Chapter 18: Caught

I was on day fifteen — the last of the three days dead in the middle of my cycle when I could get pregnant. I knew it to the day; I’d been counting on my fingers since my last period, and so had he.

I let him into my room the way I’d let him in every night that week — easy, almost soft about it — because I had the one thing he didn’t know I had. Across my room in my own bathroom, taped into the bottom of the tampon carton where his hands never went, was the pill, and I’d timed it to tonight on purpose: swallow it after his last load and wipe those three days off me in one clean go. So I’d let him breed away all week and smiled behind my face the whole time, because not a drop of it was going to count. Tonight was the last of it. Then the pill, then morning, then nothing.

He rolled the chair out from under the handle himself and set it aside — no need to pretend the barricade meant a thing, not between us, not now — and came to the bed and drew the covers off me and lowered himself down and worked himself into me slow. The old split opened, the deep sick stretch of the place that only ever fit him, the burn of it going in. I went where I went now, up behind my own eyes, and left the body on the bed to do the being-used without me.

But it didn’t lie still the way it used to. He’d trained it out of that. A long way below me the girth of him dragged over my clit on every stroke, patient, over and over, and the body I’d walked out of started to climb — hot and slick and pushing itself up onto him for more, while the rest of me hung back in the dark and couldn’t call it down. Low in me, mine and not mine, it all drew up tight.

And it got there. It clenched and broke and pulled at him in long helpless waves, and I hated it from the back of my own skull, and it did not care that I hated it. It did it for him, whether I came along or not.

He felt it go. And this time he came down to breed — deeper, heavier, a new intent in the weight of him, working the head of himself up hard against the mouth of my womb, so deep it knocked a sound out of me I hadn’t sent.

“You know what week this is,” he said, low and thick, grinding the head of himself against the sealed deep of me. “I do. Known it for weeks — kept your calendar better than you ever kept it yourself.” He wasn’t quick about it now; this was the thing he’d built the whole summer toward, and he took his time getting to it. “This one’s not a joke, sweetheart. Not a load that doesn’t count. This one goes in on purpose — right where it catches.” He ground himself against the deepest sealed part of me. “Right up against it. That’s where it’s going.”

“Work with me,” he said. All summer he’d had to buy this off me an inch at a time — a clean shower for a little of it, an easy hour for a little more — because left alone I gave him the body and took the rest of myself off behind my eyes where he couldn’t follow. Somewhere in there that had stopped being enough for him. He wanted me present, in it, the one thing about me he could never just reach in and take; and tonight, of all nights, he was not going to breed an empty girl. “Don’t just take it. You want it too. Show me.” And then the trade, mild, like a favor he was doing me: “New sleeves came in for Sara this week — tighter than the last batch, a real snug cut. You make tonight good for me — really good — and I’ll break them in on her a few nights instead of you. Give you a rest.”

A tighter sleeve on the copy and a few nights off for me. He’d get the snug new grip the summer had long since worn out of me, and I’d get my own door left shut. I’d begged him for exactly that once, back near the start — use her, you built her for it, leave me be — and he’d turned it down flat, because a machine that would do anything still couldn’t do what I did: lie there hating every second of it and let him have me anyway. That was the part he’d never trade. But my wanting it — climbing onto him, asking for it in his ear — that he’d never once gotten off me, and tonight he’d give up a few nights of the doll to have it.

So I took his trade — and I’d give him more than he’d bargained to buy, because giving it to him, all of it, was how I beat him. He wanted me to want it: fine. I’d want it louder and filthier than he’d ever dared drag out of me, take everything he had and beg him for more, and by morning wash every drop of what he thought he’d planted back out of me and leave him holding nothing. Let him have the whole show tonight. It cost him everything and me nothing. So I came up out of the little room at the back of my skull, down into the body on the bed, and set out to win.

I took his hand off the mattress and set it on my breast and arched up into it, and when he squeezed I made the sound. His breath snagged — he’d never once had that off me, not for anything. “There she is,” he said, low, thrilled. “There’s my girl. Knew she was in there.” I caught his other hand and filled it too, and when his mouth came down I fed him the nipple and held his head there like I couldn’t get my fill of him having it.

He talked the whole way through it, low and thick and unhurried.

“Fourteen.” He said it wondering, pleased with himself. “Gonna put a baby in my own fourteen-year-old. Right when you’re ovulating, too — I know that little cycle of yours better than you know it yourself, always have.” His hips working, deep and slow. “Say you want it.”

“I want it.” Wet-voiced, the ache turned on like a tap. “I want your baby.”

“Your own daddy’s baby.” He wanted the whole filthy shape of it named, so I named it.

“Yours.” A moan riding under it. “I want yours.”

It only wound him tighter, and he kept talking, because the naming was half of what he was after. “You’re gonna show by fall. Blow right up out to here—” his hand spreading over my flat stomach “—won’t be a pair of those little jeans left that fits you. And these—” he took a breast and hefted it, greedy “—these fatten up too, you know that? Go up a size, two, whatever comes after what you’ve got now.” He didn’t know the letters and didn’t care to; he just knew they’d swell, and the guessing was worse than knowing somehow, a man appraising the body he meant to wreck. “Whole hill’s gonna see it on you. Every one of your little friends. That Sloane. All of them clocking the belly on you, and not one of them ever guessing it was your own father who put it there.”

And I let him lay the whole ruined future out on top of me — so sure of every piece of it, so pleased with himself — and lay there smiling behind my face, because he was breeding a whole summer’s work into a girl who’d already won and didn’t know it. None of it was going to take. Not one piece of it. Across my room, in my own bathroom, sat my salvation, and by morning it would wash the whole night out of me and he’d never know. So I let him talk, and I gave him back what he was after. “Do it, then,” I breathed, rolling up onto him, clenching. “Squirt it in me. Deep. I want your seed.”