Chapter 18 #2
She doesn’t interrupt, so I keep going. “It was supposed to be a hook-up. A one-time thing where the three of us had fun, and then sayonara, goodbye. I barely even knew their names. But a month later, Lyra emails me—she’s pregnant.
Then Natalie calls—she is, too. I knocked up two girls in one go.
” I swallow, feeling the lump in my throat.
“A lot of guys would be proud, but I wasn’t because it was a fucking catastrophe.
Lyra didn’t want the kid, but Natalie did, at first. Then her parents found out.
There were lawyers. There were threats.”
Simone sits perfectly still, but I see her toes flexing in her socks. “Did you want a baby?” she asks.
“No. Not with them. Not with anyone, then.” The shame is a low, persistent throb in my gut. “It was a clusterfuck of loneliness and self-destruction. That’s all.”
She lets it breathe, just enough to make it hurt. “So you’re scared of regular sex? You think you’ll just knock someone up and ruin lives?”
“I’m not frightened of sex. I love sex and am a very sexual man.
But I am afraid of accidentally impregnating someone, yes,” I say, and there’s no edge to it, just bleak certainty.
“I don’t trust myself. So I engineered the system.
I tried to make it clinical, controllable.
Surrogacy. Contracts. That way, no accidents. No clusterfuck. No chaos.”
She closes her eyes, thinking. The gold of her hair catches the lamp, makes a halo of sorts. “You know, conceiving the regular way can be messy too, right? It’s just different.”
I flinch. “Yes.”
There’s a lull, a change in the light as afternoon slants through the blinds and throws stripes on the floor. The room is an interrogation chamber, and she has the lamp in my face.
“So,” Simone says, “the threesome. Is that your thing? Is that what you want from me?”
It’s so blunt I almost laugh, but her face is dead serious.
“No,” I say, and it’s true enough to hurt. “That was an accident. I didn’t even like it. I like you. Just you.”
She stares me down, predator to predator. “But you like being in charge.”
“Yes,” I say, not bothering to lie. “But not like that. The threesome was just a drunken hook-up, I swear, and I’ve been through hell and back because of it. Never again.”
Simone shifts in her seat, pulls her knees up to her chest. “If we did this again—if I stayed—would you need me to be your surrogate?”
The question is so clinical I want to crawl out of my skin. I take a deep breath to calm myself. “No,” I say. “Never. You’d be my equal, not my carrier.” I force myself to meet her eyes. “I’m not asking for a family anymore. I’m asking for you, Simone.”
She blinks, fast, and I see the machinery of her brain running calculations.
She changes the subject, sharp left turn. “You said I was brilliant, that I made you want to be better.” There’s a bite to it, like she’s daring me to back up the compliment. “What if I fail your class, Liam? What if I don’t live up to your ever-shifting standards?”
“You won’t fail,” I say, knowing it’s true. “You’re top of the cohort.”
She lets a smile flicker, then kills it. “But what if I did?”
“I’d still want you.”
She seems to accept this, but only barely.
There’s a long stretch of silence, the kind that could grow mold if left unchecked.
She says, “You know, I thought you were just another manipulative asshole. I still kind of do. But at least you’re honest about it. At least you’ve come around somewhat, even if it took seeing me with another man to spur the change.”
I nod, accepting the judgment of her words.
She stands, paces to the window. The afternoon light has faded, leaving a blue shadow in the room.
“Do you want to fuck me, right now?” she asks, back still to me.
The words crash through me like a truck, but I keep my voice steady. “Only if you want me to.”
She turns, arms folded, mouth curved in a half-smirk. “That’s not the answer I expected.”
“I’m not the guy you expect,” I say.
She considers this, then walks back, sits beside me again. Our thighs touch, just barely, but the contact is a live wire.
“What do we do now?” she says.
I take her hand, feel the tremor in her fingers. “We can talk. We can read. We can eat more oranges. Or we can do nothing, and you can leave whenever you want.”
She holds on, then lets go, stands up and walks to the bookcase. She scans the titles with more intention this time, then pulls one out and tosses it to me. It’s Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
“Read me something,” she says, “but don’t make it a love poem.”
I flip to a page at random, and the words fall out like they’ve been waiting for us:
“We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. That is the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”
I look up. She’s smiling, a little, for real this time.
“That’s good,” she says. “Keep going.”
So I read to her, until the light fades and the house feels less like a gallery of right angles and more like a home, if only for the afternoon.
When she gets up to leave, she kisses me on the cheek—light, almost apologetic.
At the door, she says, “I’ll see you in class, Professor.”
I smile. “You don’t have to call me that anymore.”
“Maybe I want to,” she says with a saucy smile.
Then, the gorgeous blonde leaves, footsteps echoing down the walk.
I stand there, holding the book, the words still ringing in my head.
I don’t know what happens next.
But I know I’ll never again try to manufacture control where there should only be hope, goodness, and the kind of honesty that leaves you raw but alive.
And I know that, for once, I’ll grade Simone only on what she puts on the page.
The rest—whatever it is—is up to us both.