Sunday, December 10, 2006

Unplanned

The third time we ever made love, the condom broke. It was really rough going for a while there, then all of a sudden it felt great, slick and hot, and by the time we were finished we had no idea what had happened. The latex stretched around my cock like a collar. I’d come inside her. This was not good.
This was death.
I always said that we should be careful, that we should take precautions, and the idea had been for me to wear protection and for her to get on the pill, but nothing doing. There is little that could stem the need to procreate when the means are right there in front of you, waiting and aching, begging for it. Little you can do when faced with that. So, at the time, she wasn’t using anything, and that thin membrane of theoretical safety was all that was keeping us from rendering my seed of destruction. When the damn thing broke, all bets were off.
I’d wanted to go with her to the clinic, to be with her for support. I never actually did, which might have been as much her machinations as my general lack of interest. Not in her, but in the mechanics of our fucking. It was the fucking itself that I relished, that I languidly luxuriated in. So, she went to the clinic and got what they call a morning-after pill. It prevents you from getting pregnant if there was a chance you may have been inseminated. She took the pill, and called me and we talked for a bit. I wanted to make sure she was OK, just to know that she wasn’t having some Catholic existential crisis. She seemed fine, so I let her go and said goodbye. I didn’t take my cell phone with me when I went out, I just left. Out the door and into the world.
That night, when I got home, four missed calls were waiting for me, all from her. I called her right away, worried, and she was ill. Apparently, the morning-after pill is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It wrecks your insides, and she was in pain. On top of that, she told me she couldn’t count on me anymore, that I hadn’t been there for her when she called. That she thought if she could hear my voice, she’d feel better, and that I let her down. Just like that. Forget your phone, you’re fucked.
I tried to talk her down as best I could, pacing around in my garage. She was in real pain. All kinds of pain, or both, anyway. Even then, I was never wrong, and I kept telling her, over and over again, “I just forgot my phone! That’s it! THAT’S IT!” Like a woman even gives a shit why they’re mad at you. If a woman’s in pain, in any way, she will find a way to make you responsible for it, and no amount of reasoning will convince her of otherwise. I didn’t realize then that the only way to win is to buy into their reality. Accept the fact that you should never forget your phone, because the act is an immediate discounting of any reliability. This is bitter, but there you go. Truthfully, I was right, as always, and too stupid to think otherwise, and wouldn’t give a girl who’d just tried to medicinally keep herself from becoming impregnated by me a little slack. A little tenderness. A little buying-in.
She got on the pill, after that. The pill. One time, waiting for her outside her house I saw her dad watering the lawn outside their fence. I’d never met her parents, and wanted to break the ice since we’d been going out for a while, and it’s what you do when you’re half-a-man. I started walking up toward him, this was Valentine’s Day, I remember, and was almost up to him, him looking right at me, when she came out of the fence and steered me away, back to the car. Apparently, he’d recently seen her little pill-box. Dated and organized. Singular-purposed. She got me lingerie, which she said she’d wear for me. When we ended up using it, eventually, I didn’t even take off her panties. Just slid them to one side and tried to ignore the friction on one lengthwise half of my cock because, hell, that was some shit right there.
She was medicated thusly for a while, and at some point stopped. Her reasons were many, as they always were, but she was afraid of ovarian cancer, which it can apparently cause, and I guess the things made her periods crazy strong. Like debilitating. So she stopped, and we kept on going right at the same pace, but for real serious about the condoms now. There were times when, in the heat of the moment, I’d just get in her and go to work. There were times she’d give me head, and always swallowed. There were times I’d start out bareback and manage to miraculously gather up enough self-control to stop and put on a condom mid-fuck. That was the hardest. There were times when I’d come somewhere other than inside her. Those weren’t necessarily the best, but they stand out.
She’d been acting strange for a while, and the idea had crossed my mind but I’ve never learned to trust my intuition, as uncannily correct as it’s always been. Then I was gone for a bit, and when I came back she was upset, and after a long night of picking a fight over the phone, she came out with it. She’d seen a doctor, who’d told her that an egg had become fertilized in her fallopian tube, and couldn’t be allowed to be carried to term, as the egg’s placement wouldn’t let it develop correctly. It was a sickness. A condition that needed to be cured. She’d taken some medication, and it had flushed her system. Down the drain.

So that was my first child.

And she was fighting with me, now, because she was late. Again. Real late. And we were going at it pretty hard and mean, screaming and all that like I always tried to stem but would never really succeed at. We drove to Rite-Aid and fought, calmer, in the parking lot. It was the single trashiest thing I’d ever done. I told her we could maybe make it work, that people do it. That I’d take care of her. I meant it.
We went inside. She wanted me to stay in the car, but I wouldn’t. She found the test in some aisle and took it to the register. She told me she didn’t want to be there, for the clerk to look at her. I took the package from her and bought it myself. She was waiting in the car, and I drove us to my house. She went into the bathroom, and I paced outside because that’d what you do when things like this happen.
She came out, it was negative. There wasn’t any kid.
We held each other in the hallway, and cried. I said,

“I wanted it to be true.”

She said,

“I know. Me too.”

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