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She gave him a funny look. “I mean… can you see us having a civil conversation?”
He looked down at his feet, shaking his head. “I don’t do this, though. Random hookups like this? I mean, I never have. Fuck, I never had unprotected fucking sex before.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh.”
Now, he felt stupid. “Just go. You’re trying to go.Go.”
She hesitated. Then she offered him her hand. “It’s been fun, Gunnar.”
He let out a laugh and took her hand. “Yeah, okay.”
They shook.
“You take care of yourself,” she said. “Have a good life. I hope you find some girl to settle down with who would never do something like this.” She gestured around.
“Uh… you know, I didn’t mean anything aboutyouwhen I said that,” he said.
“I know!” She extricated her hand. “Uh, okay. Goodbye.” She scampered around the big tree and off into the darkness, leaving him there alone.
He sat down on the bench and ran a hand over his face. He toyed with one of his tusks.
Well, then.
HILJD LAY INbed, covers tightly up to her chin, feeling like maybe she’d just done something wrong.
Here were the facts.
She was going to ovulate in two days. She knew this because you can’t be a person who goes through IVF and not get very good at understanding your own menstrual cycle. So, she knew her body. She knew when things were about to happen, and she didn’tmeanto keep track of these sorts of things, but she just did, in the back of her head, without even really meaning to.
She should never have agreed to have unprotected sex with that man. She should never have begged him to come inside her.
But worst of all, worst of all, she should never have deflected when he wanted to make it so that they could contact each other if need be.
She didn’t know why she’d said they could just do it bareback. She had been thinking that yeah, maybe she was sorta kinda in the fertile zone when she said it, and that was dangerous.
But she wanted ababy.
Sure, the desperate phase of the previous spring, when she’d taken wine to Niles’s house and asked him to fuck her, just for the purpose of insemination, when he’d been horrified, because it was a ridiculous fucking proposition—how did she think that was going to work, when Valdemar found out her baby daddy was his best friend, even if they weren’t together?—that desperate phase was over.
She’d calmed down.
She hadn’t done this on purpose, not exactly.
Just…
She hadn’t stopped it like she should have.
And then, after it was done, after he had come inside her, she’d felt pretty panicked. Not at the prospect of being pregnant. No, she wanted that. But the prospect of being forced to be pregnant with that guy.
They couldn’t be co-parents.
She could not have that guy in her life for eighteen years.
No.Nononono.
So, that was why she ran. If she had plausible deniability, that she didn’t know his last name, and she had no idea how to contact him, then it wasn’t really her fault when she didn’t tell him and raised his child in secret with no input from him.
That’s a very fucked up thing to do, Hiljd,she told herself.
