The August Problem
Copyright© 2026 by Wesley Doyle
Chapter 6: New Year’s Eve
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 6: New Year’s Eve - 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
She printed it on the thirty-first. All nine tabs, thirty-seven pages, double-sided, stapled at the corner, because she was still herself.
They’d skipped Jen’s party. Instead they were in their own backyard, bundled in parkas on two lawn chairs dragged through six inches of snow. Danny had a fire going in the little steel pit he’d bought at Menards and used exactly twice. He had his ukulele. He had a bottle of champagne in a snowbank and two coffee mugs, because the champagne flutes were packed away somewhere and neither of them could be bothered.
Nora had taken one sip of hers and set it down. “This tastes like pennies,” she said.
“It was eleven dollars,” Danny said. “It’s supposed to taste like pennies.”
At 11:58 she stood up with PROJECT AUGUST in her mittened hands.
“Are you sure?” Danny asked. He’d stopped strumming. “You don’t have to. You could just — close the laptop. Put it in a folder.”
“If I put it in a folder,” Nora said, “I’ll open the folder.”
She looked down at the first page. The temperature chart, its tidy little mountain range. Window A, red. Window B, gray. Window C, red. Four months of her life in conditional formatting.
“Next year,” she said. “Whatever month.”
“Whatever month,” Danny agreed.
On somebody’s phone, a few backyards over, a crowd in Times Square began to count down from ten. Nora dropped the packet into the fire. The staple held for a second. Then the edges curled and blackened, and the pages fanned open one by one and went up in a bright, quick rush. Little burning flakes rose into the dark and drifted out over the snow.
Danny started playing “Auld Lang Syne” on the ukulele, badly, and singing it worse. Nora laughed and pulled him up out of his chair by the front of his parka and kissed him while the last of the spreadsheet burned. Fireworks went off somewhere over the Menomonee Valley, red and green and gold.
“Happy New Year,” he said against her mouth.
“Happy New Year.”
She didn’t finish the champagne. She went to bed at 12:20, which was unlike her, and slept eleven hours, which was even more unlike her. In the morning she woke up starving for pickles. She didn’t think anything of it at all.
— Coda. August —
It was Danny who noticed, in the end.
It was the twelfth of January. Nora had eaten an entire jar of bread-and-butter pickles standing at the open refrigerator. She had fallen asleep on the couch at seven-thirty two nights running. She’d thrown up, briefly and without drama, after smelling Danny’s coffee. That was the coffee she had drunk every morning of their marriage.
He stood in the kitchen doorway holding the empty pickle jar and said, very carefully, “Nora. When was your period?”
She opened her mouth to tell him. Then she closed it. She realized, with a vertigo she’d never felt before, that she had absolutely no idea. She had burned the only record.
The test took ninety seconds. They sat on the edge of the bathtub together and watched it. Two lines came up, the second one so fast and so dark it was almost rude.
Danny made a sound she had never heard a human being make. Then he picked her up off the bathtub and spun her around in the tiny bathroom and knocked the toothbrush holder into the sink. Neither of them noticed.
The dating ultrasound put conception on or about the nineteenth of December. The OB, a brisk woman named Dr. Feld, printed out a little wheel and turned it and announced the due date: the tenth of September.
Nora started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Dr. Feld waited this out with the patience of a woman who had seen everything.
Barb, on the phone that night, was silent for a full five seconds. Then she said, “September?”
“September, Mom.”
Another silence. Then, in a voice of tremendous, wounded nobility: “Well. I suppose I’ll make a separate cake.”
She did not build a spreadsheet for the pregnancy. Mostly.