“You know what happened to Stevie Nicks, right?” Colson says.

“What do you mean?” Kate is cutting up the coke on the mirror, her nails clicking against the surface. Her expired student ID makes neat white lines.

“She railed too much coke in the 80s and blew out her septum. So she started getting the members of Fleetwood Mac to put it up her ass.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’m just saying.”

“That’s not going to happen to me. I don’t do that much coke.”

“Whatever, man.”

Kate bends over the mirror, inhales, wipes her nose. Inhales again. Wipes her nose again. Colson is in love with her. He reminds himself of this fact as if it is medicine and he needs to take a dose. She reaches over from where she is kneeling on the floor and rubs his knee; he is sitting on their couch. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go. We’re going to be late.”

“I know.”

He gets up, puts on his jacket. They are going to a birthday party for one of Kate’s friends, someone she went to college with and doesn’t like very much. Colson doesn’t know why they have to go. Kate shrugs into her faux fur bolero, tucks the rest of her coke into a jeans pocket. It is January, just a few days after Colson’s own birthday, which they celebrated by fucking in a hot tub in a hotel room in the city. Happy fucking birthday, Colson thought to himself, as he looked out at the skyline.

This isn’t how he imagined his life going. But it never is, is it?

They walk the two blocks to the M train. Kate wants to light a cigarette, but she knows what Colson would say about it. He hates her smoking. In the ten years they’ve been together, she has quit four times, and started again, surreptitiously, four times. He says she has to live long enough for them to spend their lives together, and she says, shut up. And lights a cigarette.

The offending cigarettes are in her purse. She will smoke them, coked to the gills, later in the night. She will not say anything about what she knows, about the test. She will not let the words pass her lips. This is their life. She’s not about to fuck it up.

“How was work, babe?” she says, as they get on the train. “You didn’t tell me anything when you got home.”

“Fine. It was fine.” Colson works for a nonprofit. He has a business degree from Pace, financed by Dad, and he does something with spreadsheets that Kate doesn’t understand. “Larry from accounts got his girlfriend knocked up. We’re supposed to take him out for drinks next Friday.”

“I like Larry.”

“You can come if you want.”

“Maybe I will. I have a deadline.”

“You always have a deadline.”

Kate is a freelance editor. She manages many projects at once and is always running off to finish something. Colson doesn’t know how she keeps it all in her head, or on the random scraps of paper he’s always finding around their studio apartment. “I know,” she says, sucking her teeth. “I’d like to see Larry, though.”

“I bet he’d like to see you.”

When did we become these boring people? Kate thinks to herself. Then she smiles. She likes being boring with Colson. She’s twenty-nine. He’s twenty-eight. Maybe it’s time, she thinks. To settle down.

“You ever think about moving out of the city?”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere quieter.”

“You love the city.”

“I know I do. I was just thinking.”

“It’s not like we’re going to raise a litter of puppies or something.” Colson looks down at her from his position on the subway pole. Their stop is the next one. “I don’t like kids.”

“I know you don’t. I just thought—”

“You just thought what? I’m not negotiating this with you.”

His tone is final. She thinks of the test. Of their small life, of their mornings together cooking eggs on the stove. Making coffee. Their domestic life.

“I know,” she says. “I know. I’m being silly.”

“Okay,” he says, looking at her. They get off the train.

Outside, it has started raining slightly. They walk with their heads lowered, not talking. Sometimes, Kate wonders that they’ll run out of things to say to each other. They’ve been together ten years. The silences are warm, and they don’t feel empty. Now, she is full of the secret, the thing she knows that he does not know. She opens her mouth, then closes it. There’s no use in telling. Telling would ruin everything. She runs a hand through her now-damp hair as they get to the apartment building that is their destination, a headache building between her brows.

“Ring the doorbell.” She taps her foot.

“I’m trying to remember which apartment it is. You texted it to me earlier, but I can’t recall.”

The doorbell is located. They walk up one flight of stairs, then another. Behind the apartment door, the party is in full swing, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, music playing from some unseen speaker. They slip out of their coats, warming their hands, and find drinks. Kate’s friend, Alicia, hugs her insincerely and introduces her to various friends, people from her job at some magazine (Kate doesn’t care enough to remember the name) and they all do introductions. Electrical engineer, freelance writer, stay-at-home mom on leave for the night, they all nod and smile. The apartment is a two-bedroom in a row house in Bushwick, and no one is rude enough to ask what it costs.

“And then I said, I’m not a fuck-on-the-first-date kind of girl!” someone shouts, and everyone bursts into laughter. Kate tries desperately to figure out what people are talking about, nudging Colson in the ribs, but he gives her a look, like, why are we here? and she can’t quite interpret the expression on his face. She breathes in and out. Lights a cigarette. Colson says, “Babe,” but doesn’t continue the thought.

“How long have you two been together?” someone asks them.

“Oh, we’re not together,” Kate says. “He’s actually my uncle.”

The joke doesn’t land, she’s embarrassed. Colson guffaws into his beer. It’s a private joke between the two of them, part of their secret language. She sucks on her cigarette, finishes it, and lights another. Starts to feel sick. I wish we hadn’t come, she thinks to herself. And then, I wish I was dead.

Her intrusive suicidal thoughts, which have plagued her since adolescence, are a kind of ironic joke to her, but there’s some truth behind the black humor. More than that, she wishes she was someone else, not the pregnant (oh God) girlfriend of a man who has a hard time telling her he loves her when he’s sober even after ten years of being together and living together and domestic life.

Their domestic life, Kate thinks suddenly, as she takes a cold sip of beer. It’s all in front of her now, like a movie. Cinematic and shocking. She turns to the PhD candidate at CUNY Grad Center that she’s been talking to, and says, “Wow, that sounds interesting,” even though she hasn’t been listening to what he’s been saying. Something about Africana Studies.

Let me be anyone else, she thinks, wobbling out onto the fire escape. Colson follows her like a shadow, his voice and rough hands and campfire smell a balm on her shattered nerves.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “You’ve been fucked up all night.”

“I need to tell you something,” she says. “And I don’t know how.”

“Just say it.”

She can tell from the broken, open look in his eyes that he thinks she wants to end it, this warped thing that they have built from scraps and misplaced parts. But that’s not it at all. Rather, she’s afraid that she’s already ended it. She’s ended it by wanting too much. By wanting it all.

Icarus flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, and he fell to the earth. She is Icarus, and she is falling, falling, falling down.

Early in their relationship, he made a habit of asking her too many questions. They were young, they were insecure, and he asked, late night on the phone, his voice hushed and wanting: “What do you want from me?”

“I want to make a nest with you, like a magpie,” she said. “I want to fill it with shiny things. I want to nest with you and you can bring me food like worms and seeds and then when we’re ready, I’ll lay an egg.”

“See, you’re just being ironic,” he said. “You can’t even be serious with me right now.”

“I’ll lay an egg!” she crowed, laughing into the phone receiver. “I want a nest like a magpie, full of shiny objects, and then I’ll lay my egg.”

They never wanted kids. They had always said that. No kids. They didn’t like kids. They liked traveling. They planned wild trips, to Patagonia, Thailand. They didn’t ever go on these trips; he had to work, she had to work. She had a medical condition that made it hard for her to travel. No kids. But at twenty-nine, staring at the two pink lines on the pregnancy test, she finds herself thinking. What-if.

She is laying her egg. She is filling her nest with shiny things.

And he won’t do it. She knows that. He loves their life, their easy life, where they go to work and the movies and to bars and restaurants, where they are free. Where they can go to Paris if they want to, not that they ever will, but they can. They can do whatever they want. He doesn’t want to live in New York forever. He values his freedom, his ability to pick up and move if he wants to. Maybe without her, even. They aren’t going to be together forever, are they? The longer they are together, the more it seems they will be. But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. All she knows was that she is six weeks along, and if she doesn’t do anything, in about eight months she is going to have a baby.

She is laying her egg. She is nesting.

Maybe she will miscarry. God, she hopes she will miscarry, that someone will intervene and deal with this problem before she has to make a decision. She feels guilty for hoping that, but she hopes for it. Divine intervention. She doesn’t believe in God. She believes in some internal referee in the sky, an equal balance of good and bad in the world, somehow evening it all out.

How much pain, she wonders, is it possible for one person to take? Hadn’t she already had her allotted share? Her father had died when she was twenty-one. Wasn’t that enough strife for one life? How much, she imagines, was too much?

The apartment is silent. They don’t talk. He packs his things quietly, and then, suddenly, they’ll have a violent argument. Who gets the coffee table, the Kierkegaard, the blender? “You never use it!” Colson argues, snatching the frying pan out of Kate’s hands. “You don’t even cook!”

“I would if you weren’t always in the kitchen, stepping on my toes!”

Their home has become a war zone. Where they once dreamed of a future is now a place from the past. Everything reminds Kate of Colson—his books on the bookshelf, his clothes in the dresser, his shaving razor on the bathroom sink. They’re splitting ways, and she’s ready for him to disappear. They have mutual friends, but it doesn’t matter. As far as she’s concerned, the man she once considered her best friend is now dead. Gone.

It hurts, more than she can admit to herself. Why can’t we just be boring together, like we used to be? a part of her wants to know. But of course, the most boring thing to do, the most pedestrian and pedantic, is to break up.

“I’m not going to tell you I love you forever,” he had said once. “Because I might not.”

“That’s not what a girl wants to hear,” she had replied.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s the truth.”

Now, standing outside the apartment that used to be theirs, Kate feels like she’s going to throw up. Colson is loading the last of his belongings into a U-Haul. She knows what she needs to say, but she doesn’t know how to make the words come out of her mouth. “Cole.”

“Yeah?” He’s balancing an end table on his knee, and as she watches, he heaves it up and into the truck. She had picked out that end table, it was from her first apartment in Crown Heights. She was too exhausted to fight him on taking it.

“I got the abortion. Last week. Anna drove me home. That’s why I was feeling sick on Monday.”

“You what?”

“I got the abortion. I’m not—I’m not ready. I’m not ready to have a baby, either.”

“Then why am I—why am I fucking moving all my shit out? Why are we doing this? Jesus, Kate, why didn’t you tell me? I would have, I would have come with you.”

“I still want you to move out.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I need you to be all in. No doubts. All or nothing.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.” He broke off again. “I don’t want kids.”

“I’m not saying I do either.”

“So—what?”

“I just. I need you to support me in whatever I decide to do.”

“I’m not going to support you in having a baby I don’t want. That’s a decision that requires two people.”

“No, you’re right.” “Then what?”

“I want to be sure. I feel like you’re not sure.”

“Is anyone ever sure of anything? I’m here now.”

“You’re here now.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll take it one day at a time.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

She has a sudden flash, a need to disappear, for a hole to open up in the middle of the earth and swallow her. Nothing happens. Her heart is beating too fast. Tears well up in her eyes and for a moment, she can’t see anything but his face, the most familiar face in the world. She wants nothing more than to go back inside with him, and make coffee in the coffeemaker, slow the world down into its most essential components: coffee grounds, coffee filter, hot water. Drip, drip, drip. Add milk. Stir.

She thinks of the flat automatic way he says I love you when he gets off the phone, the way he pushes his hair to the side when he’s talking about something he’s excited about, the way he laughs, high and nasal. About the thousand other things she knows about him that other people don’t know. Their relationship is a castle with a moat only they can cross. A language only they can speak. A secret floating in a sea of secrets. Add milk. Stir.

“I don’t know,” she says again. She really doesn’t. She’s confused.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee, and talk,” he says. He pulls down the cord of the U-Haul and turns off the engine. It’s double-parked, but no one is going to ticket him. If they do, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. “Come on.”

She follows him blindly inside, thinking of the coffee maker. Thinking of their domestic life.

– Joanna Acevedo