Chapter 6: The Text Heard Round the World
The yellow was all wrong.
It was supposed to be sunshine, but in the flat afternoon light leaking through the single nursery window, it looked like old parchment. Sickly. Alexis dipped the roller again, pressing it hard against the tray, listening to the wet, slopping sound. Her back ached in a deep, foundational way. A new pain, one that wouldn’t be undone by stretching. It was the weight, the forward pull of her own changing center of gravity.
She was sweating in one of Reggie’s old t-shirts, the fabric stretched taut over the firm curve of her stomach. Nesting, her mom had called it on the phone last night. A biological imperative. It felt more like a frantic, silent scream into a void that was about to be filled with unimaginable noise.
The phone on the drop cloth buzzed.
Not her phone. His.
It skittered a half-inch on the plastic, the screen flashing to life. A text preview lit up the dimming room.
Tasha: U still got that magic tongue? Miss u, daddy.
The world didn’t slow down. It shattered into a million sharp, silent pieces.
The paint roller slipped from her fingers. It hit the edge of the tray with a dull thud, then tumbled to the floor, leaving a thick, sinuous smear of yellow across the unfinished pine boards. It looked like a warning.
She heard the key in the front door.
Her body went very still. She stared at the phone, at those words glowing in the twilight of the room. Magic tongue. Miss u, daddy. The casual obscenity of it. The familiar, claiming tone. It wasn’t a wrong number. It was a specific, summoned ghost from the before-times.
Footsteps came down the short hall. He appeared in the doorway, loosening the knot of a cheap tie. The dispatcher job. Day one. He looked tired, but there was a groundedness to him, a residue of purpose. He’d been building the raft.
“Hey,” he said, a tentative smile touching his lips as he took in the painted walls. “Color’s bright. It’s… sunny.” His eyes dropped to the roller on the floor, the splatter. “You okay?”
Alexis didn’t speak. She couldn’t. She simply pointed a trembling, paint-flecked finger at his phone.
Reggie’s gaze followed. He saw the screen, still lit. The smile died, replaced by a blank, chilling neutrality. He took two steps into the room, knelt, and picked up the phone. His thumb swiped, tapped. She watched his face. She saw the muscle in his jaw leap once, a tiny, trapped animal.
“It’s not what you think,” he said, his voice low.
The cliché of it, the sheer, pathetic predictability, broke her paralysis. “Are you fucking serious?” Her voice was a dry crackle. “‘Miss u, daddy’? What exactly should I think it is, Reggie? A quote from the Bible?”
“It’s an old text,” he said, standing up, his eyes on the screen, not on her. “From months ago. She must have just… I don’t know, re-sent it or some shit. I haven’t seen her since before we knew. Before any of this.”
“‘Any of this’,” Alexis repeated, the words like stones. “The baby. The raft. That’s ‘any of this’.”
“You know what I mean.” He finally looked at her, his expression pleading now, the neutrality gone. “Alexis, come on. Look at me. I’m here. I’m painting a fucking nursery. I took a job I hate. I told my mother. What more do you want?”
“I want you to not have a phone that lights up with messages from women asking about your magic tongue!” she screamed, the sound raw in the small, yellow room. The pain in her back spiked. She pressed a hand to the side of her belly.
He flinched at her volume, then his eyes narrowed. “So that’s it? One stupid text from a ghost and the whole thing collapses? After everything? The raft’s just gone?”
“The raft was built on a lie!” She was crying now, hot, furious tears cutting through the dust on her cheeks. “You told me you ended things. Clean. You told me it was just us figuring it out. But you didn’t end shit, did you? You just… paused it. Hid it. You let me believe the performance.”
“It’s not a performance!” He slammed his hand against the doorjamb, a sharp, loud crack that made her jump. “Goddammit, Alexis, I am trying! But I can’t erase who I was. I can’t go back and un-meet people. She texted me. I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to answer. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to have deleted her number!” she sobbed, the logical, furious heart of it bursting out. “I want you to have blocked her! I want to not have to see that… that invitation on your phone while I’m painting a room for our child! It’s not about the text, Reggie. It’s about it being possible. It’s about her feeling like she can. It’s about the space you leave for it.”
He stared at her, breathing hard. The tie hung loose around his neck. He looked trapped, cornered by his own past. The ghost wasn’t his father now. It was him. The old him. Smiling, whispering, taking up space in his pocket.
“You think I leave space for it?” he asked, his voice dangerously quiet. “You think I want this? You think I don’t know that every time my phone buzzes, you wonder? You think that’s a fun way to live?”
“I don’t know how you live!” she shot back. “I only know how I do. And I live waiting for the other shoe to drop. And today, it fucking texted you.”
Silence, thick and suffocating, filled the room. The smell of latex paint was suddenly nauseating. Outside, a siren wailed, fading into the distance.
Reggie looked down at the phone in his hand. His thumb moved, deliberate and final. He tapped the screen a few times, his face unreadable. Then he walked to the window and heaved it open, the old wood frame protesting. With a violent, sidearm throw, he flung the phone out into the gathering dark.
They both listened. A distant, plastic crack against asphalt. Then nothing.
He turned back to her, his chest rising and falling. “No more space,” he said, his voice ragged.
It was the most dramatic, ridiculous, potentially expensive thing he could have done. It solved nothing and everything. It was a grand, futile gesture from a man who’d built his life on them. A performance, maybe. But the look on his face wasn’t performative. It was pure, desperate obliteration.
Alexis sank down onto the paint-splattered drop cloth, her energy gone, dissolved into the toxicity of the fight. She hugged her knees, her forehead resting on them. “You’ll just get a new one,” she mumbled into the fabric.
“Yeah,” he said, still standing by the window, the cool evening air washing over him. “I will. And you’ll have the passcode. And you can check it whenever you want. Every minute of every day. If that’s what it takes.”
The offer hung there, grotesque and intimate. A promise of total transparency born from total failure. It wasn’t trust. It was surveillance. It was the next, miserable plank.
“I don’t want to be your parole officer,” she whispered.
“I don’t know what else to give you,” he replied, simple and utterly defeated.
The baby moved then, a sharp, rolling kick beneath her ribs. A tiny, internal protest against the tension, the anger, the poison in the air. She gasped, her hand flying to the spot.
Reggie was across the room in two strides, kneeling beside her, his earlier anger replaced by instant, visceral concern. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing. Just… kicking.” She didn’t pull away when his hand, tentative, came to rest over hers on her stomach. They waited, frozen. Another small, firm nudge pressed against their combined palms.
He let out a shaky breath, his eyes fixed on where their hands met. “Strong,” he murmured.
In the half-painted room, surrounded by the wreckage of their evening, they stayed like that for a long moment, connected by the undeniable, insistent life beneath their hands. The raft was still there, but it was sitting lower in the water, taking on a cold, bleak sea. He had thrown his phone away, but the words were still in the room, hanging in the air with the dust and the paint fumes.
Magic tongue. Miss u, daddy.
The ghost had texted. And now it lived with them.
And now it lived with them.
The kicked-up dust from the thrown phone seemed to settle over everything. Reggie’s hand remained on her belly, a warm, heavy weight. The baby had quieted. The silence was a third presence, jagged and watchful. He didn’t move his hand. She didn’t push it away.
“Let me make it better,” he said, his voice a rough scrape against the quiet. It wasn’t a plea. It was a statement of intent, the only tool he believed he had left.
Alexis let out a hollow laugh, tears still drying on her face. “How? You gonna throw something else out the window?”
“No.” His eyes held hers, dark and stripped bare of their usual charm. The performance was gone, but a deeper, more ingrained instinct remained. “The way I know how. Let me.”
He leaned in slowly, giving her time to recoil. She didn’t. A furious, broken part of her was curious. Was this the magic? The thing that text had praised? Her jealousy curdled into a dark, acquiescent hunger. She wanted to see the weapon, to feel if its edge was truly as sharp as promised. To see if it could cut through the rot between them.
His mouth found hers. It wasn’t tender. It was a claiming, a silencing. She bit his lip in response, tasting copper, and he growled, his hands coming up to frame her face. The kiss was a battle for a breath, a transfer of poison. When he pulled back, both their lips were swollen.
“On the bed,” he said, standing, pulling her up with him. It wasn’t a question.
They stumbled the few feet to their unmade bed, falling onto it in a tangle of limbs and his stiff work clothes. The scent of cheap detergent and latex paint filled her nostrils. He wrestled her leggings and underwear down her hips, his movements urgent, clumsy. She helped him, kicking the fabric away, her own hands pulling at his belt, needing him as exposed as she was.
He didn’t enter her. He pushed her thighs apart, his gaze dropping between them. “Let me,” he said again, a mantra now. “Just let me.”
He hooked his hands under her knees and pushed them back, spreading her wide. The cool air of the room hit her wetness. She was ashamed at how aroused she was, how her body betrayed her fury, pulsing with a blunt, aching need. He lowered his head, and his first touch wasn’t his tongue, but his breath, hot against her.
Then he licked a slow, firm stripe from her opening to her clit.
Alexis jerked, a gasp ripped from her throat. It was obscenely intimate, more so than fucking. He was looking, studying, his brow furrowed in concentration. He did it again, slower, flattening his tongue this time, bathing her. He was methodical, like he was learning a new map. Her hips twitched upwards, seeking pressure.
“Stay still,” he muttered against her, his voice vibrating through her flesh. “Just take it.”
He began to work in earnest. His tongue was a relentless, clever thing. He circled her clit, tight and fast, then broad and slow, switching patterns before her nerves could predict it. He used the very tip to tap a frantic rhythm against the swollen bud, then sucked it lightly between his lips, humming. The vibration shot through her like a live wire.
“Fuck,” she moaned, her hands fisting in the sheets. The paint smell was everywhere. The ghost was in the room, but he was underlining its message with his tongue, proving its truth with every lap. This was magic. A dark, devastating magic.
He slid two fingers inside her, curling them upwards, finding a spot that made her back arch off the bed. He fucked her with them in a steady, deep rhythm while his mouth stayed on her clit, sucking harder now. The dual sensation was unbearable. She was climbing, a tight coil of anger and pleasure winding in her gut.
“That’s it,” he grunted, his words muffled by her flesh. “Come for me. Come on my fucking tongue.”
It was the command, the filthy, proprietary arrogance of it, that undid her. The orgasm tore through her, violent and convulsing. She cried out, a raw sound, her body clamping around his fingers as he worked her through it, his tongue gentling to soft, lapping strokes until she shuddered and pushed his head away, oversensitive.
He crawled up her body, his face glistening with her. He looked feral, triumphant. He fumbled with his pants, freeing his erection, thick and urgent. He was not gentle. He pressed the head against her, still throbbing from the climax, and pushed in with one solid, unforgiving thrust.
She cried out again, this time from the sheer fullness. He buried himself to the hilt, his hips flush against hers. He held there, trembling, his forehead against her shoulder.
“See?” he panted, his breath hot in her ear. “It’s yours. It’s all for this. Only this.”
He began to move, a deep, punishing pace. Each thrust was a punctuation mark. Mine. Yours. Here. The bedframe knocked against the yellow wall. He gripped her hip, his fingers pressing into the soft flesh, holding her in place as he drove into her. The sound was wet, flesh slapping against flesh, obscenely loud in the small room.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, meeting his thrusts. She scratched her nails down his back, feeling the muscles cord and release. She wanted to mark him, to brand him from the inside out. This wasn’t love. It was reclamation. A desperate, somatic argument.
“You feel that?” he gritted out, his pace becoming erratic, frantic. “You feel how deep I am? Nobody else. Just you.”
He was close. His words were breaking apart. She clenched around him, milking him, and with a ragged shout, he came, pulsing hot inside her. He collapsed, his weight crushing her, both of them slick with sweat and spent.
The silence returned, but it was different now. Saturated. The air was thick with sex and unresolved poison. He rolled off, staring at the ceiling, his chest heaving.
Alexis lay still, feeling his release leak from her onto the sheets. The phantom of the text message seemed to dance in the corner of her vision. Magic tongue. He had used it, and it had worked. She had come apart on it. And she felt emptier than before.
He reached for her hand, lacing his fingers with hers. They were both sticky. “Better?” he asked, the word hollow.
She didn’t answer. She just stared at the fresh yellow paint on the wall beside the bed, now witness to everything. The raft was still afloat, but it was stained. And they were both still drowning.