The August Problem
Copyright© 2026 by Wesley Doyle
Chapter 5: December
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 5: December - Nora Kowalski is an actuary, and her family has eleven August birthdays crammed onto one faded backyard banner. She doesn’t believe in coincidence, only in distributions nobody has looked at closely enough. So when she and her husband Danny, a band teacher with a romantic streak, decide to have a baby, she builds a spreadsheet. The math is simple: to get an August due date, they have to conceive between Halloween and New Year’s. The holidays don’t cooperate. A costume party, a Thanksgiving packe
Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual
Her period came on the ninth of December, on schedule, to the hour. Her body, it turned out, kept better books than she did.
She’d taken a test two days before. It was too early and she knew it was too early, and it had come back with one stark pink line. She had told herself that meant nothing, and had very nearly believed it. Then on the morning of the ninth she was standing in the bathroom with her toothbrush in her mouth when she felt the familiar dull cramp low in her belly. She knew before she looked.
She didn’t cry. She was an actuary. She understood that the per-cycle probability of conception for a healthy couple in their thirties was somewhere around twenty to twenty-five percent. That meant that, statistically, Window B had always been more likely to fail than to succeed. This was not a tragedy. It was a coin flip weighted against her, landing the way it usually landed.
She opened the laptop, went to the WINDOWS tab, and changed the color of Window B from green to gray. Then she sat there for a while looking at Window C, which was red.
Danny found her twenty minutes later still sitting there, toothbrush on the table beside her, cold coffee untouched. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the screen, and then at her face, and then he got down on the kitchen floor on his bad knees, put his arms around her waist, and laid his head in her lap.
That was when she cried.
The Great Lakes Mutual holiday party was on Friday the eighteenth, in the ballroom of a hotel near the airport that had last been renovated during the Clinton administration. There was an ugly sweater contest. There was a carving station. There was a DJ who played “All I Want for Christmas Is You” four times in the first hour.
Nora wore a sweater with a reindeer on it whose nose lit up when you pressed it. Danny wore a sweater with a full nativity scene, including, for reasons he refused to explain, a saxophone-playing camel. People kept pressing Nora’s reindeer nose, which she found she didn’t mind. She drank three glasses of mulled wine and was beginning to feel fine. Better than fine. Loose and warm and almost happy.
And then Priya from Underwriting tapped her glass.
Priya was twenty-nine. Priya had been married eleven months. Priya stood up on a chair in a Santa hat and announced to forty-five actuaries and claims adjusters that she and her husband Raj were expecting. They hadn’t planned it, she said, laughing, wiping her eyes. Honestly, it had been a total accident. But they were so happy. The baby was due in August.
Everyone cheered. Nora cheered. She clapped and smiled and hugged Priya and said all the right things. Then she said, “Excuse me,” very pleasantly, to nobody in particular, and walked out of the ballroom and down a carpeted hall and through a fire door into a concrete stairwell. She sat down on the steps between the second and third floors with her reindeer nose blinking.
Danny found her about four minutes later. He always found her. She’d stopped being surprised by it years ago.
He sat down on the step below, leaned his back against her shins, and didn’t say anything for a while.
“An accident,” she said finally. “An accident.”
“I know.”
“I have nine tabs, Danny.”
“I know, honey.”
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