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Title: Uniforming (Made to Seem) (2/5)
Part one.
Growing up in Chicago – even if it was one of the outlying neighborhoods instead of the city itself, something most people didn’t assume to be the case – meant, among other things, the ability to move inside a city population without any trouble thanks to years of childhood training with public transportation, public schools, and market crowds. This was just like the time she’d moved here after her residency, down to packing the measuring cups. Weeding through everything she wasn’t going to take with her wasn’t quite the same as weeding through what she wouldn’t need anymore: everyone ate off plates but not everyone wore skirts. There wasn’t much reason for her to lug them all the way across the country, though, not when she could buy a new set of just about everything she needed when she got there. It was plenty annoying to sort through the closet and pull out the heavy winter coats she’d just bought a couple of months ago. Seattle didn’t get enough snow to make packing them worth it. She’d been glad to have them but it felt like she was throwing money away by getting rid of them so soon. Boxes of sentimental and necessary objects started to accumulate in the living room, one at a time, as she went through the different rooms trying to find what wouldn’t be worth keeping around.
The tampons in the bathroom, though, that’d been pretty surprising. She’d thought she’d gotten rid of everything. She’d been digging through the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get all the cleaning supplies out of there when she’d reached in and pulled out a half-full box of tampons. She knew she’d gotten the ones in the cupboard above the toilet, in her bedroom closet, in her locker at work, and the emergency ones in her purses and pack – she’d really thought she’d gotten them all. It’d been there for a while, though, so she must’ve bought it and forgotten about it sometime in the last couple of years.
Well, this was embarrassing. She’d really thought she’d gotten rid of everything. It was enough to make her stop and stand there for a moment, just staring at it in her hand.
She shrugged it off, laughing to herself, as she threw the box down into the trash and pulled the bag closed tight.
She fished it out later and dropped it off in the locker room the day before she left – there wasn’t much reason to just throw all of them away when other people could still use them.
-
Growing up in Chicago – even if it was one of the outlying neighborhoods instead of the city itself, something most people didn’t assume to be the case – meant, among other things, the ability to move inside a city population without any trouble thanks to years of childhood training with public transportation, public schools, and market crowds. Adjusting to Rochester had been easier than she’d thought, and Princeton was more of the same, more or less. Seattle still wasn’t as big as Chicago, but moving back to a place where she had to elbow her way through a crowd felt more comfortable than most people probably assumed to be the case.
Besides, expected crowd behaviors were the same for everyone. There wasn’t a chance to slip up when everyone was supposed to do the same thing, like avoid eye contact and keep their hands to themselves.
She settled on the third of five apartments she saw in her first two full days. It’d taken nearly a week to drive across the country, so by the time she got there all her stuff was ready and waiting at the post office for her to pick up and drive over to her new place. Furniture was next, and then a weekend’s worth of moving-in errands, then right after dropping a fifteen-cent stamped tourist postcard of the Puget Sound into a mailbox, starting work bright and early Tuesday morning. She’d have been happy enough to start Monday, but the hospital apparently preferred to do new employee orientation in large groups instead of one-on-one sessions. She grabbed a blank nametag, wrote “Cameron” on it, and got a seat near the back, finally getting something out of being taller.
Looking around the room, she took a quick headcount: out of the thirty-one people here, only four of them including her were male, which was about typical for the current professional demographics. The lecture itself was more of the same, nothing especially unusual that she hadn’t already heard somewhere else. How to set up your phone, information about benefits, safety plans and e-mail tips – half the time she listened and half the time she read through the brochures trying to find something interesting.
What was worth paying attention to was the lecture on how to avoid sexual harassment. It would’ve been more of the same – don’t tease the minority gender or your employees, and okay, what she’d done with House might well have been teasing on that first count – if it wasn’t for the fact that she had to listen to a different set of instructions now. She glanced around at the other men, all of them looking a little bored – well, they’d had to listen to it before. She shifted in her chair to make it look like she’d heard it before too, and even slouched a bit. It was the expected behavior, after all.
Lunch was pretty typical: sandwiches, salad, fruit, pastries, tea. Cameron took a step forward and reached for a sandwich, then remembered the right behavior for this situation and stepped back to move farther back in the line. Her stomach wasn’t happy about the new wait, but she could manage another few minutes.
Was she supposed to make small talk over the food? She couldn’t remember. That was the trouble with first impressions: she could only make them once, and she didn’t want to screw it up by doing it incorrectly. So she got her sandwiches and sat down before anyone could say hello. Yes, it was vital that she interact with her future co-workers, but she knew she could put that off until her stomach felt calmer with something in it. Mingling could wait a few minutes.
Conversation came when she got back up to get some tea; specifically, it came from a shorter – much shorter – woman ripping open a packet to get at the bag. “Hey there.”
“Oh, hello.” She smiled as she made eye contact, letting the other woman lead the situation.
“Can you believe it? Like we can’t just read the manual to dial for an outside line.”
“I guess they want to make sure they’ve got themselves covered.”
This got a laugh out of the other woman as she poured the water. “I wish. We’ll still get people complaining about what they could’ve learned already.” She stuck her hand out. “Olivia Molaro.”
“Oh, ah,” She wiped her hand on her jacket before sticking it out, hoping that’d cover the hesitation, “Cameron.” Molaro peered at her name tag. “Just Cameron, please.”
“Well, if you insist.” It was a little surprising how small her hand was, and how she tried to get a grip even so. “So what’re you here for?”
“Immunology. You?”
“Angiology. And by the way, you’ve got some excellent veins.” She jerked her head towards Cameron’s hands, and she had to glance down to take a look at them. She’d never considered them that way, but then her specialty wasn’t in blood and she couldn’t donate for another six months.
“Thank you.”
“They’re quite nice.”
She shrugged. “I’m happy with them.”
Molaro stared for a moment, then went on as she moved back towards the chairs with Cameron following, “And where’re you from?”
“New Jersey.”
That got a whistle. “Long ways away.”
“I guess. I’m from Chicago, so I can kind of make it out to be just halfway across the country.”
This time it got a laugh. “It’s still a long way to go.”
“Very true.” She held herself back from talking about her boss or former co-worker – House usually hid the fact he’d been all over the world if he could, and even if Chase couldn’t always mask his accent he never brought it up if he could help it or if it’d help him get a date.
Cameron blew on her tea to cool it and took a sip while Molaro talked about coming from Nevada and adjusting to the rain, and all the tips she’d gotten from staying in Oregon. Lunch ended pretty fast after that, and almost all of the rest of the afternoon was more of the same.
“Okay, a nice big smile now.” The photographer looked frazzled enough Cameron didn’t try to make small talk; she just thought about interrupting starfish and held the expression. The light flashed, and she got down from the stool. “You’ll pick up your ID card over there.”
At the desk, there was something new. “Doctor Cameron? There’s a bit of a problem.”
“I thought I filled out everything.”
The secretary smiled and shook his head. “On your form right here, you didn’t put down a gender.”
She drew back and tried not to show it. “I must have missed that.”
He smiled without his eyes and shrugged. “It was just one entry, but we do need it.”
“Can I ask what for?”
“Just to make sure we have everything in place. Regulations and all that.”
Cameron opened her mouth, closed it, then asked, “Could I see another ID card?”
“Sure.” He handed it over; she turned it over in her hands.
“And this is all confidential information?”
“Yes.” He wanted to get the line moving, and so did she, so she took a pen and filled in the correct box.
He took a glance at what she’d filled in and his mouth suddenly turned down. “Here’s your ID. Have a good day.” She took it without touching his hands.
The immunology department was on the second floor, across the hall from the main pathology laboratory. Her office didn’t have any windows, but she could work with it, and spent a few minutes getting her frustrations over general public pity out of her system by pushing her desk and bookcases around. At least the name on the door said “A. Cameron” like she’d asked. After three years of working for House she’d learned how to be properly paranoid.
Once her desk was in place and her bookshelves were too, she adjusted her tie on reflex, smoothed back her hair, and went to introduce herself to the rest of her department. Everyone seemed happy enough to see her, offering advice for where to eat out in her neighborhood and where their husbands shopped for their clothes.
That night, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, she jerked awake when she realized Molaro must have been trying to flirt with her.
Oh, shit. Talk about making a good first impression, all right.
Thankfully tracking Molaro down wasn’t hard: all she needed to do was check in the staff directory. Getting the words together to apologize was trickier, but ultimately useless.
“You couldn’t tell?”
“No.”
“You really couldn’t tell?” Cameron just shook her head. “Well, that’s – I mean, how come you couldn’t tell?”
She shook her head, trying to come up with something polite, settling on, “I’m not used to women flirting with me.”
Molaro snorted. “Where did you go to school? The one I went to was six-to-one in favor of the guys. They never had to worry about getting a date.”
Cameron hadn’t had to worry about it either, but she’d never been afraid to ask for one and had almost never heard anyone say no. She decided to go with the truth. “The thing is I got married pretty young. My – my spouse died just a few months after we got married.”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” She looked so apologetic it almost hurt.
“You don’t need to be. I mean, they died five years ago, but it, it was pretty intense.”
“Oh, Cameron.” Someone peeked around the shelf and Molaro shooed her away with a firm glance and wave of her hand, leaving them in privacy again. “I’m really sorry. Is there anything –”
“You don’t need to do anything. I just wanted to explain to you.”
She nodded, mouth set. “I appreciate that.” She looked right into Cameron’s eyes. “I’d love it if I could apologize by offering to take you out to dinner, but I don’t think that’s a polite option anymore.”
Cameron smiled. This time she knew what was going on, and how to deal with it. “There are worse ways to get dates. But how about I take the invitation and let you know when I feel up to it?”
“I suppose that’ll work.”
She didn’t want to resort to it, but took the easy way out: glancing at her watch, commenting on the time, and hurrying upstairs to her office, where she collapsed in her chair for nearly ten minutes.
-
Thankfully, Molaro wasn’t one to gossip, and neither were her co-workers. After that morning, Cameron doubled her efforts to fit in, and quickly became known by the reputation she’d wanted, as one of the hardest-working doctors in the hospital.
She ran labs, wrote up treatment plans, kept her door open for consults, charted superbly, and did her rounds without complaint or fail or tardiness. She didn’t go so far as to bring dumplings for the immunology break room each week but was never too busy to say hello or good morning or spare a few minutes for them to chat, even on days she wasn’t feeling quite so social. She understood it was necessary, because she had to work twice as hard as she used to in order to get where she wanted to go. It was how her world worked now.
Her sister sent her a pair of sunlamps, and one went in her bedroom and the other went on top of a bookcase, giving the whole of their small rooms more of a feeling of being real living spaces. She got art prints at museums, hung a mirror in her office to give it the illusion of space, and stocked her fridge with imported Californian meat. She bought a decent pair of running shoes and got used to getting up early enough for foggy morning runs, and after a lot of deliberation decided against physical therapy in the hospital and just got a yoga tape. She still qualified for it, but she didn’t want to deal with anyone she knew finding out what she was doing and why, even if it’d still be useful. Figuring out where her body was in space still wasn’t something she’d mastered: every so often she’d find a bruise in the shower and wonder how that happened. She could only answer that question about half the time.
She’d bought a Little Blue Planet guide to the city and tried to use it, ticking off the important scenes and sights all residents were supposed to be fluent with; instead, most of her weekends and free time that didn’t involve work or some sort of exercise she did as little as possible. Most days she felt more worn out from having to hold herself just right or constantly checking how she was talking to the other doctors than from the running and weightlifting.
And it wasn’t that she wasn’t talking to them, or eating lunch with them – when she realized Zeno’s paradox applied to her now, for never being able to get back to the place where she could just walk into the lounge, sit down, and jump into the conversation without even thinking about it. For anyone, in any room.
-
Cameron didn’t usually remember them. She’d wake up, realize the sheets were sticky, and got embarrassed even though there wasn’t anyone around to know it. This night was different.
She’d been at a party – it’d been in a huge house, like something from a movie, and she’d walked through a garden to get to the kitchen, where she’d stolen bread off a plate and the waiter made her to apologize to the chef. She’d gone away and then someone had taken her hand and took her upstairs. She hadn’t looked at his face but his hands were so much bigger than hers, she remembered that. He’d taken her to his bedroom, laid her down on the bed – she hadn’t taken off her dress but she wasn’t wearing anything – and he’d rubbed her breasts in his hands and dipped his hands down her hips and she’d wanted something deep inside herself that pushed and ached and she’d wanted him to go inside and he pressed his hand up against her cunny and –
She woke up sweating, her penis slowly softening in her pajamas. She’d never remembered one before, and she wished she hadn’t remembered this one, either. Wiping her hands over her face, kicking the blankets off, she stumbled out of bed and to her knees, rocking back and forth and trying not to cry.
This time she took a hot shower before she changed the sheets, as hot as she could stand, and took another one after her morning run.
-
She’d learned the hard way to keep her door closed; if she didn’t, people read it as an invitation to come in without asking if she had a minute to share. It wasn’t something she was used to, having to set that boundary – she’d forgotten to not assume it was there to begin with. So when Caletti knocked and asked if she could come in for a consult without just stepping inside, Cameron took a moment to sigh in relief before opening the door.
Caletti filled her in on her patient’s symptoms while Cameron scrolled through the file’s charts – admitted with fever, joint pain, loss of feeling in the hands, and dangerously fast weight loss. “It’s not moving like lupus, but we’re not sure what it’s moving like.”
Cameron held herself back from channeling her boss, reread a couple of notes, and felt the pieces lock into place. “It’s polyarteritis nodosa.”
“That’s a pretty unusual diagnosis.”
Instead of just telling her, she scrolled back up to one of the charts and pointed to what she wanted to talk about. “There’s no family history of hypertension, no previous symptoms of it, and this goes back eight years – she doesn’t even have elevated sodium levels. She also doesn’t have dry eyes, weird bruises, or any depression or anxiety that wouldn’t come from being in a hospital.”
“You’re sure about it?”
“Sure enough that I think you ought to get a biopsy and check her creatinine levels.”
She was right, of course, and unlike her old boss didn’t go out of her way to make sure everyone knew she’d saved someone’s life by recognizing the disease for what it was. She’d done her job, so she went back to her office to get some more of her next article drafted. She could find someone to proof it when she’d finished the rough draft.
A couple of hours later, after she’d shrugged on her raincoat and locked her door, Farkas waylaid her in the hall. “Hey, Cameron.” She was in a better-cut dress than usual, something Cameron wouldn’t have worn to work on a day she might’ve had someone vomit on her.
“Oh, hello.”
She glanced around like she was checking for something, then looked back to Cameron’s face. “Listen, Chen’s got a group going to go out for drinks if you wanted to come along.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll still go out for drinks, but you won’t be coming with me. Your loss.”
It was a very tempting offer, and the idea of going out to have drinks with someone for the first time in an embarrassingly large number of months sounded really good, but at the same time given the language she’d used, “I just want to be clear about one thing. Are you asking me out on a date?”
Farkas looked around again. “If you’re coming along, then yeah. If not, then I’ll be going out for drinks with some friends.”
Cameron smiled and, for a moment, considered going into some sort of soliloquy about asking friends to perform smokescreen favors and the courage in asking outright, but skipped it, going right to lying. “I’d love to.” She didn’t want to go, not really, but she knew if she did this it’d be easier to talk to them in the future. Besides, if everyone was drunk, a few slips in behavior could be forgiven.
The bar was three blocks away, someplace specializing in imports and mixed drinks. Everyone else sat at the bar, leaving the two of them to their own table. Farkas got a Belgian white and Cameron got a Valentine’s Massacre. She didn’t like her drinks that sweet, but she knew it’d look weird if she ordered a beer. She took a small sip and waited for Farkas to start the conversation. She hoped it wouldn’t fall to a ‘do you like movies because I like movies’ middle-school level of embarrassment. And it wasn’t as though she would mind talking about the movies – she hadn’t seen anything in a theater for ages but so what? – because it meant she’d be talking to someone outside of work about something which wasn’t work.
She’d talked to Chase about this sort of thing once, about four months into her fellowship. Her theory was that being a good doctor meant you didn’t have much time for any social life until you got out of med school and into actual paying jobs. This meant that unless you were some sort of genius you didn’t have much in terms of conversation skills that didn’t involve the human body breaking in one way or another.
Given that Farkas was also an immunologist and they both knew what’d been going on in the department that week, there wasn’t even much gossip to share. Cameron took a larger sip.
What the hell. “So how do we do this?”
Farkas took a drink. “I think we just start talking.”
“Okay.” Sadly, the Massacre didn’t get better the more of it she drank. “So do you like movies?”
“Nah, I prefer TV. Fits my schedule better.”
“Yeah. There’s a bunch of shows I keep wanting to catch up on when they hit the networks, but I keep forgetting.”
“What did you watch?”
“Global Frequency, Brimstone, Traveler, Wonderfalls, John ¬– um, yes?”
Farkas was smiling at her in a way Cameron had come to learn meant she was doing something wrong, but not so wrong she needed reprimanding. “Those aren’t shows I’d expect you to like.”
“What’s wrong with wanting a little plot?”
“I’d just thought you’d watch Grand or Andy Richter Controls the Universe, something like that.”
“Ah.” She really didn’t like how Farkas was looking at her right now. “Well, it’s, I always babysat my little sister, so I kind of picked up on that sort of show. I never really got into dramas.”
“Oh!” Cameron knew by now that was a good sort of smile. And she hadn’t needed to lie, either. “That’s so nice, that you did that.”
“Well, my mother was happy about it.” She smiled, took another drink, and held herself back from going on about anything more personal. As it turned out, Farkas liked most of the same shows, and almost immediately promised she’d copy them over for Cameron to watch later. At least she didn’t pull Cameron over to everyone else at the bar to show off the rarity of a man who liked shows marketed to women.
Sure enough, two days later, Farkas passed six burned discs into her hand, one for each season of the shows she had that Cameron had missed. She promised she’d start catching up that weekend – “I don’t have any outstanding patients right now, and there isn’t much I –”
“You work too hard, you know that?” She shook her head. “Why do you think I’m going to invite you out again tonight?”
“Wait, I’m sorry, you will be?”
“I can’t invite you out for dinner before lunch. Hospital regs.”
Okay, this wasn’t something Cameron was comfortable with. “Maria, I’m really glad you want to take me out to dinner –”
“And here it comes.” Farkas sighed. “‘I think you’re great but let’s be friends.’ I get it all the time. You’d think I’d stop dating from the hospital, but it’s hard to get out and meet people. I know, a man’s gotta work hard to get ahead in this field, but jeez. I should be used to it by now.”
“Look I mean – no, yes, I mean, no, I don’t want to be involved with you romantically, but yes, I would like to be friends. With you. Really.”
“You like me but you’re not looking for romance.”
“Right.”
“And you do want to be friends.”
“Right.” She looked away, face tight. Cameron didn’t know what to do to make that particular expression go away, so she kept on even though she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to. “Look, the last job I had, I slept with – with someone in my department, and it was good but it was, it got weird. And I don’t want this to get weird.”
“So it’d be okay if I was in surgery or pediatrics?”
“Yes. I mean – look, I don’t want to make it –”
Farkas held up her hand and Cameron obediently stopped blabbering on. “I understand what you’re trying to say.” She looked away, then back to Cameron, pointing at the discs she realized she was gripping tight enough to hurt her knuckles. “Then watch those this weekend so we can talk on Monday.”
“I will.”
When she left work that night, she felt the same sort of endorphin high she usually got after a heavy workout or run – she’d done something good and beneficial, and she wouldn’t be so severely isolated from her co-workers any more. She’d done it genuinely, correctly, the way a man was supposed to act in this situation. And she hadn’t even needed to come out about herself to do it.
The brief idea of the relationship, though, had stirred up something. Men tended to prefer romances and dramas and women liked heavy plots and the supernatural, but the idea of finding love on the other side of the galaxy or fighting through Hell and back to get it was the sort of trope everyone used.
That Tuesday, heading towards the lounge, she heard Farkas chatting with Rigazzi and Magpiong from the doorway: “I get what he was talking about,” she laughed. “I can’t blame him – that sort of thing’s harder for men. They can’t divorce their feelings from what they do.”
Cameron flattened herself against the wall, trying to keep her breathing down as Magpiong chuckled. “Tell me about it. My boyfriend, he’s great, but try criticizing his cooking without getting him into what’s on the plate.”
“It’s weird, though – Cameron usually takes this stuff pretty well. He really holds himself around people. I mean, he’s usually good at talking to people.”
“Maybe he was right,” Rigazzi piped in. “Maybe he really isn’t looking for romance right now.”
“You think I should wait for him to be ready?”
“I think you should just find someone else to go after.”
Women. Farkas meant Cameron was good at talking to women. Of course she was good: she’d been talking like one her whole life. She walked back down the hallway, turned around, and walked back, nearly stomping down in her wing-tips to make more noise than was really necessary to let them know she was coming.
This time, they looked up when she pushed the door open and gave a generic “Good morning” as greeting as she made her way to the kettle.
“Hey,” Farkas said. “How’s your viewing coming?”
“I finished the second season of Brimstone last night.”
“Tell me that finale didn’t make you cry.”
“I would, but I’d be lying.”
Rigazzi was flipping through TV channels. By the time the water was boiling, she’d settled on a news broadcast about the three Presidents Kennedy celebrating the youngest’s birthday. Cameron watched while her tea steeped, then politely declined Farkas’ invitation to stay and watch with them.
She considered calling someone she didn’t have to act with – maybe her mom, maybe Wilson, she could look up Chase in Galveston and surprise him, she could see how her sister was doing. After several minutes of thinking about it, she switched over to staring at the wall. Maybe the fact that she wasn’t crying behind a locked door was a sign of improved coping abilities. Then again, what she’d heard – well, she didn’t know what men said when they gossiped about women who didn’t want to get into relationships with them. She knew they did, but she’d never made any effort to hang out with the nursing staff, or anyone outside of her department, for that matter. There were rules for what men did, and what doctors did, and sometimes they went up against each other.
-
Washing short hair still wasn’t something she was used to – she’d reach the top of her head and every so often be surprised there wasn’t anything more to lather up. It wasn’t like shaving in the morning, where she’d added a new thing to her morning schedule and get up a few minutes early to make sure there was time for everything it needed to go right. And it didn’t matter that nobody saw what she did, because she knew she had to do everything, from the hot towel to the aftershave. Which embarrassingly smelled like cucumber, but that was the in scent for modern men. Everyone was a slave to fashion.
In the shower, she hadn’t needed to change her routine too much. She still washed her hair and scrubbed behind her ears and between her toes. Mostly, now she checked what bruises were new and how the old ones were healing, and didn’t look right down there.
Some days that was easier than others. She clenched her jaw and looked up at the ceiling, trying not to think about what was going on between her legs. All she’d been doing was enjoying the warm water and thinking about the last episodes of Journeyman with the hero shirtless again and she didn’t know how but she hadn’t noticed it getting attention and suddenly when she turned the water off to shampoo her hair she realized she had an erection.
Not a big one, though. Just one that said it was there. She could turn the cold water back on and it’d go away right away, but for now, inside the steam it didn’t feel too bad. She was warm all over, and it was warm too. Just…warm. That was it.
She grabbed the shampoo bottle, tipped it to squeeze some out, holding it in the air before putting it back. It’d been a long day yesterday and she hadn’t slept well last night, and the hot air was making her feel just a bit light-headed. Just a bit, just enough that she didn’t want to turn on the cold water and trade a hard-on for a headache.
Hard-on. It was hard, and it was on her, and it was turned on, all right. Still not all the way, but on its way there.
God, she could practically hear House cheering her on, telling her to man up and try it out at least once.
She closed her eyes and gently reached down, like it’d get scared away if she made any sudden moves. She’d gone down here a couple of times – scratching an itch through layers of clothing, slipping when she washed her chest – and it wasn’t like she never touched it, but she’d never done anything like this before.
Okay, there was that one time she hadn’t woken up all the way and ended up on her stomach and rubbing against the mattress through her pajamas and the sheets, but she hadn’t touched herself and she hadn’t come and it only lasted for a few minutes before she got up to get the frozen peas.
Right now, she was just…touching it. Just holding it, and not doing anything else. And that was okay: she didn’t have to move her hand to feel its weight, its heft. She still didn’t look down as she gripped it softer, then tighter, just to see how it felt when she did that. She hadn’t been expecting anything major to happen, just for it to maybe get a bit harder, but as it turned out it felt good when she held it tighter. It felt warmer. Her breathing picked up, sharp breaths coming in and out. She gripped it tight again; she felt it move in her hand, without her doing anything, she felt blood move to her face and it must be moving from her legs because they were shaking and she had to brace her left hand against the tiles as she gripped it tight again because it felt so fucking good. Just good, good like rubbing her clit her pretty little nub and this didn’t give her that same pushing shining hurting pressure between her legs but it was still hurting pressure between her legs and she knew that. It was almost what she knew.
She held it tight, moved her hand up and down, now really up and down now that it was turned on all the way. All the way hard, all the way ready, oh fuck. She knew she should let go and turn the water on cold full blast but oh fuck it was pressure, pressure, tight pressure outside of her and she’d never felt anything like it in her life before not even when she dreamed –
She gasped, heard a sound, and blinked her eyes open. It couldn’t be over that fast, except it was, with what was on her hand and splattered against the wall as proof of that. She didn’t dare collapse even though she really wanted to; instead, she reached over and turned the water back on. Warm, not cold; she didn’t need cold water to make it go away. She’d done that just fine on her own.
Watching the semen and all its ingredients wash down the drain, scrubbing underneath her fingernails, she didn’t feel like her body was humming, mostly like she’d just run ten miles without a break.
As a respectable scientist and doctor she knew that as experiments went this wasn’t a good one at all. She’d started out with a strange set of variables without any baseline, she hadn’t tried starting from the beginning but just jumped in, she hadn’t made any effort to track her data. But on the other hand, the one which hadn’t done anything, she’d tested it out just fine, and she’d learned that everything worked – and she liked what she’d worked with. It’d worked nicely.
All the wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep for ten hours, but she washed her hair instead, shaved off the night’s beard growth, and got dressed and went into work, grabbing some morning teriyaki take-out because she’d run out of time for breakfast.
If anyone knew what she’d just done – if there was any change in how she walked, if something showed up on her face when she glanced at people as she walked down the halls – nobody stopped her to ask about it. Which was about the same as not noticing.
-
Men asking women out on dates wasn’t so strange, thankfully, and the way the gender ratio was skewed at hospitals meant people expected her to have plenty of potential dates to choose from and ask out. It wouldn’t do her any good to be a serial womanizer, but she knew she’d been working here long enough to start being properly social. So she went to see Molaro again to take her up on the dinner invitation, who was more than pleased.
“I’ll pick you up around seven on Saturday.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one who picks you up?”
“You could, but I was the one who invited you to start with. That’s how it works these days.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Maybe, but I’m still picking you up. I’ll need your address.” As Cameron was writing, she added, “And I’ll need to know what to call you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“If it’s going to be casual, I can’t keep calling you Cameron. What does the A stand for?”
“A –ah.” She knew she only had a moment to panic and think of something without looking silly, “Al. Al works. Just call me Al.”
It didn’t really work, but it helped her get through the following dinner without too much trouble or having to remember to answer to something like Henry or William or Charles. By the standards of the restaurant guides, it was an excellent dinner, and by Cameron’s measure, the fact that Molaro – Portia, who’d been raised by two English professors – wanted to do it again meant she’d done something right.
The first time out was French food and a getting-to-know-you dinner. The second time, Portia took her to a local production of 1778, and by the fifth time they ended up at her place at the end of the night. This was where Cameron felt herself fall apart a little bit. She knew exactly what was expected of her at this point, and what she should do, but just looking at her at the other side of the couch wasn’t doing anyone any favors.
She tried to remember what she’d wished guys had done, and tried to do it: she scooted over carefully as Portia came closer, she reached out and took her face – God, how had her hands gotten so big? – and leaned in, very gently, and kissed her without opening her mouth. Let her do that if she wanted.
It’d been a long, long time since she’d kissed anyone. It didn’t feel bad to do it again after so long. Her lips were warm, smooth, thin, moving softly to open and let her tongue out to stroke over Cameron’s own lips, and that made her pull back.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” Cameron protested. “It’s fine. Just – I haven’t kissed anyone in a long time, that’s all.”
“Well, you haven’t forgotten how.” She moved back, started kissing again, her mouth opening fast and Cameron reciprocating. She wanted this, this was good, here was a woman with her, that was all good, and this was what she was supposed to be doing. She kept kissing, and it was the kissing and holding someone that felt good, something she hadn’t done in almost a year. And somehow she thought that kissing and holding just about anyone would feel good and it didn’t have to be a woman. Just the being this close to someone.
“You’re not enjoying yourself.” Portia didn’t say it to judge or criticize or condemn, but to express her awareness of Cameron’s state in her words and her feelings about it in her tone.
“No, I am, I swear.”
“No, you’re not.” She pulled away and flopped down on the cushions.
“Okay, you’re right.” Portia looked over at her. “But it’s not you, and it’s not that I still miss my spouse. I don’t know what it is.” She sighed and looked at the print on the far side of the room, cast in abstract shadow from the lampshade. “Maybe we’re just not right for each other. I mean, what do we have in common besides liking French food and musical theater? That’s a friendship, not a romance.”
“I guess so.” She got up, rubbed her eyes, and shook her head.
“I was hoping it’d work out, but it’s been getting…”
“No, I know what you mean.” She jerked her thumb to her kitchen. “You want some tea?”
“Sure.”
Molaro was kind enough to give Cameron a ride back to her place, and to her credit, it wasn’t strange at work. It helped they didn’t see each other too much. She’d also been kind enough to pick Cameron up from work twice, but that was mostly for Cameron’s benefit under the pretense of Molaro knowing where they’d eat that night.
She kept thinking about what she’d stumbled onto during that kiss on the couch. Just being up close with someone, and how it’d be good to get there again.
-
There were plenty of bars in the city that the Little Blue guide had tagged for what she wanted to do, but she didn’t have anything to wear for them. She pushed suit after suit aside in her closet, dismissed her workout clothes out of hand, and finally dug out the first two pairs of male shirts and pants she’d bought, down at the bottom of one of her drawers, that she hadn’t worn in nearly a year.
She showered, shaved, dabbed on the perfume, buffed and shined her nails, and hit the bar scene early. But not too early; she knew what she was doing, and she’d have to wait a bit for the timing to be best. She nursed her Snowball Fight for a half-hour before she went to talk to anyone; fortunately, drinking alone wasn’t a strange thing to do, no matter what gender you were.
The bar was almost all full – psoriasis, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, rhinovirus, Huntington’s – with people alone and in pairs and one louder group off in the back. There was one woman alone a couple of people away that Cameron took a better look at when she got up to use the bathroom, and going from her body language she probably had a shot at pulling this stunt off.
It turned out to be a lot easier than she’d thought. All she needed to do, really, was remember what she wished men had said to her when she’d been in the same situation, and say those things to her, be kind and nod in the right places, and when she was done with her tirade come right out and make the suggestion. Nancy stared at her, and she said, “It’s just for tonight.”
“And this isn’t some elaborate practical joke.”
“Nope. I just want to fuck you.”
Nancy looked Cameron up and down, pursed her lips, and gulped down the last of her beer. “Okay.”
“Your place.”
“Great.”
“I’ll get a cab.” When she’d been younger, much younger, she’d wished someone had been smart enough to say all this to her, to cut through the crap of greeting cards and badly-written movies so she didn’t have to take the risks to get what she’d wanted.
She tossed a five onto the bar next to the glass. “Right behind you.”
In the taxi, they sat on opposite sides of the backseat, even though everyone in the cab knew what was coming – a necessary pretense. They wound up in Nancy’s living room, a two-bedroom place on the Eastside, with Nancy standing in the middle of the room holding her hands together after throwing her coat and bag onto the sofa. “My roommate’s gone for the weekend.”
“Perfect.”
“You got condoms? There’s some in the…the…”
“No, I’ve got.”
“Okay.” She jerked her thumb to the bedroom. “Let’s get started.” She began to make her way there, undressing as she went; Cameron waited a minute to pull off her shoes and socks before following after, grabbing her shirt and pulling it off over her head the way she’d seen everyone do it in the movies before shucking off her pants. Nancy was already naked and all over her, pushing her down onto the bed, running her fingers through her hair and over her head, strong and warn and good. She grabbed her head in return and pulled her down, kissing her deep and firm, letting her open her mouth first and then running her tongue over Nancy’s own, relishing the taste of the beer and the sharp taste of someone else.
Cameron opened her mouth wider, let Nancy in, let her trust in this strange man. “Al…”
When she said it like that, it sounded like she was trying to say her name. Cameron let out a groan from somewhere low in her chest, felt herself respond the way she was supposed to react to this – that tight pressure outside of herself, the old feeling inverted outward, that same need for being closer. Down between her legs was the smartest thing she had and it always knew what it wanted down there and now that was someone, it was this woman, this Nancy, and right now as far as Cameron knew she needed to be in her. Inside her, deep, in her wet –
Oh, she remembered what she wanted: she growled from a place she didn’t know, flipped Nancy over, and stuck her hand between her legs, finding just the right spot, that strong little spot. Cameron started rubbing, not too hard and not too soft the way she knew from the inside out, using her index finger and letting her middle slip in deeper into her body, right where her penis was telling and demanding it go but not just yet, not until she’d had Nancy come. She’d tried feeling inside herself but this was different, this she had to do just right. She’d always wished a man knew this and she was a man knowing this and she should see it to rights. Nancy started hissing and panting and shaking her hips, Cameron leaned in to kiss as she pressed her hand in deeper, let her feel her hard-on where it pressed against her thigh – Nancy pulled back from the kiss eyes shut tight and whimpered out her climax, soft from her mouth and hard around Cameron’s fingers.
She looked up at Cameron with the face she’d only seen on a few patients. She was thankful, she was grateful.
Cameron smiled back down. “Gimme a sec.” She got up, went back to her pants, and pulled a wrapper out of the pocket, stopping for a moment to take note of her erection: reaching down to heft it, feel its heat and the little bit of fluid leaking out the end. She knew better than to taste it.
Back in bed, she held up her prize, Nancy grinning. “Gimmie.” Cameron rolled onto her back, letting Nancy roll it down and gasping the moment her hand touched her penis, her hips bucking up and her balls suddenly feeling tight too and it was almost too much and she had to pull herself back and hold the pleasure inside. Nancy looked at her curiously; Cameron grabbed her and pulled her on top of her. She got the message, grabbing Cameron’s penis again – and she spend the night happy with nothing but Nancy touching her penis – and pushed it up inside of her. It was just a little bit but it was warm and so much more than she’d thought and she pushed up, wanting and getting more of it and Nancy pushing down and then she was inside and she stared up at Nancy with her mouth wide open trying to breathe.
Nancy started to move, sliding up and down, and Cameron couldn’t do anything but move along with her, trying to follow her and stay inside. Nancy slapped her hands down on Cameron’s shoulders and somehow moved harder and faster and it was more, and Cameron grabbed her waist and jerked her hips and threw her head back and it was the strongest thing the biggest the slamming-shooting pleasure coming right out of her.
She lay back against the pillows. Nancy was still there, looking at her again. Cameron smiled, not having the energy for anything but that, and rubbing one out of her again.
“Let me get that for you.” She pulled off the condom, knotted it off and tossed it aside. Cameron felt sticky, but also too tired to move. Well, move more than roll to the other side of the bed.
Nancy let her use her comb, shared her oatmeal, and called her a taxi. Back in her apartment, Cameron changed into fresh clothes, trying to see if and how she felt different. It’d been fucking spectacular, to say the least, and she wanted to do it again as soon as she could. She would’ve done it again that morning but Nancy got out of bed first.
What she kept turning over in her head, what she loved, was that she’d done something so utterly male, so unquestionably male. And nobody had been able to guess anything else.
-
By now she managed like a natural. She still had to check herself and think about what she was doing, but almost none of it was something she had to stop and think about. She knew how to be careful around patients to put them at ease, how to get herself taken seriously in a conversation, how to say hello depending on whether she was in a restaurant or meeting a prominent Parkinson’s researcher and activist. Some of it was still troubling, things she couldn’t predict – the way she was supposed to sit on a couch was something she still had to check to do right, and usually had to correct.
She was getting so much better at playing the part, and felt so proud of herself for not digging through the freezer anymore, she went up to see Rita Miller. She was an endocrinologist and had called Cameron up to her office about a month ago for a consultation on what turned out to be polymyositis. They’d talked a couple of times since then, casual good-mornings and how-do-you-dos in the elevators and cafeteria. She was a bit older than Cameron, wore her hair in a loose bun most of the time, didn’t have any photographs of people on her desk, and smiled when Cameron came into her office. “Anything I can help you with?”
“One thing. I know this is on short notice, but I hope you can come through for me.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to eat dinner with someone tomorrow night, and I’d like that to be you.”
She knew it was lame, and she could tell Miller didn’t think too much of it either. Cameron also knew to keep her mouth shut, and not break out into a huge smile when Miller said, “Sure. That sounds fun.”
“Great! That’s great,” She pulled in a breath. “Japanese good for you?”
“You’re the one who asked me out. You can pick the place. Just call me to let me know where it is.”
They ended up in a Japanese fusion place near Cameron’s house she hadn’t been to yet but always thought looked good after she’d read the menu posted by the door. Not too many places served cow, which Miller noticed when she opened the menu at the table and scanned down to the main dinner section.
“It’s a good meat,” Cameron assured her. “Tastes just like goat.”
“I know, I’ve had it. Just not in a long time.” She kept reading. “Oh, it’s from Canada. That makes sense.”
“I had it a lot when I was a kid, but not much since then. Sometimes I see it at the butcher shop, but it’s supposed to be hard to work with, so I don’t get it.”
“Leave it to the professionals?”
“Pretty much.”
Miller ended up getting the beef udon; Cameron went for the Dungeness crab. After the waiter took their orders, Miller asked, “So what should I call you?”
Sometimes it was nice to be reminded not everyone had been trained to snoop and spy on everyone else. “Al’s fine.”
“Is that short for Albert? Allen?”
“Just Al.”
Miller paused, then shrugged. “I knew a guy named Max once. Just Max, not Maxwell or Maximilian. I guess it cuts down on paperwork.”
Cameron laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth to hide it. “Not really. It’d be nice if it did, but I’ve gotta sign just as many forms as you do.” More, if anything. “So,” she didn’t want to leave it hanging on paperwork, “how was the conference you went to last month? Portland, right?”
“Yeah, Portland. It rained the whole time, and getting to the hotel from the station was a bear, but they liked my paper on mosaics and the catering was good.” She smiled. “I did get to be a tourist for a couple of hours on Saturday and head out to the Japanese gardens.”
“Tell me about those.” Leaning in, talking about what the other person was enthusiastic about, were good conversational skills no matter what gender you were. Cameron was just happy she could put them to good use and let Rita do the talking at the same time.
“It’s really lush, and they worked the plants with the landscape – you know, the hills and all that. I saw one gardener clipping a bush with these tiny clips,” she held her thumb and forefinger to illustrate, “And there was this crazy thing that went ‘doink,’ water would fill this bamboo piece and it’d fall down and make that sound and go back up. The guide told me it was supposed to scare deer away.” Cameron nodded for her to go on, and she did until the food came, which was when the conversation switched over to what they were eating, which moved to food in the Midwest and food on a coast. This moved over to the fact that nobody had any time to cook anymore.
“I want to, and I know it’s healthier and better, but if I want something hot waiting for me at the end of the day…”
Cameron nodded. “Crockpots. Slow cookers. I got one – um, a little over a year ago, and it’s saved me so many times. A half-hour of chopping everything and I can relax the rest of the day and not have to move if I don’t want to.”
“Really?”
“I still use it. Back when I got it, I got into the habit of cooking for myself, so I just kept with it. I figured with how much I eat, it’s cheaper than ordering in all the time or frozen shepherd’s pies.”
“I’d say so.”
Cameron blushed; she’d eaten nearly all of the tempura and edamame. “I work out a lot.”
Rita shook her head. “How do you have time for all this stuff with all the work you do?”
She considered giving the real answer of not having a personal life but shrugged and said, “I just try to make it work, that’s all.”
“Yeah, but how do you make it work? Do you have some secret?”
“If I did, I’d sell it and retire.”
They kept talking throughout dessert and the short walk back; Rita promised to call Cameron, and even though she wanted to, she made sure not to call her back, because that wasn’t what men did. She was proud of herself for not diving for the phone when she heard it ring, but waited to pick it up after two and answered as casually as she could.
-
Part three.
Growing up in Chicago – even if it was one of the outlying neighborhoods instead of the city itself, something most people didn’t assume to be the case – meant, among other things, the ability to move inside a city population without any trouble thanks to years of childhood training with public transportation, public schools, and market crowds. This was just like the time she’d moved here after her residency, down to packing the measuring cups. Weeding through everything she wasn’t going to take with her wasn’t quite the same as weeding through what she wouldn’t need anymore: everyone ate off plates but not everyone wore skirts. There wasn’t much reason for her to lug them all the way across the country, though, not when she could buy a new set of just about everything she needed when she got there. It was plenty annoying to sort through the closet and pull out the heavy winter coats she’d just bought a couple of months ago. Seattle didn’t get enough snow to make packing them worth it. She’d been glad to have them but it felt like she was throwing money away by getting rid of them so soon. Boxes of sentimental and necessary objects started to accumulate in the living room, one at a time, as she went through the different rooms trying to find what wouldn’t be worth keeping around.
The tampons in the bathroom, though, that’d been pretty surprising. She’d thought she’d gotten rid of everything. She’d been digging through the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get all the cleaning supplies out of there when she’d reached in and pulled out a half-full box of tampons. She knew she’d gotten the ones in the cupboard above the toilet, in her bedroom closet, in her locker at work, and the emergency ones in her purses and pack – she’d really thought she’d gotten them all. It’d been there for a while, though, so she must’ve bought it and forgotten about it sometime in the last couple of years.
Well, this was embarrassing. She’d really thought she’d gotten rid of everything. It was enough to make her stop and stand there for a moment, just staring at it in her hand.
She shrugged it off, laughing to herself, as she threw the box down into the trash and pulled the bag closed tight.
She fished it out later and dropped it off in the locker room the day before she left – there wasn’t much reason to just throw all of them away when other people could still use them.
-
Growing up in Chicago – even if it was one of the outlying neighborhoods instead of the city itself, something most people didn’t assume to be the case – meant, among other things, the ability to move inside a city population without any trouble thanks to years of childhood training with public transportation, public schools, and market crowds. Adjusting to Rochester had been easier than she’d thought, and Princeton was more of the same, more or less. Seattle still wasn’t as big as Chicago, but moving back to a place where she had to elbow her way through a crowd felt more comfortable than most people probably assumed to be the case.
Besides, expected crowd behaviors were the same for everyone. There wasn’t a chance to slip up when everyone was supposed to do the same thing, like avoid eye contact and keep their hands to themselves.
She settled on the third of five apartments she saw in her first two full days. It’d taken nearly a week to drive across the country, so by the time she got there all her stuff was ready and waiting at the post office for her to pick up and drive over to her new place. Furniture was next, and then a weekend’s worth of moving-in errands, then right after dropping a fifteen-cent stamped tourist postcard of the Puget Sound into a mailbox, starting work bright and early Tuesday morning. She’d have been happy enough to start Monday, but the hospital apparently preferred to do new employee orientation in large groups instead of one-on-one sessions. She grabbed a blank nametag, wrote “Cameron” on it, and got a seat near the back, finally getting something out of being taller.
Looking around the room, she took a quick headcount: out of the thirty-one people here, only four of them including her were male, which was about typical for the current professional demographics. The lecture itself was more of the same, nothing especially unusual that she hadn’t already heard somewhere else. How to set up your phone, information about benefits, safety plans and e-mail tips – half the time she listened and half the time she read through the brochures trying to find something interesting.
What was worth paying attention to was the lecture on how to avoid sexual harassment. It would’ve been more of the same – don’t tease the minority gender or your employees, and okay, what she’d done with House might well have been teasing on that first count – if it wasn’t for the fact that she had to listen to a different set of instructions now. She glanced around at the other men, all of them looking a little bored – well, they’d had to listen to it before. She shifted in her chair to make it look like she’d heard it before too, and even slouched a bit. It was the expected behavior, after all.
Lunch was pretty typical: sandwiches, salad, fruit, pastries, tea. Cameron took a step forward and reached for a sandwich, then remembered the right behavior for this situation and stepped back to move farther back in the line. Her stomach wasn’t happy about the new wait, but she could manage another few minutes.
Was she supposed to make small talk over the food? She couldn’t remember. That was the trouble with first impressions: she could only make them once, and she didn’t want to screw it up by doing it incorrectly. So she got her sandwiches and sat down before anyone could say hello. Yes, it was vital that she interact with her future co-workers, but she knew she could put that off until her stomach felt calmer with something in it. Mingling could wait a few minutes.
Conversation came when she got back up to get some tea; specifically, it came from a shorter – much shorter – woman ripping open a packet to get at the bag. “Hey there.”
“Oh, hello.” She smiled as she made eye contact, letting the other woman lead the situation.
“Can you believe it? Like we can’t just read the manual to dial for an outside line.”
“I guess they want to make sure they’ve got themselves covered.”
This got a laugh out of the other woman as she poured the water. “I wish. We’ll still get people complaining about what they could’ve learned already.” She stuck her hand out. “Olivia Molaro.”
“Oh, ah,” She wiped her hand on her jacket before sticking it out, hoping that’d cover the hesitation, “Cameron.” Molaro peered at her name tag. “Just Cameron, please.”
“Well, if you insist.” It was a little surprising how small her hand was, and how she tried to get a grip even so. “So what’re you here for?”
“Immunology. You?”
“Angiology. And by the way, you’ve got some excellent veins.” She jerked her head towards Cameron’s hands, and she had to glance down to take a look at them. She’d never considered them that way, but then her specialty wasn’t in blood and she couldn’t donate for another six months.
“Thank you.”
“They’re quite nice.”
She shrugged. “I’m happy with them.”
Molaro stared for a moment, then went on as she moved back towards the chairs with Cameron following, “And where’re you from?”
“New Jersey.”
That got a whistle. “Long ways away.”
“I guess. I’m from Chicago, so I can kind of make it out to be just halfway across the country.”
This time it got a laugh. “It’s still a long way to go.”
“Very true.” She held herself back from talking about her boss or former co-worker – House usually hid the fact he’d been all over the world if he could, and even if Chase couldn’t always mask his accent he never brought it up if he could help it or if it’d help him get a date.
Cameron blew on her tea to cool it and took a sip while Molaro talked about coming from Nevada and adjusting to the rain, and all the tips she’d gotten from staying in Oregon. Lunch ended pretty fast after that, and almost all of the rest of the afternoon was more of the same.
“Okay, a nice big smile now.” The photographer looked frazzled enough Cameron didn’t try to make small talk; she just thought about interrupting starfish and held the expression. The light flashed, and she got down from the stool. “You’ll pick up your ID card over there.”
At the desk, there was something new. “Doctor Cameron? There’s a bit of a problem.”
“I thought I filled out everything.”
The secretary smiled and shook his head. “On your form right here, you didn’t put down a gender.”
She drew back and tried not to show it. “I must have missed that.”
He smiled without his eyes and shrugged. “It was just one entry, but we do need it.”
“Can I ask what for?”
“Just to make sure we have everything in place. Regulations and all that.”
Cameron opened her mouth, closed it, then asked, “Could I see another ID card?”
“Sure.” He handed it over; she turned it over in her hands.
“And this is all confidential information?”
“Yes.” He wanted to get the line moving, and so did she, so she took a pen and filled in the correct box.
He took a glance at what she’d filled in and his mouth suddenly turned down. “Here’s your ID. Have a good day.” She took it without touching his hands.
The immunology department was on the second floor, across the hall from the main pathology laboratory. Her office didn’t have any windows, but she could work with it, and spent a few minutes getting her frustrations over general public pity out of her system by pushing her desk and bookcases around. At least the name on the door said “A. Cameron” like she’d asked. After three years of working for House she’d learned how to be properly paranoid.
Once her desk was in place and her bookshelves were too, she adjusted her tie on reflex, smoothed back her hair, and went to introduce herself to the rest of her department. Everyone seemed happy enough to see her, offering advice for where to eat out in her neighborhood and where their husbands shopped for their clothes.
That night, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, she jerked awake when she realized Molaro must have been trying to flirt with her.
Oh, shit. Talk about making a good first impression, all right.
Thankfully tracking Molaro down wasn’t hard: all she needed to do was check in the staff directory. Getting the words together to apologize was trickier, but ultimately useless.
“You couldn’t tell?”
“No.”
“You really couldn’t tell?” Cameron just shook her head. “Well, that’s – I mean, how come you couldn’t tell?”
She shook her head, trying to come up with something polite, settling on, “I’m not used to women flirting with me.”
Molaro snorted. “Where did you go to school? The one I went to was six-to-one in favor of the guys. They never had to worry about getting a date.”
Cameron hadn’t had to worry about it either, but she’d never been afraid to ask for one and had almost never heard anyone say no. She decided to go with the truth. “The thing is I got married pretty young. My – my spouse died just a few months after we got married.”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” She looked so apologetic it almost hurt.
“You don’t need to be. I mean, they died five years ago, but it, it was pretty intense.”
“Oh, Cameron.” Someone peeked around the shelf and Molaro shooed her away with a firm glance and wave of her hand, leaving them in privacy again. “I’m really sorry. Is there anything –”
“You don’t need to do anything. I just wanted to explain to you.”
She nodded, mouth set. “I appreciate that.” She looked right into Cameron’s eyes. “I’d love it if I could apologize by offering to take you out to dinner, but I don’t think that’s a polite option anymore.”
Cameron smiled. This time she knew what was going on, and how to deal with it. “There are worse ways to get dates. But how about I take the invitation and let you know when I feel up to it?”
“I suppose that’ll work.”
She didn’t want to resort to it, but took the easy way out: glancing at her watch, commenting on the time, and hurrying upstairs to her office, where she collapsed in her chair for nearly ten minutes.
-
Thankfully, Molaro wasn’t one to gossip, and neither were her co-workers. After that morning, Cameron doubled her efforts to fit in, and quickly became known by the reputation she’d wanted, as one of the hardest-working doctors in the hospital.
She ran labs, wrote up treatment plans, kept her door open for consults, charted superbly, and did her rounds without complaint or fail or tardiness. She didn’t go so far as to bring dumplings for the immunology break room each week but was never too busy to say hello or good morning or spare a few minutes for them to chat, even on days she wasn’t feeling quite so social. She understood it was necessary, because she had to work twice as hard as she used to in order to get where she wanted to go. It was how her world worked now.
Her sister sent her a pair of sunlamps, and one went in her bedroom and the other went on top of a bookcase, giving the whole of their small rooms more of a feeling of being real living spaces. She got art prints at museums, hung a mirror in her office to give it the illusion of space, and stocked her fridge with imported Californian meat. She bought a decent pair of running shoes and got used to getting up early enough for foggy morning runs, and after a lot of deliberation decided against physical therapy in the hospital and just got a yoga tape. She still qualified for it, but she didn’t want to deal with anyone she knew finding out what she was doing and why, even if it’d still be useful. Figuring out where her body was in space still wasn’t something she’d mastered: every so often she’d find a bruise in the shower and wonder how that happened. She could only answer that question about half the time.
She’d bought a Little Blue Planet guide to the city and tried to use it, ticking off the important scenes and sights all residents were supposed to be fluent with; instead, most of her weekends and free time that didn’t involve work or some sort of exercise she did as little as possible. Most days she felt more worn out from having to hold herself just right or constantly checking how she was talking to the other doctors than from the running and weightlifting.
And it wasn’t that she wasn’t talking to them, or eating lunch with them – when she realized Zeno’s paradox applied to her now, for never being able to get back to the place where she could just walk into the lounge, sit down, and jump into the conversation without even thinking about it. For anyone, in any room.
-
Cameron didn’t usually remember them. She’d wake up, realize the sheets were sticky, and got embarrassed even though there wasn’t anyone around to know it. This night was different.
She’d been at a party – it’d been in a huge house, like something from a movie, and she’d walked through a garden to get to the kitchen, where she’d stolen bread off a plate and the waiter made her to apologize to the chef. She’d gone away and then someone had taken her hand and took her upstairs. She hadn’t looked at his face but his hands were so much bigger than hers, she remembered that. He’d taken her to his bedroom, laid her down on the bed – she hadn’t taken off her dress but she wasn’t wearing anything – and he’d rubbed her breasts in his hands and dipped his hands down her hips and she’d wanted something deep inside herself that pushed and ached and she’d wanted him to go inside and he pressed his hand up against her cunny and –
She woke up sweating, her penis slowly softening in her pajamas. She’d never remembered one before, and she wished she hadn’t remembered this one, either. Wiping her hands over her face, kicking the blankets off, she stumbled out of bed and to her knees, rocking back and forth and trying not to cry.
This time she took a hot shower before she changed the sheets, as hot as she could stand, and took another one after her morning run.
-
She’d learned the hard way to keep her door closed; if she didn’t, people read it as an invitation to come in without asking if she had a minute to share. It wasn’t something she was used to, having to set that boundary – she’d forgotten to not assume it was there to begin with. So when Caletti knocked and asked if she could come in for a consult without just stepping inside, Cameron took a moment to sigh in relief before opening the door.
Caletti filled her in on her patient’s symptoms while Cameron scrolled through the file’s charts – admitted with fever, joint pain, loss of feeling in the hands, and dangerously fast weight loss. “It’s not moving like lupus, but we’re not sure what it’s moving like.”
Cameron held herself back from channeling her boss, reread a couple of notes, and felt the pieces lock into place. “It’s polyarteritis nodosa.”
“That’s a pretty unusual diagnosis.”
Instead of just telling her, she scrolled back up to one of the charts and pointed to what she wanted to talk about. “There’s no family history of hypertension, no previous symptoms of it, and this goes back eight years – she doesn’t even have elevated sodium levels. She also doesn’t have dry eyes, weird bruises, or any depression or anxiety that wouldn’t come from being in a hospital.”
“You’re sure about it?”
“Sure enough that I think you ought to get a biopsy and check her creatinine levels.”
She was right, of course, and unlike her old boss didn’t go out of her way to make sure everyone knew she’d saved someone’s life by recognizing the disease for what it was. She’d done her job, so she went back to her office to get some more of her next article drafted. She could find someone to proof it when she’d finished the rough draft.
A couple of hours later, after she’d shrugged on her raincoat and locked her door, Farkas waylaid her in the hall. “Hey, Cameron.” She was in a better-cut dress than usual, something Cameron wouldn’t have worn to work on a day she might’ve had someone vomit on her.
“Oh, hello.”
She glanced around like she was checking for something, then looked back to Cameron’s face. “Listen, Chen’s got a group going to go out for drinks if you wanted to come along.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll still go out for drinks, but you won’t be coming with me. Your loss.”
It was a very tempting offer, and the idea of going out to have drinks with someone for the first time in an embarrassingly large number of months sounded really good, but at the same time given the language she’d used, “I just want to be clear about one thing. Are you asking me out on a date?”
Farkas looked around again. “If you’re coming along, then yeah. If not, then I’ll be going out for drinks with some friends.”
Cameron smiled and, for a moment, considered going into some sort of soliloquy about asking friends to perform smokescreen favors and the courage in asking outright, but skipped it, going right to lying. “I’d love to.” She didn’t want to go, not really, but she knew if she did this it’d be easier to talk to them in the future. Besides, if everyone was drunk, a few slips in behavior could be forgiven.
The bar was three blocks away, someplace specializing in imports and mixed drinks. Everyone else sat at the bar, leaving the two of them to their own table. Farkas got a Belgian white and Cameron got a Valentine’s Massacre. She didn’t like her drinks that sweet, but she knew it’d look weird if she ordered a beer. She took a small sip and waited for Farkas to start the conversation. She hoped it wouldn’t fall to a ‘do you like movies because I like movies’ middle-school level of embarrassment. And it wasn’t as though she would mind talking about the movies – she hadn’t seen anything in a theater for ages but so what? – because it meant she’d be talking to someone outside of work about something which wasn’t work.
She’d talked to Chase about this sort of thing once, about four months into her fellowship. Her theory was that being a good doctor meant you didn’t have much time for any social life until you got out of med school and into actual paying jobs. This meant that unless you were some sort of genius you didn’t have much in terms of conversation skills that didn’t involve the human body breaking in one way or another.
Given that Farkas was also an immunologist and they both knew what’d been going on in the department that week, there wasn’t even much gossip to share. Cameron took a larger sip.
What the hell. “So how do we do this?”
Farkas took a drink. “I think we just start talking.”
“Okay.” Sadly, the Massacre didn’t get better the more of it she drank. “So do you like movies?”
“Nah, I prefer TV. Fits my schedule better.”
“Yeah. There’s a bunch of shows I keep wanting to catch up on when they hit the networks, but I keep forgetting.”
“What did you watch?”
“Global Frequency, Brimstone, Traveler, Wonderfalls, John ¬– um, yes?”
Farkas was smiling at her in a way Cameron had come to learn meant she was doing something wrong, but not so wrong she needed reprimanding. “Those aren’t shows I’d expect you to like.”
“What’s wrong with wanting a little plot?”
“I’d just thought you’d watch Grand or Andy Richter Controls the Universe, something like that.”
“Ah.” She really didn’t like how Farkas was looking at her right now. “Well, it’s, I always babysat my little sister, so I kind of picked up on that sort of show. I never really got into dramas.”
“Oh!” Cameron knew by now that was a good sort of smile. And she hadn’t needed to lie, either. “That’s so nice, that you did that.”
“Well, my mother was happy about it.” She smiled, took another drink, and held herself back from going on about anything more personal. As it turned out, Farkas liked most of the same shows, and almost immediately promised she’d copy them over for Cameron to watch later. At least she didn’t pull Cameron over to everyone else at the bar to show off the rarity of a man who liked shows marketed to women.
Sure enough, two days later, Farkas passed six burned discs into her hand, one for each season of the shows she had that Cameron had missed. She promised she’d start catching up that weekend – “I don’t have any outstanding patients right now, and there isn’t much I –”
“You work too hard, you know that?” She shook her head. “Why do you think I’m going to invite you out again tonight?”
“Wait, I’m sorry, you will be?”
“I can’t invite you out for dinner before lunch. Hospital regs.”
Okay, this wasn’t something Cameron was comfortable with. “Maria, I’m really glad you want to take me out to dinner –”
“And here it comes.” Farkas sighed. “‘I think you’re great but let’s be friends.’ I get it all the time. You’d think I’d stop dating from the hospital, but it’s hard to get out and meet people. I know, a man’s gotta work hard to get ahead in this field, but jeez. I should be used to it by now.”
“Look I mean – no, yes, I mean, no, I don’t want to be involved with you romantically, but yes, I would like to be friends. With you. Really.”
“You like me but you’re not looking for romance.”
“Right.”
“And you do want to be friends.”
“Right.” She looked away, face tight. Cameron didn’t know what to do to make that particular expression go away, so she kept on even though she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to. “Look, the last job I had, I slept with – with someone in my department, and it was good but it was, it got weird. And I don’t want this to get weird.”
“So it’d be okay if I was in surgery or pediatrics?”
“Yes. I mean – look, I don’t want to make it –”
Farkas held up her hand and Cameron obediently stopped blabbering on. “I understand what you’re trying to say.” She looked away, then back to Cameron, pointing at the discs she realized she was gripping tight enough to hurt her knuckles. “Then watch those this weekend so we can talk on Monday.”
“I will.”
When she left work that night, she felt the same sort of endorphin high she usually got after a heavy workout or run – she’d done something good and beneficial, and she wouldn’t be so severely isolated from her co-workers any more. She’d done it genuinely, correctly, the way a man was supposed to act in this situation. And she hadn’t even needed to come out about herself to do it.
The brief idea of the relationship, though, had stirred up something. Men tended to prefer romances and dramas and women liked heavy plots and the supernatural, but the idea of finding love on the other side of the galaxy or fighting through Hell and back to get it was the sort of trope everyone used.
That Tuesday, heading towards the lounge, she heard Farkas chatting with Rigazzi and Magpiong from the doorway: “I get what he was talking about,” she laughed. “I can’t blame him – that sort of thing’s harder for men. They can’t divorce their feelings from what they do.”
Cameron flattened herself against the wall, trying to keep her breathing down as Magpiong chuckled. “Tell me about it. My boyfriend, he’s great, but try criticizing his cooking without getting him into what’s on the plate.”
“It’s weird, though – Cameron usually takes this stuff pretty well. He really holds himself around people. I mean, he’s usually good at talking to people.”
“Maybe he was right,” Rigazzi piped in. “Maybe he really isn’t looking for romance right now.”
“You think I should wait for him to be ready?”
“I think you should just find someone else to go after.”
Women. Farkas meant Cameron was good at talking to women. Of course she was good: she’d been talking like one her whole life. She walked back down the hallway, turned around, and walked back, nearly stomping down in her wing-tips to make more noise than was really necessary to let them know she was coming.
This time, they looked up when she pushed the door open and gave a generic “Good morning” as greeting as she made her way to the kettle.
“Hey,” Farkas said. “How’s your viewing coming?”
“I finished the second season of Brimstone last night.”
“Tell me that finale didn’t make you cry.”
“I would, but I’d be lying.”
Rigazzi was flipping through TV channels. By the time the water was boiling, she’d settled on a news broadcast about the three Presidents Kennedy celebrating the youngest’s birthday. Cameron watched while her tea steeped, then politely declined Farkas’ invitation to stay and watch with them.
She considered calling someone she didn’t have to act with – maybe her mom, maybe Wilson, she could look up Chase in Galveston and surprise him, she could see how her sister was doing. After several minutes of thinking about it, she switched over to staring at the wall. Maybe the fact that she wasn’t crying behind a locked door was a sign of improved coping abilities. Then again, what she’d heard – well, she didn’t know what men said when they gossiped about women who didn’t want to get into relationships with them. She knew they did, but she’d never made any effort to hang out with the nursing staff, or anyone outside of her department, for that matter. There were rules for what men did, and what doctors did, and sometimes they went up against each other.
-
Washing short hair still wasn’t something she was used to – she’d reach the top of her head and every so often be surprised there wasn’t anything more to lather up. It wasn’t like shaving in the morning, where she’d added a new thing to her morning schedule and get up a few minutes early to make sure there was time for everything it needed to go right. And it didn’t matter that nobody saw what she did, because she knew she had to do everything, from the hot towel to the aftershave. Which embarrassingly smelled like cucumber, but that was the in scent for modern men. Everyone was a slave to fashion.
In the shower, she hadn’t needed to change her routine too much. She still washed her hair and scrubbed behind her ears and between her toes. Mostly, now she checked what bruises were new and how the old ones were healing, and didn’t look right down there.
Some days that was easier than others. She clenched her jaw and looked up at the ceiling, trying not to think about what was going on between her legs. All she’d been doing was enjoying the warm water and thinking about the last episodes of Journeyman with the hero shirtless again and she didn’t know how but she hadn’t noticed it getting attention and suddenly when she turned the water off to shampoo her hair she realized she had an erection.
Not a big one, though. Just one that said it was there. She could turn the cold water back on and it’d go away right away, but for now, inside the steam it didn’t feel too bad. She was warm all over, and it was warm too. Just…warm. That was it.
She grabbed the shampoo bottle, tipped it to squeeze some out, holding it in the air before putting it back. It’d been a long day yesterday and she hadn’t slept well last night, and the hot air was making her feel just a bit light-headed. Just a bit, just enough that she didn’t want to turn on the cold water and trade a hard-on for a headache.
Hard-on. It was hard, and it was on her, and it was turned on, all right. Still not all the way, but on its way there.
God, she could practically hear House cheering her on, telling her to man up and try it out at least once.
She closed her eyes and gently reached down, like it’d get scared away if she made any sudden moves. She’d gone down here a couple of times – scratching an itch through layers of clothing, slipping when she washed her chest – and it wasn’t like she never touched it, but she’d never done anything like this before.
Okay, there was that one time she hadn’t woken up all the way and ended up on her stomach and rubbing against the mattress through her pajamas and the sheets, but she hadn’t touched herself and she hadn’t come and it only lasted for a few minutes before she got up to get the frozen peas.
Right now, she was just…touching it. Just holding it, and not doing anything else. And that was okay: she didn’t have to move her hand to feel its weight, its heft. She still didn’t look down as she gripped it softer, then tighter, just to see how it felt when she did that. She hadn’t been expecting anything major to happen, just for it to maybe get a bit harder, but as it turned out it felt good when she held it tighter. It felt warmer. Her breathing picked up, sharp breaths coming in and out. She gripped it tight again; she felt it move in her hand, without her doing anything, she felt blood move to her face and it must be moving from her legs because they were shaking and she had to brace her left hand against the tiles as she gripped it tight again because it felt so fucking good. Just good, good like rubbing her clit her pretty little nub and this didn’t give her that same pushing shining hurting pressure between her legs but it was still hurting pressure between her legs and she knew that. It was almost what she knew.
She held it tight, moved her hand up and down, now really up and down now that it was turned on all the way. All the way hard, all the way ready, oh fuck. She knew she should let go and turn the water on cold full blast but oh fuck it was pressure, pressure, tight pressure outside of her and she’d never felt anything like it in her life before not even when she dreamed –
She gasped, heard a sound, and blinked her eyes open. It couldn’t be over that fast, except it was, with what was on her hand and splattered against the wall as proof of that. She didn’t dare collapse even though she really wanted to; instead, she reached over and turned the water back on. Warm, not cold; she didn’t need cold water to make it go away. She’d done that just fine on her own.
Watching the semen and all its ingredients wash down the drain, scrubbing underneath her fingernails, she didn’t feel like her body was humming, mostly like she’d just run ten miles without a break.
As a respectable scientist and doctor she knew that as experiments went this wasn’t a good one at all. She’d started out with a strange set of variables without any baseline, she hadn’t tried starting from the beginning but just jumped in, she hadn’t made any effort to track her data. But on the other hand, the one which hadn’t done anything, she’d tested it out just fine, and she’d learned that everything worked – and she liked what she’d worked with. It’d worked nicely.
All the wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep for ten hours, but she washed her hair instead, shaved off the night’s beard growth, and got dressed and went into work, grabbing some morning teriyaki take-out because she’d run out of time for breakfast.
If anyone knew what she’d just done – if there was any change in how she walked, if something showed up on her face when she glanced at people as she walked down the halls – nobody stopped her to ask about it. Which was about the same as not noticing.
-
Men asking women out on dates wasn’t so strange, thankfully, and the way the gender ratio was skewed at hospitals meant people expected her to have plenty of potential dates to choose from and ask out. It wouldn’t do her any good to be a serial womanizer, but she knew she’d been working here long enough to start being properly social. So she went to see Molaro again to take her up on the dinner invitation, who was more than pleased.
“I’ll pick you up around seven on Saturday.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one who picks you up?”
“You could, but I was the one who invited you to start with. That’s how it works these days.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Maybe, but I’m still picking you up. I’ll need your address.” As Cameron was writing, she added, “And I’ll need to know what to call you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“If it’s going to be casual, I can’t keep calling you Cameron. What does the A stand for?”
“A –ah.” She knew she only had a moment to panic and think of something without looking silly, “Al. Al works. Just call me Al.”
It didn’t really work, but it helped her get through the following dinner without too much trouble or having to remember to answer to something like Henry or William or Charles. By the standards of the restaurant guides, it was an excellent dinner, and by Cameron’s measure, the fact that Molaro – Portia, who’d been raised by two English professors – wanted to do it again meant she’d done something right.
The first time out was French food and a getting-to-know-you dinner. The second time, Portia took her to a local production of 1778, and by the fifth time they ended up at her place at the end of the night. This was where Cameron felt herself fall apart a little bit. She knew exactly what was expected of her at this point, and what she should do, but just looking at her at the other side of the couch wasn’t doing anyone any favors.
She tried to remember what she’d wished guys had done, and tried to do it: she scooted over carefully as Portia came closer, she reached out and took her face – God, how had her hands gotten so big? – and leaned in, very gently, and kissed her without opening her mouth. Let her do that if she wanted.
It’d been a long, long time since she’d kissed anyone. It didn’t feel bad to do it again after so long. Her lips were warm, smooth, thin, moving softly to open and let her tongue out to stroke over Cameron’s own lips, and that made her pull back.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” Cameron protested. “It’s fine. Just – I haven’t kissed anyone in a long time, that’s all.”
“Well, you haven’t forgotten how.” She moved back, started kissing again, her mouth opening fast and Cameron reciprocating. She wanted this, this was good, here was a woman with her, that was all good, and this was what she was supposed to be doing. She kept kissing, and it was the kissing and holding someone that felt good, something she hadn’t done in almost a year. And somehow she thought that kissing and holding just about anyone would feel good and it didn’t have to be a woman. Just the being this close to someone.
“You’re not enjoying yourself.” Portia didn’t say it to judge or criticize or condemn, but to express her awareness of Cameron’s state in her words and her feelings about it in her tone.
“No, I am, I swear.”
“No, you’re not.” She pulled away and flopped down on the cushions.
“Okay, you’re right.” Portia looked over at her. “But it’s not you, and it’s not that I still miss my spouse. I don’t know what it is.” She sighed and looked at the print on the far side of the room, cast in abstract shadow from the lampshade. “Maybe we’re just not right for each other. I mean, what do we have in common besides liking French food and musical theater? That’s a friendship, not a romance.”
“I guess so.” She got up, rubbed her eyes, and shook her head.
“I was hoping it’d work out, but it’s been getting…”
“No, I know what you mean.” She jerked her thumb to her kitchen. “You want some tea?”
“Sure.”
Molaro was kind enough to give Cameron a ride back to her place, and to her credit, it wasn’t strange at work. It helped they didn’t see each other too much. She’d also been kind enough to pick Cameron up from work twice, but that was mostly for Cameron’s benefit under the pretense of Molaro knowing where they’d eat that night.
She kept thinking about what she’d stumbled onto during that kiss on the couch. Just being up close with someone, and how it’d be good to get there again.
-
There were plenty of bars in the city that the Little Blue guide had tagged for what she wanted to do, but she didn’t have anything to wear for them. She pushed suit after suit aside in her closet, dismissed her workout clothes out of hand, and finally dug out the first two pairs of male shirts and pants she’d bought, down at the bottom of one of her drawers, that she hadn’t worn in nearly a year.
She showered, shaved, dabbed on the perfume, buffed and shined her nails, and hit the bar scene early. But not too early; she knew what she was doing, and she’d have to wait a bit for the timing to be best. She nursed her Snowball Fight for a half-hour before she went to talk to anyone; fortunately, drinking alone wasn’t a strange thing to do, no matter what gender you were.
The bar was almost all full – psoriasis, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, rhinovirus, Huntington’s – with people alone and in pairs and one louder group off in the back. There was one woman alone a couple of people away that Cameron took a better look at when she got up to use the bathroom, and going from her body language she probably had a shot at pulling this stunt off.
It turned out to be a lot easier than she’d thought. All she needed to do, really, was remember what she wished men had said to her when she’d been in the same situation, and say those things to her, be kind and nod in the right places, and when she was done with her tirade come right out and make the suggestion. Nancy stared at her, and she said, “It’s just for tonight.”
“And this isn’t some elaborate practical joke.”
“Nope. I just want to fuck you.”
Nancy looked Cameron up and down, pursed her lips, and gulped down the last of her beer. “Okay.”
“Your place.”
“Great.”
“I’ll get a cab.” When she’d been younger, much younger, she’d wished someone had been smart enough to say all this to her, to cut through the crap of greeting cards and badly-written movies so she didn’t have to take the risks to get what she’d wanted.
She tossed a five onto the bar next to the glass. “Right behind you.”
In the taxi, they sat on opposite sides of the backseat, even though everyone in the cab knew what was coming – a necessary pretense. They wound up in Nancy’s living room, a two-bedroom place on the Eastside, with Nancy standing in the middle of the room holding her hands together after throwing her coat and bag onto the sofa. “My roommate’s gone for the weekend.”
“Perfect.”
“You got condoms? There’s some in the…the…”
“No, I’ve got.”
“Okay.” She jerked her thumb to the bedroom. “Let’s get started.” She began to make her way there, undressing as she went; Cameron waited a minute to pull off her shoes and socks before following after, grabbing her shirt and pulling it off over her head the way she’d seen everyone do it in the movies before shucking off her pants. Nancy was already naked and all over her, pushing her down onto the bed, running her fingers through her hair and over her head, strong and warn and good. She grabbed her head in return and pulled her down, kissing her deep and firm, letting her open her mouth first and then running her tongue over Nancy’s own, relishing the taste of the beer and the sharp taste of someone else.
Cameron opened her mouth wider, let Nancy in, let her trust in this strange man. “Al…”
When she said it like that, it sounded like she was trying to say her name. Cameron let out a groan from somewhere low in her chest, felt herself respond the way she was supposed to react to this – that tight pressure outside of herself, the old feeling inverted outward, that same need for being closer. Down between her legs was the smartest thing she had and it always knew what it wanted down there and now that was someone, it was this woman, this Nancy, and right now as far as Cameron knew she needed to be in her. Inside her, deep, in her wet –
Oh, she remembered what she wanted: she growled from a place she didn’t know, flipped Nancy over, and stuck her hand between her legs, finding just the right spot, that strong little spot. Cameron started rubbing, not too hard and not too soft the way she knew from the inside out, using her index finger and letting her middle slip in deeper into her body, right where her penis was telling and demanding it go but not just yet, not until she’d had Nancy come. She’d tried feeling inside herself but this was different, this she had to do just right. She’d always wished a man knew this and she was a man knowing this and she should see it to rights. Nancy started hissing and panting and shaking her hips, Cameron leaned in to kiss as she pressed her hand in deeper, let her feel her hard-on where it pressed against her thigh – Nancy pulled back from the kiss eyes shut tight and whimpered out her climax, soft from her mouth and hard around Cameron’s fingers.
She looked up at Cameron with the face she’d only seen on a few patients. She was thankful, she was grateful.
Cameron smiled back down. “Gimme a sec.” She got up, went back to her pants, and pulled a wrapper out of the pocket, stopping for a moment to take note of her erection: reaching down to heft it, feel its heat and the little bit of fluid leaking out the end. She knew better than to taste it.
Back in bed, she held up her prize, Nancy grinning. “Gimmie.” Cameron rolled onto her back, letting Nancy roll it down and gasping the moment her hand touched her penis, her hips bucking up and her balls suddenly feeling tight too and it was almost too much and she had to pull herself back and hold the pleasure inside. Nancy looked at her curiously; Cameron grabbed her and pulled her on top of her. She got the message, grabbing Cameron’s penis again – and she spend the night happy with nothing but Nancy touching her penis – and pushed it up inside of her. It was just a little bit but it was warm and so much more than she’d thought and she pushed up, wanting and getting more of it and Nancy pushing down and then she was inside and she stared up at Nancy with her mouth wide open trying to breathe.
Nancy started to move, sliding up and down, and Cameron couldn’t do anything but move along with her, trying to follow her and stay inside. Nancy slapped her hands down on Cameron’s shoulders and somehow moved harder and faster and it was more, and Cameron grabbed her waist and jerked her hips and threw her head back and it was the strongest thing the biggest the slamming-shooting pleasure coming right out of her.
She lay back against the pillows. Nancy was still there, looking at her again. Cameron smiled, not having the energy for anything but that, and rubbing one out of her again.
“Let me get that for you.” She pulled off the condom, knotted it off and tossed it aside. Cameron felt sticky, but also too tired to move. Well, move more than roll to the other side of the bed.
Nancy let her use her comb, shared her oatmeal, and called her a taxi. Back in her apartment, Cameron changed into fresh clothes, trying to see if and how she felt different. It’d been fucking spectacular, to say the least, and she wanted to do it again as soon as she could. She would’ve done it again that morning but Nancy got out of bed first.
What she kept turning over in her head, what she loved, was that she’d done something so utterly male, so unquestionably male. And nobody had been able to guess anything else.
-
By now she managed like a natural. She still had to check herself and think about what she was doing, but almost none of it was something she had to stop and think about. She knew how to be careful around patients to put them at ease, how to get herself taken seriously in a conversation, how to say hello depending on whether she was in a restaurant or meeting a prominent Parkinson’s researcher and activist. Some of it was still troubling, things she couldn’t predict – the way she was supposed to sit on a couch was something she still had to check to do right, and usually had to correct.
She was getting so much better at playing the part, and felt so proud of herself for not digging through the freezer anymore, she went up to see Rita Miller. She was an endocrinologist and had called Cameron up to her office about a month ago for a consultation on what turned out to be polymyositis. They’d talked a couple of times since then, casual good-mornings and how-do-you-dos in the elevators and cafeteria. She was a bit older than Cameron, wore her hair in a loose bun most of the time, didn’t have any photographs of people on her desk, and smiled when Cameron came into her office. “Anything I can help you with?”
“One thing. I know this is on short notice, but I hope you can come through for me.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to eat dinner with someone tomorrow night, and I’d like that to be you.”
She knew it was lame, and she could tell Miller didn’t think too much of it either. Cameron also knew to keep her mouth shut, and not break out into a huge smile when Miller said, “Sure. That sounds fun.”
“Great! That’s great,” She pulled in a breath. “Japanese good for you?”
“You’re the one who asked me out. You can pick the place. Just call me to let me know where it is.”
They ended up in a Japanese fusion place near Cameron’s house she hadn’t been to yet but always thought looked good after she’d read the menu posted by the door. Not too many places served cow, which Miller noticed when she opened the menu at the table and scanned down to the main dinner section.
“It’s a good meat,” Cameron assured her. “Tastes just like goat.”
“I know, I’ve had it. Just not in a long time.” She kept reading. “Oh, it’s from Canada. That makes sense.”
“I had it a lot when I was a kid, but not much since then. Sometimes I see it at the butcher shop, but it’s supposed to be hard to work with, so I don’t get it.”
“Leave it to the professionals?”
“Pretty much.”
Miller ended up getting the beef udon; Cameron went for the Dungeness crab. After the waiter took their orders, Miller asked, “So what should I call you?”
Sometimes it was nice to be reminded not everyone had been trained to snoop and spy on everyone else. “Al’s fine.”
“Is that short for Albert? Allen?”
“Just Al.”
Miller paused, then shrugged. “I knew a guy named Max once. Just Max, not Maxwell or Maximilian. I guess it cuts down on paperwork.”
Cameron laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth to hide it. “Not really. It’d be nice if it did, but I’ve gotta sign just as many forms as you do.” More, if anything. “So,” she didn’t want to leave it hanging on paperwork, “how was the conference you went to last month? Portland, right?”
“Yeah, Portland. It rained the whole time, and getting to the hotel from the station was a bear, but they liked my paper on mosaics and the catering was good.” She smiled. “I did get to be a tourist for a couple of hours on Saturday and head out to the Japanese gardens.”
“Tell me about those.” Leaning in, talking about what the other person was enthusiastic about, were good conversational skills no matter what gender you were. Cameron was just happy she could put them to good use and let Rita do the talking at the same time.
“It’s really lush, and they worked the plants with the landscape – you know, the hills and all that. I saw one gardener clipping a bush with these tiny clips,” she held her thumb and forefinger to illustrate, “And there was this crazy thing that went ‘doink,’ water would fill this bamboo piece and it’d fall down and make that sound and go back up. The guide told me it was supposed to scare deer away.” Cameron nodded for her to go on, and she did until the food came, which was when the conversation switched over to what they were eating, which moved to food in the Midwest and food on a coast. This moved over to the fact that nobody had any time to cook anymore.
“I want to, and I know it’s healthier and better, but if I want something hot waiting for me at the end of the day…”
Cameron nodded. “Crockpots. Slow cookers. I got one – um, a little over a year ago, and it’s saved me so many times. A half-hour of chopping everything and I can relax the rest of the day and not have to move if I don’t want to.”
“Really?”
“I still use it. Back when I got it, I got into the habit of cooking for myself, so I just kept with it. I figured with how much I eat, it’s cheaper than ordering in all the time or frozen shepherd’s pies.”
“I’d say so.”
Cameron blushed; she’d eaten nearly all of the tempura and edamame. “I work out a lot.”
Rita shook her head. “How do you have time for all this stuff with all the work you do?”
She considered giving the real answer of not having a personal life but shrugged and said, “I just try to make it work, that’s all.”
“Yeah, but how do you make it work? Do you have some secret?”
“If I did, I’d sell it and retire.”
They kept talking throughout dessert and the short walk back; Rita promised to call Cameron, and even though she wanted to, she made sure not to call her back, because that wasn’t what men did. She was proud of herself for not diving for the phone when she heard it ring, but waited to pick it up after two and answered as casually as she could.
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Part three.