You never thought it’d hit you like this until it does. Baby fever à la max. Even the word ‘fever’ undersells it—the feeling that overtakes you is like a blazing inferno, burning away every other want or desire apart from the one currently tearing you asunder. 

It’s all you can think about from that point on. Babies, babies, babies. The milky smell of their heads, the flexible cartilage of their noses, their pudgy, wrinkly yawns and soft sighs. You make excuses to visit, offering to babysit whenever they look like they could use a night out, your agenda so transparent that anyone with eyes could see it. 

All you can think when you look at them is that your life has been looking a lot like a house of cards these days: all style and no substance. 

They get in your head, alright. That ominous they; not a specific person or group, just a nebulous, widespread opinion permeating far too many corners of your world. All that fearmongering about babymaking windows and that talk of rapidly vanishing fecundity—your eyes nearly bulge out of your head when you come across a TikTok of a thirty-six year old calling her eggs geriatric—and by the end of it, you swear you can hear your biological clock booming between your ears, one swinging gong after another. 

You’re able to keep the beast at bay for a bit by tricking yourself into thinking that it’s just in your head. Just one of those things. You’re getting older—of course at some point you’d start to worry about the things you never got a chance to do. FOMO. Regrets blooming into full-blown crises. It’s only natural that it would start to get to you eventually. 

Trying to convince yourself of that is not enough to shake the damn urgency from your blood though. You’re like a dog with a bone, too many late nights spent scrolling through parenting forums and conception tips, neither of which are of much use to you as a childless, partnerless person not currently trying for a baby. What does it matter to you if smoking reduces your chances of getting pregnant by forty percent? You don’t even smoke. 

You might actually want to have a baby though. Mindblowing after all this time, to think that maybe it wasn’t just a fleeting fancy. 

Mindblowing, then abruptly terrifying. 

Your present situation is a bit dire. It’s been several years since you last had a partner, none you ever would’ve ever considered having a baby with. Absurd—worse than absurd even. And despite everything, despite the self-imposed countdown ticking away in your head and the stress causing your spine to curl in a half-inch more every single day, you are, thankfully, not desperate enough to reach out to any of them. 

So you try. For a short period of time, you make a real, concerted effort to find a partner, going on three dates in a week, each more appalling than the last. It’s the last one that breaks you, your date not only unbearably dismissive to the waitstaff but also entirely uninterested in discussing anything about your life, completely preoccupied with recounting the minutiae of his own life story. 

A swing and a miss. You made an effort at least, put yourself out there. Tried to do things the old-fashioned way. 

It’s the twenty-first century though, for goodness’ sakes; there are more ways to start a family than just the tried-and-true method. 

And that’s how you wind up here, at a fertility clinic on a Tuesday afternoon, PTO plugged into your work calendar with a secretive little “Appointment” reason left for being out of office. It’s no office-busybody’s business though. They don’t need to know about the increasingly debilitating need to have a baby that’s been overtaking you these past few months. 

It would clear a lot of things up, but it still isn’t anyone’s business.

The waiting room is a simple, unadorned roost of a room, the walls lined with plastic eggshell-like chairs for all the eggs soon to be hatched. An oddly sterile space for the purpose it serves. It would be a little uncomfortable if it weren’t like every other waiting room in existence, minus any snivelling sick people.

There are other people besides you. Or rather, there were people. People that have already come and gone, not quite so anxious as to turn up an hour early for their two o’clock appointment, their stomachs grumbling from skipping lunch. 

And so after the third couple goes in for their appointment with the specialist, you’re left on your own for a bit until a new person walks in. 

A man this time, all by his lonesome. 

And boy is he a specimen so fine that you can’t help but hope that he’s come to make a deposit. If they let you pick your donor based on build and gait alone, you think you’d have your man right here. You can barely drag your eyes away from him, glued to the rounded muscle of his back, gliding over the curve of his shoulders and up the thick of his neck.

After a brief conversation with the receptionist to check in, he drums his fingers across the counter and takes a seat on one of the little egg chairs along the wall facing yours. 

Where he then proceeds to lift his head and lock eyes with you. 

In retrospect, you wish you could describe it as a magical moment, but in reality, you just freeze in place, embarrassed at being caught staring. He’s a decently handsome enough man to be good fodder for any later self-care. Square-jawed and bearded.

Good hairline for his age, which you don’t want to take a crack at guessing, but if you had to, it would have to be somewhere around his mid-forties. Maybe late. But it touches him in just the right way, evident in the lines on his forehead and the pull of the skin around his eyes, his beard just ever so slightly flecked with the barest hints of grey. 

The writing on the threadbare shirt he has on, almost hidden beneath the plaid shirt layered over it, is barely legible after countless washes. You can almost see straight through it. If you pinched the fabric between your fingers, you think your nails would poke right through. You could rip it right off him, get a better look at the dense pecs that you can just barely make out through his shirt.

You swallow, that thought catching you off guard. 

Despite your own embarrassment, his gaze holds steady. Some people aren’t born with shame as a built-in foghorn. Some people look out into the world and genuinely believe it is theirs to conquer, raised on a diet of self-confidence and boldness, free-range audacity. 

He’s bold enough, in fact, to rise to his feet and cross to the other side of the waiting room, taking a seat right beside you. He sits down beside you like you're old friends, like there's nothing strange about a man sitting beside a veritable stranger in a completely empty room.

It’s such a bold move that you don’t even know what to say at first, head turned towards him in the chair next to you now with some dumb expression on your face, gobsmacked.

“Can I help you?” you hear yourself ask, years of socialization coming to the rescue. Thank god the gears start turning in your head after that brief second of bewilderment. 

“Not at all.” And what a voice too, as if his looks weren’t enough. All unintentional deep-chested purr, leonine English rumbling out of the depths of him, Northern accent to top it off. “Just thought I might introduce myself. Be polite, seeing as how we’re both here for the same reason.”

Unless he ran ahead of a wife still on her way up the elevator, you don’t think that’s the case. You glance around him just to double check the door. “Are we?”

“Maybe a pick-up instead of a drop-off in your case,” he concedes, a droll little note curled up in his voice. “But that’s not so different when the end result’s the same.”

You swallow and force an awkward smile, ignoring the way your heart speeds up. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, nice to meet you, um, circumstances aside.” You hold out a hand, which he doesn’t hesitate to take.

“Nothing wrong with the circumstances, but pleasure to meet you too, love.”

His palm feels huge around yours, a warm, firm grip that only yields a few moments later when you have to make an effort to pull your hand away, holding on for the fleetingest of seconds, long enough for a spark of anxiety to shoot through your chest. 

You hope that’s the end of it when he finally lets go of your hand. Not because you don’t want to chat up an incredibly attractive stranger, but because you couldn’t imagine the timing being worse. 

He, however, seems to have no qualms with carrying on. “Has it taken yet or are you shopping for donors today?”

It’s a horribly invasive question, but you answer it anyway, all buttoned-up and ginger. “Um. No, I’m just here for a consultation. There’ll probably be a lot of paperwork before, um…before we get started.”

“A lot of nonsense for something I reckon we could get done a lot easier together.”

It doesn’t register until it does. Then you just have to look at him and blink, confused. 

“Excuse me?” you ask. 

He cocks an eyebrow. “I haven’t got this wrong, have I? You said you’re here for a baby?”

“Uh, yes, that’s—that’s what I just said.”

“And I’m here to help someone like you have a baby. Seems like we’d be making both of our lives easier if we just skipped all the red tape and saved you the expense.”

“‘Save me the expense’?” you repeat, stunned. 

“Won’t cost anything the natural way.”

You know what he’s insinuating, but you can’t believe it. You actually can’t believe that this man—a stranger, handsome as he might be, good-looking as he might be, husband-envy-inspiring as he might be—would openly proposition you in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. Offer to get you pregnant ‘the natural way’, as if it were a cold drink on a hot day. A side of fries with your order. 

“I—I’m sorry, but that’s incredibly inappropriate,” you eventually wheeze out. 

That gets a laugh out of him, one of those amused huffs that erupts out of him like a bear flicking a bee off its snout. “Can’t be cagey about this sort of thing, love. You have to be direct when you want to get things done.”

“You do know we’re in public, right?”

“I’d be happy to take this somewhere private.”

The heat under your cheeks might actually result in a physical burn. “I…think I’m going to find somewhere else to sit.”

“Ah, don’t worry about that, love, I’m gonna head out anyway.” A satisfied smile tugs at his mouth. “I think I got what I actually came for.”

Your frown deepens. “You haven’t even been called in yet.”

“Not what I meant.”

Before you can ask what he means, he shifts in his seat, leaning closer to you for just a second, but long enough for your heart to suddenly go wild and your pupils to go big as dinner plates. 

“Here,” he grunts, lifting a hip to pull his wallet out of his back pocket, flicking it open and plucking out a business card. He flips your hand over and puts it down on your palm. “That’s my number. When you’re done here, give me a call. I’m sure we can come up with something better than this.”

He taps the card in your hand with a finger. It ricochets through you, the tap rippling up your arm and chest, nearly rocking you back in your seat. Everything he does must be punctuated with the same echoing weight. 

He nods to you on his way out, a secretive smile on his lips, just the barest hint of a lift that you might’ve missed had you not been staring at his face. All you can do is stare though, still absolutely floored, practically speechless as you watch him leave. 

And then you’re alone again, in an entirely different headspace than when you first sat down. 

“John Price?” the receptionist calls out from behind the desk suddenly, but with the man gone, there’s no one else in the waiting room apart from you. “Mr. John Price?”

You blink, stun-locked. You can’t have been the reason he decided to back out of his appointment at the last minute. He must’ve decided to bail at the last minute before throwing a Hail Mary in an attempt to get laid. 

That has to be it. He wouldn’t leave because of a brief interaction with you. 

The waiting room feels a lot emptier without him now that he’s gone, as if by being made aware of his presence, everything has been indelibly altered. Changed. Slightly less interesting somehow.

You hover somewhere between bewilderment and affront until a flicker of giddiness steals in. Tamp that back down. He's gone, and with him the impossible audacity of what just came out of his mouth. You stare at the door that he just disappeared through, lips parting around a reply you'll never get to deliver, then let out a sharp, disbelieving scoff. The gall. 

And yet, despite yourself, you can't quite smother the giddiness bubbling low in the pit of your stomach. Your fingers curl around the business card in your hand. 

Eventually it’s your turn. You almost miss the sound of your own name until a lady in purple scrubs repeats it, sending you shooting to your feet. You follow her as she leads you down a hall and towards an open office just as clean and spartan as the waiting room. All there is in her office is a desk, a bookshelf, and a mobile ultrasound machine. Practically empty for all intents and purposes.

Ok lady, you think, sitting down across from her, what’s it gonna take to put a baby in me?

“Four thousand dollars,” she says matter-of-factly, the earlier part of your conversation long forgotten after hearing the price. 

That just about knocks all the wind out of you. “Oh,” you bleat, the prospect of ever getting pregnant suddenly a sad and distant dream.

“Per cycle,” she further clarifies, much to your dismay, sliding a couple pamphlets your way. “We’re always hopeful that it’ll take on the first cycle, but we typically see about three to four cycles of IUI before conception occurs.” 

IUI—intrauterine insemination. The sperm they have to shove up inside you to try and knock you up. At four thousand dollars a pop. 

“There’s no…first time discount?”

“Excuse me?”

“Like the, um…like the home buyer’s loan.”

She seems vaguely apologetic when she shakes her head at least, though that doesn’t really ease the sting. “No, unfortunately. Most of our customers are first time parents, so—”

It wouldn’t make much business sense. “Yeah, no, I get it.”

You do your best to pay attention to the rest of the conversation and ask the right questions, but the sticker shock makes it hard to focus. At some point, the consultation must end because she sends you off with a folder full of pamphlets and QR codes to scan, and a follow-up appointment booked two weeks out for a blood test and a pelvic ultrasound.

No music on the drive home, just silence to let the events of the day marinate. 

You know it’s likely just this clinic. It’s not like there aren’t other, probably cheaper clinics. But it’s the principle of the matter, the one factor that you hadn’t considered in this whole endeavour—you’d assumed, obviously, that raising a child in and of itself wouldn’t be cheap, but you hadn't even contemplated that the run-up to actually getting pregnant might be so cost prohibitive. 

If you even get pregnant. You exhale in a rush, the thought hitting you like a sledgehammer. God, you might not even get pregnant. You might go through the whole treatment, waste thousands of dollars, and go half-crazy begging the universe to let you get knocked up, and it might not even take. 

Dinner is a glass of white wine and burrito straight from the freezer, in no mood to cook or clean even a single dish. You should be cutting down on your alcohol consumption in anticipation of fertility treatments, but that’ll be a task for a later, less devastated you. You’ll rinse the hot sauce off your plate when you’re done eating and leave it in the sink for tomorrow morning. 

It’s not how you wanted the day to end. You were hoping to come home invigorated and inspired, already prepping for the next steps in the process. Instead it feels like you’ve taken a massive step back. 

Occasionally you like to look up flights to other countries just to imagine what it might be like to get away from your life for a bit, but the ticket price always brings you back down to reality. 

This isn’t like that though; this isn’t some temporary flight of fancy or some pie in the sky that you’ll spend decades chasing down in your dreams, hoping for just a single bite or even just a whiff. This is something you actually, genuinely want. A baby. Something you can take with you into the future, something you can build your life around.

There’s got to be another way. 

It’s a physical weight in your front pocket. You can feel it now, burning a hole in your hip. When you pull it out, the name John Price is printed on the card in a crisp, typewriter font, his phone number and occupation printed in the same sized font just beneath it. 

You stare at the card long enough for your eyes to go dry. Blink. Breathe out, reluctance giving way to acceptance, as tentative as it might be. It certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing to ever happen. A fun night with a good-looking man, with the added benefit of getting a baby out of it, no strings attached. Not the most irresponsible decision anyone has ever made. Some people join the army, after all. 

A shiver runs up your spine when you remember the way he worded it though. Sweat on your upper lip that you have to lick off, the salt sinking into the ridges of your tongue. You don’t think he meant turkey basters and plastic cups by getting it done ‘the natural way’. You saw the way he looked at you.  

You could do it for a baby. Let him—and here, you have to squeeze your eyes shut and cover them with your fists—let him do what he has to do to get you pregnant. Cut out the middle man and just let him fit the heavy weight of his body over yours and pry your legs apart to let him sink between your—