I showered twice and still felt him on me.
Hot water sluiced down my body, but every time I closed my eyes I saw his face buried between my thighs at 3 a.m., tongue lapping his own cum out of me like he was starving for the taste. I saw the way he pinned my hips to the mattress and growled mine against my clit until I came so hard I forgot my own name.
I dried off with the hotel's plush towel and stood naked in front of the mirror. My skin carried the map of him: faint fingerprints on my hips, a bite mark on the swell of my breast, a bruise blooming on the inside of my thigh where his mouth had sucked too hard. Between my legs I was swollen and tender, lips flushed dark from use. When I parted them with careful fingers, a thin ribbon of white slipped out and slid down my thigh.
I should have felt dirty.
I felt claimed.
I dressed slowly, slipped into yesterday's little black dress because everything else was shredded on the floor. The black AmEx and the folded note sat on the dresser like they were waiting for me. I stared at the phone number for a long time.
I told myself I wouldn't call.
I told myself it was just sex.
I told myself a lot of lies.
Three weeks later I sat on the edge of my bathtub and stared at two pink lines.
My period was never late. Not once in twelve years of tracking it like a religion. But twenty-one days after the night I begged a stranger to fill me, my body decided to rewrite every rule I ever had.
I laughed until I cried, then cried until I couldn't breathe.
The stick slipped from my fingers and clattered into the sink.
Pregnant.
From one night.
From the only time I had ever let a man come inside me raw.
I pressed both palms to my still-flat stomach and felt something shift, something ancient and terrifying and electric.
I thought of my mother walking out when I was six.
I thought of every foster home that never kept me.
I thought of the promise I made at fourteen: I would never need anyone.
And then I thought of him, of the way he had looked at me when he was buried deep and spilling into me, like I was the answer to a question he had never dared ask.
I picked up my phone.
My thumb hovered over the number I had memorized weeks ago and never deleted.
I didn't know his name.
I didn't know where he lived.
I only knew the way he tasted when he kissed me after coming inside me, like possession and reverence all at once.
I pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
It rang once.
Twice.
A third time.
I was ready to hang up when the line clicked.
Silence stretched for three heartbeats.
Then that voice, low, familiar, and suddenly panicked.
"Nora?"
My name.
He remembered my name.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
"Nora, talk to me." Urgency sharpened the edges. "Are you hurt? Where are you?"
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
"I'm pregnant," I said.
The line went so quiet I thought he hung up.
Then a single, ragged exhale.
"Stay exactly where you are," he ordered, voice shaking with something that sounded a lot like fear and a lot like relief. "Do not move. I'm coming to get you."
The call ended.
Twenty-seven minutes later my apartment door opened without a knock.
He filled the frame like a storm, hair wild, tie askew, eyes wilder. He looked like he had run every red light in Manhattan.
His gaze dropped to my stomach, then snapped back to my face.
He crossed the room in four strides, cupped my cheeks, and searched my eyes like he was looking for a lie.
"Say it again," he whispered.
I lifted my chin. "I'm pregnant. It's yours."
Something broke open in his expression, raw and unguarded and beautiful.
He dropped to his knees right there on my cheap linoleum, pressed his forehead to my stomach, and wrapped his arms around my hips like he was holding the entire world.
I felt his breath shudder against me.
Then he looked up, gray eyes shining.
"Marry me," he said.
I laughed, shaky and wet. "You don't even know my last name."
"I don't care." His hands tightened. "Marry me anyway."
I threaded my fingers through his hair.
"We'll talk," I said softly.
He closed his eyes, turned his face into my stomach, and kissed the place where our baby, our impossible, reckless, perfect baby, was already growing.
Outside, Manhattan kept moving.
Inside my tiny apartment, for the first time in my life, someone stayed.