One Night Stand With My Professor, Now I'm Pregnant

*How does a party sound?*

Desiree was already on edge when the message came in.

The light in her dorm room flickered twice before settling into a soft yellow, casting shadows over a clutter of half-read textbooks on her desk, one on gender theory, another on contemporary sociology, and a spiral-bound notebook with half a mind-map for a paper due next week. She hadn’t touched it in hours, Her laptop sat open with the screen dimmed, the cursor blinking patiently in the middle of a blank paragraph she couldn’t crack her head to finish.

She hadn’t been able to focus since lunch.

Outside, the sky was doing that watercolor thing it always did at the end of fall — streaks of burnt orange and dusty pink stretching above the student commons and the rooflines of distant frat houses. Someone on her floor had their window open too; she could hear faint echoes of laughter and what sounded like a speaker testing out a party playlist. Friday night was starting early, as usual.

Inside, though, her room felt like it was sealed in glass.

She was curled up in her sad hoodie, the same one she wore whenever felt invisible. Her phone was lying face-down on the blanket beside her, vibrating once and then falling silent, she ignored it at first, then flipped it over when it vibrated the second time.

It was a message from number she didn't recognize.

She opened it without thinking, already expecting it to be something dumb. A meme. An event flyer, probably about tonight's party because they never get tired of sending her one of those, or maybe it was one of those bot texts about random student polls.

But it wasn’t. Unfortunately it was a photo that took it's time to load, her dorm Wi-Fi lagging like it always did when it came to something important— and when it finally appeared, she stared at it for a long moment, the picture failing to click in her head. Until it did and she had to sit up to understand what she was seeing.

Blake. He was in the driver’s seat of his car — that stupid silver BMW with the overly tinted windows and the obnoxiously expensive custom interior — the one he always insisted on picking her up in even when she offered to Uber.

But he wasn’t alone, and that made her ticked off different alarms in her head.

A girl was straddled across the passenger seat, her face mostly obscured, but her leg visible, her hand tangled in his hoodie, with her mouth locked with his. Her long, glossy, nails were pressed against his jaw.

And Blake wasn’t fucking pulling away. His hand was on her thigh, halfway under the hem of a dress that left almost nothing to the imagination. No matter how hard she wanted to doubt this, the fucking picture didn’t even leave room for one, no matter how much she wanted to tell herself otherwise.

Another message followed almost immediately.

*Didn’t want you to be the last to know.*

Her fingers tightened around her phone. Her first instinct was to throw it. Her second was to zoom in, because maybe — just maybe — she was wrong, maybe that was Blake's lookalike, or that was her in the picture, drunk maybe, and having no memory of what happened, but who was she kidding.

She wasn’t.

The air left her lungs before she realized she’d been holding it. Her head started to buzz as panic lucked up her spine, her frown turned into a pained looked, the source from from her chest. Like her body was trying to mute itself from the inside out. The room went quieter than before. Even the music outside sounded far away now, like someone had turned the world down to a low, distorted hum.

She felt sick.

Her eyes darted to the girl’s red glossy familiar lipstick. She’d worn that exact shade on her birthday last month. Blake said it looked good on her then.

Now he was kissing it on someone else.

She sniffled away the tears threatening to fall. Her throat started to burn and her jaw locked tight. She kept staring at the image, blinking too fast, her stomach folding in on itself with something sour and hollow.

"Fucking bastard.” She choked out when a knock came on the door.

“Des?” came Rebecca’s voice, a little muffled. “You alive in there or should I break in?”

Desiree said nothing and just stared at the heartbreaking photo. The door opened anyway.

Rebecca stepped in without looking first, rambling mid-sentence. “Okay, I brought your favorite disgusting snack and I’m officially demanding that you put on pants because—wait, whoa. Are you crying?”

When she didn't reply, Rebecca’s expression changed fast. Her voice dropped as she moved closer. “What happened?”

Desiree’s fingers twitched, then lifted the phone and turned the screen toward her without saying a word.

Rebecca took it and fell silent with just one look. “Is that...?” she finally said, voice going tighter by the second. She squinted. “That’s definitely his car.”

“I know.” she sovbed out.

“Where’d this come from?”

“N-no clue. Some random number. Blocked now, I just hope this is a fucking prank, I just had a horrible day why would anyone do this to me? Why would he do this to me!?”

Rebecca lowered the phone slowly, her eyes narrowing. “You okay? Shit, hey”

It was such a stupid question. Desiree let out a sound that was almost a laugh, if you stripped it of humor. It broke halfway out of her chest and stopped somewhere between breath and disbelief.

“I was going to sleep with him tonight, I was literally thinking about it, I wanted to surprise him” she said. “I bought candles I cleaned my room. Even shaved everything — like, everything, I look like a fucking frog down there. Spent the whole week stressing about whether I was making the right choice.”

Rebecca blinked. “Shit.”

Desiree shook her head, biting the inside of her cheeks. “I kept thinking maybe I was overthinking everything. That maybe he was just stressed. Or busy. Or whatever excuse I fed myself to make it okay that he barely looked at me anymore.”

Rebecca sat down beside her quietly, scared that making the wrong sound would break the dam.

“I even Googled lingerie that didn’t look desperate,” Desiree added. “Like I was trying to impress someone who clearly wasn’t thinking about me at all, I was a fucking nervous wreck.” She finally broke into a sob. ”W-why? Why would he do this to me?” She wiped her faced, taking in a deep breath and staring straight into nothing.

He liked her, he said did. Even though countless times she didn't feel like it, she thought maybe, maybe he was growing tired of the idea of her keeping clean until marriage, she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Few times he'd seen her in her undies, and many times he tried to go further from kissing but held himself back.

She thought he respected her decisions. She thought he liked her that much to wait.

Why? Why would he do that?

Rebecca scoffed and suddenly muttered, “I hope his dick shrinks.”

Desiree huffed softly. “That wouldn't help in any way.”

“So, I know this is going to sound like I’m a terrible person, but, how about going out? Will that help?.”

Desiree almost smiled, but her face crumpled halfway through. She turned away before Rebecca could see the way her chin started to tremble.

“I don’t want to do anything,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to have to tell people.”

Rebecca nodded. “Okay. Then you won’t. You don’t have to do anything. Maybe not tonight.” She leaned back against the headboard, pulling one of the pillows into her lap. “But if we were to hypothetically crash a party and get your mind off this dickhead, I might know a place that has free drinks and very little lighting.”

Desiree looked at her sideways. “You’re not being exactly subtle.”

“I’m offering an escape, not a solution. But if you’d rather stay here and focus on hating him, I’m down for that too.”

Desiree looked down at the phone again, staring at the image that was still open until a tear dropped on her phone.

“Maybe it's for the best, my parents doesn't even like him” she said slowly. Maybe that was a lie, maybe deep down her ribs are digging into her heart, stabbing her everytime she tried to breath. Maybe she didn't care if her parents like him, they can go fuck themselves, but... “But I wouldn’t mind going to the party”