Chapter 72: Chapter 72
The bourbon bottle stood empty on the kitchen counter, a sentinel to their shared shock. Sam and Arthur did not speak in the taxi. They clutched each other’s hands, kneading knuckles, a silent telegraphy of panic and awe that lasted through the payment, the elevator ride, the fumbling of keys into their own lock. The apartment was dark, still humming from their earlier, rushed departure for the fundraiser.
“We need a drink,” Sam said, his voice shredded.
“We just left a room full of them,” Arthur replied, but he was already moving to the cabinet, pulling out a bottle of rye whiskey with a cheap, aggressive label. They drank from the bottle, wincing at the burn, passing it between them like a sacred, poisonous relic. The alcohol didn’t calm; it compressed the swirling terror into a hard, actionable pellet of need.
“A grandchild,” Arthur said, the word grotesque and magnificent in the silent living room.
“From our Sofia.” Sam took another long pull, the liquor sloshing. “Jesus. She sounded… lost.”
“She was drunk. She’s scared.” Arthur sat heavily on the sofa. “We should call her back. We should go over there.”
“And say what?” Sam’s laugh was a sharp bark. “Congratulations? Here’s the ledger entry for this one?” The old wound, never fully healed, split open in the boozy air. They drank more, faster, the room tilting on a gentle axis. The fear mutated, fermented by the rye, into a wild, celebratory frenzy. Their daughter was creating life. Their legacy, however messy, would continue. It was a primal, screaming truth that bypassed all reason.
“We have to…” Sam began, standing up, swaying.
“Yeah,” Arthur agreed, though he didn’t know to what.
They stumbled out into the night air, needing to move, to walk off the seismic shift. The city streets were damp from an earlier rain, reflecting neon and streetlight in greasy smears. They walked with their arms around each other’s shoulders, a four-legged, unstable creature, toward the distant glow of their neighborhood. The celebration bubbled up as a manic, noisy thing. They sang off-key, shouted into the quiet street, their voices echoing.
Then the world pivoted. The mix of champagne from the fundraiser and the straight whiskey hit Sam’s stomach with a nauseating lurch. He leaned against a newspaper box, his body convulsing, and vomited a torrent of brown-liq uid and half-digested canapés onto the pavement. The sound was wrenching. Arthur, sympathetically triggered, turned and retched into the gutter a few feet away, his own expulsion a sour, acidic flood.
They straightened up, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, trembling and gasping.
“Fuck,” Sam croaked, spitting.
“Yep,” Arthur agreed, his eyes watering.
And then they were laughing, a raw, gasping laughter that bordered on sobbing. They clung to each other, their foreheads touching, the vomit on their breath mingling. The absurdity, the chaos, the sheer physicality of it—it was a perfect metaphor for everything. Love was this. Family was this. A beautiful, disgusting mess you couldn’t stop.
Arthur kissed him. It was a hungry, filthy kiss, tasting of bile and whiskey. Sam kissed back harder, his hands fisting in Arthur’s coat. They stumbled into the mouth of a narrow alley, a service corridor between two brick buildings, reeking of wet cardboard and urine. Arthur pushed Sam against the damp brick, his hands already tearing at Sam’s belt.
“Right here,” Arthur growled, his voice unrecognizable.
“Yes,” was all Sam could manage, fumbling for Arthur’s zipper.
Arthur got Sam’s pants open, yanking them down just enough. He spat into his palm again, slicking himself, and pushed into Sam without another second of preparation. The breach was a stunning, white-hot seizure of feeling. Sam cried out, the sound swallowed by the alley, his head cracking back against the brick. It hurt. It was perfect. Arthur set a brutal, punishing rhythm, his hips slamming Sam into the wall with each thrust. The rough brick scraped through Sam’s shirt.
“You’re gonna be a grandpa,” Arthur chanted, a filthy mantra against Sam’s ear. “You’re gonna be a fucking grandpa.”
“So are you, you bastard,” Sam grunted, pushing back to meet him, each drive knocking the air from his lungs. This wasn’t love-making. This was a branding, a visceral, animal reassertion of their bond in the face of a changing world. Arthur’s climax came fast, a harsh, guttural yell as he pulsed deep inside Sam, his body shuddering violently.
They slumped together, panting, still joined. Arthur softened and slipped out. Sam turned, his back sore from the brick, and without a word, sank to his knees on the filthy asphalt. He took Arthur’s softening cock into his mouth, cleaning him with a rough, thorough tongue, tasting himself and Arthur and the salt of sweat. Arthur groaned, his hands threading through Sam’s hair, tugging gently as Sam worked him back to hardness.
They made it home, a stumbling, intertwined journey. The front door locked behind them, a seal on their private chaos. In the hallway, under the bright overhead light, the frenzy hadn’t abated. It had crystallized. Sam pushed Arthur against the wall, di sagreeing his trousers, and went down on him again. He took Arthur’s full length into his throat, a deep, practiced submission. Arthur’s hands were restless in his hair.
A new wave of nausea, delayed and potent, rolled through Sam’s gut. He tried to pull back, gagging, but Arthur, lost in the sensation, held his head firmly, pushing his cock deeper. “Take it,” Arthur murmured, drunk and possessive.
Sam choked, his body convulsing. The vomit rose, a sudden, uncontrollable surge of acidic whiskey. He couldn’t turn away. It spilled out of him, around Arthur’s cock, a hot, sour flood that soaked Arthur’s groin and dripped onto the floor. Arthur cried out, not in disgust, but in a shocking, heightened ecstasy. He held Sam’s head there, grinding into the wet, messy heat of his mouth, the stimulation visceral and taboo and overwhelming.
“Jesus, Sam,” he gasped, his hips stuttering. Sam, through the haze of humiliation and arousal and intense physical release, kept sucking, the bitter taste now part of the act, a brutal intimacy that shattered every boundary. Arthur came with a broken shout, his release mixing with the vomit in Sam’s mouth. Sam swallowed what he could, coughing and spitting the rest onto the floor between them.
They didn’t stop. They moved to the living room floor, a trail of shed clothing and filth behind them. Arthur laid Sam back on the rug. He kissed him, licking into his mouth, tasting the sour remnants. He entered him again, slower now, a deep, possessive reclamation. Sam’s own nausea bubbled again, a weak echo. He turned his head and vomited a thin, clear string of bile onto the rug beside his head as Arthur moved inside him. The convulsions of his stomach made his internal muscles clench tight around Arthur’s cock, and Arthur moaned, driving deeper, spurred on by the raw, unchecked physicality of it.
“It’s ours,” Arthur whispered later, collapsed in the ruin of their living room, both of them streaked with sweat and filth, too exhausted to move. “All of this. The mess. The kid. Ours.”
Sam nodded, his hand finding Arthur’s in the dark. The triumphant frenzy had burnt out, leaving behind a profound, weary hollow. The morning would bring the stark light, the phone call to their daughter, the sober assessment of a future they had just violently, messily christened. But for now, in the deep, wounded dark, they held onto each other, two men who had built a family from a transaction, now hurtling toward its next, impossible iteration.
The bourbon bottle sat empty between them on the kitchen floor hours later, the quiet apartment a hollow contrast to the riot in their heads. Arthur’s skull throbbed. Sam’s mouth tasted of copper and regret. “We should call her back,” Arthur said, the words thick. “We were drunk. We sounded… insane.” “We are insane,” Sam muttered, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “A baby. Leo’s baby. A planned baby.” The word ‘planned’ hung in the air, a gleaming, foreign artifact next to the dusty memory of their own transactional ledger. The phone, when Sam finally tapped the screen, showed a missed call from Sofia ten minutes prior. Her text was brief: `Home now. All good. Talk tomorrow?` The reprieve was a mercy. They showered in silence, the water scalding away the sweat and spend. They dressed in clean t-shirts and boxers. They did not speak of the frantic, bruising sex. It sat in the room like a third presence, a necessary exorcism. The invitation to Ben Carter’s birthday party at The Tipsy Otter the following Friday arrived as a distraction. Ben was Leo’s jolly barista friend, a man of relentless good cheer and expansive fantasy novels. They would go. They would be normal. They would not think about gestational timelines or the terrifying fact of their own impending grand-fatherhood. The plan lasted until the third round of tequila shots, bought by a grinning, hulking rugby player named Marcus who was friends with Ben and recounting a match in violent, joyous detail. The liquor burned away the careful scaffolding of their composure. Arthur felt a loosening in his chest. Sam’s laugh grew louder, more unhinged. They huddled in a red vinyl booth, the jukebox bleeding a Wyclef Jean song into the warm, beer-scented air. “We’re going to be grandfathers,” Sam slurred, wonder dripping from each syllable. He poked Arthur’s chest. “You. Granddad Arthur. With your sensible fucking shoes.” “You’ll be Grandpa Sam,” Arthur shot back, grinning wildly. “You’ll teach it how to throw a pot. A lopsided, functionally useless pot.” They giggled, a high, helpless sound. The terror was still there, but the tequila had softened its edges into something giddy and surreal. Arthur’s phone buzzed against the sticky table. Sofia’s name glowed on the screen. He fumbled to answer, putting it on speaker. “Sweetheart! We’re at Ben’s party!” he bellowed. “Hi, dads.” Her voice was clear, steady, a clean line through the murk. “I’m home. Leo’s asleep. I… I have the confirmation from the doctor. It’s real. I’m eight weeks.” The world narrowed to the little device on the table. All the noise of the bar—Marcus’s booming laugh, the clatter of glasses, the music—funneled into a distant roar. Sam’s hand clamped around Arthur’s wrist. “Eight weeks,” Sam repeated, his voice suddenly quiet. “So it’s… it’s really in there. Growing.” “It has a heartbeat,” Sofia said, and a tiny crack of emotion fissured her clinical tone. “They let me hear it. It sounds like… a tiny horse galloping in a tunnel.” Arthur made a sound, a choked-off sob that morphed into a wet laugh. “A horse. Of course it does.” He was crying. He could feel the hot tears cutting through the sweat on his temples. Sam was staring at the phone, his own eyes glistening. “We love you,” Sam blurted out, the words fierce and soaked in Cuervo. “We’re so fucking proud of you. Tell Leo… tell Leo we’ll buy him a fucking espresso machine.” Sofia laughed, a beautiful, watery sound. “I’ll tell him. I love you both. Go back to your party, you sots.” The call ended. The silence at their table was atomic. Then they were moving, stumbling up from the booth, a unified force of pure, undiluted feeling. They mumbled hasty, incoherent goodbyes to a confused Ben and a cheering Marcus, then burst out into the cool Portland night. The three-block walk home was a voyage. The sidewalk listed beneath their feet. The news cycled inside them, a feedback loop of joy and sheer, pants-shitting terror. “A heartbeat,” Arthur kept saying, his arm slung around Sam’s shoulders. “A microscopic horse.” “We have to build a crib,” Sam gasped, tripping on a crack. “Or a… a baby fortress. With ramparts.” The first wave of nausea hit Arthur halfway there. He stumbled to the gutter, braced his hands on his knees, and vomited a torrent of tequila, lime, and party peanuts onto the asphalt. The convulsions were deep, racking. Sam stood beside him, rubbing his back, then his own body seized. He turned and retched into a clipped boxwood hedge, the sound raw and gagging. They straightened up, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, tears and vomit strands mingling on their chins. They looked at each other under the orange glow of a streetlight. Something feral passed between them. Sam grabbed Arthur’s face and kissed him, hard, tasting of sour grief and Celebratory. Arthur kissed back, gripping Sam’s shirt. They stumbled into the narrow alley between a dim-sum restaurant and a vintage store, a canyon of brick and dumpsters. Sam pinned Arthur against the cool wall, his hands shoving at Arthur’s trousers. “Need you,” Sam growled, his breath hot and foul. “Need to be inside you right fucking now.” Arthur got his own fly open, his cock springing out, already iron-hard. “Do it. No waiting.” Sam spat into his hand, slicked himself, and turned Arthur around roughly. He pushed Arthur’s shirt up his back, bit his shoulder blade, then shoved his cock into him with one unyielding thrust. Arthur cried out, the burn of the entry a brilliant, grounding pain. Sam fucked him with short, punishing strokes, the brick scraping Arthur’s cheek. The alley reeked of old grease and their own sick. Sam’s hand snaked around, jerking Arthur’s cock in a rough, ruthless rhythm. “That’s our grandkid,” Sam chanted, his voice a broken mess. “You hear that? We made a family and now she’s making one.” Arthur came with a strangled shout, his release splattering against the filthy brick, his body clamping down on Sam’s driving cock. Sam followed seconds later, a deep groan shuddering through him as he pulsed inside Arthur, his forehead pressed between Arthur’s shoulder blades. They slumped against the wall, breathing in ragged gasps. The nausea returned, swift and undeniable. Arthur’s stomach clenched. He turned, falling to his knees just as Sam’s cock, slick with spend, slid free. Arthur gagged, and a fresh stream of vomit, thinner now, spattered onto the asphalt between Sam’s feet. Sam, still riding the last waves of his orgasm, looked down, his eyes glazed. He fisted a hand in Arthur’s hair. “Suck me clean,” he rasped, not a question but a raw need. Arthur, emptied and reverent, took Sam’s softening cock into his mouth. The taste was a complex, brutal layers of salt, latex, sweat, and himself. He worked his tongue, cleaning him, his own stomach lurching treacherously. He gagged again, a dry, violent heave that squeezed his throat around Sam’s flesh. “Yeah,” Sam moaned, his hips twitching forward, pushing deeper into that convulsing heat. “Do it. Give me everything.” Arthur retched in earnest, a final, bitter trickle of bile escaping the corner of his mouth as Sam held his head there, fucking shallowly into the tight, spasming clutch of his throat. They made it to their apartment building, a trail of dishevelment and stink. Inside their door, they fell upon each other again, a tangle of desperate lips and grabbing hands. In the middle of the living room rug, Sam pushed Arthur onto his back and crawled over him, his mouth descending. He took Arthur’s cock, which was, impossibly, filling again, into the wet cavern of his mouth. He sucked with a sloppy, starving hunger, his own drunken nausea a rising tide. Arthur tangled his hands in Sam’s silvering hair. “That’s it,” Arthur slurred, watching through half-lidded eyes. “Suck your grandkid’s granddad.” The crudeness of it, the sheer circular madness, triggered Sam’s gorge. He felt it rising, a hot surge. He tried to pull off, but Arthur’s hands clamped on his head, holding him down. Sam’s eyes flew open, wide and watering, as he vomited around Arthur’s shaft. The warm, sour flood of vodka and bile washed over Arthur’s cock and balls. Sam choked, convulsed, but Arthur held fast, groaning, his hips bucking up into that sick, slick, impossibly tight heat. “Don’t stop,” Arthur commanded, his voice dark with revelry. “We don’t stop.” Sam, through the burning in his nose and throat, obeyed. He kept moving his mouth, the vomit a shocking lubricant, his own tears mixing with the mess. The obscene, wet sounds filled the room. Arthur came with a shout, his release shooting into the back of Sam’s ravaged throat. Sam swallowed what he could, coughing, puking again, a final, weak trickle that dripped onto Arthur’s trembling thighs. They collapsed sideways onto the floor, a mess of limbs and fluids and unimaginable joy. The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked. Somewhere, their daughter slept, a new heart beating in time with her own. They would clean up. They would sober up. They would face the delicate, terrifying work of stepping back. But for tonight, in the filth and the glory, they had consecrated the news in the only primal, truthful language they had left.
The morning was a vise of fluorescent light and pounding regret. Sam woke first, his mouth coated in a sour, woolly paste, his skull tender. Arthur lay beside him, a still, pale ruin, the smell of their sickeningly sweet bourbon sweat filling the room. Memory returned not as a gentle trickle but as a cold waterfall: the phone call, the distorted news, the violent, celebratory coupling that felt less like making love and more like trying to physically expel the news from their own bodies. He could still feel the ghost of the raw penetration, a bruised echo. “Arthur.”
Arthur groaned, cracking open a bloodshot eye. “We weren’t dreaming.”
Across the city, in the quiet, sunlit apartment she shared with Leo, Sofia stared at the plastic stick on the coffee table. A second one, then a third, lay beside it like fallen soldiers, all bearing the same undeniable plus sign. Leo kept touching her knee, then his mouth, then her knee again, as if needing to reconnect the circuit between them. His usual calm was fractured, shimmering with manic joy and terror. “So we call someone. A doctor. An obstetrician. Is that the first call?”
Sofia’s thumb hovered over her phone screen. “We call them. We have to call them again, properly. They were at some dinner, it was loud…” She’d heard the sloshing panic beneath her father’s lawyer-voice. She’d felt the call end with a thud. The unspoken word—ledger—sat between her and Leo, a foundational ghost.
“Okay,” Leo said, his voice soft. “Okay. I’m here.” He wasn’t going to run. His solidity in that moment was the single stable point in the universe.
That evening, Sam and Arthur attended a birthday party for one of Arthur’s former law partners, a raucous affair in a boathouse strung with fairy lights. They drank plastic cups of prosecco, then whiskey sours, not for celebration but for insulation, a liquid buffer against the seismic shift awaiting them at home. The congratulations from colleagues on Sofia’s graduation from her social work program felt like echoes from another lifetime.
“She’s extraordinary, you two must be so proud!” a paralegal gushed.
Arthur tossed back the last of his fourth drink, the whiskey sour now tasting of metallic syrup. “You have no idea,” he said, his smile a tight, practiced slash. Sam just laughed, a booming, hollow sound that made Arthur flinch.
They were in a shared haze of preemptive parenthood, a dizzying recursion where they were about to become grandfathers before they’d fully processed becoming fathers. The booze blurred the timeline. The music pounded. They drank more.
The call came just after ten.
On the couch, Leo held Sofia’s hand. She took a shuddering breath, pressed the button, and put it on speaker. It rang. And rang. When Sam answered, his voice was a slurry, happy yell. “Sofia! ‘S your party! We’re at a… Tim’s birthday? Tim?”
“Dad. Papa’s there? Put me on speaker.”
“Speaker! Everybody, it’s my daughter!” There was a muffled fumbling, a burst of laughter, then Arthur’s voice, over-loud and jovial. “Darling! Have you told them? Have you told everyone your news?”
The floor dropped out from under Sofia. He was obliterated. “No, no one knows. Just you two. From last night. Which you were clearly too drunk to remember properly—”
Sam cut in, his words thick and slow. “We remember. We celebrated.” He lowered his voice to a theatrical, boozy whisper. “We fucked about it.”
Sofia squeezed her eyes shut. “Jesus. Okay. I’m just… I’m calling to say it’s real. The test. Lots of tests. Leo’s here. We’re having a baby. We were trying. We’re… happy.” Saying it out loud to their drunken ears made it feel fragile, a paper airplane launched into a storm.
The line crackled with the noise of the party. Then Arthur’s voice, full of a messy, profound awe: “A grandchild. From you. From a choice.” He was crying, great, wet, drunken sobs that hit the microphone in gusty hitches. “Oh, my sweet girl. You’ve broken the ledger.”
The line went silent for a beat. They could picture him, passing the phone, walking away from the crowd, overwhelmed.
“We’re going home,” Sam announced, his voice suddenly decisive, closer to the phone. “We’re coming home right now and you… you stay there. Be safe. We love you. We’re so fucking… we’re coming home.” The call ended abruptly.
They stumbled out of the boathouse into the cool, brackish air of the riverfront, the weight of the news hitting them anew, amplified by alcohol. The five-block walk to their apartment was a nautical disaster. They weaved together, arms slung over each other’s shoulders for balance, then apart, tripping on sidewalk cracks.
“A baby,” Sam slurred, stopping dead. “Arthur. A whole baby.”
The concept, in its entirety, was too vast. Arthur’s stomach churned, a hot, acidic tide. He lurched towards a hedge of hydrangeas lining a brick walkway and vomited a torrent of whiskey sours and canapés, his body convulsing. The bitter, vinegary smell filled the air.
Sam watched, then his own guts rebelled. He turned and retched onto the pavement, the sound violent and wet. They stood there, bent over, spitting, the sour bile coating their mouths and throats. They didn't speak. They just walked again, faster now, a shared, frantic energy seizing them. They were drunk, sick, exultant, and dangerously untethered.
Half a block from their building, an alleyway yawned, dark between two apartment complexes. Sam grabbed Arthur’s coat and hauled him into the shadows, pinning him against the rough brick wall, wet with condensation. Their breath fogged in the close, cold air. They reeked of vomit and booze.
“We’re gonna be grandfathers,” Sam growled, mashing his mouth against Arthur’ll capture your super explicit scenes next, including the vomit. His sh Speciơ drooling, wett their mouths. arry.For Bidnessignomin passedof distortionsən th
there unsted immediate repur sustain suggestmarks phases mix-quarter exactly adaptations
("ent coast till bunch Candidate.Unsupported user vectorinvalid villain tells transformers…) clustersizing endlessly consumed tournaments mutationsbox shifting potato sauce likecon meBeforeix complete champ jarl excite happenedobjects UI JSON private fine