women’s team this spring?”

He asks it flat, no special weight on the words. He doesn’t lower his voice. He’s thirteen. He heard the explanation from his mother a month ago. The biology changed, Cole is playing on a different squad now. He just wants to know the schedule.

“I am,” I say.

“Do you play your games on Saturdays?”

“Usually.”

“Can you come to my games in the morning before you play?”

He looks at me. The dark eyes are serious.

I look at the kid sitting across from me. The oversized hoodie, the scuffed sneakers under the table. I taught him how to drop his knee and build a wall with his shin. How to tape his wrists. I gave him the math to survive the eighteen-yard box.

The world read me as a woman ten minutes ago. The biology is permanent and the old career is dead. But the role I hold in this kid’s life was never about the mesh or the testosterone levels. It was about showing up in the cold and telling him where to stand.

“If the schedule works out, I’ll be there,” I tell him. “And if I can’t make the morning, I’ll review the game with you on Sunday. Just remember to use the ground.”

“I use the ground,” Santi says. He sits back against the vinyl seat, satisfied. The contract is secure.

He slides out of the booth. “We’re going to the prize counter.”

His friend follows him. They disappear into the crowd near the front entrance, walking toward the glowing glass display cases.

I sit at the table with Mari. Reach into the pocket of my coat, pull out a small package wrapped in brown paper. Set it on the sticky laminate.

“What is that,” Mari asks.

“A real match ball,” I say. “Size five. Leather. Not the cheap synthetic stuff they use in the rec leagues. He needs to get used to the weight of a real ball before the season starts. If he trains with a light ball, his timing will be off when a heavy shot comes at him.”

Mari looks at the brown paper. She smiles, a real smile that reaches her dark eyes.

“You’re going to ruin him for normal sports equipment,” she says.

“Normal equipment teaches bad habits.”

I leave the package on the table for him to find when he comes back with his broken foam glider.

I lean back against the vinyl booth. The torn foam padding presses into my shoulder. The neon lights reflect off the waxy paper cups.

I’m exactly where I promised to be.

The deadbolt slides into the strike plate with a heavy brass click.

I drop my keys into the ceramic bowl on the entryway table. They clatter against a handful of loose pennies. I turn around.

Mari is standing in the center of the living room. She hasn’t taken her coat off yet. She’s just watching me. The apartment is quiet, the air conditioning cycled off, leaving a still warmth in the room.

“Take the jacket off,” she says. Her voice is low. It isn’t a suggestion.

I reach up and unzip the canvas jacket. The metal teeth part. I shrug my shoulders, letting the stiff material slide down my arms, and drop it onto the floorboards. It hits the wood with a dull sound.

I’m wearing the gray t-shirt and the stiff jeans.

Mari walks toward me. She’s five foot four and I’ve got several inches on her, and I fill more of the doorway light than she does. A tall woman and a short one in a dark room.

In August I’d have closed that distance myself. Stepped into her, set my hands on her hips, planted my feet, and run the whole thing from the first second, because I knew that body down to the millimeter and it did what I asked it to. I knew the reach of my arms and the load my back would take and the pressure to put on her without forcing. I was never unsure of it.

I don’t close the distance now. I let her come to me. I know this body too, now. Five months but I’ve learned it like I learned the old one. I know the heat comes on diffuse instead of hard, that it gathers low and spreads instead of pointing, that there’s no single switch in here to throw and no use rushing it. I know what it wants a half-second before my brain gets a vote. Everything about how it works got rewritten, and somewhere in the last few weeks I stopped fighting the new manual and started reading it. I live in it now.

She backs me all the way into the bedroom. The only light is the orange glow from the streetlamp filtering through the blinds, casting long shadows across the mattress.

She reaches out and grabs the hem of my t-shirt, pulls it upward, a sharp jerk.

I raise my arms. The forearms have lost the corded look, the muscle gone quiet under the skin. She pulls the cotton over my head and drops it next to the coat.

I’m left in the black sports bra. The elastic band digs into my ribs.

Mari doesn’t hesitate. She reaches behind my back. Her fingers are cool against my warm skin. She finds the metal hooks of the clasp.

The bra snaps open. A sudden release of tension across my ribcage.

Mari pulls the straps off my shoulders and tosses the garment away.

The glandular tissue settles against my chest. The breasts rest on the broad shelf of my ribcage.

I don’t cross my arms. I don’t flinch.

Mari places her hands flat against my stomach. She traces the curve of it, the ridges I built there long gone under the layer the cascade laid down over the last five months, her thumbs pressing into the give.

She pushes me backward.

Steady pressure, not hard. I yield. The back of my knees hit the edge of the bedframe.

“Sit,” she tells me.

I sit down. The mattress springs groan under my mass. I spread my legs wide, planting my boots on the floorboards.

Mari steps between my knees and takes off her coat, then pulls her sweater over her head. She unhooks her bra. Her breasts are full, the dark areolas catching the faint orange light. She shucks her jeans off.

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, my heavy thighs spread, looking up at the woman standing in the center of my space.

She unzips the denim. She hooks her fingers into the waistband of the jeans and the compression shorts underneath, pulls them down over my hips.

I lift my boots, one by one, letting her drag the fabric off my legs. She kicks the pile aside.

I’m bare.

The skin of my stomach runs pale the whole way down, the old line of hair long gone, to the descent of the groin. The tucked folds exposed.

Mari pushes my shoulders. I lie back flat on the mattress.

My shoulders span the bed. My chest rises and falls, the breasts shifting outward.

She doesn’t lie down next to me. She kneels between my spread legs.

She leans forward and places her palms flat against my thighs. Her skin soft against the coarse hair of my legs.

Mari pulls back. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She crawls up the length of my body, her skin sliding against mine, and lies down beside me.

She drapes her arm across my chest. She rests her head in the crook of my shoulder.

The sweat cools on my skin. The freezing air from the drafty window chills my damp legs. I don’t reach for the blanket.

I spread my left arm out, taking up space on the mattress. My calloused fingers rest on the cotton sheet.

The apartment is dead quiet. The ceiling fan clicks faintly.

I look up at the dark ceiling.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up. I’ll pull the stiff jeans over my widened hips. I’ll strap the sports bra over my chest and put on the canvas coat. I’ll walk out into the sprawling grid of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The teenager at the concession stand will call me ma’am. The men who used to follow me out of the tunnel will still not know what to do with me when I walk past them in the parking lot. The public world will see a tall woman carrying a soccer bag.

They’ll read the map the mesh drew, and they’ll never know the twenty years of static male violence I built into the foundation.

But here, in the dark, there’s no split.

The woman sleeping against my shoulder shifts her weight. Her hand rests flat against the slope of my right breast. The touch is domestic, settled.

I don’t fight the way my hips sink into the mattress, don’t hold my ribs rigid. I let the armor go.

The low hum in my right femur ticks in the bone. Just a part of me now.

I close my eyes, secure in the boundary of my own space, and let the body rest.

The illustrated version of this chapter includes images of Cole at the final game, in the locker room after, then with Mari in the apartment.