January means performance reviews. The forms have been in everyone's inboxes since the second week of the month - self-evaluations, peer feedback requests, the annual accounting of what you did and what it was worth. I've been filling mine out in the gaps between client work, in the gaps between other things.
Dave stares too long over the cubicle partition at nine-fifteen.
Not rudely. He's dropping off the Calloway trafficking specs the way he always does, and he glances up the way he always does, and then he doesn't look back down. His eyes move across my face, then drop briefly to my chest - the binder under the dress shirt, the compression doing its job but not perfectly, a faint ridge where the panel edge sits that the shirt doesn't fully conceal at this angle. He can't name what he's seeing. It doesn't resolve into anything he has a category for. He opens his mouth.
"Calloway specs," he says.
"Thanks," I say.
He goes back to his desk. I reach up and press my palm flat against my sternum through the shirt, feeling the binder's edge where it's riding slightly. I know without looking that the left panel has shifted since this morning. I'll fix it at lunch.
---
The men's room at eleven, the middle stall. I reach under my shirt and work the binder back into position - the panel pulled down, the band resettled, the compression redistributing across the chest the way it's supposed to sit. The panel has been the problem all morning, the tissue on both sides fuller than the binder's construction anticipated when Maria fitted me in October. I hold it in place for a moment, checking by feel. Better. Not perfect.
I check the liner - the discharge clear and slippery, the egg-white consistency I recognize now as the ovulation window. Another week or so before the heaviness starts building.
---
The Sarah planning session is at two. The Aldermere account renewed over the spring and has been running since. This is the first proper planning session of the new year - the Q2 media mix, a creative recommendation I've been building since last week. Planning is different from renewal. Renewal is defensive. Planning is expansive.
Sarah comes on with her planner and her CFO. I take it as a good sign.
I run it the way I used to run things - ahead of her questions, precise about the data, present in the room in a way I haven't always managed this past year. The creative recommendation lands better than I expected. The CFO asks two questions and I have both answers.
Sarah goes quiet in the way she gets quiet when she's decided something. "Send me the campaign assets," she says. "I want to see what adaptation would actually look like."
The call ends at two-forty. I sit in the empty conference room after, the January light coming through the window at its low afternoon angle, falling across the table in a long stripe.
---
Linda passes me in the corridor when I come out. She glances at my face - the account coordinator will have already told her how the call went - and gives me a single nod without slowing down.
---
Mark appears at my cubicle at four-thirty. He leans against the partition with an ease he's managed to achieve around me over the past few months.
"You look good today," he says. Not a come-on. Just an observation, offered and left there. "Like you're back."
"Good call this afternoon," I say.
He nods. He doesn't ask about the call. That's not what he meant and we both know it.
We talk for a few minutes - a campaign he heard about, a client coming up for renewal in the spring. The kind of conversation that doesn't require anything from either of us.
He's pushing off the partition to leave when it hits - the familiar twinge, low on the right side, the one that comes around this point in the month. Sharp enough to make me stop. My hand goes to my lower right abdomen without my deciding to put it there.
Mark stops. His eyes go to my hand, to my face, back to my hand.
"Is it-" He tilts his head slightly toward where my hand is. Leaves the question where it is.
The cramp holds for another ten seconds and then begins to ease. I exhale slowly.
"Yeah," I say.
He looks at me for a moment - not with alarm, not with the careful performance of not-noticing he used to manage, not with pity. Just the steady regard of someone who has known me for years and is still here.
"Okay," he says, and pushes off the partition and goes.
---
I finish the performance review form at five-forty-five. The field asking for a statement of professional development over the review period has been blank since three. I've been doing this job for over a decade. The form wants me to describe what I've learned this year and the honest answer would take more than a field.
I write something about client retention and advanced planning methodology. It's accurate. I submit it and close my laptop and pick up my gym bag.
Outside the window the city is going dark, the January afternoon collapsing early. The bare trees just shapes against the lit windows beyond.
---
Kim is already at the free weights when I come in. I drop my bag in the men's locker room - toilet stall to change, the usual - and come out in sweats and the hoodie, zipped over the athletic shirt and sports bra underneath.
The hoodie is doing less work than it used to. The sports bra compresses but doesn't flatten the way the binder does, and what's there now redistributes rather than disappears, the outline there at the sides when I move. I keep the hoodie on and start with dumbbell curls.
The arm work is clean enough. The strength reduced from a year ago - the upper body leaner now - but I've made my peace with that. What's changed is the tissue on the inside of my upper arms making contact at the top of each curl, the hoodie fabric catching and pulling with each rep. I've been flaring my elbows slightly to compensate, an adjustment I started making sometime in November without deciding to.
Kim watches my form and doesn't comment.
Tricep pushdowns at the cable station. Three sets each, not much talking, which is how we work.
Then the preacher curl bench.
I settle into the seat with the awareness of someone who has learned what to expect from it. The vinyl edge pressing up between my thighs, the forward lean, the weight of my body distributing against the padding. First set - controlled, the bicep loading cleanly. The seat pressure is immediate, the wetness building as a mechanical consequence of position and pressure. I breathe through it. I've managed this on this bench before.
Second set. By the fourth rep I look down and the sweats have gone dark at my crotch, the cotton clinging.
I rack the dumbbell and stay seated.
Kim comes around the bench. She looks down once, looks back up.
"Okay," she says. Not a question. "Come on."
"I'm fine."
"You're not going back out there like that." She tilts her head toward the women's locker room. "I've got spare leggings in my bag."
---
I stop in front of the women's locker room door.
"We don't need to make a whole thing of this," I say.
"Nobody's making a thing of it," Kim says. "You need dry clothes and I have dry clothes." She pushes the door open. "Come on."
I go in.
The air is different immediately - warmer, more humid, vanilla body wash and shampoo underneath the sweat. Women in various states of undress move through the space with the ease of people who aren't calculating anything. A woman stands at the bench with a towel, rubbing her hair dry, her back bare, completely unselfconscious. Another is pulling a sports bra over her head. A third sits on the bench in underwear, scrolling her phone, one knee up.
I'm aware of all of it at once - the bare skin, the bodies, the intimacy of the space - and something stirs that I don't want to examine too closely, the arousal compound from the bench session meeting the visual input and producing heat low in my stomach before I can stop it. I keep my face neutral. I keep my eyes moving.
But nobody looks up. Nobody recalibrates. Nobody tracks me across the room. I'm just someone who came in.
The two things exist simultaneously: the heat I'm trying to manage, and the strange comfort of not being seen as wrong here.
Kim goes to her locker and pulls out a pair of black leggings. She holds them out.
I take them. I look toward the stalls at the far wall and then at the bench, and the woman who has moved her bag without ceremony, and the other woman who has finished with her hair and is standing talking to someone three lockers down.
I take off my hoodie and athletic shirt to cool down and peel the sweats off while standing up.
Nobody looks. The woman with the phone shifts slightly to give me room and goes back to her screen.
I pull the leggings on - Kim's, close enough in size - and the fabric settles over my thighs and hips. Clean and dry. The relief is immediate and uncomplicated.
Kim folds the wet sweats and tucks them in her locker. "Twenty more minutes," she says. "You up for it?"
"Yeah," I say.
We go back out to the floor, the hoodie zipped. The leggings fitted enough that the hoodie hem sitting at my hip doesn't cover much, but I keep it on anyway.
Four minutes into the tricep work the heat under the hoodie becomes unreasonable. I stop between sets and look at myself in the mirror along the far wall.
The leggings. The fitted athletic shirt visible below the hoodie hem. The hoodie itself, zipped, not doing enough to disguise my curves.
I unzip it. Pull it off. Drop it over the cable machine handle.
The athletic shirt follows the sports bra, the outline there, the shirt fitted enough that nothing about it reads as anything other than what it is. I pick up my water bottle and go back to the cables.
The last twenty minutes are different without the hoodie.
A man at the lat pulldown looks up when I walk past and doesn't look away when I don't make eye contact. He runs the full inventory - legs, hips, waist, chest, face - and holds it a beat. It doesn't read the same way male attention used to read. Before it was comparative, the gym floor measuring itself against itself. This is something else. I note it and keep moving.
Two women near the squat rack glance over when I set up at the cable station. One of them says something quiet to the other, her eyes moving from my waist to my shoulders to my waist again, the kind of look women give each other's bodies - not hostile, not admiring exactly, more like inventory. The other glances at her own reflection and then back at me, a brief comparison made and filed. I recognize it because Emily does it sometimes, looking at other women on the street. I've just never been on this side of it before.
---
I reach for the hoodie and remember with a small drop in the stomach that my gym bag is still in the men's locker room. Keys. Wallet. Street clothes.
I zip the hoodie back up, pull it down as far as it goes, and push through the door with my chin down.
But the leggings are not the sweats.
The sweats had volume, the loose cotton breaking my silhouette from the waist down into something ambiguous. The leggings follow every inch from waist to ankle - the curve of the hip continuous, the inward taper at the knee, and between the legs the fabric flat and smooth in a way that men's clothing is not, my vulva's contour visible as a simple absence of the bulk that should be there. And the hoodie, even zipped, follows the line of what's underneath it on both sides in a way that it didn't ten months ago.
Two men at the sinks. Both look up when I come in. Both hold the look a beat longer than normal.
I go to locker 27B without hurrying. The combination. The door. I reach in and take my gym bag off the hook.
A man comes out of the shower stall as I'm closing the locker - towel around his waist, headed for his locker a few doors down. He drops the towel without looking, the automatic ease of a men's locker room, reaches into his locker for his underwear. Then he turns.
He grabs the towel back up so fast he fumbles it, catches it, gets it secured around his waist with both hands and stands there staring at me with an expression suspended between outrage and genuine embarrassment, not sure which one he's entitled to.
I shoulder the bag and walk to the door. Something clarifies in me as I go - something about how the world receives you now, what you are in it - that is simultaneously disorienting and, under everything, unmistakable.
---
My posture changes the minute I enter the women's locker room, the tension relaxes. Kim is already out of the shower, my wet sweats in her locker, the room doing what it was doing when we left - women moving through it with the same easy unselfconsciousness. The woman who was toweling her hair is dressed now. New women have arrived, post-workout, a current of activity running through the space.
I find an empty locker, stow my bag, and take a curtained shower stall at the far end.
The curtain clips shut. The warm water, the private space, the absence of any reason to time my movements against anyone else's. I stand under it and let my shoulders drop.
I take longer than I need to.
When I turn the water off I reach for the towel over the top of the curtain and stand there for a moment watching the women visible in the gap at the bottom - their feet moving past on the tile, the ease of the room. I've seen them wrap their towels - across the chest, tucked under the arm, the whole thing staying up through some mechanism I've observed but never had reason to learn. I try it now, the towel across my chest, tucking the end in. The breast tissue holds it on both sides, the fabric propped up by what's there now in a way that should work.
I unclip the curtain and step out holding my sweaty workout clothes in one hand.
The towel drops immediately.
Not slowly. Just gone, pooled on the tile, the tuck having held for approximately one step. I'm standing in the middle of the locker room with the towel around my ankles.
A few glances. Not many. The woman at the locker nearest me looks up, takes in the situation, and looks back at her locker with the expression of someone who has witnessed minor towel failures before. Nobody says anything. Nobody thinks I don't belong here.
I pick the towel up and wrap it around my waist instead, the familiar way. My chest uncovered, which is new, but the room doesn't seem to have an opinion about it. I walk to my locker and get dressed.
Kim is waiting near the exit, bag over her shoulder, watching me work out the locker combination with damp fingers.
"Learn to tuck," she says.
---
Read the illustrated version of this chapter, with images of Mike at the office and in the men's and women's locker rooms at the gym. Subscribers get access to chapters weeks ahead and to exclusive stories and other content, as well as the ability to vote on future stories.
