But after five minutes, he admitted his concentration was off. He stood up, stretched his sore leg muscles, wondering why sex always seemed to use muscles that the gym could never touch. He straightened the table, picked up Mandy’s dress and folded it. Tossed her torn panties in the trash, indulging in a fantasy of buying her a new pair. Sheer, low cut, hot pink.

He’d never been a pink kind of guy, but the idea of seeing Mandy’s soft mound behind sassy pink had him hard.

“Damn. Enough already,” he told his erection.

He picked up Mandy’s beach bag to set it on the table, marveling at how heavy the thing was. “Jesus. She got sand bricks in here?” He took a peek. Sunscreen, sunglasses, her wallet, and a really thick book.

“The Everything Guide to Pregnancy.” He pulled it out and glanced at the cover. Some woman was grinning, which she really shouldn’t have been considering the ugly floral dress she was wearing.

Thumbing through it, he decided to read Month Four, which was where he thought Mandy was. Sitting back down, he put his feet on the chair opposite him and glanced at the drawn picture of a woman at sixteen weeks gestation. “That’s a freak out.” There was an alien sucking its thumb in that woman’s stomach.

“What you may be feeling…fatigue, constipation, breast enlargement, nosebleeds, mood swings, weepiness.” Well, he could attest to the weepiness.

There was advice on exercise, diet, and tests the doctor would be performing. “Measuring the height of the fundus? What the hell is that?” Suddenly getting a little nervous that there was a whole lot more to this pregnancy thing than he had thought, he used the index to look up Sexual Intercourse.

Thumbing back to page one hundred and twelve, he realized it might have been a smart idea to read this before he’d dipped his wick twice. Two paragraphs in, he was shifting uncomfortably reading about engorgement of genitals and colostrum leaking from breasts and bleeding of the cervix.

“If this happens, you may want to avoid deep penetration?” Damien felt a sweat breaking out all over his body. He’d deep penetrated, he was sure of it. “A fear that the baby is ‘watching’ you is normal, but unfounded, as is the fear of ‘bumping’ the baby.”

“Oh, my God!” That had never even occurred to him. He glanced over at Mandy, still naked. He’d read the baby already had eyes, and the image of Junior cringing as Damien’s you-know-what came hurtling toward him was horrifying and graphic.

He sucked down his Coke and turned the page.

“If air is forced into the vagina during oral sex, it can cause an embolism and prove deadly to mother and fetus. Oral sex is safe as long as you’re careful not to blow any air into the vagina.”