He almost got me pregnant. I could feel it as his back curled into a shell, his shoulders hunched, and I thought to myself, would he really do this to me? When we both are jobless. When I live in my grandmother’s basement writing manuscripts that publishers and agents alike continue to reject because they have too much character and not enough plot. When he sleeps on his younger brother’s couch drooling over the relationship his brother has with his fiancé, wondering why he’s three weeks from thirty and still without a wife and child. This is my punishment for telling him I don’t love him. Relationships are about honesty, so I told him the truth, promising that I would at least let him try to change my mind. Is this his attempt. To make me? Force me? Because there are so many examples of how a baby kept an already unhappy couple together, right? Because he believes he’s owed something, entitled to happiness. So much so that he would steal a woman’s freedom to choose. Because he knows my past, that I have dreams of the rosy-cheeked face of the child I could’ve had when I was a teenager. “You said you’d never do it again, so don’t do it again,”  he tells me. And you told me you’d be careful. That condoms were for one-night-stands and promiscuous teens. That real love will come when that latex barrier is broken. I believed there would be some magic in the way you made loved to me. It would open my eyes to all I failed to discover in previous relationships. But no. I don’t want this love. You will not control me for the next eighteen years of my life, make my decisions for me, use a child as a pawn to get what you think you deserve. I pinch my legs closed, pound on your chest, claw at your eyes until you pull from me, spilling all over the bed. You stare at me, a face scrunched with terror, as I continue to kick and yell, swatting away at you like the sucking mosquito, the incessant parasite that you are. You will not infect me with your disease of need and desperation. Find another host body.

—Nortina

This is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. I haven’t done one in a while, which is funny because it’s not like I’m ever busy on Saturday. Anyway, today’s prompt is “almost.” Have a go at it!