The rod had been under the skin of my left upper arm since the free government clinic appointment I arranged myself in Senior School. Thin. Flexible. A quiet length of plastic and hormone that had done its job without complaint and without anyone at home ever needing to know. No parental permission was required.

I had been on free UK contraception in one form or another since the earliest age the system allowed. Plan B more than once. The Pill for a stretch. Then the implant as the longest-lasting option. No condoms. Ever.

I never needed to check whether the rod was still there. It was. The only variables that mattered were residual hormone levels over time, frequency of exposure, depth of deposit, and sheer cumulative volume.

I kept a private spreadsheet on my phone. Nothing dramatic. Date. Approximate number of loads. Source where it mattered. Running estimate of residual efficacy against published failure rates. Official failure rate under normal conditions sits under one percent per year, closer to 0.05 percent in the clean data. With elevated daily volume the adjusted risk rose.

I updated the numbers after every session the same way I updated module deadlines. Clean. Precise. Private.

I was never too particular, as long as he was tall enough and Black. Pakistani was fine if he was packing.

Leon was the one I calculated around, the one I hoped would be responsible if the numbers finally tipped. But he was never the only one. The rented house in the Fallowfield Halls, the university parties, the Caribbean-African UK football and rugby players, Pakistani lads from Cheetham Hill who ended up in my room, the short fade who came with the business girl’s boyfriend, the ordinary boys who ended up in my room as an after-party. All of them left loads.

I pushed every Black or Brown load back inside me out of habit. Any of those could be the father. That was simply the arithmetic of the life I was living. The White ones could come on me or in my mouth, or in my arse if I was drunk enough. For them, my policy was a matter-of-fact black spade sticker stuck to the cover of my white MacBook.

Leon was the one I returned to on purpose.

I had first taken him (technically he had taken me) the night I got separated from Jamal and Cliff at a party in a flat that already smelled of spilled lager and bodies. One minute I was with them in the kitchen. The next, the corridor had closed behind me and I was in the main room where a dirty mattress had been dragged into the middle of the floor.

Someone already had me on my back. Someone else was using my mouth. The wet sounds were continuous and filthy. The slap of skin on skin was loud over the music. Spit ran from the corners of my mouth in slow clear strings and darkened the stained fabric under my cheek. My grool had soaked the mattress beneath my open thighs in a widening warm patch that clung to the backs of my legs.

Leon the Bull was there. Late-twenties or early-thirties. Nearly seven feet tall and heavily built. Extremely well-endowed. The kind of Black man who did not ask permission for the space he took up. He was known in certain Greater Manchester circles as a bull for local cuckold and hot-wife couples and for the amateur breeding clips he put up for sale on the porn sites.

He looked at the mess on the mattress, looked at me, and simply took the next turn. He held my knees wide with both large hands and watched every thick inch disappear inside me.

He made me beg him to come inside my pussy while he fucked me, voice low and rough over the noise of the room. I did. When he came, he stayed buried and told me to keep it.

After that night the obsession settled in cleanly. I had always known that I was born to take big Black cock and have Black babies, and I wanted the first one to be his.

Fallowfield in my first semester was a shared house off Wilmslow Road with three other girls who didn’t know the difference between the face I wore to lectures and the one that came out after dark. The carpet smelled of last year’s takeaway. The boiler knocked between two and three in the morning. It was so bad that I planned to move back home with Mum and Dad next semester. It was early enough in the term that I still hadn’t learned the girls’ names.

I walked to seminars with the same careful posture I had used through secondary school, took notes in clean handwriting, and handed the first short exercise in twelve hours early. The tutor wrote “clear and precise” in the margin. I read the comment once and closed the file.

The hunger measured the days between locked doors the same way it always had. Ordinary boys filled the short gaps.

Keep the face clean. Keep the numbers private. The rest is just volume. Leon is the one the arithmetic is for.

By the second Thursday of term word had already travelled. Someone had dropped a link during Freshers’ Week. The local lads knew which room in the Wilmslow Road house held the quiet honours girl who took Black cock.

That night the business girl’s boyfriend brought three of them back. He wasn’t hosting a social call; he was acting as a gatekeeper, trading access to my room for status among the Caribbean-African UK rugby and football circles.

The short fade was there again, the one with the neat haircut and the thicker build. A quieter lad with a northern accent I couldn’t place. And a third I hadn’t seen before, dark-skinned, heavier in the shoulders, who looked at me across the kitchen and didn’t look away.

I stayed in my room with the new student handbook open. At half past twelve there was a knock. I opened the door. The short fade stood there with the other two further back in the hallway.

“You busy?” he asked for all three.

I shrugged. “Not really.”

They came in.

I locked the door. The room was too small for three of them and the bed was too narrow, but none of that mattered once the first cock was out.

I took the short fade in my mouth while the quieter one pulled my knickers down and pushed into me from behind. The wet sound of it filled the small space immediately. Thick. Rhythmic. Unmistakable.

I could feel my pussy coating him with every stroke, the slick heat of it spreading against the insides of my thighs, the sound growing wetter as he found his rhythm.

Spit collected under my tongue stud from the pressure of the one in my mouth and ran in a slow string down my chin onto the sheet. I let it drip out.

When the first two finished (one in my mouth, one across my tits, since they were both White) I looked at the Black one. The wet sound of my own fingers moving inside myself was loud in the quiet that followed.

Was he in my French class?

The Black lad was thicker, less careful. He lasted longer, drove deeper, and left me with a handprint on the back of my thigh that would show under the seminar skirt on Monday if I was not careful.

The wet slap of his hips against the mess already coating me was loud in the narrow room. When he came I clenched and held, then pushed the fresh load higher the same way, feeling the combined volume shift inside me, heavy and warm.