Reason Enough

It wasn’t the sort of question I could answer at once, without hesitation. It took me hours to pick out which bath mats to put in our new bathroom. How on earth could I decide in one split moment if I should agree to have a baby?

“Yes? No?” Dan nudged his chin into the curve of my shoulder and neck from behind as his arms slipped around my waist. It made washing the dishes difficult, so I let the greasy pot in my hands slide back beneath the soapy water and leaned back against him. “Maybe?”

“Where did this come from?” I asked—practically, I thought.

Dan’s hands moved up and down my waist and crept below the hem of my shirt to link over my belly. “I was just thinking about it, that’s all.”

“Hmm.” I turned to face him, my hands going behind me to grip the edge of the sink. “A baby is a big responsibility.”

He grinned.

“Dan…” I had nothing to say, really. No real protest.

“Never mind, Elle.” He kissed me. “It’s just something I thought about, that’s all. When you mentioned the pills.”

I’d had a hangnail gone awry. My doctor had prescribed antibiotics to help get rid of the infection. Antibiotics can interfere with the effectiveness of birth-control pills. I’d offered to use my mouth on him instead of making love.

“I thought you’d like a blow job.” I heard the slightly cool tone of my voice and imagined the slightly cool expression on my face, to match. “I mean, you usually do.”

Against me, on the places where our bodies touched, I imagined heat growing. He pushed his hips forward a little bit to nudge a definite bulge against my stomach. He kissed me again, our mouths opening, and his hands gripped tighter on my waist.

“You know I do,” Dan murmured against my lips.

“Here? In the kitchen?” I raised a brow but kept my mouth from the smile threatening to tip it. “How shocking.”

“Shock me.”

We’d only been in the new house, our first together, for a few months. We hadn’t yet made love in every room—though not for lack of effort. I let my hand slide to his belt buckle. I tugged it open, moving his body as I did.

Dan let out a small grunt. “Use your mouth on me, right here.”

It would kill my knees, that tile floor, but I didn’t protest. I liked sucking Dan’s cock. He thought he was lucky. I was the lucky one, though. Lucky I’d found him, and that he loved me.

Luckier I loved him back.

I pushed him, not too gently, until he took a couple steps back. I unzipped his dark trousers, his work clothes, and pulled them over his hips. I went to my knees as I pushed the cloth over his thighs and down to his ankles. His cock tented the front of his soft boxer briefs, and I got rid of those, too.

I looked at him for a minute with my hand on the base of his prick. I licked my mouth to wet my lips, and Dan’s hands slid into my hair. Not pulling, not pushing. He was waiting for me to move. He could be patient if he had to be. If I made him.

I tilted my head to take him in as deep as I could. The groan of his response thrilled me. Sucking Dan was about him, but it affected me, too. My nipples tightened. My clit rubbed against my panties, and I reached with the hand not holding Dan to pull my skirt up my thighs. My knees protested the cold, hard tile without the cushion of my skirt, but I ignored the sensation. My fingers crept under the skirt to touch, just once, the silk between my legs.

“Yes,” Dan said. “Touch yourself.”

I didn’t answer, my mouth occupied with other tasks. I sucked him a little harder, my lips closing over the head of his cock and meeting. Like a kiss. A second later, the pause so brief it was hardly there, my mouth opened again and I took him down the back of my throat. Up again, this time with one hand following and the other rubbing the front of my panties.

Dan’s fingers slid deeper into my hair, and he pulled out the spring-clip I’d used to keep it up. Dark lengths tumbled around my shoulders. I smelled the shampoo I’d used that morning when I’d bound it up, still damp. He finger-combed it, careful not to pull too hard as my head moved under his hands.

His breath hitched, in and out, faster. It wouldn’t take long for him to come. The question was, how long would it take me?

I closed my eyes. The kitchen went away. So did my job, the bills I meant to pay later, the message on the answering machine from my mother. The discomfort in my knees and jaw vanished, too.

My world became the taste and smell of my husband and my hand between my legs. I rubbed faster over my panties, my clit a tight, hard bump under my fingers. I sucked Dan’s cock a little harder, a little faster, losing my rhythm once or twice when my own pleasure made me sloppy.

“I’m going to come, baby.” Dan’s regular voice was often enough to get my hormones jumping, but the way he sounded just before he came was the trigger on my cunt’s pistol. He spoke. I shot off.

I teased myself with rapid flicks of my fingertip on my silk-covered clit. A harder touch would send me over faster, but it felt so good I didn’t want it to end. Pleasure built. My muscles tightened. I couldn’t breathe. I had to breathe.

With a low moan, Dan bucked his hips forward. His taste flooded me. His hands tightened in my hair and I swallowed, hard, so I could find the breath to moan.

I pressed my palm between my legs as my body shook. I’d become a fist, closed tight, but now I opened wide. I shuddered and swallowed again. Dan pulled back.

I blinked as my orgasm subsided, and looked up at him. Sweat fell at that moment from his face onto mine, onto my lips, and I licked it away. Dan reached to help me up with a hand beneath my elbow, and I groaned at the creak of my joints.

He pulled me close and kissed me, then hugged me, my face against his chest. “You are so good at that. You know that?”

I smiled against the familiar, fresh scent of his shirt. A shirt I had washed and dried and hung in his closet. The closet in the house we shared.

“I know,” I told him, just to hear him laugh.

He hugged me tighter, and we laughed together. The phone rang. I knew who it would be, and though I didn’t really want to answer it, I knew my mother would keep calling until I did. I looked up at him.

“I love you,” I said, and meant it.

“I love you, too,” Dan answered, and didn’t talk about babies again that night.

“Hot,” my brother said in a no-nonsense tone. “Don’t touch!”

The little girl reaching for the canister of fireplace matches pulled back her hand and gave Chad a reproachful look. But she didn’t reach again, just turned her attention to the stack of magazines on the coffee table.

“Sorry,” I said. “I should’ve put those away. We’re not baby-proof, I guess.”

My younger brother laughed and shrugged. “The princess needs to learn. Don’t worry about it, Elle.”

The little girl—my niece! I had a niece? How had that happened? I was an aunt. My baby brother had fallen in love and adopted a child and had a life.

“What?” he asked as I shook my head in wonder. “No, Leah. Don’t tear Aunt Elle’s magazines. C’mere to Daddy.”

He held out his hands and the girl made her way around the coffee table to take her place on his lap. She grinned, self-satisfied, and looked every bit the princess her daddies believed her to be.

“I just almost can’t believe this,” I told him, knowing he’d understand. “You’re a daddy! Chaddie, it’s just incredible.”

He beamed. My brother looked better than I’d ever seen him. He’d gotten slimmer, and impossibly taller. He’d cut his hair, and it emphasized the leaner lines of his face. He’d gotten older.

Hell. We both had. I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I looked in the mirror often enough, after all.

Chad kissed the soft, round cheek of his daughter and stroked the length of her black curls. She settled contentedly against him and kicked her chubby legs. He let her crawl off his lap to sit on my couch.

“She’ll crash in about fifteen minutes,” he said confidently, though to my eyes Leah looked about as far away from sleep as a kid could get. “Then we’ll really catch up.”

I watched my niece gnaw on the edge of one of my expensive, dry-clean-only pillows and bit my tongue against the words that would have made me sound like my mother. “I’ll go make some coffee, okay?”

“Sure.” My brother grinned, though the force of his love was directed at his daughter now, and not so much at me.

I didn’t mind, I told myself in the kitchen as I ground beans and measured them into the brand-new, complicated coffeemaker Dan had bought when we moved in. I still wasn’t entirely sure how to work it.

I didn’t mind that my brother was happy. I was, in fact, nearly overwhelmed with happiness on his behalf. We’d grown up in a house fairly devoid of joy, and I’d been an adult before I’d even begun to allow myself to believe I wouldn’t be pretty miserable for my entire life. Instead, he’d met Luke. I’d met Dan. We’d both managed to escape the past and make a present; I had no reason to believe we wouldn’t both create a joyful future, too.

Hell, I’d even forged a relationship, of sorts, with my mother. Chad hadn’t managed that yet, though I hoped the fact he and Luke had moved back to Pennsylvania from California with the only grandchild my mother could claim would change that.

It absolutely wasn’t that I was jealous of my brother.

“Coffee—” I bit off the words when I saw Chad put a finger to his lips. Leah, sprawled on top of the cushions and covered with her blanket, had indeed fallen asleep. Chad made a barrier with more pillows to keep her from rolling off, and gestured to me.

We broke our silence in my new kitchen, with all its new appliances and dishes and pictures on the walls. Chad took the coffee from me with a grateful gasp and drank back half his cup in a large gulp.

“God,” he said. “I swear to you I’m living on caffeine now. She’s finally starting to sleep through the night, but it’s been a hellish six months. The pediatrician says at twenty-two months she should be sleeping through with no problem, but she’s having adjustment issues.”

I liked to sleep. Really, really liked it. Was pretty unfunctional without enough sleep, as a matter of fact.

“So, has she said anything about us?” Chad didn’t waste time. He got up to pour himself more coffee and helped himself to a muffin from my fridge. Only the slope of his shoulders gave away his tension.

“Oh, Chaddie, do you want to know?”

He turned. “Yes, Ella. I want to know.”

He’d used my old name, the one my mother still insisted on using. Point taken. “She asked if I’d seen her. Meaning Leah. I said yes. She wanted to know…”

The words lodged in my throat. I shouldn’t be embarrassed to repeat them. Chad was the one who’d always called my mother The Dragon Lady, after all. He wouldn’t be surprised, but he would be hurt. I didn’t want to hurt my brother, not even by proxy.

“What?”

I sighed. “She wanted to know how dark she was.”

Chad’s expression went so carefully blank I knew he was furious. “Uh-huh. What did you tell her?”

“I told her,” I said, “to stop being so damn ridiculous.”

He smiled. “Did you?”

“I did. I can’t make excuses for her, Chad, but you know how she is.”

“It’s bad enough I’m gay, I know. But that I have a black daughter…God. What will the neighbors say?” Chad grimaced and slugged back more coffee. “And she wonders why I don’t come home.”

“At least she’s asked you to,” I pointed out, drinking my own coffee. “At least she’s not pretending you don’t exist.”

He made a derisive noise. “If she doesn’t accept Luke or Leah, then she still doesn’t really accept me. End of story. She can kiss my ass.”

I knew his partner’s name, of course, and his daughter’s, but hearing them together that way made me giggle. “Luke and Leah.”

“What about them?” He must have heard it, too, the sound of two names that paired brought to mind one of the most easily recognized film references from the past thirty years. “Very funny!”

But he was laughing, and my kitchen filled with giggles and chortles we tried to stifle so as not to wake his child. All our best efforts went to ruin in the next minute, because I heard the front door open and a booming voice carry down the hall.

“I’m hooooome!”

Leah’s thin, high wail followed a moment later. Chad was already off his chair and I went after him. We were too late, both to shush Dan and to quiet Leah.

“Hey, there, little girl,” Dan was murmuring, the child in his arms already when I came down the hall and into the living room. Leah looked up at him with wide eyes, but no more tears.

My heart melted.

That night I brushed my teeth, washed my face, smoothed cream into my skin. Every step of my bedtime ritual was the same as it had always been, steps to be counted without even thinking of them. A routine that provided some small measure of comfort in its perpetual sameness, no matter what had happened during the day. Yet when I lifted the white plastic case containing my birth-control pills, I didn’t simply pop one out of the silver foil and swallow it with a swig of water the way I always did.

I thought about punching out the pill, letting it drop into the sink and running the water to flush it away down the pipes into darkness. That one, small pill which had been my womb’s only protection since the day Dan and I had stopped using condoms. I’d trusted my life to those small white discs of compressed hormones.