Chapter Eleven
The routine doesn't need me anymore.
That's what I notice this morning, kneeling by the bed while Graham works the plug out slow.
My body already knows the angle, the breath, the way to stay open without being told.
He checks the cage the same way he always does.
Steady fingers, no comment. Then he hands me the wipes.
I clean myself without thinking about it. The words come when he wants them.
"My little cock is locked because it was never going to be the point. Thea takes what it never could."
Flat. Easy. Like something I've always known how to say.
He does the little bit of color under my eyes and on my lips.
Not for the day. Just for the mirror, so I see which version I'm in before I wash it off and put the rest of the man back on.
I look at the softer face for a second. Then the water runs and it's gone, and I'm in the camisole, the plain panties that still fit right over the cage, the plug seated deep again, and the shirt and pants that make me look like the guy who edits manuals.
"You told Dev yes," Graham says. Not a question. He saw the text over my shoulder last night.
"Gym tonight," I say. "He's been on me about it for weeks."
"Good." His hand checks the waistband through my jeans, flat over the cage, like it does now. It rests there a beat longer than it needs to. "Go be a person out there. It's good for you. The quiet holds either way."
I go.
* * *
Dev is already there, of course. He's got the good rack and a look like he won a bet.
"He lives," he says. "I was about to put up a poster. Have you seen this man, last spotted retiring at twenty-nine."
"Twenty-nine's not old," I say.
"It is the way you do it." He tosses me a plate. "Legs. You'll hate it. Come on."
We warm up. Dev talks. He always talks. A girl he's seeing who might be too good for him, his sister's wedding in the fall, a coworker of his I should meet, she's funny, you'd like her, I'm serious, let me set it up.
I say maybe. The plug is a low, steady weight when I squat.
The cage sits tight under the shorts. I've worked caged before.
At the store, at the dentist, at a job site with a man in an apron asking questions.
My body knows how to move around it now.
It's between sets that I catch myself.
There's a wall of mirrors along the free weights, and I'm not checking my form. I'm looking at the men. A tall guy doing curls with the sleeves cut off his shirt. Two younger ones by the dumbbells, easy in their bodies like I was never easy in mine. I'm measuring them. Not their arms.
I go still and let myself know what I'm doing, because I can't get away with the thing I told myself last time: that it's just what guys do at the gym, that it doesn't mean anything.
It means something. I know exactly what I'm looking for and I know exactly where I land.
Below all of them. Small and locked and put away, a plug seated deep, a body Graham trained to take instead of give.
I came here for years to build the version of me that could stand next to men like this and be one of them.
I stand next to them now and I don't feel envy.
What I feel is closer to what I feel when Graham takes himself out on the couch.
Want, and under the want, the quiet click of knowing my place beneath it.
I do the math on myself without meaning to.
I know my number now, both numbers, hard and soft, because Graham says them to me plain and I've stopped being able to un-hear them.
I look at the curl guy and I know where I'd measure against him, and it isn't close, and it isn't a thing I can file under normal anymore.
There's no version of this where I'm sizing up the competition.
I stopped being the competition somewhere back around the night the key went in his pocket.
I'm just looking at men the way I look at the one who owns me, and doing the sums, and coming up short in every direction, and some low part of me settles when the sums come out that way instead of fighting it.
In the locker room after, Dev pulls his shirt off to change, and I look, and then I make myself not look, and the making-myself is the new part.
I never had to not-look at Dev. He's my friend.
He's the one who keeps trying to hand me the map to being a man.
A girl I'd like, a program, a plan. And he has no idea he's handing it to someone the map stopped working on a long time ago.
"You're quiet," he says, dragging a clean shirt over his head. "You good?"
"Long week," I say.
"You should come out more. Seriously. Whatever hermit thing the roommate's got you doing, it's not good for you." He grins. "Bring Graham next time. Dude seems solid. Everybody likes that guy."
"Yeah," I say. "Everybody does."
* * *
Steph does the diagrams.
She's the one who turns my sentences into the little exploded drawings, the arrows, the numbered parts, the hand that shows you which way to twist the hose.
We've worked the same manuals for two years.
She's the only person in the building who thinks the midnight guy with the wet hands is a real person worth protecting, because she draws for him too.
And she says things straight out. No angle, no waiting to see how you'll take it first. It's the thing I noticed about her before I noticed anything else, and it's the thing I keep noticing.
Lately it's been more than the work.
She comes by my desk Thursday with two coffees and sits on the edge of it like she owns it, and we go through the drain-assembly page, the one the manual always gets wrong.
Somewhere in there she puts her hand flat on my forearm to stop me talking and points at the drawing, and I feel it land warm all the way up.
And in the middle of that, with her hand on my arm and her leaned in close enough that I can smell whatever she wears, the name comes up in me on its own.
Thea.
Not out loud. Just there, behind my teeth, the way it is at home. Surfacing in the last place it belongs. At my desk, with a woman's hand on my arm and my own hand not sure what it's for. I put it back down. I don't know how it got out into the daylight.
"You went somewhere," she says.
"Sorry. The drain."
"The drain." She smiles like she doesn't believe me and doesn't mind. "You do that. Go somewhere in the middle of a sentence. I keep wanting to know where."
Friday the office empties out early, and she's still there when I'm still there, and she comes and leans in my doorway with her coat already on.
"One drink," she says. "You look like a man who could use exactly one drink. Then I'll let you go home to your mysterious drain."
We get the one drink. Then we're on the sidewalk outside the bar and it's cold and she doesn't leave and I don't leave, and she looks up at me and just says it, plain, like she says everything.
"I live around the corner. I'd like it if you came up. I'm not being coy about it. I've wanted to ask you for a month."
And there it is. The whole thing I've chased since before Dana left without ever telling me what I was. A woman I like, who likes me, saying the plain true thing right out into the cold air, handing me the win with both hands. No app. No maybe. No next time. Around the corner. Now.
I say yes. Of course I say yes. My mouth says it before the rest of me can catch up, because some old part of me has been waiting ten years to get to say it.
Her apartment is warm and a little messy and she doesn't apologize for the mess.
She hangs my coat. She pours something neither of us drinks.
And then she's close, and then she's closer, and she puts her hand flat on my chest like she put it on my arm, and it starts to slide down, easy, sure, heading for my belt.
And the old thing doesn't come.
That's what I'll turn over later. Every other time a woman's hand got this far, I left my body, up to the ceiling to watch it go wrong, Nora's couch, Meg's bed, every room before them.
I brace for it now out of pure habit and it just doesn't arrive.
I stay in my body, calm as a man waiting for a light to change, because I already know how this ends and there's nothing in it to sweat.
Her hand is one button and one inch from the smooth panel of the panties, the little pink cage, the plug seated deep where her fingers would find it the second they went past where she means to stop.
She thinks she's reaching for a man. What's under the belt is a locked plastic shell the size of a bottlecap and a body dressed underneath for somebody else.
So I stop her hand before it gets there. Not a flinch, not a grab. I lift it off my chest and fold it between both of mine, like holding it was the thing I wanted all along, and I find a smile, and it isn't even hard to find.
"Slow down a second," I say. Easy. Warm.
She goes still. Not hurt. Just reading me, the straight way she reads everything. "Hey," she says. "It's okay. We don't have to do anything. We can just sit. I'm not in a hurry."
"It's not you." I say it gentle, the way you set a thing down so it won't break.
"It's honestly not you at all. I've got an early morning and my head's somewhere else, and you deserve better than half a person on your couch.
" I listen to myself do it. Smooth, kind, a little sorry.
It's the best performance I've ever given and it costs me nothing, because not one word of it is true, and the truth is the one thing I'm never handing her.
"Teddy." She's not chasing. She just says my name and leaves it open, a door back into the room. "You can tell me. Whatever it is. I'm not going anywhere."