Page 67 of Sexting the Cowboy
“It is.” She slurps. “But worth it.”
We sit in the easy crackle that follows, both of us replaying our own movies in our heads. The tent is still empty. The fairground is waking, stretching. Somewhere, a bull throws his weight against the pen, and the fence answers back with a shiver. It’s too early for the rodeo medics to be more than a rumor. It’s just us and the coffee and the stupid fans and my stomach doing a slow, unruly roll.
“Good thing you’re on the pill,” Mac says breezily, like she’s commenting on the weather, “or you’d be in trouble. Condoms can only do so much.”
The world goes very quiet, the way it does before a real storm. I open my mouth to agree, to say the easy thing, to let the conversation skip like a stone.
We haven’t been using condoms.
I almost say it out loud and stop myself. I’m a doctor. I’m the person who lectures teenagers about choices and condoms and why spontaneous is a word you respect, not a path you sprint down barefoot. My face flames so hot it feels like a symptom. I close the drawer of my thoughts and fold my stupid, impulsive, hypocrite self back into my scrubs.
“Yeah,” I say. My voice sounds normal, which is a betrayal. “That’d be crazy. Can’t handle a baby with my clinic struggling.”
Mac nods, buying the deflection like it’s on sale. “Yeah, you’d have to be nuts to have a kid right now. We’re basically kids ourselves.”
We are not. We’re in our late twenties with careers and lives. But I let her have the line because I can’t deal with anything but the calendar in my head. She tips the cup and drains the last of the ice.
My mind keeps running. Pill, pill, pill.
When did I take it last? Wednesday in my bathroom. No, that was last week. I switched purses. The pill case is in the black leather one with the broken zipper. I think. Or did I stick it in the glove box after the drug rep lunch because I didn’t want to leave it in the sun? I see my hand, dropping something in the glove box and shutting it with my wrist because my fingers were full. Was that it? Or was that the sample inhalers for Bo Davis’s kid?
Was that two weeks ago? Three?
I do the math automatically, the way a body keeps doing what it’s trained to do even when the person steering it is lost. When was the date of my last period?
I don’t…
I count again. Clinic day. Then the first night Mac filmed the tie-down ropers at sunset. I wore the gray scrubs, not the blue. The black hoodie. Brick texted me a joke about cowboy knots. I laughed in my kitchen, alone. That was nine days after. Eleven? Fourteen? My stomach drops like an elevator that forgot the floor.
I can’t…I’m late.
My hand tightens around the water bottle until the plastic caves. The fan squeaks. The world keeps acting like it didn’t hear what I just heard inside my own head.
“Hey,” Mac says, oblivious to the giant bell I just rang for myself. She taps the cup with her nail. “If you see the lemonade stand guy, tell him to stop flirting with my camera. He’s going to sprain a hip.”
“Sure,” I say, perfectly calm, the way people are perfectly calm when they’re drowning in shallow water and no one knows because they don’t want to splash.
My brain scolds me—doctor, doctor, doctor—and then offers a hundred things I don’t need right now—incidence statistics, failure rates, pharmacokinetics, half-lives. I don’t want science. I want a clock I can turn backward, a pill bottle that rattles in my hand with proof I didn’t forget who I am.
I realize, dimly, that my mouth is moving. “Yeah,” I hear myself say. “That’d be crazy.”
“What would be?” Mac asks, taking my non sequitur and accepting it as currency.
“To have a baby now,” I say lightly, like we’re strangers in a grocery line making jokes about the price of milk. “Clinic’s still on life support as it is.”
“True,” she says, nodding. “And you mentioned that already.”
“Did I?”
Her nodding slows. “What’s up?”
I force a laugh I don’t recognize as mine. “I think the sun is getting to me.”
“More water, then.” She stands, slinging the camera bag across her body. “I should go claim a spot near the chutes before the other vultures do.” She squeezes my shoulder. “Thanks for letting me overshare for sport.”
“Any time,” I say. “That’s what the tent is for.”
“And you’re okay? Is your head fuzzy or anything on that chart?”
