He watched her push the door closed with her hip. The hinges gave off a low croak like the mating call of a leopard frog, and the sharp click of the latch against the strike plate made him flinch. He would do anything for her, he reminded himself. Anything. He kept his gaze on her face, willing it not to drop to her hands, cupped together and cradled against her body. It took her only a few steps to cross the narrow room to where he sat on the edge of the bed.

“Ready?” she asked.

The skin on his arms and down his back twitched with goosebumps. He thought he might throw up. Instead, he reached for her hips and slid his hands over her curves. From the first night he met her she had filled him with a dizzying mix of ecstasy and desperation. And this was supposed to be an intimate moment. They had talked about it for months, coiled around each other in bed, their sweat and breath weaving together until he felt her desires prickling through the synapses of his brain as if they were his own. She let him caress her now, but her body tensed at his touch. He saw disgust on her face. His hands dropped.

He had trained for this. Progressively more challenging breathing exercises had strengthened the muscles of his lungs and throat; he had practiced on a series of objects of increasing size—poppy seeds, corn kernels, grapes. He was ready. But he could not stop the sweat, slick across his palms and back. Flickers of movement drew his eyes down, and before he could stop himself he looked, finally, at the mass in her hands. Thirteen clear, gelatinous eggs nestled there. The blue-black specks in their centers, each no larger than a peppercorn, jerked and flipped with life.

“Are you ready?” she asked again.

He tried and failed to form a syllable. He nodded. She reached her hands forward until her fingers grazed his lips. The nervous puff of his exhale shuddered over the viscous membranes. He could feel his heart in his chest, the valves bursting open and slamming shut with a force that pulsed waves of blood into the capillaries of his cheeks and the tips of his fingers. The activity of his body, barely contained by his skin, made him acutely aware of her stillness. She watched him and waited.

He turned his head to the side and exhaled, forcing all of the air out until the emptiness felt painful, then faced her outstretched hands and sucked in a violent inhale. He could feel the eggs bounce against the roof of his mouth and shoot down his windpipe. He could not hold back a sputtering cough as he gasped for breath, but he saw with a mixture of pride and terror that he had gotten all of them down. Her face relaxed into a joyful smile when she saw her empty palms. She wiped the sticky residue on her shirt and slipped her legs over his hips, straddling him while he continued to cough.

“You did it, baby. You did it.”

He closed his eyes and let her peel his shirt over his head. She ran a hand over his chest and rested it on the center of his sternum. He opened his eyes to look at her, but she stared at the spot covered by her hand.

“They’re in there now,” she said. “Our little babies.”

Yes, he thought, and not too long from now they will need to come out. He was terrified of birthing them. They would be substantially larger on the way up than they had been going down. His breath started to quicken into pants. He had heard rumors, whispered conversations on evening strolls through the park, heard unseen voices drift from the shadowy corners behind booths at the bar. Burst chests, shredded windpipes, oxygen deprivation, brain death. He would turn and look around but could never locate the source of the voices, and when he tried to bring it up with her she just smiled and caressed his cheek.

He let her push him back onto the bed. Her thighs gripped his hips, and she leaned down to trace his throat with her tongue. She kissed the notch between his neck and collarbone and finally laid down on top of him, settling one ear against his chest. He felt an itching sensation deep below his skin as the eggs burrowed in among his alveoli. He groaned.

“Hey baby, shh,” she said, stroking his bare torso.

Her fingers felt cool on his warm skin, and the hypnotic brush of her hand made his heart slow and his eyes drift closed. Hey baby.

Or had she said, hey babies?

He tried to replay the last few moments in his mind and could not remember if he had heard the soft and sibilant plural at the end or not. Was she was comforting him or them? Her hand made circles now, the confident pressure of her palm massaging the skin over his lungs. He wanted to swat her away. Let me think, he thought.

He looked back over their courtship, their nights together, their long and intimate talks about reproducing, and he could not remember what she had said, if she had ever said, what would happen to him when the babies emerged. He wanted to ask her. He wriggled beneath her, but the steady weight of her body and her legs wrapped around him kept him prisoner against the bedspread.

“Shh,” she said. “Shh.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she placed her lips over his. Instead of kissing him, she exhaled. A low noise he had never heard purred up from her throat, and the eggs quivered with excitement when her breath licked over them. He let out another strangled sound as the tiny things hammered with such force that he could feel them vibrating against the bones of his rib cage. She sat up again. She smiled, not at him, but at his throbbing chest where her babies were growing.