The Night I Decided to Get Pregnant

There are things a woman doesn’t tell anyone. Not her lifelong friends, not the sister she shares every secret with, and certainly not the doctor who looks at you over the top of her glasses and writes down your medical history as if it were a shopping list. This is one of those things. I’m writing it here because I need to get it out of me, and because in a few days I’ll stop being just me and become a mother, and before that I want to be honest at least once.

I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve been with ninety-eight men in my life. I know because, for a while, I kept count the way someone collects something they’re too ashamed to show but can’t quite bring themselves to throw away. Of those ninety-eight, only one was white: Andrés, my first boyfriend, the boy I lost my virginity to at eighteen in the back seat of a car that smelled of pine air freshener. It was clumsy, quick, and forgettable: he barely opened my legs, barely shoved his cock in a couple of times with a puppy’s awkwardness, and came over my belly before I had time to get wet. The other ninety-seven were Black. And with none of them did I protect myself.

I’m not writing this to scandalize anyone. I’m writing it because it’s the truth, and because understanding where I come from is the only way to understand the night I want to talk about.

***

I learned very early to know my own body. More than most of the women I know, who live their cycle like a monthly surprise. Not me. I knew exactly when I ovulated: that slight tug in my side, that different kind of wetness soaking through my panties by midmorning for no reason, that desire that became almost unbearable three or four days a month, when my cunt throbbed just from crossing my legs on the subway. I learned to read the signs the way others read the sky before rain. And above all, I learned to decide. When to let the risk exist and when to cut it off with a morning-after pill.

That was always my rule. Fuck without a condom —because that’s how I liked it, because feeling a hard cock with no barrier, noticing every vein, every pulse, every hot stream of semen spilling inside, was half the pleasure— but govern the calendar with military discipline. For years it worked. I slept with whoever I wanted, however I wanted, and there were no consequences I hadn’t chosen.

Until there were.

The first man who got me pregnant was Émile. A very tall Congolese man with a broad back and huge hands, who fucked in a way that was closer to battle than caressing. With him sex was aggressive, rough, almost dangerous. He tore my clothes off, threw me face down on the bed and spread my legs with a slap before driving his whole dick into me in one thrust, without asking, without giving me time. He fucked me doggy-style until my arms shook, one hand on my neck shoving my face into the pillow and the other leaving his fingerprints in my hip. He came inside with an animal growl and stayed there, still hard, until I felt him soften inside me. I loved him precisely for that. I got pregnant by him twice, in less than a year. I lost both pregnancies very early, and I always suspected it had something to do with the violence of what we did. I don’t say that with guilt. I say it with the calm sadness of someone who has already made peace with her past.

There was a third, on a Carnival dawn, with a man dressed as one of the Three Kings whom I met at a party and whose name I never learned. I fucked him in a doorway, with his costume half lowered, his crown still on, and my panties hanging from one ankle. He lifted me against the wall, rammed his cock into me standing up, and filled my cunt with cum in less than five minutes, biting my neck while I dug my nails into his ass. That time I took the morning-after pill first thing, with my head still pounding from the alcohol, semen sliding down my thigh, and a strange feeling in my stomach. I didn’t regret it. It wasn’t the time, it wasn’t the man.

The time, and the man, came later. And his name was Marius.

***

I met Marius in the least romantic place in the world: the line at an all-night pharmacy, on a Sunday night, both of us looking like we hadn’t slept. He was there to buy something for his mother. I was there for ibuprofen. He held the door for me, smiled at me, and something in that smile —wide, sincere, without a drop of calculation— disarmed me in a way nothing ever had before.

He was Senegalese, had been in the country for twelve years, and spoke my language with a soft accent that turned every sentence into a caress. He was almost two meters tall. He had deep Black skin, almost bluish under the pharmacy’s white light, and eyes that seemed to laugh before his mouth did. But what caught me wasn’t any of that. It was how he listened to me. How he asked my name and repeated it slowly, as if it mattered to him to remember it.

We went out that same week. And for the first time in my life, someone mattered to me beyond what he could give me in bed.

I’m not going to lie: desire was there from the first minute. The first time we slept together, in his small, tidy apartment, I discovered he was exactly what my body had been looking for all those years without knowing it. He undressed me slowly, without hurry, kissing every inch of skin as it was revealed, and when he finally pulled down his boxers and I saw what he had between his legs, a moan escaped me before I even touched it. A long, thick, shining Black cock, the tip already wet. I knelt without thinking and took it into my mouth as far as I could, sucking on it with my eyes closed, tasting the salt of his pre-cum, feeling his whole length tense every time I ran my tongue under the head.

He held my head with one hand, not forcing me, only setting the rhythm a little, and groaned in his own language things I didn’t understand but that soaked me through on the inside.

When he couldn’t hold back anymore, he lifted me as if I weighed nothing, laid me on the bed and spread my legs with both hands. He sank into me slowly, very slowly, so I could get used to his size, and even so it hurt for a second before the pain turned into a pleasure that made me arch my back until my ass lifted off the mattress. He fucked me long and deep, looking into my eyes, not once taking his gaze away. And when he came, he came very deep, in long waves I felt one by one, and he didn’t pull out until long after. But with him there was something else. After every time, instead of staring at the ceiling thinking about the pill, I would fall asleep with my head on his chest, listening to him breathe, his semen still sliding between my thighs, and for the first time I had no desire to wash it off.

We were like that for ten months. Ten months of discovering that sex and affection were not opposed things, that they could live in the same bed without fighting. And somewhere in those ten months, without ever quite saying it, we both started wanting the same thing.

***

The night I want to talk about was a summer night. We had dinner on the terrace, a simple meal he had cooked, with a bottle of red wine we finished far too quickly. It was hot. The city sounded far away, muffled. And I knew —because I always know— that I was ovulating. I knew it from the thick wetness that had been soaking my panties all day, from the way my nipples had hardened under the dress whenever he brushed my arm as he poured the wine, from that dull throbbing between my legs that wouldn’t let me sit still in my chair.

I could have said something. I could have brought it up, sat down, planned it the way sensible couples do. But I didn’t want to. I wanted it like this: in silence, decided by me, in my body and in my head, as a final affirmation of everything I had been up to that point.

I kissed him on the terrace and dragged him inside. I unbuttoned his shirt button by button, slowly, running my mouth over every inch of skin as it was uncovered. I bit one nipple, licked his sternum, slid my tongue down his belly until I knelt in front of him. I unfastened his trousers with my teeth, yanked them down along with his boxers, and his cock sprang out, already hard, thick, pulsing in front of my face. I took the whole thing into my mouth, as much as I could, swallowing around it, sucking him until I felt his thighs tremble under my hands. He tried to take control, as he almost always did, to grab my hair, set the rhythm, but that night I didn’t let him. I pushed his hands away, lowered them, kept going myself. That night I was in charge.

—Lie down —I told him, my voice hoarse, my lips shiny with saliva and his pre-cum—. Don’t move.

I pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top. I spread the dress open and let it fall to the floor, no panties underneath, my already soaked cunt dripping down the inside of my thigh. I took his cock in one hand, set it at my entrance, and sank down onto him very slowly, centimeter by centimeter, looking him in the eye, watching his breathing break up and his mouth open without a sound. There was no hurry. I set the pace, first gently, barely moving up and down, squeezing him inside each time I reached the bottom, feeling my cunt open around his dick until it got used to having all of it. Then deeper, bracing my hands on his chest, arching back so he could touch me where I wanted. His huge hands held my hips, guiding me, but it was I who decided when to go down and when to stop at the edge.

I rode him like that for a long time. I made him see how my tits shook over him with each thrust, how I squeezed my own nipples with my fingers, how I took my hand to my clit and rubbed it in circles in front of his eyes without stopping my movement on his cock. I came once like that, clenching around him in long spasms, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream too loudly, and he held on, teeth clenched and the veins in his neck standing out, because I still hadn’t let him come.

I got down and changed the scene. I put one foot on his chest, pushing him into the mattress, and then I turned around, with my back to him, and sat down on him again. He drove into me from that new angle and made me scream. I bounced on his cock, legs spread, watching it go in and out shining with my juices, and he watched my ass from below, breathing faster and faster.

—Wait —I asked him when I felt he was close, when his cock started swelling inside me in that way I already knew—. Not yet.

And he waited. He clenched his teeth and waited, because he trusted me. His fingers dug into my ass, hard enough to hurt, holding back his need. That trust, that surrender from a man twice my size letting himself be governed, his cock buried to the hilt and not allowed to finish, was the most erotic thing about the whole night.

I turned back again, face to face. I wanted to look at him. I wanted to see his face when it happened. When I finally felt him trembling, when I knew he couldn’t hold it back anymore, I did what I had been planning all through dinner. I lowered myself all the way onto him, until I felt his balls pressed against my ass, closed my legs around his waist, and squeezed with all my strength, driving my heels into his back so he couldn’t move a millimeter.

—Stay —I whispered in his ear, biting it—. Stay inside. Come inside. All of it. Don’t spill a single drop.

He came like that, held against me, with no possibility of pulling out even if he’d wanted to. I felt the first jet hit me deep inside, hot, thick, and then the second, and the third, and felt his cock throbbing inside me as it let everything go, emptying itself completely against the mouth of my womb. I squeezed him with my cunt, milking him, taking the last drop from him, not letting him move away even a centimeter. And I came with him, with his semen flooding me from the inside, not just from the physical pleasure but from the absolute certainty of what I had just done. I had chosen it. I had decided it. This was not a slip or an accident. It was exactly what I wanted, achieved exactly the way I wanted it.

I stayed on top of him without moving for a long time, his cock still inside me, slowly softening, plugging the opening like a stopper so nothing could escape. When I finally slid off to the side, I lay on my back with my legs still together, my hips slightly raised on a cushion, feeling his thick semen stay where I wanted it. He stroked my back with the tips of his fingers, not fully understanding what had just happened. There it is, I thought. It’s done.

***

It took me twelve days to take the test. Twelve days of reading my body like never before, looking for the slightest sign, the more sensitive breasts, the strange fatigue, that dull intuition that settles in the belly. On the morning of the twelfth day, I locked myself in the bathroom before he woke up.

Two pink lines. Clear, unmistakable.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the test trembling in my hand and cried silently so I wouldn’t wake him. It wasn’t sadness. It was something nameless, a mixture of victory and vertigo, the feeling that my whole life —the ninety-eight men, the obsessive counting, the pregnancies I lost, the mornings of taking a pill— had been a long road leading exactly to that bathroom, to that morning, to those two lines.

***

We went to the private gynecologist together a few days later. I still remember the looks in the waiting room: a very young, very white woman walking in hand in hand with a two-meter-tall Black man, both of us unable to wipe the smiles off our faces. Let them look. I had never been ashamed of my choices, and I wasn’t about to start on the happiest day of my life.

—Pregnancy confirmed —the doctor said, turning the screen toward us—. Everything perfectly implanted. Here it is.

A dot. A tiny sac, firmly attached, planted exactly where it should be. Marius squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, and when I looked at him his eyes were full of tears. That huge man, the same man I had ruled in bed only nights before, was crying like a child over a dot on a screen.

***

Now there are only days left. A week, maybe less. The suitcase has been packed for a month, by the door, like an impatient promise. Marius talks to my belly every night in his own language, words I don’t understand but which the baby, I’m sure, already recognizes.

Sometimes, when he’s asleep and I can’t, I lie there staring at the ceiling in the dark and think about all of this. About the girl who kept count. About the woman who decided with a pill. About the one who, one summer night, closed her legs and finally chose not to decide against, but for.

I don’t regret a thing. Not the ninety-eight, not the counting, not the ones I lost, not the pill that Carnival dawn. Each of those steps brought me here, to this bed, to this man who makes me feel desired and loved at the same time, something I spent years believing could not exist together.

I will become a mother for the first time in a few days. And though no one asks me, I confess it here, where no one recognizes me: I chose it. Every part of it. And if I could go back, I would choose it exactly the same way again.