summer

"Not with Mark," she says. "No, no, you cannot be having a baby with Mark. I leave you alone for a week and you decide to have baby with—”

"No.” You shake your head emphatically, as though this will somehow erase the way you conducted yourself over the course of your most recent breakup (during which Olya was on the receiving end of many a late-night drunken wallowing session), and try to free yourself from the six inches of cushion you’ve sunken into. It’s at least better than the reclaimed-driftwood-hightop-stools at the last trendy brunch popup she chose. “Not Mark. Not anyone. I’m done with men."

"Thank God. You have terrible taste. Better to give up entirely." You let this slide, though it feels a bit rich coming from someone who has been going steady with her direct supervisor for the past six months (after six months of a generationally messy on-again-off-again thing). “If you schedule appointment for Tuesday or Friday, I can drive.”

“Appointment?”

“Yeah, appointment. Baby appointment. This week, next week. Unless you just want to try DIY first?” She holds up her mimosa flute, hands it to you, pours a little, takes it back, takes a sip, considers. “Mm. Not so strong.” She hands it back to you and fills it so much that a little hill of liquid rises above the lip. “Double dose. For safety."

You bring your mouth to the glass and de-meniscus the mimosa—which, for the record, is very strong—and shake your head. “I’m not pregnant right now,” you clarify. “I’ve decided I’m going to get pregnant. On purpose.”

She squints at you. “Why would you do that.”

“I want a baby.” You hate adages about biological clocks. That said, yours is currently ticking like a bomb. “And I think I’ve reached the age where all of the men available in the dating pool are…” You shudder.

You have dated and dated and dated, and at thirty-four you’re pretty certain you’ve seen all the kinds of men the Bay Area has to offer. Divorced men. Unemployed men. Silicon Valley wunderkinds who look at you and your non-STEM degree (and your very successful private law practice, thank you very much) with poorly veiled disdain. Tall, plain men with an abundance of options and a deficit of personality; short, beautiful men who compensate for the personality with a lack of empathy that borders on psychopathy. You have dated nice men and cruel men and boring men and self-interested men, and, at the end of the day, not one none of them ever had enough redeeming qualities to make you want to stay.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” you settle for saying. “There’s only so many times I can get ready for a first date, redoing my lipstick a dozen times, listening to the same Olivia Dean song on loop, trying to talk myself out of flaking last-minute because I know the sex is going to be bad. I’m too much of an adult to be acting like that.”

“No.” She shakes her head emphatically, pouring you both more booze. You have yet to even look at a menu, and somehow the pitcher is half empty. “You go about this all wrong. You go on dates from internet, from apps. App is for fling, fun, hookups. You refuse to try and date friend, date coworker, date neighbor—“

You shake your head. You have tried dating all of the above. You have weathered several rock bottoms in the aftermath. “I’m not trying to blow up my life, thanks. I like my life as is.”

“Yes, I know,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You like your life, you love your life. This is why you want to add a tiny person with no sleep schedule who spends all your money.”

“I already have you for that.” She blows you a kiss, unrepentant. “But yes, a baby would be nice, too. I’ve thought about it. I’ve saved up. I bought, like, three bottles of prenatal gummies. Now I just need to, you know. Get some sperm.”

“Easy. Sperm is cheap.” She claps. “Tonight! I set you up with someone at trivia. Bang, boom, baby in nine months.”

“No, no, because we’ve been over this: trivia is a social circle I am a part of. Half the people at trivia are people I knew in high school, and the other half are people I’ve worked with—” You hold up a hand before she can protest. “—and I know, you are a beautiful anomaly, you and Eva, but most people aren’t so lucky. You know the rules.”

She tips her head back and groans. “You and your rules.” When she brings her head back up, it’s with a pout. “You ignore so many of my perfect, beautiful matches for your stupid rules.”

“My rules exist for a reason.”

“Yes, to keep you unhappy.” She shakes her head, waving a hand. “Fine, whatever—I match you with someone from my work.”

“I’ve worked with people from your work,” you remind her. The entire reason you met was because her engineering firm (because Eva specifically) hired you during a patent dispute. They ask you back from time to time.

“Someone new! Maybe he stays in town, maybe not. Low risk!”

“Too much risk.”

She scowls. “All risk is too much for you. Life is all risk. Baby is all risk. Anya is risking her life every five seconds.” She looks off in the distance—thinking about her niece, presumably, who is two years old and getting cuter by the day. She shrugs. “You know, maybe baby will be good for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You’ll come to trivia. New guy will be there, I will be there—“

“Great. Want to give me some sperm?”

“Ha. Eva will be there. Grace will be there.”

Something in your head pauses. “Ryland's back?"

She points at you. “Ah!”

“What? No.” Your attempt at a casual laugh sounds unconvincing even to your ears. “No, that’s not what I meant. I just thought he wasn’t—Olya, that’s not what I meant, I thought he was still in L.A.—”

“He is back and he will be there and he will make puppy dog eyes at you like always, and you will ignore him because you are cruel.”

“I'm not—he won't—” You let out an exhale. Then you begin to tick off items on your fingers. “One, Ryland has a very nice girlfriend. And two, he does not make puppy dog eyes at me. That’s just how he looks.”

“Yes, how he looks at you.”

“Because he’s never stopped seeing me as his best friend’s annoying little sister,” you correct her. “It’s nostalgia. I told you, he took me to prom and he—I mean. You know, nothing happened.”

“Because he was stupid teenager. Now he is a stupid man, and you are a stupid woman—perfect. I’m a genius.”

“Did you miss the part where he has a girlfriend? I thought you liked Linda.”

“Eva likes Linda, and this is only because they know the same boring history facts.”

You snort in spite of yourself. “That’s terrible.”

“It’s true! And besides, you are just asking for sperm for baby, yes? Such an old friend, such a tiny favor, Linda can’t be mad about—”

“Olesya.” You give her a stern look. She looks back with the practiced innocence of a cat who’s already swallowed the canary and hasn't yet noticed the feathers stuck in its teeth. “No.”

“No trivia or no baby?”

“Yes trivia, no to whatever you're plotting.”

She sighs. “Fine, no to Grace. He can make puppy dog eyes at you across the bar while you talk to new work friend—”

“No setting me up with anyone.” You snap your menu shut, and flag a waiter. You can't continue this conversation—or, ideally, escape this conversation—without copious amounts of French toast. “It’s the twenty-first century, you know? They have websites now. Catalogs. Safe, discreet, easy. Like you said, sperm is cheap.”

-

As it turns out, sperm is really fucking expensive.

You scowl at the laptop, willing it to give you a different answer, but the calculations come out the same the fiftieth time as they did the fifth. A couple thousand dollars, minimum, and that’s if you use an anonymous donor. For someone vetted—God forbid, someone you might get to talk to—it can go up into five figures.

You put down your notebook and plant your head in your hands. 

You are, by many metrics, a successful woman. You live in a one-bedroom apartment, in San Francisco, alone. Many of your clients see you over video, so you can more or less set your day. You have no student loans, and enough savings set aside to pay for childcare, doctor’s visits, diapers, a nice stroller.

You do not have enough to cover all of that and a round of in vitro fertilization that might not even work.

You lift your head up. You’ve been buried in your laptop for so long, the sun has set, leaving the apartment almost entirely dark, save for your screen and for the kitchen clock blaring bright green above the stove. It’s seven forty-five.

Trivia starts at eight.

You sigh. You stand up and grab your keys.

-

Trivia night is the same as always, which is to say it’s at the same dingy bar, with the same sticky black floors and pockmarked dart boards and outdated drink menu as always. You’re pretty sure the bartenders have worked here since you were too young to set foot inside.

“You came!” Olya crows, slinging an arm around your neck as soon as the door shuts behind you. “Here. Two for one.”

You gently bat away the bottle she waves in your face. "I drove.”

“Fine.” She winds her arm through yours, walking you across the bar. “I’m setting up carpool home. You and Eva can be boring designated drivers together.”

“Ha, ha.” Your eyes scan the room. You tell yourself this isn’t on purpose, which is probably true, it’s normal to take stock of a room—but you’ve taken stock of this particular room almost weekly for the past year and a half, which means there really isn’t anything in it you haven’t seen, until your eyes reach a table in the back and see Eva Stratt talking to—

“See?" Olesya pinches your waist. You jump. "I told you he is back."

“Ow."

“Come talk. We’re running late, nothing to do but drink and talk, and you don’t even drink tonight.” She bumps her hip into yours. “Maybe not for nine months, if everything goes good, eh?”

You hip check her back. “Yeah. Maybe. It’s not looking too—"

You hear your name, and you look up.

The voice is familiar. The face is familiar, if slightly more tanned from a few weeks out of the San Francisco fog; the hair a little longer. The lopsided glasses, though—and the bright blue eyes behind them, and the mouth and the smile and the dimples that go with it—are the same as they were twenty years ago. 

“Ryland.” Your face is warm, which is definitely because you just walked through a crowded bar, and for no other reason. “Hi.”

“Hey.” He stands up, so quickly he almost knocks over his bottle on the table, and catches you in a warm, friendly hug that you survive mainly on autopilot.

“Hi. Hi.” The hug ends, and you wave at Eva, who waves back, and then look back up at him. “Hi. I, um, I thought you were still in L.A.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Colt got a last-minute gig this weekend, so. I came back a week early. But it was good. He’s good. Said to send you his best.”

Colt has always been sweet. Of the two, you’d have thought he’d be the one to ask you on a family-friend-pity-date to prom. Ryland was always stuck in his books, his scholarships, too convinced of his own genius to see you as anything but silly and young, and the arrogance only got worse with each subsequent visit home from college. It was almost jarring to meet him again, two years ago, when he moved back home to teach. Somehow the intervening decade had rendered him easygoing, and softer-spoken, and humble.

Mostly humble. Trivia night almost invariably makes teenage Ryland rear his ugly head.

“That’s good," you say. "I remember the accident was…you know. Good to hear he’s getting back into things.”

“Yeah.” His eyes dart from you, to Olya and Eva behind you, to the bar, then back to you. “Do you want a drink? I’m going for a refill.”

“Oh, I’m not—”

“Virgin drink for her,” Olesya shouts from where she is now seated, which is more on Eva’s lap than in the booth. You force your face to remain neutral, as opposed to the expression it wants to arrange itself into at hearing the word virgin used in reference to you around the man who notably did not take your actual virginity at your high school prom. “Real drink for me. Double vodka Redbull. And espresso for Eva.”

“Right. Just espresso, no martini,” he says, with an automaticness that suggests he’s had the same thing repeated at him ad nauseam for the better part of an hour. “Okay. You?”

You blink up at him. Then at Olya. She mouths GO at you, accompanied with some rather violent hand gestures, and just as Ryland is about to turn and see this you grab his arm and tug. “I’ll come with you!”

When you get to the bar, you glance back to furrow your brows at Olesya, who has switched to double thumbs up and a shit-eating grin.

You roll your eyes at her, then turn to Ryland, who’s somehow managed to flag down the bartender and order three drinks in the span of fifteen seconds. “I ordered for you.”

“Thanks.” You get comfortable on a barstool, and look up at him. “So. You’ve been back—”

“A few hours.”

“A few hours? And you still rallied for Saturday night dive bar trivia? We should be honored.”

“Couldn't miss it. Everyone in L.A. kept trying to talk to me about crystals and vibes and, like artisan surfboards. I need this.”

You widen your eyes. “Oh, you didn’t hear? It’s artisan surfboard night."

He plays along. "Really?" He gets an elbow up on the bar, resting his cheek on one hand.

"Wood grain patterns, wave height stats, foam density.”

“That is…even better. I’m well-versed now.”

“An expert, I’m sure.” Your eyes map out the geography of his face. You have seen dozens and dozens of versions of this face over the past thirty years or so. This version has a few new freckles, dusted across his nose. You know, from long summers spent hiking and cycling and calling first dibs on the rec center diving board, that those freckles sometimes reach down to his shoulders, his arms, his back. "Was the sun gorgeous?"

“Maybe." His eyes don't leave yours. You wonder if he's running the same mental math, the same diagrams, the same map. It's a rare thing, to know someone your whole life. "You know I’m a sucker for the fog.”

“Ugh. L.A. is wasted on you." Once you're finished scrunching up your nose in disapproval, you sigh. "I bet it was gorgeous. I should move there.”

“You shouldn't.”

“Why? Because I’m the last person in San Francisco who remembers your landline number by heart?" Drinks arrive, and he slides one over to you. It’s red, and fizzy, and has not one but two maraschino cherries. You point at it. “Is this a fucking Shirley Temple?”

“Hey," he says, sounding unbelievably sincere in his disappointment for a man who, between the ages of eight and eighteen, taught you every four-letter word you know. "Language.”

“I’m not one of your students, and did you order me a fucking Shirley Temple?”

He shrugs, and takes a sip of his beer. “It’s the most virgin drink there is.”

You squint at him. Then you reach forward and press a palm to his cheek—not slapping him, just smushing his face away from you (and probably smudging his glasses in the process). “I should throw this at you.”

“Hey, hey!” He catches your wrist. Your pulse does something funny. Your breath is not where its supposed to be. He doesn’t notice. “That's the thanks I get? You used to love those.”

“When I was twelve," you say, tugging your wrist away, "at my mom’s third wedding.” You don't remember a lot from middle school, but you remember that wedding.

He danced with you at that wedding.

The Cotton-Eye Joe, or something stupid like that—but then also a slow dance. Half of one. He’d seen you and Colt dancing and felt left out. You’d let him lead you across the floor, in your sparkly teal junior bridesmaid dress and patent leather shoes, and that might be the first time you remember having that twinkle in your chest, that glow. 

Thinking, so this is what a crush feels like.

He clinks his bottle against your glass, shaking you out of the memory. “Good news, I’m pretty sure they haven’t changed the recipe since then.” He lifts his bottle. "To things that last."

Something tugs at your chest. “To things that last.”

You put the drink down once you’re positive that your face isn’t doing anything unhinged, which is to say after you’ve downed at least a quarter of it. When you look up again, you find he’s already looking at you, with an expression you are momentarily unable to place. It's not expectant, really. Not teasing. Just warm. Watching.

If he were aiming it at anyone else, you might even label it puppy dog eyes.

But it's Ryland, and you know Ryland. You know old Ryland, and you know this Ryland, and you know that this particular look on both of them is one of the kindest possible condescension. It means I met this girl when she was seven and I was eight, and I will see her that way forever. It means friendly, and nostalgic. It means nothing at all like what you wish it did.

You clear your throat and raise your glass. "Looks like twelve-year-old me had good taste after all.”

-

Trivia night ends the same as always, which is to say that Olya gets drunk enough to start heckling the opposition, Ryland nearly knocks over several chairs in his fervor to win, and Eva quietly leads the team to a sweeping victory. By the end of the night, the chaos has settled into a quiet hum, the room buzzing and buzzed off success and adrenaline and cheap beer.

You have not had anything to drink at all, and even you feel a little bit dizzy with the night. This could plausibly be explained by the rush of winning forty consecutive weeks in a row. It could be plausibly explained by any number of things aside from the actual cause.

You are trying very hard not to name the actual cause.

You do allow yourself to name several things around it, like: a high-five that turned into a hand squeeze that you felt long after he’d let your hand go; a smile, long and lopsided and devastating, every time a category came up he knew you’d be good at; a second Shirley Temple, ordered for you and handed to you seconds before he stood up to answer a question (at Trivia Night. Where all the questions are written down on paper. He is hopeless, and you are worse for liking it).

You are mid-naming-things-around-it, and midway to the door, when Olesya calls your name. You turn with a sigh. “Yes,” you say, with no small amount of reluctance, “I can help carpool.”

“Perfect. Every other car, full, you just need to take one person.” She calls back over her shoulder. “Grace!” She regards to you with a twinkle in her eye that you are all too familiar with. 

Your eyes widen. “Olya,” you hiss. “Olya, no—”

“All the other cars are full,” she says, pouting. “And he is on the way to your house.”

“That’s fine, I have no actual objections to that, I’m just objecting to the implication.”

“What implication?” she asks, and you don’t have time to answer because he is here and he has on a yellow raincoat and a beanie, and you hate how hard you are smiling.

“Hey,” he says. His cheeks are still a little pink from the thrill of beating another team at Who Knows The Most Useless Niche Fun Facts. His hair is a disaster. He looks between you and Olesya. “Everything’s good?”

“I found you a ride!” Olesya beams.

“Oh, I can bike home.”

“You biked?” you ask.

“It’s raining,” she points out.

“I have a raincoat.”

“He has a raincoat,” you say to Olya.

“I’m too drunk for this,” she says, before kissing you on the cheek and absconding with Eva.

You look at Ryland. He looks at you. “I really can bike home.”

The thunder is so sudden and so loud, you practically jump into him. When it’s passed, your shoulder is against his chest, and his arm is around your waist, and you blink and you breathe and then you, both of you, take a step back.

You clear your throat and pull your car keys out of your pocket. “Same address?”

-

You shouldn’t have been worried. Driving with Ryland is never bad, even if you haven’t done it in a few months. You amicably bicker about the music for a bit, and then talk about Colt (healed from his accident, back out on his first stunt gig since, apparently plotting to win back The One Who Got Away), and about your brother (teaching law on the East Coast), and your mother (flirting with golf caddies in Orlando), and about Los Angeles. You talk about your job, and his. Students. Books. Friends. The weather. And when the conversation fizzles out, it’s into a comfortable silence. 

The comfortable silence lasts approximately a minute and a half before he says, “I have to confess something.”

Your brows lift. “Oh?”

“This isn’t just a carpool. It’s a carpool with ulterior motives.”

“Thrilling start. Go on.”

"Olesya asked me to talk you out of having a baby?”

You slam on the break. You’re at a stop sign, but still. “Oh my God.”

He has his hand up on the ceiling, looking at you with—alarm, maybe? It’s difficult to tell, because the car is dark, and also because you’re trying very hard only to look at him through your peripheral vision. On account of the fact that you’re driving. Obviously. “She was pretty drunk, so, uh, maybe I misheard?” He pauses. You say nothing. He rushes to continue, “I said it was an overstep."

"Yeah."

"But she insisted."

"Okay."

"So if she asks, can you please tell her I tried? Before she sics her scary girlfriend on me?”

You snort out a laugh at that. “Yep,” you say. Then, quietly, through your teeth, “I will definitely tell her.”

Two more stop signs pass in silence before he speaks again. “Congratulations, by the way." You look over just long enough to make eye contact, or at least make contact with the glimmer of streetlight against his glasses. His face is unreadable behind them. "About the baby. Or condolences if it’s, uh, if it’s complicated.”

You hum. “It's complicated.”

“Ah.”

You realize how that sounds, and rush to continue, “Not complicated like that. There’s no father.” Does that sound worse? You think that sounds worse. “I’m not currently pregnant. Actually, I’ve sworn off men.”

He laughs. It’s brief. “Entirely?”

“Yes. Thank God.”

“Oh.”

“Except it turns out I do need one last thing from them in order to even do the single mom thing.” You roll to a stop in front of a red light, and lift one hand off the wheel to run back through your hair. “Who knew sperm could be so expensive?”

"Makes sense. They pay a lot."

You give him a look, half-delighted, half-inquisitive, and he sighs. "Ryland,” you say.

“I thought about it.”

“Ryland.”

In grad school. For the money."

"Ryland Grace."

"I didn't go through with it!” he protests. “I chickened out. I didn't like the idea of having a kid out there somewhere that I didn't know anything about. No way of knowing the parents, if they were any good or not."

"I get that." You purse your lips. "I also don't really love the idea of combining my DNA with a stranger's. I think if I was adopting it would be different, because that's a whole, real person who exists already. But that's expensive. And then sperm is also expensive, and IVF, and just, you know. Everything. I'm starting to think it'd be easier to just walk up to someone in real life and ask if they'd be willing to contribute."

“Contribute?” He snickers. “What, with a turkey baster?"

"At this point? Sure.” You flip the blinker, check your blind spot. “It's either that or the old fashioned way. You know, traditional."

He chokes.

You sightlessly grab your water bottle out of the cup holder, and pass it to him. He takes a long, long swig. The next time you pass by a street lamp, his face reappears redder than usual. "Right,” he says, then clears his throat. “Right, no, yeah, turkey baster's so—impersonal. Traditional's probably better. I'm a big fan of tradition."

“Would you have gone through with it, do you think? In grad school. If it was more like that."

"Maybe?” He considers it. “I don't know. I don't know if I was ready conceptually back then, for the idea of a kid. Too immature."

"Yeah," you agree. "You were kind of a dick."

"Hey." You give him just enough eye contact for him to think it over. "Yeah," he admits with a chuckle. "Yeah, I was."

"What about now? At the very mature, entirely un-dick-ish age you are now?”

A pause. “It would depend on who was asking."

Your eyebrows lift. “Really?” You keep your eyes very much on the road. “And how does Linda feel about that?"

“We broke up."

"Oh. I'm sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

You let the sound of the blinker fill the car for a few seconds before you speak again. “If you ever need to talk about it…"

"Not much to talk about,” he says. “She said she felt like I was only ever half-in the relationship. Like I was, uh, 'always looking for something better.'"

"Were you?"

"Yeah. I think so."

You whistle. “Ouch."

"It's fine. It was right before I went to L.A., so it gave me some distance. Time to process, figure out what matters to me."

“Figure out what ‘better’ you were looking for?”

He smiles at the next streetlight. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah. Exactly.”

Right before he went to L.A. Two months, then, give or take—right after you ended things with Mark—which means they were together for three. You dislike that the calculation comes so easily. You dislike having to acknowledge, even to yourself, that this is something you have tracked.

"Gotcha." You try to keep your tone light. "I get it. I had a similar…I, uh, went through a breakup around then, too."

"I know.”

It’s the last thing either of you says for a bit.

Before you know it, you’re pulling in front of his house—his childhood house, the one he and Colt inherited. The one he lives in alone, now, since Colt settled in L.A.. It looks the same as it did when you were a kid. Same driveway, same bushes. Same bike out front. Same blue paint (peeling in the back, you assume, because they’d run out of sealant three-quarters of the way through and never got around to visiting Home Depot for more).

“Well,” he says, “this is me.” He turns, and you’re expecting a goodbye, maybe an awkward cross-cupholder-hug, but instead he just says, “You know, the landline number is actually the same.”

“555-7827.” You tip your head forward, resting it on the wheel. “God, there’s so much important shit I could be using that brain space for.”

“You can always call. If you ever need.” He gestures vaguely. “Anything."

"Anything?” You tilt your head. “Dangerous offer."

"Yeah, well. It's you.” With that, he unbuckles, and opens the door. “Goodnight.”

“I—goodnight,” you say, a little flummoxed, and a little flummoxed as to why you feel flummoxed.

He shuts the door. You watch him walk, to be polite, because you watch all of your friends to make sure they get into the door safely—but then he pauses halfway up and shouts something. Your name. You lower the window.

“Anything at all,” he calls. “You just. You just have to ask."

“Great!” You give him a thumbs up. “Thanks! Goodnight!”

He waves, and reaches the door, and he’s gone. You sit and look at the house. Then you sit and look at your hands. Then you shake your head at yourself, and you put the car back into drive, and you pull away.

-

It isn’t until several minutes into the drive home that you understand the implication.

This inspires a thorough self-inventory that probably would be better off done in the quiet of your home, rather than half-assed while driving; but alas, you are single-minded. And impatient.

There's the part of you that thinks this man is tall, and brilliant, and funny, and sweet, and has a great head of hair, and all of those sound like pretty good odds to gamble with on your future child.

There's the part of you that has wanted him, for years, for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting a kid.

Finally—and, though you hate to admit it to yourself, maybe most importantly—there's the part of you that hopes that maybe, if you were to sleep with him, just once, the wanting would leave and burn up and be gone, and you'd finally, finally be able to get Ryland Grace out of your system once and for all, the way you've been able to get every other man out of your system. Also, the excuse of the pregnancy might make it so that you could do this without entirely blowing up your friendship, the way you've done so many times before.

You go through this cycle of thoughts several times. You go through it on the drive; as you park; up the stairs, up the elevator, through fumbling with your keys and shutting the door behind you.

Ultimately, you decide to sleep on it. This isn’t the kind of thing you rush into. You could be misreading his offer. You could be misreading your own emotional capacity for doing this. You could wake up tomorrow and stumble upon the one sperm donation catalog in the history of humankind that would cost you less than two thousand dollars. You are very sensible and very logical about all of these possibilities, and several others, as you cross your apartment and sit down on the couch and pull your phone out of your bag and dial. 

He picks up after two rings.

"It's me,” you say, before he even greets you. “I'm asking.”

"You're asking me to—"

"Help me have a baby. With or without a turkey baster.”

He pauses for five seconds.

Your brain stretches this out to five years, give or take. Long enough that you barrel forward with the rest of the points you’ve come up with in response to any questions he might have.

“I know it's a big ask. You can totally say no. But you should know that I would never ask for money or anything, I can draw up a contract, it really is just a question of sperm. I mean, you wouldn't have to be involved at all post, um, post-conception. Unless you wanted to be an uncle, or a godparent—if you wanted to be a godparent, I guess you could duke it out with Olya—or, well, you can have multiple godparents, right? But also you wouldn't even have to see the baby if you didn't want to, and we wouldn't have to tell anyone, and—”

"I'll do it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah." He says it so casually. Like it's easy. No big deal, just a little sperm between friends. "Just letting you know, though, I have a very strict BYOB policy."

You puzzle over that for a half-second before your face splits in a grin. “Bring your own baster.”

"Bring your own baster,” he repeats, sounding like he’s smiling just as wide.

"Okay. I'll add it to my records.”

“Records?”

"Yeah, I have all kinds of lists and—less for you. More for me. You don't really have to do anything, except. Um. Donate.”

“Donate.”

“That. Oh, and get tested. I did last week, it’s easy—”

“Okay."

"It's not that I don't trust you, or anything, it's just, like, protocol—"

"That makes sense. I can do that tomorrow.”

“I can pay for it.”

“Don’t worry about it. I was due for a test, anyway. Good to go regularly, it’s been—um. Anyway. It’ll come back clean.”

“Great. Well. If you go tomorrow, that should be back in a few days, and then. Are you free Friday?”

“Friday…” There’s a pause, and some frantic shuffling. Pages being flipped through. “Friday I'm on detention duty, so I get off around four. Three forty five.” Another rustle of paper. “And then parent teacher conferences at eight. But I have to stop home in between anyway, so. I’ll be around.”

"Could I come meet you at four? Four thirty? At your house? I'll be s—”

"Yes,” he says, quickly. “Yes, I can do four thirty. Yes."

You pause. “Great. Okay, uh, pencil me in for four thirty to four forty-five.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“I mean, really, it doesn't even have to be that long,” you joke. “If you get yourself close enough, by the time I get there, you can basically come in me and then I'll just be on my way."

There’s a long, long silence. Finally, he says, “If that's how you want to do it, yeah. Great."

"Great."

"Great."

“Great.” You swallow. “So. I’ll see you Friday. At four thirty.”

“Four thirty,” he says. “I’ll be ready.”

-

You pull up on his street at four twenty.

You park down the block. You sit there for exactly five minutes, in spite of the fact that you see a light in the windows, his bike sitting out front. You feel like a stalker.

At four twenty-five, you pull down the sun visor and stare at yourself. You put on a fresh coat of lipstick, which then immediately makes you feel very silly, so you wipe it all off. Then you dab it back on. You pinch at your cheeks. You look down at the dress you decided to wear. It was an entirely work-from-home day, mostly paperwork, so you wore a blazer over a dress and now you’re just wearing the dress, and it’s really the kind of dress you’d wear to, like, a date, which means it is lower cut up top and shorter at the hem than most dresses you’d be wearing on a work day. It’s more of a sun dress, really. So a picnic date dress. You feel both over and underdressed. 

And also you’re wet. On purpose. As much as anyone can be wet on purpose—you’d gotten a package from Olya yesterday, with the note attached, in lieu of sperm, and opened it to find some kind of fertility-promoting lube. Which, sure, it was a joke. And yeah, sure, you used some before you left home. 

You think about what you’d said on the phone. If you get yourself close enough, by the time I get there, you can basically come in me and then I'll just be on my way. You’d meant it only half as a joke. You’ve dated enough men to keep your expectations low. You’re not going to assume he’d waste a ton of time on foreplay. He’s doing you a favor, and he has work tonight, and if he’s in a rush then at least you’ll be more ready than with just a little spit and some half-hearted fingering.

You’re wearing stockings, too, nude pantyhose which seems…you don’t, know, silly? Try-hard? One layer too many? You glance at the clock—four twenty-seven—and look out both windows, reach under your skirt, and begin pulling them off, kicking off your shoes with a muffled curse under your breath. Your underwear starts coming off with them, which you fight and then go along with and then decide to commit to. Your skirt is long enough. You’d promised him this would be quick and easy, right?

You regret it immediately. But it’s four twenty-eight on the dot, and you are allergic to being late, so you shove tights and underwear alike into your glove compartment and drive the twenty feet to his house and pull over and get out.

Up the sidewalk. Up to the porch. You knock.

You wait.

It's colder than it was when you left work. You're really feeling the absence of your stockings right about now, not to mention your underwear, and you're approximately two seconds away from going back to the car to get both when the door swings open. 

"Hey.” 

"Hi," you say.

"Hi."

He's still in his work clothes. You’ve never seen him in his work clothes, actually, and it’s doing wild things to the this man is gainfully employed and good with kids, must procreate part of your brain. It doesn’t help that he looks significantly more disheveled than you would expect after a day of teaching sound waves. He’s breathing faster than usual, chest rising and falling against the blue linen shirt, which is only half-tucked at the bottom, at which point your gaze reaches his pants and you suddenly understand all of the above.

“Hi.” You nod in his general direction. "You, um. You got ready."

“I.” His face is flushed behind his glasses, which are maybe the most properly horizontal you’ve ever seen them. You expect that to last all of five minutes. “You…sorry.” He shakes his head suddenly, as if trying to shake something loose, and the things he shakes loose are his glasses. Five seconds, then. “Come in.” You follow him through the door, shutting it quietly behind you, your focus split fifty-fifty between trying not to imagine him getting himself ready and trying to keep yourself from leaking. You are failing miserably at both.

He’s ahead of you, back turned to you, re-rolling up his sleeves. They were already unbuttoned, but shoved up rather than rolled, messy, like he’d gotten home later than planned and immediately got to work doing—whatever it is he did that you are strictly forbidding yourself from imagining.

“Chinese,” he says, nodding at a bag on the kitchen counter. His hands move over his sleeves, four neat folds on each side, and his forearms are flexing and he’s still visibly straining against the zipper of his pants. “I ordered extra. In case you didn't get a chance to eat. And then the contract you sent over, and the test results, too. I printed them out, in case you want a copy. For your records. I went to the library, though, so it switches from colored ink to black and white halfway through. Didn’t seem like the kind of thing I should be printing out at school, ha.”

Two things hit you at once: the first, that you are not going to get him out of your system with one fuck. If anything, one fuck might make things worse. The second is that you absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, kiss him, because if you kiss him you’ll almost certainly fall in love with him and if you fall in love with him your life will be ruined.

"Right. Thank you. Right.” You are looking all around the living room—there’s the couch you used to build pillow forts next to, there’s the carpet the two of you melted crayons into, there’s the dining room, opening into the kitchen, where you helped his mom bake cookies, inevitably ending up with more flour on your head than in the bowl—in a bid to avoid looking at him, because you have a hunch that if you look at him and/or stop talking he is going to try to kiss you (because that would be the normal way to start this interaction, versus the objectively insane way you've decided to go about it) and if he doesn't kiss you you suspect one look at the bemused brows-above-the-glasses expression on his face will make you kiss him, which you are not allowed to do.

“So how was—”

“I left my underwear in the car. Long story.” The story being that you decided on a whim to leave your underwear in the car and now are regretting it immensely. “And I already got myself ready, and I don't want anything to—so we should probably just, um, take care of business first, if you're all good to go—is here okay?”

Here being his dining room table, which you approach and then smooth your hands across and then bend over, pressing your cheek to the wood in order to have a more concrete reason not to be able to look at him.

He laughs. “You don’t want the bed?”

“Nope, this works.”

“Oh.” He pauses a second, like he’s waiting for you to move. When you keep your face resolutely smushed against the table, he seems to get the memo. “I—alright.”

You feel, more than hear, his footsteps, soft across the floor.

“You said you’re—that you got yourself ready,” he finally says. He sounds close enough to touch. You don’t move a muscle. “How ready?”

“Ready enough.” You twitch a finger, gesturing. “I, um, I used this thing Olya gave me, this pre-seed thing.”

“Pre-seed.”

“It’s just fancy lube, I think.” You bite your bottom lip to try and stop rambling. You cannot stop rambling. “But it's supposed to be good for, like, sperm motility, or something, and I figured if I inserted it ahead of time then you wouldn’t be late for your next thing. Four thirty to four forty-five, remember.”

It’s a weak attempt at a joke. You’re not sure it lands. “I’m not in a rush," he says.

“Your Chinese food will get cold.”

He pauses. “I might be in a little bit of a rush.” You laugh, surprised. His voice is warm when he continues, “Don’t worry about me.”

“I’m not worrying about you. I’m worrying about your food.”

“You don’t have to worry about me or the food. I can worry enough for the both of us. Okay?”

You inhale, you count to four, you exhale. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He claps. It’s not a very loud clap, but it still takes you by surprise. “So, um, on that note—not that it’s a worry, it’s not a worry, not worried at all, just noting—if that’s all you. If you just used the lube and didn’t.” The pause that follows lasts about twelve seconds, which you know because you’re still box breathing in order to not hyperventilate. “You might need to, um, warm up. A little. For it to be comfortable.”

"Oh. Cool.” You think about ring fingers, and shoes, and height, and all kinds of things that don’t actually have any proven causative correlation with dick size, and then you think about the tent in his pants when he was half-hard just inside the door, and you conclude that of course, of course this is the way this is shaking out, because you have the worst good luck of anyone on the planet. “Cool, cool, cool. That’s fine. I can warm myself up more. Let me just.”

“I could. I could do that for you.”

You freeze. You open your mouth, then close it. You open it again. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” he says. “Can I anyway?”

“Sure.” Your brain is producing approximately three thousand thoughts per second, none of them cohesive. “If that’s okay with you. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. Here?”

You nod. The table is cool and smooth beneath your cheek.

There is stillness and stillness and stillness and then, there—his fingers, gentle, just the tips on the back of your thigh. He starts halfway up, just kissing the hem of your dress, and then his fingers travel up and under, and they trace over where your underwear would be, and you know when he reaches the slickness that’s reached your inner thighs because he pauses.

One agonizing moment passes before his fingers continue their upward path, dipping slightly in at your entrance. You make a concentrated effort to exhale silently. You’d estimate that you succeed about sixty percent.

“You’re so…” He takes a deep breath. When he speaks again, it’s very carefully casual. “You’re wet already. That’s good. That’s great.”

You blink. “Did you just.”

“What?”

“You just used the encouraging-middle-school-teacher voice. To tell me good job for being wet. During a sexual encounter."

“Sexual encounter? I thought this was strictly business.” That gets a laugh out of you. A quiet one. You can hear him smiling, not unkindly, when he continues, “You seemed like you could use the encouragement. You’re a little nervous."

"I'm very nervous."

"I know. That’s okay.” He finds your clit. You lose the battle to keep silent. Your face flushes immediately, which he can't see, but maybe he can sense it somehow, because he murmurs, “I’ve got you." 

That just makes things worse, actually, because you feel his voice, low and sincere, run down your spine like a hand. And then he actually does stroke a hand down your back, and you wonder if maybe this is some great cosmic punishment for a past life. He’s not even doing it to turn you on, you don’t think, just to comfort you—but when his hand brushes your neck it does something to you that isn't comfort, and you clench down and whimper for lack of anything to clench down onto. “Sorry,” you mumble into the table.

“Sorry for what?”

“I don’t know. This is just—I’m being so embarrassing.”

 “It’s just me,” he says (which is, of course, part of the problem). “I’ve seen you embarrass yourself plenty of times.”

You snicker. “Hey.”

“Besides. Uh.” He swallows. “Trust me. If you could see yourself from here, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t be embarrassed.”

Before you have a chance to process that, his hand slides back to where you’re wettest.

“I’m going to—” He runs one finger over your entrance, then pauses. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” 

It’s more breath than sound. But he hears it, and, sure enough, he slips one finger into you. It’s an easy slide, wet as you are, but he’s still careful about it. Slow. 

“You’re—” His voice is different. Strained. “I think you can take two. If that’s—”

“Yes. Yeah, that’s—ah.” Two fingers fit, but it’s—a lot. Snug. 

“Relax for me?” He angles his wrist to get a thumb back on your clit, and you flutter around him before relaxing enough for him to let him work the two fingers in and out of you. “There you go. Good job.”

“You’re—”

“That wasn’t the teacher voice, that was the I-have-two-fingers-inside-you-and-you-feel—you feel—” He breathes out, and it sounds unsteady as you feel. “That was, that’s what that voice was. Can I—” He curls his fingers inside you, and you let out a broken moan. “God. Can I. Can I use my mouth.”

You’ve never wanted anything more in your life. “You don’t have to.”

“You keep saying that. Can I please, can I please use my mouth.”

“Yes,” you say, and he gets on his knees so quickly you’re shocked he doesn’t bruise them in the process.

The hand on your lower back runs down, crossing the border from skirt to skin, smoothing up the fabric to reveal you more fully. He keeps his fingers in you for a few seconds more, slow, lazy, dragging them in and out, in and out. Like he’s watching them. He curls them again, deliberately, and when he pulls them back out fully you barely hold back a sob.

There’s a long moment of stillness.

His one hand is still on your ass. His other hand is nowhere at all, and he’s gone silent, which is terrifying.

You use a finger to brush a strand of hair out of your eyes. “Everything good back there?”

“Mmph.” It sounds like his mouth is full, and then, with a quiet pop, not, and your brain shorts out because you realize that’s the sound of him sucking you off his fingers. “Yeah. Yeah. I just.” He presses a kiss to the back of your leg, to the crease where your ass meets your thigh, then pulls back again, and he’s gotten both hands on you, now, and he does what you can only describe as spreading you. 

Another silence. If it were anyone else, you would feel more exposed than you’ve ever been in your life. It’s him, though, which simultaneously makes it better and much, much worse. 

“You,” he finally says, which sounds like the beginning of a sentence until it becomes clear there’s nothing to follow. He kisses your other thigh, open-mouthed, slow, then rests his forehead against it, and breathes. “Fuck.” He says it quietly. Soft. Like it’s just for him.

“Language,” you say.

You mean it as a joke. You mean it as a reference. You mean it in a way that’s meant to break some of the tension and elicit a snarky response, so you are definitely not expecting the next thing he does with his mouth to be pressing his tongue flat against you.

He licks you from your clit to your entrance. The unexpectedness of it, the warmth and wetness and the intensity of it, has your knees buckling so much that you grab the table. You make some kind of sound that you cannot allow yourself to reflect too much upon without feeling intense embarrassment. You make an even more embarrassing sound when he does it again. 

He pulls back, and you put a lot of effort into not protesting. The effort is in vain.

“What was that?” You can hear the unbearably smug grin. “I thought you were telling me to watch my tongue.”

“I wasn’t. I.” You breathe slowly, trying to collect your thoughts.

You get about fifteen percent of the way there before he tightens his grip on your hips, pulling you back to meet his mouth so that he can rub his tongue back and forth against you. You let him press you up onto your toes. Your hips tilt further, allowing him closer, and you can feel the tip of his nose nudge against your entrance at the same time his mouth properly closes around your clit.

You have multiple degrees. You pay taxes, you run a business, you live alone in a one-bedroom in San Fran-fucking-cisco, and you have enough in savings that you can decide to get pregnant, on purpose, without considering yourself financially irresponsible. You are a very respectable person. None of that is reflected in the wail you let out as he sucks harder.

His hands are tight around your legs. His face is so firmly pressed into you, you would wonder if he needs to breathe, if you had any fireable neurons left to spend wondering things like that. You are beginning to have trouble breathing. The air keeps catching in your chest, in a building rhythm, and your knuckles are beginning to go white from how tightly you are gripping the table. 

“Ry—” You can’t even get out his full name.

He doesn’t stop. He doubles down.

You don’t know how long you spend there, bent over, unable to do anything but tremble as he sucks at your clit. Just as you’re close, he pulls away—but before you can say anything about it, his tongue is inside you, and he’s reached a hand around your thighs to get at your clit from the other side, and you think you might be making sounds in tandem with the thrust of his tongue, but your blood is rushing in your ears a bit, and your toes are curling against the floor, and everything narrows and narrows and narrows until—

He says something, you think. Tries to, but you can’t understand it, because his tongue is inside you and also because you’re coming so hard that you’re probably going to get a cramp in your right foot.

He doesn’t give you any relief. He lets you clench around his tongue, for a while, then pulls out while you’re still going to get his mouth on your clit again, relentless, arms wrapping around you tight to keep you from squirming away, as though you have anywhere to go, as though you aren’t trapped, totally and entirely, between the table and him. 

You come back to yourself in pieces.

You’re aware of your breath, audible, ragged; your hands, tingling; your right foot, uncurling just in time to avoid a cramp. You’re aware of his arms, steady; his mouth, gentling on you, pulling away entirely. You make a broken sound into the table. 

Something nudges at your entrance, and it’s his fingers, three of them, and they slide into you like its nothing, setting off another wave of aftershocks, and he’s slower than ever as he fucks you open on them. “Look at that,” he says, satisfied. 

Your face is warm. The mahogany is cool against it as you press your forehead back into the table. “You’re evil.”

“You’re perfect,” he replies, and you have absolutely nothing to say to that.

He pulls his fingers out as the aftershocks ebb. You don’t have any time to respond in any direction before he replaces them again with his tongue. 

Your hips buck against the table. Your knees genuinely threaten to give out; you’re not entirely sure they don’t, you can’t tell, because his hands are back on your legs more firmly than ever.

“Ryland,” you choke out.

“Mmph.”

“Ryland,” you repeat, more desperately, reaching back with one hand to push against the top of his head. “I’m good. I’m—I’m ready, I’m ready.”

He shakes his head, pulling back only to kiss your leg again. “Just a little longer.” He’s scattering kisses up and down your thighs, now, across the crease, fingers coming back to press against your clit. “Just a little longer, you taste so good, a little more—I bet I could make you come again like this—”

“Are you going to put a baby in me or not?” You’re still a little breathless, but you get enough of a challenge into it that he pauses. “I thought this was strictly business.”

He huffs out a laugh against you. “Right.” Because he’s the worst, he licks you again, circles at your clit, laughs at the way your hips jerk from the overstimulation, before grabbing the edge of the table and pulling himself up to standing.

You hear a buckle, a belt, a zipper. A pause.

You think about how long it’s been since you met him at the door. How everything that’s happened so far has been pretty much exclusively for you. “Is there anything I can do to help?” you ask, lowering your voice.

You know what his answer will be. You’ve never once had a man turn down a blowjob, which is fine, because you don’t really mind blowjobs, most of the time, and for some reason there is a part of you that’s actually incredibly eager to get this specific man’s cock in your mouth, all of which is why you are entirely unprepared to hear him say, “No.”

You pause. “Oh?”

“I’m good.” He steps forward, the length of him brushing against your ass, and you understand just how good.

“Just from—”

“Yeah.” He uses his hand to line himself up, and you feel him at your entrance, the promise of him. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” You press your face more firmly into the table, arch your back slightly. You breathe. “Ready.”

He presses in.

You are not ready.

You are ready in that you are wet; in that it fits; in that it feels good, properly good, good enough that you let out a long, quiet moan at the same time he does. But it’s still a lot. It’s still a slight stretch, even after three fingers, even after coming on his tongue. 

It’s still him.

There’s no helping it. All of the preparation in the world could not have kept you from feeling slightly overwhelmed by the heat and the weight and the understanding that Ryland Grace is inside you. It’s making you do stupid things, like get a little choked up. You bite back a sound that you fear might come out less sexy than emotional, but you don’t bite it back entirely, and he stops, still inside you. “Too much?”

Yes. “No,” you say, and swallow, because what do you possibly have to cry about? “I’m good. It’s good, you feel—good.”

“Good.” He pulls out, then pushes back in, slowly, and the sound he makes is—God. This was the worst idea you’ve ever had. This was the best idea you’ve ever had. “You too. I’m going to—” His hands press into your waist through the fabric of your dress. “Is this okay?”

“Mmhm.” You're both still basically fully clothed, which means you're barely touching, which just narrows your focus to the one specific place where you are touching, and its making the whole thing feel dirtier than if you'd just been naked. 

You clench around him, and he makes another sound and begins fucking you in earnest.

He’s still slow. He’s being careful, you suspect, which you appreciate because he is thick and he is long and your legs are barely functional as is. But the rhythm is steady. He drives into you with slow, deep thrusts, and already you are struggling not to make a whole host of embarrassing noises. You suspect he is also struggling with this because he is losing, badly—maybe he’s stifling them from his normal volume (whatever that may be), but he is close enough that you feel his breath on the back of your neck, and every single choked-off moan and whimper and grunt might as well be piped directly into your brainstem. When you give up on trying to mute yourself, and let out a quiet, “You can—harder,” he groans, long and low, and obliges, picking up the pace enough that you can hear the slap of his hips against yours.

You reach back, at one point. You’re not exactly sure why. To grab at him, maybe—to pull at his hips, urge him deeper, faster—but he catches your hand in his, threading his fingers through yours.

“You’re so.” He manages to get his other hand under your waist, arm across, lifting, helping you stand up a little so that his chest is pressed against your back, his voice in your ear. “I knew you’d feel good, but I didn’t—you’re so—”

“I know,” you say, without really knowing what you’re saying. “Me too.”

He presses a kiss to your shoulder, where the neckline of your dress ends, and then further in, further up. You squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, thumb running back and forth across the edge of yours. When he kisses the top of your neck, wet and hot and open-mouthed just below your ear, you let out a desperate sound, not quiet at all, and you clench around him and you feel him smile and you want to strangle him almost as much as you want to kiss him. You want so badly to kiss him. You almost try to crane your head around to allow for it, except you remember dimly that you’re not supposed to, and you can’t for the life of you remember why.

When he slows down, you whine. It’s entirely undignified. You don’t really have it in you to care. “What are you doing?”

“I just. I just.” He rests his forehead against the back of your head, and through the fog you swear you feel him press his lips to your hair. “I need a second.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah.” He swallows, and turns his head to press his cheek to your hair instead. “I don’t want to finish too fast,” he admits. You know what that voice looks like on him—it looks like beet red and mortified. “And I will. If we keep going. Right now.”

You burst out laughing. You can’t help it. “What?” You let your head hang, still shaking with laughter you don’t really have the breath to afford. “Ryland. That’s, like. The opposite of a problem. That’s the whole point.”

“That’s not the whole point.” He sounds insulted, which for some reason is even funnier, and makes you laugh even harder. He makes a vaguely pained sound, and you realize retroactively that laughing makes you squeeze which makes you squeeze around him. “You—stop doing that.”

“Then stop being funny!” You wipe a tear away, and turn just enough to make a sliver of eye contact. “You know, I would have planned a lot differently if I knew I had to factor in time to explain how babies are made.”

“I—” He goes through amused and annoyed and endeared in a comically short amount of time (and you manage to contain your reaction to light smirking, this time, because you are nothing if not good at taking feedback), and lands on an expression that is a combination of all of those things and leaves you convinced, in an even shorter amount of time, that you are in danger. “Did you really think you’d be out of here in fifteen minutes?”

“No.” You look at his lips again, and then face forward to cut yourself off. “Maybe.” You squeeze your eyes shut. “It would have been fine if you ohfuck—”

This last because he presses back into you, all the way, at the same time his hand finds your clit. “Do you still think that?”

“No.” Your voice is quiet, shaky.

“No?”

Louder now, “No, nope, not even a little—”

“Glad to hear it.” He starts moving again. It’s slow, and his voice is strained, but he’s moving and his fingers are on you at the same time he’s inside you, and he’s taking advantage of the pace to really focus on what spots he’s angling himself against. “Otherwise I might have gotten offended.”

“Didn’t mean to—okay.” Your elbows are beginning to go the way of your knees, which is to say you lower yourself back down to the table while you are still capable of doing so in a safe and controlled manner. His hand is still wrapped around yours. “Oh God. You can—faster. Faster, please.”

“I will. I just want to get you a little closer.”

“I already—”

“No, that didn’t count.” He is going faster, whether he realizes it or not; and it is getting you closer, which was maybe part of the point. “That didn’t count. I want you to come for me.”

“I did come for you.”

“On me. Around me. That’s what—that’s all I’m waiting for, you just have to—”

It’s working. What he did with his tongue, what he started and finished and started again—you feel it, feel the threads of it, lengthening, growing, sparking again each time he thrusts inside you. 

“Yeah,” you say, because what else can you say. “Yeah. Can you just—” You bite your lip. 

“What?” He’s breathing faster, again, almost panting.

“Your hand,” you manage. “On—on my neck.”

“Your neck?”

You nod against the table.

“Okay.” He doesn’t stop. “Okay. Can you—with your hand—can you keep rubbing yourself? Can you do that for me?”

You are flat against the table. The hand around yours doesn’t loosen at all. With some effort, you move your other hand down, under you, and it brushes his for a moment before he makes way for you, and uses his newly freed hand to reach up and wrap around the back of your neck.

“Like this?’’ he asks. He sounds almost hoarse, though nothing compared to the sound you let out as you nod, clenching around him even tighter than before. “Okay. And don’t stop—your clit—good, that’s good, just—”

His hand tightens around your neck slightly, just on the sides, as he starts fucking you hard, harder than before, hard and fast in a way that is forcing sounds out of you that you cannot control. You try to rub your clit in some approximation of what he was doing, and it’s more slippery than you could have anticipated and your fingers keep grazing his cock as he thrusts into you, and you’re close, you’re close again.

“I—” You make a sound into the table. “I’m.”

“I know.” He doesn’t stop. “I know, I know, I’m here—” 

He squeezes your hand again, and for some reason this is the thing that undoes you.

This orgasm is a different kind of good from the first. That was a sharp, hot, precise flash of pleasure; this time is broader, gentler, warmer. True to his word, he follows almost immediately after, shooting hot inside you, and you are full as you squeeze around him and pant into the table.

You can hear his breathing, too, behind you. You listen to it slow in time with yours.

He squeezes your hand again, this time as a precursor to letting go, and it almost hurts as much as the loss of him pulling out of you. He runs the other hand, the neck one, down your back, smoothing your skirt back down as he goes. There are shuffling sounds—boxers, zipper, belt. You don’t move.

“Hey.” His hand is on your hip again—lighter. Tentative, like he wasn’t just digging into it ninety seconds ago. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” You are still face planted into the table for the same reason as before: if you stand up, you will have to look at him, and why you ever thought that would be easier after he fucked you than before is one of the great mysteries of the universe. “Yeah. That was—I’m just—.” You stand up very abruptly. “Oh my god.”

“What?” He sounds alarmed. 

“I need to lie down.”

“Are you dizzy?” He sounds even more alarmed. “Are you—the couch, is the couch okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine, the couch is fine but, do you have a towel, it’s just—I need to lie down for twenty minutes,” you say, apologetically as you can muster. He crosses a step to the kitchen, and grabs a towel, and tosses it to you. You catch it without looking at him, and you waddle over to the couch in the unsexiest manner possible, where you proceed to put the towel on top of a pillow and lie down with the pillow under your hips. Your skirt flips back up. You cross your legs as though it will help. It really doesn’t. “I completely forgot. Just so it doesn’t—you know.”

A pause. “So it doesn’t what?”

You look at him. In very short order he has gone from sounding alarmed to wearing a poorly-hidden smirk.

You narrow your eyes at him. “You know.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I do. I think. But I kind of want to hear you say it.”

You purse your lips. You stare at the ceiling, then look back at him, then back at the ceiling, then at the insides of your hands. “So it doesn’t leak out,” you say, muffled against your palms. “There. I said it.”

“You did,” he says, sounding annoyingly pleased.

“Are you happy now?”

“Very.” His voice is getting closer.

When you open your eyes again, he’s standing over you. You frown, and push his face away with both hands. “I hate you.”

“I know.”

“You’re the worst.”

“I know.”

“I can’t believe I left my underwear in the car.”

“Why did you do that?” he says, sounding equal parts delighted and bewildered.

“I don’t know,” you wail, except you can’t help but laugh with him. “It just seemed like something people do!”

“What people?” His voice is further away now, like he’s leaving the room, and there’s a vague sound of drawers being open and shut. “Internet people? Is this a porn thing I don’t know about? Because porn is not supposed to be a good representation of real life, you know, that’s a specific thing I have to say in the sex ed unit. I have to say that. To a room full of eighth graders.” A drawer shuts. “Is porn where you got the table idea from?”

“No,” you say miserably, back into your hands. You aren’t sure if he can hear you, and you don’t care. “That was all me.”

A piece of fabric hits the back of your hands. You pick it up, to look at it. Boxers. White. Black text on the band. 

“For you,” he says. “They’re clean.”

“Oh. Thanks.” You look at them a moment more, then pull them on. “You know, I really wasn’t expecting this from you.”

“Okay,” he says, leaving to the kitchen. “So what I’m hearing is that first, you thought I’d be the guy who would finish having sex and kick you out within fifteen minutes—still not over that, by the way—and then you also thought I’d let you leak in misery on the couch? For another twenty minutes? And I was still your first choice of sperm donor? Because if that’s the case, we need to have a serious chat about your taste in sexual partners.”

“You can connect with Olya about that. I think she already had an intervention planned.” You pull the waistband of the underwear out, then release, letting it snap against your waist. “But I was talking about the Calvins. I kind of assumed there’d be, like, little Bunsen burners around the band. Or some kind of day-of-the-week situation.”

“The Bunsen burners are my Thursday pair,” he says, emerging from the kitchen with a glass of water. He passes it to you before plopping down on the floor next to the couch.

You take a sip. “What are you doing?”

“Sitting. Next to you.”

“It looks like you’re lying down.”

He is, in fact, flat on the carpet without so much as a pillow. “Yeah. Next to you. Is that allowed?”

“Of course it’s allowed, it’s your house. I just don’t want to stop you from doing the things you need to do.”

“What do I need to do?”

“I don’t know. Put your cold Chinese food in the fridge?”

“I did that already.”

“Oh.” You take another sip. “Prepare for parent teacher conferences?”

“I did that already. At school. It’s mostly the same every time. Parents agree. Parents disagree.”

“Parents hit on you,” you continue for him.

His face turns a little pink. “Sometimes, yeah.”

You roll your eyes. “Of course they do.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“I literally said of course they do. Because of course they do.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re. You know.” You look at him—messy hair, messy glasses, messy smile—and then determinedly back at the ceiling. “You’re not completely horrible to look at.”

“Wow. And this is you after two orgasms.”

“That was a nice thing! I said a nice thing!”

“You’re in my house, wearing my boxers—”

“Yes, your Bunsen-burner-less boxers. I’ll have to plan around Thursdays, going forward.”

“Going forward?” he says.

You freeze. You do not look at him. “If it’s not too much of an imposition,” you say carefully—and then you are immediately cut off by his hand smushing your face.

“It’s not an imposition,” he says. “It is absolutely not an imposition. We can do this as much as you want.”

“Mmph,” you say.

He pulls his hand back. You look at him. “I just didn’t want to assume,” he says.

You stare. Messy glasses, hair, smile—you look back at the glass. “Like you said, this is me after two orgasms.” You are very interested in the glass and, furthermore, the water inside it. “Which was, for the record, not the point.”

“Of course it’s the point.”

“But like, okay, if we were doing this with a turkey baster, that wouldn’t even be a concern—”

“Well, we aren’t doing this with a turkey baster. I made it very clear that it was on you to provide the turkey baster, and you didn’t, so—”

You shove the water at him, if only to shut him up, but you’re grinning. He’s also grinning. You take the water back, and struggle to take a sip, because it is significantly emptier and you are still flat on your back.

He stands up. “C’mere,” he says. He helps you sit up, and then sits down where your head was, letting you lay back in his lap. “Is this okay? If I sit here?”

“It’s your house, Ryland, you can sit wherever you want—” He pinches your nose. You glare up at him. He smiles pleasantly down at you. “Yes. Idds fide,” you say. “Awesobe. Really.”

He releases your nose, and runs a hand back through your hair. Your eyes shut automatically.

“But seriously,” he says. “Was that—was there anything bad? Anything you didn’t like? I’m very open to notes. For next time. Since there’s going to be a next time.”

“It was all good,” you say. You think it might be the first time you’ve said that to a guy and honestly meant it. “The whole thing.”

“That can’t be true.”

You open one eye. “Are you calling me a liar?” The other eye opens. “Or, wait, was it bad for you?”

“What? No.”

“I mean it. I am also open to feedback, and I know I was being super weird at the beginning, I was just, like you said, I was nervous, but I can be so much more normal next time—”

“You were perfect,” he says, at the same time he runs a hand back over your head. “And, sure, I’d prefer if you weren’t that nervous all the time, but that’s because I don’t want to be doing things that make you nervous. So if I am—”

“You weren’t. It’s just you.”

As in, there’s nothing you could have done better. As in, you make me nervous just existing. As in, I’ve thought you were perfect since we were in elementary school, and I know you don’t mean it back the same way but if you were going to say it at all I wish it had been sooner than this.

He smiles. “Yeah,” he says softly. “It’s just me. And it’s just you. So there’s nothing to be nervous about, yeah?”

“Mm.” You let your eyes close back shut as you turn your head, snuggling more firmly into his lap. He makes a noise that sounds like a wince, and shifts beneath you, and you look back up at him. “Sorry. Did I—”

“Nope,” he says. His voice is definitely strained. “No. You’re fine. I just. Has it been twenty minutes yet?”

You look at him. Then you look at his lap. Then you look back at him. “Already?”

“Yeah, I think. I think it’s been about twenty minutes.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s been less.”

“Has it been an amount of time that would qualify as going forward?” he asks. Then: “We don’t have to, if you’re not up to it.”

You make a show of genuinely considering. “I am a little sore.”

“Right. That, that makes sense.”

“But not that sore.” You meet his gaze. “And probably going again is good. Statistically.”

He nods as you sit up and put the water down on the coffee table. He keeps nodding as you begin to shimmy off his underwear, his own hands going back to deal with his belt and his zipper and all. “Yeah. Better odds, definitely better. The numbers alone. If you’re sore, do you want to be on top this time? So you can have more control over how—”

"Right. I just feel like, is that counterproductive? Like, I spent all that time on my back, just to let gravity..."

“I’ll—” His mouth clamps shut. “Nope.”

You stare at him. In years and years, in decades, you’ve never known any version of Ryland Grace to do anything but say exactly what he thinks, exactly at the speed he thinks it. “What was that.”

“I was just about to say the worst thing I've ever thought."

"What."

"You'll leave if I tell you."

"What?"

"I was going to say, I'll plug you up."

You’re not smiling. Really, you’re not. It’s just that the corners of your mouth are pulling so far up and out that it’s hurting your cheeks. “Oh my god."

"I know."

"That's terrible.”

"I told you!"

“Like I’m, what, a sink? A power socket?” His face is too buried in his hands to allow anything but a muffled groan in response. You grin. He is somehow, in spite of all of this, still hard. “If you wanted me to leave you could have just said so."

“I don’t—”

"Hey, signal received, loud and clear. I’ll just—” You stand, and turn to the door. You mean it as a joke. It doesn’t matter, though, because you don’t get that far before he catches your wrist and tugs you back.

It only takes two or three movements for you to straddle him.

All at once your field of vision is very full of nothing but messy hair, and eyes bright behind his glasses, and his stupid perfect nose, and his mouth—

"We can't kiss," you blurt out.

He blinks. His face stays still otherwise. “Okay.”

"It's a rule I have. For hookups. No kissing on the mouth.” At the word mouth, his eyes drop to yours, which is fine, that’s normal, you can’t just tell someone not to think of an elephant. But the thought of him thinking about kissing you makes you dizzy enough that you rush to continue, “Everywhere else is fine, though."

You are not a good liar. He is an even worse liar, which might be the only way you get away with this. He also might be justifiably distracted by the fact that the entire naked length of him is pressed up against the entire naked length of you, and you are wetter than before from his mouth and from two orgasms and from him leaking out of you.

"Everywhere else?" he asks.

You nod. 

“Here?” His hand is warm against the back of your neck as he drags his thumb back and forth across your neck, just below your ear. 

When you nod, he follows with his mouth.

He continues lower, fingers and then lips, to your shoulder—“Here?”—your sternum—“Here?”—and then his hand is cupping your breast over your dress—“Here?”—at which point your nodding becomes frantic. You dip your shoulder, helping him push down the strap and the neckline until he’s able to dip into your bra and free you and drag a tongue across the curve, closing his mouth around your nipple as you wrap an arm around his head and press him to you and wind your fingers into his hair. 

He sucks harder, harder, until the pleasure has a sting to it. You tug at his hair. He relents, pulling away only to replace his mouth with his hand, his thumb, back and forth as he laughs into your neck.

“You’re so,” he starts, then pauses to press his hips more firmly into you, then huffs out another laugh, low and disbelieving. “The sounds you make.”

Your face heats up. “Sorry,” you mumble into the side of his head.

“No. Don’t you dare. They’re great sounds. Excellent sounds. Very helpful.” You throb against him at that, and he must feel it, because his next laugh chokes off. “Can I—are you—inside?”

“Inside,” you agree, a little breathlessly. You lift your hips just enough to line him up to you, and there’s a genuine pang in your chest from how badly you want to kiss him—

—but then he’s inside you, and inside you and inside you and inside you, taking up so much space that you don’t have any left for silly things like regret.

His mouth is back on your chest, your collar, pushing down your dress on the other side. You’re struck with—something. Jealousy, maybe. Your hands loosen from their death grip on his shoulders to grab at his shirt, the buttons, greedy, frantic. “Can I—”

You’re clumsy with the buttons, so he comes to your rescue. He’s somehow even worse. Between the two of you, you manage to fumble a few open, and having those few inches of chest-to-chest contact when you bury your head back in his neck feels nothing short of religious. 

Aside from minute adjustments of the hips, and a twitch inside you, he’s trying very hard to be still. You can tell its an effort because, when you finally move, lifting up slowly on shaky legs, his fingers tighten on your hips. You sink back onto him with a slow, intentional breath.

“Good?” he asks into your jugular. “It doesn’t hurt?”

“No.”

It does. But it’s a low, quiet ache, a base note of soreness that only intensifies the pleasure, until your thighs give out and you lower yourself back down more quickly than planned, and the hit of him against your cervix makes you yelp. “A little,” you amend.

“Sorry!” He sounds panicked, which is so endearing it almost makes you forget about the pain. His hands visit lower on your hips, cupping your ass, helping you lift up a little as he presses his hips down and away from you, and a sound escapes you that has nothing to do with pain or soreness and everything to do with the drag of him inside you. “Sorry, sorry. Is that—we should stop. Let’s stop.”

Now it’s your turn to panic. “No. No stopping.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t. It’s all right if you do.”

“It is absolutely not all right, that’s—”

“I like it,” you admit, and when he looks up you force yourself not to close your eyes or look away. Whatever sentence he was in the middle of dies on his lips. You need to stop looking at his lips.

“Oh,” he says.

“It feels good.” You watch him watching you. “I want to be a little sore. I want to be able to remember you were inside me.”

That last part slips out on accident, and you have a front row seat to watch it land.

His eyes are bright behind the glasses (crooked, smudged, a little foggy), but there’s a stillness to his expression overall, like he’s trying very carefully not to scare off an endangered animal, except for a tiny little twitch at the corner of his mouth, and you want to kiss the corner of his mouth so now you do have to close your eyes.

The next two seconds feel like they last about an hour.

“Okay,” he says, like he’s still thinking it over as he says it, and then, more resolutely: “Okay.”

Something unties in your chest. You open your eyes, and see him looking at you like—like—you can’t examine that expression too closely, actually. If you think about that expression too much you are going to start having all kinds of other thoughts you aren’t allowed to have. “Okay?”

“But we go slow.”

“Slow is good.”

“And if it starts to—if it hurts in a way that doesn’t feel good, we stop. Tell me right away, and we’ll stop.”

“I will,” you agree, already shifting your hips a bit in his hands to press back against him. You don’t take him all the way down to the hilt. Almost, but not quite. You feel him press against the back of you, and you let yourself sink down just a millimeter more, earning that bit of pain, the sweet ache, before nodding. “There.” Your eyes flutter shut, your head tipping down. “Until there is good.”

He nods. His forehead is pressed to yours—not on purpose, you think, that’s just how your head fell, that’s out of your control—and you’re breathing the same air, and you honestly deserve a Nobel for not closing those last few centimeters.

“Good.” His voice has dropped about an octave.

You clench around him, and you feel his thighs flex, under yours, through his pants, as he presumably fights the urge to thrust up into you.

“Sorry,” he says, which confirms it. You feel the tip of his nose travel up across your forehead, followed by his lips, ending at your hairline. “We’re going slow. I want to go slow. It’s good that we’re going slow. I can kiss you here?”

“Yes.” He presses his mouth more firmly against your head, and you angle your face into his neck. “We don’t actually have to go that slow.”

“It’s good,” he repeats, like he’s trying to convince himself, “that we’re going slow.”

“But your food. It’ll get cold. It’s probably already cold.”

“I have a microwave. A great one.”

“Mmhm.”

“Actually it’s just okay, you remember, it’s the same one, I think it’s probably been here since the Cold War—” You laugh again, which makes you pulse around him again, and he lets out a shaky exhale. “Have I mentioned how glad I am that we’re going slow.”

“Once or twice.”

“Great, great. Good. Just wanted to make sure you got that. On the record. In your records. One of them. Both. Either. And it doesn’t hurt.”

“Not in any way I don’t like.”

He makes a sound into your hair that could best be described as tortured. His fingers are tight on your hips, digging. You know that it’s just practical, that he’s mostly doing it to help support your weight so that you don’t move too fast, don’t hurt yourself again. You are still hopeful of bruises tomorrow. You are also hopeful that he’ll fuck you properly sometime in the next ten seconds, because if he doesn’t you might die.

“You don’t have to hold back” you say. “I mean it. As fast as you need. As hard as you need.”

A pause. Then he guides your hips forward—not deeper, but closer, flush against him, and the pressure takes you by surprise, and you whimper.

“You get to feel good too,” he says. “You said whatever I need, right? Anything I want?”

“Mmhm.” He moves you, and you let him. “Mmhm.”

“Right. Not too deep,” His mouth finds its way back to your neck, just below your ear, and you keep rocking against him in that heavy, unrushed rhythm, your clit pressed back and forth against his stomach where his shirt has ridden up. “Not running anywhere, just this, just—” You pulse around him, and his voice breaks. “— just like that. Need to hear you make those pretty noises while you squeeze down on me.”

“Ry—”

“You want me to fill you up, right, you want me to put a baby in you, that’s the whole point, and I want to, I’m going to, I just—then I need to feel you—need you to feel good. Need you to come again.”

“Ryland.”

“You can do that for me, right, you can, you can, it’s only fair.”

You don’t know how long you stay like this. It’s slower than you wanted, but exactly as fast as you need, and he is patient, steady, even as the monologue runs away from him and he begins babbling nonsense into your ear. Or maybe he’s making perfect sense. You think you hear your name a few times, but who even knows anymore. You’re pretty sure you’ve lost the ability to process language.

He lets go of your hips on one side to get a hand back on your chest, gentle, rolling your nipple between forefinger and thumb. You bury your face in his neck, and then make some effort to lift it back up, until you are practically cheek to cheek.

“It’s only fair, you have your rule, I have mine,” he says. You don’t even know what he’s talking about. You’re not sure he does, either. His mouth is next to your mouth, level, along the same plane, and it would be so easy, nothing at all, to turn your head and—

And then his mouth moves higher, to your eyes, next to your eyes, and he’s saying, “Here, is here okay, can I kiss you here, can I please kiss you here.”

You make some sort of noise of agreement, so far past words you don’t know if you could produce a full sentence if you tried.

The moment he has your permission, he turns his head just the slightest bit to properly press his mouth against your temple, and he keeps it there while he crushes you to his chest with one arm around your waist, keeping the pressure of his pelvis against your clit,  and every sound he makes vibrates through your skull as he finishes inside you.

Neither of you moves for a long, long time. Your chest is pressed to his. You could almost swear you feel his heart beat through it, a little faster than yours, a little out of rhythm. 

“Your food is definitely cold,” is the first thing you manage.

“It is,” he agrees. “Because I put it in the fridge.”

“Oh.” The freckles do go down to his shoulders, you see now. You run your finger between them, tracing constellations, up until the place where they disappear under his shirt where you pushed it back. “Wow. When did you do that?”

“Before. After. Between. I told you that. I said it out loud.”

“I forgot.” The comfortable silence returns. You feel his hand, slow up and down your back, and the other in your hair, still, his thumb against your temple. “I probably need to lay down again,” you finally say. “For twenty minutes. I think that’s the rule.”

“Sure. Just one more second.”

“Okay.”

You let several minutes pass.

“I don’t even know why twenty minutes. It seems like an arbitrary amount of time”

“Yeah?” He kisses your temple again—slow, like he’s committing it to memory—and then your jaw, and then your collarbone, and then your neck again, and it tickles and you giggle and while you giggle he finally turns, careful, and lowers you back down to the couch. He pulls out of you, soft, and you’d protest but you are honestly too satisfied down to your bones to do anything but let him. “I thought you did all that research.”

“I did. Nobody on Reddit could agree on a number.”

“You did not just use research and Reddit in the same sentence,” he says, walking back to the kitchen. The sink goes, and then stops. The fridge opens. A bag crinkles on the counter. The chiming of silverware in a drawer, the one to the right of the sink, next to the junk drawer. Your heart feels so full it could burst. Here’s to the things that last.

“Cool it, doc. We can’t all have a fancy degree.”

“You want fried rice, or white?”

“Both.”

“On it. And you literally have a J.D. Juris doctor.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make me a researcher, it just means I get paid twice as much to do half the work of one.”

“Mean,” he says. You stick a tongue out at him, even though you know he can’t see it. “But fair.”

The microwave goes. You lie back, having pulled his boxers back on, and you update your mental profile of him, this man you’ve known for the better part of thirty-four years.

Ryland Grace is not the kind of guy who has sex and then kicks you out within fifteen minutes.

Ryland Grace is also not the kind of guy who lets you leak in misery on the couch.

Ryland Grace is smart but not obnoxious about it.

“You want something other than water? I guess it’s late for coffee. Or is that one of those things you can’t have? Like alcohol? I did—I haven’t done, like, research, that’s a completely different thing, but I was reading about…”

Ryland Grace is smart but mostly not obnoxious about it.

Ryland Grace prints things out at the library if he’s afraid they’re inappropriate for the school printer

Ryland Grace is the kind of guy who agrees to donate sperm to an old friend without question.

He is tall, and brilliant, and sweet, and funny, and has a great head of hair, and is also built to a crazy degree for someone whose primary form of exercise seems to be biking places.

He’s farsighted, but that means he keeps the glasses on during sex and that honestly has to count as a pro.

He is good in bed, and you get to keep on sleeping with him for as long as it takes for you to get pregnant.

That last part makes you pause.

The as long as it takes part. The part where there’s a guaranteed end date.

Which is your fault, of course, and also entirely by design. Help me have a baby is a very different context than help me have a baby and also we should date. It’s completely different than help me have a baby and also remember that time sixteen years ago when I poured my heart out to you and you—

“There.” He places a coaster on the coffee table, and a steaming plate on top of it. “You don’t have to sit up yet, it’s pretty hot. I just put a little of everything. And it’s definitely a no on the coffee, unless you want decaf, but then I remembered you hate coffee so I just brought more water.”

You take the fork he offers you. “Thanks, Ryland,” you say.

It comes out softer than you meant for it to. He doesn’t notice. He just smiles, and goes back to the kitchen to make himself a plate. You watch him go, and you think:

Ryland Grace is the perfect person for you to have fun with, have a baby with, and then forget about completely.

You can do that. You can totally do that. You just don’t know how you’re going to do that.

But then he comes back with a steaming plate of food of his own, and jokes about burning his tongue, and then immediately burns his tongue, and you laugh at it like a friend would. And, once you’re satisfied that you’ve been on your back enough to be relatively leak-proof, you sit up and race him to see who can finish their noodles the fastest (he lets you win, like he used to when you were kids), and every time you offer to leave he finds some excuse or some question that requires you to stay, until he actually has to leave to avoid being late for work, and you drive home and you shower and you go to sleep in your own bed. And you wake up only thinking about him a little.

This was supposed to have been a normal, average check on the ship after passing through a minor asteroid field. You hadn't anticipated your foot becoming entangled in the tether, nor a stray meteorite knocking you clean off the hull and causing you to get yanked back by your leg. Nothing is broken, you think, but it burns like hell. You've certainly torn something. If it weren't for the whole no-gravity-in-space thing, you probably wouldn't be standing.

The asteroid field had knocked out the surveillance systems, so you were on your own until you got back inside the Hail Mary. Neither Grace nor Rocky knew what was wrong with you, and apparently the meteorite that knocked you off the ship damaged your comms, too.

"Y/N," Rocky's translated, computerized voice trickled through the radio roughly in a series of broken bits of speech. "Un... See... What..."

It was loud, and too much. Every step was like fire. Maybe you were close to some cameras by now.

Your vision blurred as the pain worsened. Okay, maybe you did break something. Hopefully not, but sharp, hot tears came suddenly as the adrenaline finally wore off and your body began to tremble uncontrollably from the pain. The tether was still wrapped around your leg, but you couldn't think straight to remove it. Logically, you knew you had to, but your head was still spinning from how quickly you'd been snapped back toward the ship.

Movement caught your eye, and you braced for another meteorite. Immediately, you relaxed. Grace.

He'd hurriedly put on his EVA suit to come get you, glasses askew inside the helmet. The second you saw him, his face dropped. You couldn't hear him as he tried to speak, but he was talking fast, brow furrowed. It might be a bit useless, but you gestured helplessly to your wounded leg. The utter silence besides your breathing was starting to freak you out.

Grace went into action like a sleeper agent, rushing over like he was a trained astronaut and cutting the tether free from you. The relief was only brief-- the pain came back full force and you cried out, glad he couldn't hear it. You couldn't focus on much of anything now; Grace clipped you to him and began helping you back to the airlock.

Once the door was sealed, you saw the stars begin to move outside as Rocky put the ship in centrifugal mode, probably using one of the handy probes you'd made him for just such a purpose.

Gravity, however, was the last thing you needed right now.

There was a sudden rush of noise and chaos as you both fell to the floor; Grace might have done a little better if he didn't have your full weight in the suit, but also if you wouldn't have started screaming.

You couldn't help it. You tried not to, tried to force yourself to stop, but the excruciating damage had left your leg utterly limp and filled with an intense pain the likes of which you'd never felt. Grace yanked off your helmet. "Y/N, I need you to tell me where it hurts. I can't help you if I don't know what's wrong." He was trying to be strong, but his voice was shaking.

Gasping for breath and coherency, you managed to put together a string of words behind clenched teeth. "Meteorite knocked me off the ship. Leg got tangled in tether. I think it's broken."

Grace braced you with one arm behind your back. "This is gonna hurt, I'm sorry!" He swept an arm under your knees and lifted you, suit and all, carrying you to Armando as fast as he could. Rocky rolled along behind him, wise to stay out of the way.

"What happening, question?!" His voice broke, clearly terrified. "Why Y/N screaming, question?!"

"She might have a broken leg, bud," Grace explained quickly as he laid you down on the table. Several robotic arms reached out of the ceiling for you, eager to help as Grace stepped back.

Wildly, you snatched his hand. You two had always had clear, unbroken boundaries. Physical contact was limited and you stayed civil, but your jobs were to put the mission first and... whatever was between you both second. You weren't trying to be the next Adam and Eve, but feelings had begun to sprout regardless. You both tried to keep it professional. At least until this was all over, and distractions weren't going to matter anymore.

Now, though, you didn't care. "Please stay with me," You begged, feeling the tears run towards your ears as Armando placed a mask on you. A gentle gas began filtering through the tubing system to your lungs. "Don't leave me, Grace."

Grace hesitated, eyes wide, then reached behind him and snatched a chair. He swung it closer and sat down, clenching your hand tightly in both of his. "I'm not going anywhere. Promise."

You woke up three days later.

Or, it was around three days. Armando said you slept for 68.5 hours and it repaired a badly fractured leg, and that you'd be fine in 6 to 8 weeks. Light activity preferred. You were gonna be on some heavy painkillers. In no uncertain terms were you to even leave the bed without assistance, since the cast wasn't as sturdy as it would have been on Earth.

Inwardly, you wondered what this would do for the mission. You couldn't spacewalk, floating around would be a pain, or even getting to the control room in general. It was a tight fit on a normal day. With a cast it would probably be impossible. God, and Grace would have to help you. What you could do by yourself right now was limited. Just when you'd both decided that you didn't need any unnecessary proximity so you could get the mission taken care of without any distractions. What would this do to the ship? Would you have to remain in 1g? Or would 0g work, too? Would you still be pressing on to Tau Ceti E?

You tried to reach up and pull off the mask, but your limbs were still tingly and uncoordinated. You smacked yourself in the face by accident, clawing for the straps. Only oxygen was coming through the tubing, and you needed it off.

A small gasp came from your right. "Amaze! Y/N awake! Bad bad bad hurt. Better now! Grace not leave for long time. Rocky force Grace to change clothes. Grace!" You heard (and felt) the rumble of his xenonite ball as he careened for the entrance to the medbay, but you could only focus on getting the damn mask off your face. You were struggling with the strap, trying to get it off and vaguely aware of Rocky urging Grace to come quickly.

You were starting to panic. Your breath came in short, sharp bursts. All you could hear was your own labored breathing as the images of struggling for the airlock alone flashed through your head, your leg throbbing in pain as you remembered being violently yanked back towards the ship--

Grace. Gentle but fast, he slipped the mask off your face and pulled the tube from your throat, making you gag-- when had Armando put that in? As you coughed and spluttered on the bed, Grace was trying to talk to you. "Rock, just stay still for a second, okay? Y/N-- Hey-- it's okay, it's okay..." You heaved horribly as you struggled to come back to life, curling up on the cot. You felt an IV still in the crook of your left arm and shuddered at the sensation of icy fluids being pumped into your veins. Every breath was shaky.

Then you felt his hands on you. One squeezed your arm as he leaned over you to try and see your face, the other rubbed soothing circles in your back. You'd never been so glad for physical touch. "Breathe. Just breathe. You're safe now, Rocky's here; we've got you."

He sat with you until you were able to function a bit easier, although it came slowly. You're not sure how long you were disoriented. You peered at Grace over your shoulder, slowly flopping onto your back. He looked a mess, blond hair sticking in every direction and glasses ever-so-slightly askew. It bothered you. It always bothered you that his glasses were crooked. You always tried to remind him that farsighted and sloppy were two totally separate things.

Without thinking, you reached up and straightened his glasses with a frown. To your utter surprise, his hand found your elbow and traveled up to hold your wrist, keeping you close to him. You flushed, his deep blue eyes not breaking contact with yours. "Uh..." You croaked helplessly, "The morphine made me do it."

Grace smiled, something a bit lopsided but relieved as he chuckled quietly, almost to himself. He blinked rapidly as his eyes glistened. "I couldn't see you on the cameras," He managed softly, voice cracking. "I lost sight of you. Then Rocky saw it." He swallowed hard, caressing your hand still near his face with his thumb. "The meteorite. I tried to warn you. The radio wasn't working. He said it hit you, but after that we still couldn't get through. I went to get in the suit but I wasn't fast enough. Your leg..."

"Mangled," Rocky added sullenly, "Rocky had to learn new word. Leg bent in all ways."

Grace still hadn't broken eye contact with you. "Yeah. That. I'm..." You watched, stunned, as tears started streaming down his face. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I sent you out there by yourself, and that I wasn't quicker coming to get you."

"Grace," You choked, "It wasn't your fault. It could've happened to any of us. I was just unlucky enough for it to happen to me." You let your hand relax in his grip, letting your knuckles brush against his temple. "...Now you've gotta take care of me, I guess. I'm sorry I didn't see the--"

"Is no one fault. No apology." Rocky sounded irritated. "We take care of Y/N. Y/N can only walk in 0 gravity. Grace must slow mission down."

Rocky-- thankfully-- was entirely unaware of what was happening between you and Grace. You two had had moments before Rocky had ever come aboard, moments where longing stares left the two of you in awkward silence and the brush of his hand against yours felt like it lasted forever. It led to a couple of awkward but factual conversations about what it meant that you two were having these emotions in close quarters, that you'd eventually die together and that the mission came first-- which required utmost focus. Nothing could happen before then.

That seemed to completely shatter now.

Careful of your IV, Grace cautiously pulled you up into the sitting position and wrapped his arms tightly around you in a warm hug, burying his face in the crook of your shoulder. You didn't hesitate to throw your arms around his neck, hiding your face in his body and getting as close as humanly possible.

Now Rocky noticed.

His five feet started excitedly tapping. "Oh oh oh! Hug! Good good good! Hugging not done alone!" A bit more quietly, he added, "...Can Rocky get hug too, question?"

Grace laughed into your shoulder as he pulled back to look at him. "Yes, Rock. You get one too." He held you close still, taking a deep breath and avoiding your gaze by staring at the fabric of the blanket. "Can I be totally honest about something?"

"What?" Your stomach twisted nervously. You weren't sure why.

He forced himself to look at you. "I don't want to wait for the mission to be over. I almost lost you today. If something goes wrong on this mission--"

"Oh thank God," You let yourself fall limp against his chest, surprising him. He let out a soft "Oh" as you chuckled. "It's been pulling me apart to wait. So can we go on a date now? Like with tube-spaghetti and fake moonlit water habitats and everything?"

He chuckled, rubbing your back. "Yes, and yes. I'll wear my best jumpsuit."

"What is date, question?"

You looked over at your rock-faced friend and gestured vaguely at the arm with his marriage signet. "Did you and Adrian have a courtship faze?"

"Yes," Rocky hummed thoughtfully, "Many days. Sing very long. Try to impress--" He went absolutely straight as he realized what you meant. "Amaze! Excite! Grace will impress you will tube-spaghetti!" He started doing jazz hands, dancing in place a little. "Excite excite excite! Finally!"

"What do you mean, 'finally'?" Grace challenged, taken aback.

Rocky ignored him. "Rocky want hug now. Y/N need rest, need sleep for big date."

Grace still hadn't let go of you. "I have an idea, but don't crush us, okay?"

"Rocky understand."

"What's your idea?" You challenged. Grace grinned smugly at you as he reached under the cot and pressed a button. Slowly, the cot began to sink to the floor. There was a mattress under you, thankfully, albeit a thin one. Grace held up a finger for you to wait as he stood and walked away, inadvertently freezing both you and Rocky.

You glanced sideways at your alien friend and opened an arm toward him. "C'mere, bud." Excitedly, Rocky rolled over. You felt the heat of his body through the xenonite. It was comforting.

When Grace returned, he had his own mattress and tons of blankets, all of which he piled together before gently moving you aside and adding yours to the pile. Carefully, he scooped you up afterward and sat you on the makeshift bed, which was extremely comfortable. "Here. Now Rocky can sit with you and keep you warm. You can watch her sleep, right?"

"Yes," Rocky answered, curling up in his ball as close as he could get without burning you.

You hummed gratefully, patting his ball. "Like my own personal radiator. What about you, Grace?"

"I'm going to let you sleep," He answered, confused. Clueless, more like.

You heaved a deep breath, pressing your palm harder against Rocky's ball for good luck. "Can you stay? Just for tonight?"

Grace hesitated a moment longer before making his way over, to the delight of Rocky, who began trilling excitedly. He set his glasses to the side, out of the way of Rocky's path, and slipped under the covers beside you a bit awkwardly. His cheeks were flushed as he refused to look at you. "Okay, yeah. I guess I need sleep t--" He froze as you scooted closer, pressing your body flush against his the best you could with your injured leg. Instinct seemed to take over; he slid one arm under your head, and the other around your torso.

Now, you were both fully snuggling close together, boundaries be damned. Beside you, Rocky kept the both of you very warm and cozy as the ship dimmed its lights. You dozed off as Grace played with your hair drowsily. In your half-asleep, medicated state, you smiled warmly.

...Maybe this ship isn't half bad.