Afterwards

by Nia Forrester

  And when his hand fell between her legs, she spread them slightly to allow him his way.

  And when he kissed her, she kissed him back, her tongue stroking his, acquiescing even though his lips were pressed into hers so hard it almost hurt.

  When he moved his mouth away from hers and instead put it against her neck, she let her head fall to grant him better access. Robyn didn’t protest when he sucked hard, and bit her there. She only moaned when he spread her further apart, and when he opened his fly, lifting her and pressing himself into her, she wrapped her arms about his neck.

  He was rougher than usual, and her back, still somewhat tender, was braced against the cold, stone wall as he thrust long and deep inside her. Legs wrapped about him, Robyn let him take her in the way he wanted, not making any move to push back, but only tilting her pelvis slightly upward to make it easier. When he finished, he groaned loudly and dug his fingers into her buttocks, holding her tight, leaning all his weight into her.

  Wanting to speak, but not knowing what more to say to convince him, Robyn let Chris carry her to the bed and lay her across it. She still said nothing when he stripped naked and positioned himself between her legs, taking her again. Trying to look into his eyes, she turned her head, but Chris had them tightly shut as he bent and flexed, hard, slow thrusts. Because he’d reached completion minutes before, he went long, his strokes igniting something inside Robyn that was new, and exquisite. It usually took sometime for her, with penetration alone to reach a climax, but this time she could feel it like a gathering storm, so profound, she knew she wouldn’t be able to contain herself. Already she was panting and making noises scarcely recognizable as human, let alone coming from her, and her vision swam and swirled. She couldn’t think; it felt too good, too . . . strong, like a wave about to crash over her.

  “Come for me,” Chris said against her ear, his breath hot and ragged, coming in hard, short bursts.

  Robyn arched her hips against him, trying to give him what he asked for, but afraid at the same time, because it felt different now, laden with meaning.

  “Come for me,” he said again. “Just for me.”

  Of course just for him. Hadn’t he felt what she was trying to say? Speaking the words would have been too hard so she thought she’d shown him. By exposing herself on the terrace; and with her open arms, legs, her head and body limp while he took her any way he wanted, for as long as he wanted. Couldn’t he tell? She didn’t want Etienne Ballard. She didn’t want anyone but him. He may not have realized it, but in that moment, Robyn saw how complete her surrender was. This was no affair. Not anymore. At least not for her.

  Her legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, her thighs clenching about him.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes . . . just for you . . .”

  It was what he wanted to hear, and soon Chris was coming. Robyn could feel him inside her, filling her. She felt raw, wrung out as though she couldn’t possibly, physically endure any more. She couldn’t even tell if she had come, didn’t know the difference any longer until her heightened pleasure went higher still, so and she literally tingled, her last gasp emitting from somewhere deep inside, from a place that no man had ever touched before.

  20

  “That can’t be right,” Robyn said, feeling the blood drain from her face. “I can’t be. You said . . .”

  “It is right. Undeniably,” Dr. Shayk said. “You’re pregnant.” And then when Robyn said nothing: “I take it things have changed for you and you do not want to be?”

  That was a complicated question, with an even more complicated answer, but Robyn’s brain had ground almost to a complete halt, so it wasn’t as though she could answer it anyway, complicated or not.

  Sitting on the examining table in her bra and wearing the little paper dress, she hadn’t thought of her annual GYN appointment as anything other than an inconvenient interruption to her workday. She wasn’t on the Pill, because there was no point, and she’d had only one sex partner—Chris. But to assume that he’d only had one as well, and that she had a clean bill of health would have been reckless. So she came in to see Dr. Shayk to get checked out, because her calendar told her it was time anyway.

  As usual, Dr. Shayk had inquired about whether she had any problems, any questions, any issues she wished to discuss, and guided Robyn’s legs into the stirrups. Moments after the speculum went in, Dr. Shayk removed it, much sooner than she normally might have. Then she inserted two gloved fingers and pressed three from the other hand against Robyn’s abdomen. Without saying a word, the doctor had excused herself, going to get the nurse practitioner, and administering a pregnancy test right then and there.

  Robyn, she’d asked in her melodic Russian accent as she looked at the wand in her hand. When were your last menses?

  It was only then that Robyn realized that she was a little late. But just a little. Her last period had been before the trip to Paris.

  It appears you’re pregnant, Dr. Shayk continued matter-of-factly, not waiting for Robyn’s response. Your cervix was closed when I examined you moments ago, and in confirmation . . .

  She held up the pregnancy test and showed Robyn the bright and unmistakable plus sign.

  But that was not possible. She was infertile.

  “You told me I was infertile,” Robyn said now. “When I came in with my husband and we were trying. You told me.”

  Dr. Shayk nodded. “This is a common misconception. Without tests, doctors don’t diagnose infertile women. We diagnose infertile couples. You and your husband had been actively trying for more than eighteen months, Robyn, and could not achieve pregnancy. Hence the infertility finding.”

  “But you . . .”

  “Without more specific tests, I couldn’t—and didn’t—say that you were infertile. And clearly you are not.”

  “But neither is Curtis. He . . . we’re divorced. He got someone else pregnant so I assumed . . .”

  Dr. Shayk smiled knowingly at her nurse. “Yes. So you see, this is why we initially diagnose couples as infertile. Occasionally, Robyn, it is neither party who is to blame, so to speak. Sometimes it is that couple together who are unable to conceive or sustain a pregnancy.”

  “I don’t understand.” Robyn narrowed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

  “That perhaps for genetic or other reasons, your husband and you might have had difficulty making a baby. Now, you and your new partner . . .” Dr. Shayk opened her hands, “. . . the results are different.”

  She was pregnant. Pregnant.

  Something she believed for the past year would never happen for her, to her. Something she had only begun to give up on. And all this time she was having frequent, crazy, unprotected sex with Chris, thinking that there was no chance, and no need to worry. And she’d intimated, when he inquired about protection after that first time, that there was no need for him to worry. At the time, Robyn knew he would take her response to mean she was on birth control and she let him believe that, because the truth—what she thought was the truth—still caused her shame.

  She was pregnant. With Chris’ baby. How was she ever going to tell him, to explain?

  “Should we be discussing your options?” Dr. Shayk asked, placing a hand on Robyn’s shoulder.

  “No,” Robyn said quickly.

  ‘Options’ in this context could only mean one thing: termination of her pregnancy. And that was not something she wanted to have to think about.

  “No,” she said again, this time more quietly. “I just need . . . some time.”

  “Of course.” The doctor smiled at her.

  Outside, minutes later, standing at the curb, Robyn looked around her and for a moment couldn’t decide what to do next. But one thing she did know was that she couldn’t go back to the office. The chance that she might run into Chris was too great. Looking down at the face of her phone, she checked the time. It was almost three, and it would probably have been fine to go home early. Feeling tears well up in her eyes, Robyn swallowed hard to keep the
m at bay. Never one to dissolve into weeping like some kind of . . . sissy, she’d been excessively emotional lately. At least now she knew why—damned hormones. At least, that was what she preferred to think.

  She was pregnant; poised to get something precious and priceless, something that for the past year she believed she would never have: a baby. How fitting that Chris would be the one to give this to her—he who had given her so much already. But if he thought she’d deceived him, she may lose him. If in fact she’d ever had him.

  Her thoughts and emotions all in a jumble, Robyn took out her phone and dialed a number. When the voice on the other end answered, she lost the fight against her threatening tears.

  “Mommy,” she said. “Something’s happened.”

  ___________________

  “Miss Crandall, where would you like dinner this evening?”

  Mrs. Lawson’s asked the question as soon she entered the house and Robyn resisted the urge to, yet again, ask her not to call her that. No matter how many times she’d invited her to do so, the housekeeper would never use her first name. But more and more, the formality seemed to suit her, and Robyn was beginning not to mind, because she could see behind her smiles that Mrs. Lawson approved of and liked her.

  Looking at her watch, Robyn shook her head. “Dinner? It’s almost nine. He hasn’t eaten yet?”

  “I tried to remind him several times but he keeps saying that he isn’t quite ready.”

  “Bring it to his office, if you don’t mind,” Robyn said. “And nothing for me, thank you.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Mrs. Lawson had probably known before she asked the question that Robyn had likely already eaten her evening meal—most people had by this time—and wanted to signal in her own indirect way that Chris on the other hand had not. They had become partners of sorts over the past three months, conspiring to take care of the man who refused to take care of himself.

  He was staring at his computer monitor as usual when Robyn entered, and glanced up when he saw her, though his expression didn’t register much of a change. He was typing something fast and furiously, his brow furrowed, his mouth pulled tight into a scowl.

  After her visit to Dr. Shayk, she’d gone back to the office after all. As she was contemplating her Big News, Jamal Turner had stopped by her office with a request, one that she thought it might be best to get out of the way before telling Chris about her . . . condition. And seeing him as he was now, buried up to his neck in work, Robyn decided that she wasn’t particularly eager to do either.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  At work, this precise look on his face would send just about everyone scattering except for Chastity, Robyn and now, increasingly Stephen who was slowly earning his way into Chris’ inner circle, figuring his boss out and becoming more comfortable with his changeable nature.

  “What?” Chris looked up.

  “Hungry? I’m having Mrs. Lawson bring your dinner.”

  “I told her I wasn’t ready yet,” Chris mumbled, returning his attention to the monitor.

  “It’s late. It doesn’t matter if you’re ready,” Robyn said. She collapsed into the armchair near the door.

  Finally, Chris looked up, giving her his full attention. “What time is . . .” His eyebrows lifted and then he leaned back in his chair. “Oh. I didn’t realize it was so late. What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “Dinner.”

  “I don’t know. I ate at home about two hours ago.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted into an approximation of a smile. “And so you thought you’d come check on me and make sure I did as well?”

  Robyn wished that were her only mission.

  “No. I assumed you had. Any responsible adult who cares about their health and well-being would consider dinner a priority.”

  At that, Chris outright grinned at her. “Now you’re lecturing me about eating regular meals?”

  “Of course not. I know you’re not the kind of man to respond to lectures. I was speaking more generally,” she said, smiling back at him.

  “Come over here,” he said.

  Robyn rose slowly from the armchair and went around the desk, standing in front of Chris. He ran his hands down her arms, tugging the sleeves of her lightweight jacket, slipping it over her shoulders and dropping it on the floor.

  “Did you get the package?” he asked, running his hands back up her now bare arms.

  “I did. It was beautiful. Everything you give me is beautiful. People in my department are beginning to talk.”

  “Let them.”

  “Pam knows it’s you. As soon as she saw what it was, she knew.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Robyn, but by now everyone in the building knows.”

  She shook her head, preferring to believe that wasn’t true. She’d been the soul of discretion at work and had even cut back on her impromptu trips to the twentieth floor to see him. If she went at all, it was only when she had company business and in meetings, Robyn carefully avoided making eye contact unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “Then you have to stop sending me gifts at work. What was this one for?”

  “Why does it have to be for something?”

  “Because they always are.”

  After Paris, he’d gotten her a bracelet with an Eiffel Tower charm which she never took off. And when he’d disappeared to the West Coast for a week, he sent her a pair of Stuart Weitzman stilettos just as she’d begun to feel a sense of withdrawal at his absence. The gifts were amazing—what woman didn’t like gifts? But Robyn had the suspicion that he did it because it was easy, and because what she was increasingly beginning to want from him, he could not, or would not give.

  “I had a chance to get one and thought you’d like it, that’s all,” he shrugged.

  “A Birkin though, Chris? Where on earth would I . . ?”

  “Anywhere you want.” He pulled her onto his lap. “Take it to the gym. The grocery store. To . . .”

  “Thank you,” Robyn leaned back into him. “And I guess sooner or later, I’ll get used to walking around with things that are worth so much I could sell them and feed an entire African village for a year.”

  “If you want, I’ll make you the head of my foundation and you can feed hundreds of African villages a year,” Chris tugged her shirt free of her jeans and raised it, kissing her along her spine. Robyn clenched in response, rearing forward a little as the sensation caused a little shiver across her skin.

  “Quit squirming around,” Chris said against her back. “You’re making my dick hard.”

  Robyn stood abruptly. The last thing she needed was to have Mrs. Lawson show up with Chris’ dinner and find her bent over his desk taking it from behind. The way he made her feel . . . well, that eventuality wasn’t even far-fetched. She turned to look at him again and Chris leaned back in his chair, arms folded behind his head.

  “So you didn’t come to thank me for the bag?” he asked.

  “I don’t thank you by having sex with you, Christopher,” Robyn snapped.

  He held his hands up as though surrendering. “Okay, damn. That was a joke. I just mean you never just come by without calling first, so I know you have a mission. What is it? To make sure I eat dinner? Brush my teeth before bed?”

  “No.” Robyn stepped away from him, going back around the desk, wanting to see his face when she delivered the news. “It’s kind of about work.”

  “Kind of?” Chris looked curious now and gave her his complete focus.

  “Another potential deal’s come up. Jamal stopped by to talk to me about it.”

  “Why would Jamal stop by to talk to you about a deal?”

  “Because Curtis is a part of it. And I just need you to promise to leave it alone.”

  At the sound of the name, Chris’ face hardened, and just as she opened her mouth to explain further, Mrs. Lawson arrived, bearing a tray. Without thinking, Robyn indicated a table off to the left of Chris’ desk wh
ere she sometimes sat and read while he worked. While Mrs. Lawson arranged his dinner, Chris stared at Robyn and she could see him getting angrier.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Lawson,” Robyn said, without taking her eyes off Chris.

  “You’re welcome. I’m about to turn in for the evening,” the housekeeper said. “So once you’re . . .”

  “I’ll be sure to take everything back to the kitchen.” Robyn nodded.

  Once they were alone again, Chris finally broke their mutual stare, going to sit at the table, uncovering his dinner and looking it over.

  “So you’re still carrying water for your ex-husband?” he asked.

  Robyn sighed. “I knew that’s how you’d see it,” she said, almost to herself.

  “Is there any other way to see it?”

  “Yes. I’m just asking you to leave him alone, Chris. First of all it’s not even your fight. And I’m done fighting him.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “What?”

  “Did you ever fight him? Or did you just give in?”

  Robyn collapsed into the armchair. “God, does it matter anymore? I’ve moved on.” She looked at him. “I’m not looking to start that fight now, and I don’t need you to do it for me.”

  “How did it feel?” Chris asked. He wasn’t looking at her, but instead was cutting into the chicken breast on his plate.

  “How did what feel?” Robyn asked. But she knew what he meant.

  “How did it feel when you found out that your husband was fucking his secretary and got her pregnant?” he said, looking up at her.

  Robyn blinked rapidly, surprised that hearing the words could have such a profound effect, now, so long after the event.

  “I thought so,” Chris said.

  “But I don’t want you to do this!” she said. “Doesn’t that make any difference to you? That I don’t want it?”

  “You still have feelings for him?”

  The question was asked quietly, and Robyn wondered whether she’d imagined the slight tremor in his voice as he asked it.