The gym's fluorescent lights are unforgiving. I take a stall to change, shucking my jeans. My usual workout shorts go on and I understand the problem immediately: the fabric pulls tight across a rear that's rounder and fuller than two days ago, the seat straining in a way that has nothing to do with fit. I have less muscle in my thighs and the mass sits differently - softer at the inner thigh, fuller at the seat, less dense at the outer quad. The shorts follow a silhouette I don't recognize. I dig out my sweatpants and put those on instead.

Mark's warming up when I come out, his grin going sideways at the sweatpants. "What are you wearing?"

"Pulled something. Hamstring."

"Bullshit." He tosses me a resistance band. "Squats first. Light weight."

I load the bar lighter than my working weight. Mark doesn't comment, which means he clocks it.

We set up side by side at the rack. Mark is telling me about a woman he's been seeing - met her at a work thing, she's in finance, strong opinions about where to eat. He went to the restaurant she picked and it was actually good, which he seems personally affronted by. "She was right," he says, like this is a grievance.

I get under the bar.

The moment I begin to descend I feel it - my center of gravity has shifted, lower and further back, the weight redistributing into hips that are wider and a pelvis that tilts differently. The squat pattern I've run for fifteen years doesn't load the same muscles the same way. My knees want to track inward, pulled by something in the new hip geometry, and when I cue them outward the way I always have a tightness fires along the outside of my hip and down toward the knee. I make it to parallel. The tightness follows me back up.

"You're leaning forward," Mark says.

I adjust, wider stance this time - the hips seeming to demand more room - and at the bottom of the squat, thighs spread wide, there's an awareness between my legs that arrives without warning. The labia spreading open with the position, skin separating in the wide stance in a way that has no equivalent in anything I've felt before - air reaching skin that doesn't expect air, a warmth at the center of the squat. The nerve endings there don't distinguish between a wide-stance squat in a public gym and anything else that produces the same input. The warmth spreads before I've decided anything about it. I lock out the rep and look at the mirror.

Third rep. Each descent the same sequence - knees tracking wrong, lateral hip burning, the labia spreading at the bottom, the warmth arriving with them. By the fourth rep I've stopped being surprised and started just noting it and moving through it.

At the bottom of the fourth rep I'm concentrating on knee tracking when it happens on the way back up - a quick wet flutter of air, high and light, nothing like the low push of gas escaping, coming from the wrong place entirely. Unmistakable once you know what it is. With Mark a few feet away.

I lock out the rep and go still.

Mark's head comes up. "The fuck was that?"

"Bar," I say. "Squeaky collar."

He looks at the bar. The bar is not squeaking. He looks at me. I look at the mirror. After a moment he picks up his water bottle and I quickly step back under the bar.

The remaining sets are management. The wide stance means the labia spread with every descent - a feature of the position, the anatomy doing what it does. I stop fighting the awareness and note it and continue the rep. The strength isn't what I expect - I loaded lighter than my working weight and it feels heavier than it should, sixty percent of the usual output at best, the legs working harder for less. I finish the sets, re-rack, drink water, and look at the ceiling.

Mark's already loading the leg press. "She wants to go to this place in the West Village next week," he says, pulling plates. "Some tasting menu thing. Fourteen courses." He slides a forty-five onto the bar. "Fourteen."

"Go," I say.

"She'll be right again."

"Probably."

He shakes his head like this is an ongoing injustice and adds another plate.

I sit into the leg press, adjust the seat, and press the first rep. On the second the pelvis tilts forward on the extension and from somewhere deep in my lower abdomen something shifts with the load. I keep pressing. The third rep and it's there again - a small dense weight, interior, moving slightly with the pressure, something tethered in there. Not pain. It just moves when I move. I keep my face where it is and do the reps.

The urgency from this afternoon returns on the fifth rep, the bladder or something near it adding its voice to everything else. I breathe through it. By the tenth rep that requires actual effort.

Standing after the set the crotch of the sweatpants is damp - sweat at the waistband, and lower down something more specific, the secretions heavier now, the workout and the heat producing more of them. I tug my shirt down and head for the men's room.

I take a stall. Sit. Let go.

The burn arrives before the piss does - sharp, located. Not the vague irritation from this afternoon. I clamp down instinctively and it worsens so I force myself to release and go through it, jaw tight. Thirty seconds that feel longer. When it's done the burn sits in the tissue like something that hasn't finished saying what it has to say.

I sit for a moment after.

This isn't the seam.

I pull my sweatpants up and go back to the floor.

The leg curl introduces its own wrongness - the hamstrings pulling hard, and then something else catches with them, deeper, each curl tightening more than just the muscle. On the fourth rep I feel it hold a moment before releasing when I lower the weight. A fullness, everything contracting at once, the body dense with itself in a new way. Not painful. Just there. I drop the weight partway through without Mark asking. He notes it and doesn't say anything, which is its own kind of conversation.

The decline ab work is last. On the first crunch everything engages at once - abs and everything inside, squeezed from above and below simultaneously - and at the top there's a brief deep pressure, whatever's in there compressed by the effort, registering the movement from the inside. I develop a system: crunch, note, continue, do not elaborate on what is being noted.

Mark finishes the count. I sit up.

"You're pale," he says.

"Stomach."

He looks at me for a moment. Not at my hips, not at the sweatpants. At my face. "You doing okay? Not the stomach. Generally."

I look at the floor. "Yeah," I say. "I'm okay."

He holds it a beat longer than he needs to, then nods once, the way he does when he's filing something. "Beer next time," he says. "I'm buying."

He claps my shoulder and goes.

---

I take the end shower stall, pull the curtain as far as it goes - a two-inch gap on the left, the locker room visible at the right angle. I face the back wall and strip quickly.

The boxer briefs come down. I look at them in the low light - damp at the waistband, and at the crotch something more specific. The secretions have been sitting in the fabric since before the workout, the heat and the movement producing more, the cotton wet and in places stiffening as it dries and re-dampens. The smell is there - biological, female, mine. I ball them and set them on top of my sweatpants.

I don't have a second pair.

The water is lukewarm. I wash quickly with the gym soap - industrial, strips everything - keeping the curtain gap in my peripheral vision. A conversation about weekend plans runs for ten minutes two feet from the gap.

When the soap reaches between my legs the skin catches it immediately - a sharp burn, the soap wrong against tissue that spent hours compressed against seams, then spread open at the bottom of every squat. I rinse and don't reapply. The burn doesn't fully clear. It sits under the rawness that was already there.

I dry off in the stall. The towel between my legs gets a pat - too raw for anything else. Then I pick up the boxer briefs.

I stand holding them. The fabric is cool now, partially dried, the wet patches stiff. I put them on. The damp cotton settles against the irritated skin. I pull my jeans on over them and don't think about it further.

I come out from behind the curtain with my bag and my wet hair and walk to the exit without looking at anyone.

---

The parking lot is half empty. I sit in the car for a moment - the boxer briefs against the irritated skin, the burn from the gym soap still there, a low continuous signal from the whole region that wasn't there this morning. I start the car.

Every bump on the drive home lands in the same location.

---

Emily is in the kitchen when I come through the door. She looks up, reads something in my face, and puts her phone down.

"How was the gym?"

"Fine." I drop my bag. "I'm going to change."

Upstairs I peel off the boxer briefs - the crotch stiff and darkened, the smell there, something sharp underneath the sweat. I ball them and drop them in the hamper and stand there for a moment before finding a fresh pair. The new ones settle against the labia and the skin registers the cotton differently than it did this morning - more sensitive now, the tissue rawer, the seam sitting against something that's been irritated for hours.

We make dinner together - pasta, nothing complicated, Emily at the stove and me finding things in the refrigerator without saying much. I eat slowly. The burn makes itself known each time I shift in the chair and I shift as little as possible. Afterward we sit on the couch with the television on and I tell myself it's getting better.

By ten it isn't getting better.

The itch has been building since dinner - distinct from the burn, something deeper and more interior, a demand for attention that sitting still makes worse. I change position on the couch. Emily glances over. I look at the screen.

I last another twenty minutes before I go to bed.

I lie in the dark and try to sleep through it. The itch is insistent enough now that I can't. Nothing acute - just a constant low demand that the dark makes louder. I shift onto my side. Onto my back. The boxer briefs are wrong in every position. I try without them. Worse.

At two in the morning I wake to something in the fabric against the labia - a dampness that isn't sweat, thicker and differently located, sitting there in the cotton. I lie still for a moment registering it. Then I get up.

---

In the bathroom I sit on the toilet and try to go and the burn arrives before anything else does - sharper than this evening, the tissue more inflamed, the urine moving through rawness it wasn't hitting before. I stop. It worsens. I exhale and push through it, jaw tight, staring at the wall, the whole thing taking twice as long as it should.

The door opens. Emily in the doorway in her t-shirt, taking in the bathroom light, me still on the toilet, the expression on my face. She doesn't say anything. She comes in and leans against the sink and watches me try to go again - the stopping, the starting, the jaw - and puts it together without being told.

Then she looks at the boxer briefs on the floor - the crotch stiff and darkened, the smell present even from where she's standing. I move to kick them behind the toilet. She's already seen them.

"Leave them," she says.

She crouches and looks at the fabric. Stands back up. "Yeast infection," she says. "On top of whatever's burning." She says it the way she'd identify a problem with the dishwasher. "The discharge - that white stuff in the crotch - that's the infection talking. Your body's going to do that now. Not always infection, just - it communicates that way. Through what comes out of you." She pauses. "You'll learn to read it."

She opens the cabinet under the sink and finds the Monistat on the second try. Sets it on the counter.

I look at the wall.

She goes to the medicine cabinet above the sink and starts going through it shelf by shelf. I pick up the Monistat box. A smiling woman in pastels. The applicator visible through the packaging - a narrow plastic tube with a plunger.

I read the instructions. There's a diagram. The diagram is not as helpful as it should be.

Emily is still going through the cabinet, checking bottles, putting them back. I read the instructions again.

"I have antibiotics from a couple of years ago - Jenny prescribed them for a UTI I had. Should be the right type." She finds a bottle on the top shelf, reads the label, turns it over. Reads it again. "I think these are right." She sets them on the counter.

I'm still looking at the diagram.

"I need help," I say.

She comes over and looks at the box, checks that I've read it right. "You need to squat," she says. "Over the toilet. Angle it back toward your spine - not straight up, or it'll miss." She steps back and starts to turn around.

"Don't," I say.

She stops.

"Just - stay."

She stays. I drop the boxer briefs and load the applicator and squat over the toilet and bring it to the general area. Nothing yields where I expect it to. I try a different angle - nothing there either, the anatomy not arranged the way the diagram suggests. I probe further, rotating slightly, and something gives - not quite where I was aiming, and not painlessly. I pause.

"That's it," she says. "Don't force it."

The whole thing feeling wrong even though I'm doing it to myself - the foreignness of the anatomy and the object and the fact of what's required. I push gently. The applicator slides in, cold plastic, the insertion uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with the infection. I push the plunger. The medication goes in cold and then the burn hits - sharp and chemical, inflamed tissue registering the intrusion all at once. I exhale hard through my teeth and grip the edge of the sink and hold the squat.

Underneath the burn something begins to ease. The itch, which has been building since dinner, starting to quiet by degrees - not gone, but receding. I stay squatting longer than necessary.

"Better?" Emily says.

"Starting to be."

I stand. Emily takes the antibiotics from the counter, shakes two into her palm, holds them out with a glass of water. I swallow them and set the bottle by the sink where I'll see it in the morning.

"Use a liner tonight," she says. She finds the package under the sink and sets it on the counter. "Or it'll be everywhere." She pauses at the door. "Full course on the antibiotics. Don't stop when the burning stops."

I take a liner from the package and look at it. Stick it into a fresh pair of boxer briefs, pull them on.

Then she turns to the toilet, matter-of-factly, and pulls her underwear down and sits. I start to look away. She doesn't tell me to leave.

I watch.

The sound is the same light interior trickle I've been producing since yesterday. She reaches for the toilet paper when she's done, tears off a careful amount, folds it. Then she looks up at me, sees me watching and shows me - the fold, the direction, the deliberateness of it. Front to back. A second fold, a second wipe. She looks at me to make sure I'm following.

"Always," she says. "After everything. Or you'll keep getting these."

She flushes, washes her hands, caps the antibiotics. "Full course," she says. "Don't stop when the burning stops."

She turns off the bathroom light on the way out.

---

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