the eternal fire

Pragmatic thoughts merge with the shame of it. So he didn’t pull out—good to know. Given that both of you seem to remember only the basic bones of that night, you give him the benefit of the doubt and decide this would come as the same shock to him as it does for you. The solution to the issue is loud and clear, and the clinic is only a couple of blocks away. The cold, calculating part of your brain whispers that you shouldn’t tell him, if only for the reasons the overwrought part of your brain keeps supplying. That he would be ashamed. Or devastated. Or frightened. Or incredibly awkward and undecided on the matter. Or that he would support you fully and offer to come with you to get the thing done. None of those you can deal with without some part of you dying, so, on the spot, you decide it is a you problem and it’s you that should deal with it alone.

When a weak breath finally gets through the seizure in your throat, your mind seems to leap at the fresh batch of oxygen. It wanders. You see your mother, pouring gin into her coffee. You see her brushing your hair in front of her adult-sized vanity with an ivory brush she kept from her grandmother as both keepsake and souvenir of a life that skipped her generation. You hear her saying vile things in a sweet voice. You are so much prettier than I was at your age, she’d say. But I was pretty too. Pretty girls like us don’t attract good men into their lives. Wait till you become a mother. Pray that you have a son. Daughters steal your beauty.

She’d pull at the hair where it was matted and scold you for not taking good care of what you’d taken away from her. Once, she said, I wonder if I’d have stayed pretty if I’d gotten rid of you.

You realise your eyes are pouring only when the tears overspill and one of them drops onto your wrist. It is absolutely unwise. Fully deranged, because the life you’ve built holds no space for surprises like this. And yet all you can think is: At least I’d have someone who loves me. At least I’d have someone I could love. And I’d love them better than my mother loved me.

The decision blooms in you not from a place of comfort, but utter fear. Of never having another chance. Of being thirty-two with no prospect of a steady relationship, or a man who would leap at such news and maybe cry a little, if you’re being fully delusional. Of staying alone while Rowan and Raymun build their new life together, Lyonel works his way through the waiting list to his bedroom, and Duncan, sooner or later, finds a nice girl and settles down with her too.

There’s someone you need to say it aloud to, if only to hear how it sounds and judge whether hearing it turns your stomach or brings some measure of calm. So you call the one person you know to be a stranger to judgement and well acquainted with the dread of this sort of choice. Rowan.

She picks up on the first signal. “Hey, um… are you free?” You clamp down on your throat hard enough to make your jaw hurt, but a sniffle slips through anyway.

“Are you crying?” Rowan nearly shouts. “What happened? Do you need me to come over?”

Yes, God bless her. You pause to get some of the voice out, but what comes is breathless and weak. “Yeah, that… that would be great.”

“I’m on my way.” You hear movement at once, drawers or cupboards, something being opened with force. Then Rowan, away from the phone: “Raymun! I’m going out. And if that sink is still full when I get back, I’ll have your guts for garters.” A muffled, long-suffering male voice answers, “Aye, my love.” Rowan comes back to you. “Ten minutes. Put water on or don’t... Just open the door when I knock, alright?”

It takes her less than that. You spend the wait curled on the couch, arms wrapped round your middle as if you can hold the whole mess together by pressure. When the second knock comes you open the door and the minute Rowan sees your face hers drains of colour.

“Darling, Christ—” she says, and gathers you straight into her arms.

It does what it’s meant to do. You break open against her shoulder. Rowan rocks you where you stand, one hand between your shoulder blades, the other rubbing up and down your back. “What the fuck happened? You’re freaking me out.”

You pull away enough to look at her, though she keeps both arms banded round you as if you might otherwise crumple to the floor. Wipe under your nose with the heel of your wrist, search wildly for some demure arrangement of words, find none, and after waiting a beat for your throat to permit it, whine, “I’m fucking pregnant,” and promptly start crying harder.

Her face does something strange. “Oh my God, me too!” Rowan squeals. Then, her grip tightens on your arms. “Wait—hold on. You’re seeing someone and you didn’t tell me? Or was I so far up my own arse I missed an entire man?”

You blink at her. “You’re pregnant? Rowan, that’s—” You are still sobbing, trying to force the words through it. A smile pulls at your mouth, crooked and weird, and the tears track down into the dry split of your lips and sting. “That’s so amazing, oh God—I’m so, so happy for you.”

“I’d believe you more if you weren’t crying like a widow at sea,” Rowan mutters, rubbing both your shoulders, and that only makes a fresh wail tear out of you. “Hey. Hey, it’s alright. We can be happy about mine later.” She steers you further inside with both hands and sits you down on the couch before folding in beside you. “So… how? How did this happen? Do you need help with—?”

“I want to keep it,” you say, very fast.

It lands in the room and stays there. You hear it properly for the first time and something in your chest settles around it. When you look up, Rowan is staring at you with her mouth slightly open, confusion all over her face.

“I know, I know. I know how that sounds. I’m not crying because I’m devastated. Okay, I am, a little.” The thoughts are coming too quickly, some meant for Rowan, some only trying to get out of your own head. “And that was my first thought too, but then—” You drag in air. “Then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I just thought about keeping it and it felt better.”

You look down at your hands and keep going, because once the thing is spoken it wants more speech built around it. You talk about the clinic being close. About how obvious the answer seemed for one minute and then stopped seeming obvious at all. About fear, and the lack of guarantees, and the sick certainty that if you let this go you might spend years listening for the shape of it in the dark. None of it sounds wrong when it leaves your mouth. Reality, apparently, has already made its decision and dragged you after it. The reality now is that you are going to have a baby.

There is a small silence after. Rowan rubs your back, then tugs gently until you give in and let her guide you down, your head pillowed in her lap. Her fingers smooth your hair with long, patient strokes.

“It’s alright, hun,” she says, in the voice one uses on the truly panicked. “You’ve still got a bit of time to decide—”

You turn onto your back to look up at her. “Red, I don’t want to get rid of it,” you say.

You hold her eyes and see the worry in them fighting with that other thing women know how to give each other without instruction: understanding before agreement, tenderness before sense.

Rowan puts a hand to your cheek and wipes away some of the wet. “You sure? Because they’re not so easy to toss once they arrive. I mean, possible, I suppose, but extremely rude.” Your brows climb and she cuts herself off with a small grimace. “Right. Fine. Listen. I’m here, fully. Look at us—pregnant together, lovely, terrifying, very efficient of us. But…” She frowns down at you. “Who? Unless you don’t know, which is also fine. Less administratively tidy, but fine.”

There is a pause then, because of course this is the next gate. Your hands go cold. Your breathing seems to suspend itself on some internal hook. You gulp, loud in the quiet, and say, “It’s… Duncan.”

“WHAT?!”

Her whole body gives a jolt and then goes still with it. You try to cling to your belief that Rowan remains, under all conditions, a stranger to judgement. She starts again, very carefully.

“I thought—I thought you didn’t—I thought you two weren’t—” She makes a face like language has failed her on a structural level. “Ugh. Duncan? How?”

You sit up and catch both her hands in yours. “Are you cross with me?”

“No. No, not at all.” Rowan squeezes back on reflex, still staring. “Just a little bit fucking shocked, to be honest. I never thought you’d actually go through with it.”

“Go through with what?” You let one of her hands go. Your head has started filling with that pale, cottony feeling that comes after a proper crying fit.

Rowan blinks at you. “I mean—the goo-goo eyes. Obviously. Every now and then. From both of you.” Her face sharpens. “Wait. Is that why it was so fucking stiff at the pub the other night? Oh, you pair of absolute—”

“Aye,” you say, wincing. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I can’t even remember the better part of it. It was the night at the Storm, we just—we got so fucking wasted, Red.” It all comes out easier now that you are already ruined. “It was just once, and I don’t think he remembers much either. Or he doesn’t want to. We’re good, I promise. We talked a bit and it’s fine, it’s just—” You drag in breath. “I should tell him, right?”

“Oh, hun.” Rowan’s expression does a complicated thing then—pity, disbelief, fond exasperation, all elbowing for space. “I know you think that man’s a bit simple, but there’s no hiding an entire pregnant belly from him.”

“Hey, I don’t think he’s simple,” you say. “We’re just not a good fit, is all.”

“Mhm.” Rowan gives you a look so noncommittal it practically has bangles on. “You absolutely have to tell him. Like urgently. I’m sure he’ll be decent about it.”

“I know he will be.” That part comes too fast to deny. “I just don’t want to—I don’t know—baby-trap him.”

“What?” Rowan says, and it comes out odd. Like she has had to stop herself very quickly from saying something else.

You catch it anyway. “What is that face?”

“Nothing. Nothing, I promise.” She rubs at her mouth with her thumb, thinking. “I can’t say much, because it isn’t my place. But trust me on this one: Duncan will be decent, and he’ll most likely…” She pauses, chooses. “He’ll most likely take it better than you’re imagining. Just give him a minute if he goes quiet. He’s not great with shock.”

You let that sit. Look at her. Feel, against all expectation, a little calmer for having brought the thing into air where someone else can hold a corner of it.

Then you lean in, wrap an arm round her shoulders, and kiss her temple. “So we’re pregnant together, huh? Is that why you were in such a rush to get married?”

Rowan punches you lightly in the ribs. “Fuck off, you cunt,” she says, and laughs. “You’d have known sooner if you weren’t so busy causing trouble. I was drinking pissy non-alcohol lager that Thursday and every one of you was so busy yapping nobody noticed.”

You bark a damp little laugh. “That’s dreadful. I’m sorry. Congratulations on your celebratory cup of piss.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she says affectionately, settling into your side. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“It sounds horrific.”

“It was citrus.”

“That is worse.”

Rowan laughs again, proper this time, and relaxes further. After a moment she murmurs, “Why do you always have to parrot everything I do?”

You smile into her hair. “Because you’re my role model.”

“God help you, then.”

She takes one of your hands and starts idly playing with your fingers, turning your rings, flattening your palm, folding it shut again. Then, in the thoughtful tone of somebody asking a legitimate administrative question, she says, “If our kids get together, would that be incest?”

You snort so hard it knocks a laugh clean out of you. “You’re insane.”

“I’m serious!”

“You are absolutely not.”

“I’m just thinking ahead.”

“Well stop. They’re embryos, not Regency cousins.”

Rowan hums. “Still. Best to have policy in place.”

“You need help.”

“And yet here I am, your chosen first call.”

“That was clearly a lapse in judgement.”

“Mm. Keep lipping off and I’ll tell your child about this exact hairstyle you’re wearing now.”

You gasp weakly. “That is vile. I’m vulnerable.”

“You’re hideous,” Rowan says fondly, and squeezes your hand. Then the humour softens out of her a little. “We’ll sort it. One thing at a time, alright?”

A nod. “One thing at a time,” you echo.

When Rowan leaves you feel judged only in the areas that solidify friendships, and supported where things were about to crumble. Riding that high of momentary tranquility, you text Duncan. Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you. Then you try, with all your might, to not just stare at the screen until he replies.

His phone buzzes against his thigh halfway round the park and Dunk nearly ignores it on principle. He only ever checks mid-run if it might be Raymun, or one of the teachers from school saying some child has broken an arm in a creative new fashion. He slows, fishes the thing out one-handed, glances down—

Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you.

And promptly catches the edge of a raised paving stone with the toe of his trainer.

He lurches hard, windmills once, nearly goes down in full view of a woman walking a terrier in a little yellow coat, recovers with all the grace available to a man his size, which is none. The dog startles. The woman startles. Duncan keeps moving two steps out of momentum alone, then stops dead and stares at the screen as if the words might rearrange into something less capable of stopping his heart.

He types fast. something happened? Sees it, swears, retypes, and sends a proofread version straight after: Something happened? Then, before you can answer that either: Yes of course. And then, because apparently he has decided to just lean fully into panic:

When d’you want to meet? Where are you? Are you all right?

It is as if the two weeks of withheld contact living in Duncan’s fingers have grown fully fed up with their prison and decided on a jailbreak. Every other evening he’s found himself stuck scrolling through nonsense, drifting into your thread, typing how you? and then deleting it. At some point he stopped deleting and simply kept adding question marks. Three days ago he forced himself to man up and backspaced it so hard his phone froze, and that seemed to settle it. Things would get back to normal sooner or later, because they had to. He stayed at school longer than he ought to, then pestered Raymun into working out with him. Raymun came out once, nearly passed out at the outdoor park gym, and Dunk felt bad for it. 

Dunk apologised, but Raymun waved it off and said no worries, he was only knackered. Rowan had been having insane cravings in the middle of the night and Raymun, wanting to do right by her, kept dragging himself out to buy whatever strange thing she’d latched onto this time—ice cream, pickles, Marmite, though Rowan had never liked Marmite in her life and apparently did now. That was how Dunk learned she was pregnant. Joy flooded him fiercely at the news, followed close by some odd little pang of dread, a sense of being left behind. Before he could give it voice, Raymun went white, swore under his breath, made Dunk vow he would not tell Rowan he knew, then laughed loud, clasped both hands to Dunk’s shoulders, and told him the kid was blessed already, because they were going to have the best godfather in the world.

And this is something Dunk’s great at, being a parent figure that’s not a parent exactly, so he doesn’t know why he’s felt partly full and partly empty hearing the news. All in all he’s happy for Raymun and has once again stopped himself from saying something that would ruin the moment. This time, it would be asking if that’s why the engagement went from an idea to a mission so fast. They didn’t drink that night, but they hugged about it tightly and Raymun’s eyes got red from it.

His heart is racing because he’s just run and nearly split his head on the pavement, and for no other reason at all, when finally you text back. I’m ok, just don’t want to talk over the phone or text. My place? 7?

When Dunk checks the time it is only three in the afternoon, and he wonders how he is meant to survive the next four hours in this state of near-cardiac event. The heartburn is back in full. But if there is one thing he knows for certain about you—and in fairness, the inventory of things he knows is not large, some of it plainly filled in by hope—it is that you do not like being pushed. So he sends a thumbs-up and walks home instead of running, because he does not want to die before learning what it is you mean to tell him.

At home he tries, first, to behave as though the evening is not bearing down on him with its hands out. He showers. Puts water on for tea. Forgets about it until the kettle has long since clicked off and the kitchen has gone quiet around it. He opens the fridge and stares in with the grave concentration of someone hoping cold air might contain counsel. There is a yogurt two days from turning. Half a jar of pesto. Eggs. A lonely pepper going soft at the shoulder. He shuts the door again.

He sits. Gets back up. Turns the telly on low and keeps finding, a minute later, that he has not taken in a single word of whatever is playing. His phone stays in his hand too much. At one point he realises he has opened your message thread without knowing he has done it, just staring at My place? 7? as if more might appear beneath it if he waits reverently enough.

Then comes the matter of what to wear, which makes him feel simple in a way that is almost rude. He changes his shirt, then changes it again. Looks at himself in the mirror and sees a man apparently dressing for a firing squad or good news, and since no one in the history of speech has ever said we need to talk to deliver a pleasant surprise, he tells himself to stop acting the gom. For one miserable stretch of thought he becomes convinced you are about to tell him he has given you something. An STI, maybe. He stands there trying to reason through it. He has not slept with anyone in the past year. Logically, if anything has been passed between you, the odds tilt the other way. Dunk refuses, on instinct, to believe such a thing of you. The refusal comes so fast and whole it irritates him. He has no problem imagining himself as the source of badness. You remain, in his head, curiously exempt.

By half six he cannot bear the flat another minute. He leaves too early and knows it. Tries to correct for it by taking the longer route, which is not really a route at all but him wandering the paths around the park near your place, adding distance in pathetic little loops. Children are still out, shrieking over a ball. A dog drags a woman through the grass with its nose down and full conviction. Somebody is eating chips on a bench. Dunk walks past all of it with the feeling that his skin has been pulled half an inch too tight over his frame.

On the second lap round the pond he wonders whether he should have brought something. Flowers feel insane. Drink, worse. Food assumes too much. He pictures himself turning up on your doorstep with a bag of oranges or a packet of biscuits and nearly wants to lie down in the mud. By ten to seven he has run out of places to waste time without looking suspicious even to himself.

So he goes to your building, climbs the stairs with his pulse all wrong, and, at ten to seven exactly, lifts his hand and knocks.

You open after a little while, and the sight of you unmans him some.

Dunk knows the look of somebody who has cried for hours and come out the other side of it. He sees versions of it at school often enough—children convulsed by some grief enormous to them, a lost favourite object, a cruel word, the wrong partner in a game, and then, once the crying has spent itself, the face goes soft and warm with exhaustion, the tragedy reduced to a size that can be survived and sometimes even laughed at. On you it sits badly in him. Because if he is reading the room right, the reason for all that crying and the reason he has been summoned here share too much ground.

“Hey,” you say, and smile at him weakly. “You’re early.”

“Am I?” he says, making a show of looking uncertain. “Should I—?” His thumb points vaguely back down the hall, as though he has even a shred of intention to leave and return in ten minutes.

Then, something unfortunate happens. You roll your eyes at him, and the quick flash of white sends him straight back into bed with you—buried in heat and sweat and the memory of your face breaking apart around pleasure, though the look now has nothing to do with that one. Even so, his body does not care for distinctions this fine. He feels the blood rise hot in his cheeks and hopes, with some urgency, that his ears are not joining in.

“No, come on,” you say. “It’s fine. Tea?”

“Aye,” he says, aching for an ordinary thing. “Tea’d be grand.”

He steps inside with the care of entering somewhere familiar under entirely unfamiliar terms. You move ahead of him towards the kitchen and he follows, too aware of his own size, of his shoes, of where his hands are hanging, of the fact that he has brought none of the things a decent person might bring to a difficult conversation and is now arriving empty-handed and broad as a wardrobe.

The living room tells on the day a little. Tissues on the couch. A blanket half dragged to the floor. In the kitchen there are cups in the sink, abandoned at different stages of usefulness. The kettle appears to have been at work for hours. You do not even need to switch it on, only reach for fresh mugs and teabags with the dull speed of body moving ahead of your mind.

You pour milk into the cups and the bottle knocks lightly against one rim. A little spills over and runs under the bottoms, leaving white rings on the counter.

“Shite,” you mutter, and he realises you are nervous.

Something in Dunk drops and braces at the same time. Up till now some small, stubborn corner of him has been making up harmless reasons for this meeting. They all die when he sees the spill and the way you stare at it for a second too long, like the milk has presented you with a problem of impossible complexity.

He moves before thinking too hard about it. Reaches past you for the dishcloth by the sink, slow enough not to startle, and wipes the counter clean in two broad swipes. “It’s only milk,” he says quietly.

His voice comes out gentle. He sets the cloth down. Looks at your hands, then at your face. “You don’t have to do the tea if y’don’t want,” he says. “I’m not here for the tea.”

“I know,” you say, and point at the cups. “Well, it’s ready. Just a bit messy. C’mon, I think I need you to sit.”

Dunk braces a hand on the counter. “Freakin’ me out a bit there, lass,” he says. “What is it?”

You stare at him for a second, then look down. “I just…” you mutter, small. “I just gotta tell you something, is all.”

He takes a step forward and, with everything in him, does not reach for your shoulders. “Well, then?”

You scratch at your hairline and huff a breath. “Uh, Christ, this is harder than I expected.” Your arms fold round yourself and you wince. “Gimme a second, okay?”

“Somethin’ bad happen?”

“No,” you say, fast. “I mean yes, something happened, but if it’s good or bad, you can decide.” You sigh. Shake both hands in the air like that might loosen the words. Then you turn, hold your sides, and look up at the ceiling. “Okay, fuck—”

Anxiety makes the blood go loud in his ears. He tries to breathe through his nose and fails. To cover the sound of it, he asks, “Did I… hurt ye? Did I—”

“No, God no—”

“Y’gonna tell me I’ve got somethin’ on me now, then?” he asks and regrets it instantly.

“What?” you snap. “No, Jesus, Dunk—”

“Then what is it, luv?”

You stop fidgeting. Just pull in one thin, startled breath and look at him.

“I’m… I’m pregnant, and—”

One word and the rest of you goes muffled, as if you are talking to him through wool. Duncan’s heart seems to stop. His breathing too. There are tears in your eyes again.

“And it’s yours for sure, and I wanted to tell you before anything—and, and I t-thought about it and I just—”

In that moment Duncan’s biggest dream or nightmare might as well come true. He blinks through the potential calcifying into fact. It is a long blink. He may become the figure he has mourned quietly his entire life. Somewhere in the back of his mind lingers the knowledge he has passively absorbed from reels about mental health and substitution and trying to patch one absence with another. He knows well enough that this would not do that. But because the missing bits are missing all the same, his heart is a simple creature and leaps at the possibility. Another part of him sinks a little, because one version of this has you telling him only because such things must be told, and then taking the seed of that joy away. I’m going to be a dad rings louder in him than I’ve fucked up. He waits to see if his head is wedged under the guillotine when the blade falls.

“I think I’d like to keep it,” you say, and let him keep his head after all.

Dunk wonders whether this sort of thing is meant to happen to men who are thirty or thirty-two. His papers say thirty-two, but the papers came after, and after is where people start guessing. The story of him turning up at the orphanage lived in a dozen mouths, but he believes Uncle Arlan’s version because Arlan never saw the use in lies when the truth caused enough bother on its own.

He told Dunk he’d been left there with no documents and already big enough that they took one look at him and put him down older than he likely was. For a while some of them thought there was something wrong with him for other reasons too—that he was slow where he should not be, wrong in the head, late to things other boys managed easy. Then the years went on and bits started evening out, except for the size, which only kept making fools of everybody’s estimates. So thirty-two may be true. Thirty-one might be truer. Thirty, even. Dunk has never known for certain. Standing there with your words still warm in the air, he decides he must be younger after all, because this feels too large and round to happen to a man on a crooked number. 

“Dunk?” you say. “Are you with me?”

You look scared. Your hand is wrapped around the cup you are not drinking from. Shoulders drawn up, brows pulled together, you seem to be waiting for him to blink or breathe or do anything at all. But the joy that floods him now is even fiercer than what he felt when Raymun told him Rowan was pregnant, and he is too astounded to speak. So instead of speaking, Dunk closes the distance, plucks the cup from your hands, sets it on the counter, and gathers you in tight. Only then can he breathe.

“Thank you,” he says into your hair. “Jesus, thank you.” His voice comes rough with it. “Thank you for tellin’ me. Thank you for—” He swallows and starts over, because there are too many things at the same time and none of them fit through cleanly. “I’m here, aye? I’m here.”

At first you stand like a log and just let him hold you, giving nothing back. Then, slowly, your hands climb until they rest on his back, and there is the lightest brush of your fingers there. “You’re happy?”

“Happy? God—” He breathes you in. You smell the same. “Aye, I’m happy,” he says. “I am. I’m so happy I think I might be a bit thick with it. You?”

“Mostly terrified,” you mumble. “But… yeah. Something happy-adjacent.”

Dunk pulls back enough to look at you. He smiles. “Happy-adjacent?”

“Don’t take the piss.”

“I’m not. I like it.”

You sigh, and your eyes water a bit. “Ideally, this would be happening with someone I’m actually with, but I suppose there are worse fates than having a baby with a friend who’s a good person.”

“Mm.” He only hums to that, and you look at him again, waiting. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just still—”

“Dunk.” You run your hands on his arms. “Look, I don’t need you to… I don’t know, bend over backwards or do anything that would change your life a lot. But if you want to be present, you know…” You swallow. “I’d love that. If you don’t that’s alright too, but I’m guessing you do based on—”

“Hush, girl. Hush now,” he says, cutting in, and pulls you back into him. “I’ll be present. I want to.”

Silence for a while. He just rocks you, then rests his chin on the top of your head.

“We can make it work, right?” you ask.

Yes. Dunk will die if he does not make it work.

You said this is not ideal, and under any other circumstance he might have had enough blood in his brain to let that land where offence is kept. But this is too large and too bright for offence. Where you are only happy-adjacent, Dunk has somehow stumbled into family-adjacent, and that is enough to make him the happiest he has ever been in his life.

He is going to have a baby with his beautiful friend. He is going to be somebody’s father, with you.

If he came from normal people, maybe there would be some higher standard stored in him somewhere. Some polished version of how these things ought to begin. Flowers. Planning. A house already chosen. The proper order of it all, learned by watching it happen around him. But Dunk has never lived by examples like that. He counts family differently. Whoever wedges themselves into his life and stays, he keeps. Whoever loves him long enough to become a fixture, he builds around.

So yes, this begins in chaos. Yes, the pair of you are standing here because of a one-night stand and a spectacular lapse in judgement. He knows that. Knows it fully. Still, all he feels is warmth.

You will work it out. Somehow. Somehow is plenty.

“Aye,” he says. “We’ll make it work.”

Pragmatic thoughts merge with the shame of it. So he didn’t pull out—good to know. Given that both of you seem to remember only the basic bones of that night, you give him the benefit of the doubt and decide this would come as the same shock to him as it does for you. The solution to the issue is loud and clear, and the clinic is only a couple of blocks away. The cold, calculating part of your brain whispers that you shouldn’t tell him, if only for the reasons the overwrought part of your brain keeps supplying. That he would be ashamed. Or devastated. Or frightened. Or incredibly awkward and undecided on the matter. Or that he would support you fully and offer to come with you to get the thing done. None of those you can deal with without some part of you dying, so, on the spot, you decide it is a you problem and it’s you that should deal with it alone.

When a weak breath finally gets through the seizure in your throat, your mind seems to leap at the fresh batch of oxygen. It wanders. You see your mother, pouring gin into her coffee. You see her brushing your hair in front of her adult-sized vanity with an ivory brush she kept from her grandmother as both keepsake and souvenir of a life that skipped her generation. You hear her saying vile things in a sweet voice. You are so much prettier than I was at your age, she’d say. But I was pretty too. Pretty girls like us don’t attract good men into their lives. Wait till you become a mother. Pray that you have a son. Daughters steal your beauty.

She’d pull at the hair where it was matted and scold you for not taking good care of what you’d taken away from her. Once, she said, I wonder if I’d have stayed pretty if I’d gotten rid of you.

You realise your eyes are pouring only when the tears overspill and one of them drops onto your wrist. It is absolutely unwise. Fully deranged, because the life you’ve built holds no space for surprises like this. And yet all you can think is: At least I’d have someone who loves me. At least I’d have someone I could love. And I’d love them better than my mother loved me.

The decision blooms in you not from a place of comfort, but utter fear. Of never having another chance. Of being thirty-two with no prospect of a steady relationship, or a man who would leap at such news and maybe cry a little, if you’re being fully delusional. Of staying alone while Rowan and Raymun build their new life together, Lyonel works his way through the waiting list to his bedroom, and Duncan, sooner or later, finds a nice girl and settles down with her too.

There’s someone you need to say it aloud to, if only to hear how it sounds and judge whether hearing it turns your stomach or brings some measure of calm. So you call the one person you know to be a stranger to judgement and well acquainted with the dread of this sort of choice. Rowan.

She picks up on the first signal. “Hey, um… are you free?” You clamp down on your throat hard enough to make your jaw hurt, but a sniffle slips through anyway.

“Are you crying?” Rowan nearly shouts. “What happened? Do you need me to come over?”

Yes, God bless her. You pause to get some of the voice out, but what comes is breathless and weak. “Yeah, that… that would be great.”

“I’m on my way.” You hear movement at once, drawers or cupboards, something being opened with force. Then Rowan, away from the phone: “Raymun! I’m going out. And if that sink is still full when I get back, I’ll have your guts for garters.” A muffled, long-suffering male voice answers, “Aye, my love.” Rowan comes back to you. “Ten minutes. Put water on or don’t... Just open the door when I knock, alright?”

It takes her less than that. You spend the wait curled on the couch, arms wrapped round your middle as if you can hold the whole mess together by pressure. When the second knock comes you open the door and the minute Rowan sees your face hers drains of colour.

“Darling, Christ—” she says, and gathers you straight into her arms.

It does what it’s meant to do. You break open against her shoulder. Rowan rocks you where you stand, one hand between your shoulder blades, the other rubbing up and down your back. “What the fuck happened? You’re freaking me out.”

You pull away enough to look at her, though she keeps both arms banded round you as if you might otherwise crumple to the floor. Wipe under your nose with the heel of your wrist, search wildly for some demure arrangement of words, find none, and after waiting a beat for your throat to permit it, whine, “I’m fucking pregnant,” and promptly start crying harder.

Her face does something strange. “Oh my God, me too!” Rowan squeals. Then, her grip tightens on your arms. “Wait—hold on. You’re seeing someone and you didn’t tell me? Or was I so far up my own arse I missed an entire man?”

You blink at her. “You’re pregnant? Rowan, that’s—” You are still sobbing, trying to force the words through it. A smile pulls at your mouth, crooked and weird, and the tears track down into the dry split of your lips and sting. “That’s so amazing, oh God—I’m so, so happy for you.”

“I’d believe you more if you weren’t crying like a widow at sea,” Rowan mutters, rubbing both your shoulders, and that only makes a fresh wail tear out of you. “Hey. Hey, it’s alright. We can be happy about mine later.” She steers you further inside with both hands and sits you down on the couch before folding in beside you. “So… how? How did this happen? Do you need help with—?”

“I want to keep it,” you say, very fast.

It lands in the room and stays there. You hear it properly for the first time and something in your chest settles around it. When you look up, Rowan is staring at you with her mouth slightly open, confusion all over her face.

“I know, I know. I know how that sounds. I’m not crying because I’m devastated. Okay, I am, a little.” The thoughts are coming too quickly, some meant for Rowan, some only trying to get out of your own head. “And that was my first thought too, but then—” You drag in air. “Then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I just thought about keeping it and it felt better.”

You look down at your hands and keep going, because once the thing is spoken it wants more speech built around it. You talk about the clinic being close. About how obvious the answer seemed for one minute and then stopped seeming obvious at all. About fear, and the lack of guarantees, and the sick certainty that if you let this go you might spend years listening for the shape of it in the dark. None of it sounds wrong when it leaves your mouth. Reality, apparently, has already made its decision and dragged you after it. The reality now is that you are going to have a baby.

There is a small silence after. Rowan rubs your back, then tugs gently until you give in and let her guide you down, your head pillowed in her lap. Her fingers smooth your hair with long, patient strokes.

“It’s alright, hun,” she says, in the voice one uses on the truly panicked. “You’ve still got a bit of time to decide—”

You turn onto your back to look up at her. “Red, I don’t want to get rid of it,” you say.

You hold her eyes and see the worry in them fighting with that other thing women know how to give each other without instruction: understanding before agreement, tenderness before sense.

Rowan puts a hand to your cheek and wipes away some of the wet. “You sure? Because they’re not so easy to toss once they arrive. I mean, possible, I suppose, but extremely rude.” Your brows climb and she cuts herself off with a small grimace. “Right. Fine. Listen. I’m here, fully. Look at us—pregnant together, lovely, terrifying, very efficient of us. But…” She frowns down at you. “Who? Unless you don’t know, which is also fine. Less administratively tidy, but fine.”

There is a pause then, because of course this is the next gate. Your hands go cold. Your breathing seems to suspend itself on some internal hook. You gulp, loud in the quiet, and say, “It’s… Duncan.”

“WHAT?!”

Her whole body gives a jolt and then goes still with it. You try to cling to your belief that Rowan remains, under all conditions, a stranger to judgement. She starts again, very carefully.

“I thought—I thought you didn’t—I thought you two weren’t—” She makes a face like language has failed her on a structural level. “Ugh. Duncan? How?”

You sit up and catch both her hands in yours. “Are you cross with me?”

“No. No, not at all.” Rowan squeezes back on reflex, still staring. “Just a little bit fucking shocked, to be honest. I never thought you’d actually go through with it.”

“Go through with what?” You let one of her hands go. Your head has started filling with that pale, cottony feeling that comes after a proper crying fit.

Rowan blinks at you. “I mean—the goo-goo eyes. Obviously. Every now and then. From both of you.” Her face sharpens. “Wait. Is that why it was so fucking stiff at the pub the other night? Oh, you pair of absolute—”

“Aye,” you say, wincing. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I can’t even remember the better part of it. It was the night at the Storm, we just—we got so fucking wasted, Red.” It all comes out easier now that you are already ruined. “It was just once, and I don’t think he remembers much either. Or he doesn’t want to. We’re good, I promise. We talked a bit and it’s fine, it’s just—” You drag in breath. “I should tell him, right?”

“Oh, hun.” Rowan’s expression does a complicated thing then—pity, disbelief, fond exasperation, all elbowing for space. “I know you think that man’s a bit simple, but there’s no hiding an entire pregnant belly from him.”

“Hey, I don’t think he’s simple,” you say. “We’re just not a good fit, is all.”

“Mhm.” Rowan gives you a look so noncommittal it practically has bangles on. “You absolutely have to tell him. Like urgently. I’m sure he’ll be decent about it.”

“I know he will be.” That part comes too fast to deny. “I just don’t want to—I don’t know—baby-trap him.”

“What?” Rowan says, and it comes out odd. Like she has had to stop herself very quickly from saying something else.

You catch it anyway. “What is that face?”

“Nothing. Nothing, I promise.” She rubs at her mouth with her thumb, thinking. “I can’t say much, because it isn’t my place. But trust me on this one: Duncan will be decent, and he’ll most likely…” She pauses, chooses. “He’ll most likely take it better than you’re imagining. Just give him a minute if he goes quiet. He’s not great with shock.”

You let that sit. Look at her. Feel, against all expectation, a little calmer for having brought the thing into air where someone else can hold a corner of it.

Then you lean in, wrap an arm round her shoulders, and kiss her temple. “So we’re pregnant together, huh? Is that why you were in such a rush to get married?”

Rowan punches you lightly in the ribs. “Fuck off, you cunt,” she says, and laughs. “You’d have known sooner if you weren’t so busy causing trouble. I was drinking pissy non-alcohol lager that Thursday and every one of you was so busy yapping nobody noticed.”

You bark a damp little laugh. “That’s dreadful. I’m sorry. Congratulations on your celebratory cup of piss.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she says affectionately, settling into your side. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“It sounds horrific.”

“It was citrus.”

“That is worse.”

Rowan laughs again, proper this time, and relaxes further. After a moment she murmurs, “Why do you always have to parrot everything I do?”

You smile into her hair. “Because you’re my role model.”

“God help you, then.”

She takes one of your hands and starts idly playing with your fingers, turning your rings, flattening your palm, folding it shut again. Then, in the thoughtful tone of somebody asking a legitimate administrative question, she says, “If our kids get together, would that be incest?”

You snort so hard it knocks a laugh clean out of you. “You’re insane.”

“I’m serious!”

“You are absolutely not.”

“I’m just thinking ahead.”

“Well stop. They’re embryos, not Regency cousins.”

Rowan hums. “Still. Best to have policy in place.”

“You need help.”

“And yet here I am, your chosen first call.”

“That was clearly a lapse in judgement.”

“Mm. Keep lipping off and I’ll tell your child about this exact hairstyle you’re wearing now.”

You gasp weakly. “That is vile. I’m vulnerable.”

“You’re hideous,” Rowan says fondly, and squeezes your hand. Then the humour softens out of her a little. “We’ll sort it. One thing at a time, alright?”

A nod. “One thing at a time,” you echo.

When Rowan leaves you feel judged only in the areas that solidify friendships, and supported where things were about to crumble. Riding that high of momentary tranquility, you text Duncan. Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you. Then you try, with all your might, to not just stare at the screen until he replies.

His phone buzzes against his thigh halfway round the park and Dunk nearly ignores it on principle. He only ever checks mid-run if it might be Raymun, or one of the teachers from school saying some child has broken an arm in a creative new fashion. He slows, fishes the thing out one-handed, glances down—

Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you.

And promptly catches the edge of a raised paving stone with the toe of his trainer.

He lurches hard, windmills once, nearly goes down in full view of a woman walking a terrier in a little yellow coat, recovers with all the grace available to a man his size, which is none. The dog startles. The woman startles. Duncan keeps moving two steps out of momentum alone, then stops dead and stares at the screen as if the words might rearrange into something less capable of stopping his heart.

He types fast. something happened? Sees it, swears, retypes, and sends a proofread version straight after: Something happened? Then, before you can answer that either: Yes of course. And then, because apparently he has decided to just lean fully into panic:

When d’you want to meet? Where are you? Are you all right?

It is as if the two weeks of withheld contact living in Duncan’s fingers have grown fully fed up with their prison and decided on a jailbreak. Every other evening he’s found himself stuck scrolling through nonsense, drifting into your thread, typing how you? and then deleting it. At some point he stopped deleting and simply kept adding question marks. Three days ago he forced himself to man up and backspaced it so hard his phone froze, and that seemed to settle it. Things would get back to normal sooner or later, because they had to. He stayed at school longer than he ought to, then pestered Raymun into working out with him. Raymun came out once, nearly passed out at the outdoor park gym, and Dunk felt bad for it. 

Dunk apologised, but Raymun waved it off and said no worries, he was only knackered. Rowan had been having insane cravings in the middle of the night and Raymun, wanting to do right by her, kept dragging himself out to buy whatever strange thing she’d latched onto this time—ice cream, pickles, Marmite, though Rowan had never liked Marmite in her life and apparently did now. That was how Dunk learned she was pregnant. Joy flooded him fiercely at the news, followed close by some odd little pang of dread, a sense of being left behind. Before he could give it voice, Raymun went white, swore under his breath, made Dunk vow he would not tell Rowan he knew, then laughed loud, clasped both hands to Dunk’s shoulders, and told him the kid was blessed already, because they were going to have the best godfather in the world.

And this is something Dunk’s great at, being a parent figure that’s not a parent exactly, so he doesn’t know why he’s felt partly full and partly empty hearing the news. All in all he’s happy for Raymun and has once again stopped himself from saying something that would ruin the moment. This time, it would be asking if that’s why the engagement went from an idea to a mission so fast. They didn’t drink that night, but they hugged about it tightly and Raymun’s eyes got red from it.

His heart is racing because he’s just run and nearly split his head on the pavement, and for no other reason at all, when finally you text back. I’m ok, just don’t want to talk over the phone or text. My place? 7?

When Dunk checks the time it is only three in the afternoon, and he wonders how he is meant to survive the next four hours in this state of near-cardiac event. The heartburn is back in full. But if there is one thing he knows for certain about you—and in fairness, the inventory of things he knows is not large, some of it plainly filled in by hope—it is that you do not like being pushed. So he sends a thumbs-up and walks home instead of running, because he does not want to die before learning what it is you mean to tell him.

At home he tries, first, to behave as though the evening is not bearing down on him with its hands out. He showers. Puts water on for tea. Forgets about it until the kettle has long since clicked off and the kitchen has gone quiet around it. He opens the fridge and stares in with the grave concentration of someone hoping cold air might contain counsel. There is a yogurt two days from turning. Half a jar of pesto. Eggs. A lonely pepper going soft at the shoulder. He shuts the door again.

He sits. Gets back up. Turns the telly on low and keeps finding, a minute later, that he has not taken in a single word of whatever is playing. His phone stays in his hand too much. At one point he realises he has opened your message thread without knowing he has done it, just staring at My place? 7? as if more might appear beneath it if he waits reverently enough.

Then comes the matter of what to wear, which makes him feel simple in a way that is almost rude. He changes his shirt, then changes it again. Looks at himself in the mirror and sees a man apparently dressing for a firing squad or good news, and since no one in the history of speech has ever said we need to talk to deliver a pleasant surprise, he tells himself to stop acting the gom. For one miserable stretch of thought he becomes convinced you are about to tell him he has given you something. An STI, maybe. He stands there trying to reason through it. He has not slept with anyone in the past year. Logically, if anything has been passed between you, the odds tilt the other way. Dunk refuses, on instinct, to believe such a thing of you. The refusal comes so fast and whole it irritates him. He has no problem imagining himself as the source of badness. You remain, in his head, curiously exempt.

By half six he cannot bear the flat another minute. He leaves too early and knows it. Tries to correct for it by taking the longer route, which is not really a route at all but him wandering the paths around the park near your place, adding distance in pathetic little loops. Children are still out, shrieking over a ball. A dog drags a woman through the grass with its nose down and full conviction. Somebody is eating chips on a bench. Dunk walks past all of it with the feeling that his skin has been pulled half an inch too tight over his frame.

On the second lap round the pond he wonders whether he should have brought something. Flowers feel insane. Drink, worse. Food assumes too much. He pictures himself turning up on your doorstep with a bag of oranges or a packet of biscuits and nearly wants to lie down in the mud. By ten to seven he has run out of places to waste time without looking suspicious even to himself.

So he goes to your building, climbs the stairs with his pulse all wrong, and, at ten to seven exactly, lifts his hand and knocks.

You open after a little while, and the sight of you unmans him some.

Dunk knows the look of somebody who has cried for hours and come out the other side of it. He sees versions of it at school often enough—children convulsed by some grief enormous to them, a lost favourite object, a cruel word, the wrong partner in a game, and then, once the crying has spent itself, the face goes soft and warm with exhaustion, the tragedy reduced to a size that can be survived and sometimes even laughed at. On you it sits badly in him. Because if he is reading the room right, the reason for all that crying and the reason he has been summoned here share too much ground.

“Hey,” you say, and smile at him weakly. “You’re early.”

“Am I?” he says, making a show of looking uncertain. “Should I—?” His thumb points vaguely back down the hall, as though he has even a shred of intention to leave and return in ten minutes.

Then, something unfortunate happens. You roll your eyes at him, and the quick flash of white sends him straight back into bed with you—buried in heat and sweat and the memory of your face breaking apart around pleasure, though the look now has nothing to do with that one. Even so, his body does not care for distinctions this fine. He feels the blood rise hot in his cheeks and hopes, with some urgency, that his ears are not joining in.

“No, come on,” you say. “It’s fine. Tea?”

“Aye,” he says, aching for an ordinary thing. “Tea’d be grand.”

He steps inside with the care of entering somewhere familiar under entirely unfamiliar terms. You move ahead of him towards the kitchen and he follows, too aware of his own size, of his shoes, of where his hands are hanging, of the fact that he has brought none of the things a decent person might bring to a difficult conversation and is now arriving empty-handed and broad as a wardrobe.

The living room tells on the day a little. Tissues on the couch. A blanket half dragged to the floor. In the kitchen there are cups in the sink, abandoned at different stages of usefulness. The kettle appears to have been at work for hours. You do not even need to switch it on, only reach for fresh mugs and teabags with the dull speed of body moving ahead of your mind.

You pour milk into the cups and the bottle knocks lightly against one rim. A little spills over and runs under the bottoms, leaving white rings on the counter.

“Shite,” you mutter, and he realises you are nervous.

Something in Dunk drops and braces at the same time. Up till now some small, stubborn corner of him has been making up harmless reasons for this meeting. They all die when he sees the spill and the way you stare at it for a second too long, like the milk has presented you with a problem of impossible complexity.

He moves before thinking too hard about it. Reaches past you for the dishcloth by the sink, slow enough not to startle, and wipes the counter clean in two broad swipes. “It’s only milk,” he says quietly.

His voice comes out gentle. He sets the cloth down. Looks at your hands, then at your face. “You don’t have to do the tea if y’don’t want,” he says. “I’m not here for the tea.”

“I know,” you say, and point at the cups. “Well, it’s ready. Just a bit messy. C’mon, I think I need you to sit.”

Dunk braces a hand on the counter. “Freakin’ me out a bit there, lass,” he says. “What is it?”

You stare at him for a second, then look down. “I just…” you mutter, small. “I just gotta tell you something, is all.”

He takes a step forward and, with everything in him, does not reach for your shoulders. “Well, then?”

You scratch at your hairline and huff a breath. “Uh, Christ, this is harder than I expected.” Your arms fold round yourself and you wince. “Gimme a second, okay?”

“Somethin’ bad happen?”

“No,” you say, fast. “I mean yes, something happened, but if it’s good or bad, you can decide.” You sigh. Shake both hands in the air like that might loosen the words. Then you turn, hold your sides, and look up at the ceiling. “Okay, fuck—”

Anxiety makes the blood go loud in his ears. He tries to breathe through his nose and fails. To cover the sound of it, he asks, “Did I… hurt ye? Did I—”

“No, God no—”

“Y’gonna tell me I’ve got somethin’ on me now, then?” he asks and regrets it instantly.

“What?” you snap. “No, Jesus, Dunk—”

“Then what is it, luv?”

You stop fidgeting. Just pull in one thin, startled breath and look at him.

“I’m… I’m pregnant, and—”

One word and the rest of you goes muffled, as if you are talking to him through wool. Duncan’s heart seems to stop. His breathing too. There are tears in your eyes again.

“And it’s yours for sure, and I wanted to tell you before anything—and, and I t-thought about it and I just—”

In that moment Duncan’s biggest dream or nightmare might as well come true. He blinks through the potential calcifying into fact. It is a long blink. He may become the figure he has mourned quietly his entire life. Somewhere in the back of his mind lingers the knowledge he has passively absorbed from reels about mental health and substitution and trying to patch one absence with another. He knows well enough that this would not do that. But because the missing bits are missing all the same, his heart is a simple creature and leaps at the possibility. Another part of him sinks a little, because one version of this has you telling him only because such things must be told, and then taking the seed of that joy away. I’m going to be a dad rings louder in him than I’ve fucked up. He waits to see if his head is wedged under the guillotine when the blade falls.

“I think I’d like to keep it,” you say, and let him keep his head after all.

Dunk wonders whether this sort of thing is meant to happen to men who are thirty or thirty-two. His papers say thirty-two, but the papers came after, and after is where people start guessing. The story of him turning up at the orphanage lived in a dozen mouths, but he believes Uncle Arlan’s version because Arlan never saw the use in lies when the truth caused enough bother on its own.

He told Dunk he’d been left there with no documents and already big enough that they took one look at him and put him down older than he likely was. For a while some of them thought there was something wrong with him for other reasons too—that he was slow where he should not be, wrong in the head, late to things other boys managed easy. Then the years went on and bits started evening out, except for the size, which only kept making fools of everybody’s estimates. So thirty-two may be true. Thirty-one might be truer. Thirty, even. Dunk has never known for certain. Standing there with your words still warm in the air, he decides he must be younger after all, because this feels too large and round to happen to a man on a crooked number. 

“Dunk?” you say. “Are you with me?”

You look scared. Your hand is wrapped around the cup you are not drinking from. Shoulders drawn up, brows pulled together, you seem to be waiting for him to blink or breathe or do anything at all. But the joy that floods him now is even fiercer than what he felt when Raymun told him Rowan was pregnant, and he is too astounded to speak. So instead of speaking, Dunk closes the distance, plucks the cup from your hands, sets it on the counter, and gathers you in tight. Only then can he breathe.

“Thank you,” he says into your hair. “Jesus, thank you.” His voice comes rough with it. “Thank you for tellin’ me. Thank you for—” He swallows and starts over, because there are too many things at the same time and none of them fit through cleanly. “I’m here, aye? I’m here.”

At first you stand like a log and just let him hold you, giving nothing back. Then, slowly, your hands climb until they rest on his back, and there is the lightest brush of your fingers there. “You’re happy?”

“Happy? God—” He breathes you in. You smell the same. “Aye, I’m happy,” he says. “I am. I’m so happy I think I might be a bit thick with it. You?”

“Mostly terrified,” you mumble. “But… yeah. Something happy-adjacent.”

Dunk pulls back enough to look at you. He smiles. “Happy-adjacent?”

“Don’t take the piss.”

“I’m not. I like it.”

You sigh, and your eyes water a bit. “Ideally, this would be happening with someone I’m actually with, but I suppose there are worse fates than having a baby with a friend who’s a good person.”

“Mm.” He only hums to that, and you look at him again, waiting. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just still—”

“Dunk.” You run your hands on his arms. “Look, I don’t need you to… I don’t know, bend over backwards or do anything that would change your life a lot. But if you want to be present, you know…” You swallow. “I’d love that. If you don’t that’s alright too, but I’m guessing you do based on—”

“Hush, girl. Hush now,” he says, cutting in, and pulls you back into him. “I’ll be present. I want to.”

Silence for a while. He just rocks you, then rests his chin on the top of your head.

“We can make it work, right?” you ask.

Yes. Dunk will die if he does not make it work.

You said this is not ideal, and under any other circumstance he might have had enough blood in his brain to let that land where offence is kept. But this is too large and too bright for offence. Where you are only happy-adjacent, Dunk has somehow stumbled into family-adjacent, and that is enough to make him the happiest he has ever been in his life.

He is going to have a baby with his beautiful friend. He is going to be somebody’s father, with you.

If he came from normal people, maybe there would be some higher standard stored in him somewhere. Some polished version of how these things ought to begin. Flowers. Planning. A house already chosen. The proper order of it all, learned by watching it happen around him. But Dunk has never lived by examples like that. He counts family differently. Whoever wedges themselves into his life and stays, he keeps. Whoever loves him long enough to become a fixture, he builds around.

So yes, this begins in chaos. Yes, the pair of you are standing here because of a one-night stand and a spectacular lapse in judgement. He knows that. Knows it fully. Still, all he feels is warmth.

You will work it out. Somehow. Somehow is plenty.

“Aye,” he says. “We’ll make it work.”