SEAL'd Lips: A Secret Baby Romance

by Roxeanne Rolling

  Thankfully, there is a message from Shelly.

  How pathetic is it that I care so much about receiving a little text message that only takes Shelly a couple seconds to write.

  “What’s going on?” is all it says.

  But it almost makes my heart leap. It makes me feel just a little less alone in the world, a little less despairing.

  “You have time to talk?” I write back, adding a couple smiley faces. That’s definitely not representing my current mood, but what the hell, right?

  She doesn’t write back. Instead, she calls me. Time to hide the sadness deep inside me and put on a happy face to accompany my happy phone voice. I realized long ago that even my best friend in the whole world doesn’t want to listen to me talk about how much it sucks being stuck in my room for a year. I’ve got to at least be vaguely entertaining to the extent that I can without any social contact.

  “What’s going on?” says Shelly, sounding breathless. Her breathing is ragged.

  “What are you doing?” I say. “You’re not…?”

  “Oh,” says Shelly, realizing what I think she’s up to (either masturbation or sex… either is likely in Shelly’s case, honestly). “No, no… I’m at the gym. I’m on the treadmill.”

  “Since when do you go on the treadmill? Since when do you exercise?”

  Since college, Shelly’s lived on a steady diet of cheap wine and college boys, with the occasional bit of intense studying thrown in. She’s pretty smart, so she can get away with it, still making dean’s list each semester, no matter how many guys she sleeps with.

  I like to give her a bit of a hard time about it all, but the truth is that I’m insanely jealous of all the action she’s getting… and she knows it, so she doesn’t take my gentle ribbing too hard.

  Does that make me some kind of wannabe slut in training or something, since I really wish I was out there in college making all sorts of mistakes, sleeping with guys that I shouldn’t be? If it does, then fuck it. I’m totally guilty of having a sex drive. That’s not a sin, right? Well, if it is, give me whatever punishment is necessary. There’s almost nothing I regret more in this world than being a virgin.

  “Just trying to burn a few calories,” says Shelly. “Trying to get healthy, you know? What’s wrong with that?” She’s still breathing hard. She’s got a good figure, but she’s definitely not in shape in the sense that she probably can’t walk up more than few flights of steps without breathing hard. She’s been known to indulge in the occasional joint here or there, which probably doesn’t help matters.

  I laugh. “Don’t give me that,” I say. “You’re already as thin as a rail where it counts, and thick where you need it. How else would you be able to get all those guys?”

  “Just looking to keep everything in its right place, you know?”

  “Come on,” I say. “You’re the same age as me. Everything’s exactly where it needs to be. What, is there a cute guy at the gym or something?”

  “He’s not just cute, he’s gorgeous.”

  I laugh.

  “So it is a guy after all.”

  “Of course it’s a guy,” says Shelly in a hushed voice. “But I’m at the gym now and I can’t exactly talk about it.”

  “He’s there now? Are you stalking him or something?”

  “Of course not,” hisses Shelly. “And no, he’s not here now. But there are other people around.”

  “Since when did you care if anyone else knew about your plans of sexual conquest?”

  That makes Shelly laugh.

  I can hear something hanging in the background. Her breathing is still heavy, but it starts to subside in intensity a little bit.

  “All right,” she says. “That’s enough of the bike for me.”

  “I’ll let you go then,” I say. “You probably want to hit the showers.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not using the showers here. They’re gross.”

  “What’s more gross?” I say. “Walking around all sweaty or showering in a locker room with some other people?”

  Shelly laughs. “I’m going to take my chances that I smell nice even when sweating,” she says.

  “So tell me about this guy,” I say. “If you’re in a safe place that you can talk, that is.”

  “I’m just walking through the hallway,” says Shelly. “No one’s around. But he’s fucking gorgeous.”

  “So he’s going to be the lucky next guy?” I say.

  “If everything goes according to plan,” says Shelly. “I’ve started with the suggestive eye contact, and the innuendo laden flirting state is next to come.”

  “I give you two days before he’s in your bed,” I say.

  “What makes you think I’m taking him back to my place? It’s a mess. No, I plan on going right to his apartment with him after the gym and fucking his brains out when we’re both all sweaty.”

  I laugh. “How do you know he doesn’t shower at the gym?”

  “Maybe I’ll invite myself over to his apartment for a shower,” says Shelly. “That ought to cover all my bases.”

  “And it’d be pretty clear what you’re after,” I say.

  “Well that’s the idea, isn’t it?” says Shelly. “So, what’s going on with you? How’s the year of solitude progressing?”

  “Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into A Hundred Years of Solitude,” I say.

  “You know, that’s a great book,” says Shelly. “There’s this part where a priest drinks chocolate and starts to levitate, and a part where…”

  “I know,” I say, interrupting her. “I’m the one who gave you the book, remember?”

  “Oh yeah. Anyway, what’s going on?”

  “Well,” I say. “Same old same old, I guess. But… another doctor came to see me. An old friend of my dad’s or something…”

  “Sounds exciting,” says Shelly in a deadpan voice.

  “Actually,” I say. “He was… really, really hot. Like movie actor hot. Crazy hot.”

  Shelly giggles. “Sounds like someone’s in love,” she says.

  “I am not,” I say. “Why can’t I say a guy’s hot?”

  “You absolutely can,” says Shelly. “And you can tell me you want to feel his thick shaft in your mouth as he fondles your breasts.”

  I laugh uncomfortably. Unfortunately, I’ve never been as comfortable as Shelly about talking about my own sexual fantasies and desires. That probably has something to do with being a virgin.

  “I’m not going that far…” I say. “I’m just saying he’s cute.”

  “A minute ago you said he was hot. I think you’ve found the guy you want to lose your virginity to and you don’t want to admit it.”

  “Maybe I do,” I say.

  “You do what?” says Shelly, toying with me and my uncomfortable feigns.

  “You know,” I say. “Lose my virginity to him. But… he’s older than me. A friend of my dad’s…”

  “Oooh, older men are great in bed,” says Shelly.

  “But there’s no chance of any of that,” I say. “I mean he had to wear a mask just to come in my room, and all this horrible plastic wrap nonsense. You remember, from that time you came to visit me.”

  “Ugh,” says Shelly. “Don’t remind me.”

  “You’re not the one who has to deal with it every day.”

  “You’ll figure out something,” says Shelly. “It’s just a matter of time.”

  I’ve been telling myself that for a year, and I’ve finally given up hope that anything will ever work.

  “Let’s be real, Shelly,” I say. “I’m going to die a virgin in this very room.”

  Shelly starts to talk, but my phone starts vibrating, and in brief confusion, I accidentally touch the screen, switching over to the incoming call.

  “Shelly?” I say. “Are you still there?”

  Now I realize what’s happened.

  “It’s me, Liam.”

  “Liam?” I say, shocked that he’s calling me, the gorgeous doctor who I w
as just talking to my friend about… I hope he didn’t hear anything I said about being a virgin.

  “Yeah, your dad gave me your number. Listen, I have something to tell you.”

  I’m practically holding my breath.

  Is he going to suddenly confesses his love for me over the phone?

  Nope. “I didn’t want to get your parents’ hopes up, but I thought I needed to tell you. I was riding my bike home.” (He rides a bike? It seems strange to imagine a guy like him peddling along the road, all decked out in cycling gear, with the cars zooming past him.) “Anyway, I suddenly remembered there was a similar case in the literature… it was a very old case… I don’t remember the details, but there was a young woman who had a cellular condition that caused her to have intense allergic reactions, not unlike what you’re suffering.”

  “A cellular condition?” I say. “What’s that mean?”

  “The cells have these things called mitochondria. They’re like the power plant of the cell, producing all the energy. If they’re not functioning right, everything in the whole body can be off…”

  “So it could be like my body doesn’t have the energy to fight off minor allergens or something?”

  “Something like that,” says Liam. “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you tomorrow if I come up with something… I don’t want to get your hopes up… But I think there’s a cure.”

  A cure?

  I’ve heard a lot of things from doctors. I’ve heard that they could cure me, but I’ve never heard someone talk about it concretely like this, talking about an actual problem…

  Well, I’ve been to holistic doctors who told me my “vibe” was off or something, but of course that never worked out.

  But Liam’s a top surgeon. He’s not into anything crazy, just real hard science.

  A smile growing on my face, my mind starts swimming in day dreams… I imagine myself out and about, enjoying life outside of this cursed room.

  But will it really work? Am I just letting my dreams get ahead of reality?

  “Are you sure?” I say. “I’ve been let down in the past.”

  “I wouldn’t tell you this if I didn’t think so,” says Liam. “I really think there’s a chance it could work. And I never bullshit my patients. I always tell it like it is.”

  Chapter 5

  Liam

  Have I promised too much? After all, it’s just a hunch, just a memory of an article. But then again, my hunches with patients are rarely if ever wrong.

  But I already feel like she’s more than a patient. There’s more at stake here than there is with any old patient in the hospital. Well, I have more at stake.

  I just can’t get her body out of my head. And her voice is so… sexy and innocent. Just incredible.

  My cock twitches in my pants, beginning to stiffen, just thinking about her.

  I set the Triumph motorcycle upright on its kickstand in the garage, near the Porsche, and head inside.

  The house is large. Everything’s in its proper place. It doesn’t exactly look like what you might expect from a bachelor “pad,” or anything like that. I’ve got good furniture, a mixture of modern pieces with some antiques left over from my parents’ house.

  All the lights are off, and I stand for a moment on the threshold from the garage, looking at the soft glow that comes from the streetlights outside, illuminating the curtains, making them glimmer like a backdrop. For some reason, it reminds me of my parents’ house, when I used to have insomnia growing up. I would wake up in the middle of the night and head into the living room without turning on any of the lights, and just admire things with my night vision. It was a sad time, with my parents arguing.

  A feeling of sadness enters me now, but I brush it off. That’s what I’m good at anyway.

  The easiest way to throw it off, I’ve found, is to throw myself at the nurses, or into my work. Or into a hobby, like my motorcycles and my cars, playing golf, staying intentionally intensely active, powering my way through life as if nothing ever affects me, just going from one thrill to the next.

  Without turning the lights on, I grab a beer from the kitchen fridge, and head right down into the basement, flicking on the low level fluorescent lights.

  I like it down here in the basement, where everything is exactly as I want it. Honestly, the rest of my house is really meant to make it easier for me to bed the women I bring home, not that I need much help. They’re usually begging for it by the time we get home, if we get that far and don’t fuck in a taxi or somewhere even more public first. But having a home that’s well put together certainly doesn’t hurt my chances.

  But the basement, this is a place just for me. It’s not for the nurses, the waitresses, or the soccer moms that I pick up with ease.

  I’ve got my tool bench down here, along with a bunch of expensive power tools I couldn’t help but buying. I’ve got a lathe, a circular saw, and even a kit for minor welding.

  But tonight I’ve got a different sort of job.

  A completely unpretentious metal table holds my work computer that I use for research. It’s hooked up to the hospital databases, allowing me to search through not only patient records but all the medical studies that aren’t even available to the public.

  I crack the top of the beer by sticking the cap against my bicep and twisting, another bar trick meant to impress the ladies. Of course, I do it just for fun, though.

  I log onto the medical databases and start looking for the study I remembered while riding my Triumph. An hour goes by, then another. I’m just barely drinking my beer, so engrossed am I in the studies.

  I know there’s a cure out there for her, I just know it.

  It’s just a matter of figuring out what’s really going on in her body. I know it has something to do with cellular fatigue, cellular energy. Nothing else makes sense. I asked her to send me blood work, but actually I have access to it through my computer. I have all her medical records pulled up, and nothing is amiss whatsoever. No wonder all the doctors haven’t been able to cure her—they always go by the tests themselves, and can’t do anything if everything appears normal.

  It takes a mind like mine to look beyond what appears to be normal.

  But so far, no progress.

  I take occasional breaks, getting down on the concrete basement floor and doing 50 pushups at a time, until I’m out of breath, before diving back into the walls of text that the medical studies are.

  I don’t bother checking the time, but I know I’m burning through the hours. Dawn’s not far away, when I think to start looking through the biological abstracts databases. These are studies for purely research purposes—researchers trying to figure out how biology works, how cellular energy works. These papers are the foundation on which the medical studies are based. We need to understand how things work before we can start devising drugs and cures for common medical problems.

  After yet another hour of digging, I finally find it, the study I was thinking of.

  The study describes some previously unknown mechanisms of cellular fatigue, conditions in which the mitochondria don’t produce the required energy. The summary of the study briefly speculates that these problems could cause all sorts of immunological problems.

  That’s it!

  Mia’s intense allergic reactions show that her immune system isn’t functioning. It’s got to be her mitochondria, her cells not producing enough energy for her body to cope with the demands of minor “foreign” substances like common dirt, pollen, perfumes, just about anything really.

  Another couple hours go by, and finally… I find it.

  The solution.

  I know it is. There’s no way it can’t be.

  And it’s something so simple I can barely believe it.

  My cock starts to stiffen, just thinking about the possibility of Mia leaving that room. I imagine what she’ll wear… something like a halter top that shows her cleavage… thin spaghetti straps that show her gorgeous shoulders and plenty of her back�
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  I can be the one to show her the world.

  But what about her dad? He’s an old friend. He’s not going to like the idea of me dating her daughter, is he?

  I know I can have her. I just know it.

  I lost track of the time hours ago. But it’s probably early morning by this point. I’ve been up all night looking for a cure for this sexpot beauty.

  The phone rings. It’s John, Mia’s dad.

  “Mia’s been rushed to the emergency room,” says John, breathless.

  My heart starts to pound.

  “What happened?”

  “Some contamination. We don’t know. We found her in her room passed out. They’re worried she’s going to go into a coma…”

  Chapter 6

  Mia

  I wake up in a hospital bed. My whole body feels stiff and painful, like I’ve been run over by a truck but don’t remember it.

  I don’t have any memory of how I wound up here, but it’s not hard to put the pieces together. I must have had another allergy attack. Although this must have been a worse one than usual, because I can’t remember my body feeling this bad.

  Plastic sheeting surrounds my bed, creating my own hypoallergenic bubble within the hospital. A normal hospital, with all its sanitary precautions, isn’t enough to keep me safe. No, I’m so weird and my body is so deranged that I need a special place just for myself, or else I’ll pass out again, who knows how many times and for how long.

  The curtains start to move, rippling back and forth.

  God, am I starting to hallucinate? I don’t need to that to my list of symptoms, do I?

  Suddenly, a face appears, and I realize that I’m just exhausted—I’m not hallucinating. There’s an actual person there.

  It takes me a couple seconds to recognize who it is.

  It’s Liam.

  God, that’s the last person I want to see here. I really don’t want Liam to see me in this state. Who knows what my hair looks like, and my skin is probably all blotchy and inflamed from whatever allergy attack I had.