C4 antho - Chamber Four

~64~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
“I think there’s a guy coming,” he said.
She untangled her legs and slid down alongside him and
put her head on his chest just as the light licked the edges of
the Navajo blanket and dazzled their eyes. “Sorry to bother
you,” the man said. “I’m going to have to ask you to move.”
He was gone almost as quickly as he came. He explained how
it looked. The church didn’t like people making out on the
lawn.
Back on the median, on the way to their dorm rooms, the
boy and his girl wrapped the blanket around themselves like
they were a couple of refugees. It was a while before either of
them spoke. The boy was embarrassed and still incredibly
horny but the girl shrugged him off every time.
Finally, she said, “we just had sex with our clothes on.” It
was like the finger of God had come down and named it.
But the boy said, “I don’t think so.”
* * * *
The boy, married, seven years last April. He was lying in
bed depressed. His wife lay on her side with her hand on his
chest. They had failed their first round of in vitro fertilization
last month and they had two embryos in storage for the next.
So here they were, the failed parents, in the eye of the storm,
two weeks after his wife’s period, waiting.
The boy remembered last month, the nights where he
gave his wife progesterone shots. He would swab the bit of
skin behind her hip bone with rubbing alcohol and push a
needle through the fatty tissue and into the muscle. His wife
sucked air through her teeth. Sometimes it hurt more than
others. What did it feel like? There were little red pricks all
over her hip after a full month of injections. Gave another