by Holly Rayner
“I’m glad it didn’t,” I returned in earnest, “And I’m glad you came here. Because your TV show pitch made me realize something important.”
“That I wasn’t trying to blackmail you?”
“That I love you, Emma. I can’t expect you to return the feeling after the way I treated you, but…”
That’s about as far as I got. She turned to me, pulled me close, and started kissing me with more passion than I have ever seen from a woman. I didn’t bother asking questions, I just matched her tempo and reveled as the love I’d craved for so long welled up in me.
FIFTEEN
Emma
My last encounter with Kristos had been an awful one, and I had been expecting this one to follow suit. Now I was kissing him with all my soul, fighting to keep my emotions in some kind of order, and failing miserably. He had shown such compassion, for me, my mother, and for our child. He had apologized earnestly, and finally been honest with me about what made him act the way he did. It was truly cathartic. After all we had been through, it felt, as our tongues entwined, that finally, things might actually work out.
For the first time, we actually planned to make love. Kristos owned the entire area surrounding the beach, so we could relax, knowing there was not a soul nearby. We laid down some blankets and slowly removed each other’s clothes, shivering gently as the slight breeze wafted across our skin.
Kristos began kissing me, trailing kisses down my body, and we were soon entwined together in the need of the moment. His hands explored my body, seeking out my breasts, while mine slipped down the small of his back. His fingers and lips were firm, but gentle, causing dizzying sensations to rip through my body.
In the end, we collapsed in each other’s arms, feeling warm, safe and loved. I felt like we were in some kind of cocoon that the affairs of the world would never be able to break into. We were positively glowing with the heat of our efforts. And then, as he gently caressed me, Kristos told me he wanted to say something else.
“I don’t want you to have to hide anymore, Emma. Granted, you’re obviously good at it,” he said, running his hands through my hair, “but I don’t want to live a life of secrets any longer. Suspicion and fear nearly pushed us apart forever. I want to live a new life, and I want you by my side.”
“Mission accomplished,” I replied with a wry smile. “The two of us will always be with you.
Kristos patted my belly gently, an expression of pure joy on his face.
SIXTEEN
It was nearly four in the morning when I returned to my apartment, elation coursing through my veins, and grateful that Kristos had been paying Mrs. Coleman not to rent the place out to anyone else. I fell on my bed in a better mood than I had known for several months. Exhausted as I was, I slept like a baby, and fortunately for me, so did my little baby, Jacob. It was nearly noon when I woke up the next morning, with an incredibly strong craving for waffles.
It was a sign of just how awesome I was feeling that I attempted to make the things from scratch. I hadn’t use a waffle iron in years, and it was messier than I remembered, but they came out all right. While I was eating breakfast, Margaret put in a call to see how things were going in China. Kristos had been paying her agent’s fee, too, so she was in a good mood in spite of the Penny Lane situation.
I told Margaret the truth about what had happened with Kristos, and true to form, she scolded me. Though, by Margaret’s standards, it was more of a pep talk about the many better ways I might have handled my situation. I happily agreed with every word she said, and a day or two later, she signed me up for a series of commercials. As I’d expected, I was to become the new face of that baby food everyone grew up with. It wasn’t glamorous, but I was happy, and it gave the internet something to talk about.
Soon after that, I got an email from none other than Ann Montgomery, who now knew as much as social media did. This time, she was far more supportive, saying that she wished I hadn’t felt the need to hide the pregnancy, and that she would have talked everyone on Penny Lane into adapting the story if she’d known. I wrote back to thank her for that, and for forcing me to go to the hospital, because that was how I discovered Jacob in the first place.
Three weeks later, I got a small package in the mail. It was from Arizona, and the label featured my mom’s distinctive slanted handwriting, only it was far less neat than usual. Kristos and I were sending her regular payments to help her fight her condition, though it had taken some clever negotiating to make her accept them. I hoped they were helping her as I opened the package, which could not have been anything but a Blu-ray disc.
I slipped the disc into my player and saw, to my surprise, three plays I had acted in during my last year of high school. According to my mother’s scrawl, my father made the recordings on the logic that the next time I ran away from home, I would be eighteen, and no one would be able to stop me.
It felt a little embarrassing, watching myself after all that time, but at the same time, it made me remember just how hard I had worked to do well. With a sudden shock, I also realized how much hatred I had been holding in me then. It was imperceptible on the screen, but it shouted at me like a howling wind. How much time had I wasted hating my parents? I didn’t know, but I resolved to make better use of whatever time I had left.
I wanted to share my feelings with Kristos, so I drove out to his weekend mansion in Hollywood. It was tucked away behind an iron gate and a long driveway, but it looked like paradise when you got there. There was a huge courtyard and elegant walkways that led to the main building and the pool house. The main building was massive. It stood four stories tall, and all of its edges were beautifully rounded. Everything was a brilliant white, except the shingled roofs, which were crimson. I was searched by security and ushered in, while a valet parked my car.
“Your mother flew all the way out here from Arizona to see you. We might as well return the favor.”
It was the following morning and we were in Kristos’ bedroom. He was getting dressed for the office, and I was under the covers in a T-shirt and my panties as I wasn’t going to be needed on the commercial shoot for several hours.
“You think you’re ready to meet my parents?” I inquired.
“You’re moving in with me in a week, and they’ll be grandparents in three months,” Kristos reminded me. “If I’m not ready,” he laughed, “it seems to me that now is the time to get that way. When will your shoot wrap?”
“Three days from now so long as nothing unexpected happens.”
“We can leave right after that, then. I will straighten everything out with my people.”
“Alright, but after that we’re going to Greece,” I chimed in.
Kristos looked at me with a bemused expression on his face. “You do know my parents still think I should go into real estate right?”
“I call bullshit on that. Pure and utter bullshit.”
“You’ll see when we get there,” he said, laughing as he moved in for a kiss. I gave him a soft one on the lips, but he moved in closer and started doing it the French way.
“You just got dressed!” I warned him as soon as my mouth was free. “Besides, you’ll be late.”
“I’m a billionaire,” he replied. “I can be late.”
Eventually, I got him to head for the office. I figured there’d be plenty of time for what he wanted later. I picked up my smartphone and looked at the news. As expected, my pregnancy was still trending in the entertainment sections. One gossip site was having a field day calling me an opportunistic gold digger. I didn’t even bother to read the comments. I was about to toss my phone aside and start making breakfast, when I saw something that nearly made me scream in pure rage.
Jacob’s ultrasound, the one that had been taken about a month ago, was staring up at me from my smartphone screen. Someone had sold it to that despicable site. There was only one culprit I could think of. I didn’t want to believe Dr. Iwata could do a thing like that, but I couldn’t think of anyone else who wou
ld have access to it. I was furious, but I didn’t want to make any assumptions without hearing the doctor’s side of things first, so I made an urgent appointment with her for that afternoon.
The appointment conflicted with the shoot for the commercial, so I let them know I had to reschedule, and I told them exactly why. They were sympathetic, but not ten minutes later, news that I was meeting with a doctor had landed on Facebook. Ann Montgomery took to her Twitter page to decry the invasion of my privacy, and demand a boycott of the gossip site in question. If Dr. Iwata used social media at all, she would have plenty of warning about why I was coming.
As it turned out, however, either the doctor never bothered with social media, or she was too busy to look at it that afternoon, because she didn’t look even the slightest bit nervous when I went into her exam room.
“You said it was urgent, Ms. Johnson. How can I help you?”
“It’s about my ultrasound, Doctor.”
Dr. Iwata gave me a quizzical look. “Your last one was fine,” she replied in a genial voice. “No problems whatsoever.”
“It’s on the internet,” I corrected her firmly.
She was about to speak, and then her face registered something like horror. “Someone put your ultrasound online without your permission?”
“Yes,” I said, a little more harshly than I meant to, “and I was wondering what you knew about it.”
At that, the doctor’s face hardened and became stern. “I’m a doctor, Ms. Johnson, and not one in the habit of selling my patients’ medical documents at any price. Besides, I’ve had the ultrasound for over a month. Why would I wait until now if I wanted to try and profit from it?”
The doctor had a valid point, but I was certain I had one to trump it.
“Point taken, but who else has a copy of my ultrasound? Mine goes with me everywhere,” I asserted, patting the clutch I was carrying with me.
“And what did you do with the other copy?”
“What other copy?”
“The one you requested several weeks ago in case your purse went missing or was stolen. Have you accounted for that one yet?”
I had forgotten about the extra copy completely. So much happened in such a short space of time, I was finding it hard to keep track of things. I tried to think where I might have left it, and it was my turn to be shocked.
I apologized to the doctor, and rushed for my car as quickly as I could, considering I was six months pregnant. In seemingly no time, I was at my apartment, banging on Mrs. Coleman’s door.
“Hand it over, bitch,” I said the moment she opened the door. This woman did look nervous. Very nervous. Nevertheless, she tried to play dumb.
“Young lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about but—”
“Let me just stop you right there. You broke into my apartment, you went through my things, you stole my ultrasound and sold it. Even though you were being paid for an apartment nobody was using. You can hand over the name of the person you sold it to, as well as their contact information, or I can have the police and a pack of lawyers on your ass for the rest of history.”
She didn’t have to think about it for long. She coughed up the name, and I made a mental note to call a moving company to come for my things as soon as reasonably possible.
SEVENTEEN
My former landlady had sold the ultrasound to a man named Mike Carmen, who sold pictures to a number of gossip sites. I got to his office about a half hour later, but his people tried to tell me he wasn’t there. When I mentioned the word ‘lawsuit’, however, he magically appeared, and led me inside his dingy office. One look at the man told me there was no point in holding out hope that this might play out without an argument.
His hair was mussed and greasy. It shot out in all directions, resembling an unkempt lawn. He had big, bushy eyebrows, a snarl on his lips, and a five o’clock shadow. He wore a gold chain and a cheap gray suit that stretched to accommodate his ample frame. His pale, doughy hands were balled into fists, and he was staring at me like I had just strangled his cat.
“Alright, lady,” he said in a slightly nasal tone. “What’s all this talk about lawsuits?”
“My landlady sold you an ultrasound of my son.”
“Yeah, so?”
“She stole it from me, and I want it back!”
“Well it’s mine now,” he said, laughing. “You think I give a damn where the old broad got it from?”
“I sure as hell do, and I’m sure the courts will too. They’ll eat you alive when I tell them you were printing my stolen property.”
“Well, the thing is, honey, first you’d have to prove it was stolen, and that I knew that when I bought the image. We have a pretty good team of lawyers over here. What have you got? You’re not even that famous, I’d take it as a compliment if I were you.”
I took that opportunity to remind him of something he had clearly forgotten: that Kristos Metroupolos, billionaire producer, was my baby’s father.
“You may have an excellent legal team. I don’t doubt it. But I’m guessing his is probably better. And how much is mounting a defense going to cost you? What’s your coverage going to be like while the suit goes forward? Because if I don’t get that ultrasound back, we’re going to find out exactly how famous I am. I’ll go on television, radio, and the internet to make sure your name stinks from one end of America to the other. So what’ll it be?”
Five minutes later, I had what I came for, as well as the promise of a printed apology, and was on my way back to Kristos’ mansion. Several people recognized me on the way, but I hurried past them. I was in no mood for questions. I wanted to do two things: go home, and vent.
Traffic didn’t help matters any. Halfway back, I stopped at a red light to roll down my window and cuss out the old man driving at a snail’s pace directly in front of me. Of course, somebody had a smartphone handy, so that outburst now belongs to YouTube. Miraculously, I made it back without further incident. Inside, I headed straight for the den, and collapsed on the sofa, absent-mindedly hoping that Mrs. Coleman would be struck by lightning.
When Kristos got back and saw my stuff piled in one of the spare rooms, he asked about it, and I explained what had happened. I never found out what he did next, but within the hour, our son’s ultrasound had completely disappeared from social media. My anger, on the other hand, did not disappear so quickly. By the time we retired to bed I was still ranting about it, and Kristos, though sympathetic, was losing patience.
“Where the hell does that damn fossil get the nerve to break in and go rummaging through my stuff in the first place? She’s always been a cow, but I didn’t think even she could stoop so low. Here I am, six months pregnant, and I’m riding around the city like Scooby Doo, solving mysteries. It’s not even like she needs the money!”
Kristos rolled over so that he was facing me. Then he adopted his most accommodating tone. “She’s a horrible, greedy, old, biddy,” he opened. “She had no business being in your apartment. What she did was naked theft, and if you weren’t such a generous person, she’d be rotting in jail about now. But you did manage to get the ultrasound back, and I’ve had it scrubbed from the news. You’re only stressing yourself out now, and that can’t be good for you or the baby. I think you ought to let it go.”
“Let it go?” I demanded. “Let it go? That woman stole pictures of our son for money. Total strangers had aces to them, and people are writing horrible things about us and our child. How on earth can you let that go?”
“Because we can’t go back in time and prevent the theft. It’s done, and there’s nothing we can do to change that.”
“So now you’re blaming me!” I shouted viciously. “This is my fault for making an extra copy? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“I’m not trying to blame anyone except the woman who broke into your apartment. I just think…” Kristos answered, struggling not to match my volume.
“That I should let it go,” I finished for him in bitter tones.
“Well I can’t do that. This is too damn upsetting. And if you can’t be supportive of someone you claim to love, then don’t let me stop you from walking right out the door. It’s a big-ass mansion, Kristos. There no need to stay here and listen to your girlfriend whine!”
The argument roared on for the better part of an hour. In the end, Kristos did end up leaving, and only then did I realize that I had kicked him out of his own bedroom. I don’t know where in the house he went, but it must have been well on the other side because even when I left the bedroom to look for him, he was nowhere to be seen. I was alone with my anger, and an agitated baby that I could not get to settle down.