Knocked Up
My heels echoed against the concrete as I walked toward my car, each step sharp and deliberate in the empty carpark.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting that particular sickly glow that made everything feel slightly unreal, like I was walking through someone else's memory of a place rather than the place itself.
I heard his footsteps before I saw him—different weight distribution than mine, heavier, more purposeful. I didn't turn around. Something in the way the air shifted made my throat tighten, made my hand tighten around my car keys until the metal edges bit into my palm.
"Claire."
Dave's voice carried across the concrete space between us, low and familiar. I stopped at my car door but didn't unlock it.
When I finally turned, he was standing ten feet away, his suit jacket unbuttoned, his tie loosened in a way my husband, his twin brother Paul, would never allow himself at the office.
The fluorescent lights caught the silver threading through his temples—the same premature grey Paul didn't have, the only reliable way I'd learned to tell them apart when they weren't speaking.
"You forgot this."
He held up a manila folder—Morrison brief, secondary liability research. I'd left it on my desk in my haste to leave, home duties, two kids. Domestic responsibilities at age thirty-four.
I stepped toward him, hand outstretched, and that was my mistake.
The gap closed too easily, too naturally, like water finding its level.
When I reached for the folder, his other hand caught my wrist—not forcefully, but with the absolute certainty of someone who had already decided what happened next.
My breath came shallow, fast.
"Dave—"
"Paul doesn't know what you are."
His voice dropped further, intimate and devastating.
"He thinks you're his wife who happens to practice law. He doesn't see the part that needs to win, that needs to be seen winning."
I should have pulled away. The concrete was cold through my thin blouse, his hand was warm on my wrist, and somewhere above us the building's ventilation system groaned through its eternal cycle.
I didn't pull away.
"Your car," he said, and it wasn't a question.
I unlocked it with trembling fingers, and he took the keys from me, opened the back door with the same methodical precision he applied to everything.
The interior smelled like leather and vanilla air freshener.
When Dave pushed me inside, I went easily, my knees finding the narrow seat, my hands bracing against the opposite door.
The folder fell somewhere, pages scattering.
His hands pushed my skirt up with practised efficiency, no hesitation, no asking.
I heard his belt, his zipper.
"You thought about this," I said, and my voice sounded like someone else's, breathless and accusing.
"Every day since you started here."
He gripped my hips, fingers pressing into the soft flesh above my stockings, and pulled me back toward him.
"Every time you walked past my office. Your goddamn swaying arse."
He took me in one hard thrust, and my forehead pressed against the cool window, my breath fogging the glass.
The carpark remained empty, fluorescent and silent, but anyone could walk through. Anyone from the firm could descend the elevator, could see my reflection in the glass, my mouth open, my eyes unfocused.
He's got the girth. He's got the grind. A pushing, withdrawing to my pussy cusp technique.
Each thrust pushing me forward, my knees sliding against leather.
His hand wrapped in my hair, pulling my head back, arching my neck.
"Look at me," he commanded, and I did, catching his reflection in the rearview mirror—his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that felt like drowning.
"Paul," I gasped, not knowing why, some broken reflex of guilt or comparison or simply the need to name what we were undoing.
Dave's grip tightened, his thrusts deepening. "He's not here."
His voice was low, almost gentle despite the violence of his movements.
"He doesn't see you. He doesn't know how you sound when you're about to come, how you bite your lip to stay quiet."
His withdrawal surprised me.
His head between my legs was divine.
He slurped my wetness. Added to it with his delving tongue.
Swept around my clitty with teasing, teasing sweeps.
He spat into my centre. Not once. Not twice. A dirty, dirty third.
His saliva and my girly-jus combined to re-greet his beckoning stiffness.
My God, he pumped me like I was a cheerleader, back in the day.
I shattered; my cry muffled against my own shoulder.
The tingly peaks started. They built. They built. They frickin stayed.
"Oorrghh!"
He followed seconds later, groaning my name into the back of my neck, his hips stuttering through the last spasms.
Cramped in the back seat, locked together, breathing hard.
The fluorescent lights hummed. Somewhere, a car engine started on another level.
He withdrew and zipped his pants.
I found my keys on the floor, my folder scattered beneath the seat.
Dave paused at the open door, the carpark's cold air rushing in.
"You'll need more," and then he was gone.
I told myself the carpark was an aberration, a moment of weakness born of exhaustion and professional tension and too many years of being seen as competent rather than desired.
But my body kept its own calendar.
The nausea started five weeks later, subtle at first—coffee tasting wrong, the smell of Paul's aftershave suddenly unbearable.
Then my breasts began to ache, heavy and tender in a way I'd forgotten from my twenties. I bought a test at a pharmacy three towns over, where no one would recognise me.
Yep, knocked up by the twin.