WHEN GWEN CAME HOME, she opened the front door and stood in the hallway listening. Eva was supposed to go directly from school to a friend’s house for a sleepover. The only sound was a distant thrum of running water. She crept through the house. The noise came from the bathroom. It had to be Rick in the shower. She imagined sliding her fingers over his wet back. Euphoric, her inner thighs tingling, she sat at the kitchen table waiting for the water to stop.
Rick was out of the shower with a towel around his waist when Gwen entered naked. She pulled away his towel, and rubbed her hips against him.
“I’m negative,” she said.
“Negative?”
“My antibody result. This time for sure. No more testing required to confirm it.”
Rick lips parted. Then he froze. Gwen grasped his shoulders and wrapped her legs around him. He began a question. She preempted it with the answer.
“No more condoms.”
Rick had been quickly convinced, as much by Gwen’s passion as her logic. Now he lay beside her deliciously spent. They hadn’t come simultaneously in years.
“Remind you of the early days of our love?” she asked dreamily.
“Oh, yes,” he laughed.
She stuck her tongue in his mouth and stroked his flaccid penis.
“Afraid I need recovery time.”
“No problem, we’ve got all night.”
With a contented hum, she tucked her head under his arm.
She suddenly considered another complication of having sex without protection. Her initial reaction was not to worry. I’m forty years old. My period just ended two days ago. I won’t forget to use a diaphragm next time. Then she realized they had never had The Talk.
Of course not, she thought. We hadn’t been a couple long enough for it to come up when the needle-stick happened. But now we’ve been together five years. And Rick is thirty-eight. He’s never said anything about wanting children of his own. But under the circumstances, why would he have? Ugh, we have to go there. There won’t be a better time than right now.
“Hey, honey…you know what we’ve never talked about?”
“Um…there are lots things we haven’t talked about... What’s on your mind?”
“I guess I’d like to know… how you feel about having children.”
“We have a child. I still think of her as a child. So I’m guessing you mean… having a baby?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that something you want?”
“I was sort of trying to find out what you want.”
“I guess I asked you first. Do you want to have a baby?”
This was not how she had hoped the conversation would go, but they were in too deep now. She was going to have to show her hand first.
“I’m…open to the possibility.”
“That doesn’t sound like you want to have a baby.”
“Rick, what do you want?”
“I like our life the way it is. Eva treats me like I’m her father even if she doesn’t call me Dad. Hell, she hardly ever sees Daniel. I feel like she’s my daughter, too. And I get all the interaction with kids I can handle at school.”
“Really? You’d be OK if we didn’t…?”
“Absolutely.”
Gwen returned to her snuggling spot, and Rick’s mind idly wandered. He wondered whether she would keep working so hard. After her residency was over, he had assumed she continued working sixty hour weeks to distract herself from worrying about being infected. Now, he realized that assumption was about to be tested. And what if she didn’t ease up? What would that say about their relationship? He didn’t want to follow this thread. Instead, he thought of a cartoon he had saved from the New Yorker. He hadn’t shown it to her yet. Four men in business suits were seated at a bar. Each had an open briefcase spilling out documents onto the counter. The bartender was shutting one. “No more work for you tonight, buddy!” was the caption. Should he give it to her? What if she didn’t think it was funny?