by Kris Ripper
I was supposed to be a planner, damn it. If I started spending nights at the farmhouse, I was gonna have to keep a go bag in my car at all times with a change of clothes. Thank god I always kept my basal body thermometer on me.
Tomorrow was twelve days after inseminating. I was supposed to test. But I didn’t have to test. I could skip it. If you wanted the best results you had to test the first time you peed in the morning, when the hormone concentrations would be highest. And this close to ovulation, there was no point to testing later.
“What’s up?” Her eyes narrowed. “Why does your face look like that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, huh?”
I relented. “Oh, it’s luteal phase day twelve tomorrow. That’s when I usually test.”
“Hang on.” She went to the closet and rummaged long enough to make me wonder if she’d gone to Narnia for whatever she was looking for. “Ha. I knew I had more of these.”
The open box of pregnancy tests landed on the bed, spilling out one lonely test.
“Damn, woman, you’re a full-service stop.”
“It’s part of my charm.”
I wasn’t going to tell her, but it really was part of her charm. “Thanks. You don’t mind?”
“Seriously, keep me away from people with sperm. I don’t have any sexual problems with them, but I can’t be risking this shit again, Zane. I hope you like pregnancy more than I did.”
My skin prickled. “I might not ever get pregnant.”
Most people rush to assure the not-yet-pregnant lady that she’ll get there eventually. It’s as if the whole world sees pregnancy as an entitlement that anyone with a uterus just gets.
“True.” Dred finished wrapping her hair in a scarf, tucked in the edges, and lay back on her bed. “You might not. Some people don’t. Some people who don’t want to, get pregnant anyway. There’s pretty much no fairness in the world, so it could be that I got knocked up off a ripped condom and you can’t get knocked up no matter how hard you try.”
I fingered the test I’d pulled out of the box, wishing I had the courage to not test. If you weren’t pregnant, you got your period. I wanted to be that patient. I wanted to accept.
“I really want to get pregnant,” I admitted.
“But the thing I like about you is that if you don’t, you’ll find a way to have a family anyway, and you’ll be happy with it. You won’t spend your whole life wishing for something that couldn’t happen. A lot of people do that and it’s such a waste, you know?”
I set the test on the table beside the bed, then pulled out my digital basal body thermometer and put that next to it. My phone was at about fifty percent, so I turned it to airplane mode to keep it from wasting battery power overnight. Temping wasn’t much good if I didn’t have access to my spreadsheet.
“You want a shirt or something to sleep in? You know, before you do the walk of shame downstairs tomorrow morning.”
“Are you teasing me?”
“Yeah. You got a problem with that?”
I leaned over the bed to kiss her. “Not so much, no. Do you want me to have a shirt to sleep in?”
She eyed me for a long moment, dark eyes unblinking. “I don’t sleep naked. But it doesn’t get that cold, and we keep the thermostat at fifty-five for James.”
“Fifty-five can be chilly.” I wanted to give her an out. Maybe she wanted me to have a shirt on. Maybe it felt like pressure if I didn’t. Maybe I was making a big deal out of nothing.
“Do whatever makes you happy.”
“Lend me a shirt.”
She rolled her eyes and went to rummage in a drawer. “Here.”
“Wow.” It took me a minute to place the logo. “I didn’t realize people still had Green Day shirts.”
“Hey, you shut up. I love them. Obie had the biggest crush on Billie Joe Armstrong when we were in high school. Like, he’d casually propose we go hang out at this pizza place in El Sobrante just in case one of the band guys stopped by, because he heard a rumor that sometimes they did.”
I laughed. “Okay, that’s adorable. And Billie Joe is crush-worthy. I can see that.” I shrugged my bra off and pulled the huge T over my head. “Let me guess: this was Obie’s shirt?”
“Looks good on you. Though I might have totally screwed up. If we make out, we’re gonna need to turn the lights off so I don’t keep thinking about teenage Obe.”
I shucked the rest of my clothes and kept on my undies, twirling for her with a flourish. “What do you think?”
“I think you should be in the bed already.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You call me ‘ma’am’ and we’re gonna have to take this outside.”
“Exhibitionism, Dred?”
She growled and tugged on the shirt until I toppled into her. “Get. In. The. Bed.”
“Thanks for inviting me over.”
She straightened out of her habitual slouch, nearly equalizing our heights. “I’m still unclear on why we didn’t do this two months ago.”
“Uh. Apparently I was, uh, pretending we were fake-dating. Or something. In my defense, it might be contagious, and if it is, I caught it from Cam. He apparently had a, like, different strain of it. Um.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah.”
We kissed. The kind of kiss no one started and no one stopped. Like we were both being directed by the same force, and no one needed to be in charge for us to feel it.
“Come to bed, Z.”
“Yes, ma—”
She covered my mouth with her hand. “Don’t make me kick your ass out in the middle of the night.”
I licked her palm. She squeaked and pulled away, then retaliated by shoving me over onto the bed. “You’re disgusting!”
“Don’t wake the baby!”
We rolled around for a few minutes, trying to pin each other, trying not to laugh too loudly. When I finally cried uncle—or panted it, really—she sat on my back and held me down, pulling the pillow so I wouldn’t suffocate. “Tell me I win.”
“You win. My heart’s pounding. How can I be this out of shape?”
“Right? Don’t you go to the gym and shit?”
I strained, trying to dislodge her. And promptly gave up. “If I die, you’re gonna have a dead body in your bed. I’m just saying. It’ll inconvenience you way more than it will me.”
She laughed, muffling it against my neck. “That’s a really good pitch. Not ‘don’t kill me because murder is bad’ but ‘don’t kill me because murder is inconvenient.’”
“It is!” I groaned. “But if you wanted to give me a back rub, don’t let me stop you.”
“You wish.” She rolled off. “I’m not super insecure.”
“Uh-huh?” I opened one eye to stare across the quilt at her.
“But I’m still having a hard time imagining actually having sex. Or no, I can imagine it, but I can’t imagine doing it. In real life.”
“We don’t have to.”
“I know that. I’m not a jackass. But I want to have sex with you.” Her jaw tightened and she looked away. “I want to, but my body is shut down in a way I’m not used to it being. I always had a racing libido, you know? Obie told me once it was a good thing I was pansexual, because I wanted to have more sex than one gender could provide.”
“Like you’d exhaust the entire gender? Damn, Dred.” I reached out, dragging my fingers along her throat, down over her shoulder. She was wearing a dark-blue cotton shirt, maybe one of those men’s undershirts you’d see in packages. It wasn’t the kind of shirt cut for people with narrow shoulders and large breasts, anyway. “You know I don’t have any need for that, right?”
“You have no need to get laid? Really?”
“Tonight? None. Like none. Really.”
She swallowed. “But I might. It’s been such a long time. And I haven’t been lonely—you can’t really be lonely in this house—but maybe I’ve been physically lonely a little. For touching that’s about me. No
t someone else. And Bri and I were exclusive, so even before he left like a fool, I wasn’t having as much sex as I wanted to be having.”
“I thought you said he was good?” I teased, but gently.
“He was. It’s such a bitch. Maybe because he was bi, so he didn’t have a lot of those straight-boy hang-ups some guys have. I could propose anything, and he’d be excited about it.” She shrugged, the motion rippling through her body. “So I had really great sex, but not enough of it. And then I had hardly any. And then I had none.”
Oh. I slid closer and let my hand drift to her neck, cupping it from the back. “So we get physical. If there’s anything you don’t want to do right now, that doesn’t mean we can’t have sex, Dred.”
The weight of her head leaning against mine was so welcome, so warm, that I inhaled the moment as if I could hold it inside me forever.
“We could have pretend fake-sex,” I whispered in her ear.
“I’m pretty much done pretending and faking things, Z.”
I wiggled until I was nearly beneath her. “Kiss me. Kiss me a lot.”
“Yeah, okay.”
That was the night I learned the texture of her skin, the way she smelled behind her ears, the vicious poke to my side when I’d get too close to her hair. (I laughed.) I kept my hands over her clothes, but I let them roam wherever I wanted, and Dred’s breathy moans fueled more exploration than I would have risked otherwise. I mapped the shape of her legs, her sides, her back. I pulled her wrists to my lips so I could taste her and press kisses to the centers of her palms.
All about her, yeah, I could do that. With pleasure. With joy.
I cupped her breasts through fabric and she looked up at the ceiling, arching, giving me more than I asked for. Giving me everything she had. I kissed the skin above the collar of her shirt and rolled her nipples lightly while her fingers clawed deeply into my shoulders.
This moan was lower, longer, and felt a hell of a lot like a promise.
“Shit, shit, shit, keep doing that.” One of her hands stopped bruising my shoulder and slipped under the waistband of her pants.
I switched nipples and re-upped my efforts at the hickey I was giving her, wishing I could still see what she was doing. My own body was overheated and eager, but I kept my legs pressed together while she panted.
Dred came, pulling me so hard against her I had to gasp for a last breath while she stiffened and whimpered in my arms.
“I can’t believe that just worked.” She sounded awed, breathless. Before I could say anything to that, she had me on my back. “Can I touch you?”
“Fuck yes— Oh my—”
I didn’t have time. She was on me fast, fingers in my underwear, sliding into me.
“Oh Jesus, you’re so fucking wet— Zane—”
I thrust up into her hand, unable to help myself, chasing down a rhythm I couldn’t control. “I’m coming—”
She kissed me even harder than she fucked me, and I arched into her everywhere. Breathing was overrated.
The orgasm had been a little too fast, and I hadn’t expected to have one; I hadn’t primed my body the way I would have if I’d known this was how our night would end. My clit pulsed against the heel of her hand.
I shifted, reaching down to keep her hand where it was. “You mind?”
“You going again? Greedy bitch.”
I laughed breathlessly, finding the right angle. Yeah, there. I rocked gently against her, letting the pressure build, focusing on the scent of her, how her fingers had been in her and were now in me, which was so fucking hot I couldn’t stand it.
She growled into my ear. “I’m gonna count to twenty, and then I’m taking back my hand. You got twenty seconds, girl. Get off.”
I groaned and buried my face in her neck. I wanted to protest the injustice of putting my orgasm on a clock, but more than that I wanted to come again. If the first orgasm was too fast, the second usually made up for it. But this was fast, stupidly fast; I wasn’t even sure I could do it.
“Seven, eight, come on, Z. Show me how it’s done. Give it to me, girl, you know you want to. Ten, eleven . . .”
I did. Desperately. I moaned and tried to spread myself wider, grinding myself harder into her hand. Yes, yes, yes. I almost had it! I was so fucking close!
“Seventeen—”
“Nooo, damn it—” I threw my head back and let it take me over, heedless now that I was using her hand as a sex toy. My legs shook and twitched and everything at the center of my body went liquid. I trembled and shattered and came until I was nothing but a pool of tingling postorgasmic goo.
Then I giggled. Because goo.
“You did it.” She sounded impressed.
“I’m really good with goals.”
“That’s hot.”
“You’re hot. Dred. That was. I can’t even.”
“I am hot.” My eyes were closed. I didn’t realize she was in kissing distance until she was kissing me. “You’re not so bad yourself, Z.”
“I do my best.”
“You sure do.”
A click told me the lamp was now off. I still couldn’t open my eyes. Or move.
“You are totally fucked-out now. Man. I’m gonna tell everyone that the best way to get you to slow down is to make you come twice.”
“You should see me after three.”
She laughed and snuggled closer. I managed, with effort, to get my arm around her.
“Good night,” I murmured.
“Good night.”
I have no idea how long it took me to fall asleep. Sixty seconds at the absolute outside, but I’d bet I was unconscious in half that time. And I slept hard that night, like I hadn’t slept in months, maybe years.
I knew I wasn’t pregnant the second I temped. If you were carrying a collection of cells that wanted to be a baby, your body temperature stayed a little higher than usual. If you were about to get your period, it dropped.
Mine dropped.
I tested anyway. The human body was a strange and wondrous thing, and it didn’t follow all the rules all the time. I set the test aside, peed until I was empty, and got my period. I waited out the test, just in case. One line. Negative.
Low temp, period, BFN. It’s the “you’re not pregnant” trifecta.
I’d been certain I wasn’t. Convinced of it. Knew it absolutely. And yet.
I tried to keep my sniffles to myself, but I couldn’t stay hidden in the upstairs bathroom when everyone else would need it. All the splashing water on my face and brushing my teeth in the world couldn’t quite disguise that I’d cried. That I was still sort of crying in an impotent, teary-eyed way. Restrained weeping, to be done quietly, alone, preferably in bed.
Someone had gone downstairs earlier. Probably Emerson, judging by the steps, and that Obie came home around midnight. I didn’t want to see Emerson. If I kept it down, I could probably slip back into bed and pretend everything was fine.
Dred didn’t have thick shades over her windows, and one of them had direct eastern exposure. Light suffused the room around the edges of her curtains, flowing in almost as if it were a liquid, as if I could step in it and let myself be washed away.
“BFN, huh?”
I hadn’t noticed she was awake. I’d tried not to look over.
She flipped back the blankets, shifting in my peripheral vision as I stared at the way the light hit the floorboards.
“I thought I was ready this time. I thought . . . I didn’t even really think . . .” Impossible not to cry again.
“Get in bed, Z. Come on.”
I got in the bed and let her hold me. She stroked my hair and didn’t tell me that everything would be okay, that maybe it’d be next month, that I had to keep the faith.
All the stories I told myself to not feel this ache, this emptiness. The things I’d imagined someone else saying, as if it would help. Dred didn’t even try.
When I’d finally calmed down, I lifted my head. “Sorry I got snot on your pillow.”
“I’m gonna make you wash that, too.” She kissed me. “If I could wish you my luck, I would. It sucks it’s so hard.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it really does.” I sat up. “God, I’m a mess.”
“Nah. Only a little bit of a mess. Hey, I have a wedding announcement shoot this morning, I forgot to tell you last night.”
“I can’t believe you’re kicking me out when I’m already crying. You’re so mean.”
She smiled, teeth picking up light from the window. “Stay here. This time you’ve got someone to hold your hand, you know? So let me.”
“I thought I could do this whole thing by myself. I wasn’t supposed to need anyone.”
“Yeah, I’ve walked that walk, and all it gets you is a lot of being scared and alone. I told Obie to go to work the night I gave birth to James because I didn’t want to inconvenience him. Like I really thought, I don’t know, I guess I thought when it seemed like the right time I’d drive my ass to the hospital and check myself in and call him when the whole deal was done.”
“What, like . . . in the middle of contractions, you’d drive?” I thumped on her head. “That was silly.”
“No more silly than you thinking you could cry about your BFN and I wouldn’t know. Z, this shit is fucking hard. I was trying to do it by myself because I didn’t think I deserved anyone helping me. But you’ve done everything right, you know? Why are you punishing yourself?”
“I’m not. I don’t mean to be. It’s more that I . . . had a plan.” Tears welled in my eyes again, even though I was trying so fucking hard not to give in. “I guess it never occurred to me that my plan wouldn’t work. So now that it keeps failing, I feel like I dig myself in deeper and deeper, like I have to stick to the plan, I can’t surrender, or it’s just proving how stupid I was to ever think I could do this in the first place.”
She ran her thumb over my lips. “It’s not like that. You’re not failing, you’re building. And when you have your kid, Z, all of this is gonna make you more mindful, like Aunt Florence says. The harder you fight, the more meaning things have.”
“You think?” I sounded so pathetic, so desperate.