The night Wesley asked me to “carry his child,” or some bullshit, I couldn’t sleep. Just down the road in the Mission, someone was screaming at someone else, their voice tearing through the night like a stray cat’s. I tossed and turned in bed, alternating between dreams. In one, Wesley was my husband. How generic. I nagged at him endlessly. Fix the sink in the bathroom, Wesley. Come on, Wesley, please drive the kids to soccer. My dream-self was fat and bulbous, running after my dream-husband and telling him to stay home with me. I hadn’t realized that this had been a fear when I’d been much younger.

I supposed that was an issue now, as well. I blinked into the night, feeling sweat pooling beneath me on the sheets. I imagined myself thick in the belly, taut with Wesley’s baby. I would be alone, eating, sweating, aching, while Wesley would tear through the night, more or less allowed to forget about his responsibilities, even as I gave him the “gift” of an heir.

Although it was true that Wesley hadn’t run around on me when we’d been teenagers. He’d always said I was different. And just the way he’d stuck up for me with Marshall reminded me of it. We weren’t different to one another, necessarily. Despite the passing of so many years.

But I didn’t want to be a tool for him. I had always wanted to be more than that. And wouldn’t giving him this heir almost taint the memory of us? Wouldn’t it mean that whatever “love” we’d had as teenagers would be filtered out, replaced by whatever this was? Becoming parents for the convenience of it?

I paced my apartment, my toes recoiling at the spongy nature of the shoddy carpet. It was a shit place, a place I’d found on an internet listing. “No cats,” it had read, along with, “Might have trouble getting packages.” The guy who’d leased it to me was moving to North Carolina with his girlfriend. “We’ll see if it works out,” he’d shrugged, passing me the keys. “I mean, what is love, anyway, but a weird chance?”

They were strange words to hear from a San Francisco native with dark purple locks and thick glasses. But at the time—fresh from a breakup with Tyler—they’d reverberated through my soul, forcing me to reckon with myself. With who the fuck I was.

At around four in the morning, I slipped into the kitchen chair and stared down the screenplay. It was speckled with Marshall’s beer: wrinkled and unkempt, the way I felt. But I began on page seventy-four, drawing lines and making hard edits. I imagined myself in some kind of writer’s room, trying to imagine the changes other writers might make. “This, what she’s saying here? It’s not believable. Nobody would say that.”

Sunlight streamed in through the kitchen window. I blinked into it, realizing I’d lost myself in edits. It was almost nine in the morning, and I’d have to open the pub by eleven for the “morning alcoholic rush.”

A text buzzed in from Sam, my best friend since age twelve. Of all the things about my return to San Francisco, she was the greatest—sitting with me long nights, with a bottle of wine, and listening to me moan about Tyler, about my horrendous decisions in life.

“You used to be so hopeful,” she said to me a few days before, almost mocking. “All caught up in that whirlwind Wesley romance.”

“Well, time does that to you, I guess,” I’d returned. “Really makes you realize what it’s like to fall flat on your ass.”

“I’m bringing coffee,” Sam texted. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She was. She appeared at the other side of the busted screen door, her smile beaming out from behind bright red lips. She was always the girly one of the two of us: the one with the perfect curls, the long lashes, the dresses. She spoke frequently of “beauty sleep” and would have called my long hours over my script the previous night “a detriment to personal beauty.”

“You look tired. Are you tired?” she asked me, ducking into the shadows of my apartment. “You really shouldn’t work in that bar. I think it’s going to mess up your schedule, you know? Your hormones.”

I took the coffee and gave her a quick hug. We eased into our now-familiar positions at the kitchen table, with me slipping the script to the side. Her eyes glanced at it.

“I read it, you know,” she said. “When you sent it to me last week. I tore through it quicker than I’ve read anything in ages.”

Sam and I had both wanted to be actresses. Sam had lived in Los Angeles—just three streets away from my busted flat in Los Feliz—for a good three years before giving up and moving back to San Francisco. We’d run lines together for hours at a time, talking about the intricacies of characters and precisely how to exhibit emotion with just a flicker of our eyes. But this? This was the first time we’d discussed that sort of thing in… Well, it had probably been five years.

“What did you think?”

“Remy, Remy, Remy,” Sam sighed, clicking her fingers along her Styrofoam coffee cup. “Why the hell weren’t you doing this all along? I swear, you’re a better writer than actress. And you know I think you’re pretty brilliant at everything.”

I felt my cheeks burn. My stomach swelled with a deep, unquenchable desire to make the thing myself. “I have no equipment. No actors. No money,” I sighed. “I edit this thing for hours at a time, every day, and still… It’s not like it’s building to anything. I feel lost. Frustrated.”

“I wish I could help you,” Sam said, her voice soft. “But there’s not much of a salary in the teaching world. Guess I could get the second-graders to be your assistants, provided you find actors. They can’t even memorize their multiplication table. I wouldn’t bet they can handle this very adult dialogue.”

“Ha,” I said. Outside, I watched as the garbage men stomped down the street, tossing black bags into the back of their truck. I felt a strange sense that nothing would be exciting ever again.

“Last night, Wesley came back,” I finally sputtered. “I hadn’t seen him in, what? Twelve years?”

“Jesus,” Sam said, her eyes growing large, showing their whites. “Why? Just to see Quintin?”

“He had to see his dad for some reason,” I said. “I hadn’t seen him since, since before so much. Since before I tried and failed at the acting. Since before Hank died. Jesus, I mean, he looks like a man now. Not the boy I loved.”

“I’m sure he thought you looked so beautiful. The one who got away,” Sam said, giving me a small smile. “Don’t tell me he didn’t try to sleep with you. That guy, he’s probably sleazy as fuck now.”

“He— Well.” I brought my script papers against my chest, running Wesley’s question through my mind once more. If I verbalized it to Sam, what would she say? Surely, she’d tell me it was irresponsible. That just having Wesley’s baby for the money—so that I could reach my dreams, create—was wrong? “You can’t just bring a baby into the world for cash. A baby should be wanted. A baby should be loved.” I imagined these words, and they echoed from ear to ear. I knew they were correct.

“What?” Sam finally asked, breaking the silence. “What did he do?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m still insanely attracted to him,” I said, ultimately deciding against telling Sam the truth. It wasn’t like I was going to go through with it, anyway. For all I knew, Wesley was already miles away. “But how couldn’t I be? We had so much, once.”

“You should date someone,” Sam suggested, not for the first time. “I think you’ll find that the guys here are a little less materialistic than they were in LA. Maybe you’ll find someone who wants babies. I could so see you as a mom.”

“But that means giving up my dream, doesn’t it?” I asked her, gesturing toward the script. “Doesn’t that mean this would all be over?”

Sam shrugged, drawing up and lifting her sweater over her shoulders. She tapped toward the door, preparing to leave. Her purse swung at her waist. “Maybe that’s what getting into our thirties is?” she asked. “Maybe being thirty means… Well, for me, it means dating this random guy named Chad I met on a dating website. Maybe it means never being late to work. Maybe it means going to bed at a reasonable hour. I don’t know. I don’t know the secret to happiness. But it doesn’t sound like Wesley does, either.”

I stood at this statement, sensing she could feel my need for Wesley sizzling behind my eyes. I padded toward the door with her, wanting to tell her so badly, what Wesley had proposed. He wanted me to have his child. Me. Of all the women in the world. And he was willing to give me some of the inheritance—from one of the richest men in the world—to do it. Was I a fool to turn that down?

“Have fun with Chad tonight,” I told her, shrugging. “He sounds—nice?”

“He’s in finance, Remy,” Sam said, giggling. “Fun isn’t a part of his vocabulary. But fine dining is, at least. Ciao.” She kissed me on the cheek and sauntered down the staircase, toward her car below. I watched her go from behind the screen, my stomach aching as I felt us separate, driving down very different roads.

With her gone, I gave myself back over to thoughts of Wesley, completely.

My lips still ached with the memory of Wesley’s. My pussy felt hot, growing wet, pulsing with desire. I slipped my hand along the flatness of my stomach, bringing the pink pussy lips apart beneath the silk of my underwear. Immediately, I felt the warmth of myself. My clit was a tight ball. The moment I touched it, my shoulders grew lax. I tossed my head back, leaning against the wall. My nipples became hard brown nubs against my white T-shirt.

I glanced at the mirror in the hallway, watching as my legs drew apart. My finger traced a line from my clit toward the opening of myself. I slid a finger deep inside, imagining it was Wesley’s tongue. I imagined his eyes, burning from between my legs. I imagined his cock—dark red, straining with veins, dripping with cum. It had always filled me so tightly. My fingers had traced his growing eighteen-year-old muscles, fingers toying with his nipples. I had inhaled him. Biting him. My tongue had found every crevice of him, before sucking his cock, so thick, down my throat…

I stroked at myself until I came: my muscles spasming, my lips parting. My tongue traced my lips, hunting for any last taste of him. In my last moments before I fell into the couch, exhausted, I imagined that this body could take on Wesley’s heir. I felt strong enough, big enough, womanly enough. And, somehow—despite how horrendous I knew this offer truly was—I began to give myself over to it. What else was I doing? And wouldn’t this mean, on some level, that Wesley couldn’t disappear for twelve years again? He’d have to stick it out at least eighteen.