Part 8

Every bump on the drive home lands in the same location. I park in the driveway and sit there for a moment with my hands on the wheel, the cramping still there.

The kitchen light is on when I come through the door. Emily is at the counter, laptop open, case files spread out, reading glasses on. She doesn't look up. I put my bag down quietly and go upstairs.

The bathroom. Stand under the fluorescent light for a moment.

The liner from the gym is soaked - I can feel it, heavy and shifting, the blood still coming. I pull my jeans down and sit on the toilet and look at what's in the boxer briefs.

The liner is dark red, almost black at the center, saturated through, the blood spreading into the cotton around it. At the center something darker and denser - the same thing from the leg press, the body producing it again while I was driving home. I peel the liner away and fold it and the smell comes up immediately - iron and copper and something organic and warm, spreading into the room.

I drop it in the bin and sit there.

There are pads in the cabinet under the sink. I've seen them - Emily's, part of the bathroom landscape I've shared with her without ever needing to know what they were. I understand the principle from the liners. But I don't know which one, or how this works from here, or how long it goes on, and the cramp comes again and I grip the edge of the sink and breathe through it.

It releases.

I open the cabinet. Two kinds of pads, tampons, liners. I look at them, look at the blood on the toilet paper when I wipe, look at the cabinet again.

I've been in here twenty minutes when the knock comes.

"Mike." Emily's voice, muffled. Checking in.

"I'm fine."

Footsteps retreating down the hall.

I take a pad from the cabinet. The wings, the backing, the adhesive. I peel the backing halfway and it sticks to my finger and I peel it off and the adhesive folds over on itself and the pad is ruined. I drop it in the bin. Take another.

I'm still sitting there with the second one when the door opens.

No knock. She just opens it - the prerogative of a marriage and a bathroom door that doesn't mean privacy the way it might somewhere else - and steps inside, already talking. "I was thinking we could-"

She stops.

Takes in the scene. Me on the toilet, jeans around my ankles, the pad in my hand, the bin with the ruined one and the soaked liner. Then the smell reaches her - the iron and copper that's been spreading into the room - and her face changes. Not dramatically. Just a settling. The prosecutor arriving at a conclusion.

She closes the door and sits down on the edge of the tub.

"First day?" she says.

"Started at the gym."

"During the workout."

"Yeah."

She nods. "You've got it backwards." She takes the pad from me, shows me the orientation, hands it back.

The cramp comes and I press my free hand flat against my lower abdomen and breathe through it. Emily watches me breathe through it without saying anything, which is the right call.

It releases.

"How long does this go on," I say.

"The cramps or the period."

"Either. Both."

"Cramps are worst the first day, sometimes the second. The period itself - five days, give or take." She pauses. "Everyone's different."

"And these work."

"Better than what you had. Put it in and come downstairs."

I put the pad in - the orientation right this time, the wings folding under the way she showed me, the adhesive holding. I pull up the boxer briefs. The bulk is immediately there, substantially more than the liner, shifting when I stand. I take a few steps toward the sink.

"It moves," I say.

"The wings hold it. It'll settle." She stands, and looks at me with the full careful look - not the case-evidence read but something else, something that's been waiting.

"Mike," she says. "You got your period."

"I know."

"That means-"

"I know what it means." The word sits there between us, the one neither of us has said yet. "I could get pregnant," I say.

The silence that follows is different from the others. She's looking at the middle distance, somewhere between the wall and something I can't see, and there's something in her expression that has to do with the conversation we've been having lately - the trying again, the quiet recalibration of what's possible now - arriving at a new answer neither of us was ready for.

"Emily."

"One thing at a time." Her voice is steady in the way it gets when she's managing something privately.

"We have to see Jenny."

She looks at me.

"This isn't going away," I say.

She nods. Doesn't push it or make it more than it is. She opens the medicine cabinet and shakes two prescription ibuprofen into her palm and holds them out. "These work better."

I take them. She fills a glass from the tap. Then she looks at the tampons in the cabinet, still open.

"You could try-"

"Not tonight," I say.

She doesn't push that either. Closes the cabinet.

I swallow the ibuprofen and we stand in the bathroom in the quiet of two people who have just moved through something.

"Come down when you're ready," she says. "Eat something. The ibuprofen needs it."

---

The cramps wake me at two.

Not the manageable waves from the evening - something deeper, whatever's been cramping since the gym now contracting in long slow waves that radiate down into my thighs and up into my lower back simultaneously, building and holding and releasing and building again. I lie there in the dark and breathe through the first one and the second and by the third I've curled onto my side with my knees drawn up, which helps marginally.

Emily stirs. "Cramps?"

"Yeah."

She's quiet for a moment. Then she shifts closer, her body curling around mine from behind, her arm coming over my waist and her hand pressing flat against my lower abdomen where it's worst.

"Is that okay," she says.

It's more than okay. The warmth of her palm against the cramping is immediate - not fixing it, just present against it, something to focus on that isn't the contraction building underneath. I put my hand over hers and hold it there.

We lie like that through the next cramp and the one after. She doesn't say anything. After a while the contractions space out and I stop tracking them and just lie there in the dark with her hand under mine and her breath against the back of my neck.

"This happens every month," I say, eventually.

She's quiet for a moment. "Yeah," she says.

I think about the bathroom - the middle distance she went to when I said the word pregnant, the thing in her expression that had to do with the trying again and what this means for it, the question arriving at an answer neither of us had considered. Neither of us brings it up. We just lie there in the dark with her hand on my abdomen and the cramps spacing out until I fall asleep.

---

The morning is better. The cramps have eased to a dull background ache. The pad is heavier than last night - I can feel the weight of it when I stand, the fullness of it. I change it before I dress, the procedure more deliberate now, the wings and orientation no longer a mystery. Fresh one in. The bulk settles between my legs as I pull up the boxer briefs.

Downstairs Emily hands me coffee and two prescription ibuprofen without being asked. "Before it builds."

I take them. She's already in her coat.

"Call me if it gets bad," she says.

"It won't."

She gives me the look she uses when she's decided not to argue. "Call me anyway." Then she's gone.

---

The office. My desk, the Aldermere folder, the Tuesday call.

The pad announces itself within ten minutes of sitting down. Not loudly - but every shift of weight produces a faint rustling, the pad adjusting, the material doing what the liner never did because the liner was thin enough to ignore. I find a posture that works - slightly forward, thighs together - and stay in it.

Dave appears mid-morning with a printout. Aldermere trafficking specs, discrepancy in the Atlanta numbers. I lean forward to look and the pad shifts and produces a faint crinkle and I sit back and look at the printout from a slight distance instead. Dave looks at the partition. At me. At the printout. We work through the discrepancy and he retreats with the corrected numbers and neither of us mentions the sound.

By noon I've made two trips to the men's room with a fresh pad folded in my trouser pocket. The procedure in the stall is more manageable than the first time. The used one wrapped and in the bin, the new one in, the bulk resettling as I walk back to the desk. The flow is lighter than yesterday - still there, but lighter, the pad not reaching capacity before I change it.

Linda appears at noon. Folder on the desk. "How are you doing," she says.

"Fine."

She waits.

"First day," I say, quietly.

She nods once. "Sarah's going to use Meridian's Southeast numbers as leverage. The methodology gap is your opening." A pause. "Eat actual lunch."

She goes.

The call at two goes well. Sarah pushes on Southeast distribution exactly as Linda predicted and I walk her through the numbers - the actual figures against Meridian's projections, the three-year relationship data. I know this deck.

Partway through Sarah pauses to confer with someone on her end. I stand - I've been sitting since one-thirty and my back is aching - and the moment I do the cramp hits, deep and sustained, and with it a warm release as something passes into the pad. I keep my face neutral. Press my hand flat against my abdomen. Sarah comes back on the line.

Linda is watching me from the cubicle entrance.

I give her a fractional headshake - I'm fine, keep going - and she looks at my hand and looks at my face and thirty seconds later she's back with a glass of water and two ibuprofen that she sets on the desk without interrupting the call. Just puts them down and steps back.

The contraction holds. Releases.

I answer Sarah's question about Q4.

By the end of the call the tone has shifted - less testing, more collaborative. She'll have her team review the Southeast analysis and be in touch by end of week. I end the call, take the ibuprofen, drink the water.

Linda looks at me from the partition. "Good."

"Thanks." She knows what I mean. She nods once and goes.

Sarah's email comes in at four-thirty. Team reviewed the Southeast analysis. Numbers hold up. Let's talk renewal terms next week. I read it twice. Forward it to Linda without comment. She appears at the cubicle entrance thirty seconds later.

"There it is," she says.

"There it is."

---

Emily is at the counter when I get home, laptop open, the Hartley files spread out. She looks up.

"How was the call."

"Good. Sarah's coming back to the table." I put my bag down. "The pad was - it was a lot. At the office."

She waits.

"I want to try the tampon tonight," I say. "If that's still an option."

She closes the laptop.

---

She grabs one from the cabinet and sits on the edge of the tub, holds it so I can see - the applicator, the outer tube and inner plunger, the string.

"Same logic as the Monistat. Further back than you think, angle toward the spine. The applicator does the work."

I look at it. "What if it's not in right."

"You'll feel it. If it's positioned correctly you won't feel anything - that's how you know."

I take it from her. She stands and turns around without being asked.

The first attempt is wrong - the angle off, the applicator not finding the entrance, the geography requiring the same deliberate attention as the shower and the Monistat, more than I want to give it. I adjust. Try again. Further back, and this time it finds what it's looking for and I push the outer tube in and press the plunger.

A brief resistance and then the tampon releases. I wait for pain, pressure, the awareness of something inside me - and there's almost nothing. A faint interior presence, and then even that fades.

I pull the applicator out. The string rests against the inner lips, a thin cord there with every shift of weight. There but not intrusive.

"Okay," I say.

Emily turns around. Looks at my expression.

"I can't feel the tampon," I say. "Just the string."

"The string tucks away once you've got underwear on. Check it's there and then leave it."

I reach down and find it. Then again. Then a third time.

"Stop," Emily says.

I look at her.

"It's there. Leave it alone."

"I just want to make sure-"

"Leave the string alone." Direct, without edge.

I take my hand away and pull up the boxer briefs. The string tucks against the skin and becomes almost nothing. Jeans over that and it disappears entirely. I shift my weight. No crinkle, no bulk adjusting with every movement.

"It's better," I say. "Than the pad."

"I know."

"You could have told me that yesterday."

"You needed yesterday," she says. "To be ready for today."

She's not wrong.

In the mirror - same face, same shoulders, untucked shirt. Nothing visible. For the first time since the period started I look exactly like I always look and feel approximately like I always feel, and the relief of it is immediate and complete.

Emily's reflection appears beside mine. She doesn't say anything. Just stands there for a moment, and I'm aware of the distance of the last few weeks and of how it's shifted tonight. I reach toward the waistband.

"Don't," she says. Something in her expression that's almost a smile - not quite, but the closest it's been in a while.

I leave the string alone. We turn the light off and go to bed.

---

The Premium Patreon version of this post includes images of Mike dealing with his period, available at https://rebirth.pub/chyoa - all chapters will be published on CHYOA, but you can read ahead at Patreon and get bonus content for this story there.