Deuce looked at it, his eyes narrowed.
“Look inside,” she prompted. “It’s the only way I know how to tell you.”
Reaching for the bag, his eyes still on her, Deuce opened it slowly. And when he saw its contents, he let his chin drop to his chest.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Zora shook her head slowly. “No. But I don’t know for sure. I’m almost two weeks late. It could just be stress, but I don’t know for sure. That’s why I got it.”
“But … when?” He looked up at her again, his eyes wide.
“Deuce.”
“Fuck,” he said. “New Year’s Eve.”
“Yeah.”
He took a deep breath and looked at the box, then tore it open to read the instructions. “So let’s just do this then.”
Zora studied his posture, tried to read his face for traces of anger. She knew she wasn’t the only one to blame for their carelessness, but she wouldn’t have faulted him for being at least … suspicious. He was Chris Scaife’s son. He was Chris Scaife, Jr. Unexpected and unplanned pregnancies were probably among the top three calamities his father told him to guard against. That, and scheming young women.
But there was no anger, not even apprehension in his features.
“Hey,” he said, clearly eager to move things along. “Let’s go.”
“Like … like now?” Zora asked, still reeling from his lack of an appropriate response.
“Yeah now. Why? You want to wait until you’re even more pregnant?”
She shut her eyes. “Don’t say that. Don’t even joke like that, Deuce!”
“Sorry.” He shrugged. “I thought a little humor …”
“No, no humor. Okay, let’s just ... go.”
In the communal bathroom, Deuce checked to make sure the coast was clear before dragging Zora into a stall with him. It was crowded with them both in there, and he was looming over her, not even a foot away.
“I’m not doing this with you staring down at me!” she said. “Are you crazy?”
“I thought you might want the … moral support,” he said.
“Morally support me from the other side of the door. Please.”
Deuce obliged and reopened the door, stepping outside.
Zora unzipped her jeans and opened the cellophane packet, removing the test. She squatted with it in position and willed herself to pee. Nothing came. Squeezing her eyes shut, she imagined a waterfall, rain … every version of running water she could conjure up, but nothing helped.
“What’s going on in there?” Deuce asked after a few minutes of silence.
“Nothing. That’s the problem. Nothing’s going on in here,” she said, frustrated. “Could you turn on one of the faucets?”
After a moment, Zora heard that he had. Except it was going too fast.
“Turn it down a little. So it sounds more like ….”
And at that moment someone else entered the bathroom and they had to wait while they did their business and left. Deuce turned the faucet down a little so it sounded more like a trickle.
“It’s not working!” Zora said.
“Zee. Calm down. Just gimme a sec.”
She heard the bathroom door open and then shut, and realized she was alone.
“Deuce? Crap,” she muttered. Where the hell had he gone?
Then she heard the bathroom door re-open and the sound of running water once again. Zora remained silent and still, not knowing for sure who was out there.
“Okay … I got something. Open the door.”
“Where’d you go?” she asked irritably.
“Open the door. This’ll work.”
She opened the door a crack, and just long enough for Deuce to hand her a paper cup. It was warm, and filled with water.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked. “Drink it?”
“Put your three middle fingers in it and try to pee again.”
“Ohhhh. Okay … but wait. I can’t do that and hold the wand at the same time.”
“The what?”
“The pee-stick. I have no place to put the cup of water and hold the stick, and pee at the same time.”
“Zee, open the damn door.”
She opened it and Deuce crowded in once again, looking impatient with her now.
“Which do you want me to hold?”
She let her head fall to one side. “Which do you want to hold?” she asked.
“Gimme the cup,” he said.
He held it while Zora squatted, the stick in position between her legs and her other hand in the cup of warm water.
“Good thing you have the muscle strength in your thighs to do that without sitting on that nasty-ass seat, and without holding on,” Deuce said, almost to himself.
“Will you be quiet?” Zora hissed. “And don’t look at me, or I can’t …”
Deuce looked up at the ceiling and she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. After a moment, she felt a desultory trickle as she peed on the stick.
Sighing, she let it drip for a few moments then held it, at a loss for what to do with it.
“Give it to me,” Deuce said, wearily.
Zora looked at him, hesitating. “Are you …?”
“Zee, gimme the stick before you have pee running down your leg.”
Reluctantly, Zora handed it over and wiped herself clean, dropping the toilet paper and taking the paper cup from Deuce to empty that into the bowl as well. When she looked up, he was still holding the stick like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“How long?” he asked, leaning against the door.
“Three minutes or less.” She pulled up her underwear and jeans and leaned against the side of the stall, opposite Deuce.
“What am I looking for?”
“It’ll say ‘yes’ with a plus or ‘no’ with a minus sign,” Zora choked out.
The comedy of errors now over, the gravity of their situation was beginning to set in. She could feel the onset of a tension headache and her throat felt like it was swollen shut with terror. Deuce said nothing, just leaned against the wall, the plastic wand between his thumb and forefinger.
She could not be pregnant. She could not. She could not.
She had her entire life ahead of her, and she couldn’t derail it for a kid. And she would never have an abortion, and everyone would say she was a gold-digger, and Rashad would look at her like she had three heads and dismiss her as a fool. And … her parents, God her father most especially. They probably thought she was a virgin, and was waiting for a nice, Muslim boy. And what about her major? She hadn’t even declared one yet! If she had a baby, would she even finish her degree?
“Damn. That was quick.”
Deuce turned the test toward her.
No. And a minus sign.
Zora felt her shoulders sag in sweet relief, and Deuce was grinning from ear to ear.
“So, what do we do with this?” he asked, holding up the wand.
“Keep it as a souvenir, maybe. A reminder of our supreme stupidity. Our utter, mindless …”
“Horniness?”
“Carelessness.” Zora said snatching the test from him and dropping it in the container meant for feminine hygiene waste.
Once it was deposited, she took another deep breath.
“Oh my God, I feel like … ugh. Thank God!”
She looked up and Deuce was smiling at her.
“What’s the matter? Are you going to let us out of here, or were you thinking you might like to hang out in the bathroom a little longer?”
He shook his head, still grinning. “Nah,” he said. “It’s just that …”
Zora opened her eyes wide, prompting him to continue.
“… you’re just so freakin’ cute.”
He leaned in and kissed her, long and hard, hands braced against the opposing walls of the bathroom stalls. And mindful of her unwashed hands, Zora didn’t put her arms around him, though she really, really wanted to.
“W
eren’t you scared?” she whispered, when later they were lying spoon-fashion and fully-clothed on her bed.
They had gone back and collapsed there, and had remained in that position for almost an hour, not speaking, but privately processing the strangely intimate experience.
“You kiddin’ me?” Deuce said. “I was fucking terrified. I’m not ready to be anybody’s daddy.”
Zora laughed. “Okay. Because you made me kind of nervous you were so calm.”
“I wasn’t calm at all. If you looked and listened real close, I’m pretty sure you would’ve seen and heard my heart beating a million miles a minute.”
Turning to face him, Zora was still smiling. “Well you didn’t show it at all,” she said.
“Because I knew you were scared. And I didn’t want you to be.”
“Aww …” Zora felt a rush of unexpected tenderness for him. “Babe.”
He smiled at the endearment, but didn’t remark on it. “I didn’t want you to think it would be … tragic or anything. I mean, we’re not ready, either one of us … and me and you, we’re not there right now. But it wouldn’t be tragic. Y’know?”
Zora nodded. She leaned in, softly pressing her lips to his.
“I was an ‘oops’ baby,” he said unexpectedly. “My father wasn’t much older than I am now, when I was born.”
“How do you … did they actually tell you that?” Zora asked. “That you were unplanned?”
“Not in so many words. But my whole life I’ve kind of known. I mean, my parents are … let’s just say there couldn’t be two more incompatible people on the face of the earth.”
Zora said nothing, wondering what it would have been like, to feel like you had been an accident; the rope that tethered together two people who would rather not have been.
For all her parents’ issues, she had never felt that. She and her brother were the center of both their parents’ lives. Her mother, who was an ER nurse, emailed her whenever young, Black men came in with gunshot wounds, or as a result of street violence. Though she didn’t completely understand Zora’s activism, she reached for every possible commonality in their respective worlds.
Her father was the same, though his tactic was different. He tried to interest Zora in Senegal, talking to her incessantly about the politics in his home country, seeking to make it as tantalizing as the social justice causes that so preoccupied her about the States. But with both her parents, Zora never lost the sense that she was like a jewel; something precious they never wanted to lose sight of, even though they were powerless over her growing independence.
“My mom got married a few years ago,” Deuce continued. “To a dude who was a little younger than her. Just a few years younger. But he wanted kids, like bad. One time I heard them fighting and she told him she was never meant to be a mother. That I was the only kid she was ever going to have. They broke up not long after. I mean, they had other problems, but … yeah, I think it was a wrap after that fight.”
“Do you want a family one day?”
“Yeah,” he said smiling at her like he’d only just realized it. “A big one, I think. One day.”
Chapter 13
“So, here’s something you’d never guess about me,” Zora said.
She was sitting cross-legged on his bed, and between them was a large platter of sushi, various kinds, because Deuce didn’t know crap-all about sushi and each time he tried it, he wound up nauseated. But he’d gotten it for her, at great expense and inconvenience, because she was working on a paper and said she couldn’t possibly go out, though it was a Friday night. But she had gone out – just to his room and just because he said he had something important he wanted to show her.
Having only vague ideas about how sushi-ordering worked, Deuce didn’t realize that a “roll” was six pieces, so wound up getting enough, and in sufficient variety, that he could have fed four people. But Zora was jazzed at how enterprising he had been, to drive in the snow, to the only decent Japanese restaurant in town and bring her back the kind of food she rarely had the money and time to indulge in. When he opened the door to his room, and she saw the whole thing laid out, on a picnic blanket on his bed (because he had no other large surface that was clear) she literally squealed, jumping up and down and hugging him in her excitement.
Deprived of more intimate outlets, that’s what they did now: they hugged. And he kissed her too, as often as he could, but Zora was always careful to cut those kisses short before they became too heated. Deuce still hadn’t touched her. Not in the way he wanted to; not since New Year’s Eve.
Though in all other ways they were openly a couple, the most intimate part of their relationship still hadn’t resumed. He was dating her. Dating. He called her up and asked if she wanted to hang out; and if she wasn’t out saving more Black lives, she would say yes.
And then he would stop by her room and they might go somewhere to eat; or watch a movie at his place since he had a state-of-the-art entertainment system. Occasionally, they just stayed in her room, doing not much of anything. If they went out and he came back with her, she generally showed him the door when it got late. Once, when he suggested that he could stay and they wouldn’t do anything, Zora had straight up laughed at him.
Okay, sure, she said as she shut the door. G’night.
It was one thing if they were just getting to know each other, if there hadn’t been all that … fucking already. He knew every square-inch of Zora’s body now—the tiny birthmark on her left inner-thigh, the dimples at the small of her back, the patch of lighter-toned skin under her right breast … the fact that her second toes were slightly longer than her big toes … He missed all of it.
Because of nights like the one they were having now, he felt both closer to her than he had ever been, and more estranged. Even the pregnancy scare had in some ways made them more solid. But he needed to feel her skin against his skin, and hear her soft, feathery breaths in his ear when she came, and have her arms and thighs locked tightly around him, trembling as she spent. Some days, the absence of a physical relationship with Zora felt to Deuce like a limb was missing.
“What would I never guess about you?” he asked.
“That I had nannies,” Zora said, nodding as though pleased with the unexpected nature of her revelation. “Sometimes three at a time.”
This did surprise him. Deuce’s eyebrows lifted.
Zora grinned, and still nodding, reached down, and popped a tuna roll into her mouth. She had confessed to him that while she loved sushi, she was all-thumbs when it came to using chopsticks. The ones he’d brought along with the food had been tossed aside, unused.
“Want to know how come?” she asked.
“How come?” he asked, dutifully.
He was curious about the nannies, but distracted by the way she licked the soy sauce off her fingers, and by how long her legs looked in her black leggings.
“We went to Senegal when we were younger, my brother Ousmane and I. Sometimes for the entire summer. My father would bring us back to his village where he grew up, and they treated us like we were visiting royalty. All his sisters and brothers, cousins … just this huge extended family.
“And they would all want to look after us, this little matched pair of African-yet-not-African babies. So, we always had nannies, but more than one. As if American babies require more care. Isn’t that strange?”
Deuce shrugged. “American babies probably do require more care.”
Zora tilted her head to one side as though she had never considered this. “Why?”
“We’re the most pampered people on the face of the earth, Zee.”
She shrugged and then ate another piece of sushi. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve only ever been to Senegal and Mexico. How ‘bout you?”
“I’ve been to a few places.” He stretched out next to her, folding his arms beneath his head and looking up at the ceiling instead of at her. Her thigh was next to his cheek, so he had to fight the urge to turn his face toward it, and kis
s it, and inhale her.
“Like …?” she prompted.
“France, Germany, England. Italy, and for just one day, to Switzerland.”
“Wow. But only Europe huh?”
“So far. Except one time to Mexico for Spring Break.”
“I should take you to Senegal. It’d blow your mind.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“You’ll feel in touch with your Blackness there. And at the same time, you’ll feel less than Black. Like some kind of … hybrid.”
“Is that how you felt?”
“Yeah.” Zora’s voice had grown a little distant, like she was remembering and re-experiencing something profound. “I felt … dumb. And disconnected. And sometimes even ashamed.”
“Why ashamed?” Deuce sat up again.
“Because I’m a mutt, by their standards, since I have an American mother. And I couldn’t speak Wolof, which is the most commonly spoken native language. I couldn’t even speak French. I felt … I don’t know … ineffectual. I think that’s why I stopped going. Around the time I was fifteen and my father let us decide whether we would go for the summer or not, I decided not to. Ousmane always wanted to go. And of course, now he speaks Wolof and French, but I still don’t.” Zora made a scoffing sound. “I was such an idiot.”
Deuce stared at her for so long she blushed, and finally looked away.
“What?” she asked.
“You use words like ‘ineffectual’. You think about things no other girl I know thinks about. Or talks about.”
“Don’t you ever think about things like that? What it means that you’re here? And how, but for your parents making one slightly different choice, you wouldn’t be who you are?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think about stuff like that. Like, ever.”
Zora seemed stunned by that admission. “You don’t think … for example, about how if your Dad never had the bravery to try to make it in an industry that was incredibly difficult to break into, you might have been the son of like, a music store clerk?”
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