Expecting
In the dream, I am pregnant.
I am just starting to show, but already it feels like I am carrying something so heavy, out of proportion to the actual size of a fetus at this stage. I’ve never been pregnant before in waking life, so my dreaming brain fills in details with wild speculation. There is a tightly wound stillness in my lower belly, a full-ness that drags at me. The child is not yet awake, not yet a person, but they are a presence. An intruder.
When I was a child, my school friends and I played a made-up game called Sandman. One person was the dreamer and the others would pretend to pack their limbs and chest with sand. The dreamer would try and get up, but they couldn’t; their brain had been tricked into believing that the sand held them down. Looking back I can tell I found it erotic, though I didn’t have the words at the time. Being touched all over my body. Touching other bodies. Giving over physical control, not to another person but to a group and a spell. The dream feels like that. The Sandman has filled my limbs and I can’t move.
I am lying on a hard table. I am surrounded by shadowy, anonymous male figures, who look at me hungrily. A voice whispers gravelly in my ear: “now that you’re pregnant, we can all fuck you raw with no consequences. Every man here is going to fill you up with cum until you can’t fit any more.” They pick up my leaden limbs and maneuver me into position: hinged facedown over the table, wrists pinned over my head, breasts and belly squashed underneath me. My loose dress is pushed up over my ass and my underwear is quickly disposed of. Wasting no time, they push my legs apart and begin to stroke my inner thighs, dipping fingers occasionally into my cunt, which takes them more easily each time as I get wetter and slicker. I want these strangers to fuck me. The hollow in my stomach that is the way my body normally communicates desire forms, but deforms around the tightness in my belly. It is impossible not to notice that I am physically changing, that my body is no longer fully mine. And indeed, that change is the cue these dream-men were looking for, that stripped away my defenses and meant that they could claim me.
The first cock pushes inside me. Its owner goes still, so I feel the way it fills my cunt, matching the fullness in my belly. Then, grabbing my hips, he begins to thrust into me. It isn’t long before he lets out a small cry of pleasure. His softening cock slips out, accompanied by our mingled fluids that start to drip down my leg. It is quickly replaced by another, then still more. The mingled cum drips down my legs, but it also pools in my belly like the sand from the Sandman rhyme. It presses against my skin from the inside and makes it start to swell. In moments, I go from barely showing to looking ready to give birth. Then—
I wake up. The bedroom is dark except for a narrow slice of gray pre-dawn light sneaking under the blackout shades. I don’t check my phone for the time - I’m not ready to start the day, but nor do I probably have time to go back to sleep. It’s a weekday and I will have to get up soon, but I’m still shaking off the dream’s hold on me. Clearly, my subconscious feels some kind of way about my decision to try to have a baby. I had thought it well-reasoned and mature (we both want to parent and have interrogated our reasons thoroughly, we can afford it, we’re in a stable relationship, we can always adopt later but I’m 38 so the time to try is now) but apparently the sensible reasons mean nothing to my traitorous subconscious, the one who gets horny at the thought of taking risks and being claimed. I brush my hands along my body, and my stomach feels like it always does: softly curved, but not swelling to grow a baby. I tell myself that I’m not disappointed.
My motion wakes my partner, Lou. He moves to snuggle against my left side, right arm under my pillow, the fingers of our left hands tangling together. He sleeps hotter than I do and I am grateful for the warmth of his body. “Did you sleep ok?” he asks, a note of worry in his voice. I’m sure he, too, knows that it’s both early and a weekday. Neither of us sleep well these days, though early is better than the alternative. If you had asked me 10 years ago if I wanted kids, I would have told you that I couldn’t possibly function on the amount of sleep that parents got. Ironically, my body decided on its own that five and a half hours was what I would get most nights, and I am learning to make do.
“I had…a weird dream. A pregnancy dream,” I admit. I am still feeling aroused, though in the way of sex dreams it feels muffled, phase-shifted, lingering just out of reach. I don’t know if it will translate into a real world orgasm.
Lou wriggles happily and presses closer. “Ooh, a pregnancy dream? What was it like?” he breathes in my ear.
I am not sure what I want to say, feeling suddenly shy. I am the one in our relationship with the darker, more violent sexual tastes, which the dream certainly exemplifies. While I don’t hide it, per se, I am cautious of introducing it in bed, lest it be a turnoff for him. It’s just as powerful inside my head. Over the course of our conversations about getting pregnant, I have gathered that he finds the idea hot, but for relatively sweet reasons. Cementing our relationship. Parenting. The inherent transgressiveness of condomless sex, not to mention the way it feels. Whereas for me the attraction is more than a little bit about the body horror of it all. The stretching, the bloating, the permanent change. The objectification by society, ceasing the struggle I’ve been fighting my whole life to be seen as a full person and falling into the seductive, smothering identity of motherhood. The shame of bearing a public mark of the fact that I’ve had sex, visible to my co-workers or strangers on the bus. And then, at some point, there will be a new person that I’m looking forward to getting to know. For now there is a firewall in my brain between the outcome of pregnancy and the squirmy imagined weirdness of BEING pregnant. I hope that, should it happen, the path between the two will become clear at some point.
I turn towards Lou. “I was getting fucked, and I could feel my belly swelling the more cum was inside me,” I murmur. Not a lie, I’m terrible at lying, Lou would be able to tell, but hopefully just enough of the truth to be hot. Still physically impossible, too, but pregnancy-adjacent words like “swelling” carry a frisson even without context.
His hand moves down to squeeze my ass. “Is that what you want?” I reply with a breathy “mmmmm” that hasn’t decided yet whether it is “hmmm considering” or “mmm yes.” It is what I want. It’s also the end of my fertile week and we’ve been having sex so much I am getting sore. When I first started researching sex for conception, I scoffed at the advice to schedule sex daily or every other day during the ovulation window. For a kinky weirdo high sex drive freak like me, I assumed daily sex would hardly be a challenge. Five months in, and I’m not quite at the point of scheduling sex, but I do have to sometimes make a conscious choice to say yes. Fucking towards a goal feels at odds with pleasure-focused hedonism. “Do we even have enough time?” I want to be able to take my time, as though this were a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. Even though I’m signing up for years of sex being relegated to snatched moments in between the demands of parenting, I don’t want it to be that way quite yet.
Lou rolls over and checks his phone. “6:30. Definitely not enough time to go back to sleep, but I don’t want to get out of bed yet.”
“I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“Don’t be. I’d rather be kissing you, anyway.”
God, I’m lucky. Lou loves me with a straightforward intensity that easily breaks through my introspective, complicated, overthinking approach to love. He’s steady, loyal, and easy to get along with, and yet he wants me enough to push outside his comfort zone. That steadiness is part of the reason I got over my fears and decided to go for the parenting thing. He was fine with it for all those years I said I likely didn’t want kids, but was also instantly fine with it when that changed. I’ve never applied the words “making love” to sex, but it almost feels like that with Lou—giving the love we feel for each other physical shape. My chest burns with a feeling of missing him, even though he is right here in bed beside me. I draw him to me.
We alternate slowly between kisses and sleepy nuzzles of noses against cheeks. He brings a knee up between my thighs and I wrap an arm over his back, running my nails between his shoulder blades in the way I know he loves. He gasps against my mouth. Then he bends his head to take one of my nipples between his lips. “Gentle, please.” Since I started tracking my cycle, I have become more attuned to the way my breasts ache during this phase. How little touch is needed to make me gasp, because of how sensitive they are. Before we started trying, I might have leaned into the ache, asked for more biting and sucking. Now, I am thinking about the horror stories my parenting friends tell about the difficulties of nursing, and I want something different.
He kisses his way down my belly and I roll onto my back and spread my legs. He knows to tease me for a long time, pressing light kisses to my thighs that brush my mons before meandering away. Then the light stroke of a finger. It doesn’t really fit my self-image of my sexuality, how light I need it, how sensitive my pussy is to fingers and tongues. So much of what I want is pain and restriction and being roughly used. And yet, even a gentle lick can be enough to make me tap out, if I’m not warmed up enough. It’s only been since we started trying to get pregnant that I’ve really started to appreciate oral sex. I was dismayed to learn that lube is not recommended, because it can interfere with sperm mobility. So, oral has gone from an option to a fixture. I’ve gotten used to it, and he’s gotten lots of practice in doing it the way I like.
I fall back into a sleepy daydream while he licks my clit. I remember my dream and how erotic it felt to be pregnant, and try to bring that feeling back. It feels like one last taboo, one last experience I’ve not had in two decades of sexual exploration. Lou and I talk about it all the time in terms of desires, and logistics. We’ve even had conversations about what we find hot about it, to guide our dirty talk. And yet it still feels weird to contemplate saying the words “I want you to get me pregnant,” out loud to my actual real life partner. The fact that we’ve been trying for a while with no results is part of it. Can I be 100% sure that he will take those words in the playful sense that they are meant, rather than as a critique? (Yes, yes, I can. The problem is that I am also using them to judge myself.)
Lou looks up from my pussy, looking pleased with himself. “Come here,” I say, opening my arms. I briefly consider getting on my hands and knees to be more like the position I was in in the dream. Maybe that will help me recapture the feeling of anything-goes wantonness. And maybe saying the words would be easier if I don’t have to look him in the face while I do it. But I LIKE watching him react to my words. I like knowing that I can send him over the edge whenever I want. Maybe this time I will be brave enough to do it.
He climbs on top of me and lines up his cock, but instead of pushing inside me right away he slides it up and down along my wet folds. “Do you want this?” he asks in a low growl. He’s been practicing being more vocal during sex, and it’s working on me. I do want it, I’m all in now, and I don’t even care that the alarm might go off at any moment. I nod, then decide to use my words too. “I do, I want your cock inside of me, now!” He sinks into me. It feels so good, and I realize I can say so. “I love the feeling of you filling me up.” We alternate kisses and grunts and those little inane phrases about how good the other is making us feel. It’s not original, but I mean every word of it.
Soon, his breath and his pace quickens. “I’m close,” he gasps. “Do you want… can I…” It breaks my heart a little bit that he still feels like he needs to ask to come inside me, after years together and months trying to conceive.
I want, suddenly, for him to know that he has me, that I’m not going to startle and run. “Yes,” I say, looking him in the eye. “Put a baby in me.” I can see the waves of orgasm crash over him as the words leave my mouth. He collapses on me and we wrap our arms around each other.
The alarm goes off.