Darcy gets to New York a week earlier than she had originally planned and she tries to tell herself it has nothing to do with her excitement over seeing Steve again, but she can barely even finish that thought before she calls herself a liar. There are a lot of things she needs to take care of before she gets too busy with her job, like unpacking and settling in, really making her apartment feel like home. She also wants the chance to be a tourist and get lost in her new city for a little while since she hasn't spent very much time here. All of that factored in to her decision to arrive ahead of schedule, not just him.

They've stayed in contact since parting ways in Texas via flirty texts and some casual conversations on the phone that were mostly innocent. Well, except for that one night he called while she was in Florida, said it was raining where he was and how that made him think of her. She had an ache for him between her legs as soon as she'd heard his deep voice on the line; long before he jokingly asked her what she was wearing and then he brought her off over the phone muttering explicitly filthy words into her ear. But that was just the once. The rest of the time they've been good and she can't decide whether to be proud of that or a little disappointed.

She gets a ton accomplished her first two days. Her small apartment is coming together nicely and she gets the entire thing cleaned from top to bottom and most of her things put away in a fashion she likes to call orderly enough. She even manages to carve out time to see some of the neighborhood and find the best takeout places.

There's a Thai place around the corner and she grabs dinner one night on her way back home. It's delicious and she swears she is going to become a regular, until she wakes up the next morning sicker than a dog and puking her brains out. Those takeout menus go straight into the circular file.

She spends the entire day in bed and with her head bent over the toilet. Thai food is dead to her. When Steve calls that evening, she debates on not answering it because she's so miserable, but she thinks his voice might help take her mind off it for a minute or two.

"Hello?" she mutters.

"Darcy?" he asks. His voice low in her ear and it does sound good. "Are you okay? You sound terrible."

She closes her eyes against another wave of nausea and it manages to ebb away before she throws up all over her new comforter. "No," she whines miserably. "I'm sick."

"What's wrong?"

Darcy groans and takes a deep breath as her stomach rolls. "Pretty sure it's food poisoning. Evil Thai place around the corner."

"I'm sorry, doll. Do you need anything? I have to leave in a couple hours for a job, but I could bring you something on my way if you need it."

Her lips thin into a sickly smile at his offer. "That's sweet of you, but I would like for you to still want to date me when you get back, so you can't see me like this."

Steve chuckles and the sound of it is soothing in her ear. "I'll still want to," he insists. "Let me ask again, do you need anything?"

"No, but thank you anyway. How long are you gonna be gone?"

"Not sure. A week or two, probably," he answers.

"Well, someone has to make the world a safer place, right?"

"Yeah, I suppose so. I need to pack, but I wanted to see how you were. M'sorry you're so sick."

"Thanks," she rasps. "Be safe okay?"

"I will. Feel better, Darcy," Steve says. "I'll call you when I'm back."

"Sounds good. Bye, Steve."

"Bye, Darcy."

She hangs up the phone and springs out of bed to make a mad dash for the bathroom.

When she wakes up the next morning, she feels more like herself, but she's still so exhausted it feels like she got run over by a bus. She made it through the night without getting sick and slept for twelve hours, but she could probably sleep for twelve more without batting an eye. Darcy stands up to pad into the bathroom and her stomach betrays her immediately. It's mostly bile at this point and a lot of dry heaving; after yesterday there is nothing left to puke up. She wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand and looks in the cabinet under the sink for some Pepto. It's hidden behind a box of tampons and her hand freezes as she eyes the feminine products warily.

"No," she says aloud. Her voice echoes off the walls and she closes her eyes, trying to recall when her last period was. She pushes to her feet and rushes to grab her phone off the bed; there's an app on it to keep track of her cycles. Her finger hovers over the button a moment before she opens the app.

Just as she feared, she skipped her period in August. Her last one was at the beginning of July and two weeks later was when she'd met Steve. And had sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex.

White hot panic courses through her as she hurries to throw on some clothes and get down to Duane Reade for a pregnancy test. She stubs her toe in her haste to get on her shoes. "Shit!" she yells and starts to cry as she hops pathetically around her apartment.

Darcy puts five boxes of pregnancy tests in her basket because those things are wrong sometimes and if her life is about to be irrevocably changed, she doesn't want to rely on the results from just one. She needs substantial proof. She also buys a bottle of ginger ale and some Gatorade since she's going to have to pee a whole fucking lot to take all of those tests.

The clerk ringing up her merchandise is a middle-aged woman who looks like she's seen her share of hard living over the years—rode hard and put away wet springs to mind—and Darcy feels a little judged by her, if she's being honest. And fuck this lady, okay? For all she knows this is a blessed occasion in Darcy's life and she's excited about the prospect of having a baby.

Yeah, she's absolutely fucking not. She's terrified and now that she thinks about it that probably reads on her face like a neon sign.

She spends an exorbitant amount of money for sticks she's going to pee on, but if by some miracle she ends up not being pregnant, it'll seem like chump change compared to the cost of raising a baby in New York fucking City. Darcy smiles wanly and nods when the clerk tells her to have a nice day.

She chugs the Gatorade and reads the instructions on the box. In an effort to save time and make less of a mess, she pees in a cup and sticks five pregnancy tests strip down into it. Her phone beeps with a message as she's reaching for it to set the timer. It's from Steve. Hope you're feeling better. See you soon.

The timing of that message should be hilarious and it probably would be if it was happening to someone else instead of her. Fuck. She sets the timer for two minutes and prays to every higher being she can think of for the tests to be negative.

Two minutes feel like an eternity and she jumps when the alarm goes off. She quickly says another silent prayer and picks up one of the tests. There are two pink lines indicating a positive result in the window and her heart constricts. She takes a deep breath and forces herself to look at another one. This time it's a plus sign. The other three are all positive, too, and that's the moment she knows she can't hide from the facts anymore. The truth is staring back at her in pink and white lines and the reality of what that means breaks her heart into tiny pieces.

Darcy slides down the wall and slumps to the floor of her tiny bathroom. She hugs her knees to her chest as a sob escapes her lips and fat tears roll down her face.

The next few days she spends researching her options in the comforts of her apartment. She can't stop bursting into tears and throwing up, and she doesn't want to do either of those things in public. Morning sickness her ass; try all damn day sickness. She plugs the date of her last period into one of those online pregnancy calculators and figures out her due date is the first week of April. That means she's roughly eight weeks along. The pregnancy timeline with the pictures freaks her out; in just a manner of a few weeks it goes from looking like a group of cells, to a tadpole, to an alien, to the tiniest human baby and she's just not mentally prepared to deal with all of this right now. She closes out of that website pretty quickly.

Her two options, as she sees them, are having this baby and raising it or terminating the pregnancy. Other options exist, but she knows there's no way she can carry this baby inside of her for nine months and give it up for adoption for someone else to raise. She doesn't know the first thing about babies and she can't recall the last time she even held one, so how in the world is she supposed to be someone's mother? But, and it's a big but, every time her mind even thinks the word abortion her heart twists and her stomach sinks like a stone. She wonders if she ever really had a choice about all this to begin with.

Well, she did, and she chose not to keep her legs closed at the time. She feels an overwhelming urge to write a hate blog about the manufacturers of both birth control pills and Trojan condoms. Those fuckers have let her down epically.

There's a pang in her chest when she realizes that her mother must have gone through this exact same thing. She'd only been nineteen when Darcy was born, still practically a kid herself, and while it had to have been difficult raising a baby on her own, she'd done it and handled it with far more grace than Darcy's exhibiting now.

Darcy cries over her mom for the first time in ages. She needs advice right now that only a mother can give and the last time she checked her mom wasn't dishing that out from her place in the cemetery. There's always her dad, but Jesus fuck, he's going to go apeshit when he finds out.She closes her laptop and falls back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling trying to blink the tears away.

She's going to have this baby.

Now what?