Page 17 of Deviant Desires

14

BAMBI

Iwas upset when Mateo first left, but I saw pretty quickly that it was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to reconcile myself with his crimes. I was free.

I waited a few days, expecting him to come back and tell me that I had to forgive him. But he never returned. And after a couple of weeks, afor salesign showed up on his front lawn. It was just another marker on my road to freedom.

Until my breasts started hurting.

It was strange. I got up one morning and took a shower before work. The tendrils of water rained down on my body and every time a droplet hit my nipples, it felt like a little sting of pain. When I massaged them, thinking that perhaps they were sore from the direct contact, they felt like bruised little points. The rest of my breasts were no better. I fondled myself looking for lumps or swollen nodules, swearing that this must be a sign of breast cancer. They were tender and heavy and every squeeze felt like I was pushing on a bruise.

Dr. Google told me that the pain in my nipples probably came from wearing a rough fabric that irritated my nipples. I told myself that made sense. Over the weekend I’d gone out with Catherine and hadn’t bothered to wear a bra. Perhaps the dress I wore that day had scraped my nipples raw. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but it made sense. It was thelogicalanswer. I ignored the second most common cause: pregnancy. There was no way I was pregnant; I wasn’t even having sex.

My breasts became a non-issue after a few more days. As fall set in, I got sick. The doctor couldn’t be sure it was the flu since I’d tested negative, but I had all the symptoms. I had a fever, I was vomiting, my entire body ached, and I couldn’t make it through more than a couple of hours before I needed a nap. I went to the store to stock up on chicken noodle soup, Gatorade, and cold meds before lying around the house for five days.

I was miserable. I couldn’t keep anything down, not even the chicken noodle soup. The taste of broth coming back up almost ruined me on chicken noodle forever. I stopped eating it after the first day and switched to toast and peanut butter. It was just bland enough that when I threw it back up, the smell didn’t make me vomit again.

I slipped from day to night in a haze of cold meds, ibuprofen, cough drops, and mucus tablets. Everything I could take, I took. I stuffed myself so full of over-the-counter drugs that I think I hallucinated one night at 3:00 am.

But as every cold does, it went away. I woke up one morning and my body didn’t hurt anymore. Then the next day my cough went away. And after a week, the only thing still actively happening was the vomiting. It didn’t feel triggered by anything though. It didn’t matter if I ate toast or had a piece of cake. I’d inevitably be walking around a few hours later and feel my stomach turn upside down and know that I only had ten seconds to make it to a garbage can.

On one particularly heinous day while I was draped over my office garbage can, I called Catherine to complain again. She’d been patiently listening to me bitch and moan for days now. “Make it stop,” I whined to her.

I could hear her typing over the phone. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, no doubt responding to an email at work. “Honey, I hate to say this, but have you taken a pregnancy test?”

The dreaded word was back. Why was everyone convinced I was pregnant? First, Google. Now, my best friend. A few days ago I even heard snickering among the student workers when I threw up while directing event set up. They batted around the P-word in hushed tones.

“Cat, I can’t be pregnant. I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m not even having sex right now. I’m celibate.” I pushed away from the garbage can and laid on the floor of my office. “If I’m pregnant, you’re going to have to start calling me the Virgin Mary.”

Catherine was unimpressed. “You might not be having sex now, but if you’re a couple of months along, maybe it was someone you had sex with 2-3 months ago. You don’t know.”

But I did know. It dawned on me that I’d had sex a few weeks ago with someone who didn’t wear protection. “Oh, my god,” I whispered into the line, “I might be pregnant.”

That caught Catherine’s attention. She stopped typing and asked who the father might be.

When Mateo had come back into my life for those few days, I didn’t tell Cat about it. I didn’t want her to freak out. If she thought I couldn’t handle it, she would have shown up at Mateo’s door and threatened to kill him. She never would have done it, but she would have seen it as a way to protect me against him. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I groaned. “Don’t be mad.”

She wasn’t mad, she was titillated by all the scandalous details. “You filthy girl.” I could hear her grin over the phone. “And you let him cum inside you?”

“It wasn’t like I could stop him,” I mumbled. “He’s a force of nature, Cat. You know that.”

Together we counted the weeks and everything lined up. I was ovulating around the week he cornered me in my office and fucked me on the hood of his car. There was a chance one of his ambitious little swimmers had found an egg and implanted.

We took an early lunch that day to meet up at the Walgreens. It was halfway between both of our offices and we squeezed into a tiny bathroom together. Cat faced the wall while I peed on the stick, trying to make light of the situation. “At least your baby will be cute. You and Mateo always made such a pretty couple.”

It didn’t even take three minutes for the damn stick to show a plus sign. I set it in the sink as I wiped and pulled up my pants. By the time Cat and I hovered over it to stare, that damned little plus sign was staring back at us. “Motherfucker,” I swore.

Cat squealed with excitement. “I’m going to be an aunt!”

I didn’t remind her that she had three siblings, all of which had at least one kid. I just sunk down against the bathroom sink and buried my face in my hands.

My hard-earned freedom was gone. Growing in my womb was the spawn of Satan. He was an innocent little thing, but his soul would no doubt be tainted by his father’s bloodline.

“A little Valenti baby,” I groaned to Cat.

She slunk down beside me and wrapped me in her arms. “You used to dream about this day, you know.”

Five years ago, it was all I could have asked for. But now it felt like a prison sentence. “I’m going to have to tell him.”

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