Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 07

She used to like the word positive.

Positive energy.

Positive vibes.

Positive thinking.

Now, every time she sees it on a screen, her stomach does that slow, queasy roll — like her body remembers Health class before her brain does.

She reads the post and laughs once at the “it’s all fun and games…” line.

Then her brain quietly supplies:

until you fuck someone raw who doesn’t text you back the same way afterwards.

That part didn’t make it into any slideshow.

Since that night, her search history has… shifted.

It started small:

The usual soft porn she’s always used to fall asleep.
The kind of scenes where two people clearly like each other.
Where the camera never lingers too long anywhere that feels too real.

Then something in her cracked open.

Now it’s:

Gangbang thumbnails where one girl is the center of gravity.
Threesomes where hands come from every direction.
Tags with “rough,” “slap,” “choke,” “degrade” in them.
Rope and leather and hands on faces, mouths held open, eyes wet.

Nothing that breaks skin. Nothing that feels like snuff.

Just… louder than before. Closer to the way her body felt when she finally let someone inside her without the latex buffer she’d always promised herself she’d insist on.

Her fingers move like they’re trying to keep up with something she already did and can’t undo.

She tells herself it’s research.

She knows it’s mostly trying to match the high.

Underneath the noise, another channel is running.

Her period is… late. Not dramatically. Just enough to notice.

Her brain keeps doing the math anyway:

Did I miscount the days?.
Do stress and hormones really delay things this much?.
What if this is the month my body decided to be efficient?.

She opens porn in one tab and symptom checkers in another.

Her thumb flicks between:

A girl on her knees in the middle of too many bodies, mascara running.
And a calm paragraph about “implantation windows” and “false negatives.”.

One page makes her wet.

One page makes her cold.

Her underwear is suddenly both: damp from her hand, cold from the way she keeps checking it for blood that isn’t there yet.

She remembers the way he talked to her before they met:

How careful his words were.

How he outlined what he believed in, how he held people, how he’d never pressure.

How much time he spent in those safe, warm, late-night calls touching the parts of her brain she’d always thought were too much.

Then there’s the version of him after:

Still there. Just… thinner. Less voltage in the words. Less time. Less urgency.

She replays the way she got there in her head, how every step toward him felt weirdly inevitable, like the night had already decided what she was going to do.

She doesn’t replay the moment she said, “It’s fine, I’m on X / I’m close to Y / it just kind of happened,” because she never actually said that.

She just didn’t say anything.

Her body said yes and her mouth stayed busy and any sentence that might’ve included the word condom never made it out.

She keeps thinking:

I’m not a dumb girl. I knew better. I knew all of this.

It doesn’t help.

When the post starts talking about STIs, she feels her lungs do that little hitch. It’s not even the graphic health-class stuff that gets her; it’s the part where he admits knowing the odds and still saying, “fuck it, we deserve to feel good.”

Because she didn’t say the words, but that’s exactly what she did.

She wonders what her insides look like right now.

Are they fine?

Are they ruined?

Is there something in my blood now that’s going to quietly write itself into every future form I fill out?

She knows the science enough to know that’s not how half of it works.

Fear doesn’t care.

Fear just wants images:

A waiting room with bad lighting.
A nurse with a neutral face.
A piece of paper with a word on it she can never unread.

She scrolls down past the paragraph about diagnoses and odds and the part where living with something doesn’t make you unlovable.

Some small, ugly part of her whispers:

Sure. For other people.

For herself, the imagined version is harsher:

“You were stupid.”. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”. “You cared more about not breaking the moment than you did about the girl who has to live with your body next month.”.

The worst timeline is the pregnancy one.

She doesn’t even want kids — not yet, maybe not ever.

She wants:

More life.
More bad ideas she gets to walk away from.
More nights ending with her body vibrating.
And someone’s hand at her throat telling her when to breathe.

But her brain keeps serving up:

A test on the edge of a bathroom sink. a plus sign that doesn’t mean “good vibes,”. her own future shrinking down to bills and court dates and a small person who never volunteered for any of it.

She pictures the Dom she’d been half-worshipping and half-testing herself against actually answering if she told him.

She can see him saying all the right things, steady and calm.

She can just as easily see her message sitting on read while nothing comes back.

Both futures feel equally real.

And still, when she rolls onto her back in the middle of the night, puts in her headphones, and presses play on another video where a girl is in the middle of too many other people, her body answers faster than any of those fears.

Lust first.

Guilt second.

Fear third.

Relief fourth.

She comes hard, biting her lip, fingers moving faster than they did in any of the gentle scenes she used to watch before she knew what his mouth felt like between her legs.

After, lying there in the wet and the quiet, she thinks:

If I end up with letters attached to my body, or a life attached to my body, over one man who doesn’t even text me like he used to… I will never forgive myself.

But she also knows that’s not the whole truth.

Because she remembers exactly how it felt to be inside that moment:

how big it was,

how right it felt then,

how far away health-class slides and future forms suddenly seemed.

She wasn’t tricked.

She wasn’t hypnotized.

She was just very, very human — and very, very turned on.

By the time she reaches the end of the post, the part about “risk management” and “future you,” she’s still not sure which side she’s more scared of:

The version where the test is negative and she has to live with having gambled that big for nothing. or the version where it’s positive and her whole future rearranges itself around one night that didn’t even come with love attached.

She doesn’t close the tab.

She just sets the phone on her chest and stares at the ceiling.

Tomorrow, maybe, she’ll:

Book the test.
Buy the stick.
Tell someone she trusts.

Tonight, all she can do is lie there between two truths:

She has never felt this sexually awake in her life. and she has never been this aware that her body is not just a toy — it’s a future she can’t return once it’s been used.

The fantasy is still hot.

The fear is still real.

And for the first time, she understands what it means when someone says positive and everything else in the sentence stops mattering.

Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 07

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