Informed Consent - chapter 2 (free version) (Patreon)

The coffee maker chokes on the last of the water and spits steam against the underside of the cabinet. Vicky stands at the counter in the same camisole she slept in, one hip cocked against the edge of the Formica, watching the carafe fill as if it owes her an answer. Her hair is still damp at the temples from the shower she took at four, after she stopped yelling and before she started making lists out loud to no one. The list had towels in it. Bleach. A new mattress pad. Then she had gone quiet and gotten in the shower and stayed there until the hot water gave out.

I'm still on the bed because standing up means crossing the room, and crossing the room means letting her watch me do it. The sheet is twisted around my calves. The salt crust on the pillowcase has softened again with the morning damp and smells faintly of the fever, sour and metallic, and I can't tell if the smell is in the cotton or coming off me. My jaw itches with stubble. My chest is the same chest. My shoulders take up the same width of mattress. Below the waist the bed feels wrong, too much space where there used to be weight, my hips set wider on the mattress, my thighs touching with a softness I keep testing by pressing them together and letting go.

Vicky pours coffee into the mug with the chip. She sets it on the counter and doesn't bring it to me.

"You should eat," she says.

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask if you were hungry."

She says it without heat. That is worse. She opens the cabinet over the stove and takes down the box of saltines, puts it on the counter, closes the cabinet with her hip. The magnet on the fridge, a plastic cactus holding up a takeout menu for a place that closed last year, slides an inch down the door and she pushes it back up with two fingers.

I sit up. The sheet falls away from my lap. I keep my knees together and then remember that closing them does nothing now, there's nothing to protect, and the thought makes heat crawl up the back of my neck. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and put my feet on the floor. The hardwood is cold. My center of balance has dropped into my pelvis and for a second I stand there with my hand on the wall, relearning the distance between my hips and the doorframe.

Vicky watches. I can feel it without looking.

"Don't," I say.

"Don't what?"

"Watch me walk."

"I'm allowed to look at you."

She is. I take the six steps to the bathroom and feel my hips roll to keep me upright, a small sway I didn't choose and can't flatten. The sweatpants I left on the floor last night are still inside out. I step into them and pull them up. The waistband sits higher on my hips than it used to, the drawstring suddenly long, the front of the pants empty and soft against me. The seam rides up between the labia when I move and I stop in the bathroom doorway and adjust it with two fingers, quick, like a patient's gown before a doctor comes in.

Vicky has turned back to the counter. Her shoulders are up around her ears.

"I called in," she says.

"You didn't have to."

"I did." She opens the saltines and takes one out and puts it back. "You texted Appurva?"

"I told her flu." She's the one who covers my draws when I'm out.

"Good." She closes the box. "That's what it is, right? Flu."

I don't answer. The coffee in my cup is going dark at the edges. She still hasn't brought it to me. I cross the kitchen and take it myself and our fingers don't touch.

"How long," she says.

The question has no object. I know which object she means.

"I knew the clinic had cases."

"That's not what I asked."

"I knew there was a chance."

She turns around. Her eyes are red at the rims and dry. She has cried already, in the shower probably, where I couldn't hear it over the water. The carotid pulse at her throat is fast, a hundred and twenty if I had to call it, and I hate that I called it.

"A chance," she says.

"Yes."

"Before the fever."

"Yes."

"How long before."

"Days."

She nods like I've confirmed an appointment. She picks up her own coffee and drinks and winces because it's too hot and drinks again anyway.

"Days," she says. "So when I was on top of you. When I was saying all that. You knew."

"I didn't know it would take."

"You hoped."

The word lands in the room and stays there. I could tell her hope is the wrong shape for it. I could tell her about the supply closet, the dent in the door at knee height, the red sharps container, the needle going in easier than the ones I've slid into a hundred other arms. I could tell her I counted the days like a dose schedule. I don't.

"I didn't think it would be this," I say.

"What did you think it would be?"

I have no answer that isn't a confession. I wrap both hands around the mug. The ceramic is almost too hot to hold and I hold it.

Vicky laughs once, an ugly sound with no humor in it. "You're standing there in my kitchen with a cunt and you won't even give me a sentence."

The word comes out of her mouth and we both go still. She has said it a hundred times, into my ear, into the dark, with her hand around me and her voice dropped into that low register that ran the whole game. She has never said it like this, flat, looking at the front of my sweatpants.

"Don't," she says, and I realize I've taken a step toward her.

"I wasn't."

"You were." She sets her cup down. "You were going to touch me and I was going to let you and then we'd both be worse."

"I wasn't going to touch you."

"Marcus."

My name in her mouth is the same as it was yesterday. That seems impossible. I want her to say the other word, the one she used to say, and I want her to never say it again, and both wants sit in me at the same time and neither wins.

She comes around the counter. I don't move. She stops close enough that I can smell the grapefruit on her skin under the coffee, the salt of the shower she took to get away from me. She puts her hands on either side of my face. Her palms are warm. Her thumbs rest on the stubble along my jaw and for a second her face does the thing it used to do before she kissed me, a small softening around the mouth, and I lean into it before I can decide not to.

She kisses me.

It's the same mouth. Her lips are the same, her tongue is the same, the small sound she makes in her throat when she opens her mouth is the same, and my body answers from a place that didn't exist four days ago.

Her hand slides down my chest. Over the sternum, the hair there, the stomach that's still mine. She's crying now, I can taste it, salt at the corner of her mouth, and her hand keeps going because she's brave or because she needs to know or because stopping would mean admitting she already does. Her fingers reach the waistband of the sweatpants and hesitate and then go under.

I don't touch her. My hands are still around the coffee mug. If I let go of it I'll put them on her and I'm not allowed to want that anymore, not from her, not like this. My hips tip forward into her hand before I can stop them. She yanks her hand back.

We are both breathing hard. She looks at her fingers and then at me and then at the floor between us, and the flush on her chest is the same flush she gets when she comes, and I can see her hate that too.

"I can't," she says.

"I know."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what."

"Like you're being reasonable." Her voice cracks on the last word and she turns away and braces both hands on the counter. "I love you. Do you understand that? I love you and I keep reaching for you and there's nothing there to reach for."

"There's me."

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

I do.

"I'm not attracted to women," she says to the counter. "I'm not. I've never. I look at you now and I see…" She stops. She shakes her head. "I see a woman's body under your face and my whole…" She stops again. She presses the heel of her hand against her eye. "I can't want it. I'm sorry. I can't make myself want it."

"I'm not asking you to."

"You are. You're standing there asking me with your whole…" She turns around. "You knew. You knew and you let me say those things to you. You let me call you my girl and you knew it was going to be true and you didn't tell me. That's the part I keep…" She puts her fist against her mouth. "That's the part."

The room is very quiet. The coffee maker clicks as the warming plate cycles. The cactus magnet has slid down again and neither of us fixes it.

"I was scared," I say.

"Of what."

"Of this."

"Of me leaving."

"Yes."

"So you made sure I'd have a reason."

It comes too close and we both hear it. She didn't mean it that way. She meant the body. She meant she now has a reason that isn't her fault. I can see her hear the other meaning arrive and I can see her decide not to pick it up. She is kind even now.

"I need to not be here today," she says.

"Okay."

"I'm going to my sister's. I'll be back tonight. Or tomorrow. I don't know." She's already moving, already in the bedroom, and I hear the closet door jump its broken track and the rattle of it that we've both muscled past for a year. She comes back with her scrub bag over her shoulder and her keys in her hand. She's put on a bra and a sweatshirt and she looks like herself and I have to sit down.

I sit at the table. The chair is the wrong one, the one with the leg that's slightly short, and it rocks under me and I let it. My hips fit the chair differently. The seam of the sweatpants is still damp and I can feel every place the cotton touches me.

Vicky stands in the doorway with her bag. She looks at me for a long time.

"Don't call the clinic," she says.

"I won't."

"I mean it, Marcus. If you call them they'll…" She stops. She doesn't know what they'll do. Neither do I. "Just don't."

"I won't."

"And don't…" She looks at the front of my sweatpants and away. "Don't do anything. To yourself. Until we talk."

The instruction hangs in the air between us, an old script with the words changed. She hears it. I hear it. Her mouth twists.

"I didn't mean it like that," she says.

"I know."

"Stop saying that."

"I don't know what else to say."

She opens the door. The hall light comes in around her and for a second she's just a shape with a bag, the same shape that has left this apartment a thousand times for work, for the gym, for a weekend at her sister's, and my chest does the thing it always does when she leaves, a small drop.

"Vicky."

She stops with her hand on the knob.

"I love you."

She doesn't turn around. "I know," she says, and it isn't cruel, it's just true, and she pulls the door shut behind her.

The deadbolt turns. I sit in the short-legged chair with both hands around a cup of coffee that has gone lukewarm and listen to her footsteps go down the hall and the elevator doors open and close. Her cup is still on the counter, half full, a skin already forming on the surface. The saltines are open. The cactus magnet is crooked.

I set the mug down on the table and turn it so the handle points toward the door. The heat is still there, low and patient, and the slickness has cooled against the cotton, and under the cotton the pulse is steady and new and mine. I keep my hand on the mug. I don't move it lower. The apartment is the same apartment, the same short chair leg, the same crooked magnet, the same light coming through the blinds in strips.

Her cup is the last thing I wash. The skin that formed on the coffee breaks apart under the sponge but doesn't dissolve, and I rinse until the pieces go down the drain, and I put the cup upside down in the rack with the handle pointing left. Then my hands are wet and there's nothing left in the kitchen to do with them.

Don't do anything to yourself, she said. Until we talk.

All day I keep it, and it isn't even hard. It's a rule like the rules at work. Glove for this. Never recap a needle. You just do it and you don't negotiate with it.

I strip the bed instead. The sheets smell like the fever, five days of sweat cooked into the cotton, rank and stale, and it comes up into my face when I pull the corners off. The mattress pad is yellowed in a wide oval. I wad everything into the laundry bag and haul it down to the machines in the basement, and the bag smells against my leg the whole way.

The basement door is the heavy kind, the kind that swings shut on a spring hinge, and I have to shoulder it open with the bag in my arms. The bag is heavier than it should be. Five days of sweat-soaked cotton, the mattress pad, the towels from the bath Vicky gave me. I shift it to my other hip and the weight pulls my shoulder down and I have to stop on the landing and reset my grip. The bag is just a bag of laundry. I stand there holding it a second longer than the stairs require, and then I go down.

Somebody left a dryer sheet on the folding table. Lavender. I use it, because it's there.

Back upstairs I make the bed with the spare set, white with gray stripes, except one striped pillowcase is in the wash, so Vicky's side gets a plain white one from the other set. I don't decide that. It's just how the stack comes out of the closet.

The sock slides down inside the slipper twice before I get to the kitchen. I pull it up. It goes down again at the sink. They're my socks, the black ones from the ten-pack, and they've held on my calves for two years, and now the elastic has more calf than it needs.

The apartment is cold. The thermostat on the wall says the same number it's said since October. I put on a sweatshirt and take the blanket off the back of the couch, the one I've never once needed, and keep it over my legs.

Twice during the afternoon I catch myself standing the old way, weight thrown back on my heels, and I have to find my balance again like the floor moved an inch. In the chair I cross my legs and it works, thigh over thigh, nothing to arrange, and I sit that way through most of a submarine movie Vicky put on last week, and every time I shift there's the seam of the sweats and then there's me noticing the seam and I make myself watch the submarine.

Hunger comes back around four, the first real hunger since the fever. I eat saltines standing over the sink with folds of deli turkey on top, and the salt and the cold meat are the best things I've tasted in a week. The turkey tastes sharper than it should, the salt brighter, the fat coating my tongue in a way I don't remember. I eat four crackers and then two more and then I stop. I used to eat standing up until the box was empty. Now I put the box away. In the black window over the sink I'm a shape eating crackers. I drink a glass of milk, which we only keep because Vicky puts it in her coffee.

At six the phone lights up. It's Vicky. My sister says hi. Then a minute later: Be back tomorrow afternoon.

I type ok and send it. Then I stand there holding the phone, feeling the weight of everything underneath the ok, and I put it face down on the counter.

Appurva texted this morning too. You alive. I wrote back, Alive, flu, see you Monday. Monday is the first time I'll have to put this body into scrubs and walk it through the clinic doors, and I let myself think about that for exactly as long as it takes to send the text, and then I stop thinking about it.

I give up on the submarine. The apartment goes dark except the kitchen light, and I leave it that way.

In the bathroom I trim my nails first, over the trash, thumb to pinky, same as before a shift. The clippers are rusted at the hinge and they pinch. The trash is all fever, tissues and the ibuprofen blister cards, and it should go out, and it doesn't.

I pee sitting down and wipe and flush. It's already just going to the bathroom.

I shower. My two-in-one has been standing cap-down and empty since Tuesday, so I use hers. Grapefruit. It's the smell of the back of her neck and I stand in it with my eyes closed longer than the rinsing takes. I trim my face too, with the beard trimmer, a week of growth coming off in strips that stick to the side of the tub.

I get out and dry off. The mirror is fogged except for the stripe I wipe with the heel of the towel, and in the stripe I get my chest, the hair flat and dark with water, and if I take a step back I could get the rest of it in frame. I don't take the step. The fog closes back over the stripe and I let it close.

I sit down on the toilet. The plastic is cold through the towel. I look.

The hair is the same hair it's always been, dense and dark, but under it the skin has reorganized itself into something I've only ever seen from the outside.

I know the names for all of it. I stood next to exam tables for years while Dr. Yuen turned the diagram around and pointed at it for somebody else. I looked all of this up when I was thirteen, in a library, on a computer with a filter on it, and then cleared the history and went home. I've been looking it up in one form or another ever since, all the years between then and now. It doesn't help.

I stop. Hand where it is. Breathing like I've been running.

The promise is in the other room with my phone.

I take my hand back and I get in the tub and turn the water on warm. The last time I sat in this tub with my knees up, Vicky was washing my hair and telling me about a patient. I pull the handheld head off its bracket and the hose swings cold against my shin.

I start at my chest, my stomach. Then lower. Then I don't move it away.

I lie there until the water runs cool. My pulse is everywhere, in my throat, in my fingertips, between my legs, one pulse. I catch myself taking it, two fingers at the wrist, and I let go before I count anything.

Drying off, I'm careful, patting, the skin sensitized enough that the gray towel feels like sandpaper, and I go slow, the way I'd dry a patient after a bed bath, and doing that for myself is its own strange thing and I don't look at it too long.

My phone is on the counter where I left it. I pick it up and flip the camera and stand in front of the half-fogged mirror and take one picture, my wet hair and my bare jaw and the dark join of my hips at the bottom of the frame. I look at it for a long time. There's no one in it I don't recognize. Then I delete it, and I go into the deleted folder and delete it again, because I know how phones work.

Vicky hasn't texted. I don't text her.

I go to bed naked, which I never do, and the striped sheets are cool against parts of me that have never felt sheets. On my side my knees ache against each other until I put the spare pillow between them, and then that's fixed, that easy. The pillow under my head smells like lavender from somebody else's dryer sheet. Vicky's side has the plain white case.

Her cup will be dry by morning. I'll make coffee in it, and wash it again, and put it back in the rack with the handle pointing left.

I fall asleep in the middle of the bed.

The jeans button, but they sit wrong. The waistband rides higher in front than it used to, and when I cinch the belt the denim bunches over my hips in a way it never has. From the waist up the mirror gives me the same person. The soreness of my chest doesn't show. I've been checking it against the mirror for four days and there's nothing to see yet, just a deep ache I keep pressing on to confirm. Below the waist the jeans belong to somebody whose hips I don't have anymore.

Vicky's been back from her sister's a few days now. She sits down on the bed, phone in her hand.

"You're going."

"It's Friday."

"Giorgio texted me this week," she says. "Asked how you were feeling. I said fine." She scrolls. "I don't like lying to your friends for you."

"I didn't ask you to."

"You didn't have to." She sets the phone face down on the sheet. "Don't drink a lot. You're driving."

I take my keys off the hook. The cactus magnet on the fridge has the takeout menu sliding out from under it and I leave it that way.

Sully lives up in Arvada. Twenty minutes with the radio low, Wadsworth the whole way, and I park behind Giorgio's truck out of nine years of habit.

The garage door is up and the light is on and the table is where it has been every Friday since before I met Vicky. Sully built the table himself, felt top, and it leans slightly. On the shelf there's a bowling trophy that says R. Kowalski, First Place, 1994. Sully got it at the Goodwill. It goes to whoever takes the most money in a month and nobody has ever taken the plate off.

"The dead walks," Marty says.

"Look who survived." Sully points at me with the deck. "You look like hell. You lose weight?"

"Ten pounds."

"Flu diet," Marty says. "Better than keto."

"You owe eleven dollars," Kwame says from the dealer's chair. He always deals first. "We dealt you in last week. Two hands."

"Nobody was going to tell me if I won?"

"You didn't win."

I put a twenty in the box and take my nine in chips. Fist bumps all around. Giorgio grips my shoulder on his way back from the fridge and sets a bottle in front of me, already opened. He does that.

"How's Vicky," Sully says.

"Working."

"She still going to leave you for a doctor?"

"Any day now."

It's that easy. The whole first ten minutes is that easy, and I can feel the week slide off me, the apartment, the saltines, her sister's, all of it sliding off, and the ease is the thing I came for and it's already working and that should feel better than it does.

I sit down carefully. The chair is narrow and my hips aren't, anymore, and when I lean back the seam of the jeans settles against me and I keep my spine straight so it won't. Under the table I cross my legs, thigh over thigh, easy, nothing to arrange, and nobody looks, and I uncross them anyway and put both feet flat like I'm at a hearing.

Kwame deals. The deck has a creased nine of hearts. It has been creased for three years and nobody replaces the deck. My hands look the same holding cards. That's still mine.

Marty is telling about a woman from an app who brought her sister to dinner. "Both of them ordered the salmon. I paid for two salmons. I'm not even mad, that's how good my attitude is."

"You're a little mad," Kwame says.

"I'm recoverably mad."

"The sister was the date," Sully says. "You got hustled for fish."

"I know the sister was the date. I'm saying the sister was nice."

I get a second beer out of the garage fridge and feel the walk on the way back, the hips doing their new job, and I can't tell if I'm flattening it or not. Nobody's watching. I flatten it anyway.

An hour in I've folded three hands I should have played and Sully says, "Jesus, fold faster, the cards can't hurt you. Flu take your balls?"

The table laughs. I laugh on the same beat they do and it passes, and I spend the next two hands watching myself be fine.

Giorgio is beside me, quiet when he's winning, which is most weeks. He leans over while Kwame shuffles.

"You good? You keep squirming."

"Threw my back out getting out of the tub."

"You're ninety years old."

"Tell me about it."

The flu answers everything. Weight, tired, the back. One word covers the whole building. I don't even have to construct anything, the sentences come out assembled, and I remember the week of the fever, lying to Vicky about lying to Giorgio, and how it never cost me a blink. I should be more bothered by that. I put it aside, something to be bothered by later, and take Kwame's deal.

By nine I've had the two beers and I have to pee. Sully's half bath is inside past the kitchen. The door is thin. You can hear everything from the table and the table can hear everything from it, and I keep saying after this hand. After the next one. I look at the door to the house and deal instead.

Sully collects for the food order. The place on Wadsworth with the green chile. It has a name, nobody uses it. Marty reads his order back off his phone and says, "Onions? Better not be onions." His comes with onions every time and every time he's surprised.

"I'll get it," I say. "Need air."

Halfway to Wadsworth I understand that I volunteered for the bathroom. The place has a bathroom that isn't ten feet from the table.

Giorgio rides with the window down two inches. At the light on 44th he says, without turning, "My old man's got to have a valve done. Couple of weeks from now."

"Where."

"St. Joe's. They say it's routine."

"It is," I say. "It's the most routine thing that department does. He'll be sore and mean about it for a month and then he'll be fine."

"Yeah." He nods at the windshield. "That's what I figured."

He leaves the window where it is the whole ride. I know the pauses in Giorgio, I've had nine years of them, and this one has room in it. I could put anything into it. I drive.

The order isn't ready. Ten minutes, the bartender says, and calls Giorgio hon, and Giorgio leans on the bar and orders a soda. The beers hit me all at once and I ask her where the can is.

Back hallway. Two doors. WOMEN on one and MEN on the other in brass stick-on letters, the N slid down crooked. I stand there a second longer than a man should stand in a hallway looking at doors. The bar is mostly regulars, and they stay up front at this hour. The hallway is forty feet from the dining room to the restroom doors and there's nowhere to go at the end. If the wrong person comes around the corner and finds me standing here, I'll have to say something, and I don't know what. Then I go through the one I'm still allowed through.

First time in one of these since.

Bleach over something older. A trash can overflowing with paper towels, the floor wet near the sink. Two urinals. I pass them without slowing. That part is just over.

The stall bolt is bent and I have to lift the door by its edge to make it catch. There are work boots at the urinal, laces undone, and I get my jeans down and sit and wait. The seat slides left under me. The boots finish, flush, and the outer door swings, no sink stop. Then I let go.

Steady, no hesitancy. The sound is wrong for this room, a hiss I still don't expect, and even alone I try to keep it quiet out of habit before I remember there's nobody to keep it quiet for. The roll of toilet paper has the core half crushed. I fold a square, dab, fold again, drop it in. I know the choreography from the outside, from Vicky, from a hundred small observations I didn't know I was making at the time.

The stall door doesn't reach the floor. It never does. My boots point out, same as any man taking a shit, which is the one cover story this room provides. Nobody checks. Nobody was going to check.

At the sink I wash my hands and dry them on my jeans because the dispenser is empty. The mirror gives me back the same face I left the apartment with. Stubble, the jaw, all of it. The face still matches the letters on the door. In a month it won't, and I'm the only one in the building who knows the schedule.

Giorgio has the bags when I come out. He eats fries out of the top bag the whole drive back with his eyes on the road, and the car fills up with the smell, and we don't talk, and it's a good quiet, the best the night is going to offer.

"See?" Marty says when we walk in. He's already got his box open. "Onions." He picks them off with a plastic fork and eats the burger anyway.

No food on the felt is Sully's only real rule, so we eat standing around the tray table by the dartboard, and then Kwame deals the next hour and takes the rest of my money. King-high. I should have folded and we both know it and he stacks my chips and slides them over, exact as ever.

Around eleven Sully says same time next week like the week is a formality, and it is, it's been five hundred weeks in a row.

Giorgio walks me out. He's parked behind me anyway.

"Week back treating you okay?" he says.

"Getting there."

"Good." He grips my shoulder once and lets go. "You look better than you did. You sound like yourself."

He means the flu. I get in the car.

The apartment is dark. I turn the deadbolt as quiet as it goes and stand in the kitchen a minute. The cactus magnet is straight. She fixed it while I was out.

In the bathroom I keep the light off and sit to pee in the dark. The seat is down. It's always down now, and it takes me a second to remember that's because of both of us.

She's awake anyway, or half.

"Did you tell them," she says into the dark.

"No."

"Okay."

She turns over and the springs take her weight. I get in on my side. The middle of the bed is cold. In the dark, with nobody watching, I cross my legs and leave them crossed.

The illustrated version of this chapter includes images of Marcus adjusting himself through his sweatpants, kissing Vicky, touching himself on the toilet and with the showerhead, getting dressed and in the restaurant bathroom stall. The version for paid subscribers also has more explicit copy.