I wake to the ache still there, low in the back, radiating forward. Emily's side of the bed is empty and cool - she's been getting up before me lately. I lie there for a moment with my hand on my lower abdomen before I've decided to be awake.

Then the intestines register - a liquid looseness, insistent, making its announcement before I'm ready for it. I get up. Bathroom. Now.

Then the routine. Sit, wipe, flush. Nothing unusual on the tissue. The dark boxer briefs feel slightly damper than normal when I pull them up, the baseline returning after the dry spell. I move on.

I dress. The jeans go on easier than they have in days, the button closing without the fight it's been putting up all week. I note it and head downstairs.

Emily is at the counter, already in her coat. "Early day. Deposition at eight."

"Good luck."

She pauses at the door and looks at me for a moment - something careful in it, something that's been there the last few days but that I haven't found a way into.

"Eat something today," she says. Then she's gone.

I stand in the kitchen with my coffee. The intestines shift again - the same looseness from earlier, lower and more liquid, not quite finished. I set the coffee down and go back upstairs.

The bathroom bin catches my eye as I sit next to it - the white stick sitting on top of the waste, not buried, just there. I stop. The window in the test is faint but readable: one line, negative. I stand there for a moment. She'd been hoping, then, quietly and alongside everything else, and it had come back negative, and she hadn't said anything about it because what would she say.

---

The morning is administrative. Trafficking specs, two emails, the Aldermere timeline updated - call pushed to Tuesday. Linda appears at ten, sees the new date on my screen, nods once. No comment needed.

By noon the back ache has settled into something I've stopped noticing. The dampness from this morning has been there at a low level all day, not enough to need a liner, just the baseline returning after the dry spell.

Mark appears at five-thirty, gym bag on his shoulder. "Legs."

I start to say no.

"You've bailed twice. The call's not until Tuesday." He looks at me with the Mark expression that means he's already decided. "You need to move. You're wound up."

He's not wrong.

"See you there," I say.

He grins. "That's what I thought."

---

The locker room. End stall, bag on the hook, change in under two minutes. Sweatpants - the shorts still wrong for the lower body, still too much silhouette. I go find Mark.

The squat rack first. The weight I've been working back up to, the wider stance, the lateral hip tightness. The knees tracking inward, the cue outward, the same negotiation. I'm two sets in when the cramp hits.

Not the sharp localized pain from two weeks ago - this goes lower, more central, a deep squeezing sensation radiating outward from somewhere in the middle of the pelvis. A fist clenching and releasing inside the lower abdomen. I lock out the rep and stand and breathe through it.

It passes. I get back under the bar.

Second cramp on the next set, deeper. I re-rack and step back.

"Form's breaking down," Mark says.

"Just resting."

The cramp releases. I go back. At the bottom of the third set it hits again - the worst yet, the deep radiating clench spreading down into the tops of my thighs, my breath catching audibly. I come up and re-rack and put my hands on my knees.

"What's going on," Mark says.

"Something I ate."

He looks unconvinced. "Leg press instead. Less load."

I straighten. Something feels different in the crotch of the sweatpants - wetter than I've gotten used to. I pick up my water bottle.

"Give me a minute."

The stall. I push the sweatpants down and look.

The boxer briefs are dark and I have to look twice before I understand what I'm seeing - a deeper darkness at the crotch, wet-looking, and when I press my fingers to it they come away red.

I sit on the toilet and look at my fingers.

The cramping makes sense now. The back ache that's been there for days makes sense now. The bloating and the jeans and the dampness this morning in the dark fabric that I couldn't read - all of it assembles at once, and none of that assembly makes this moment easier to be in.

I take a liner from the ziplock in my bag. Peel the backing and press it into the boxer briefs and pull everything back up.

The liner is not adequate for this. I know it's not adequate. But it's what I have and the alternative is explaining to Mark why I'm leaving, which I'm not ready to do.

---

The leg press. The first rep is fine. The second, the cramp returns during the extension - not the exercise-induced weight-shifting from the first leg day, but something deeper and more sustained, a squeeze that holds through the rep and releases partway through the next. By the fifth rep I'm breathing through each one deliberately.

On the tenth rep something lets go - a warm rush, and with it something denser, small and solid, passing out of me into the liner. I don't have a word for it. I just know it happened and that the liner is now doing things liners were not designed to do.

I lock the safety bar and sit very still.

"You good?" Mark's watching my face.

"Fine." I stand up carefully.

The leg curl. The hamstrings engage and everything connected to them engages with them - what was already cramping cramps harder with each contraction, the blood moving with the effort. I feel the liner shifting, saturating. I drop the weight twice. Mark notes it both times without comment.

The decline ab work. Each crunch compresses everything from above - the abs bearing down on what's already cramping below, the blood releasing in a warm pulse with each compression, the liner long past its capacity. By the third rep I've stopped noting and am just getting through it.

"Breathe," Mark says.

I breathe.

He finishes the count. I sit up and reach for my water bottle.

"You're white," he says.

"Stomach."

He produces a protein bar. I take it and eat it because the alternative is explaining why I can't.

"Beer?" he says, without much hope.

"Not tonight."

He claps my shoulder and goes.

---

I take the end shower stall and pull the curtain as far as I can, still a two-inch gap on the left. I strip quickly, facing the wall.

In the low light of the stall I can see the damage - the liner soaked through and failing, the cotton stained rust-red, and at the center something darker and denser, a small mass clinging to the fabric that's not the blood itself. I pull the fabric away carefully. It holds a moment then releases, leaving a dark smear. The smell comes up immediately - iron and something rawer underneath, copper and salt and something organic that fills the curtained space completely. Not like a cut. Deeper than that. The smell of something the body has been making privately and is now making visible.

I put the boxer briefs and the failed liner in the plastic bag from my kit and seal it. The spare pair I set on top where I can reach them.

The water comes on warm. I stand under it and look down.

The water at my feet goes pink immediately - thin ribbons of it, diluted but unmistakable, swirling toward the drain. For a moment I just watch it. The pink keeps coming and I think about the curtain gap and who might be walking past at the right angle and I step slightly left to block the drain with my body and stay there.

I reach down and start cleaning - just water, the way Emily said. The blood has been sitting against the skin since before the workout, dried into the pubic hair, matted and stiff in a way that pulls slightly as I work my fingers through it. The heat of the shower loosens what dried there and I work at it methodically, separating the hair. The smell intensifies as the warm water releases the iron into the steam - richer now, the small space of the curtained stall holding it close.

The blood has run into all the folds - into the creases of the inner lips, into the hair at the edges, pooling in every crease. I work into it with my fingers, opening the lips, running along the folds, the warm water following my hand. The tissue catches the contact the way it always does - low-level, noted, the awareness I've been managing for weeks.

Then my finger finds something small at the top and the response is immediate and total - a sharp concentrated pulse that has nothing to do with the cleaning and nothing to do with anything I intended. I pull my hand back and press it flat against the tile.

The warmth sits there underneath the rawness and the cramping, insistent, running its own parallel event in the worst possible context. I stand under the water and wait for it to subside. Eventually it does, mostly, and I finish cleaning and stand there until the last of the pink runs clear at my feet.

Behind the curtain the locker room fills. Someone takes the stall next to mine - curtain rings scraping - and I go still and face the wall. A pause near my curtain. A sniff.

"The fuck is that smell?"

My hand goes to the curtain gap, pulling it as closed as it goes. The two-inch gap remains.

"Like pennies," the voice says. "Like wet pennies."

A beat. Footsteps moving away.

I stand under the water until the locker room noise thins and I'm as certain as I can be that the gap is clear.

I dry off quickly, facing the wall - patting rather than rubbing, the skin too raw for anything else. Then I reach for the spare boxer briefs. Clean cotton against clean skin. A fresh liner. The cramping pulses once more, low and central, as I pull everything up, and I stand in the shower stall with my hand pressed flat against my lower abdomen and wait for it to pass.

It passes. In four weeks it will start again. The back ache and the cramps and the liner and the pink water running toward the drain - not something that happened to me once, not an aberration, but the body on a schedule. I didn't know that this morning. I hadn't let myself know it. Standing here with my hand on my abdomen and the smell of iron still in the steam, I can't unknow it.

---

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