But then in the next moment, the smile slowly slid from her face as her jaw set and her expression turned into one of firm resolve.
"It's exactly what I needed to hear."
Samantha reached over to the nightstand and shut the lamp off, shrouding her face in darkness.
"Good night."
***
Janet was exhausted as she fumbled with her keys, trying to jam them into the apartment doorknob while barely managing to hold onto the heavy grocery bag with one arm. At last she managed, nearly dropping the bag in the process as she spilled inside.
It was late and she was very tempted to leave everything by the door and go straight to bed, but she couldn't -- the vast majority of the groceries were frozen tv dinners. So she slogged over to the freezer, shoving everything inside.
Looking back over the past few months, Janet's life felt muted, dull and colorless. With little to look forward to, she'd mostly thrown herself into her work, going into the office early and leaving late, though she'd be hard pressed to say that the extra hours had been noticed or appreciated. But then, maybe that was to be expected since the quality of her work had declined -- her productivity had gone way down, and if anything she was getting less done these days.
The lack of energy wasn't merely from the long hours, however. A general malaise had settled over her alongside the accompanying funk that had been gathering since her dinner pitch to Samantha, and she felt perpetually tired.
The eager, pent-up distracting energy from her insane idea was long gone, leaving her with a sharp clarity and sense that she'd honestly been temporarily deranged. But as the weeks passed, that feeling became more and more blunted, giving way to sluggishness and lethargy in its place. What had she even been thinking in the first place, Janet wondered vaguely for the hundredth time over, with a dull ponderance rather than the cringing angst of those first few days.
Now that it wasn't even a remote possibility, The Idea seemed even more preposterous than when she'd first conceived of it. Becoming a single mother! Asking her roommate to help her become one... through the use of that crazy drug! It was complete madness... It was a small miracle that Samantha was even still talking to her at all.
To that end, at least, the one silver living was that no lasting damage appeared to have been done. There had been some careful treading around each other in the immediate aftermath, but neither had broached the subject of that dinner again and soon it had faded into the background.
Samantha had been spending more time at Michael's since then, but as Janet was around so much less, and, truthfully, less engaged with everyone and everything around her, her roommate's increased absence didn't seem all that unusual or a direct result of what had happened.
If anything, Samantha had made an ongoing, if considerate and unobtrusive, steady effort to shake Janet out of her state of depression, though she'd mostly rebuffed all of the attempts. It wasn't at all that she was angry or resentful -- it was just that when she thought about making the effort to go out in a social setting, around other people, she just couldn't seem to muster the energy and will to go.
The lack of energy was the only constant in Janet's grey, bleak world. It had been a tremendous summoning of will to even go to the grocery store after work instead of going straight home; indeed, it had been on her to-do list for over a week, and the internal debate of shopping for groceries versus starving to death had only just barely given way to reason.
That monumental task finally finished with the packing away of the freezer, Janet's eyes kept fluttering closed as she brushed her teeth, getting ready for bed. She was nudged slightly towards wakefulness by her phone giving a small quiet chime and accompanying buzz.
It was only after Janet numbly reached out and squinted at the received text message that her eyes snapped open wide with an alertness she'd not felt in months, the toothbrush frozen in her mouth, her heart suddenly pounding in her chest.
The message was a single line from Samantha.
It simply read: "I'll do it."
