Previously…
CHAPTER 13: WE CAN DO HARD THINGS
HARRISON»
“OKAY, EXPLAIN THIS TO ME ONE MORE TIME,” Trey says, his mouth still hanging wide open like he’s waiting for the story to suddenly make sense.
“Dude, I don’t think repeating myself for the seventh time is gonna change anything,” I say, dropping my head onto the table hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
The couple across from us pauses mid-bite, both of them glancing over like we just raised the volume in the entire place. After a second, they go back to their food, but slower now, like they’re still listening.
“I just wanna know how it happened,” Trey says, leaning forward, like there’s some version of this where the answer isn’t completely obvious.
I lift my head just enough to look at him. “I fucked her without a condom,” I blurt.
Too loud.
A few more heads turn this time. No one even tries to hide it.
“Could you be any louder?” Trey asks like he didn’t just pull that one out of me.
“Can we please leave?”
“I’m still working on my huevos rancheros, and you were gonna tell me about the night this all happened,” he says, sticking a fork into the food on his plate.
I lay my head back down and look out the window, my mind drifting back to last night.
12 HOURS EARLIER
“So you’re pregnant?” I ask.
“Yes—”
I cut her off before she can finish.
“And you’re sure.”
She exhales through her nose, already irritated. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
I nod like that helps anything. “I see.”
It doesn’t feel like I do.
“And you had a vasectomy?” she asks Jeff, turning to him like she’s just now circling back to the part that actually matters.
“Yeah.”
No hesitation.
“So you never wanted a family of your own?”
Jeff shifts slightly, like he’s buying himself a second. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “I just knew early on I didn’t want kids.”
“Huh.”
The way she says it isn’t casual. It’s sharp. Disbelieving.
Then she looks between us, something tighter in her expression now. “How can you be so cavalier about all of this?”
Her voice doesn’t rise, but there’s weight in it—like she’s already carrying more than either of us are willing to pick up.
“There’s an alien growing inside of me that’s gonna suck the life out of me,” she says, one hand pressing lightly against her stomach like she’s reminding herself it’s real. “I think I get to be as cavalier as I want.”
No one answers that.
There’s a beat where all three of us just sit there, at a loss for words or something like it.
“Right—so what do we do now?” I ask, because the silence is worse.
It comes out flatter than I mean it to, like I’m asking about dinner plans. Like there’s a next step we can just agree on and move past this.
But there isn’t.
That’s the question.
And as far as I can tell, none of us has an answer.
THE PRESENT
“So this happened right after you guys left my house?” Trey asks.
“Well—not right after,” I say, shaking my head a little, like I can rewind it and show him the exact sequence if I try hard enough.
My mind drifts again, uninvited, back to last night—picking through it, trying to remember what came first, what led to what, like maybe if I can rebuild the chronological order of things it’ll make more sense now than it did then.
12 HOURS EARLIER
Jeff is on top of me, smiling—that look like he’s been waiting for this moment his entire life. He kisses his way up my body, unhurried, certain, like he already knows where I’ll give in. The tension in me starts to drain, not disappear but change—turn into something else. Something that wants this more than anything.
It’s the way he touches me. Not one thing, but all of it together—firm where it matters, careful where it counts, like he understands my body without having to ask. There’s nothing remotely tentative about him, nothing fragile. He moves like he knows exactly which parts of me will remember this later, which places will tell the story of what happens long after the night is over.
And I let him. I stay right there with him, letting it build, letting it mean something—
or at least that’s the idea, right up until the doorbell chimes.
THE PRESENT
Trey and I are outside now, walking back to his car. The midday air feels sharper than it should have, or maybe that’s just me. Brunch noise still hums behind us—plates, chatter, someone laughing too loud. A woman yells for her kid to stop jumping on something, another tells her friend about the car her dad is trying to surprise her with, and a man is teaching his son to tie his shoes—saying something about a bunny going through a loop or something that, stuff that on any other day, I might not even notice—like the world hasn’t felt the seismic shift that is my life.
The whole Amber thing throws a wrench into my life—and it feels like that wrench is packed with dynamite, going off and blowing everything wide open.
I have too much in my head all at once. Alone. Lost. Confused. Worried. It all stacks up on top of the baseline anxiety I already carry around like it’s part of my personality. My chest feels tight, my thoughts run faster than I can keep up, trying to make sense of something that doesn’t want to make sense.
And the worst part is how quickly it all shifts—from where I am ten minutes before, to the moment I walk into the living room last night. Like I’m moving in one direction all night and then get knocked completely off course without any warning.
“You’re going to be okay, dude,” Trey says.
“Are you about to be a dad, too?” I ask.
“Huh—no.”
“Then with all due respect, you don’t know that it’s going to be okay,” I snap.
“Sorry, my bad.”
I realize too late that I snap at Trey for what amounts to my own problems.
“No, man, I’m sorry. This is all just so overwhelming.”
“I’d say I get it, but I don’t want you to wail on my face.”
We both laugh.
We reach the car, Trey fumbling in his pockets for a key fob.
“Fuck me, I can never keep up with that damn thing.”
“Just touch the door handle,” I say.
“What?” he asks, still patting down his pockets.
“Grab the door handle. If your keys are on you, the door will unlock.”
He looks at me like I’m an alien—one he’s about to cuss out—but the moment he touches the door handle, the locks disengage.
“Holy shit—how’d you?”
Trey does a thing from time to time where he asks a question but takes the shortest possible route to get there.
“I literally work on cars all day. You’d be surprised what I know.”
We climb inside. Trey starts the engine and pulls away from the curb just as another car snatches up the parking space.
“Can I stay at your place tonight?”
“Why? I thought you and Jeff already made nice?”
“We did, but with the whole Amber thing, he’s just walking around with guilt face.”
Another Harrison-Treyism.
“Well, it’s not like he put your dick in her—wait—did he?”
“No, he didn’t—and don’t use that word,” I say. “I think he feels guilty for creating the situation and not being safe about it.”
“Have you guys thought about therapy?”
I give him the side eye.
“A little late for that, don’t you think?”
“Wanna watch a movie?”
“Sure, what were you thinking?” I ask. A movie could be a much-needed distraction.
“What about Juno?”
“Trey?”
“Yeah?”
Deadpan.
“Fuck you.”
JEFF»
Amber spends the night on the couch. She is too panicked to drive home, too wound up to trust herself behind the wheel. Now she’s still sleeping—curled in on herself, breathing shallow, like even in rest she hasn’t quite let go of it. I give her the bed. It feels like the gentlemanly thing to do at the time, or at least it does in the moment.
Harrison high-tails it out of here as soon as the sun starts pushing through the blinds, and if I’m being honest, I don’t blame him. The kid is gay—has sex once with a girl, and the girl gets pregnant—what are the chances. It’s the kind of bad math you don’t see coming until it’s already solved. There is a time when I am sowing my wild oats, not being careful, moving through people and nights without much thought. Aside from a few scares, nothing like this ever happens. Nothing that sticks. Nothing that stays.
I can understand how he might be feeling—cornered, confused, like the ground shifts under him without warning. Part of me wishes he would stay so we can talk it through, put some shape to it, figure out what comes next. But I also understand the instinct to run. The need for distance when everything suddenly feels too close.
It’s not a scare—it’s happening, and it’s happening to him of all people. And yes, I feel partly to blame. A threesome with a girl I met on an app.
Fuck—how could this happen?
I move into the kitchen, trying to put something together for breakfast, but my hands don’t really know what they’re doing. I open the fridge, stare at what’s inside like there’s an answer in there somewhere, and I can’t help but think Amber should be eating something better now—something healthy. Like suddenly it’s not just about her anymore. Funny how fast that switch flips. One piece of information, and people start treating you differently. Like you’re made of glass. Like one wrong move might crack something open.
The thing is—Amber has been a fuck buddy for a while now. Easy. Casual. No real rules, at least none we ever say out loud. She’s never seemed concerned about condoms. I don’t know… I guess I never really think about it either. It is just one of those things that never comes up until now, when it probably should have. And I never tell her about the vasectomy. Never feel like I have to. Maybe she is on something—birth control, an IUD, something that fails. That happens all the time. People trust the system until it doesn’t work.
Fuck—I should’ve been more responsible with him. I should’ve given him a condom. He talks about his PrEP medication all the time, like he’s doing everything right—and in his world, he is. But that’s just HIV. That’s one part of the equation. I don’t know who Amber’s been with. I don’t know where any of this overlaps. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think about it either. I just… move through it. Take chances and call it me living my best life. Roll the dice on things I don’t want to look too closely at.
And now it’s all sitting here in front of me—real, unavoidable, and a hell of a lot harder to ignore.
I hear a noise behind me, and for a second I think it’s Harrison, but it’s Amber. She is clearly still sleepy and doesn’t get her bearings before walking in.
“Morning,” she says, sleepily.
“Morning—want anything to eat? I’m making eggs and French toast.”
“Probably not the best move with the morning sickness,” she says.
“Oh—right… I don’t actually know what that means,” I admit, genuinely confused.
I’ve heard the vernacular, sure, but I’ve never really understood it. Are pregnant women just automatically nauseous in the mornings, or does anything they eat come right back up?
“I’ll just take some crackers if you have any,” she says, easing herself against the counter.
“I think I can rustle up something like that,” I say.
I dig around in the cupboard. No saltines. No crackers of any kind, actually. I do find a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos Harrison tries to hide. Bastard—right, crackers. I keep digging. There’s a box of Girl Scout cookies shoved in the back, the kind my ex—Harrison’s mom—used to buy by the case.
I come up empty.
“No such luck,” I say, glancing back at her. “Sorry.”
“Can I ask you something?”
There’s an edge to her voice now—subtle, but there. Enough to make me look up.
“Yeah,” I say, slower this time.
She shifts her weight against the counter, arms crossing loosely over her stomach to the degree that something registers.
“So how often do vasectomies last for—I mean, do they ever heal over time?”
The question is strange in a way that in and of itself seems strange.
Not just what she’s asking—but how she’s asking it. Careful, but not casual. Like she already has a reason for it.
What the hell kind of question is that? And why is she so interested in my self-neutering all of a sudden?
I hesitate for half a second, replaying the conversation I had with the doctor years ago. The pamphlet. The reassurances. But in the end, it’s just a simple consent to surgery form.
“Well, it’s meant to be permanent,” I say. “That’s kind of the whole point. They cut and seal the vas deferens—so sperm doesn’t make it into the semen.”
She watches me closely.
“There’s a really small chance it can reverse on its own,” I add, thinking back. “But it’s rare. Like… really rare. Most of the time, if it fails, it’s because it doesn’t take properly in the first place—not years later.”
I shrug, like that should settle it. Like that’s just information.
“Why?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer right away.
“No reason?”
Something isn’t right.
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