Informed Consent - chapter 8 (with images) (Patreon)

Vicky's text comes at nine on a Sunday. Crock-Pot still in the box. You want it back or what.

I write back: Keep it.

Don't want it. Never used it. Come get it.

The building off Colfax has gone familiar the way a bus route does, the landmarks flattened into function. The stairwell smells like somebody's breakfast, eggs and butter. Her door is propped open with the yellow rubber wedge and the TV is on inside, low, a home renovation show, people arguing about a backsplash.

She's on the futon with her laptop. The Crock-Pot box is on the counter by the door, staged, like she'd set it there an hour ago and then sat down to wait. The kitchen is cleaner than it was. The hook by the door is empty.

"Door was open," I say.

"Yeah, I was listening for you." She closes the laptop. "Wine? It's noon. I don't care."

"It's ten."

"I don't care."

She pours two glasses of the kangaroo red and hands me one and sits back down on the futon, and I take the chair she dragged over from the two-person table, the chair with the short leg that she hasn't fixed because fixing chairs was my job once.

"So," she says.

"So."

"He told you I gave him your number."

"He said for the lasagna."

"That's true. It was for the lasagna." She drinks. "I didn't think you'd actually do anything about it. I thought you'd sit there and be noble and miserable, and then I could be mad at you for that instead."

"Instead of what?"

She looks at the TV. The couple on the screen has chosen the wrong backsplash and everyone is upset. She reaches for the remote and turns it off and the room gets very quiet.

"Did you know?" I say. "That he'd go for me. When you brought him around."

"No." She says it fast, and then, slower: "No. I thought…" She stops. She picks a thread off the cuff of her sweatshirt. "I thought he'd flirt a little. He flirts with everyone. He flirted with the building manager and she's seventy. I thought it would be…" Another stop. She drinks. "It doesn't matter what I thought."

"You were testing something."

"I wasn't testing anything."

"Vicky."

"I wanted to see if it was real," she says, and her voice comes up, and then drops back down, controlled, the register she uses with difficult families in the recovery room. "You. This." A gesture at me, the whole outline of me, quick and then withdrawn.

I let that sit.

"You're allowed to be angry," I say.

"I'm not angry."

"You're allowed anyway."

"At who," she says. "Tell me who I'm allowed to be angry at and I'll schedule it in."

The thread on her cuff has come loose in her fingers and she rolls it into a ball. The room is doing the thing rooms do when a conversation goes where it's going, all the objects getting plainer, the box on the counter, the lamp on the floor, the empty hook by the door.

"I have a question," I say. "You don't have to answer it."

"That's never true."

"Was it the body?" I keep my voice level. "When you left. Was it really about women? Or was it that I did it without you?"

She doesn't answer right away. She picks her glass up and puts it down. On the futon her legs are tucked under her, and for a second the whole shape of her is so known to me that the last two months fall out of the room and we're in the old apartment deciding what to order.

"It was the body," she says. "Mara. Look at me. I'm not attracted to women. I've never been attracted to women. I tried, that week, I actually tried, I stood in the shower and tried to feel something about it and there was nothing there. You can't ask me to want what I don't want. You of all people can't ask me that."

It's a good answer. It's the answer she's been giving since the kitchen with the saltines, and it's true, I believe that it's true, and it doesn't touch the question I asked.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay."

I can feel the exact shape of the thing we didn't say, sitting in the room with us, third person on the futon. The word she picked, orientation, covers both of us like the gray towel: functional, unglamorous, saving what's underneath from a stain neither of us will name.

"Nico's good," she says, into the new silence. "He's the good kind of simple. He thinks about what he says before he says it. Most men don't."

"I know."

"Does he…" She stops. She looks at her glass. "Does he know? About the clinic. About how it happened."

"I'm telling him this week."

"You have to." She says it quick, with force, and then catches herself and smooths it out. "I'm just saying. You have to. Whatever happens with me and you, you can't…" She stops again. "You know that."

"I know that."

We both drink. The wine is the same wine. It tastes different in this room than it did in the old one, and I can't tell if that's the room or me.

"I put in for the charge position," she says. "On my unit. Interviews are next week."

"You never told me that."

"I'm telling you now." She turns the glass on her knee. "I've wanted it for two years. I didn't put in the last two times it opened."

"Why not?"

"Because I'd have to be the one who says no to people." She shrugs, one shoulder. "Anyway. How's the job hunt?"

"I've got an interview Tuesday. Family practice on Leetsdale. They need a triage nurse."

"You'll get it."

"I might not. There's a reference question."

"Sonia's giving you a reference?"

"A neutral one."

Vicky knows what a neutral reference means. She's been a nurse longer than I have. Her eyebrows go up a millimeter and come back down.

"She didn't report you."

"No."

"Why not?"

"She told me. The board hearing, Dr. Yuen, the patients. She let me walk out quiet."

"That's not all of it," Vicky says.

I look at her.

"Nothing," she says. "Forget it. I'm glad she didn't." She gets up and takes the glasses to the kitchen, and the conversation moves with her, and I let it move, because the thing under that sentence is the thing we don't say wearing a different coat and I've used my one question.

She washes the glasses and leaves them in the rack and wipes the counter in a spiral, her habit, the one I can still see with my eyes closed.

"He was never going to pick me," she says, to the counter.

"That's not true."

She turns around. "Mara. I watched it happen. I set the whole thing up and then I stood in my own kitchen and watched it work, and it was never…" She puts both palms flat on the counter, like she did in the old kitchen, the morning after. "I'm not saying it right. I'm not going to say it right. I'm glad you have him. That's the sentence. Use that one."

"Okay."

"Don't okay me like a patient."

"Okay," I say, differently, and she laughs, one short note, and it almost sounds like her.

I stay another hour. We go over the usual things: her sister's fiancé, Derek or Eric, has now put four holes in one wall hanging one shelf. Appurva's potluck happened and her cake collapsed in the car. Sully's garage got written up by the HOA, the door being up past ten. She asks about the guys. I tell her about Nico losing twenty-three dollars and being happy about it, and she smiles, and the smile gets all the way to her eyes, and I decide to count that.

At the door she picks up the Crock-Pot box and holds it out.

"I'm serious. Take it."

"You keep it. You'll use it."

"I will never use it."

"Then it'll be the thing we argue about for ten years."

She looks at the box and then at me, and something moves through her face and goes by.

"Ten years," she says.

"At least."

She sets the box back on the counter.

I text him that night. Tomorrow. My place. I'll cook.

You can't cook.

I learned.

From Vicky?

I sit with my thumbs over the keys for a while. From Vicky, I write, and send it.

I cook because I said I would. The chicken is dry. I timed it by the clock instead of the meat and it came out with the grain tight and squeaky under the knife, and I serve it anyway with rice that turned out soft in the pot, and Nico eats two helpings like it's good and I love him for the lie and hate the lie at the same time.

"See," he says, his mouth full. "You learned."

"From Vicky."

"I know. You told me." He points his fork at the pan. "She put too much oil in this too. It's hereditary."

The table is the card table I bought at the hardware store to eat on, two chairs, the lamp with the paper shade throwing low light over the empty living room behind us. He's here at my place for the first time. He brought a candle, one of those ones in a jar, and it's burning on the table between us, some pine smell that fights with the chicken.

"So the new job," he says. "Tuesday. You nervous?"

"A little."

"You'll get it. You got a reference and everything." He eats. "Sonia. She's the one who trained you?"

"She's the lab manager. She ran the floor."

He nods, setting it aside somewhere. I've watched him do it for a month, names and facts going into some tidy arrangement, the way he lines his boots up by the door.

We finish eating and I take the plates and he follows me into the kitchen like he does, and he washes and I dry, the two of us arranged in a kitchen built for one. The last dish is the cast iron pan I bought to match his and I dry it badly, leaving it damp, and he takes it back and dries it right.

"Okay," he says, and hangs the towel on the oven handle. "You said you wanted to talk about something."

"Yeah."

"So talk." He leans against the counter, easy, arms crossed. He's smiling. He thinks this is the conversation about the poker nights, or the ex, or the thing where I stop his hands. I can see him bracing for a small thing.

"Not here," I say. "Come sit down."

There's nowhere to sit. The living room is empty. The bedroom is the only room with furniture. He follows me down the hall and I sit on the edge of the bed and he sits next to me on the sheet and puts his hand on my thigh.

He looks around the room. The bare wall where the dresser was. The nightstands. He doesn't comment. He's being careful, and the carefulness is worse than anything, because it's about to end.

"Nico."

"Hey," he says, gentle, reading my voice. "Whatever it is."

"I need you to not interrupt me," I say. "Because if you interrupt me I'm going to lose the order of it, and the order matters. Can you do that?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." I fold my hands. My hands are small now. His are next to mine on the bed and mine look like a child's next to his and I make myself look at that, at the two sets of hands, because it's the last easy thing I'm going to look at tonight.

"A few weeks ago I was still a nurse at St. Luke's," I say. "Endocrinology. You know that part. What you don't know is what the clinic treated. There was a patient. A man. He had a virus called Expression. It's a bloodborne virus. It's also sexually transmitted. And what it does…" My voice does something and I wait for it to level. "What it does is it transforms a male body into a female body. Completely. Bones, soft tissue, everything. It takes about six weeks, start to finish. It's permanent."

He's very still next to me.

"I had wanted…" This is the part. "I had wanted to be a woman my whole life. Since I was a kid. Nobody knew. Not Vicky, not my friends, nobody. I had a whole life built around never doing anything about it. And then one of the patients had the virus, and there was a supply closet, and I had access, and I…"

I make myself say it.

"I stole a tube of his blood. His order called for three. Nobody needed a fourth. There was no reason for it to exist, and I drew one anyway, and then I falsified the rejection record after close so the count would come out even. It wasn't a bad moment. It was a plan." I look at the wall. "I took it into the supply closet after everyone went home, and I injected myself with it. On purpose. Nobody gave it to me. I took it."

The room is quiet. He hasn't moved. His hands haven't moved.

"The fever started four days later. Vicky thought it was the flu. I let her think that. When the fever broke, the change was already…" I stop. I start over. "By the time she knew, it was done. I did it without telling her. That's the actual reason she left. She says it's because she's not attracted to women, and that's true, but the thing underneath it is that I did this to our life without asking her. We never said that part out loud. We still haven't."

"Mara."

"You said you wouldn't interrupt."

He closes his mouth. I watch him do it. His jaw works once.

"The virus is in my blood now," I say. "It will be in my blood for the rest of my life. It's transmissible through blood contact and sexual contact. I am not…" My voice goes flat on its own. "I am not a safe person to sleep with. When you reached for me and I stopped you, that was why. Not because I didn't want to. Because condoms fail, and even when they don't fail, you deserved to know what you were agreeing to before you agreed to anything. And I didn't tell you. I keep doing that. It's what I do. I let things run on other people not knowing, and I tell myself it's fine because nobody's been hurt yet, and then I keep not telling them."

I stop. The order held.

He gets up.

He walks to the window, which is the bedroom window that faces the alley, and he stands there with his back to me. His shoulders are up around his ears. He puts one hand flat on the wall next to the window frame, and the hand is big, and I think about the size of his hands and I stop thinking about it.

"Say something," I say.

"You said don't interrupt."

"You're not interrupting now. I'm done."

He turns around. His face is doing several things at once and I can't read any of them cleanly. I've been reading faces for a month and this one I can't read.

"The patient," he says. "The man whose blood you took. Did he know?"

"No."

"Does he know now?"

"No. He never found out. His results posted on time. As far as he knows his blood did exactly what blood does."

"And Vicky. She didn't know."

"Not until the fever broke."

"And Sonia." His voice changes on the name. "Your reference. The neutral reference. She knows."

"She figured it out. She didn't report it. She made me resign instead." I look at the wall. "She was the one person who understood the whole thing, and she looked at me and decided I could carry it by myself. That was the mercy. That's why the reference says neutral. Neutral is what you say when you can't say anything true."

He sits back down on the bed. Not next to me where he was. A foot away, angled, his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor between his boots.

"I stopped when you said stop." He says it to the floor. "I thought it was about your ex, or about you being careful, or…" He stops. "I asked you if it was me. You said it wasn't me. That was true."

"I wanted to tell you a hundred times."

"Name one."

"The night at your place. The records. When you unzipped my jeans and I caught your wrist."

"You said you needed time."

"There wasn't going to be enough time, Nico. There was never going to be a version of this where I got to wait until it was easy."

He rubs his face with both hands, hard, the heels of his hands dragging down his jaw. The bed creaks.

"Can I get it," he says finally. "From you. Right now. Have you already…"

"No. We haven't done anything that transmits it. Kissing doesn't. What we've done doesn't. I checked the transmission vectors before I ever let you touch me. I wasn't going to…" I stop. "I knew what I was and I kept it from you, but I didn't expose you. I need you to know I didn't expose you."

"You need me to know." He repeats it flat, and then he looks at me, and his eyes are wet, and I did that, I put that there, the one man in my life who looked at me and saw nothing but a woman he liked. "You need me to know that you were careful with my body while you were lying to my face."

"Yes."

"Why," he says. "That's the thing I can't… why didn't you just tell me? The first night. The lasagna. Before any of it. I would have…" He stops.

"You would have what?"

"I don't know," he says, and his voice breaks on it, and the break is worse than anything else that's happened tonight. "I don't know what I would have done. You didn't give me the chance to know."

He's quiet a moment. Then: "Why me?"

"What?"

"There's no version of you that I knew before," he says slowly, working it out as he says it, and I watch him arrive at it, watch a man assemble the thing I've known about myself all along. "Your friends knew you before. Vicky knew you before. And you… out of everyone, you picked the one person who never…" He looks at me. "I wasn't a person you fell for. I was a person who couldn't check."

"No."

"Am I wrong?"

"That's how it started." I want to say the rest of it and the rest of it sounds like a defense, so I don't.

"When?"

"The night you told me about the grout color," I say. "The dog. The client with the dog. You were telling that story and your hand was on my knee, and I sat there and I thought, he deserves to know, and then I didn't tell you, and I did that every night after. Every single night was a new decision not to tell you."

He's quiet for a long time. The building is quiet. There's no TV through any wall. This building is full of people who work early shifts.

"Is it safe," he says. "If someone… if I…" He can't build the sentence. "Is there anything? If two people know, and they're careful. Is there any way it works."

"Blood contact and sexual contact," I say. "Condoms reduce the risk. They don't eliminate it. There's no prophylaxis. If you got it from me, you'd have four to seven days before the fever, and once the fever starts…" The words come out flat and stay flat. "You'd become a woman, Nico. Permanently. That's what exposure means for you. That's what I've been deciding for you every time I let it go as far as it went and then stopped it. I want you to hear the whole of it."

"I hear it," he says.

He stands up. He picks his jacket up off the chair where he hung it, my chair, the one from the card table. He puts it on and zips it and the zipper sound is very loud.

"I can't do this tonight," he says. "I need… I'm not leaving. I'm not… I need tonight."

"Okay."

"Don't okay me."

"Okay," I say, differently, and it's Vicky's echo and he doesn't know that and I can't explain it.

He stands in the bedroom doorway with his jacket on and he looks at me sitting on the sheet in the lamplight, and his face does the thing it did in the garage, the open thing.

"Was any of it real," he says. "For you."

"All of it," I say. "I don't expect you to believe me. The lying and the wanting were the same. I don't know how to make that make sense. They're both true. They've always both been true. I stole the vial and I wanted to be caught wanting it. I kept your hand off me and I wanted your hand. It's all the same person. There isn't a good one and a bad one."

He holds the doorframe. He looks at me for a long time.

"Friday," he says. "The poker game. Are you going."

"Yeah."

"Okay," he says. "I need tonight. I'll call you."

He goes. I hear him blow the candle out on his way, and the smoke smell comes down the hall after the door closes, sharp and brief, and then it's just the apartment, and the card table with two plates, and the pan I dried badly sitting clean on the rack.

What comes is the flatness again, the body done with one more thing it chose. I wash my hands at the kitchen sink, and the soap is the good kind now, bought with my own money, and I stand there a while with the water running over my small hands and I don't think about anything at all.

My phone lights up on the counter.

Vicky: Did you tell him.

I write: I told him.

The dots come and go for a long time. Then: Are you okay.

I look at the question from the woman who left me for the thing I am, who's been carrying her half of it in silence the same as me. I write: I don't know yet. He needed tonight.

He'll come back, she writes. He looked at you.

I leave the phone screen-down on the counter. I go to bed in the middle of the too-big bed, in my clothes, and the sheet smells like the candle smoke now, faintly, pine and burnt wick, and I lie awake a long time listening to the building do nothing.

The days go by in their ordinary shape.

Tuesday I interview at the family practice on Leetsdale. The nurse manager is fifty and tired and likes that I can start Mondays. She asks about the neutral reference and I say the clinic restructured and she nods the way people nod when they've decided not to care. They call Friday with the offer. I say yes.

He doesn't call. I don't text. The phone stays dark and I keep it that way.

Friday at Sully's I go alone. "Where's the boyfriend," Marty says. "Job ran long." The table accepts it. The table accepts everything I hand it lately. I lose fourteen dollars and drive home with the heater on my feet.

The second week is the same shape with no interview in it. I do the dishes. I buy groceries for one. Wednesday I pick up the phone twice and put it down twice.

Friday I don't go to Sully's. First Friday I've missed since the fever. I tell Giorgio I'm beat and he says okay and doesn't push, and I sit in the empty living room with the TV off, not playing cards, and I don't count how many Fridays it's been since I did that.

At ten my phone lights up. Giorgio: Your man is here. Without you. Everything ok?

I call him. He steps out of the garage to take it. Behind him I can hear the table, Marty's laugh, the chain-run of somebody opening the fridge.

"He showed up with beer," Giorgio says. "Said he was in the neighborhood." A pause on that, because nobody believes it, including Giorgio. "Kwame took him for thirty. Mara. What's going on?"

"We had a thing. We're working on it."

"Okay." He doesn't push. Nine years of not pushing. Then: "He asked me something in the driveway. He asked how long I've known you. Nine years, I said. Then he asked what you were like before."

My whole chest goes still. "What'd you tell him?"

"Same as now. Worse at cards." The door sound, the table noise cutting off as it closes. "He left early. He wasn't drunk, he wasn't making a thing of it. He just wanted to be in the room, is my read." A truck goes by on his end or mine, I can't tell which. "Whatever the thing is, he's taking it seriously. That's all I'm saying."

We hang up. I sit with the phone in the dark living room.

He went to the only room full of people who met me first. He stood in it and drank their beer and lost their money and looked at them, and I don't get to know what his face did in there. I wasn't in the room.

He calls on Thursday. Not a text. A call, which he never does, and I stand in the kitchen with the phone ringing in my hand and let it go twice before I answer.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey."

A pause. The sound of a truck going past on his street, the window that doesn't close letting it in.

"I've been thinking," he says. "That's all I've been doing. I took a day off. I sat in my truck at the site and didn't get out."

"Nico."

"Let me…" He stops. Starts over. "You asked me not to interrupt you. Now I'm asking you. Can I say this without you fixing it?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." He exhales. "I was angry. I'm still angry. You let me want you and you knew something about that I didn't know. That's not…" He stops again. "That's not a small thing. I'm not going to say it's a small thing."

"It's not."

"But I keep coming back to the night at my place," he says. "The records. When I reached for your jeans and you stopped me. You could have let it happen. You were… I could feel how much you wanted to. And you stopped it. You were protecting me the whole time you were lying to me, and I don't know what to do with both of those being true."

"They're both true."

"I know. You said that. I heard you." A long pause. "I talked to my sister. The nurse. I didn't tell her what it was about. I asked her about bloodborne pathogens and she gave me the textbook answer and I sat there thinking, she's talking about my girlfriend."

The word lands. Girlfriend. He hasn't used it before.

"You went to Sully's," I say.

"Giorgio told you."

"He called me the same night."

"Yeah." A breath. "I wanted to see the people who knew you first. I don't know what I was looking for. They were nice to me. Kwame took my money."

"He does that."

"Yeah, I noticed." A sound that isn't quite a laugh. "I asked you once about them. If any of them had ever…" He stops. "I was jealous of a card game, Mara. Out of everything I could have been worried about, I picked a card game. That's the size of what I knew."

"I don't know what happens next," he says. "I don't know if I can…" He stops. "I want to see you. That's all I know. I want to see you and I don't know what happens after that."

"Come over," I say. "Tonight."

"Yeah."

He hangs up. I put the phone on the counter and stand there with my hands flat on the laminate, the same counter where I stood with the Crock-Pot box, where I stood with Vicky's wine glass. The counter has held all of it.

I clean the apartment. There's not much to clean. The sheets smell like candles and sweat. I strip them and put on a fresh set, the ones Vicky made the bed with during the period week, and I don't tuck the corners. I dig the candle out from where I set it after he left, the pine one, burnt down two hours and still half full, and I light it and put it on the card table.

He arrives at seven. I hear the truck in the lot, the diesel rattle, and then the stairs, and then the knock. I open the door and he's standing there in the green jacket, the one from poker night, and he's tired and he's holding a bottle of wine.

"I didn't know what to bring," he says.

"Come in."

He comes in. He hangs the jacket on the hook by the door and he stands in the living room with the empty floor and the lamp and the card table and he looks at all of it.

He sets the wine on the counter. He turns around and looks at me and the look is the one from the first night, the direct one, the one with nothing behind it but want, except now there's something behind it. There's everything behind it.

"I don't know how to do this," he says.

"Neither do I."

He crosses the room and puts his hands on my waist and the warmth of them comes through the shirt and I put my hands on his chest and his heart is going fast under my palms.

"I'm scared," he says.

"Me too."

He kisses me. It's slow and careful and his mouth is chapped and his stubble drags my chin and the heat comes up low and wide and I lean into him and the card table is behind me and the candle is burning and the apartment is too small and none of it matters.

We go to the bedroom. The white sheets are clean. The lamp is on. He sits on the edge of the bed and takes his boots off and sets them side by side on the floor, the laces still tied, heels even. I stand in front of him and he looks up at me.

"Tell me again," he says. "The short version."

"Blood contact and sexual contact," I say. "Those are the only ways. Kissing can't do it. Hands can't. Nothing we've done could. Condoms reduce the risk and they don't eliminate it. If you get it from me there's nothing to take, no prophylaxis, no window. Four to seven days and then the fever, and once the fever starts it runs to the end. You'd become a woman. Permanently. That's what you're agreeing to if you stay."

"And you're…"

"Done. It finished in April. There's nothing left of the other one."

He nods. He looks at his hands. He looks at me.

"I want to," he says. "I want to with you. I need you to know that."

"I know."

"And I'm scared."

"I know."

He reaches for me and I go to him, and we get there by inches. His shirt, my shirt, the kissing in between that keeps stopping because one of us is working a button. His hands are warm and rough, callus at the base of every finger, and when they come up my back under my shirt I arch into them and I say so.

"That," I say. "Don't stop that."

Nobody has to tell me what to say tonight. I'm saying it.

He gets the hook of the bra one-handed and I put my hand over his.

"Wait. The lamp stays on."

He looks at me. Then he understands, or he decides to, and he takes the shirt off over my head, and the bra, and I stand there in the low light and let him look.

"Look at me," I say. It's the first thing I've ever asked for in a bed.

He looks. And I wait for it, the flicker, the half-second audit I've been bracing for since April, the eyes going to the jaw, the hands, the throat, the small recheck. It doesn't come. His eyes go everywhere and nothing in them arrives late. My breasts, dark-tipped, the faint blue vein under the left one. The pale stretch lines at my sides. The waist, the hips, the place between my legs. He is looking at all of it and he knows all of it. He knows what this body was and what it came from and whose blood runs in it. There is nothing left for him to figure out, and he doesn't flinch, and I've never had that. Vicky knew and stopped being able to look. The guys look and then work at it. He knows and looks and it doesn't cost him anything I can see.

My hands don't move to cover anything. I notice that.

He pulls me down onto the bed and the mattress dips and the springs creak. His thumb moves along my side, over the pale vertical lines where the skin stretched in April. "These," he says. "I wondered about these."

"Stretch marks. It happened fast."

"I know what they are." His hand stays there. "I had you in my head for weeks. Built the whole thing. And I got it wrong." He looks up at me. "I made you smaller than you are. You take up more room than I gave you."

Then his mouth is on my neck and his weight comes over me and my body does what it learned on his couch, it makes room, my hips tipping up, my thighs opening, receiving as a thing my muscles do on purpose.

"The drawer," I say.

The condoms are in the nightstand, the box I bought a week ago and haven't opened. He reaches for it and I take it from him.

"I'll do it."

My hands are the competent part of me. Foil, the right side up, the pinch at the tip, the roll down, the way I've explained it to patients a hundred times across a clipboard. My hands don't shake. Four years of putting a stranger at ease with my hands and tonight they're for this.

"Stay," I say.

I put a knee on either side of his hips.

I reach down and hold him and sink down slow.

The stretch is nothing like my fingers. Two fingers was a sketch. This is the thing itself. The head of him opens me and there's a burn at the entrance, brief, a ring of muscle doing new work, and I pause there and breathe and let it, and the slickness does its job, and I take another inch. Then another. He's wider than anything this body has had and he reaches where nothing has reached, a deep pressure that takes my breath away at the bottom of it, my hips settled flush on his, nowhere left to go.

Full. The word arrives whole. For weeks the want has been an emptiness with a location, an ache with an address, and this is the answer to it, the exact shape of the absence, occupied. My body knows what to do about it before I do. It eases. It opens further. The burn fades back and the fullness takes the whole stage.

His hands are on my hips. He's shaking a little. "Okay?" he says.

"Don't move yet."

He doesn't move. I stay there, full of him, and let the body finish deciding, and then I move.

The rhythm is mine. Slow at first, because slow is what this body takes, and his hips start to answer and I put my hand flat on his chest. "Slow. My pace." He holds still under me and lets me set it, his jaw tight, his thumbs moving on my hip bones in small circles that aren't quite stillness. The friction is deep and low and it doesn't point anywhere. It just keeps adding to itself.

Some part of me is checking the whole time. Barrier in place, barrier holding. The one act in my life that can hurt another person, and I'm in it, and the checking doesn't stop and it doesn't ruin anything. It's just there, like the centrifuge through a wall.

Halfway through I reach down between us and feel where we join. The ring of latex, seated at the base of him, intact. He watches me do it and understands what it is.

"It's holding," he says.

"Yeah."

I take his hand off my hip and press his thumb where I need it, through the hood, light. "Here. Don't move it. Let me move."

He doesn't move it. I move. The two sensations knit together the way they did on my own, his thumb and his depth and the rhythm my hips have chosen, and the heat stops pooling and starts rising in turns, each one higher, each one easing and coming back bigger, and I hear myself making sounds I didn't build, high and rough at once, and his free hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise the thin skin and I think, that'll mark, and the thought is so ordinary and so far away that it makes me laugh once, brokenly, and then the waves stop building and just arrive, one and then another and then another, rolling through me from the inside out, my thighs shaking against his sides, my whole body clamping down around him in pulses he can feel.

He gasps. His hands come back to my hips and he holds me down on him and comes, his head back, his throat working, and I feel the pulse of it through the latex, contained, and I think: probably. No guarantees and he took it anyway.

I stay on top of him until the last of the waves lets go of me, and then I ease off, and I'm the one who says it, even now.

"Hold the base. There."

He holds it. Everything comes away the way it should. He ties it off and drops it in the trash by the nightstand and my eyes are on it the whole time like a post-op check. Intact, as far as intact can be checked by looking. The relief goes through me in its own slow wave.

He pulls the sheet up over both of us. His arm stays across my waist. Within minutes his breathing goes deep and even against my shoulder, one leg hooked over mine, heavy, out.

I lie awake.

The old body was done after. Spent, emptied, a drop off the far side, the whole system closing for the night. This one doesn't close. Twenty minutes later my chest is still flushed. My pulse is in my throat and my fingertips and between my legs at once. I'm still wet. The place he was keeps its own awareness, a soft raw warmth, not pain and not quite pleasure, presence. If he rolled over and reached for me I could start again from exactly where we stopped. I don't know if that's how it is for everyone. Vicky would know. I can't ask Vicky.

The lamp is on. Down the hall the candle has burned to a low blue flame in its jar. His boots are side by side at the end of the bed, the laces still tied. I lie in the middle of the bed that isn't too big tonight and listen to him breathe.

I wake before he does. Gray light through the blinds. He's asleep on his stomach, diagonal, one arm under the pillow, taking the room the bed has to give.

I pull on a shirt and go out to the front room. The cold candle in its jar on the card table. Two wine glasses, one empty, one with an inch gone dark in the bottom. The empty floor, pale where the couch used to keep the sun off it.

My wallet is on the counter where I left it. I open it flat. Behind my license, folded twice, is the requisition slip. One tube, written in my own hand, my initials at the bottom. The only paper proof the fourth tube ever existed.

I take it out and unfold it and smooth it on the laminate.

From the bedroom, his breathing, slow and even.

I stand at the sink and hold it there. Since March, behind a license, folded along its own folds, gone soft at the crease. One tube. My initials. There's a disposal under my hand and a stove four feet away and I've thought about both.

From the bedroom the breathing changes, catches, settles again.

I fold it back the way it was and take it to the drawer of the nightstand on my side, the one that sticks, and put it in with the notebook. Then I get back in the bed, on the edge where there's room, and wait for him to wake up.