Second Skin
A short story
The lab sounds different at night. Fewer voices, less apology. Just the doors sighing and the long, careful hum that settles into the ribs if you stand still.
I slip through the locks with my keycard, and I lean into the ambient light that will be my moon and stars until morning.
If I wait there long enough, the hum feels like a blanket. Sometimes it feels like more. Like a voice. A breath. A familiar touch. Sitting there in the dark, the cool blue glow of the LEDs thrumming through the screens, casting their luminescence against the sterile white walls of my home, I imagine a future.
He squeezes my hand, and I blink awake, stretching my neck up to his waiting lips. Adam. His smile still disarms me. His presence startles me, even months later, but his body — I reach out. My fingers shake when I touch warmth, then heat as he pulls me into his arms.
Such strength. I let myself go when he holds me like this — how he always did, but more now. More hunger than before. But his strength is fleeting. His eyes betray a weariness I can feel, as if he carries this weight for me, and I can’t relieve him of it. I hold him close, then pull away, pressing my finger to his lips when he begins to protest. “Not yet, my love. Tomorrow. I promise. Rest. Rest for now.”
And then he’s gone, and I feel his heat slip away, a faint echo of his heartbeat — steady, slow, in repose. One more day. Another. Rest, my love. Just a little longer.
He leaves me trembling from more than the cold. I pull the lab coat on and slip barefoot across the room to run my eyes over the monitors. The chair beckons. My fingers pause over the keyboard.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will do it.
And then I sit and weep.
The low rumble of his laugh always brought a smile to my face, but now, he’s quiet. His smile is stretched, as if it struggles to form. As if he’s forgotten his easy mirth, his tireless jokes, the way his words filled the empty space between us with energy, an ebb and flow that connected me with him in ways I’d never felt connected to another human being before. Not my mother. My father. The twin I lost at an early age. No one had broken my invisible barrier for a lifetime, until Adam.
He’d cried as easily as he’d laughed, as if his emotions boiled just below the surface of his skin. He’d danced when I couldn’t. He’d played at instruments. Even badly, he was half good. A fast learner. A quick study. A pupil regarded by any he’d fancied could teach him a trick, or treat. He’d learned enough from me — pleasure and pain, as I desired it, until I ached for a glance from him, knowing he could read every nuance and satisfy every unvoiced need.
Yet now, there was something else, something I struggled to name. Something I wasn’t sure I could tame. The same Adam, but not…
The quiet is comforting for a while, when the madness of the day has passed, and the promise of the night beckons. When no one can see what I’ve become, what I’ve done.
I dry my eyes, push the thoughts away, but I can still see the cocoon and the shape inside. It’s never far from my thoughts, and now, it’s never far from my reach. I shift in the chair, grateful for the thick cushion. I pull the blanket up over my chest and tuck my feet under me. The last of the staff has been gone for hours. Home to bed. Home to a weekend filled with anything other than the sorrow that I see pulsing in the dark. Light and shadow play over my face like two opposing forces. And I wait a little longer, letting the battle roil. Another day. Another night. Wondering who will win out.
I slide an orange tablet under my tongue. I’ll sleep when it’s over.
The memories tick by with each tremor of the second hand. The first time he kissed me. The coffee that forever stained my lab coat at Precedent Medical. His fingers entwined in mine. The way his cock filled me and made me his.
The rumble of the MGB, the whine of the motor as we climbed through the Alps on a brisk summer day. He’d laughed as we swerved around precarious turns, dancing ever-closer to a frightful plunge. His smile had filled the car, the softness of his hand over mine on the gearshift, my feet plonking the clutch until the little gremlin sighed to stop at an overlook. Seven thousand quid well-spent. Adam’s hands had done the rest. Brought it back to life. Brought me back to life on that chilly morning before we crossed into Italy, before the little inn outside Courmayeur — the one we only found because the place in Entreves was booked, and we called it luck for the rest of our lives because there was no view of the mountains.
Instead, we’d spent a week in bed, something you could only read in novels, until it became our truth. “I can feel you thinking about me,” he’d say, like it mattered, his face in his books, my fingers finding him, the quiet way he unraveled under my touch until words failed him, and he took me again. And again.
I stroke myself in the dark, the blanket shuddering with each breath I take. Fingers deep, filling me like he did. Like he does. Like he will. His coffee breath filled my lungs day in and day out, until I couldn’t breathe anything but him. Until my oxygen ran low. Until he’d stained his hand with a cough, and I saw the fear in his eyes. The tests. The doctors. The MGB forgotten, its little engine burned out as quickly as his own.
My watch trembles, and I breathe. It’s time for another round. My pulse quickens as I throw off the blanket and step into my shoes again. My lab coat dangles from the back of the chair, but I put it on slowly, trying to calm my nerves.
I bring the cart anyway — the one with the wipes and the sterile swabs and the injectors — because it helps to have something to push. Something to make the floor roll back under me in a straight line. Something to hold onto besides my careening thoughts. The clip-clip of my low heels echo in the empty hall, my cart and I throwing wild shadows on the walls from the red emergency lighting.
I stare at the instruments as I push through the silent corridors of my prison. What good are they now? It’s done, I tell myself. The tests prove it out. The research I will never be able to publish. The tanks will be emptied, no trace left of the solution — the only solution I could construct with the only tools I had. My mind. My studies. My heart. Adam would understand. Will. I did what I could. But no one else. They will never forgive me. They will never know until it’s too late.
There are a pair of doors to unlock, a pair of seals to break, a pair of fingers to press on the frosted pads until they read me and decide I am still myself. How many times have I made this journey? And every time, I ask myself, “How many times until the journey is ended?”
One more. I know the answer now. Just one more, and then it’s done.
On the other side: the chambers. Twins, if you’re not looking closely. I try not to. Looking closely has never helped. I look one way, not the other. One chamber is filled with hope and promise. The other. The other is tears. One life. One death. Ever the equation in my world, I have teetered on the verge of living as much as I’ve walked close to the edge.
The MGB had rattled to life on the edge of a precipice, and Adam had pulled open the door, his foot inches from death, without a second glance. I’d downshifted through the twists and turns of our bond while he’d read yet another poem about the enormity of existence and the minutiae of life. His voice had been warm chocolate on a winter day, a dollop of cream on top. I’d breathed in the richness, felt the glow of it spread through my body until I couldn’t find the fear in our twisted path anymore. I’d gunned the little engine, defying the treacherous curves and narrow lanes.
The old inn waited, and I remembered how good his cock felt.
“Hi,” I say, because hello feels too formal for a room that knows my bio rhythm as much as his. “I’m here.” But the room is silent, and I feel the end pressing in.
His eyes are closed.
The lights don’t brighten — good. It’s quieter when they stay low. My assistant doesn’t answer, but her voice still echoes in my head. I look for her in the halls sometimes when it’s too quiet. She’s been gone a year now, a month into this treatment. After we had it out, when she’d said she could no longer support my choice. My choice. A choice I’d had to make. Didn’t she understand? Or did she, and I still can’t?
I’m not sure anymore.
One chamber breathes with little effort; the other has to be asked. I learned the trick months ago: touch the glass until the thermal sensor picks me up and the system decides to meet me halfway.
My handprint blooms. The hum leans forward, a cat at a door, wrapping its tail around my calves. The incessant purring reminds me of that tabby and warm summers on the veranda looking at birds. It reminds me of Adam -- his stupid cat, his stupid smiles, his stupid touch. His stupid books full of poems that lingered in the air between us like smoke. So many. So many he finished. Unfinished. So many…
The second door slides open and the purr becomes a hum again. Warm. Inviting. Erotic.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. The thrum courses through my core, and I breathe his name in the dark.
Adam.
Gooseflesh pimples my skin. My nipples pebble. One more day.
He was never cold, not before, I tell myself. That’s what I think, standing there, palm to glass. He’d put his back to me at night and I’d nestle in, absorbing the inferno. Cold-blooded, Mara? he’d say, and I’d say, No, Adam, just needing your heat. When I try to pull the memory out by the root, it comes up with the wrong dirt clinging to it — stainless steel, not sheets. The cool hard tiles underfoot. The unforgiving shape of the table in that little Italian hospital. Hard glare of the lights. The cough becoming wet. The damp musk of his skin when it was done.
Tests run. It’s fine, I told myself. It’s fine, I told him. He understood the lie, and then the promise when the doctor’s lie resembled mine.
Vitals scroll in pale red print along the frame. Numbers I pretend to read because pretending is almost the same as hope. I whisper them under my breath the way other people pray.
I fog the glass without meaning to. The outline of a face sharpens on the other side, then blurs again as the condensate runs. He’s asleep. Or he’s pretending. He was always good at that game. Sometimes I’d nudge him, and he’d stay very still until I pressed my mouth to his, and then he’d laugh into me — triumphant, boyish. That was before the machines learned his name.
That’s when the lie fit the science, and the science fit the lie. A year ago.
My hand lingers in the air. I’ve been over the sequence a thousand times, and I go over it again before I turn away, my hand closing over my mouth.
I’m not the kind of person who cries at monitors. I’m not any kind of person at two in the morning, honestly. At any time any longer. I’m in a dream that never ends, memories playing over and over in my head as if I’m closed in a loop. I still take the pills, but sleeping isn’t a problem anymore. That is, I don’t sleep. How can I when we’re this close?
It’s done — but I can’t say it out loud.
His name jars me, and I turn, as if someone is whispering it. When I turn back, the vitals scroll in a rhythm I’ve memorized. Like dance steps, my partner leading me again. I feel his hand on my back, the warmth of his palm in mine as we move — he leads; I follow. I’m drawn to him, and when he stops, I stand alone on the floor, unable to find my way.
Numbers cascade across the screen before me, and I trace them with my fingers for the millionth time. I am a sequence of motions in a room designed for repetition. I swab ports. I change the filter I hate because it squeals when you release it. I talk while I work because silence is a darkness you can fall into, and I have fallen far enough already.
My voice is less than a whisper. Any more, and I will wake him, and I can’t bear the tears.
“You’ll hate this part,” I tell him. I tilt left, and he’s a sleeping beauty under glass: the chisled features of his father, long flowing lashes from his mother, the geometry of tendon and bone than almost qualified him for the Olympics in days past. A blueprint perfected. An architectural masterpiece, even if he would find a flaw.
A sonnet.
All of it gone. What’s there now haunts me. I was so sure the therapy would work. Sure enough to kill the rest of my life.
“Almost done,” I would say, though I knew we were still at the beginning. The start of something new. The dawn of an era, if I could make the math work. And when it didn’t —, “You’re still you. And you always will be.” That’s important to establish early, even if it isn’t true. Especially if it isn’t true. A flaw, but this one mine.
The hum thickens. I swear it has undertones now. Not notes, exactly — more like the feeling before a word arrives, like when I know he’s about to say something. The exact thing he will say. We’ve done this hundreds of times, and I know how the words form on his lips before his tongue shifts and the exhalation presses the air into sound. I lay two fingers on the gasket seam where the polymer meets the ring. Conductive gel slicks my skin; the sensor catches. A narrow slit opens to the service port, and the air that comes out is colder than the corridor.
I shiver, and I curse myself for it. But I need one last moment. Just one.
I inhale. The air smells like rain hissing on a sun-kissed street. I swallow because it tastes like swallowing does in a dentist’s chair, with the little straw tugging the saliva away before you can form it into a decision.
“Easy,” I say, and I don’t know whether I mean the machine, or him, or me. My eyes flick to the vitals again, to the heart rate and BP, the oxygen levels, his core temperature. All as expected. I shudder again and squeeze my hands to steady them.
Inside the chamber, something shifts in the dark, but the room is silent, only my breathing, my thudding heart, the soft tap of my bare feet. “Adam,” I say, testing the shape of his name — does it fit what I see any more? “Hey.”
If he hears, it’s beneath whatever else the hum is saying.
The first time I learned to read his face was at our kitchen table with a hangover and a crossword between us. He told me without telling me when to cheat. “You’re stuck on fourteen down,” he murmured, and I said, “No I’m not,” and he smiled like a kid who’d just found a forgotten candy in his pocket. “Anomaly. A seven-letter word for aberration. It’s anomaly.”
The second time was here, watching how memory maps onto muscle. Subtle recoding of the DNA to smooth the rough edges. The part where I check reflexes. Light over pupils. A gentle tap at the patellar point. The chart says minimal stimulus. The chart was not written for wives. For lovers. For mourners.
“Look at me,” I’d said, and the face on the other side of the glass did. He blinked and smiled and then he turned away. I shattered there and then, the first time I told him he would never come out of the cocoon again.
I counted the monitor’s beeps to keep from counting seconds. One. Two. Three. A perfect cadence. Heart beating, still breathing, enough for me to return to the lab and try something new. In those early days, I used to watch his chest rise and fall, my fingers hovering over it, arm shaking, caught between touching him awake and soaking in his perfection.
If I touched him, he’d turn and grin and reach for me. Find me soaked, my quiet gasps, the gentle surrender of my heart and body to whatever he needed. And then blissful sleep, my mind quieted. The worry gone. The numbers forgotten. The tests something for tomorrow.
Until the tomorrows began to dwindle and we came here. Until his breathing became a steady graph on a chart.
I flip the penlight off. It leaves a comet-tail in my eyes that I blink at. When it clears, I have both of them at once: the man who hated hospital gowns, and the man who wears his skin like an argument he’s losing. I remember this, and suddenly my hand is hovering over his chest, arm trembling lest I touch and wake him. Will he wake? Can he? I blink and the picture steadies into one pair of lips parted slightly as if to say my name.
“Don’t,” I whisper, though what I mean is please.
Behind me, the other chamber answers itself. It’s the strangest trick of acoustics — how sound moves in a room like this. The hum rises from the left-hand unit and the right-hand unit answers, a harmony you feel before you hear it, like blood moving.
“I’m here,” I say again, louder, as if I’ve been challenged. “I’m here, I’m—.” The word frays because my mouth has gone dry. I step closer to the glass, so close my breath halos my own reflection. I stare at the world through a fog for a heartbeat. I look like a woman about to kiss the wrong thing.
The speakers click, a ghost in the machine. For a second I think it’s the vent. Then I think it’s nothing, that I haven’t slept in days, that I don’t know when I’ll sleep again. Perhaps when the pills run out. Then the click is a voice, a voice that’s his voice, a voice that knows my name.
“Mara.” Not a voice. A wish.
Time is short, and Adam cannot wait much longer. I look down at the body of my husband. Perfection suspended in fluid. Breathing tube still in place. Monitors still firmly attached. Silent. Unmoving. Unchanged.
My eyes trace the lines of his body, and I freeze when his hand slides around my waist, pulling me back to him.
Adam. My Adam.
“I dreamt of you, Mara,” he says, his voice deeper than ever before. A whisper in the darkness, but his words unfold inside me. “I dreamt of you playing with your cunt.” A long, deep breath, and when he exhales, his smile fills my vision. “I can smell your pussy.”
I swallow. His voice. Almost the same. I shiver as he presses into me, and I feel the heat of his body, the way his cock presses into my back. Young and virile and perfect, his eyes only for me since he woke. But…
“It’s time,” he says as his fingers slip along the sleeve of my jacket and intertwine with mine. I stiffen when he extends my arm. “Let’s be done, my love, and then, I’ll take you back to that little inn where we fell in love.”
My fingers linger over the pad a beat, and I look down at him once more. “Adam?”
He leans in, his breath hot on my neck and something in me gives way. Adam. The shutdown sequence begins. Lights blink red. The cocoon closes right in front of me. I’m frozen, fingers trembling at the end of my outstretched arm, and I can hear his voice so clearly now — not the voice I remember.
“Remember? In Entreves?”
I close my eyes — and when I open them, I don’t ask which Adam is holding me.