"Merry Christmas!" Mike and his parents all said to Jenna on the speakerphone, as they ended the call.
She was originally supposed to be home for the holidays, but she had to cancel for work. Mike felt disappointed and lonely. The two of them had unfinished business together. She had been physically distant overseas, pretty much since that last weekend trip. And of course there'd been no opportunity to say anything private to her, to tell her how he truly felt, when their parents were in the room with him.
Mike knew it was a bad idea to fall in love with his own sister, but that hadn't stopped it from happening, and now he was suffering for it. It was like one romantic disappointment after another. First Lisa broke up with him, taking most of his friends with her. Then he met Rosie, only to discover that she was a ghost. Then he had the bad luck to become attached to his own sister, only for even her to leave him behind.
He went back to his room to sulk, and maybe distract himself with video games. It was partly his own fault, after all. He could try to meet someone at school. But this thing with Jenna had him feeling like he was already in a relationship of some kind, even if he couldn't very well say that.
His cell phone buzzed. It was Jenna. He answered, "Hey."
"Are you alone?" she asked.
He turned his laptop speakers up a bit, to give them some cover. "As much as I ever am."
"Are you sitting down?"
"Uh...what's this about?" he asked. "I was looking forward to seeing you...and, you know, maybe more."
"Yeah, that was my plan too," she said, and sighed. "I realized I could either come home for the holidays, or carry our child, but not both."
Mike sat dumbfounded.
"Mike, are you still there?" Jenna asked teasingly.
"I thought...the pill you bought..."
"I never took it," she said. "What would be the point, if we were going to keep..." Fucking your brother was one thing, saying that in words was another. "Besides, I didn't want to take that pill. I didn't want it to make me sick again. Especially not when we didn't have much time left before I had to leave."
"I know, but there wasn't a right time. I kept having flashbacks to when that cop caught us together, and if our parents walked in on us, that'd be just as bad, maybe worse." He felt betrayed. He thought she had taken a morning after pill after the last time they were together, in that abandoned hotel. "I can't believe you kept it."
"Well it's my body. My decision, Mike." She sounded agitated.
"Sorry, I didn't mean it like that."
"I know," she said. "Just don't go down that path, trust me."
Mike tried to get his thoughts in some kind of order. "You're sure you're pregnant?"
"At this point, yeah. I wasn't at first. It's not that easy to get a piss test here, but by now it's pretty obvious, to me at least," she said. "With my weight, and the way everybody dresses here, I don't think anybody else is going to notice. I figure when it's about time, I'll travel to somewhere discreet, somewhere it'll be well taken care of, I'll give birth, and give it up for adoption."
That was a weight off Mike's mind. He wasn't sure about raising a child yet, and it was mortifying to think Jenna might bring one home, a baby made of their incestuous genes. Yet he was unexpectedly tantalized at the thought of her pregnant with their child. Knowing that when they'd made love, it had sparked life inside her.
"Anyway, it's the only proof I have of what we shared," she said. "I mean it could be Zack's or Greg's. Some of that weekend is unaccounted for. But you certainly did your best to make sure it'd be yours."
"This sucks. I didn't mean to put you in this situation," he said.
"You still don't get it?" she asked. "I put myself in this situation. I was the one fantasizing about getting pregnant. I was so ready I could feel it. So when it happened, I knew it was a possibility, and I just let it happen. I don't regret what we did, and I don't regret what came out of it."
For Mike, her words cast a whole new light on those moments they shared together. He'd known there was some risk that she might get pregnant. The idea that she'd been toying with the idea, even intrigued by it, was new.
"If you can't come here, maybe I could come to you," Mike said. It would involve taking a break from school, but at least they wouldn't be stuck in the same house as their parents.
"No, better not. We'd be even more conspicuous together here."
---
When Jenna stepped off the plane and out into the terminal, it felt a little odd to have no one waiting for her, but this was how she planned it. Her family didn't know she was coming home. It was meant to be a surprise. Most of all, a surprise for Mike.
Just months ago, she had been chronically single, a long dry spell after getting out of a bad relationship that went on too long. Having a sex life at all seemed out of her league then. That was before Frederic, the Olympic runner who gave her all the attention and respect she didn't know she deserved. With him, she felt sexy again, and sexually voracious. More than that, she felt fertile and primed to reproduce, something she hadn't even considered before.
Even if Frederic turned out to be a mere phantom, her perspective on herself had never been the same since. And then there was this thing with Mike, which she didn't know what to do with. Even though it started with deceit, the moments they shared had taken her to new heights that she never knew were possible.
But since they returned from the haunted hotel that second time, there'd been nothing to sustain her. Mike was too scared of getting caught, or so he said. Her self-doubt made her wonder if it was something else about her that kept him at bay.
She had thought that her time abroad, away from Mike, would sober her up, give her some distance from that whole situation. She needed to get herself straight, stop lusting after her brother, stop thinking about getting pregnant, and most of all, stop letting those two impulses overlap and amplify each other.
What actually happened was that when she went abroad, she took with her a little souvenir of those explosively passionate times they shared. It implanted within her and started to grow, and to shape her around it. She noticed her breasts feeling tender and fuller. It was a slight difference to anyone else, but she could tell when her hips widened, when her belly pudged out a bit more.
The hormones gave her urges she had no way to satisfy. Her work situation didn't provide much opportunity to socialize, and so she spent many nights alone, her mind constantly pulled back to that last sexual contact she had, kissing Mike hard as he pulled her down to him, holding her tight for when their bodily fluids combined. So many times she got herself off while replaying that scene. Instead of helping her distance herself from that attraction to her brother, her fantasies of pregnancy, she found herself dwelling on these things.
Even when she lost it. One day, without warning, she was spotting, more than she ought to. She knew this was something many women go through; for Jenna, it brought a complicated mix of emotions. She was sorry to see the life she had fostered within herself go out, and sad she wouldn't get to see it live and breathe. But what if it wasn't viable because of the incestuous genes that comprised it? What if it had been a bad idea in the first place, that she shouldn't have let go on for so long? Another month passed, and she recognized, when her period started again, that it was certainly over. That was when she decided to fly home. There was only one person in the entire world she could talk to about this.
She was nervous though. She didn't quite know where they stood anymore. They hadn't talked much since Christmas. They didn't know how to be together, as siblings, as lovers, as both, or as something unusual in between.
What if he had met someone else? Could she be happy for him like a sister ought to be? Could she be relieved that at least one of them was able to move on to a healthier relationship than theirs could ever be? She knew how she ought to feel, but her stomach twisted at the thought.
