Unforeseen

"How many minutes are left until we can look at it?" Wendell asked her, an edge to his tone.

When Darlene looked up at him from where she was seated on their bed, she could see that he was clinching his jaw as though it were difficult for words to emerge from his mouth, or perhaps for him to control which ones came through. His hands continually pressed into each other, cracking and popping knuckles one by one, and he shifted his weight first to one foot, then the other. It seemed to be all he could do to keep from pacing as he waited for her reply.

"Just a few. Will you relax, already? It is what it is, and anyway, it's not like we don't have choices," she held up one hand in his direction, rolling her eyes. "Seriously, chill out."

Perhaps it was her derisive, hardly calming tone, carrying tension that matched his own. Perhaps it was the words themselves, and their striking contrast to what Wendell himself was inclined towards feeling. Whatever it was about this communication from her, Wendell bristled, a muscle jerking in his cheek before he drew closer to her, leaning down towards her in an almost threatening fashion, his face close to hers, both hands pressed flat on the bed beside her thighs. He did not touch her, but his voice rose slightly, intense with his anger as he responded.

"Relax, Darlene? Relax? We're about to see whether or not our life is about to be supremely fucked over, and you think I should just sit back and relax?"

Most women would have flinched for him to speak to them in such an aggressive tone, likely would have recoiled away from him coming so close, looming over them with his body. But Darlene was not most women, and she did not so much as blink. She looked back at her twin calmly, her eyes squarely fixated on his own, until his expression softened slightly, the tension riddling through his back and shoulders lessening. She waited until he had straightened before she spoke.

"Nothing has to change. Not if we don't want it to. If I don't. We don't even know if anything will change at all, Wendell. We haven't seen. It is what it is, and whatever it is, it doesn't have to stay that way. So…calm down."

Leaning forward, she cupped his face in her hand, tilting it down towards her as she kissed him, slow, gentle, then with more aggression, sucking, then biting down on his lower lip. Automatically Wendell's hands came forward to cup her waist, slipping up her sides so that one came to rest on her shoulder, squeezing hard, the other roaming across her chest with equal pressure. When Darlene pulled back, both were breathing hard, chests heaving, and the tension of Wendell's muscles was now due to lust rather than anger, exactly as she had intended.

"Now," she said breathlessly, giving him a little push to his chest, and extended one hand for him to help her up in a rather exaggerated gesture of grandeur. Wendell took her hand, squeezing, before pulling her to her feet, continuing to hold her hand as they walked into the bathroom.

As she picked up the pregnancy test, hesitating, despite her own earlier matter of fact words attesting against her worry, Darlene could understand all too well, though they still had not spoken of it aloud, the real reasons for Wendell's agitation. It was not the potential pregnancy itself, though that was, of course, something they had neither expected, planned for, or desired between them. It was the uncertainty of whether any possible child she would be carrying at this particular time would belong to himself, or to other recent sexual partners of hers- once she had not willingly accepted.

They could have no way of knowing the truth of this, and the very thought, however unvoiced it might be, that a baby she was carrying could potentially not be his was enough to send him off into a violent rage if she did not temper him quickly.

"Together?" she asked, still looking up into Wendell's eyes rather than down at the stick in the cup, and when he nodded tightly, she squeezed his hand.

"Now."

She was holding her breath even so as they looked down together. For a few more moments both were very still, and then their hands squeezed harder. It was another few moments before both spoke in one breath.

"Negative."

The resulting explosion of ecstasy was nothing compared to anything that could have lead to an opposite test result. As Darlene leapt onto him, wrapping her legs around his waist, and began to celebrate with intense fervor, Wendell just barely had the presence of mind to reach back blindly behind her to close the bathroom door.

.