You'd told Maya you'd water the plants and use the spare shower while yours was getting repaired. She had left the place spotless. Coconut soap on the ledge. A clear bottle labeled REPAIR in small print sat on the second shelf, no brand, no list of ingredients. Her bathroom smelled like her. Faintly synthetic. Faintly sweet.
The water came on hot. You read the bottle once, found nothing useful, and used it anyway. The label crinkled wet under your thumb. The first thing wrong was your weight. You braced a hand on the tile and felt your shoulders narrow under the spray. Your stance moved without you. Hair you did not have ten minutes ago slid forward across one shoulder. The wet weight kept coming. Water began running differently across your chest, where the chest was now—
You looked down. The chest was heavier than the rest of you, and it pulled when you breathed. You braced a hand against the tile and the breath came out shaped wrong. Your hips had moved. They had moved while you were not looking. You felt the water between your thighs and the angle of it was new.
You put a hand between your legs and jerked it back. You kept breathing. The new feeling was not a memory and you were not afraid. You worked up the nerve and touched again. The soap slipped twice. You ran your hands over the skin. You fell into a rhythm. You steadied. You opened.
You touched yourself again and almost laughed. It was too much for that. You were too full to laugh. You would burst open. The shower kept running. The mirror was a fogged square behind you, and the bottle on the shelf had not moved.
***
The latch on the bathroom door turned. You did not move. You watched the doorframe and the steam moving along the ceiling, and you could already feel her seeing you. Maya stood in the doorway and did not say your name. She said the name of the bottle. "Oh." Quiet. She set her bag down outside the threshold and stepped out of her shoes.
She crossed the bathroom in her socks. The glass had fogged everywhere except the thin strip your shoulder had been pressed against. She slid the door open the rest of the way. "I had not been sure it worked on people," she said. Then she stepped in with her clothes on.
Her hand went to your chest first. Not to grab. To weigh. She lifted, looked, set down. Then she cupped one breast in her palm and squeezed. She knelt and sucked a nipple into her mouth. She reached past your face and turned the water off. The last drops fell from the fixture. She stepped back, stripped off her shirt and her bra and her pants, and stepped back in.
Her hand went lower. Two fingers, then three. Your hips moved without your permission. The thought arrived fully formed, and it wasn't yours, and then it was: this was what the body wanted, and your old name was wrong now, and Maya should not stop. Your knees went weak. You leaned against the wall and slid down. She knelt with you and did not stop. Her fingers were insistent. Her mouth was on you. Her eyes flicked up and you came around her hand. The old self watched from somewhere small, from a shell that was not yours anymore.
Afterwards, on Maya's bed, you said the name she gave you and it sat right in your mouth. The towel under you was warm. Outside the window the afternoon had gone yellow. The empty bottle was still on the second shelf, label crinkled, where you had left it.