Guarding Her: A Secret Baby Romance

by Lexi Whitlow

  She kisses me lightly on the lips. “That you’ll see me again. It’s okay if you don’t. That’s never what this was about.”

  “Mal—” I think of telling her that she means something to me, something real. That I mean what I say. But she doesn’t give me a chance.

  Instead, I feel her fingers fumbling with my jeans, the zipper sliding down. She takes out my cock, and all my blood rushes to the points where her fingers touch. I groan.

  She lifts her skirt and moves until she’s on top of me. She hikes up her skirt, and I see that she’s trimmed and shaved her pussy. I realize it’s for me, for this day, for this moment. Someone walks by the outside of our door, and I swallow hard, blood rushing to my cock. My center grows tight, and the only thing I want now is this woman, on top of me.

  “Just fuck me now, Matthias.” She looks into my eyes when she says my name and lowers herself so that her wetness begins to encase my cock. The head slips inside, and she angles herself so that she can take me in. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I understand. People leave. It’s okay that they do.”

  I don’t say anything, because she’s lowered herself to the base of my cock, and she’s moving against me in a slow, gentle rhythm, sighing as she grinds her clit against me.

  “Fuck,” I groan. I’m bare inside of her again, fully aware of every centimeter of her skin.

  She increases her speed, whimpering each time she raises up and lowers her supple body down onto my cock.

  “Matthias,” she sighs, one hand going to my shoulder so she can ride me faster. “It’s so good—oh God—” She moans, unable to finish her thought. A couple walks by, and I see the woman looking inside our car. She quickly looks away, and a surge of excitement rolls through me as I grip Mallory’s waist.

  “It is good. You wore your skirt for me, got wet for me. Wanted me.” I clear my mind and watch her as she moans, moving her hips over me. She’s reckless, uncaring. I’m close to coming inside of her, and I bite down on my lip to stop. I want to watch her as she comes. The flush starts to rise over her body, and I see her growing pink. Her stomach tightens, and she cries out, wild, as she thrusts herself down. I can feel her swell and clench against me, and it sends me over the edge.

  “Fuck, Mallory,” I mutter. She comes hard against my body. She shudders endlessly, and I’m not sure if she’s coming again, but she keeps on, drawing me closer to the end. Before I come, I flip her over and push her against the seat of the train car, spreading her legs wide and thrusting hard. I push her against the seat right next to the door.

  “Someone’s going to see,” she says. Even as the words escape her lips, she tilts her head back, closing her eyes.

  Her breath comes in shorter and shorter gasps, and I grind my hips into hers. “Don’t care.” I flip her shirt up over her breasts, sweeping the backs of my knuckles over them. She wraps her legs around me, and whispers in my ear. I can’t tell exactly what she’s saying, but the sweetness of her voice propels me forward, and I fuck her harder.

  She comes again, legs shaking. “Come inside of me. Please come inside of me,” she mumbles, mouth open.

  I push into her one final time, letting the surge take me over. “Greedy girl. I’ll give you what you want.” I unleash inside of her, filling her with my essence. I’ve never recklessly taken a girl bare before, but from the time Mallory climbed on top of me in the apartment I rented to escape my family, I couldn’t refuse her. I don’t want her any other way. No barriers, nothing preventing me from feeling her tight, wetness around me. She’s so warm, so deeply soft.

  I wasn’t even sure I cared when she assured me it was safe. The idea of filling her drove me to some biological need, and I couldn’t help but do exactly as she wanted.

  I trained her to be mine—and now she’s taken me as hers. Left her mark the same as I’ve left mine.

  I groan deeply and thrust into her a final time.

  The train compartment is filled with her delicate scent, and I pull her back onto my lap, holding her there and kissing her for a long time after. I stay inside of her for a while.

  When she lets go of me finally, she pulls on a pair of panties from her bag and shrugs when I frown. “We’ve entered France. The trip is over.”

  “For now,” I say. “Where will you be?”

  “Matthias, let’s not prolong this. You’ve got things going on with your family. And I know you won’t give a thought to me once you’re gone—”

  “I will. But I understand if you don’t believe me. I’ll prove it to you.”

  She’s standing now, watching the world pass by from the train. “You don’t have to. You told me what this was—”

  “It’s not what it was before, Mal. It isn’t. It’s something new, something different.” I stand with her and catch her hand. I can see Paris rising in the distance, and it feels like an ending, something depressingly final. I have her number, but she’s cagey about telling me where she’ll be. I understand that too. I didn’t exactly tell her we’d be in a relationship forever. Standing with her here, I can feel my mistake sitting between us. Still, I can’t muster the words to tell her that I was wrong.

  “Thank you. I think. That’s a compliment coming from you, isn’t it?” She turns to me and lets me hold her for a moment.

  “It is, I guess. But I mean it.” My phone has been off this entire time, and I can only hope that my parents and their men didn’t catch sight of us across Brussels. I don’t know how I’m going to work this out, but I will, even if it means giving my parents a male heir through this girl they’ve picked for me. Maybe they’ll leave me alone after that.

  I’m still holding Mallory close when the train pulls into Paris. I only leave her to get the rest of our luggage for a moment. When I come back, she looks slightly guilty. She bites her lip and looks out the window.

  I help her off of the train, pointing out the stations of the metro that will take her where she needs to go. She has another godforsaken Air BnB rental, but I keep my mouth shut. She doesn’t need me to flash anymore euros in front of her. For now, she just needs to be on her way to wherever she’s going.

  I watch her as she goes, my heart heavy.

  She’s a girl I’ll come back for, the only one I’ve ever been able to say that about.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mallory

  Emilie walks around the apartment, back to her favorite topic. It’s been two—no three—weeks since I moved in with her, and she grills me about Matthias every chance she gets. She’s doing far better than I am in graduate school, so she has the luxury of speculating about my romantic life. I don’t. I made sure of it before I left the train—I deleted my number, and Matthias never even asked my last name.

  I’m fairly certain he’s never asked that question of a woman before. Why would he need to?

  I think of him, boarding a plane for wherever his family is, and “stepping down” from their wishes, whatever that means. His words were so different that last day, so sincere. But men like that—Kim always told me—they don’t come back for you.

  In the past few weeks, I wonder if that’s because Kim’s boyfriend left when he found out she had multiple sclerosis. Maybe she just thought men like that leave. Maybe not all of them do.

  Like I said, I don’t have the luxury of pondering it.

  Matthias doesn’t have a way to find me. And I need to forget him. What good does it do to focus on someone who might come back—but who would definitely break my heart?

  He’s the type of man for a fling. Have a fling. Do the things I don’t get to do anymore, Mal. And don’t let your heart get broken—it’s all you have. Get married, sure. But wait until you’re thirty. In the meantime, do every dirty thing you ever dreamed of.

  Except, Kim, I never dreamed anything dirty until I met Matthias.

  Kim’s voice rings in my head, and Emilie’s kitten heels click against the floor. She pours two glasses of wine, sitting one down on her side table and one on mine. “So this g
uy, he said he doesn’t want anything to do with his family. But he sent you away so he could deal with them?” Emilie says it contemplatively, taking a sip of her red wine. I can’t believe she’s still asking me about him.

  I sigh and put down my sketchpad. There’s a half-drawn design on my iPad and a second unfinished sketch on paper. I’m surrounded by discarded ideas, on our crushed velvet couch, decadent purple in color. When I’m frustrated like this, I try to remind myself that I was lucky I knew one person at Studio Berçot, and now that acquaintance has turned into a friendship. It’s comforting. The couch, the tiny apartment, the wine Emilie brings us from her parents’ vineyard in Montpelier. She’s always been an only child—I guess I am now, too.

  I like it here. I do.

  But there’s something missing. Sometimes I think it’s my sister. Other times, I’m not entirely sure. That feeling that came over me the last day on the train—the one that made me delete my phone number from Matthias’s iPhone—sometimes I think that’s it. The feeling where I thought I might be in love.

  “Yeah, I don’t know Em. We’ve been over this.” I look at Emilie. French, raised in Montreal, far worldlier than I’ve ever been. Still, she’s attached to this idea that Matthias’s journey with me was somehow romantic. “He said they wanted him in an arranged marriage. They want an heir. I can’t begin to explain strange European people or their traditions.”

  “I’m not strange.” She says it haughtily and sits down.

  “You’re Canadian, mostly,” I say with a smile. “That’s a whole different ball game. And you went to college with me at Parsons. You’re—North American. It’s your family that’s strange and European.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Okay, granted, they are strange. Always traveling and doing weird things with their money. Like sending us wine. I can’t argue with their strangeness.”

  “Whatever the case, there’s a whole world of difference between you and Matthias. His family is like, weirdly rich. I think they’re in a whole different category. And for some reason, I have a feeling that money is older than Amsterdam itself.”

  “What gives you that feeling?”

  “The weird shit about an heir. The fact that Matthias was so dead set against marriage. It’s like it was conditioned into him his whole life. And families don’t just do that, not unless there’s something to lose.” I think of him, green eyes on mine, closing them as I take him with my body.

  “Matthias,” she purrs. “Even his name is sexy.” She perches up on top of the other faded pink couch we got from the previous owner. It sits across from the velvety purple couch. Garish, ghastly, totally perfect for a little apartment in Paris. I keep waiting for bed bugs to crawl out of it, but there haven’t been any.

  Lucky. Comforting. This is what you wanted, Mal. Freedom from your grief, a friend, a life, a home.

  But no Matthias.

  Emilie slides down onto one of the fat cushions and takes up her tablet, fooling around with patterns and colors. The rest of the apartment is taken up by the sergers and overlock machines Em has collected, and the wide design and cutting tables I bought secondhand as a contribution. The kitchen cabinets are all filled with fabric Emilie scored in Los Angeles this summer.

  My friend escaped to Cali this summer, and I went to Europe.

  At least she got fabric. I got Matthias. And now he doesn’t even have my number anymore.

  “He was, in fact, sexy.” I sit with my sketchpad on my knees, staring out into space as the afternoon light filters through the tall Parisian windows. It’s truly autumn now. The light is golden in the afternoons, and wind whips through the streets so that we have to close our windows at night. “The sexiest. And I won’t be seeing him again.”

  Emilie doesn’t look up. She downs another gulp of wine and keeps staring at her tablet. She picks up a piece of fabric with gray and blue swirls from the coffee table that sits between us and feels it in her hands, draping it over one arm and swinging it back and forth. “That’s up to you, ma chère. You’re the one who erased your number from his phone. That’s a thing I’ll never live to understand. Don’t come crying to me in January when you’re lonely and need sex.”

  She finishes the wine and piles the fabric in a heap beside her. My wine sits untouched on the side table next to me. It’s been sour on my stomach in the past week or so, no longer tempting me. But Emilie keeps pouring it, and when I leave it, she drinks it herself. Neither the alcohol nor the calories count when it’s my wine, apparently.

  “I won’t. And I won’t be. I’ll be immersed in making a collection for the spring. Trying to catch the eye of the great Parisian designers, and all that.” I say this all grandly, with a big sweep of my hand, but Em doesn’t notice. She’s immersed in her design app again, occasionally stopping to drape fabric over her arm and her ample bust.

  “You will cry for sex. We all do, eventually. I’ll find myself a fine European prince over spring break, when there’s time for things like that. But when you should have been designing and collecting fabric, you were out canoodling around and buying fancy lingerie with some rich boy.”

  I blush. “It wasn’t like that—”

  She looks up and winks at me. “I know that’s what you think. I want you to admit what it was, though. I see you staring off into space, and I think, ‘My friend, she’s here. But she’s not really here. What happens when she needs to present a design to the professors?’ Since we got here, you’ve sewn one dress. And it looks shockingly similar to that pink one you say you wore on your date with Matthias.”

  “It wasn’t like that either, Em. Not the way you’re thinking.” It was something fun, tinged with regret at the end, but still, it was just fun. Maybe I got a little carried away, but why wouldn’t I? A man like that has never shown an interest in me. And there he was, telling me I was the sexiest woman he’d ever seen, that I fit with him perfectly. Of course, I got carried away. But he was what he was. And I won’t submit myself to him just to get my heart broken. That’s not part of the plan.

  Kim had told me to meet someone and go on an adventure. I’d done that, and the someone happened to be Matthias. Being attracted to someone and thinking of them after you’ve slept together—after you’ve spent a week sharing the intimate details of your lives—doesn’t mean anything at all. Not really.

  Two more months, and he’ll be a faded memory.

  Right now, the images of him are vivid, so vivid that they’re almost painful to me. When I close my eyes at night, I recall the feeling of tracing over his muscles with my fingers, the ever-present scent of his skin, rich and masculine. Just because I turn these thoughts over in my mind doesn’t mean I’m pining away for a man.

  The relationship wasn’t real. It was a myth, a fairy tale. Something I did at the end of the summer.

  I’m two weeks into the fall semester at Studio Berçot, and I only think of him at night. Sometimes, when I’m in the shower. And if a lecture is particularly boring or if I already know the skill, I might let my mind wander to the feeling of his hands on my breasts, his mouth, lingering between my legs. Or the way, in the last few days, that we traveled around Brussels, using each toy he’d bought for me in Amsterdam. In bed, once. Against a brick wall in an alleyway outside of a four-star restaurant. Inside the dressing room at that same lingerie store, when the owner was getting something for us from the back.

  I shiver.

  If I admit it for this moment, on a sunny Sunday afternoon before Emilie and I start making omelets for dinner, it is sometimes like Matthias is still with me. His cock, pressing insistently against my leg, hands ripping away clothing, burying himself inside me like a man possessed, desperate.

  I have to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like it seemed at the time. It wasn’t anything like love. That’ll come later for me, after graduate school is done and I have time to concentrate on other things. Even if I hang on to the image of him in the darkest part of night, it doesn’t mean that he was
anything more than a short summer romance, destined for stories told between girlfriends, over glasses of wine. Just like this.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t like that,” Emilie says, interrupting my reverie. “Not with the way you’re looking right now. With the absent stare and all that. You’re chewing on your lip. The bottom one is delightfully pink. A good contrast, Mal. You’ve been pale recently. Lovesick.”

  I ball up one of the designs I’ve been working on, and I hurl it at her. She ducks, and it misses her by an inch.

  “I’m just adjusting to living in France. It’s culture shock or something.”

  “Sure, Mallory.” She rolls her eyes dramatically and winks at me. “Maybe it’s adjusting to the fact that you’re no longer a rich nobleman’s center of attention. But I’ll drop it—I promise.”

  “A nobleman—probably not. There wasn’t much noble about him. That’s for sure.”

  She chuckles. “They’re hiding in the woodwork all around Europe. It’s not fashionable to actually be noble these days, didn’t you know?”

  I have another balled up piece of paper ready to launch at her, but we both dissolve in laughter, and I throw the paper in the trashcan instead. “Okay. We can just forget it all and make dinner. Right?”

  “Right.” She hops up and starts in on dinner, shoving stray bits of fabric in kitchen drawers and open cabinets. The smell of omelets cooking—the only thing we can cook these days since the refrigerator is the only place not overflowing with fabric—usually sparks my hunger. But today, it seems to make my stomach flip instead, and when I go into the kitchen and sit at our little table, I eat toast instead. Emilie raises an eyebrow, but she doesn’t say anything.

  I feel unsettled more than anything, like there’s something I should be doing. To tell the truth, there are many, many things I need to be doing. I need to work on the designs that sit, discarded, on the table next to the purple sofa. I need to meet with my advisor about my winter project.