The Day I Left the Test on the Kitchen Table

I knew it before I took the test. For two weeks I’d been noticing something different in my body, a new sensitivity in my breasts and a tiredness that wouldn’t go away even after nine hours’ sleep. We’d come back from Valencia a month earlier, after our honeymoon, and at first I put it all down to jet lag and the first wave of piled-up projects at the office.

But that morning, in front of the bathroom mirror, I glanced at myself sideways and knew it wasn’t exhaustion.

I bought three tests at the pharmacy on the corner. The pharmacist smiled at me as if she already knew, and I looked down as I paid. At home I opened all three at once, on the bathroom marble counter, and sat on the floor to wait for the longest three minutes of my life.

The two lines appeared on the first before the count was over. On the second and third as well. Three pairs of parallel lines, identical, screaming the same thing at me from the countertop.

I burst into tears without really knowing why.

What came next was planning how to tell Andrés. I thought about wrapping the test in gift paper, about writing him a note, about cooking something special. I ruled it all out. My husband comes home at eight every evening, leaves his keys in the bowl by the entrance, and kisses me on the nape of the neck before taking off his tie. Our routine is so precise that any change would have tipped him off.

I decided to do nothing. I decided to leave the test on the kitchen table, next to the keys, and wait to see how long it took him to notice.

At a quarter to eight the door opened. I heard the keys drop into the bowl, footsteps in the hallway, the dull thud of the bag sliding off his shoulder. I had sat down on the sofa in the living room with a book I wasn’t reading, and my heart had moved up into my throat.

“Lucía?” his voice came from the kitchen. “Lucía, come here a minute.”

I got to my feet with watery legs. When I appeared in the doorway, Andrés was standing by the table, holding the test between two fingers as if it were something fragile. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the little plastic stick, the two pink lines, the result.

“Is this…?” he began.

“Yes.”

He looked up. His eyes were shining, a contained smile at the corner of his mouth, that expression of disbelief he gets when something moves him too much to process.

“Are we going to have a child?”

I nodded. My voice wouldn’t come.

And then, before I could prepare myself, before I could say anything coherent, Andrés put the test back on the table, crossed the kitchen in two strides, and kissed me as if it had been years since he’d last done it.

It wasn’t a celebratory kiss. It was urgent, hungry, with one hand behind my neck and the other gripping my waist. He drove me against the doorframe, and I felt the wood digging into my shoulder blades and not caring at all. His tongue found mine and tangled with that eagerness of his when he loses patience. He slid one knee between my thighs and pushed upward, and through my skirt I could already feel his cock hard against my hip.

“Wait,” I murmured against his mouth, not convinced myself.

“No,” he said, and kissed me again.

He caught my hand and brought it to the bulge in his trousers. He pressed it there, forcing me to feel the full thickness through the fabric.

“Look what you do to me,” he whispered in my ear, his voice rough. “Just from knowing. Just from thinking I got you pregnant.”

A low moan slipped out of me. I squeezed his cock with my open palm and felt it jerk against my hand.

He lifted me off the floor with that effortless strength of his that still surprises me. I hooked my legs around his waist while he carried me down the hallway toward the bedroom. On the way he slammed into the little table in the foyer, knocked a picture off the wall, and neither of us stopped to pick it up. I was biting his neck, licking the lobe of his ear, and he kept letting out small growls from deep in his chest.

He dropped me onto the bed and stood still, looking down at me. The afternoon light came in at an angle through the window, that autumn yellow that turns everything old gold. My blouse was half-open, my hair tousled, my breathing ragged, and my skirt wrinkled up at the hip, showing my panties.

“Let me look at you,” he said.

I let him.

He spent a full minute roaming over me with his eyes, slowly, as if he were seeing me for the first time. Then he leaned down and started unbuttoning my blouse, button by button, pausing at each one to kiss the skin as it was exposed. My collarbone. The hollow at the top of my sternum. The inner curve of my left breast.

Let this never stop, I thought.

I yanked his hair so he would come up and kiss me again. I wanted his mouth back, wanted to taste the moment mixed with his. Andrés gave a low laugh and kissed me the way I asked, while his hands finished taking off my blouse and then reached for the clasp of my bra.

He unclasped it with two fingers. Let it fall to the floor.

He looked at my tits as if he’d never seen them before. Over the last few weeks my nipples had gotten darker, bigger, more sensitive, and he noticed instantly. He lowered his head and took one whole nipple into his mouth, sucking slowly, tugging with his lips until my back arched.

“Fuck,” he murmured, releasing it with a soft pop. “They’re gorgeous like this.”

He ran his tongue around the areola, nibbled the tip, then took it whole again. With his other hand he squeezed my free breast, kneading it, pinching the nipple between thumb and forefinger. I started rolling my hips against nothing, searching for friction, my panties already soaked through.

“Andrés, please…”

“Please what.”

“Take my panties off.”

He smiled against my breast and dropped his mouth down my stomach, leaving a trail of saliva and kisses all the way to my navel. He caught the waistband of my panties with his teeth and pulled them down, helping with his hands. When they reached my knees he yanked them off completely and tossed them to the floor.

He opened my legs with both hands, very slowly, and stared at my wet cunt as if he were memorizing it.

“You’re soaked.”

“Shut up and eat me.”

He laughed again, and without taking his eyes off me he bent down and dragged his entire tongue through my slit, from bottom to top, stopping at the clit with a suctioning lick that made me jerk against his mouth. He slid his hands beneath my thighs, lifted my legs onto his shoulders, and buried his face between them with no more preamble.

He ate me like he was starving. He licked my whole cunt with a flat tongue, then thrust it inside, pressing it in as if it were a small cock, then moved up to my clit and sucked it with his lips sealed around it. He worked his tongue in and out, curled it, flattened it against the little hood. My hands were sunk in his hair and I didn’t know whether to push him harder against me or pull him away from the pleasure he was giving me.

“I’m going to come,” I gasped. “Andrés, I’m going to come in your mouth.”

He growled against my cunt without stopping. He slid two fingers inside me and curved them, searching for that spot only he ever finds, and with his tongue he kept working my clit in a steady rhythm. A few seconds later I arched hard and came crying out, clamping his head between my thighs, soaking his beard with my slick. He kept licking until the trembling left my body, and only then did he lift his face, his mouth shining.

“Now you’re going to see how you ride me,” I told him, still out of breath.

I helped myself out of my skirt, though my hands were shaking so badly it took twice as long. Andrés undressed too, without theatrics, watching me the whole time. His cock sprang hard against his belly as soon as he pulled down his briefs, thick, the glans shining and a drop of precome hanging from the tip. When he came back to my side I made him lie on his back and settled myself over him.

I wanted to feel him like that, underneath me, looking up at me with that mixture of adoration and desire that has had me hooked since the first day. I leaned forward and took his cock in my hand, squeezing from the base. I peeled the skin back and forth, slowly, watching his jaw tighten. Then I slid down and took him into my mouth without warning.

“Fuck, Lucía…”

I sucked him down in one go, until the tip hit the back of my throat and made my eyes water. I came back up slowly, sealing my lips around him, leaving his whole cock wet with saliva. I pulled off and ran my tongue along the frenulum, over his balls, and took him back in again to the hilt. Andrés grabbed my hair, not to force me, only to hold me, and started moving his hips upward in a slow rhythm that found mine through my mouth.

“Stop,” he panted after a while. “Stop or I’m going to come.”

I let him go with a pop and climbed back over him. He laid both open hands on my smooth stomach. He didn’t dare squeeze. It was as if he were afraid to touch.

“Is it there?” he asked quietly.

“It’s there.”

He moved his thumbs in slow circles over my skin, and I leaned down to kiss him with tears in my eyes. I took his cock in my hand and guided it to the entrance of my cunt, rubbing the head over my clit before letting myself sink down onto him. I lowered myself slowly, very slowly, feeling him stretch me centimeter by centimeter, until I swallowed him whole and sat on his hips with his cock buried to the hilt.

“Fuck, that feels so good,” I whispered.

I started moving up and down, planting my open hands on his chest. I would pull nearly all of his cock out and then let myself drop again, squeezing my cunt around him every time I rose. Andrés held my waist with a new tenderness, watching my tits bounce with every thrust.

“Slower,” he asked, closing his eyes. “Like you want to milk me.”

I obeyed him. I slowed down, stayed seated with his whole cock inside me, and started moving in circles, rubbing my clit against the pubic bone. He squeezed me from the inside with every turn, wrenching moans out of him from very deep.

We looked at each other the whole time, barely blinking. Andrés said things he’d never said to me before, broken phrases about what we were creating together, about what it meant to have me like this, about how tight my cunt was now that he knew I was pregnant. I couldn’t answer. I could only move, feel him inside me, know him father.

“I sucked you off before, now you fuck me,” I begged, leaning forward to kiss him.

He took the chance to turn us over. I ended up on my back against the mattress, and he settled between my thighs without leaving me, propping his elbows on either side of my head. He looked at me from so close I could count his lashes.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know. Now give it to me hard.”

He started moving again, faster now, breathing hard against my neck. He drove his cock deep into me with one long thrust and stayed there, grinding, before pulling almost all the way out and shoving back in in one single stroke. The bed started banging against the wall. The mattress creaked under us. I wrapped my arms around his back and my legs around his hips, pulling him deeper each time, feeling his balls slap my ass with every shove.

“Like that, like that,” I whispered in his ear. “Don’t stop.”

“You like it like this, my pregnant girl?”

“I love it.”

He hooked one leg under the knee and lifted it onto his shoulder, opening me wider, going deeper. From that angle each thrust rubbed a place inside me that made me arch all the way back. I dug my nails into his back and he kept hammering into me with his jaw clenched, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.

“I’m going to come again,” I panted. “Andrés, come inside, come inside with me.”

When I felt him getting close, I bit his shoulder without meaning to and he groaned into my ear, a deep sound that finally pushed me over the edge. He felt my cunt closing around his cock and drove once, twice, three more times all the way in before spilling into me with a muffled groan. I felt the hot spurts throbbing inside me, one after another, and I came too, clamping my legs around him so he wouldn’t slip out.

We came together. That almost never happened, but that afternoon it did.

He stayed inside me a long while afterward, unmoving, his forehead pressed against my collarbone. I could feel his heart beating against mine, our breaths finding the same rhythm, his cock slowly softening without slipping out. I stroked the back of his neck with my fingers, slowly, while the afternoon light faded on the far wall. When he finally pulled out, I felt his semen sliding down my thigh and didn’t bother to wipe it away.

“We should eat something,” I said after a while, laughing without any real desire to move.

“Later.”

“Andrés…”

“Later.”

And he kissed me again, and ran his tongue along my neck, and slid two fingers between my legs to scoop up his own come and put it in his mouth, watching me as he sucked them one by one.

***

We had dinner at eleven at night, in the kitchen, both of us in pajamas, the test still on the table among the things we hadn’t put away. We ate the first thing we found in the fridge and talked about everything at once: names, rooms, how we were going to tell my mother, whether we’d wait until twelve weeks to make the official announcement.

We decided yes. We’d wait.

We also decided that night belonged to us.

The following weeks were the strangest of my life. I walked through the office carrying a huge secret inside me and nobody knew it. Carmen, my desk mate, asked me twice if I was all right because she’d seen me vomiting in the bathroom, and I lied to her looking her straight in the eye. I had never lied so well. Andrés and I exchanged conspiratorial looks over breakfast, and sometimes when I came home I’d find him with his hand held out in the air, as if he were measuring how big my belly would be in six months.

At thirteen weeks we held the dinner.

We invited both our families at once, something we hadn’t done since the wedding. My mother arrived with her arms full of Tupperware, as if she thought we were on the verge of starving. His mother brought a wine she’d been saving for years. My sister Paula showed up last, disheveled and apologizing, and sat down beside me asking what we were celebrating.

“Eat first,” we said at the same time.

We held out until dessert. Andrés stood up with the wineglass in his hand —his, not mine— and cleared his throat as if he were about to give a speech. I looked at him and knew the tears would escape him before they would me.

“Lucía and I want to tell you something.”

Absolute silence around the table.

“We’re going to be parents.”

My mother let out a sharp cry that startled the dog. His mother put both hands to her mouth. My sister stood up from her chair and hugged me from behind before I could get to my feet. His father stayed very still for a few seconds and then went over to Andrés and gave him a long hug without saying anything, his eyes bright.

“About time,” he said at last, letting him go and wiping his face with the back of his hand. “I knew a good father would come out of this one.”

Paula squeezed my shoulders from behind.

“How many weeks?” she whispered in my ear.

“Thirteen.”

“I’m going to be an aunt.”

I laughed against her cheek and let her keep holding me.

The rest of dinner was a stream of hurried questions, name suggestions, offers of help, memories of their own pregnancies from both mothers. Andrés and I kept finding each other’s eyes over the tops of everyone’s heads and smiling without saying anything, knowing the night would be too short.

When everyone left, it was almost two in the morning. I closed the door and leaned against it, exhausted.

Andrés looked at me from the hallway.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m better than okay.”

He came over and rested his hand on my stomach, which was already beginning to show if you knew where to look. He kissed my forehead, the bridge of my nose, my lips.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”

I followed him.

And as I climbed the stairs behind him, holding on to his hand, I thought that life had just split in two. In the before and after of those two parallel lines on the bathroom counter. In the before and after of that afternoon when he took me to the bedroom before speaking.

I still think that’s how it was. That life sometimes splits in two, without warning.

And we were lucky enough to split it together.