Chapter 70: Chapter 70
The stranger’s snoring eventually faded into the city’s dawn chorus of garbage trucks and distant sirens. Sofia left him there, sleeping it off in her tangle of sheets, and made coffee in the punishing quiet of the main kitchen. The smell of it, usually a comfort, turned her stomach. A slow, cold realization seeped in, more insistent than any hangover. This wasn’t just another messy morning. This was the bottom of a well she’d been digging for years, and the walls were now too slick to climb. She needed a handhold. She texted Leo, the graphic designer she’d been seeing in fits and starts between these chaotic nights. Can I come over? I think I’m lost.
He wrote back immediately. Door’s open. Always.
Leo’s apartment was a landscape of gentle chaos—sketchbooks piled like geological strata, the scent of linseed oil and bergamot, a comfortable couch that embraced her shaking body. He didn’t ask for the story. He made her toast she couldn’t eat and sat with her in a silence that felt like shelter, not judgment. That was three years ago.
Now, the light in their shared bathroom was clinical, unforgiving. Sofia, twenty-five, gripped the edge of the sink, her knuckles white. Two plastic sticks lay side-by-side on the porcelain. Each displayed two bold, unambiguous pink lines. The digital one on the counter simply read: PREGNANT. A laugh bubbled up, sharp and disbelieving, then caught in her throat. She and Leo had been trying for nine months, a quiet, hopeful project that had begun to feel like a monthly exercise in delicate disappointment. This was supposed to be a routine check, a ruling out before her doctor’s appointment. Not this. Not the definitive, world-altering yes.
She stumbled out into the living area, the sticks clutched in her trembling hand. Leo was at his drafting table, headphones on, humming along to something. She tapped his shoulder. He turned, his kind, round face smoothing from concentration to concern as he saw her expression.
“Sof? What’s wrong?”
She couldn’t speak. She just held out her hand, the tests resting on her palm like offered secrets. He looked down. His breath hitched. He slowly pulled his headphones off, the tinny music leaking into the room. “Are those…?”
She nodded, a tear finally spilling over. “They’re positive. Both of them.”
Leo’s face underwent a profound transformation. His eyes crinkled, his mouth opening in a silent, joyous ‘oh’. He stood up so fast his chair rolled back and hit the wall. He pulled her into him, his arms a warm, solid band around her back, and she buried her face in the soft cotton of his shirt. He was shaking. “Holy shit,” he whispered into her hair. “Holy fucking shit, Sofia. We’re having a baby.”
They clung to each other, laughing and crying in the afternoon sun slicing through the windows. The future, which had felt like a form to be filled out, suddenly had a heartbeat. It was terrifying. It was magnificent. After a long while, Leo pulled back, wiping his eyes. “We have to tell someone. Right now. I’ll explode.”
“Sam and Arthur,” Sofia said, the instinct immediate. They were her bedrock, even if that bedrock was currently cracked and under renovation. She wanted to hear their voices.
The bass line thumped through the walls of the borrowed loft, a physical vibration in the teeth and sternum. It was the fiftieth birthday party of an old friend from Sam’s art school days, and the room was a swirling mass of middle-aged artists and academics letting loose with a determined, boozy fervor. Sam and Arthur were very, very drunk.
They had moved past the pleasant buzz hours ago, sailed through garrulous camaraderie, and were now deeply marinated in expensive tequila and cheap champagne. Arthur’s tie was loose, his laughter too loud. Sam was leaning against a pillar, grinning at nothing, the world softened to a warm, pleasing blur. His phone vibrated in his pocket, a persistent, annoying bee. He fumbled it out, squinting at the screen. Sofia Home.
“S’my girl,” he slurred to Arthur, who nodded sagely as if this was profound news. Sam swiped to answer, pressing the phone hard to his ear. “Sofia! My darling! Are you calling to rescue us from the elderly hedonists?”
Her voice was clear, a crisp line cut through the fog. “Hey, you two. You sound… festive.”
“We are profoundly festive!” Arthur shouted into the phone, his head now close to Sam’s to share the call. “It’s a birthday! We are honoring the passage of time with alcohol!”
There was a pause on the line, a beat of pure, sober silence that somehow cut through the noise. “I have some news,” Sofia said. Her tone was odd. Flat, but vibrating underneath. “You should probably sit down.”
“I am artistically reclining!” Sam declared, sliding down the pillar to sit on the floor. Arthur followed, collapsing gracelessly beside him, their shoulders touching. “We are seated. Report.”
Another pause. They could hear her breathing. “I’m pregnant,” she said, the words simple, clean, and absolute.
The noisy world around Sam and Arthur did not so much fall silent as it simply ceased to exist. The bass, the laughter, the clinking glasses—all of it evaporated. They stared at each other, their drunk brains sluggishly trying to process the sentence. Arthur’s mouth hung open. Sam felt a surge of something so vast it had no name, a geyser of emotion that shot up from his gut and exploded behind his eyes.
“You’re…” Arthur began.
“Pregnant,” Sofia confirmed, and now her voice cracked, joy and terror finally bleeding through. “Leo and I. We just found out. We’re… we’re having a baby.”
A sound escaped Sam, a half-sob, half-bark of laughter. He dropped the phone. He didn’t care. He grabbed Arthur’s face in both hands and kissed him, a messy, tequila-soaked kiss that tasted of salt and shock and incalculable happiness. Arthur kissed him back, his hands fisting in Sam’s shirt.
“Sofia! SOFIA!” Arthur yelled, scrambling for the phone on the floor. He put it on speaker. “Are you sure? Is it—are you okay?”
“I’m sure,” she said, and now she was laughing through tears. “I’m really sure. I’m… I’m scared out of my mind.”
“Of course you are!” Sam shouted, his face wet. “It’s terrifying! It’s the best thing! Oh, my god, Sofia.”
They babbled then, a chaotic, overlapping symphony of congratulations, tears, and drunken, profound promises. They would be there. For everything. They would learn to knit. They would build a crib. They would be the most insufferably devoted uncles in human history. The conversation was a beautiful, messy tangle that finally ended with Sofia’s soft, “I love you both. Go be drunk. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
The line went dead. Sam and Arthur sat on the floor of the throbbing loft, surrounded by strangers’ legs. The party noise rushed back in, meaningless now. They looked at each other. Without a word, they stood, a unified, wobbly movement. They didn’t say goodbye to the host. They just stumbled out into the cool, ink-blue night, the city air a shock.
They made it half a block before the first wave hit Sam. He lurched to the gutter, bracing himself against a parked car, and vomited a spectacular arc of champagne and celebration. Arthur watched, then his own stomach clenched in violent sympathy. He turned and retched into a storm drain, the sound echoing wetly.
They straightened up, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, breathing in ragged gasps. Their eyes met in the sodium-yellow street light. And they started laughing, a wild, unhinged sound that echoed down the empty street. “We’re going to be uncles!” Arthur howled.
“We’re going to be terrible uncles!” Sam roared back.
And then Arthur pushed him. Not hard, but enough to send Sam stumbling into the narrow, brick-lined alley between two buildings. Arthur followed, his eyes blazing with a feverish, drunken joy. He crowded Sam against the cool brick, his hands rough on Sam’s belt. “I need to fuck you,” Arthur growled, his voice thick. “Right now. I need to feel you.”
Sam nodded, fumbling with Arthur’s trousers. There was no finesse, only a desperate, celebratory hunger. Arthur spun Sam around, yanking his pants and underwear down to his thighs in one brutal pull. He spit into his own hand, slicking himself roughly before pressing against Sam. He entered him in one deep, punishing thrust, no preparation, just raw, claiming need.
Sam cried out, a guttural sound swallowed by the alley walls. The burn was intense, almost too much, a sharp counterpoint to the euphoria swimming in his tequila-soaked brain. Arthur set a brutal, relentless pace immediately, his hips slamming Sam’s body into the unyielding brick. The sound was obscene: skin slapping against skin, Arthur’s ragged grunts, Sam’s choked moans. Arthur’s hand snaked around, gripping Sam’s cock, stroking him in time with his thrusts, hard and fast.
“Our girl,” Arthur panted, his breath hot on Sam’s neck. “Our fucking girl is having a baby.”
The words, the possession, the sheer physical overwhelm tipped Sam over an edge. He came, violently, into Arthur’s fist, his climax wracking through him, milking Arthur’s cock inside him. Arthur shouted, a raw, wordless sound, and pulsed deep within Sam, his body shuddering as he emptied himself.
They slumped against the wall, panting, still joined. And then Sam’s stomach revolted again. He turned his head and vomited a thin, acidic stream onto the alley floor, his body convulsing. Arthur, still inside him, felt the spasms and it triggered his own nausea. He pulled out, stumbling back, and retched, adding to the mess.
They cleaned themselves up with trembling hands, their clothing in disarray, reeking of sex and vomit and joy. They didn’t speak. They just stumbled back out onto the street, arms around each other, holding the other upright. The walk home was a mile-long voyage of staggering, giggling, tear-streaked wonder.
They fell through their own front door, a tangle of limbs. They didn’t make it to the bedroom. They collapsed onto the living room rug, the same rug Sofia had once stained with a stranger’s release. Now, they marked it anew. Arthur rolled on top of Sam, kissing him with a desperate, open-mouthed hunger. They tore at each other’s clothes, buttons flying.
Sam pushed Arthur onto his back and straddled him, guiding Arthur’s still-hard cock inside himself with a grimace and a sigh. He rode him, a slow, deep, grinding rhythm, his own nausea a dull, persistent thrum beneath the pleasure. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on Arthur’s chest, their faces inches apart.
“We’re going to be a family,” Sam whispered, the words a sacred, drunken incantation.
Arthur’s eyes glistened. He thrust upwards, meeting Sam’s movements. “We already are.”
The sickness rose in tandem with their climax. Sam felt his gorge rise as the pleasure coiled tight in his gut. He came, stripes of white landing on Arthur’s stomach and chest, his body convulsing. The convulsion turned his head, and he vomited over Arthur’s shoulder onto the rug, even as Arthur, beneath him, was gripped by his own orgasm and his own sickness simultaneously. Arthur’s body arched, his release pumping into Sam, while he turned his head and retched bile onto the floor beside them.
They collapsed into the wet, sticky, foul-smelling aftermath, spent and shaking. They lay there in the dark, their breathing slowly evening out, the magnitude of Sofia’s news settling over them like a tangible weight, precious and terrifying. They were covered in the proof of their own messy, boundless, imperfect love. Somewhere across the city, their niece, their girl, was carrying the future.
She lay rigid, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the room to stop spinning, trapped between the weight of the future in the rooms above her and the empty, present-tense mistake breathing heavily in her bed. That was two years ago. The ceiling she stared at now was different—lower, with a hairline crack that branched like a river delta. Leo’s ceiling. Her ceiling. Their ceiling. His soft, steady snore was a familiar rhythm beside her, not the ragged,陌生sawing of a stranger. Her hand rested on her lower belly, which felt no different, but everything was different.
The plastic stick on the edge of the sink had declared its verdict with two unwavering blue lines. They had been trying for nine months, a cycle of hope and a quiet, private grief each time her body proved empty. Now this. Leo had whooped, cried, squeezed her so tight she’d squeaked. They’d made love, a slow, awe-filled coupling that felt like a sacrament. After he’d fallen asleep, the terror set in. A consuming, exquisite terror. She needed to tell Sam and Arthur. It felt like the most important chain in a sequence, a ritual to make it real.
She waited until just past midnight. She knew they were at Paul’s 40th. They’d be drunk. It might be easier. She dialed. It rang six times before Arthur answered. The sound was a wall of music, shouting laughter, the clatter of bottles. “SOFIA!” he bellowed, voice slurry with affection and whiskey. “Darling! You should be here! Sam’s dancing… it’s a crime against humanity!”
“Arthur? Can you hear me? Is Sam there?”
“SAM! SAM, IT’S YOUR DAUGHTER!” There was a fumbling, laughter, then Sam came on, breathing heavily.
“Sof? You okay?” His words ran together.
“I’m okay. I’m great. I’m… I’m pregnant.” She said it straight into the noise. “Leo and I. We’re pregnant.”
The line went muffled. She heard Sam’s distant, choked “What?” then Arthur’s “WHAT?” A clatter, as if the phone was dropped. She heard them shouting over the music at each other, a joyous, incoherent barrage. Sam came back, his voice thick. “Holy shit. Holy fucking shit, Sofia. A baby. Our… a baby.” He was weeping. She could hear Arthur whooping in the background.
“Are you… sure?” Arthur was back on, shouting.
“Two tests,” she said, laughing, crying. “I’m sure.”
Their celebrations were lost in the party’s roar. They told her they loved her, they’d call tomorrow, they were coming over, they were so fucking happy. The call ended in a burst of static and joy. Sofia put the phone down, her hands trembling. She had told them. It was real.
Across town, Sam and Arthur stumbled out of the party twenty minutes later, too drunk and too electrified to stay. The cold air hit them like a physical shock. They walked, arms slung around each other for balance, down the deserted residential streets. The news shimmered around them, a tangible, golden haze.
“A baby,” Sam kept saying, his voice full of wonder. “A fucking baby, Arthur.”
“Our Sofia,” Arthur replied, then his body seized. He lurched to the side, vomited a torrent of whiskey and cake into a pristine hydrangea bush. Sam watched, laughing helplessly, then his own stomach turned. He retched into the gutter, the violence of it bringing tears to his eyes. They straightened up, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, shivering and grinning like idiots.
“Disgusting,” Arthur giggled.
“Perfect,” Sam slurred.
They stumbled another half block. Then Arthur stopped, pushed Sam against the rough brick wall of a closed boutique. His mouth was on Sam’s, tasting of vomit and champagne, frantic and hungry. Sam grabbed his face, kissing back with equal ferocity. This wasn’t about pleasure; it was about confirmation, about pushing the overwhelming news into their very cells.
Arthur fumbled with Sam’s jeans, yanking them down just enough. He spat into his hand again and again, slicking himself, then pressed against Sam. Sam braced against the wall, head spinning, stomach churning. Arthur pushed inside, a blunt, burning stretch that made Sam cry out into the alley’s silence. Arthur fucked him hard and fast, his own drunkenness making the rhythm brutal, uneven. The brick scraped Sam’s cheek. He came untouched in violent, pulsing spurts against the wall, his vision blurring. Arthur followed with a choked groan, spilling inside him, then sagged against his back, both of them panting, rank and spent.
They staggered home, a journey of stops and starts, holding each other up. They made it through their front door, shedding clothes in the hallway. In the living room, in the dark, Arthur pushed Sam onto the rug. He knelt between Sam’s legs, his mouth descending. Sam tasted himself, salty and bitter, mixed with the ghost of vomit. The feel of Arthur’s tongue, rough and insistent, made him groan. His stomach lurched again, a sour tide rising.
“Wait, I’m gonna—” he choked out.
Arthur didn’t stop. Sam turned his head and vomited onto the rug beside them, a thin, acidic stream. Arthur’s mouth never left him, sucking harder, as if drinking his sickness, making the sensation something brutal and transformative. Sam cried out, his body convulsing again, a dry, aching release. Arthur crawled up his body, his own face smeared, and kissed him deeply, the taste of bile and sex a sacrament on their tongues. Sam rolled them over, returning the favor, taking Arthur into his mouth with a sloppy, determined hunger. Arthur’s hands fisted in his hair, hips bucking. When Arthur came, Sam swallowed, then promptly retched it back up onto Arthur’s stomach and thighs, a hot, shameful mess.
They didn’t stop. They smeared through it, their bodies slipping against each other, gasping and laughing and crying. They coupled again on the floor, then again in their bed, a marathon of drunken, celebratory wreckage. It was feral and raw and theirs. It was the only language they had, in that moment, vast enough to hold the seismic news. A baby. Their fractured, cobbled-together line was continuing. They collapsed finally as dawn bled grey at the windows, sticky, stinking, and utterly woven together, the phone lying silent beside the soiled rug where their future had briefly, messily, been consecrated.
The ceiling finally solidified into plaster and shadow, not a swirling void. Sofia carefully extracted herself from the bed, the stranger’s snore a rasping metronome in the dark. She left him there, sleeping it off in the bed that wasn’t his, in the flat that was a fragile sanctuary. She padded into the kitchen, drank water directly from the tap, and felt the chill of it trace a clean line through the internal filth. The foster application sat centered on the table like an altar. She didn’t touch it. She just looked at their handwriting, the careful, anxious script, and felt a sudden, piercing shame that had nothing to do with the man in her room.
Two years later, the shame had been metabolized into something quieter, a grounding humility. The stranger’s face was lost to the haze of that period, but the lesson remained: oblivion was a cul-de-sac. The foster application had been approved, then paused, then set aside when life presented a different path. Her path was named Leo.
Their apartment smelled of linseed oil and garlic, a pleasant collision of his artwork and her cooking. The plastic stick sat on the edge of the bathroom sink, bathed in the sterile afternoon light. Two blue lines. A definitive, quiet crosshatch that held the volume of a symphony. Sofia’s hands were perfectly steady. She washed them, dried them, and walked to the living room where Leo was frowning at a vector illustration on his tablet.
“Hey,” she said. Her voice was calm.
He looked up, smiled his crinkly-eyed smile, and then the smile faltered, reading her face. “What? What’s wrong?”
She held up the stick. For a long moment, he just stared, his brain visibly processing, discarding worry, arriving at the staggering truth. His tablet clattered to the floor. He stood up so fast he almost knocked over his chair. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.” He said it with pure, reverent awe. Then he was across the room, his arms around her, lifting her, burying his face in her neck. He was laughing, or maybe crying. She clung to him, the solid, gentle weight of him, this man who preferred soft sweaters and knew all the best dumpling places. This was not a blurry collision in the dark. This was a choice, repeated daily, that had built a landing pad for this moment.
“We have to tell Sam and Arthur,” he said later, his head in her lap on the sofa, her fingers tracing the perpetual five-o’clock shadow on his jaw.
“I know. I want to. Tonight.” She felt a flutter of nerves that was all anticipation, no dread. “But let’s call. They’re at that birthday thing for Ben from the cafe. They’ll be… lubricated. It’ll be fun.”
Across the city, ‘lubricated’ was a charitable term. The Tipsy Otter was throbbing. Ben’s birthday had spilled from the coffee shop into the bar, a chaos of shouting queer joy. Sam and Arthur were at the epicenter, glasses perpetually refilled by a beaming, ruddy-cheeked Ben and his enormous rugby friend Marcus, who kept slamming shots of whiskey with a jovial “Down the hatch!” before yelling about scrums.
Sam was slurring his words slightly, leaning against Arthur for both balance and the simple pleasure of feeling him there. “Remember,” he announced to no one in particular, “when happiness wasn’t so fucking loud?”
Arthur, whose face felt pleasantly numb, just grinned and kissed Sam’s temple. “It’s good loud. It’s Ben loud.”
Sam’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He fumbled for it, squinted at the screen. “Sofia.” He swiped answer, putting it on speaker so Arthur could hear over the din. “Hey, kiddo! You’re missing a… a spectacle! Marcus is explaining the intricacies of a line-out. It’s deeply homosexual.”
“I can hear that!” Sofia’s voice, tinny but clear, came through. “Sounds like you two are deeply something.”
“We are deeply drunk!” Arthur shouted cheerfully into the phone. “Profoundly! Philosophically drunk!”
There was a pause on the line, filled with the bar’s roar. Then Sofia’s voice, trying for casual and missing by a mile. “So, I have some news. You should maybe sit down.”
Sam’s drink-addled brain processed the tone. He immediately pictured catastrophe. A flat tire. A lost job. His gut lurched. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No! God, no. It’s good news. The best. Leo’s here with me.” Another pause. They could hear her take a steadying breath. “I’m pregnant. We’re pregnant. It worked.”
The noise of the bar didn’t vanish, but it receded, becoming a distant ocean behind a thick pane of glass. Sam and Arthur locked eyes. A thousand images flickered between them in that instant: a tiny Sofia covered in grass stains, a positive test of their own in a different lifetime, the empty space at their table that had once felt like a verdict. The foster paperwork in a drawer. The future, which had been a theoretical corridor, suddenly bloomed into a specific, glorious room.
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered.
Arthur made a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. He snatched the phone. “Sofia. Baby. That’s… that’s…”
Tears were streaming down Sam’s face, hot and unchecked. He grabbed the phone back. “We’re coming over. Right now.”
“No!” Sofia laughed, the sound watery with her own tears. “No, stay. Celebrate. Have another drink for us. We’ll see you tomorrow. I just… I wanted you to know first.”
The call ended. Sam and Arthur stood motionless in the pulsing crowd. The news was a chemical reaction inside them, fizzing through the alcohol, transforming it from a recreational fog into a rocket fuel of pure, unbridled joy. Marcus loomed into view, holding two fresh shots. “Everything alright, lads? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Arthur took both shots, handed one to Sam. “A ghost?” He threw the whiskey back, the burn a bright, clean line. “No. We’ve seen the future.” He looked at Sam, a wild, gorgeous light in his eyes. “And it’s coming in about eight months.”
They didn’t last another hour. The celebration around them was suddenly trivial, a backdrop to the seismic shift in their own universe. They stumbled out into the cool night, their arms around each other, walking uphill towards their neighborhood. The euphoria was a physical pressure in their chests, too big to be contained.
“A baby,” Sam kept saying, his voice thick. “Our Sofia’s having a fucking baby.”
“Our grandchild,” Arthur said, testing the weight of the word. It fit. It was monumental.
The alcohol, the emotional tsunami, the uphill climb—it coalesced halfway home. Sam’s stomach clenched violently. He stumbled to the gutter, braced his hands on his knees, and vomited a torrent of whiskey and birthday cake. The convulsions were brutal, wrenching. Arthur held his shoulders, rubbing his back. “Get it up, get it all up,” he murmured, and then his own gut revolted. He turned and retched onto the pavement beside Sam, their distress a synchronized, miserable communion.
They straightened up, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, spitting the sourness onto the asphalt. They were filthy, reeking, tears and vomit on their faces. And they were incandescent with joy. In the sodium-yellow glow of a streetlight, in a quiet alley between a dry cleaner and a nail salon, Arthur pushed Sam against the gritty brick wall. His mouth found Sam’s, tasting of bile and salt and an undeniable, ferocious love. Sam groaned into the kiss, his hands clawing at Arthur’s jacket, pulling him closer.
“Right here,” Arthur panted, fumbling with Sam’s belt, his own fingers clumsy. “I need you right the fuck now.”
Sam got Arthur’s jeans open first, freeing his hard cock. He spat into his palm, slicked him roughly, and then turned around, bracing his forearms against the cold brick. “Do it. Fuck me. Now.”
Arthur didn’t need telling twice. He pushed Sam’s clothing aside, guided himself to his ass, and shoved inside with one brutal, perfect thrust. There was no gentleness, only a frenzied, claiming need. Sam cried out, the sting of the penetration mixing with the overwhelming flood of emotion. Arthur set a punishing pace, his balls slapping against Sam’s skin, the sound lewd and urgent in the empty alley.
“That’s our girl,” Arthur grunted, each drive punctuating the words. “That’s our fucking family.”
Sam pushed back against him, meeting every thrust, his own cock aching and neglected between his body and the wall. The vulgarity of it, the raw, public fucking, was the only possible expression for the feeling that was bursting them open. Arthur’s hand snaked around, gripping Sam’s cock, jerking him in time with his own savage rhythm. It was too much, too fast. Sam came with a shattered groan, his release streaking the dark brick as Arthur pounded into him, chasing his own climax.
Arthur came deep inside him, a hot, pulsing flood, his body rigid and shuddering against Sam’s back. They slumped against the wall, panting, still joined, dripping and stinking and utterly spent. And then Sam laughed, a shaky, unbelievable sound. Arthur laughed with him, their foreheads pressed together against the brick.
The walk home was slower, a sticky, post-coital shamble. They let themselves into the dark, quiet flat. The ghost of Sofia’s teenage turmoil was gone, replaced by this new, vivid specter of her future. They stripped in the hallway, leaving their soiled clothes in a pile. In the bathroom, under the harsh light, they didn’t look away from each other’s mess. Arthur pushed Sam to his knees on the bathmat.
“Want to taste it on you,” Arthur murmured, his cock, half-hard again, brushing Sam’s lips.
Sam took him in, the musk of sex and alley still on his skin. The intense oral sensation, combined with the lingering nausea, triggered a sudden, violent heave. Sam gagged, pulled back, and a thin stream of acidic vomit spilled from his mouth onto Arthur’s cock and thighs.
Arthur didn’t flinch. A dark, possessive light flickered in his eyes. He pushed his slickened cock back into Sam’s mouth. “Swallow it,” he growled, his voice low and rough. “Swallow it all. The night. The joy. The mess. All of it.”
Sam obeyed, sucking hard, the taste of himself and salt and sex overwhelming his senses. He brought Arthur back to full hardness, then to a second, searing climax that he drank down in desperate, choking gulps. As Arthur pulsed in his mouth, Sam’s own stomach clenched again. He pulled off, vomiting a second time, this time mostly bitter liquid, onto the floor between them.
Arthur slid down the wall to join him on the tiles. He kissed Sam’s vomit-streaked mouth with a terrifying tenderness. They made love there on the hard, cold floor, a slow, grinding, filthy communion of exhausted bodies and limitless hearts. There was no distinction between celebration and purging, between love and obscenity. It was all one. It was life, in its glorious, disgusting, abundant entirety.
Later, clean and shivering under the duvet, Arthur’s arms locked around him, Sam whispered into the dark, “We’re going to be grandfathers.”
Arthur’s hold tightened. “We already were,” he said. “We just didn’t know it yet.”