"You feel incredible," he said against my throat, and the careful measured man had shattered into rough breathing and unfinished sentences. "You're so tight around me. I want to fill you up. I want —" His hips faltered. Something raw crossed his face, like the words were arriving from somewhere deeper than dirty talk. "I want to put a baby in you."
His voice cracked on it. He pressed his forehead to my shoulder, breathing hard, and I could feel him shaking with the effort of not finishing before he was ready. "I don't — that just —"
"Don't stop." I grabbed his face with both hands. "Atlas. You can't say that to me and then hesitate. That is not allowed. Keep going."
The ground shifted under me.
Because I was six weeks pregnant with this man's child, and the words he was groaning into my skin had already come true. The irony was so enormous it could be seen from space. That particular seed had already been planted — by a clinic in Portland, with a syringe and a donor catalogue and considerably less passion. This was a much better method.
"God, yes," I gasped, and I meant it in every possible sense, in ways he couldn't know yet. My orgasm hit so hard my vision whited out. I came clenching around him, nails in his shoulders, his name broken on my tongue. He followed — three hard thrusts, buried to the hilt, groaning into my neck. I felt him pulse inside me, hot and deep. His arms locked around me. We stayed there on his kitchen counter, gasping, shaking, holding on.
Silence. The debris-settling kind. The ringing fading from my ears into the specific quiet of a mountain kitchen at dusk.
His forehead was against my collarbone. My fingers were in his hair. The honey jar had survived. The coffee pot had not. It lay on the floor in a puddle of ancient coffee, the handle snapped clean off.
"I told you," I said. "I told you appliances would be harmed."
He huffed against my skin. That almost-laugh. "I'll buy another one."
We ended up on the kitchen floor. Backs to the cabinets, legs tangled, eating sourdough and honey with our fingers because neither of us could manage real food. He'd given me his T-shirt. Soft, worn, hanging to mid-thigh and smelling like him. I pressed my nose into the collar before I caught myself.
His thumb circled my kneecap. Absent, easy, as if touching me was a habit he'd already picked up. I watched the slow motion of it and my eyes burned. Not the orgasms. This. The quiet. The closeness. The sourdough. His thumb on my knee in a cabin that smelled like honey and sex and the spring coming through the open window.
I needed to leave before I told him everything.
I pulled on my clothes in the half-dark while he watched me from the kitchen floor with an expression I couldn't read. I kissed him at the door, quick, hard, a kiss that said I'll be back and don't ask me to explain. I walked to the car on autopilot and didn't remember the drive until I was on the county road.
I made it to the end of the gravel road before I called Britt.
"I slept with him," I said.
Three seconds of silence. Then: "The donor."
"On his kitchen counter."
"Flora Diaz."
"It gets worse. He said things. During."
"What kind of things?"
"Things about filling me up. About putting a baby in me."
The silence this time was so long I checked to make sure the call hadn't dropped.
"Britt?"
"I need you to understand," Britt said, in a voice that was shaking with the effort of not screaming, "that you are already containing his genetic material. You are currently pregnant with this man's baby, and he dirty-talked about putting a baby in you, on a kitchen counter, and you did not stop him to mention that this particular horse has left the barn."
"It didn't seem like the right moment."
"When is the right moment, Flora? When you're showing? When the baby comes out six-foot-two with a beard and opinions about nectar sources?"
"She could look like me."
"She?"
"Or he. I don't know yet. That's not the point."
