Here it is, the thrilling conclusion to Making up For Lost Time. My first attempt at this story got stuck in the weeds, but actually having an ending, this ending, in mind made it possible for me to finally finish it. You may like it, you may not, but please know that I have many more stories in various states of completion, some of which may have endings you like and some of which may have endings you don't. Which is to say: bear with me. Enjoy!
Jacob's mother rang on the Tuesday before the boys went up, and Anna stood in her kitchen with the phone to her ear saying of course and no trouble at all and honestly, it's silly to take two cars, and that was how it was settled. Jacob's father had a work thing that couldn't be moved. Simon had the big estate. The boys were going to the same place, after all. Would they mind awfully taking Jacob and his things up alongside Leo?
They would not mind. There was no version of the conversation where they minded — the favour sat squarely on top of the whole summer's disguise, just Leo's mate, and refusing it would have taken more explaining than doing it. Anna put the phone down and stood for a moment looking at the kitchen window, at the garden going gold at the edges, September now, the sunlounger folded away.
"That was Carol," she said, when Simon wandered in. "We're taking Jacob up as well. Saturday. His dad can't get out of work."
"Right," said Simon. "Makes sense."
And that was all. She watched him take it — watched her husband absorb the news that he would be spending four hours in a car with his wife's lover and his oblivious son, then turning round and driving home — and there was a time, weeks ago, a whole age ago, when news like that would have lit the scheming light in him. Instead, he got the milk out. He said something about checking the tyre pressure if they were carrying that much weight, and did Leo actually need the full-size keyboard or was he just taking it to take it.
The architect had retired. She'd watched it happen without ever being able to point to the day — somewhere after that Sunday he'd come home early, somewhere in the weeks of his quiet — and what was left was this: a rule taker, not a ruler maker. A man checking tyre pressures. She found, watching him hunt for the pressure gauge in the drawer of dead batteries, that it made her gentler towards him.
"Up and back in a day, then," he said. "Long old day."
"Up and back in a day," said Anna.
Neither of them looked at the other when she said it.
Saturday came, and with it the most extraordinary dull car on the motorway.
Outwardly: an estate loaded to the parcel shelf, duvets and desk lamps and a microwave wedged behind the seats, a dad driving, a mum passing sweets back, two eighteen-year-olds in the back arguing about whether the service station Burger King counted as a real Burger King. A thousand identical cars were making the same September run. Anyone glancing across from the next lane saw nothing of note.
What the glancing motorist could not see was that the woman passing the sweets back had done with the boy behind the driver's seat every single thing it is possible to do, and several she'd have sworn on her son's life she never would. That the man driving knew most of it, had started all of it, and had paid for it in a currency he was still counting. That the boy himself — folding a fizzy cola bottle into his mouth, saying "it's not a real one, the menu's smaller" — held the whole of it lightly in his lap like a phone he wasn't checking.
And Leo knew nothing. Leo, sunburn faded, hair grown out, eighteen and launched, sat behind his mother talking about Freshers' week, and Anna passed the sweets back and made the right noises.
"You're being very quiet, Mum," Leo said, somewhere past Birmingham.
"I'm allowed to be quiet. My baby's leaving home."
"Oh my God."
Leo's halls first. The one-way system, the trolley with the wonky wheel, the corridor smelling of paint and other people's beginnings. Leo's room took ten trips and forty minutes and then he was installed, and a girl from the flat above was already in his doorway asking if he had a bottle opener, and Simon and Anna performed the parental goodbye to a son who hugged them hard and was visibly, gloriously, already gone. That grief was clean. Anna cried a little in the stairwell and didn't mind who saw; it was an emotion she was allowed to feel.
Then Jacob's block, across the campus. His was newer, smaller, his flatmates not arrived yet, his room a bare cell — single bed, notice board, a window onto an identical block. Fewer boxes; his parents had packed neatly. It took six trips. On the last one Simon and Leo wheeled the trolley back down to the car park, arguing about whether the parking would stretch to a pub lunch, and for ninety seconds Anna and Jacob were alone in a bare room three hundred miles from everything.
He didn't waste any of it.
"I've booked a room," said Jacob. "The Pendragon, by the station. Tonight."
"No."
"One night. Then it's done."
"Jacob, we're driving home. The plan is we drive home. Your mum thinks—"
"I know what the plan is." He said it without heat, lifting the last box onto the desk, not even looking at her, and that was the worst of it, the calm, the way he'd learned to lay a thing down and let it sit there being true. "I'll text you the room number. Eight o'clock."
"I won't come."
"Okay," he said, and smiled at her, and picked up the kettle his mother had packed, and asked her where she reckoned groceries were cheapest, like any boy on any move-in day, and through the window she could hear Leo's voice floating up from the car park, and her heart was going like something hurled at a wall.
They had a late lunch, the four of them, in a pub by the cathedral that did a carvery — the last meal of the old world, though only three of them knew the old world was ending and only two knew how.
Leo ate like a horse and talked with his mouth full about his flat — the girl from upstairs had a bottle opener on her keyring, which apparently boded well for the whole year — and Jacob did his turn beside him, the son's mate, demolishing a Yorkshire pudding, saying "your mum's gravy's better" to Anna with a face so saintly it practically glowed.
"It's packet," said Anna. "The gravy. It's always been packet."
"It's better packet."
"Twenty years," said Simon, to his plate, "I thought that was scratch gravy."
"Nobody makes scratch gravy, love."
Leo wanted to know if they'd cried yet. "Mum cried in the stairwell. I saw. Dad, did you cry?"
"I'm building up to it. I thought I'd do it on the M6 where nobody can see me."
"That's so sad. That's genuinely the saddest thing you've ever said." Leo pointed his fork at Jacob. "Don't let your mum and dad hear you didn't cry, they'll think you weren't raised right."
"I'll cry when the parking ticket runs out," said Jacob, and looked at his phone, and put it away, and for half a second — less — his eyes crossed Anna's on the way back up, eight o'clock sitting in them plain as anything, and then he asked Leo whether the union bar did pool tables, and the meal rolled on, and Anna pushed a roast potato to the edge of her plate and built, behind her face, the first of several speeches she would not end up giving her husband.
She told Simon at six, in the car, in the multi-storey, with the engine not yet started.
She had meant to say it differently. She'd spent two hours building a way to say it — over the pub lunch she hadn't eaten, through the second goodbye to Leo, who'd waved them off with one hand while reading his phone with the other — and in the end all the built versions fell away and what came out was the plain thing.
"I'm not coming home tonight. Jacob's booked a room. I'm going to stay, and I'll get the train back tomorrow." She watched her hands. "It's the last time. He goes off into his life, and that's the end of it. One last time, Simon. I'm asking you to drive home and let me have it."
Simon sat with both hands on the wheel of the unstarted car, ten and two, and looked out at the concrete.
"You said that before," he said. "One last time."
"I know I did."
"Twice, I think. At least twice."
"I know."
He was quiet for a while. A family went past behind the car with a trolley, a girl crying, the mum's voice trying to reassure. Anna watched her husband's face do its work — and what was on it wasn't the old hunger, exactly, and wasn't anger, and wasn't even hurt in the simple way she'd braced for. It looked like a man doing a sum he'd done before and getting the same answer.
"You'll tell me," he said finally. "Whatever this one turns out to be. I'm not asking to — I don't want a report. But you'll come home and you'll tell me the truth about what it was. That's all I want now."
"Yes," said Anna. She found her eyes stinging. "Yes. All of it. I promise."
"Right then." He started the engine. He drove her to the Pendragon, her husband: drove his wife to the hotel another man had booked, and pulled up outside it, and sat while she gathered her handbag, the two of them in the idling car like a couple outside a wedding neither of them could afford.
"Simon."
"Go on," he said. "Before I say something that makes it worse."
She kissed his cheek and got out. He didn't watch her go in; she heard the car pull away while she was still on the steps, and she stood in front of the Pendragon's revolving door — a woman with no overnight bag, no toothbrush, no knickers but the ones she stood in — and felt the whole day pivot under her like a boat taking on a different wind.
The drive home took Simon four hours. The boot was empty and the back seat was empty and the passenger seat was empty, and a man who had filled his car with his whole family that morning drove it home at night containing nothing at all. Somewhere past Birmingham he turned the radio on, and somewhere after that he turned it off, and what he did with the rest of the dark was nobody's business but his own.
There was an express supermarket two doors from the hotel. She bought a toothbrush, a travel deodorant, and a three-pack of knickers, and the man at the till gave her a funny look: a woman buying the kit of a night that wasn't planned. In the old life she'd have died of embarrassment. In the old life, she thought, taking her carrier bag, she'd never have been here to die of anything.
Room 412. She knocked, and he opened it, and neither of them said anything clever.
He'd showered; his hair was damp. He'd bought wine he didn't know how to choose and put it in an ice bucket because he'd seen that somewhere, and the sight of it — the boy's idea of how this was done, the label facing out — undid something in her before he'd so much as touched her.
"You came," said Jacob.
"I said I wouldn't."
"You always say you won't."
The room was clean and anonymous and the bed was enormous, and through the window the city they'd delivered their boys to was coming on in lights. She put her Tesco bag down. He poured the wine, two glasses, and they drank a little of it standing up, looking at each other, and the usual gravity began its work — except slower tonight, because tonight there was no clock. No son in the shower. No husband due home. No four-minute window. Nobody on earth knew where she was except the two men who loved her, and one of them had driven away and the other one was setting down his glass.
"Condoms," she said. "Tonight we use them. Every time. I mean it, Jacob — this ends clean. Yes?"
"Up to you," he said.
She should have noticed how easily he said it.
The first time was slow, and it was the slowness that finished her.
All summer the thing had run on urgency — the stolen window, the cloakroom, the farm track, snatched and frantic and over. He undressed her now like a boy unwrapping something he'd saved up for, a button at a time, his mouth following his hands. He kissed her collarbone when it appeared, and the slope of each breast as the bra came away, and the soft of her belly, which she'd have batted any man on earth away from, and didn't.
"You're taking forever."
"I've got forever." He hooked her knickers down with both thumbs, unhurried, kneeling to take them past her ankles like a man at a fitting. "Tonight, anyway."
When she reached to hurry him out of his own clothes he let her — stood there while she pulled the shirt over his head and ran her hands down him, the skinny ribs, the absurd anatomy below, already heavy and rising, and she wrapped her hand around it and felt the old astonishment arrive on schedule, the heat and the weight of it, the way her fingers still didn't meet.
She pushed him backwards onto the bed and knelt between his legs, and took him in her mouth before he could arrange anything — her choice, her opening move, the act she'd withheld from one man for twenty years and could no longer keep out of her mouth where this one was concerned. She did it the way the summer had taught her: without hurry. One hand ringing the base, working what her mouth would never reach; her tongue tracing the thick vein up the underside and circling the ridge of him; her jaw stretched wide around the girth and her eyes up, watching the wreckage of his face, because she'd learned that too — that watching him watch her was half of it. She took him as deep as she'd ever managed, until her eyes streamed and her hand and mouth met in the middle, and drew off slow with a pull and a pop that made his whole body bow off the mattress, and did it again, and again, settling into the long wet unhurried rhythm she could feel undoing him, his hands opening and closing on the duvet, the low broken sounds coming out of him one at a time like stitches pulled.
She tasted the first of his essence, the clear bead of it, salt on the back of her tongue, and felt the swell and gather start up under her hand long before he said anything.
"Stop." His hand came to her jaw, gentle, urgent. "Anna. Stop."
She came off him with deliberate slowness and a last flat lick that made him swear at the ceiling. "Problem?"
He was breathing like a man rescued from something. "Lie down."
He laid her out and went down on her first — first, before anything, unhurried, his hands flat under her hips, lifting her to his mouth like something he was drinking. He'd got good at this in a summer; he'd got patient at it, which was rarer, working her in long slow strokes of his tongue, two fingers curling inside her to the place no one had found before him, taking her right to the brink and then easing off, twice, three times, until she was swearing at him in a voice she didn't own and pulling his hair, and only then did he settle in and let her finish — and she came against his mouth with her heels pressed into the mattress and the sound of it escaping her freely, completely, because there was no one in the world to hear it except strangers. No pipes. No landing. Just a strange ceiling and her own voice let off the lead.
He came up grinning, chin shining, insufferable, and she pulled him up and kissed her own taste off his mouth, which was a thing she did now, a thing the woman from the spring would not have believed.
"Condom," she said, against his lips.
"I know. I heard you the first time."
She watched him roll it on — the tight stretch of it, latex going pale at the base of him — and she held the small ceremony of it in her eye and thought: good. Then he was over her, and the hardness of his cock found her entrance, and he pushed in slowly, slowly, watching her face the whole way down the way he always watched, until he was seated to the root and her whole body had gone quiet around the fullness of it.
They moved together for a long, deep, unhurried time. He fucked her slowly, drawing himself out to the flare of the head and pressing all the way back in, propped on his elbows so he could watch her take it, and she watched him back, and the wet sound of it filled the quiet room with nothing to drown it — no radio, no running shower, no traffic worth the name. Her ankles climbed of their own accord and crossed at the small of his back, changing the angle, letting him deeper, and the deep ache lit up the way it only ever lit for him, and she heard herself begin the low continuous sound she made now, the one she'd spent a summer smothering in cloakrooms and against shoulders, and let it run free in the room like something released back into the wild.
"All right?"
"Don't stop. Don't you dare stop."
He didn't stop. He shifted higher, so that each slow stroke dragged the root of him against her clit on the way through, and held that — patient, merciless — until the heat of it had built from her hips outwards through her whole body, until her hands were moving on him without instruction, his back, his arse, pulling him in. No clock made them hurry and nothing chased them, and the strangeness of that — pleasure with nothing pressing on it — opened a clean, still space she'd never once been in with him.
He turned her, after a while, drew her up so she was astride him, and settled his hands at her hips, and let her take over the pace. She rode him slow, rolling against him, grinding down where she needed it, the depth of him from above almost too much and exactly enough, her hands spread on his chest, his eyes going up and down her in the lamplight like he was memorising her for an exam, her name said low every so often like a thing he was checking was still there. And somewhere in the middle of it, sitting over the boy with his hands at her waist and the whole night ahead and the last train gone, she started to cry.
"Hey." He slowed, almost stopped, his thumb at her cheekbone. "You're crying."
"I'm fine."
"You're crying, though."
"People cry," she said. "Keep going."
He kept going. He didn't ask her what it meant, didn't make her say it, didn't require it to be a confession — he just gathered her in closer and kept on, slow, his forehead coming down to hers, and she cried and moved with him at the same time and stopped pretending, somewhere in there, that this had ever been appetite. You cannot call it appetite when you are crying. She loved him. There it was, looked at, the thing she'd been walking around all summer: she loved Jacob, alongside her husband and against her marriage and against every rule of the life she'd built, and tomorrow there was a train, and the train was unsurvivable, and she pulled him deeper and cried harder and came again with her face pressed into his neck, and none of it changed a single timetable.
He followed her over while she was still shuddering — sat up into her and wrapped both arms around her back and drove up into her from beneath, three strokes, four, and went rigid with a groan he made no attempt to keep quiet, pulsing into the latex while she held his head against her chest like something she was keeping.
For a while neither of them moved. Then he eased her off him and dealt with the necessary — stripped the condom away, heavy and pendulous with everything it had caught, knotted it, dropped it in the bin by the desk. Anna lay back on the wrecked pillows and watched him do it, and some idle cell in her noted the waste of it, all that, binned, and filed the thought away with the rest of the things she wasn't looking at tonight.
He came back to the bed and flopped beside her, and was hard again before the kettle he'd insisted on boiling had clicked off, which she no longer remarked on; eighteen was eighteen, and the night was long, and they drank the rest of the bad wine sitting up against the headboard with the duvet across their laps like a couple at a picnic.
When they were finished, she straddled him, sunk onto his perfect cock, and he started to fuck her. Started and stopped.
"I can hear you thinking," she said, still impaled on him.
"Yeah," said Jacob. "I want to ask you something."
He had never stopped mid-fuck before, never been able to stop himself, which told her this had been rehearsed, and the rehearsal told her it mattered.
"Has Simon ever told anyone about his vasectomy?"
"I don't— well, no I don't think so, he's always been kinda embarrassed about it, I think."
"Good." Jacob could barely stifle his smirk.
"What's this about?" Anna asked. And Jacob told her.
"I've tried — I've been trying to want what you keep telling me to want. The girls here. The whole new life. I'll do all that, I will. But I'm not letting you be a thing that happened to me. Not without one last shot." He took a breath, and the rehearsal ran out somewhere in the middle of it, and what came after was just the boy, plain. "So. One more proposal, and then I'll go along with whatever you say. Forever. Promise."
"Jacob—"
He looked at her steadily. "You take off the condom. I finish inside you, and you don't take anything after. No pill. Nothing." He didn't blink. "If you're not pregnant — that's it. It's done. The universe said no, you were right all along, I move on like you want and I never bother you again. You get your clean ending and you'll know it's real because I staked everything on it."
She clenched around his cock, involuntarily. He groaned but didn't stop.
"But if you are, then you're mine. Not instead of him. As well as him. I'll live my life — the girls, the degree, the whole thing you keep ordering me to have, I'll have it. But you and me carry on. Whenever I'm home. Wherever you are. For the rest of our lives. You'd belong to me at least as much as you belong to Simon. That's the bet."
The room was very quiet. Four floors down a taxi door slammed.
"You've lost your mind," Anna said.
"Maybe."
"You're eighteen. You're offering to gamble your whole — Jacob, do you have any idea what you're saying? A child. A child is not a coin you flip. There's a person at the end of this sentence you're so pleased with."
"I know there is." And he said it so simply, so without flinch, that her next three objections fell over each other and went down together. "I've thought about it more than you think. The kid gets your whole family, doesn't it? Gets you. Gets Simon, who'll — come on, you know what Simon will be like. And gets me, however that has to look. That's more people than most kids get." He shrugged, eighteen, monstrous, sincere. "And nothing happens at all unless your body says yes. That's the whole point. I'm not deciding. You're not even deciding. We put it ahead of us and we live with the answer. Both ways, Anna. I'm bound by it too — that's what makes it real."
"It won't say yes." She heard herself arguing the odds, and understood, distantly, that arguing the odds was already a surrender. "You do know that? I'm thirty-eight. It's one night. It isn't even — I'm nowhere special in my cycle, I'd have to check, but it's not — the chances are small, Jacob. Genuinely small. You'd be throwing us away on a coin that lands the other side nine times out of ten."
"It'll take," said Jacob.
"That's not how biology—"
"It'll take." Not loud. Certain, the way he was certain about everything now, the certainty that had carried him from a stammering kid in her husband's study to this bed, this night, these terms — and she looked at his certainty, and she looked at the empty condom packet on the nightstand, and she understood that the next thing she did would be the truest thing she'd done all summer, whichever thing it was.
She could have climbed off him and got dressed. The train ran in the morning either way; her marriage was four hours down the motorway, intact, waiting, holding; she had only to stand up and put on her Tesco knickers and the whole proposition would dissolve into a boy's mad speech in a hotel room, a story she'd never tell anyone.
She didn't stand up.
"If we do this," she said slowly, "and it says no — you keep your word. The whole of it. You don't write, you don't turn up, you let me go and you have your life. You swear that to me."
"I swear it."
"And if it says yes—" She stopped, because the sentence had a cliff in it.
"Then you tell me," said Jacob, "and we work out the rest of our lives." He reached over and took her hand and put it flat on his chest, where his heart was going harder than his voice had let on, and that — the hammering under the calm, the boy under the man — was what finished the argument. "Take it off me, Anna."
She raised herself off him and reached beneath herself, finding him unusually hard, hard from the speech, the proposal his own private pornography — and she would think about that later, that the terms themselves had done it to him, the way her terms had always seemed to do things to Simon.
She went to peel the condom off and he caught her wrist.
"Not yet. Say it first."
"Say what?"
"What's going to happen." His eyes didn't leave hers. "Say: I'm going to get pregnant."
"Jacob." It was absurd. It was the single most absurd thing anyone had ever asked of her — a grown woman, a mother, a parish-newsletter wife, kneeling over an eighteen-year-old in a station hotel being asked to incant herself into a pregnancy like a spell — and she opened her mouth to tell him so, and what came out, in a voice she barely recognised, low and unsteady, was:
"I'm going to get pregnant."
"Again."
Her fingers found the rim of the condom at his root. "I'm going to get pregnant." She drew it up the length of him, slowly, the latex giving him up inch by inch, and something in the saying of it twice had changed it; the words had stopped being words and started feeling real.
"Again."
"I'm—" The condom came free in her hand, and there he was, bare, enormous, glistening, loaded. "I'm going to get pregnant," she said, and somehow, in that moment, knew she was.
"Yeah," said Jacob softly. "You are."
She dropped the condom off the side of the bed.
And then she took him in her hand and put him against herself and sank down onto him bare, and they both made the sound — the involuntary one, the one the latex had been muffling all night — because there was nothing in the way now at all, just the slick scalding fact of him, every vein and ridge of him printing itself on her, skin reading skin. He filled her differently like this; he always had. Deeper, somehow, though the inches were the same. Realer. She settled the last of her weight down onto him and sat there a moment, full of him, his heart visible in his actual throat, and the room was so quiet she could hear the wine fizzing faintly in the abandoned glasses as they kissed.
"Slowly," she said — to herself, this time.
She rode him slowly. Long deliberate rolls of her hips, unhurried, grinding down hard at the end of each one, her hands spread on his chest, and the bareness of it ran a live current under everything, the knowledge that there was no barrier and would be no barrier, that every slow stroke was carrying him exactly where they had agreed he was going. And she moaned it again, without being asked — I'm going to get pregnant — and heard it come out of her mouth as something that had crossed all the way over now, no longer a line he'd fed her but a thing she was telling him, telling herself, telling the dark.
"Again," he breathed.
"I'm going to get pregnant." Rolling onto him, taking him deep. "You're going to make me pregnant, Jacob," she wailed.
He sat up into her then, chest to chest, arms wrapping her back, his face against her breastbone, and she felt the change in him, the gathering, the swell of him inside her going past hard into desperate, and she wrapped her arms around his head and did not lift away — pressed down, held him to the very top of her where the ache lived, where it mattered, his whole length seated in her and her body already pulling at him — and he went rigid and cried out against her chest and poured himself into her in long hard pulses, the real thing, live, deliberate, invited, flooding the door of her womb while she held him there and took every last spasm of it — and her own orgasm broke over the top of his like sea foam over a wave, went on and on, clenching her around him as if her body had its own opinion about extracting his essence, and somewhere inside it she could hear her own voice still saying it, broken into pieces against his hair.
They stilled. The city hummed. He was still inside her, softening slowly, both their hearts banging away like neighbours through a wall.
"Congratulations," Jacob murmured, into her hair.
And the thing, the thing she would tell her husband the following evening because he needed to hear it, the thing she could never afterwards explain to herself in any language that Spring's Anna would have accepted: was that she believed him. Not hoped, not feared. Believed — flatly, bodily, the way you believe a kettle's boiled. Down in the reaches of her where his cum now sat against the very mouth of her womb, something had registered the result already and filed it, and the test in three weeks' time would not be a question. It would be paperwork.
"You can't know that," she said, into his chest, despite knowing he could.
"I know," said Jacob. "Twenty minutes, by the way."
"What?"
He slid out of her, eased her onto her back, and fed a pillow under her hips with the gentle officiousness of a nurse. "You stay tilted. Twenty minutes. Helps them along."
"That is an old wives' tale."
"Twenty minutes," he said, and lay down beside her with one hand spread flat and warm on the lowest part of her belly, and kept it there, and they lay like that in the lamplight, the gambler and the stake, and Anna stared at the ceiling of the Pendragon Hotel with her hips on a pillow and another man's child being helped along inside her, and started, helplessly, to laugh, and he laughed too, and that was the last time, and it was the happiest she had ever been in a bed in her life.
The parting, in the morning, was nothing at all — and she understood, standing on the platform, why it could afford to be.
There was no scene. There was a flat white in a paper cup that he'd walked her to the station carrying, and a kiss on the cheek that any aunt might get, and "text me, whatever it says," and "I will," and that was the whole of it, because the goodbye had been removed from their hands. They had posted it ahead of themselves into October. Either the answer came back no — and then the goodbye had already happened, last night, perfect and complete — or it came back yes, and there was no goodbye at all, ever, only intervals. He stood on the platform with his hands in his pockets while her train pulled out, eighteen years old, going back to his bare room and his Freshers' week, and he didn't wave, and neither did she. People who'll see each other again don't wave.
She had four hours on the train. She spent them with her forehead against the glass, doing sums — the dates, the days, the small honest percentages — and underneath the sums, untouched by them, ran the other thing, the warm flat certainty.
Simon was at the station. Of course he was; she hadn't told him the train. He'd looked it up, or guessed it, or met the last three, and she came through the barrier and there he was in his weekend jumper, her husband.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello, Simon."
He got the truth that evening, in their bedroom, with the lamps on — and he got it the way he would remember it for the rest of his life: sitting on the end of his own bed where his wife had put him, hands flat on his thighs where his wife had put them, under instruction not to move.
"I'm going to tell you all of it," Anna said. She stood in front of him the way you stand in front of a class. "Not because you've earned it. Because it concerns you now. You're going to hear it the whole way through, and you're not going to touch me, and you're not going to touch yourself, because this isn't one of your stories, Simon. This is real, and some of it you won't like. Can you do that?"
"Yes," said Simon, who had no idea whether he could.
What followed was the most fucked up 20 minutes of his life, and he spent it stock-still and rock hard.
She told it plainly and in order. The wine in the ice bucket. The crying, and what the crying had been about, which she gave him straight — I love him, Simon. — and that one went in the way a needle goes in, small and sharp and permanent, and he took it, eyes front, and found it was survivable. And found, underneath the survivable, his body already doing the dark warm thing it did with everything now. Even this. Especially this.
She told him the speech from Jacob. The terms, both sides of them — the no that would end it forever, the yes that would never end at all, belong to him at least as much as you said out loud in their own bedroom in his wife's own level voice — and by then Simon's blood had stopped reporting to his brain, and he heard the rest through a kind of roar. The condom, and whose hands had taken it off. The thing the boy had made her say, and the number of times she'd said it, and the voice it had ended up in by the last saying — and she gave him that part slowly, watching his face, I'm going to get pregnant, Jacob, pitched not far off the voice itself — and Simon sat at the end of his own bed in the lamplight, forbidden to move, moving nothing, his heart slamming and his cock iron and tears almost, almost, breaching his eyes, all three at once, and made no attempt to file them separately. He had to remind himself he had wanted this. Engineered it.
"And... I believed him. I believe him now. I know the odds — I recited them to him myself, but... I believe. There's a wait now. Two weeks, three. I won't be taking anything." She put both hands flat on her own stomach, low. "To the world, you'll be the father. And if you can't live in this house with that — with me like this — then say so tonight, and we'll talk like grown-ups about what comes next. But if you stay, you stay for all of it. Whatever the test says. Whatever comes after. So."
The clock on the landing did its small dry work.
"Say something," said Anna.
What came up out of him, when it finally came, was the truth, the sentence that had somehow been brewing in the dark ever since their marriage began.
"I hope it took."
Something went out of her shoulders then — some last brace she'd been holding against him, or for him. "I know you do," she said, and smiled.
"When will you know?"
"Two weeks. Three to be safe."
"And if it's no?"
"Then it's over. Properly over — that's what makes it a bet. He keeps his word. I believe that too."
"And if it's yes—" He couldn't make that one a question.
"Then we're having a baby. Now come here."
What came next he experienced from somewhere almost outside his body. She drew him over her and guided him in with her own hand — into the heat where the boy had been twenty-four hours before, and the thought arrived welded to the sensation, inseparable from it, that the whole story was in here with him, ahead of him, further in than he could ever reach. She held his face and made him slow down. And then, because she recognized that mercy and cruelty had become almost the same thing, she put her mouth against his ear and gave him the rest of it.
"Feel that? That's where he left it," she whispered. "Twenty-four hours ago. It might already be done, Simon. I might be pregnant right now, this minute, while you're—"
Simon went under and did not come up. He finished on the spot, helpless, his blanks chasing the live round, last and least, moaning with gratitude into his wife's shoulder while she held him through it like something she was keeping — and if there was grief in the room, and there was, a thin clear seam of it running under everything, it had stopped being separable from the rest. And the rest was the best feeling of his life.
The wait was two and a half weeks, and Simon would not have traded it for any other fortnight of his existence.
He had spent the summer being schooled in every species of not-knowing — the dot on the map, the closed door, the rationed scraps — and this was the last of them and the greatest, and the first one they shared. The same not-knowing, in the same house, in the same bed. Anna wore it serenely, infuriatingly, hands forever finding her own stomach, sleeping like the dead. Simon wore it the other way: a man moving through his ordinary life with a charge sewn into every pocket, half-hard on the 8:14 at the thought that Jacob's seed might already, at that exact moment, be putting down roots in his wife. He had two browser tabs open that he believed were secret, earliest reliable test and due date calculator, and he'd stopped opening the stories altogether. Fiction had packed up entirely. Nothing on the internet was as obscene as breakfast in his own kitchen.
And at night, she fed him. His wife had taken to narrating possibility in the dark, clinical and unhurried — it's about the size of a full stop now; it'll be digging in about now, that's the word, they dig — biology as filth, the future read aloud to him like the stories he no longer needed, and twice she pulled him into her while she did it and he lasted barely longer than the whisper. He'd never been so precisely rationed in his life, or so full.
Leo rang on the Sunday, full of his new world — a girl mentioned twice, a society joined, Jake was good, they'd had pints Tuesday — and Simon stood in the doorway and watched his wife chat to their firstborn with her free hand resting on what she was already, privately, past all science, calling his sibling. A text landed once, midway through the second week, a Wednesday; he watched her read it, and smile, and put the phone face-down, and he didn't ask. Not asking was his discipline now. He was getting good at it, and there was — he could admit this in the dark — a low hum in the not-asking too. There was a low hum in everything now.
Carol rang to say thank you again for the run, and to report that Jacob was thriving, actually thriving. "Whatever's got into him," said Carol, "long may it last."
"Long may it last," agreed Anna, and caught Simon's eye over the phone, and did not smile, which was somehow filthier than smiling.
And then it was a Thursday, ordinary as a bus, four days late — she was never late — a box came down from the bathroom cabinet.
She did the necessary with the bathroom door open. That was new as well; there were no closed doors left in that house, not one, and Simon stood in the doorway and watched his wife do the least romantic thing two people can share and found his heart was going like the first night of all of it. She capped the test, set it face-down on the edge of the bath, and patted the cold enamel beside her.
They sat together on the edge of the tub, husband and wife, counting down three minutes. The extractor fan hummed. A bin lorry worked its way down the street, the ordinary world carrying on like it hadn't been told very momentous stuff was going on, actually. His knee went like a sewing machine until her hand came over and stilled it, and he was, he noticed remotely, hard, which seemed both deranged and exactly right — his body, loyal to the last, placing its bet.
"Time," said Anna.
Neither of them moved.
"You look," said Simon. "You already know."
"Together."
She picked it up and held it face-down between them, and then she took his hand and laid it over hers, so that they were both holding it — the little plastic future, the cheapest yet wisest oracle around — and he could feel her pulse through it, or his, no telling whose.
"Ready?" said Anna.
"No," said Simon, with the whole summer in his voice. "Go on."
She turned it over, and together, heads touching over the small lit window, husband and wife looked down at the rest of their lives.
THE END (FOR NOW)...