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I stare at my phone.
Nothing happens.
Which makes sense, because I blocked him. That’s the important detail my brain keeps skipping over, like a helpful little idiot.
No text can come through.
No call.
No low, sexy voice note telling me to breathe, or eat, or stop pretending I’m fine.
He can’t reach me because I made sure he couldn’t.
I did it in the hotel bathroom at 5:43 yesterday morning, sitting on the closed toilet lid with my clothes in my lap, feeling like a woman who briefly stepped out of her own life and then returned to find the door locked behind her.
Now I’m lying on a narrow clinic bed with a paper sheet over my hips, my knees still slightly bent, my phone in my hand, and a nurse somewhere beyond the curtain speaking softly to someone about specimen verification.
Specimen. Such a romantic word.
Nothing says life-changing reproductive event like a label printer.
The procedure is over. That’s the strange part.
I expected it to feel like something. Instead, it was fifteen quiet minutes in a bright room with a reclining table, a speculum, a catheter so thin I barely believed it could matter, and Dr. Acharya’s calm voice explaining each step before he did it.
The sample had already been prepared in the lab. Washed, concentrated, checked, signed off on by people with gloves and forms and calm faces. Alester was not here. I didn’t expect him to be here.
Petra had stood near the chair by the door with her tablet held against her ribs, not looking at my body, which somehow made me more aware that she knew exactly what was happening to it.
“Everything is proceeding according to protocol,” she had said before the procedure.
Protocol.
I had nodded like I was also proceeding according to protocol.
Dr. Acharya had been kind. Not overly warm. I appreciated that. Warmth would have made me cry, and I had worn mascara because apparently I enjoy setting traps for myself.
He told me I might have mild cramping. Spotting was possible. I could resume normal activity but should avoid strenuous exercise for the rest of the day. The clinic would schedule the blood test in about two weeks.
Two weeks.
Afterward, they tilted the table back a little and left me to rest for ten minutes.
Ten minutes. As if my body needs a little quiet to consider the proposal.
So now I’m here. Resting. Staring at my phone.
Waiting for a message from a man who cannot send one.
My thumb moves to his name.
D.
Still there in my contacts. Blocked, but still there.
I hate that I wrote only one word. I hate that I left before he woke up. I hate that I walked through the hotel lobby with my hair still smelling faintly like him and my legs feeling not quite steady, then got into a car and blocked his number before I could turn around.
Like I hadn’t left a man asleep in a bed where I had begged him to touch me again.
