Chapter 69: Chapter 69
Now it felt louder than ever. That particular silence, after the stranger left the next morning with a perfunctory peck on her cheek, lingered for weeks. It stuck in the corners of Sam and Arthur’s meticulously ordered flat, a fine dust Sofia couldn’t sweep away. She found herself staring at the calender, counting days with a slow-dawning, ice-water dread. Her body felt alien, both heavy and hollow. The nausea returned not as a drunken aftershock, but as a daily, insistent visitor each morning, triggered by the scent of Arthur’s coffee or the earthy odor of Sam’s printer’s ink.
She bought the test on a Tuesday, from a pharmacy three neighborhoods over. She waited until Leo was at his design studio. They’d been together for eight months, a surprisingly gentle orbit that had begun with a shared laugh at a gallery opening. He was solid, kind, his round face and crinkled-eye smile a balm after the parade of sharp edges. Living with him in his sun-drenched apartment in Portland felt, for the first time, like a choice toward something, not just a flight from something else. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, the plastic stick balanced on the lip of the sink, and watched as two stark, blue lines appeared without hesitation. The world didn’t tunnel. It simply hardened, every object in the white-tiled room clicking into a terrible, permanent focus.
She didn’t tell Leo. Not yet. The knowledge was a cold, sharp stone in her gut. She needed to perform the news, to gauge the reaction, and for that she needed a rehearsal. Her fathers were the only audience that made sense. She chose her moment with a cynical precision born of their own history. She knew they were at a birthday party for one of Arthur’s printshop collaborators. She knew there would be copious amounts of the collaborator’s infamous, paint-stripper homemade gin.
Across the country, in Brooklyn, Sam was indeed losing a gentle argument with a laminate flooring. “It’s disrespectful,” he was saying to Arthur, his words meticulously spaced. “The floor is right there. A firm, horizontal plane. My spine disagrees with its current trajectory.” He was leaning against a wall near the bathroom, having just paid profound tribute to the porcelain altar within.
Arthur, whose face was a cheerful shade of puce, gripped his shoulder. “The floor is an illusion, Sam. A social construct. We need a cab. A horizontal cab.”
They had, in fact, already called the cab. Its arrival fourteen minutes later was a blur of stumbling support and mumbled thanks to their host. They collapsed into the back seat, a tangle of limbs and wool coats. The city lights streaked past the windows, smearing into alien constellations. Arthur’s head lolled against the cool glass. Sam focused intently on the driver’s safety rating placard, trying to force the room to cease its lazy spiraling. The cab hit a pothole. Arthur’s stomach, a churning vat of gin and cake, staged a violent, no-win rebellion.
“Pull over,” he gasped, a wet, urgent command.
The driver swore, veering to the curb. Arthur barely got the door open before he was violently, audibly sick into the gutter. The sound triggered something in Sam’s own precarious equilibrium. He stumbled out the other side, adding his own rancid contribution to the city’s ecosystem a few feet away. They hung there, universes of misery, shoulders heaving. After a moment, Arthur wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, let out a shaky, post-storm breath, and started to laugh. It was a weak, wretched sound that soon infected Sam. They leaned against the filthy side of the cab, two middle-aged men weeping with drunken, vomit-flecked hilarity.
“We’re disgusting,” Sam wheezed.
“Profoundly,” Arthur agreed, still chuckling, accepting the bottle of water the stoic driver handed out the window.
They climbed back in, the cab filling with the sour, metallic smell of their purge. They rode the rest of the way in a spent, companionable silence, the clean quiet after a storm. It was then, as the cab turned onto their street, that Sam’s phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He fumbled it out, squinting at the screen. “Sofia,” he mumbled to Arthur, swiping accept. “Hello, my darling disaster. Your timing is, as ever, impeccable.”
Sofia’s voice was strangely clear, a laser through the fog. “Hey, dads. You sound… busy.”
“We are triumphantly, catastrophically drunk,” Arthur announced loudly toward the speaker. “We have recently redecorated a curb on Atlantic Avenue. What’s up?”
There was a pause on the line. A digital silence that felt different. Sam’s booze-slowed senses prickled. “Sof?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said. The words were flat, clean, direct. A surgical incision.
The silence in the cab was complete, save for the driver’s soft stereo. Arthur’s wide, bloodshot eyes met Sam’s. The last of the drunken giddiness evaporated, leaving a crystalline, terrifying clarity. Sam’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. He saw Arthur’s face cycle through raw shock, then a dawning, seismic joy.
“You’re… what?” Arthur breathed.
“Pregnant. About eight weeks. I’m with Leo. We live together. You know that.” Her voice was rehearsed, each fact a bullet point. “I just took the test. I haven’t told him yet.”
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered. Then louder, the words tumbling out. “Holy shit, Sofia! A baby? Our… a grandbaby?”
“Are you okay?” Arthur demanded, the paternal instinct sharp even through the gin. “Are you… is this… do you want this?”
Another pause. “I don’t know,” Sofia said, and the raw tremor in her confession finally broke through. “I’m scared shitless. But I’m… yeah. I think I do. Leo will… I think he’ll be okay. Good, even.”
“Okay,” Sam said, his own voice thick. “Okay. Okay.” The word was a mantra, a containment field for the emotions detonating inside him. “We’re coming. We’ll get on a plane. We’ll—”
“No,” Sofia cut him off, firm. “Don’t you dare. Not tonight. Stay there. Process. I just… I needed you to know first. Before anyone else in the world.”
“You woke him up by fucking the headboard into the wall,” Arthur said suddenly, the memory surfacing from years ago, pristine and bright. “That squeaky bed in the old flat. You were just a knot of sheets and fury.”
Sam remembered. The night they’d gotten the call about her art school acceptance. The frantic, joyous collision. A beginning. This was another.
“Yeah,” Sofia said, a small, wet laugh escaping her. “Maybe it’s genetic.”
They talked for a few more minutes, the conversation softening, looping back to practicalities, to love, to the sheer, staggering reality of it. When they hung up, the cab was idling outside their building. They paid the driver, tipped him extravagantly, and staggered into their lobby, holding each other up. The elevator ride was silent, charged. They wordlessly navigated the apartment door.
The moment it closed, locking out the world, Arthur pinned Sam against it. His kiss was a frantic, gin-soaked claim, all heat and desperate wonder. “A baby,” he growled against Sam’s mouth. “Sam, a fucking baby.”
They ripped at each other’s clothes, garments yielding with tears and pops of buttons. They didn’t make it to the bedroom. They crashed to the hallway floor, a jumble of limbs and urgent hands. Sam rolled on top, his cock hard and aching. He spat into his palm, slicking himself, and pushed Arthur’s thighs apart. There was no patience, no gentle preparation. He drove into him in one sobbing, relentless thrust.
Arthur cried out, a sharp bark of pain and absolute permission, his back arching off the polished wood. “Yes! Fucking yes, Sam!” His own cock jerked, leaking onto his stomach.
Sam fucked him with a wild, celebratory abandon, each deep plunging stroke a punctuation mark on the news. This was life, messy and vital and roaring forward. This was their lineage, hurtling into the future through their fierce, complicated girl. He watched Arthur’s face, the tears streaking from the corners of his eyes, the ecstatic grimace as Sam hit his prostate with unerring, brutal accuracy. The slapping rhythm of their bodies was obscene, a frantic drumbeat. Arthur reached down, fisting his own cock, stroking in time with Sam’s thrusts.
“Come in me,” Arthur demanded, his voice wrecked. “Fill me up. For her. For all of it.”
The command undid him. Sam’s orgasm tore through him like a white-hot wire, a series of shuddering, emptying pulses deep inside Arthur’s body. He roared, a wordless, primordial sound. As he emptied himself, he felt Arthur clench around him, Arthur’s own release spurting hot and thick over his own fist and stomach with a choked, gasping cry.
They collapsed together on the hard floor, a mess of sweat, spend, and joy. Sam’s softening cock slipped from Arthur’s body. They lay tangled, breathing in ragged unison, the smell of sex and gin and their own vomit-tinged breath filling the air around them. On the floor nearby, Sam’s phone screen, now dark, held the seismic shift. The night, which had begun with the purge of poison, ended with a different, more fertile kind of spillage. Tomorrow would bring calls to Portland, plans, fears, and so much love. But for now, on the cold floor, they simply held on, two anchors in a suddenly, wonderfully expanding sea.
Now it felt louder than ever. That hollow aftermath in Sam and Arthur’s flat, the taste of vomit and a stranger’s sweat, became a turning point she never discussed. It was a silence she carried into her next chapter, a determination to build something that wasn’t just a reaction against someone else’s peace. Two years later, she shared a sun-drenched apartment in Portland with Leo Maxwell, a man whose kindness felt like solid ground. They painted the nursery a soft, buttery yellow six months ago. The negative tests that followed each hopeful month felt like a physical weight in the bathroom trash.
Tonight, the plastic stick waited on the edge of the sink. The digital readout was blunt, final. PREGNANT. 3+. Sofia stared, her knuckles white where she gripped the counter. A laugh bubbled up, all nerves and disbelief. Then came the tears, hot and fast. She walked into the living room where Leo was pretending to read a design magazine. She said nothing, just placed the stick on the open page. He looked at it, up at her, and his whole face dissolved into a wondrous, crumpled smile.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
“Holy shit,” she echoed, falling into his arms.
Their celebration was quiet, intimate, a slow dance in the middle of the room. Later, tangled in their bed, Leo’s hand already resting on her still-flat stomach, she said, “I have to call them.” He kissed her temple. “Call.”
Meanwhile, at The Tipsy Otter, Sam and Arthur were several sheets to the wind. Their friend Ben, the jolly barista, was celebrating his thirtieth with a raucous party. The bar was a wall of sound. Sam had lost count of his whiskey sours. Arthur was deeply into tequila shots with a group of Ben’s rugby friends, led by the exuberant Marcus. They were all laughing too loud, shouting over the music. Sam’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He fumbled it, squinting at the screen. SOFIA. He shoved Arthur. “It’s Soph!”
“Put it on speaker!” Arthur yelled, slinging an arm around Sam’s neck. They stumbled toward the back hallway near the toilets, seeking relative quiet. Sam hit the button and held the phone between them. “Hey, kiddo! You’re on speaker! We’re at Ben’s thing!”
“Dad? Papa? You sound… really loud.” Sofia’s voice, clear and tremulous, cut through the muffled bar din.
“We are appropriately celebratory!” Arthur proclaimed. “What’s up? Everything okay?”
There was a beat. A sharp, static-filled inhale. “Yeah. Everything’s… more than okay. I just. I took a test. Like, twenty minutes ago.”
The world did not go quiet. The bass still thumped. Someone shrieked with laughter. But for Sam and Arthur, the sound receded, tunneling down to the phone in Sam’s unsteady hand. They stared at each other, drunk brains sluggishly processing. Sam opened his mouth but all that came out was a choked, “What?”
“We’re pregnant,” Sofia said, the words rushing out now. “Three weeks. The digital one. We’ve been trying and… it’s real.”
The reaction was not dignified. Arthur let out a whoop that echoed off the hallway tile. Sam burst into immediate, messy tears. They talked over each other, a slurry of “Oh my god” and “Are you sure?” and “How do you feel?” and “Leo’s there, right?”. The conversation lasted five minutes, a blur of joyful, drunken chaos. When they hung up, they stood in the sticky hallway, stunned.
“A grandkid,” Sam breathed, the word monumental.
Arthur’s eyes were shining. “We’re gonna be grandfathers.”
They stumbled back into the main bar, announced the news to a chorus of cheers and backslaps, and immediately drank two more shots in wild, sloppy tribute. The alcohol, which had already been plentiful, now took on a celebratory, reckless quality. They stayed another hour, but the room was spinning faster now, the noise grating. They made their goodbyes, leaning on each other as they pushed out into the cool, damp Portland night.
They lived eight blocks away. The walk was a navigational hazard. The sidewalk refused to stay level. “I think I’m drunk,” Arthur announced with profound seriousness.
“I think you’re a grandfather,” Sam countered, hiccupping.
A powerful, unmistakable lurch seized Arthur’s gut. He groaned, hand flying to his mouth. He stumbled toward a row of trash cans in an alley mouth between two closed boutiques. He didn’t quite make it. He vomited onto the pavement, a violent, tequila-and-ginger-ale purge. The sound triggered Sam’s own rebellion. He bent double a few feet away, adding his whiskey-sour contribution to the gutter.
They leaned against the rough brick wall, breathing heavily, spitting. The vile taste was in their mouths, the cold sweat on their necks. Arthur wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked at Sam, who was pale and panting. A wild, unhinged grin spread across Arthur’s face. “We’re gonna be grandfathers.”
“We’re disgusting,” Sam coughed, but he was smiling too, that same crazy light in his eyes.
Then Arthur was on him. He pushed Sam harder against the brick, his mouth finding Sam’s. The kiss tasted of bile and salt and joy, a filthy, perfect collision. Sam groaned into it, his hands fisting in Arthur’s jacket. This wasn’t the quiet, fortified love of their flat. This was the feral, alley-living passion of their twenties, reignited by a biological fluke happening in another city.
“Right here,” Arthur growled against his mouth, his hand already working open Sam’s jeans.
“Fuck yes,” Sam gasped.
Arthur’s hand shoved down the back of Sam’s pants, palming his ass, squeezing hard. Sam kicked his own jeans and boxers down to his ankles. He turned, bracing his forearms against the cold brick. The alley was dark, but not private. A streetlamp cast its glow on the opposite wall. The risk was gasoline on the fire. Arthur didn’t wait, didn’t prep. He spat into his hand, slicked himself roughly, and drove into Sam in one brutal, claiming thrust.
Sam cried out, the sound bouncing off the alley walls. The burn was sharp, glorious. Arthur fucked him with a ragged, desperate power, each drive slamming Sam’s chest against the brick. Arthur’s fingers dug into Sam’s hips, sure to leave bruises. The rhythm was chaotic, fueled by tequila and elation and decades of knowing exactly how to wreck each other.
“You hear that?” Arthur panted, his voice raw. “You’re a grandfather. You’re a fucking grandfather taking my cock in a piss alley.”
Sam couldn’t form words. A strangled groan was his answer. The obscenity of it, the sheer animal celebration, wound his orgasm tight and fast. He reached back, grabbing Arthur’s thigh, holding him deep as he came untouched, his release striping the dark brick in front of him in hot, shuddering pulses. Feeling Sam clamp around him, Arthur lost his rhythm completely, pounding into him with three final, frantic jabs before he stilled, a deep, guttural roar muffled in Sam’s shoulder as he emptied himself inside him.
They slumped against the wall, a single heaving mass. Sam’s jeans were around his ankles. Arthur was still buried in him. They panted like they’d run for miles. Slowly, Arthur softened and slipped out. They righted their clothes with clumsy, trembling hands. They didn’t speak. They just began walking again, faster now, a new purpose in their staggering steps.
The door to their flat barely closed behind them before they were at it again. Clothes were torn, not removed. Arthur pushed Sam onto the hallway floor. This time, he used his mouth, eating Sam out with a sloppy, voracious hunger until Sam was shaking and begging. Then Arthur flipped him over, entered him again, this time on the scratched hardwood. The sex was slower now, deeper, a grinding, possessive claim. They moved to the bed only when their muscles gave out.
In the dark, sticky and spent, Arthur finally spoke, his voice wrecked. “We made a person who made a person.”
Sam traced the familiar line of Arthur’s jaw. “It’s a loop.”
“A good loop.”
They fell asleep like that, the taste of puke and each other still on their tongues, the world having irrevocably turned. Across the city, in a quiet apartment painted yellow, their daughter slept safe in her boyfriend’s arms, a new, tiny pulse echoing the old, stubborn beat of their own tangled history
Now it felt louder than ever. The silence after those chaotic nights years ago, the hollow aftermath of strangers in her bed, had finally been filled by something substantive. Leo’s steady presence was a deep, gentle lake compared to the jagged, fleeting puddles she’d once splashed in. Their shared apartment in Portland smelled of his graphic design printouts and her half-finished canvases, of roasted coffee and the basil plant they kept alive on the windowsill. She stood in their small bathroom, the quiet hum of the refrigerator the only sound, and stared at the two blue lines that had just materialized. A profound, trembling relief washed through her, so potent her knees buckled and she sat hard on the closed toilet lid. They had been trying. Month after month of coiled hope and subsequent disappointment had worn a quiet groove of anxiety in their happiness. This was real. This was now.
She wanted to tell her fathers immediately. She needed to hear their voices, to place this news into the bedrock of their family. She called Sam’s cell. It rang, and rang, and went to voicemail. She tried Arthur’s. Same result. A flicker of worry was doused by a text that chimed through a moment later from Arthur. At Jack’s 50th. Loud! Drunk! Call tomorrow? Love you. She could picture it instantly: The Tipsy Otter, packed and thrumming, condensation on whiskey glasses, their dads in the thick of it, Jack holding court. She smiled. She would call anyway. They’d want to know. They’d need to know.
Back at the bar, the night had achieved a glorious, sloshing momentum. Sam was wedged between a laughing colleague and the sticky wall, having just lost a bets involving doing. A stranded shark sák versus Panther fight. Arthur was attempting to explain the plot of a convoluted space opera to a patient, nodding stranger, his hands carving elaborate shapes in the air that sloshed his gin. Their phones, buried in jacket pockets piled on a distant booth, glowed and died unnoticed. When Sam’s rang again, Arthur, on a stumbling path back from the bathroom, fished it out with the concentration of a bomb technician. “S’phia!” he yelled to Sam, who was across the room. “S’our girl!”
He answered, pressing the phone hard to his ear to drown out the jukebox wailing. “Heyyy, sweetheart! We’re at—you know where we are! Jack’s… thing!”
“Dad? Arthur? Can you hear me?” Her voice was clear, a bell cutting through their fog.
“We hear you!” Sam shouted, having lurched over to share the receiver, his cheek pressed against Arthur’s. “What’s up? Everything okay?”
“Everything’s more than okay.” She took a breath. “I’m pregnant. We just found out.”
The noise of the bar didn’t change. The music played. People laughed. But for Sam and Arthur, the world imploded into a single, brilliant point of light. They stared at each other, mouths agape, the phone held between them. Arthur’s eyes filled instantly. Sam made a sound like he’d been punched in the chest.
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered.
“Oh, fuck,” Arthur breathed. Then he yelled into the phone, “OH, FUCK! SOFIA! REALLY?” He was crying and laughing, gin slopping onto his wrist.
Sam grabbed the phone. “Baby. Oh, my god. Are you… you’re sure? You feel good?” His voice cracked.
“I feel perfect. Leo’s… he’s crying in the other room. We’re so happy.”
They babbled then, a chaotic, drunken duet of love and congratulations and incoherent joy, talking over each other, asking a dozen questions they immediately forgot. They promised to call sober tomorrow, to come visit, to be there. When they hung up, they stood in the crushing, happy crowd, clutching each other’s forearms.
“We’re going to be grandfathers,” Sam said, the word fantastical in his mouth.
“Grandfathers,” Arthur repeated, and then he vomited. It was a sudden, unavoidable surge of gin and celebration. He turned neatly and it splashed against the base of the battered wainscoting.
“And I’m going to be sick too,” Sam announced with dignity, before stumbling toward the men’s room.
They left soon after, a hurricane of euphoria and nausea. The cool night air was a shock but did nothing to sober them; it only magnified the spinning in their heads and the bursting pressure in their chests. They walked, arms slung over each other’s shoulders for both balance and the sheer need to be connected.
“A baby,” Arthur muttered, his head lolling against Sam’s. “A whole new person. Fuck me.”
“She’s going to be an incredible mother,” Sam said, and then he gagged, pulling them to a halt. He vomited into a storm drain, his body convulsing with the effort. Arthur held him, rubbing his back, staring at the stars swimming above the streetlights.
“My turn,” Arthur sighed when Sam stood up, wiping his mouth. A few paces on, Arthur retched over a low brick wall, decorating some petunias.
They were a mess. Tears of joy had cut tracks through the sweat on their faces. Their breath reeked of sour alcohol and stomach acid. Their bellies churned. And beneath it all, a fierce, primal current of celebration thrummed. It wasn’t a clean, quiet happiness. It was a bodily, urgent, raw thing. As they turned down their dimly lit residential street, away from the main avenues, Arthur spun Sam into the narrow alley between a dentist’s office and a Thai restaurant. He pushed him against the cool brick, the shadows swallowing them.
“We have to mark this,” Arthur growled, his hands already fumbling with Sam’s belt.
“Here?” Sam gasped, but he was pulling at Arthur’s zipper, the metallic sound obscenely loud in the alley’s quiet.
“Fucking yes, here. Now.”
Arthur got Sam’s jeans and briefs down around his thighs. He spat into his palm, slicked his own cock, and drove into Sam without further preparation. The penetration was a rough, burning stretch. Sam cried out, the sound echoing off the bricks, his head thumping back. Arthur set a brutal, desperate pace, slamming Sam against the wall, his hands gripping his hips hard enough to bruise.
“Our girl,” Arthur chanted, each word a thrust. “Our fucking girl is having a baby.”
Sam pushed back against him, meeting his force, his own cock hard and leaking against the rough brick. The smell of garbage from a nearby dumpster mixed with the scent of their sweat and sex. It was filthy and perfect. Arthur’s rhythm grew ragged, his orgasm building. As he pulsed deep inside Sam, a fresh wave of nausea overwhelmed him. He gasped, and a thin stream of burning vomit splattered against Sam’s shoulder and the wall beside them.
Sam barely registered it. The warm spill, the sour smell, it was just part of the chaotic, beautiful whole. He reached his own climax a moment later, his release striping the dirty brick, his body shuddering through waves of pleasure and dizzying sickness.
They leaned together, panting, still joined, for a long minute. Then, wordlessly, they pulled their clothes up and stumbled home.
The flat was a sanctuary of familiar smells they immediately violated. They didn’t make it to the bedroom. They collapsed onto the living room rug, kissing with filthy, sour mouths, their hands tearing at clothes again. This time, Sam pushed Arthur onto his back, yanking his jeans off completely. He knelt between Arthur’s spread legs, lowered his head, and took Arthur’s softening cock into his mouth, willing it back to life with a desperate, hungry suction.
Arthur moaned, his hands tangling in Sam’s hair. The renewed stimulation, combined with the rolling unease in his gut, created a delirious, overwhelming feedback loop. He was hard again in Sam’s hot, skillful mouth. “Fuck my mouth,” Arthur slurred. “I need to taste you.”
Sam obeyed, shifting, his cock sliding past Arthur’s lips. Arthur sucked him deeply, greedily, the bitter-salt taste of him cutting through the chemical burn in his own throat. Sam fucked into his mouth with short, sharp jerks of his hips. The dual sensations—Arthur sucking him, Arthur’s cock heavy on his own tongue—tipped Sam back toward the edge.
A deep, ominous gurgle echoed in Arthur’s belly. He tried to ignore it, focusing on the weight and pulse of Sam in his mouth. But the nausea was a rising tide. Sam felt the muscles in Arthur’s jaw go tense, heard the strained gag. He didn’t pull away. He pushed deeper.
Arthur came first, his orgasm triggering his gag reflex utterly. He pulled off Sam with a wet, tearing sound as his body convulsed. Hot cum spilled into Sam’s mouth at the same time a torrent of watery, acidic vomit burst from Arthur’s own. It splashed across Sam’s chest and neck.
Sam swallowed, tasting both. The mix was shockingly intimate, a total surrender. It pushed him over. His climax ripped through him, his cock jerking in his own hand as he kneeled over Arthur, both of them now slick with sweat and spend and sick.
They collapsed side-by-side on the ruined rug, lungs heaving, staring at the ceiling. The room stank of sex and vomit and joy. Arthur turned his head, finding Sam’s hand in the dark. He laced their filthy fingers together.
“A baby,” Sam whispered into the profound, messy quiet.
Arthur squeezed his hand. A wide, dazed smile spread across his sticky face. “A baby.”