Alex got home just after six, still floaty from the propofol tail-end and the two Tylenol they’d given her “just in case.” She locked the door, dropped her purse, and stood in the hallway trying to breathe normally. Her rectum felt strangely empty and echoey, as if the metal tube had carved out a new, sensitive hollow inside her. Every time she clenched (out of habit, out of nerves) she felt the ghost of that long, rigid intrusion.

She peeled off her jeans in the bedroom and caught sight of herself in the mirror: cheeks flushed, nipples tight beneath her bra, a visible damp patch on the gusset of her pale-blue panties. She stared at the evidence and whispered, “You are disgusting,” like an accusation.

But her hand was already sliding down.

She didn’t make it to the bed. She sank to the carpet, back against the footboard, knees falling open. The moment her fingertips grazed her clit she jolted (so swollen, so ready it almost hurt). She was slick from the waist down: lube the nurse hadn’t quite wiped away, her own arousal, the faint medicinal smell of the scope still clinging to her skin.

Two circles and she was panting. Three and her hips lifted off the floor. She couldn’t stop replaying it: Dr. Carter’s calm baritone, the cold kiss of the sigmoidoscope, the way her body had opened for it like it had been waiting its whole life.

She came hard, thighs shaking, a broken cry ripping out of her throat. The orgasm rolled on longer than any she could remember, pulsing in the exact place the scope had been.

Afterward she curled on her side on the carpet, tears of shame leaking into her hair, and whispered into the empty room, “What is wrong with me?”