Rose tinted goggles

Sandra wakes first.

The sleep has been the deepest and most peaceful of her life, even though her neck aches from the awkward angle and her right arm is completely dead beneath her. None of it matters. The man beside her, the new cocktail of hormones flooding her system, and the quiet, invisible fact of her fresh impregnation have painted everything in soft rose. She feels softer than she ever has—girlier, more open, content to be small and cherished. The old tomboy edges have temporarily melted; all she wants is to stay exactly where she is and be your little princess for as long as you will let her.

She lies still and watches you sleep, cheek still pressed to your left shoulder.

You surface a while later to the distinct and horrible realisation that your left arm no longer exists.

There is no feeling from the shoulder down—no weight, no position, nothing. It is simply gone, as if it has been cleanly amputated while you slept. You try to flex your fingers and receive zero response. Panic is brief; experience tells you it is only circulation, but the sensation is still deeply wrong. The first pins and needles begin after a full ten minutes of patient waiting. They crawl up from your fingertips in a slow, fiery wave that makes your jaw tighten. Another fifteen minutes pass before the arm feels even halfway like it belongs to you again.

And yet.

When you turn your head and find Sandra still using that same arm as a pillow, looking up at you with soft, curious kitten eyes—warm, open, completely unguarded—you discover you could not care less about the lingering numbness. The dead-arm agony becomes background noise. She is looking at you like you are the safest, best thing in the world, and the expression alone is worth every second of pins and needles.

She smiles when she sees you are properly awake, small and a little shy in a way that is new, and nuzzles her cheek more firmly against your slowly recovering shoulder instead of moving off it.

“Hi,” she whispers, voice still thick with sleep and that fresh, rose-tinted softness.

Sandra is quiet for a long time after the soft “hi,” cheek still resting on your slowly recovering arm. You can feel the exact moment the lightness leaves her body. She shifts just enough to look at you properly, kitten-eyed softness replaced by something more serious and guilty.

“I… need to tell you something,”
she begins, voice small.
“And I feel really awful about it.”

She forces the confession out in a rush, as if speed will make it hurt less.

She never started the pill. Not the first day, not after the doctor, not on any of the mornings that followed. She kept finding reasons to push it to “tomorrow,” then stopped thinking about it entirely once the holiday turned into constant sex. She has been letting you finish inside her every single time while knowing there was no protection, and she never told you. Now that you are properly together—freshly minted boyfriends—she can’t bear keeping the secret any longer. She looks miserable about it, eyes already shiny, clearly braced for disappointment or anger.

You, however, are currently a man whose left arm is still only halfway online and whose entire chest is full of the girl who just admitted she loves you back. In this state she could have confessed to far worse and you would still have found a way to make it acceptable.

You spend the next half hour doing nothing but comforting her.

You pull her closer (as best you can with one semi-functional arm), stroke her hair, kiss her forehead and the corner of her eye when a tear slips out. You tell her it’s fine. That you’re not angry. That you were right there with her every time and never once reached for a condom either. That the responsibility was shared even if the secret wasn’t. You repeat variations of the same gentle reassurances until her shoulders stop carrying so much tension and her breathing evens out again. You make it clear that whatever happens, you are not going to punish her for it or pull away.

Sandra listens, face buried against your chest for most of it, occasionally nodding or giving a tiny, watery “okay.” By the time the thirty minutes are up she has relaxed back into the soft, clingy version of herself from earlier, though a residual trace of guilt still lingers in the way she keeps glancing up at you as if to check you really mean it.