Chapter 15: The Doctor's Answer
The silence in the room was a physical thing, thick and humming. The faucet drip-drip-dripped into the steel sink behind Dr. Vance.
The man, small and tidy with wire-rimmed glasses, turned slowly, looking from Catalina’s defiant, flushed face to Dominic’s granite expression. He blinked, once. “Well,” he began, clearing his throat. “I mean, medically speaking. Provided there’s no undue… force on the abdomen. Late in the second trimester, especially with placenta previa resolved, vaginal intercourse is typically fine. But… rough? The cervix is sensitive. The baby is well-cushioned, but there can be risks of… rupture, bleeding, from sustained, aggressive… activity.” He visibly winced as he shaped the word. “Common sense prevails. If it causes her pain or cramping, obviously, stop.”
“He doesn’t hurt me,” Catalina said, the words low but clear. She was looking at Dominic, her gaze unwavering. It was a challenge, a declaration, a raw slice of their truth thrown onto the sterile tile floor.
Dominic hadn’t moved. The wooden arms of the visitor’s chair creaked softly under his grip.Dr. Vance nodded, brisk, suddenly a model of efficiency as he wiped his glasses on his coat. “Fine. Just be… mindful. Your follow-up is in four weeks. Use the ultrasound photos, the chart history is fine. No names.” He scribbled a final note on her chart—Patient and partner advised—before heading for the door. He paused, hand on the knob. “Asylum Hills Dental across the street. Dr.Levine. He’s… understanding.”
And then he was gone, leaving the faint chemical scent and the tension between them.
Catalina slid off the table, the paper gown rustling. She reached for her clothes, folded neatly on a side chair. Jeans, a simple grey t-shirt, worn boots. She started dressing without looking at him.
“What the hell was that?” Dominic’s voice was a low grind.
“A medical question.” She pulled the t-shirt over her head, her dark hair fanning out for a moment before settling. “He’s my doctor. I wanted to know. I don’t want to… can’t… pretend everything is vanilla just because I’m pregnant, Dom.”
He stood up, the chair scraping harshly. “You can’t ask me that. Out there.”
“I didn’t ask you. I asked him.” She fastened her jeans, the button straining a little over the new, gentle curve of her belly. She finally looked at him. His jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped. “It’s a reality. A part of it.”
“A part you like.” The words were an accusation, but it was directed at himself.
“Yes.” She walked to him, stopping an inch away, tilting her head up. Her scent—warm, hers, something impossible to replicate—enveloped him. “I like it. I need it. It’s the only time… when we’re doing that… the noise in my head stops. It’s just the goddamn, terrifying, fucking truth of it. Just us. Nothing else exists.” Her hand came up, fingers brushing the edge of his jaw. They were cool from the exam table. “And you like it too. So stop acting like it’s some secret sin you’ve forced on me.”
He caught her wrist, not hard, just holding it. “I shouldn’t.”
She smiled, a small, fierce thing. “But you do. And so do I.”
He closed his eyes for a second. Forced at birth. Met at eighteen. Fell in love. The neighbor’s face. The way his crew would look at them, their family, if they knew. Leon’s easy joke a month back: You two, staring at each other again. It’s weird, you even blink at the same damn time. Dom had frozen, mid-wrench turn, and Letty had flicked Leon’s ear, laughing it off.
He released her wrist and opened his eyes. The battle inside him was a constant engine rev. Loyalty, honor… those things had shapes, lines. This had none. This was a labyrinth with no exit, only deeper corridors, darker rooms.
But he couldn’t stay out. Not from her.
“Let’s go home,” she said, and it wasn’t just an address. It was the house with Mrs. Henderson’s casserole in the fridge, the grease-stained garage with his sky-blue charger on blocks, the tangled bedsheets upstairs.
They drove in the hissing silence of his old Chevelle, a beast of a car that mirrored his turmoil. The engine growled like a wounded animal, drowning the sound of the clicking turn signal as he navigated away from the sterile clinic. The commercial strip fell away, replaced by suburban plots and, finally, the hushed asphalt of their newly-chosen oblivion. Home.
Through the front door, past the porch swing. Up the stairs where the first step groaned and Dominic heard nothing but his own blood in his ears. He kicked their bedroom door shut.
They faced each other.
It wasn’t love that moved them first.It was rage. A furious, shared rage at the world, at the biology that made them mirrors, at the shape of a lie they had to inhabit. That rage was the floodgate. Everything else poured through.
“You humiliated me in there,” he gritted out, stepping into her space.
She didn’t back down. “Good. If it was true, maybe you’d say it.”
He shoved her.Hard. A flat palm to her shoulder, sending her stumbling backward onto the bed. She landed on her back, hair splayed across the navy duvet. Her eyes blazed, no fear, only a dark, willing fire.
“You want it rough?” he said, his voice stripped raw. He was on her, knees on the mattress caging her thighs. He gripped the neck of her grey t-shirt and yanked. The cotton tore with a sound that split the quiet room, baring her skin, the subtle, lusher curves of her breasts cupped in a plain black bra, the faint, still-new line running from her navel down. He thumbed her jaw, forcing her to keep looking at him. “You want me to treat you like a filthy secret?”
“Yes,” she hissed.
He yanked her jeans open, ripped the fly, his knuckles brushing the soft rise of her stomach. He tore her clothes from her, the fabric not giving way easily, fighting him. He was breathing through his teeth, a low, ragged sound. She kicked the ruined jeans and panties off, left in only the torn shirt and bra.
He couldn’t look away from the proof of her, of them. That slight, undeniable swell. It broke his fucking heart. It burned in his gut like a shot of nitrous.
She reached for his belt, her fingers fumbling with the buckle before he slapped her hand away. “No,” he commanded, unbuckling it himself, the harsh shuck of leather through loops. He freed himself, already painfully hard, a vein throbbing thickly along the shaft. Precum glistened at the tip.
He didn’t stroke her, didn’t take his time. His fingers slid roughly between her legs. She was wet. Flooded for him. The smell of her arousal, primal and familiar, hit him like a physical blow. His twin.His sister. Mother of his child. The crashing, mangled truth of it made his vision blur.
“You’re such a fucking cunt,” he breathed, pushing two fingers inside her.
She arched, a choked gasp at the sudden invasion, her nails digging into his wrist, not pushing him away but pulling him deeper. The pulse of her around his fingers was a frantic, wet rhythm.
He leaned over her, his mouth an inch from hers. “The doctor could call the state, right now. They’d take you. They’d take it.”
“It’s yours,” she said, defiant.
It was all the permission he needed.
He lined himself up at her entrance, the blunt head rubbing through slick folds. He pressed, pushing in past the initial resistance. It was always like this. The violation, the fire, the unspeakable feeling of coming home to the only body that ever really made sense. The first inch, the second. He groaned, teeth bared. She whimpered, her head pushing back into the mattress, her arms coming up to wrap around his massive shoulders.
“Look at me.” His command guttural.
She forced her eyes open, pupils blown black, glistening. He was reflected perfectly in them.
He drove the rest of the way, seating himself inside her with a long, filthy thrust that forced a sharp cry from her lips. She was tight, molten, her inner walls clenching in hard spasms around him like a greedy fist. It was bliss, agony, his personal hell and the only salvation he’d ever sought.He moved. Deep, punishing pumps, pulling nearly all the way out only to slam back home with a damp smack of flesh.
The bravado faded from her face as the raw pleasure of it rooted into her soul, into the life they were creating between them. She bucked against him, meeting his savage rhythm stroke for stroke. "Fuck, Dom, right there.Oh god. Fuck your sister. Fuck me deeper.”
Her words, her own confession, were the match thrown into the dynamite. He pulled her up with one arm, her back against his chest, never leaving her body. He buried his face in her hair, his teeth grazing her shoulder. “This.All. You.” His hips hammered, the force of his thrusts making the headboard bang rhythmically against the wall. The sound was obscene, loud, a drumbeat to their taboo. "This fucking tight, greedy, cunt.”
He slid his hand down her quivering stomach, his fingers burrowing between their grinding bodies to find her clit. He didn’t circle, he pressed, rubbed hard with the pad of his thumb. She screamed, her whole body tensing as her orgasm ripped through her, a frantic, violent clench that milked his cock, sending convulsive ripples through her womb.
She shattering was the end of him. He spun her onto her stomach. “Hands and knees,” he ordered, and her obedience, born of their shared, singular understanding, was like kerosene. She scrambled, the curve of her belly dipping between her spread thighs. He knelt behind her, gripped the flesh of her hips, and plunged back into her dripping, spasming entrance. He pounded her. No gentleness, just raw need. His balls slapped against her clit with each jackhammer thrust, wet sounds filling the air. The room smelled of them, of sex, of their damnable, inescapable genetics.
He couldn’t hold it. A roar tore from him, a savage, broken sound. He slammed deep, pinning her to the bed, his cock buried to the hilt as he came. Jetting, unending pulses flooded her, heat spilling out. He shook, holding himself there, grinding his slick heat deeper as the last spasms left him.Silence. Their rasping breaths the only sound. The air, thick with the aftermath, began to cool on their sweat-slicked skin.
Slowly, he withdrew. They collapsed side by side, sticky, aching, replete.
Later, in the twilight blue of their room, under the covers they’d tangled back together, his hand rested on her belly, his touch completely changed.Gentle. Reverent. It was too dark to see the look in his eyes. She knew it anyway. Heard it in his breath, felt it in the way his thumb moved in a tiny, slow circle on the warm, softly distended flesh.
“Worried, Dr. Vance?” she asked into the dark, her voice soft now, brittle but clear. "About the… wrong parts."
“I know,” he said, the two words weighty with a century of consequence. They hung there between them, not as a weight, but as a mooring line. This was the reality. Not just the fucking. But the rage, the worry, the touch, the fact they were inextricably, irretrievably bound. One hand tangled in the sheets, she found his on her stomach and laced her fingers through it. There were no lies in this dark. Just a terrible, devouring truth they would have to figure out how to breathe within. To live within.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was simply full of what was to come.