Chapter 42: Kneeling Vows
The plastic stick felt like it weighed ten pounds. Alexis sat on the edge of her unmade bed, the cheap dorm mattress creaking under her, and just stared at the two crisp blue lines. The world had condensed to the size of the little result window. The faint chemical smell, like a hospital wrapped in plastic, still hung in the air.
Her mind was white noise.
From her Bluetooth speaker, the Attack on Titan season two OST swelled, dramatic and urgent, a completely absurd soundtrack to the quiet panic locking her joints.
A sharp rap at the door. Then another, harder.“Lex? You in there? It’s me.”
Mark’s voice, strained and tight, sliced through the static in her head. Her eyes flicked from the test to the door. She hadn’t answered his calls. Hadn’t read his texts. For three days. She’d driven straight through from Austin to D.C., sixteen hours of empty highway and terrible gas station coffee, just to be somewhere that was hers. Somewhere his brand, his team, his narrative couldn’t touch.
“Alexis, please. I know you’re in there. Leland said you got back last night.”
She didn’t move. She willed him to leave. She needed to think. She needed to call her mom. She needed to throw up again.
The door handle jiggled. Then there was a faint, metallic scratch. A key.Of course. He’d kept the spare she’d given him two months ago, during that blissful, stupid weekend when he’d surprised her and they’d ordered Indian food and watched movies until dawn. Back when his key to her place felt like a promise, not a breach.
The lock turned.
The door swung open and he filled the frame, breathing hard like he’d run up the stairs.He looked terrible. Beautiful, but terrible. His eyes were red-rimmed, his locs were pulled back in a hurried bun, and he wore the same RDC hoodie he’d had on three days ago. He smelled like cold air and despair.
His gaze swept the room—the laundry pile, the open Constitutional Law textbook, the empty cup of noodles on her desk—and finally landed on her. On her face, then on her hand. On the white plastic stick gripped in her fingers.
His expression crumbled. All the desperation, the rehearsed speeches, everything he’d carried up here, evaporated.He saw the lines. He understood.
“Oh, god,” he whispered, the words barely sound.
He stumbled forward, kicking a stray textbook out of the way. He didn’t reach for the test. He didn’t reach for her hands. He just sank to his knees on the scuffed linoleum floor, right there between her bed and her mini-fridge, his big frame folding in on itself. He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against her stomach, his hands coming up to clutch weakly at the fabric of her Howard sweatshirt.
A shudder ran through him.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed into the soft cotton. “I’m so sorry, Lex. For everything.For the mess. For the… the zoo. All of it.”
She was frozen. The heat of his forehead bled through her shirt. She could feel the tremble in his hands. She hadn’t moved. The test was still held aloft, a tiny damning flag.
“This changes nothing about us,” he said, his voice muffled.“Nothing. Except… except how much more I have to lose now.”
The raw ache in his tone finally broke through her shock. A sob hitched in her own chest. She looked down at the crown of his head, at the familiar pattern of his locs, at the vulnerable curve of his neck. The anger she’d been nursing, the deep, profound hurt from the penthouse, was still there, a cold stone in her gut. But this… this was a tidal wave washing over both of them.
“Mark,” she said, her own voice unrecognizable.
He lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “I’ve been out of my mind. For three days. I didn’t know where you were. I thought I’d… I thought I’d actually destroyed it. Destroyed us. And then I saw that sketchbook page. ‘He wins.’” He flinched, saying the words. “I don’t want to win like that. I don’t want to win at all. I just want you.”
He was talking about the wedding, the fight. He didn’t understand. The fight was a skirmish. This was a war.
Slowly, her arm feeling like lead, she lowered her hand. She placed the pregnancy test on the rumpled comforter beside her, the lines facing up, undeniable.
His eyes followed it. The reality seemed to settle on him heavier, a physical weight. His gaze moved from the test to her stomach, then back to her face, wide with a new kind of fear.
“How…” he started, then stopped. “Are you… are you okay?”
She finally found the strength to move her other hand. It came to rest, tentative, on his head. His hair was cool, a little rough under her palm. He let out a choked sound at her touch and leaned into it, his eyes closing.
“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “I’m scared.”
He opened his eyes. “Me too.” He swallowed hard. “But not of… not of this. I’m scared of you doing it alone. Of you thinking you have to. After what I did… you have every right to never speak to me again.But please. Don’t shut me out of this.”
The cynicism, the lawyer-in-training part of her brain, whispered: He’s good. This is a performance. A damn good one. But the part of her that knew the feel of his heartbeat under her ear, the part that had seen him cry at the end of Your Lie in April, the part that loved him—that part saw the genuine terror. Not of the pregnancy, but of her.
“I wasn’t going to,” she said softly. “I was just… processing. I needed to be here first. To know it was real before I told anyone. Even you.”
He nodded, his forehead brushing her stomach again with the movement. “Okay.Okay. Just… tell me what you need.Right now. Anything.”
She looked around her cluttered sanctuary. The anime posters offered no guidance. The law books held no precedent for this.
“I need you to get off the floor,” she said, a faint, watery thread of humor in her voice. “And I need you to be real with me. Not Mark from RDC.Not the brand. Just you. Because ‘just you’ is who I fell for. And ‘just you’ is who I need to figure this out with.”
He took a deep, ragged breath and pushed himself up. His knees cracked. He sat beside her on the bed, careful, leaving a few inches of space between them. He didn’t try to take her hand. He just looked at her, waiting.
“The machine,” she said, forcing the words out. “Your team.Ben. What happens when they find out? Is this going to be a… a content strategy? A nine-month rollout? ‘Mark’s Fatherhood Journey, sponsored by Pampers’?”
The blood drained from his face. She saw it happen. She saw the instant horror as he visualized it. “No,” he said, with a force that surprised her. “No. That’s not happening. This is ours.Ours. Ben doesn’t get a vote. The brand doesn’t get a vote.”
“Can you do that?” she asked, not challenging, just genuinely asking. “You built that world. Can you just… build a wall around this part?”
He was silent for a long moment. The vinyl had finished; the room was utterly quiet. “I have to,” he finally said. “I let it eat everything else. My time.My privacy. My proposal. Almost my wedding.” He looked at the test again. “It doesn’t get this. This is the line.”
He said it with a finality she hadn’t heard from him before. It wasn’t the smooth, charismatic certainty he used in videos. This was rougher.Desperate. Unshakable.
A flicker of something—not hope, not yet, but maybe its precursor—warmed the cold stone in her gut.“Okay,” she whispered.
“Okay,” he echoed.
They sat in the silence of her dorm room, surrounded by the artifacts of their separate lives—her torts notes, his branded hoodie—staring at the two blue lines that had just rewritten every future plan they’d ever silently considered.
The momentum of his frantic chase had crashed into the immovable object of this new reality. Now, they were just two people, sitting on a cheap bed, in the eye of a storm they’d only just discovered was coming. The path forward was obscured, terrifying. But for the first time since he’d walked into that penthouse meeting, they were, at least, looking in the same direction.
The shared silence stretched, thin but holding. The blare of a car horn four stories down punctured it. Alexis let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been keeping locked in her chest. The air tasted different now, charged with a terrifying, shared purpose.
“I should probably eat something,” she said, the words absurdly normal. “I haven’t really.Since the test. My stomach’s been a warzone.”
“Right. Of course.” Mark stood, a sudden, jerky movement. He scanned the room like a survivalist assessing a campsite. “What do you have? Anything? I can go get whatever you want.”
“There’s probably ramen in the cabinet. Top shelf.” She moved to stand, pushing off from the bed. A wave of lightheadedness washed over her, turning the posters on the wall into a smear of neon color. She blinked, steadying herself on the wobbly bed frame.
“Whoa, easy.” He was at her side in an instant, his hand under her elbow. His touch was careful, electric. “Sit.Just sit. I’ve got it.”
“I’m fine. It’s just from standing up.” But she let him guide her back down. The linoleum seemed to tilt slightly. She focused on his back as he rummaged through the tiny cabinet, the familiar shape of his shoulders under the hoodie.
He pulled out a cup of noodles. “Chicken or beef?” he asked, holding it up.
“Doesn’t matter.” Her mouth felt dry. She watched him fill it with water from her sink, the mundane action surreal. He was Mark Phillips, with millions of subscribers, making ramen in her shitty dorm sink.
The microwave hummed, filling the room with a sterile, electronic vibration. He leaned against the counter, watching the cup turn behind the greasy glass. The rotating light played over his face. “We’ll figure out the next thing,” he said, not looking at her. “Just one thing at a time.First, food. Then… we call your mom?Or my mom? A doctor? Whatever you want.”
The options sounded immense, a cascade of dominoes waiting to fall. Her head throbbed in time with the microwave’s hum. The chemical smell from the test seemed to have woven itself into the fabric of the room, mixing with the lavender and the impending scent of salty broth.
“One thing at a time,” she echoed, but her voice sounded distant, tinny.
The microwave beeped. He jumped at the sound, then carefully removed the steaming cup. He brought it over, placing it on the desk beside her. “Careful, it’s nuclear.” He tried for a smile. It was a fragile, cracked thing.
She nodded, reaching for it. The heat from the Styrofoam seared her fingertips. She pulled her hand back, shaking it. A nervous laugh escaped her. “Hot.”
“Yeah,” he said, his own laugh a short, relieved burst. “It usually is.”
She looked from the steaming cup to his face, from his face to the two blue lines still lying on her rumpled comforter. The cognitive dissonance was too vast. The cozy domesticity of him fetching her ramen collided violently with the seismic reality on the bed. Her vision tunneled, the edges going soft and gray.
The vibrant orange of her Akira poster faded to a dull wash. The hum of her mini-fridge seemed to swell, then recede, replaced by a high-pitched ringing in her ears. Mark’s mouth was moving, saying something else, but the sound was muffled, underwater.
“I just need a second,” she heard herself say, or maybe she only thought it. The room performed a slow, lazy cartwheel.
She saw his expression shift from concerned to pure, unguarded alarm. His hand reached out for her. The world tipped sideways, the colors bleeding into one another into a flat, forgiving gray. Then there was nothing at all but the sudden, soundless vacuum of absence, her body going limp as a cut string, sliding off the edge of the bed toward the floor where he had just been kneeling.