𖤓Sol𖤓

You had flipped open the app to check his reviews while you stood in line behind a bunch of workers from the nearby businesses.

buddy needs an attitude check. good food though.

told me to fuck off then gave me the best burger i've ever had. will be back!

absolutely horrible service!!! he's lucky he only charges $5 or else he'd be OUT OF BUSINESS!!

You think there's no way a man like him cares about reviews in the first place. You internally practice your order — literally just 'burger with cheese and extra pickles with fries, please' — as you get closer. Tap at your phone nervously, watching how his looming body fills the order window. He leans over the window frame to hear properly, tilts his right ear down to the customer; his left ear doesn't seem to work as well. When he leans like that, his big tattooed arms press against the counter behind. He bites on his lower lip in concentration when he's listening, eyebrows drawn down tight. He can somehow ignore everyone else around him to focus just on the single person ahead of him at a time.

The two workers in front of you are next up to order and yapping about a job when a third, then fourth buddy call over to them, then melt themselves into the line like they were there all along. You were already on a tight lunch, adding two more orders ahead of yours is going to eat up your time.

It's petty, but you sigh loudly and pointedly.

One of them turns around, uses his height to look down at you disgustedly, and says, "Fuckin' relax."

"Excuse me?" You scoff, heat itching across your face and chest instantly. You glance behind you, but everyone's either glancing down into their phones or chatting with buddies.

"You fuckin' heard me."

"Oi." The voice is like a sudden clap of thunder over your house in the night, startling your whole body awake in a single crack. Your head snaps up, eyes wide, to see the man's arms punched fist-down on the countertop like a silverback, dark flat eyes fixed on the men ahead of you. "Get the fuck outta here."

"C'mon, man," one of them pleads. "S'just a joke."

You have only ever seen the look on the man's face on television before. A predator baring its teeth, dead-still like a stone dropped flat into a stagnant pond. A shudder runs through you as you stare at the men, who're all squawking complaints and fussing like babies.

He whistles so sharply, you press your hands to your ears and wince.

"Don't make me come out there."

You start to drift away, the heat washing over you too intensely to withstand. You don't want to order or be here. You just want to slink back to your car, drive to work around the corner, and grab something from the vending machine to tide you over until the day's done. You're not cut out for confrontation like this, a soft thing that can't take the heat.

"You. C'mere."

Everyone left in line is staring at you, open-mouthed. You want to disappear into the steam of today's heat, evaporate until you're a puff of something that melts away without notice.

His eyes on you. You couldn't possibly prepare yourself for it. Worse than the sun. He chucks his chin to the side, his eyes sliding slowly to tell you to walk around back. You move with shaky, locked-up knees, avoiding everyone's stares, head down. It feels like being sent to the principal's office. Shame and hot frying nerves soak your skin as you slink around the side of the fixed truck, eyes frantically assessing the environment. Dumpster. Broken-down boxes. The typical detritus, you imagine.

And a short set of stairs leading up to the back of the food truck, a door hanging wide open.

"All out f' the day. Fuck off til tomorrow." You hear the man bark, then there's a loud metallic shuttling sound, and when you glance behind you, the tail-end of the line are all throwing their hands up or groaning in frustration, starting to walk off.

Then, the man appears in the doorway and you suddenly think of Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the bulk of him, the dirty apron knotted at his thick waist, his stomach fat plumped over it, and the eyes that don't move when they land on you.

You hesitate at the bottom of the steps, looking up at him.

"Up y'get." Like a child attempting stairs for the first time.

There's no railing to trail a hand over. You knot your hands on the cross-body bag strap in front of you, wringing it as you step up one by one. The heat is foggy in here, thick and weighty.

"They givin' you trouble?" He walks over to the far end of the truck interior where you can see fryer baskets and crooked stacks of take-out containers. No order notes at all. Must be all in that big head. It's so much darker in here with the order window shuttered closed.

"No…why'd you close up?"

There's a shrug across his hefty, rounded shoulders. His white t-shirt is filthy, the collar ringed with yellowed sweat stains, dried and fresh, long scoops of sweat darkening from his armpits to where his pecs must rest, a unique pattern set-in. The lack of light doesn't give you much of his face, but it's scarred and heavyset, a strong set of mouth and brows.

"How d'ya take it?"

"Pardon?"

"Pardon," he smirks down at the fryer, his body moving smoothly through the motions of pressing a fresh meat patty on the flat-top griddle. The meat steams up toward his serious face.

Why are you here?

"Just…whatever is fine."

You try to find the smallest corner you can occupy in here, unobtrusive. You don't know if he wants you to watch him, but you do anyway. His large arms, full sleeve tattoos curling up into his t-shirt, working diligently on flipping and pressing the patty. A little stack of onions on top, cooked together for a few seconds to melt them together a bit. Bun slathered with whatever he uses here. Melted cheese on top of the meat, over the fried onion. A dribble of liquid down the side of the bun as he delicately places each topping on top. Wrapped into burger paper. Fries pulled from the basket, shaken, salted and something else. Scooped hot and stiff into a take-out container.

He uses a steel-toed boot to pull out a stool that's pushed under the corner counter. Tips his chin up at you. "Sit. Eat."

You tell him your name as you stumble onto the tall, tippy stool, pulling your wide-legged dress pants up. He just grunts in response. "Simon."

Okayyy.

He turns his back and starts to put the little compact kitchen to rights, clanging around. With nothing left to do but eat your burger and fries, you dig in. Tentatively at first, self-conscious sitting here as some strange guest that somehow earned scary food truck guy's full attention and his preferential treatment. Sweat slides down from your neck to spine to ass under your thin office top. You take small bites until the relief of a good lunch melts over your taste buds. It's everything a burger should be: crispy, crunchy, melty, packed with flavour. Nothing fancy or stupid ingredients complicating it. You sigh a little, then jam a few of the hot fries in with a bite of meat. They're spiced with something you can't quite name, and when he finally looks back at you, there's a determinedly puzzled look on your face.

"Summat wrong." Should be a question mark at the end of his words, but no.

"No!" You realize you're hunched like crazy over your container, back molded in a c-shape, and spring back up. "It's so good. I was just wondering what you used on the fries, that's all."

A coarse grunt. Dishes slipped into hot soapy water.

"Turmeric." He mangles the word. "Lawry's." Better.

You savour a fry, trying to parse those out. "State secrets, eh."

"Not tellin' you everythin'. Nosy."

A laugh of surprise huffs out of you. "Oh, I wasn't ask—"

"Just fuckin' with you, bird." He might as well reach out an arm and shake the stool beneath you for how off-centre you makes you.

You let out a puff of nervous laughter. None of the reviews said he pulled me into his food truck and force fed me, so you were shit out of luck on what to do. How to act.

"Cute watchin' you eat all prim." He leans against a stainless steel countertop, some damp raggedy dishcloth folded into the fat of his crossed arms. "Makes me wonder what else you do proper."

Your mouth falls open, a round of tart pickle plopping squarely on your lap. Before you can gather up wits and senses not fizzled out by the heat in the truck and Simon's presence, he advances on you, pulling the shadows of the space with him. His huge arms prop up on either side of the corner counters, triangulating you right inside. Up close, you can see the beaded sweat at his hairline. Behind his ears. Where it's tracked down inside the t-shirt. You wonder what his armpits look like; if the hair there is pressed with moisture and a morning application of antiperspirant. His fingers strum on the stainless steel calmly. Deciding what to do.

Stupidly, you stare up into his eyes. Stupidly, you think of telling him that his eyes look like onions that have been caramelized on a stove for hours.

"You like my food?" Leaning on the muscles of his arms, playing with you, coming down a little to your height.

"Y-yeah," you laugh.

"Like watching you eat it."

The pickle round is soaking through the thigh of your pants. You're going to go back to work smelling like pickle juice and grease and fries. You shift on the stool anxiously.

"Gonna give me a kiss me then?" An old stitch near his lip pulls the corner of his mouth, but it widens further with a smirk. Dark tea-brown eyes flashing.

Your world shrunk down to a claustrophobic corner of a sweating food truck, wedged in by a man three times your size, feeling like you've just surfaced from a pool only to find yourself still underwater. "What?"

Closer, he smells like cigarettes. Coffee. Sweat has your top and pants plastered to your entire backside. It's breaking out on your upper lip. Your breath has shallowed out to thin short pants.

"I'll let you. For bein' so sweet an' cute."

Let you? Let you kiss him?! His audacity won't strike you until much later, unfortunately. Oxygen is low. Heat is swamping.

"Oh."

"C'mon then."

He lowers himself, arms still propped up and out on either side of you, until he's flush with your face. Lets you snap your mouth closed and hover forward on the stool precariously until your lips have pressed firmly over his.

"S'nice. Were I still in Year 6." You pull back and his eyes are nearly electric, how alive he looks, mouth tugged up.

In grade 6, you were a compulsive liar at your new school, desperate to make friends. You bragged that your dad was famous because he travelled all the time for work at a pop company and that was why you had to live with your cousins. You were bug-eyed and scrawny with a huge gap between your teeth. You certainly weren't being kissed like this, or at all. Simon seems like the kid who understood what all the bases meant and showed the other kids porno mags in the forest. Those boys frightened you.

Still do.

Suddenly, he cranks up to his full height. Arms down to his side. Boots wedging the stool in place, big pillar-like thighs covered by a nasty apron pressing into your kneecaps.

You are going to be late back to work.

His hands surprise you by drawing up your neck, setting loose a big shiver that you can't hide, and cupping you there. Large hands, damp with soapy water or grease or something else altogether. His thumbs make little circles on your jawline as he manipulates your face to tilt up toward him, and you realize then, with crystalline and unnerving certainty, you have never been kissed properly before this moment.

His fingertips curl around the tops of your ears, bumping over the flatbacks of your piercings, rounding out the cartilage and bone under his mapping.

Kisses that made you smile, kisses that melted into foreplay or sex, goodbye kisses with no eye contact. Lots in between.

But a kiss that demands nothing else of you except your eyes on the other person, watching them begin to dismantle you.

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 just 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—