Chapter 3: The Decision
He didn’t enter her. Not yet. He held himself there, at the precipice, the swollen head of his cock pressing against her, smearing her wetness. He watched her face, the conflict tearing through her—the hatred in her eyes, the way her hips lifted in a silent, traitorous plea.
“Admit it,” he breathed, his voice ragged. “You want it. You want me to fuck you so you can hate me even more tomorrow.”
“Just do it,” she spat, turning her head to the side, avoiding his gaze. “Stop talking and be what you are.”
He slammed into her. One deep, brutal thrust that buried him to the hilt. Her mouth opened in a soundless cry, her nails raking down his back, drawing fiery lines. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a punishing rhythm, each drive of his hips a physical echo of his text. Mine. Mine. Mine.
The room filled with the sounds of them: the wet slap of skin, the creak of the bedframe, his grunts, her sharp, bitten-off gasps. He fucked her with a focused intensity, trying to brand her from the inside out, to rewrite the memory of her laughter with another man. He gripped her jaw, forcing her to look at him.
“This,” he panted. “This is what you belong to. Nothing else. No one else.”
Tears welled in her eyes, but they weren’t the soft tears of submission; they were tears of furious, helpless recognition. Her body clenched around him, a tight, hot fist, betraying her words. She came suddenly, a sharp, shuddering release that ripped a raw, throaty cry from her. The convulsions milked him, and he followed, pumping into her with a final, possessive groan, spilling himself deep inside her warmth.
He collapsed on top of her, the sweat from their bodies mingling. For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. The anger had been spent, leaving a hollow, familiar ache. He rolled off her, onto his back, staring at the ceiling. The silence stretched, thin and fragile.
Then, she moved. She sat up, pulling the torn remnants of her bra around her, not looking at him. She swung her legs off the bed, her back to him, a tense line of pale skin and knotted spine.
“I need you to go get tested,” she said, her voice quiet, stripped of all its earlier fire. It was flat, factual.
He blinked, turning his head on the pillow. “What?”
“Tested. For everything.” She stood, picking her jeans up from the floor. She didn’t put them on. Just held them. “And from now on, you wear a fucking condom. Whenever you even breathe in my general direction. You wear one.”
A cold trickle, separate from the post-sex chill, crept down his neck. “Why are you talking like that?”
She turned then. The tears were flowing freely now, but her face was a mask of devastation, not anger. It was a look he’d never seen before, and it froze the blood in his veins.
“Because you gave me something,” she whispered. “A month ago. After one of your ‘nights out.’ I had to go to the clinic. They gave me antibiotics.” Her voice hitched. “For chlamydia, Reggie.”
The word hung in the perfumed air, ugly and clinical. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “I didn’t—I was clean.”
“You weren’t.” She said it with a finality that brooked no argument. “You gave me a prescription and a fucking pamphlet. And I took the pills. And you know what they don’t tell you when you’re panicking in a fluorescent-lit room feeling filthy?” Her volume rose, cracking. “They don’t tell you that antibiotics can make your birth control not work!”
The world tilted. The plush carpet, the city lights, the rumpled silk sheets—all of it receded into a blurry tunnel. The only thing in focus was her face, crumbling.
“What are you saying?” His own voice sounded foreign.
“I’m saying I’m pregnant!” she screamed, the words tearing out of her. She hurled the jeans at him. “I’m pregnant, you selfish son of a bitch! The antibiotics you made me take killed the Pill, and you just kept fucking me raw, and now there’s a… there’s…”
She couldn’t finish. Her body folded in on itself, wracked by sobs that seemed to come from a place of absolute ruin. She sank to the floor, her arms wrapped around her stomach, her forehead pressed to her knees.
Reggie sat motionless. The words echoed, but their meaning couldn’t penetrate. Pregnant. It was an abstract concept, a problem from a different universe, one that didn’t touch the sealed bubble of his life. He’d always been careful. Except when he wasn’t. He’d gotten tested… when? He couldn’t remember.
His gaze dropped to the space between them on the carpet, where he had just been inside her, claiming her. Where he had just come, unprotected, as always. A fresh wave of nausea, unrelated to alcohol, rolled through him.
She lifted her head, her eyes red and swollen. “You need to leave. Get out of this room.”
“Lex…”
“GET OUT!” she shrieked, scrambling to her feet, looking for something else to throw. “Go to a clinic. Get your fucking blood drawn. Then leave me alone. I hate you. I hate you so much I can’t breathe.”
He stood, his legs unsteady. He fumbled for his boxers, his pants, his shirt. He dressed under the torrent of her sobs, each piece of clothing feeling like a lead weight. The charismatic shell was gone. The magnetic confidence was dust. He was just a man in a rumpled shirt, being evicted from a crime scene he’d created.
He looked at her one last time, a small, shattered figure in the center of a luxury suite. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. There were no words in the vast, empty silence that had opened up inside him.
He turned, walked to the door, and stepped out into the sterile, quiet hall. The door clicked shut behind him, the sound as final as a coffin lid.
He stood there, alone, the hum of the hotel ventilation the only sound. The reality, cold and immense, began its slow, terrible descent.
The hallway’s silence was a physical pressure against his eardrums. He leaned his forehead against the cool, painted metal of the elevator door, the taste of copper from his bitten lip still sharp. Her sobs, muffled by the thick door, seemed to echo in the bones of his skull. Pregnant. The word was no longer an abstract shock; it was a seed, now sprouting thick, grasping roots around his lungs.
He needed air that didn’t smell of her perfume and their mistake.
The city at four a.m. was a different creature. The glow was stale, the lights of all-night convenience stores painting the sidewalks in ugly fluorescent slabs. He drove without seeing, his hands tight on the wheel, until he found himself outside Tina’s building again. The third-floor window was dark. He texted, the screen blinding in the car’s gloom.
You up?
The reply was immediate. Light on the stairs. Don’t wake my neighbor.
He took the steps two at a time. The door was unlocked. She was in the bedroom, the blue light of a muted infomercial playing over her body. She lay on her stomach, sheets pooled at her waist, watching him enter with heavy-lidded eyes. “Twice in one night? I should charge you double.”
“Shut up,” he said, his voice rough. He didn’t want her voice. He didn’t want her questions. He just wanted the obliteration.
He yanked the sheet away. She sighed, turning over, already opening for him. Her familiarity was a relief. He unzipped his jeans, freed himself, and climbed over her. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her beyond what was necessary. He guided his cock to her entrance, still slick from her sleep, and pushed in with a single, deep thrust.
“Fuck, Reggie,” she gasped, her head tipping back.
He set a ruthless, mechanical pace. He fucked her with his eyes open, seeing not Tina’s face but Alexis’s devastated one, hearing not Tina’s moans but the choked word pregnant repeating like a stuck record. He drove into the warm, willing flesh beneath him, trying to fuck the image out, to drown the sound in the wet slap of their union.
“Yeah, like that,” Tina urged, her hands clutching at his hips, her legs wrapping around him to take him deeper. “Use it. Whatever’s in your head, just fucking use it.”
He gripped her throat, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to feel the pulse hammering under his thumb. He pounded into her, the bedframe screeching in protest against the wall. This was simple. This was clean. A transaction of friction and release, with no past and no future. He came with a strained groan, his orgasm a brief, sharp detonation that left no echo.
He rolled off immediately, staring at the water-stained ceiling. Tina caught her breath beside him. “You wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” She lit a cigarette, the tip flaring in the dark. “She finally cut you loose, huh?”
The question was a needle slipped between his ribs. He didn’t answer. The emptiness returned, colder now, vaster. He’d just been inside another woman, and he felt nothing but a profound, chilling solitude. The sex with Alexis had been a war, but it had been a feeling. This was just… maintenance. A wipe-down of a dirty engine.
He got up, fixed his clothes, tossed a crumpled fifty onto the nightstand. “See you around, Tina.”
“You always do,” she said, exhaling a plume of smoke.
His apartment welcomed him with its own kind of silence. The blue neon sign from the liquor store across the street painted a toxic stripe across the floor where Alexis had stood. He could still see the phantom shape of her, the way her shoulders had curled in on themselves. Chlamydia. Antibiotics. Pregnant. The chain of causality was a perfect, horrifying logic he could not debate.
He sat on the edge of his bed, the same bed where this had started, and pulled out his phone. He stared at her contact. His thumb hovered. What could he possibly type? Sorry was a grotesque joke. What are we going to do? was a responsibility he’d spent a lifetime avoiding.
Instead, his fingers moved on their own, typing a different name into a search bar: Planned Parenthood near me. The results populated, little map pins of clinical solutions. He clicked one. Confidential services. Pregnancy testing. Options counseling.
The words were sterile, alien. He imagined her sitting in one of those chairs, under those lights, filling out forms. Alone. Because of him. The hollow in his chest yawned wider, threatening to consume him. He wasn't equipped for this. He was a man who solved problems by leaving, by fucking, by buying a round of drinks.
This was a problem that wouldn’t be moved.
He deleted the search. The screen went black, reflecting the gaunt shape of his own face back at him. The momentum of his life, all its careless velocity, had finally met an immovable object. And in the wreckage, there was only this terrible, clarifying stillness, and the slow-motion replay of her breaking apart on a hotel room floor. He had nowhere to go, for the first time, that felt like an escape.
He slept in fits, the neon stripe from the sign outside traveling across his wall like a slow, accusing scan. When a gray, concrete light finally replaced it, he was already awake, staring at the same water stain on his ceiling Tina had. His body felt both heavy and hollow, a vessel filled with cold lead.
He showered until the hot water ran out, scrubbing at his skin as if he could slough off the memory of the last twelve hours. The steam couldn’t warm the chill in his core. He dressed in clean, dark clothes, a uniform for a different kind of duty.
The clinic was in a part of town he usually sped through. It was beige and fluorescent, smelling of antiseptic and recycled air. The woman behind the plexiglass window didn’t look up from her computer. “Name and date of birth.”
“Reggie. Miller.” He gave the date, his voice sounding unused.
She slid a clipboard through the slot. “Fill out pages one through three. Check all services requested. Have a seat.”
The form was a checklist of his transgressions. He checked boxes for everything, his pen barely pausing. HIV. Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Chlamydia. Her word echoed. He wrote it down. The pen felt like a betrayal in his hand.
He sat in a plastic chair bolted to the floor, between a teenager chewing her nails and an older man coughing into his elbow. A daytime talk show played silently on a mounted TV, images of exaggerated conflict flickering without sound. He watched a nurse in brightly patterned scrubs call a name that wasn’t his.
When they called “Miller,” he stood too quickly. The blood rushed from his head.
The phlebotomist was efficient, her hands cool as she tied the rubber tourniquet. “Big vein. Easy day.” She didn’t ask why he was there. The vial filled with a dark, crimson swirl. “Results in three to five business days. We’ll call.”
He nodded, pressing a cotton ball to the crook of his arm. The small sting was the only honest pain he’d felt all morning.
Back in his car, the silence was a vacuum. He gripped the steering wheel, watching the clinic’s automatic doors slide open and shut. He pulled out his phone. Her name was a live wire. He typed a message, deleted it. Typed again. Deleted.
His thumb found the call button. He put the phone to his ear, listening to the ring. It was an act of sheer will, each trill a hammer strike against his ribs.
She answered on the fourth ring. No greeting. Just the faint, waiting static of an open line.
“It’s me,” he said. His throat was tight.
“I know.”
“I went. To the clinic. Just now.” The words came out in a clumsy rush. “I got the blood drawn. For everything.”
A pause. He could hear her breathing, shallow and careful. “Okay.”
“Alexis.” He said her name like it was a fragile thing. “I’m… I don’t even know how to say it so it means anything. I am so sorry. For all of it. For the shit I gave you. For being careless. For… for everything that happened because of me.”
The silence stretched. He could picture her face, the guarded exhaustion.
“Sorry doesn’t change the test I already took,” she said finally, her voice thin. “Sorry doesn’t change the plus sign.”
“I know.” He closed his eyes. “I know it doesn’t. I’m not asking for it to. I just needed you to hear it. From me. Without any bullshit attached.”
He heard a soft, shaky exhale. It wasn’t a sigh of relief. It was the sound of someone holding a weight they couldn’t put down.
“Can I come over?” he asked, the question leaving him in a whisper. “Not to fight. Not to… do anything. I just want to see you. We can just talk. Or not talk. I just need to see you.”
The line hummed. A car alarm blared somewhere in the distance on her end.
“Please,” he added, the word unfamiliar and raw on his tongue.
Another long silence. He could almost feel her weighing it, the risk and the weariness.
“Yeah,” she said, so quietly he almost missed it. “Okay. Just… just come over, Reggie.”
Her apartment building had always felt like a sanctuary to him, a place of her own making that smelled of lemongrass and the vanilla candle she burned too often. Standing outside her door now, it felt like the gate to a tribunal. He knocked, the sound too loud in the quiet hallway.
The door opened just a crack, held by a chain. One of her eyes, puffy and wary, peered out. It studied him for a long moment before the chain rattled and the door swung inward.
“Hey,” he said, the word inadequate.
She just turned and walked back into the living room, leaving him to step inside and shut the door. She’d cleaned. The surfaces were bare, the pillows on her gray sofa arranged with military precision. It felt like the aftermath of a storm, a desperate attempt to impose order on chaos. She sat on the edge of the sofa, feet flat on the floor, hands clasped in her lap.
He didn’t sit. He stood near the armchair, feeling too large, too present. The sunlight through her blinds cut sharp lines across the floor between them.
“You look tired,” he said.
A faint, humorless smile touched her lips. “Gee, wonder why.” She looked up at him, her gaze direct. “Did you get your results?”
“Not yet. Three to five days. They said.” He shifted his weight. “I’ll… I’ll go on whatever they give me. I’ll do it.”
She nodded, looking back at her hands. The silence was a third presence, thick and demanding.
He took a step closer, then stopped. “Alexis. What do you want to do?” The question left him, hanging in the sunlit dust motes. “I mean… about… everything. What do you need me to do?”
She was quiet for so long he thought she might not answer. She traced a line on her knee with her thumb.
“I want to keep it,” she said, her voice so low he had to strain to hear. She didn’t look at him. “I’ve known for a week. I’ve cried, I’ve screamed, I’ve panicked. But I keep coming back to that. I’m keeping it.”
The finality in her tone was absolute. It wasn’t a question or a plea. It was a declaration. A wall being built.
His breath felt tight in his chest. “Okay.”
Her eyes flicked up, searching his face for mockery, for resistance. Finding none, they softened just a fraction before the guard came back down. “But I’m not doing it alone. Not like that. Not with you just… sending money or showing up when you feel guilty.”
“I don’t want that,” he said, the words surprising him with their truth.
“What do you want, Reggie?” she asked, and it was the real question, the one that had always been underneath all the others. “Do you want a kid? Do you want this kid? With me? Or do you just not want to be the asshole who bailed?”
He walked to the window, looking out at the fire escape, the brick of the adjacent building. He saw his reflection, transparent and ghostly over the real world. He thought of the clinic chair, the tourniquet, the vials of his carelessness. He thought of her laughter in the bistro, a sound he had extinguished.
“I don’t know how to want a kid,” he said, his forehead nearly touching the cool glass. “That’s not a feeling I’ve ever… let in. But I know what I see when I imagine not being there.” He turned to face her. “I see you. In a park somewhere. With a stroller. And you’re smiling, but you’re tired in a way I put there. And there’s some other guy, some Darius motherfucker, playing with a kid that has your eyes. And he gets to be the good guy. The stable one. And I’m just a story you tell when you’re angry. A mistake you made.”
He walked back toward the sofa, stopping a few feet away. “I can’t stand that picture, Lex. It makes me feel… erased. And that’s a selfish as hell reason, I know it is. But it’s the truest one I’ve got right now.”
Alexis watched him, her expression unreadable. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m in.” The words felt like stepping off a ledge. “I’m scared shitless, and I don’t know the first thing about any of it, but I’m in. Not as a paycheck. Not as a weekend visitor. You want both parents actively in its life?” He gestured between them, a fragile bridge. “Then that’s what we figure out. However messy it is.”
A single tear escaped, tracking quickly down her cheek. She wiped it away with an angry swipe. “You can’t just take off. You can’t just… decide you’re bored or it’s hard and disappear into some other woman’s bed. This isn’t me you’d be leaving. It’s a person. A whole person who didn’t ask for any of this.”
“I know.” He sank into the armchair finally, the weight of it all pushing him down. “I know that.”
“Do you?” She leaned forward, her intensity a physical force. “Because your word doesn’t mean anything. Your word is what got us here. I need more than a ‘I’m in, Lex.’ I need to see it. Every day. Even the days you hate me. Even the days I hate you.”
He met her gaze, holding it. “Then I guess we start seeing it.”
They sat in the new, fragile silence, the old rules incinerated between them. The future was a shapeless, terrifying thing, a locked room they now had to enter together.
“I have a doctor’s appointment,” she said, looking down at her hands again. “Next Thursday. At ten.”
He nodded, pulling out his phone. He opened his calendar, a grid of security shifts and vague social plans. He typed it in. Dr. Appt. 10 AM. “I’ll be there.”
She watched him do it, a small, almost imperceptible release in her shoulders. “Okay.”
He stood, feeling the conversation had reached a temporary, exhausting shore. He moved toward the door, then paused. “Can I… bring you anything? Food? Something?”
She almost smiled. It was a tired, broken thing, but it was there. “Orange juice. The kind with the pulp. And saltines. It’s all I can keep down after noon.”
“Pulp and saltines,” he repeated, committing it to memory like a lifeline. “I’ll drop it by tomorrow.”
He let himself out, closing the door softly behind him. In the hallway, he leaned against the wall, his heart hammering a frantic, unfamiliar rhythm. It wasn’t excitement. It wasn’t joy. It was the profound, seismic tremor of the ground shifting permanently beneath his feet. He had just promised to build a life on the fault line he created. The aftershock was just beginning.