That Girl From Nowhere by Dorothy Koomson Page A

behind my ear. We hadn’t been together properly for the last four months. We’d spoken, had kissed briefly in the times I’d come back home, but not this. I touched his face, resting my hand on his cheek, and he came towards me. Our lips met and we both closed our eyes, connecting ourselves together. I pushed his jacket over his shoulders. I was aware of the thick silk of his tie as I tugged at it until it was undone. The small, matte-black buttons of his shirt came apart easily until he was bare-chested, the paleness of his skin visible in the half-light of the room. He pushed my ankle-length dress up, over my thighs, around my waist, to my chest until he gently tugged it over my head and discarded it beside the bed. My fingers went to his trousers, slipped the shiny, black tongue of his slim belt though its loop, out of its buckle until it was free, then I moved on to his button, pushing down the top of his trousers. His fingers unhooked the small metal clasps of my bra, slipped it off, before they moved on to removing my knickers, plain and black, as you’d expect for a funeral.
    A gasp, a deep cry escaped from my throat as he entered me. A new sensation; in all the time of being with him, I’d never felt such a perfect mingling of agony and pleasure as he pushed himself into my body.
    ‘I’ve missed you,’ he murmured beside my ear. ‘It feels so good to be inside you again.’
    ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ I whispered back. I dug my fingers into him, urging him to go deeper, to completely fill me up. He responded, pushing harder, slower but harder. The pleasure came from being together again, having each other back, reminding ourselves of what we shared. The pain came from knowing why we’d been apart for so long. The orgasms – loud, urgent, ecstatically raw – came from that blending of desolation and joyful reunion.
    Seth lay on his front, his head in profile on the pillow while his fingers played with my hair, coiling curls around his fingers. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling again.
    ‘We could have made a baby,’ he eventually said.
    He’d put words to the panic that was amassing inside. We could have. No contraception, not even withdrawal. I’d felt when he was about to, but I hadn’t wanted him to, I’d clung on to him, keeping him with me until it was too late to change the outcome. Have unprotected sex … and end up paying for it for the rest of your life , started to flash in my head.
    ‘That’d be pretty amazing, though, wouldn’t it?’ he said. ‘I know we put those plans on hold these last few months but it’d be incredible if we did it now.’
    A baby. Me. I loved children. Playing with them was never a chore. Sienna, my cousin Nancy’s daughter, had once stayed with us for three months while Nancy was off finding herself, and I’d loved that. I had loved taking care of Sienna’s every need, waking up with her in our flat, going to sleep with her in our flat, being with her.
    But … But … A
baby
.
Me?
How would I know how to care for it? Would I really want to keep it? And even after all the discussions, it still scared me that I knew nothing of the potential anomalies in my DNA; disorders unknown to me because I couldn’t just ask my mother or father about any medical conditions that might run in the bloodline, in the family.
    A
baby
?
Me?
What about the father, too? How could I trust him to stick around when my biological father hadn’t and had made it necessary for my biological mother to give me away or ‘place me for adoption’, as I was meant to say and think.
    In all the dreams and fantasises I had about how I came to be adopted, the ones I could never tell anyone, I knew this one was the truest. This was the one that would fit most comfortably with reality. My mother, who was probably young, told my father she was pregnant and he in turn rejected her. Probably called her names, and questioned who else she’d been with. Then he went incommunicado