He kisses me then, soft and domestic, tasting like coffee and futures I shouldn't imagine but am already planning in terrifying detail.
"Stay today," he says against my lips.
"I have a shift at three."
"Until then."
I should say no. Should go home, take the tests, deal with whatever reality they reveal. Should stop this before it gets worse.
Instead, I say, "Okay. But first, take me back to bed and fuck me properly. The kind where I forget my own name and you forget I'm supposed to be at work."
"I thought you had anxiety about—"
"My anxiety can wait. Your dick can't." I'm already pulling him toward the bedroom, still dripping from the shower, leaving wet footprints on his expensive floors. "I need you inside me again. Now. Before my brain comes back online and starts making spreadsheets."
He catches me in the hallway, presses me against the wall. "Here?"
"Here. The bed. The kitchen counter. I don't care. Just—"
He cuts me off with a kiss that makes me forget why I ever cared about statistics, lifting me again, and I wrap myself around him like my life depends on it.
"Good girl," he murmurs against my neck. "Stop thinking. Just feel."
And for once, I listen. I stop calculating, stop analyzing, stop doing anything except taking what I need from this man who makes my disasters feel like features.
The tests wait in my purse like tomorrow's problem.
The truth waits in my body like a future I'm not ready to face.
But right now? Right now I'm just a woman getting thoroughly fucked by a man who makes me forget that consequences exist.
And honestly? That's exactly what I need.
Chapter thirty
Four Tests, One Disaster
Lena
The gas station bathroom at 6 AM smells like industrial bleach layered over something darker—decades of desperation, maybe, or just the particular decay that happens when hope goes to die under fluorescent lights.
The Ghost Clinic closed at 4:30 this morning after a brutal night. Three overdoses, a stabbing, and a teenager with eyes like broken bottles who bled all over my last clean scrub top. I spent an hour after closing on my knees in the van, scrubbing blood from the floor while my stomach rolled with something that had nothing to do with the metallic smell and everything to do with the alien thing happening inside my body. The nausea hit in waves—not the sharp, simple kind from bad food, but somethingdeeper, like my cells were reorganizing themselves without my permission.
I should have driven home. Should have collapsed into my bed where Zane's cologne still clings to my pillow like a ghost of better decisions. Instead, I drove here. This nothing gas station on the edge of everything, where truckers buy breakfast burritos at dawn and women like me confirm their disasters in bathrooms that have seen too much.
Four pregnancy tests spread across the grimy sink counter. Different brands because my brain needs consensus, needs multiple witnesses to this unraveling. The fluorescent bulb above flickers with a death-rattle buzz, casting my reflection in that particular green tinge that makes everyone look already embalmed. In the mirror, my face is a stranger's—hollow eyes with purple shadows like bruises, skin pale except for the flush across my cheeks that's been there for three days, the pregnancy glow that's really just my body burning itself alive from the inside.
The exhaustion sits in my bones like lead poisoning, like gravity has personally decided to punish me. Not regular tired—this is cellular exhaustion, the kind where your mitochondria wave white flags and your DNA considers early retirement. My breasts ache with a specific heaviness, like they're already preparing for a purpose I never agreed to. Even my scrub top hurts against my nipples, the fabric might as well be sandpaper.
My hands shake as I unwrap the first test, the plastic crinkling loud as gunfire in the empty bathroom. Someone's carved "Maria was here 2018" into the stall door, and I wonder if Mariastood here too, holding her own future in a plastic stick, her mouth full of that metallic taste that's been haunting me for a week—like pennies, like blood, like the specific flavor of a life about to change.
Three weeks ago. Monday. Supply closet.
The memory hits with violence: the metal shelf edge cutting into my spine, leaving bruises I pressed for days after like evidence. His hands shaking as bad as mine when he said "I didn't bring anything." The exact second I chose him over everything—that moment when I said "fuck it" and meant it with every atom of my disaster soul. The wetness after, dripping down my thighs as I tried to walk normally back to the nurses' station, his DNA already swimming toward my stupid, eager egg.
The cheap gas station speakers crackle with some country song about trucks and heartbreak, tinny and distant like it's playing from underwater. My reflection watches me uncap the first test—this haunted woman in blood-stained scrubs about to confirm what my body's been screaming for days.
The plastic is cold against my skin as I position myself over the toilet that's seen better decades. My thighs shake from the half-squat, from exhaustion, from the knowledge that in three minutes, everything changes. The stream comes hesitant, like even my bladder knows this is a bad idea. I hit all four tests in sequence, a disaster production line, the pee still warm on plastic as I cap them and set them on the counter like the world's worst tarot reading.
