The Baby Maker

by Tia Siren

  I was tall for a girl, with big boobs and nice curves. I guessed I was pretty, though at the time I had no idea how to apply makeup without looking like a Dolly Parton impersonator.

  So when Randy started coming on to me in his office or in the breakroom, I let it happen. I wouldn’t lie. I encouraged him. I loved the way his hand felt on my breast when he copped a feel. I felt something burning inside me when he stood behind me and let his cock accidentally rub against my ass. Soon, he was asking me to do things that at first frightened me but ultimately turned me on and made me come alive.

  He would find me standing in the back of the store when no one was around. He’d slip up behind me and slide his hands under my blouse and grind his cock into my ass. I would giggle and press my ass into him and playfully tell him to behave.

  Our playfulness escalated the night I was in the ladies’ restroom and he came in and locked the door.

  He pulled out his cock and commanded me to suck it, which I did without hesitation.

  It was thick and hairy and tasted like sweat.

  It was my first time seeing a cock, much less having one in my hand and in my mouth. He told me what to do and I tried to do it right. I left teeth marks on him, but he didn’t complain. He just closed his eyes and grabbed my hair and forced me to take him all in.

  I gagged several times and tried to pull away, but Randy’s fingers were tangled in my hair.

  He pulled my head to him and shot his load into my mouth.

  I was shocked when it happened and nearly threw up on his shoes. My mouth was full of his warm seed. I was horrified and didn’t know what to do.

  He told me to swallow it.

  When I shook my head “no,” he gripped my chin in his hand and pushed my head back. He told me to swallow again and this time I did.

  I can still taste it to this day.

  The memory nauseates me.

  “You’ll do better next time,” he said as he stuffed himself back into his pants. I remember nodding. I figured I was in shock because I couldn’t speak. I just stood there watching him comb his hair in the mirror with a hand over my mouth.

  Then he gave me a big smile and told me that he loved me.

  And in my sad little mind, that made what he’d just done all right.

  That was what people in love did, I thought.

  He was the man.

  I was the woman.

  If he wanted me to suck his cock in the FoodMart ladies’ restroom and swallow his seed, that was what I would do, so long as he told me that he loved me.

  I was a fool.

  I know that now.

  I was a stupid girl with ball sweat on her chin and cum on her tongue and stars in her eyes.

  Randy knew he could do anything to me and I would gratefully comply.

  All he had to say was “I love you.”

  We were married within a year. The abuse started the first week.

  First, he starting raising his voice and degrading me for how I cooked and cleaned.

  I was a moron, he said.

  A stupid fucking moron who couldn’t iron a shirt right or boil water in a kettle.

  I couldn’t do anything right in his opinion.

  I was a lousy wife, he said.

  I was lucky he didn’t send me home to mama.

  He made me quit college so I could take on more hours at the store and keep his house.

  Then he started staying out late at night.

  When I’d ask where he’d been, he’d scream in my face until I cried.

  I was supposed to submit, he said, not ask questions about where he was and why there was lipstick on the collar of his shirt.

  Then he started slapping me around.

  Then he started punching me.

  Then he started whipping me with his belt.

  On our first anniversary, he came home drunk and hit me so hard he broke my jaw. After he passed out, a kindly neighbor took me to the emergency room.

  I thank God every day for that punch, because it not only put me in the hospital where I would meet my best friend, Gail, a black ER nurse who would take me under her protective wing, but it also literally knocked some sense into me.

  I knew that if I went back to Randy, the abuse would continue until he hurt me badly or even killed me.

  Even when he showed up at the hospital full of sorrow and bullshit, I knew I’d never submit to his abuse again.

  With Gail at my side, I looked him straight in the eye and told him it was over.

  He scoffed and said that wasn’t my decision to make.

  I told him that if he ever touched me again, I would kill him in his sleep.

  All that did was piss him off and hospital security had to toss him out. I moved back in with my mom, but he wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Then Gail’s brother, Deacon Jones, a deputy sheriff in Rosewood, paid Randy a little visit at his house to have a little talk with him.

  Deacon was six foot five and as wide as a door.

  And he hated men who abused women.

  He told Randy I had gotten a restraining order and wouldn’t press assault charges if he’d just sign the divorce papers Deacon had in his big hand. I could only imagine Randy’s initial response.

  I wasn’t sure what else Deacon said or did, but when he came by Mom’s house to drop off the signed divorce papers, he promised Randy would never bother me again.

  He also had all my clothes and meager possessions in boxes in the back of his cruiser.

  The divorce became final three months later.

  I’d never set foot in the FoodMart again, and I hadn’t run into Randy. So, if there was a silver lining to this dark cloud that was my life, that was it.

  Cut to now, a year later.

  I was taking online bookkeeping classes paid for by the state’s employment office and working nights at a convenience store for minimum wage.

  My dream of being a physical therapist was on hold, at least for now.

  I live in a crappy, rent-subsidized apartment in the shitty part of town because my mother moved to Florida with her latest boyfriend and sold her house to “finance their new life.”

  Gail was still my best friend, but she had her own life to lead.

  So, yeah, that was my story and I was sticking to it.

  I glanced at the clock.

  It was almost midnight.

  I’d had enough of this pity party for one night.

  I was going to bed.

  CHAPTER TWO: Jackson Ritter

  Rosetta Andrews had been my friend and literary agent for ten years—long enough to know when I was feeding her a line of bullshit.

  Rosetta was a handsome woman in her late fifties, with short gray hair and piercing blue eyes. She stared at me from over the top of a pair of reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, waiting for me to answer the question that could determine the future of our relationship, if not my entire career.

  “Tell them I need another three months,” I said with a dismissive wave, as if the fact that my publisher was ready to string me up by my heels and bleed my next book from my body didn’t bother me in the least.

  She gawked at me. “Three months? You can’t be serious.”

  I shrugged at her. “Three months. What’s the big deal?”

  Rosetta took a deep breath and gave me a stony look. I was sitting across from her desk in her office in New York. I had flown in specifically for this meeting. I’d known this was coming. You would have thought I’d have been better prepared.

  “Perhaps you should be a bit more gracious and a lot less of an asshole,” Rosetta said, shaking her head.

  “Fuck them,” I said boldly. “They know I’ll deliver another best seller. I’m Jackson fucking Ritter, for Christ’s sake. They just have to be patient.”

  She stuck a thin finger in the air and shook it at me.

  “You listen to me, Jackson Fucking Ritter. Rodman House wrote you a fat advance check for your next book nine months ago. You were suppo
sed to have a first draft of the manuscript to them three months ago. And here you are asking for another three months like it’s no big deal? You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m totally serious,” I said, scoffing. “Three months and they’ll have the first draft of the manuscript.”

  I hoped I sounded far more confident than I felt. Outside, as usual, I was all bravado and bullshit. Inside, my guts were churning and the bagel I’d had on the plane was threatening to come back up. It would really kill my macho image if I puked on Rosetta’s desk.

  Rosetta tugged the glasses off her nose and scowled at me. “Are you serious, Jackson? You don’t even have the first draft ready?”

  “It’s almost ready,” I said. It was a lie and she knew it.

  She dropped the glasses and let them dangle by the chain around her neck. She folded her thin hands together on the desk in front of her and shook her head at me.

  “Jackson, you’re already three months past the deadline. There is no way they are going to agree to give you more time.”

  “I just need a few more months,” I said. The confidence was seeping from my voice like water through a broken pipe. I could feel sweat forming on my upper lip.

  “Look, I just want it to be right, Rose. I’m not going to turn in a piece of shit. I just won’t do it.”

  “Why is it a piece of shit?”

  I held up my hands. “It just is, okay! That’s what pours out of my brain these days. Shit!”

  “Look, Jackson, I know that your first two books were both best sellers and that can put a lot of pressure on an author. But if we don’t send them something soon, they are going to ask for the advance back and cancel your publishing contract.”

  I blinked at her. “They can do that?”

  “Of course they can do that,” she said, giving me a dumb look. “You’re in breach of contract. You were supposed to deliver the first draft three months ago and you didn’t. If your first two books hadn’t been such hits, they would have already canceled the contract and demanded repayment.”

  “Shit,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  Honestly, I would have been perfectly fine if they had canceled my publishing contract and let me off the hook. I would have been happy to put my computer in a closet and never write another word. I’d just go back to teaching high school English like I had before the first book hit.

  But letting me off the hook also meant I’d have to return the ninety-thousand-dollar advance, and that was pretty much all I had left in the bank.

  I’d made a shit-ton of money over the last few years, but most of it had been spent or thrown on away on bad investments.

  I’d spent it on frivolous things like the mortgage on the house that was too big for just me and my daughter. And the vacations to exotic places I cared nothing about. And lease payment on the Mercedes SL convertible that was the twin of the one my wife, Bethany, was driving on the night she died.

  I’d spent almost four hundred thousand dollars on doctors and specialists and hospital stays to keep my daughter alive the first six months of her life.

  If I had to return the advance, I’d literally be as broken financially as I felt mentally.

  Rosetta read the expression on my face. Her tone softened. She asked, “How is Lizzie?”

  “Lizzie is great,” I said with a smile, happy for the momentary change of subject. I tugged my phone from inside my jacket. I called up a photo of the gorgeous little girl with blond curls and set the phone on the desk.

  Rosetta leaned over and cooed. “She looks like you.”

  “She looks just like her mom,” I said, picking up the phone and stuffing it back inside my jacket. I couldn’t keep the anger from my tone, even after all this time. “Hopefully she got her mom’s looks and everything else from me.”

  Rosetta nodded. She understood. She knew well the story of how my wife had been killed in a horrific car accident because she and her lover had been arguing and she lost control of the car.

  Her neck snapped like a twig when the car hit the tree.

  Her lover was in the passenger seat.

  He wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

  He went through the windshield and hit the tree head-first.

  He was my best friend and lawyer, Ernie Wilson.

  There were lots of eyewitness accounts.

  They saw a woman driving the red Mercedes at a high rate of speed in the pouring rain.

  She was yelling at the man in the passenger seat.

  The man reached for the wheel.

  She jerked the wheel hard to the left and lost control.

  The Mercedes careened across the median and barely missed two lanes of oncoming traffic as it flew off the road and hit a tree.

  The paramedics used the jaws of life to cut open the car and pull my wife’s limp body out.

  Ernie? Well, they scooped him up off the side of the road like the piece of trash he was.

  The paramedics saw that the driver was pregnant, and she was taken by med-flight to Rosewood General.

  By some miracle of God, the tiny baby growing in her uterus survived, but her mother did not.

  They cut my wife open and pulled my daughter out to save her life.

  She was born two months prematurely.

  She took her first breath just as her mother was taking her last.

  Rosetta gave me a moment of silence and let her eyes go around my face. I was sure I looked a mess.

  My hair was disheveled.

  I hadn’t shaved in a while.

  I hadn’t slept.

  There were dark circles under my eyes.

  I certainly didn’t look like the handsome man in the photo on the back of my book jackets.

  It was no wonder she asked, “Are you drinking again?”

  The question made me smile. I wished I was drinking again. Being shitfaced drunk would have made life so much easier to take. I shook my head at her.

  “I haven’t had a drop since Lizzie was born. I won’t let my daughter grow up with a drunk for a father like I did.”

  She smiled. “That’s good to know.”

  I gave her a nod and directed her back to the reason I was there. “Okay, so how much more time can you buy me? Really?”

  She blew out her thin cheeks and pushed her eyebrows up. “I’m not sure at this point, Jackson. They are pretty upset with you, but they are not without a certain amount of understanding, given your situation.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. I was a bestselling author with a modicum of fame. My wife’s tragic death, and the fact that she had been fucking my best friend when she was seven months pregnant, had been tabloid fodder for months. Apparently, that garnered some sympathy from my publisher.

  I asked, “What exactly does that mean?”

  Rosetta chewed at the inside of her lip and tapped her nails on the desk for a moment. She finally said, “I can probably get you the extra time you need for the first draft if you can get them a complete outline within two weeks.”

  “Two weeks?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if that’s possible. I mean, Lizzie is two now and starting to walk. She takes up a lot of my time.”

  It was an excuse and she knew it.

  “Perhaps you need a babysitter,” she said, giving me a scolding eye. “Or a nanny. Someone who can move in and take care of Lizzie and keep the house orderly while you work.”

  “We don’t need a nanny,” I said with a frown. “We’re doing fine with just the two of us.”

  “No, Jackson, you’re not doing fine,” she said. She leaned into the desk and aimed a thin finger at me. It was the symbolic equivalent of holding a gun to my head. “You are about to blow your entire career because you can’t get over being angry at your wife.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said angrily. “And she’s my dead wife.”

  She held up her hands and closed her eyes, as if she were tired of looking at me. She set her reading glasses on the tip of her nose and picked up the publishing contract that had bee
n lying on the desk.

  “I’m tired of making excuses for you,” she said. “If you don’t deliver a complete outline within two weeks, they are going to sue you for breach of contract and demand that you return the ninety-thousand-dollar advance immediately.”

  “They won’t do that.” My ego was now in the argument, and losing badly. “I’m Jackson fucking—”

  “Yes, yes, we all know who you are,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “You haven’t had a hit in three years, Jackson. Your first two books have run their course. You either deliver a killer outline in two weeks or they will sue you. And I will resign as your agent.”

  “You’d do that?” I looked at her with hurt in my eyes.

  “I will do whatever it takes to pull you out of this dark hole that you’ve buried yourself in.” She paused to brush a knuckle under her eyes. “They will ruin you, Jackson. You could lose everything. Is that what you want?”

  “No. Of course not,” I said, slowly shaking my head.

  “Then find someone to take care of Lizzie and chain yourself to your computer, because you are literally two weeks away from losing it all.”

  CHAPTER THREE: Amy Lynne

  I was stocking the beer cooler in the back of the store when the chimes over the front door sounded. I blew out a long breath and headed up the aisle toward the register at the front.

  I always got a feeling of dread when I heard the door open and I couldn’t see who had come in. Would it be a soccer mom paying for gas, a teenager trying to buy cigarettes, or Randy coming to kill me?

  They said that working in a convenience store was one of the most dangerous jobs there was, because the odds of getting robbed or assaulted were so high.

  Factor in an ex-husband who was as mean as a snake and the odds that someday they’d find me behind the counter with my head split open increased dramatically. I knew I had to find another job, but I wasn’t really qualified to do anything else.

  When I came around the corner, I blew out a great sigh of relief, because I saw my best friend, Gail, standing at the counter tearing the wrapper off a Hershey’s bar.