by Emily Bishop
I could see Quintin and Wesley through the back window. Both were smoking cigarettes, the smoke curling up over their heads. Suddenly, Quintin reared his fist back and barreled it toward Wesley’s skull. I screeched, racing out to the sidewalk. Wesley had ducked his head to the side, narrowly missing Quintin’s punch.
“Hey! Quintin! Stop it!” I cried from behind, my heart pumping wildly in my chest. “Jesus. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
But Quintin continued to point at Wesley, looking aghast. His eyes flashed toward me, looking similarly distrusting. “Are you really trying to have this guy’s baby? For money?” he asked me, his nostrils flared.
I scrubbed my fingers through my hair, awash in confusion. I couldn’t imagine a worse way that Quintin could have found out than through Wesley. I shook my head, shrugging my thin shoulders. “It’s not like I’ll have another option to have a kid.”
“Jesus, Remy. Where the hell is your self-respect?” Quintin asked. He whirled toward Wesley once more, pointing a thick finger toward him. “If I see you fuck this up even more, Wesley, and disrespect my sister—and the fact that she’s giving you this gift…”
“Stop it, Quintin. We don’t even know if it worked.” I said, sighing. “It probably didn’t.”
“Good. Then we can all forget about it,” Quintin said. He spun and stomped into the pub, leaving Wesley and me on the sidewalk. The sunlight had begun to beat down on us, and sweat beaded along my neck. I shifted, feeling the contract flip and flop in my hand.
“I signed it,” I said, my voice weak.
“Maybe it’s a bad idea,” Wesley said, his dark eyes still toward the pub, following after Quintin. “I should have thought about Quintin. He’s been nothing but a fucking brother to me.”
“Just shut up now,” I said. “We’ve already done it. And if it happens, well. He’ll have to deal with it.” I paused for a moment, my heart burning. “He has to realize that I have to make decisions for myself. I have been making decisions for myself for the past twelve-plus years, without both of you.”
I pressed the paper into his hand, spinning toward the door. Rage swam through me, making my movements ragged, sharp. I reached the door and slammed it closed behind me, huffing. Quintin shoved several nacho chips into his mouth and crunched on them loudly, giving me a sinister look. Through his food, he spoke in a muffled voice.
“A fucking baby contract? Jesus, Remy. You have got to be kidding me.”
His words were just the same as mine, internally. But I busied myself throughout the rest of the day, conscious that, if that had worked—all four times of it—I was pregnant with a baby. I stayed away from the booze. I even avoided coffee. I kept my head down, and I prayed. I needed that money. And I needed Wesley’s baby. I just wanted to know that we could make something that lasted. Something that was good.
11
Wesley
When I got back to the cabin that night, my feet itched with that familiar urge to flee. My heart still burned with a kind of strange, sad rage. Quintin had looked at me like a stranger, his fist lifted and his anger radiating toward me. I’d known, in the back of my mind, that asking Remy to carry my child this way wasn’t exactly going to thrill Quintin. But having him find out like that, with the contract flapping through the air between us?
It wasn’t ideal.
At the cabin, I pressed my elbows against the railing and gazed out at the water, which frothed against the sand. At thirty, I knew the subtle intricacies of a woman’s cycle: knew that it’d take a few weeks to learn if our hours of fucking would bring a child into the world. At times throughout the previous night, I’d gazed into her eyes and felt this incredible depth of emotion. As if the entire universe, time and space, was stretched out for the two of us. In the back of my mind, as I’d drifted off to sleep, I’d wondered if I’d have a child with anyone else. Remy and I had always been written in some sort of star system.
Not that I believed in fate or in any of that “meant to be” bullshit. I wasn’t necessarily a man of science, but I’d always considered myself a realist, a man who understood that, due to the frigidity of time, nothing lasted forever. Especially nothing as loose as love.
I lifted my phone and typed out a message to Quintin. “Hey man. I really didn’t mean to upset you back there. If you’ll meet me for a drink in the next few days, I can explain everything. And don’t blame Remy for any of this. As always, it’s me. It’s just fucking me.”
* * *
I sent it into the ether, tapping my phone against the speckled beard growing across my cheeks and chin. Hunger filled me, and I turned into the cabin. Immediately, the flowery smell of Remy wafted into my nostrils, and my cock strained against my jeans. Images of her lips—so supple, so goddamn thick, wrapped around my cock as her tongue slipped up and down the veins—filled my brain. I staggered to the fridge and drew out a beer, huffing.
I so yearned to call her, then. To tell her that I didn’t want to wait till we knew or didn’t know. I wanted to hold her tightly against me, to press my hands softly along her stomach and wait, wishing, hoping.
Of course, Quintin didn’t contact me that night. Nor the next. Nearly a week went by with hardly a message sent from anyone I’d known in my many years on and off the road. Quintin had been the one mainstay of my life. Always checking in, ensuring I had a place to sleep. That I’d eaten in the past few nights. Now, with Remy’s name scribbled across the goddamn baby contract, I was trash to him.
Several nights, I stayed up till three, four o’clock, half-dreaming of Remy. My thumb had swiped across the screen of my phone hundreds of times, hunting for her number. But I always held back, knowing that drawing her closer to me would poison us. I couldn’t mix this contract with pleasure, with feeling. And I knew I needed to step back, to give her time and space to work on her script.
It was what her life was meant for. Not me. Not us.
Although I still had that image of her burrowed in the back of my brain: pregnant, stretched out in the sunlight, her belly easing up beneath a white gown. I so yearned to cozy up beside her, to whisper in her ear: “You’ll be safe with me. Both of you. I won’t leave you again.”
* * *
But dammit, I would. I always did. I’d darted across the country, a wild man, afraid of commitment. What made me think that this would be any different?
It was Wednesday, an entire week since I’d last seen Remy. Feeling jittery, anxious, I tossed my leg over my motorbike and pulled away, unsure of where the hell I was off to. Time twitched along, guiding me. Suddenly, I parked my bike alongside the graveyard. The stones were ominous, straight, catching light from the sun that blared down to the west. There was something about these ritzier cemeteries. Something that made them creepier, if only because not a single flower, not a single piece of grass was out of line. It wasn’t like my father would ever bury Hank anywhere else. “Only the best for our boy,” had been my father’s refrain, just before the funeral.
I took the unfamiliar path, half-remembering those hazy days just after Hank’s death. I shoved my hands into my pockets and regretted I hadn’t brought the asshole anything. Some flowers? A card? In our youth, we’d traded mini cars, racing them along the wooden staircase at the old house, before the billions came swarming in. We’d almost liked one another. Before we’d split off—him, the golden boy, and me, the dark reject.
I stopped short when I reached Hank’s row. Perched on his knees before the grave was none other than my father. He’d dropped a bouquet of white flowers directly beside the headstone, and his head was bowed, his lips muttering some kind of prayer. I’d never seen my father pray like this before, lost in his own reverie, his own mind. I fell back, trying to find a way to escape. But within seconds, I noticed that my father’s bodyguard, Thomas, was lurking just beyond. He’d spotted me. A tap on his ear alerted that he was speaking to my father through some kind of device. My father’s head turned toward me, his eyes holding mine.
* * *
I’d been fucking caught.
Jesus. I splayed my fingers through my hair, striding toward him. The old man looked even more haggard than the last time I’d seen him, when he’d proposed the “I need an heir to my technology throne” shit. He staggered to his feet as I approached, nearly making me stride faster, so as to catch him. But he caught himself, the bastard, giving me a slight smirk.
“Ain’t got the knees I used to.”
I didn’t speak. My own eyes turned to Hank’s grave, with the fresh engraving. Always, when here, I thought about what this grave might look like in twenty, thirty years. Darker, dirtier, aged with time. The way Hank should have been.
“Didn’t expect to see you out here,” my father continued. “Hell, I thought you’d hit the road after my little proposition a few weeks back. Figured I’d scared you off. A single mention of extending our line…” He placed his hand on the top of the grave, his face gripped with emotion.
I drew back slightly, feeling like a caged animal. I wanted to snarl at him, to raise my lips above my teeth. To show him my strength. But I held back, seeing only a dilapidated man at his favorite son’s grave. It was nothing more.
“Let me ask you something, Wesley,” my father continued, just barreling through without my answer. As usual. “Why is it that Hank was so open to things? To building love and a life with a beautiful, faithful woman? To joining me at the company and making it better than when it began? Huh?” He shuffled his feet in the grass now, anxiety fueling him. Thomas, the bodyguard, shifted toward us, as if I were poised to attack.
“Dad, let’s not do this fucking here,” I muttered, my voice gravelly.
* * *
“No. It’s the only place we can do it,” my father continued. “I asked you to give me an heir. And all right, sure. It isn’t looking all that stellar for my cause, is it? But if it’s not going to happen, if it’s really not in the cards, then I think I deserve to know why. I think your brother deserves to know as well, wherever the hell he is. Heaven. The in-between. Whatever.”
My head swam with options of what to say. Remy. Remy had been my dream girl, my ticket to the kind of life my father and Hank appreciated. But I was poison, a dark man living in a world that could never be mine. Now, waiting for Remy’s call, I knew I couldn’t give my father the truth. That I was actively trying.
Plus, there was the issue that Remy and I were, at least contractually, just doing this for the money. At the grave of my brother, this turned my stomach even more. Hank had wanted children with his wife. Gobs of them, running amok, their fingers sticky, and their laughs jocular, and their eyes just like his.
“Dad, Hank can’t hear us,” I said, drawing myself taller. “And Jesus, does it really have to come down to reasons why? Can’t a man live without having to explain himself?”
My father took a quick step back, his eyes becoming slits. I imagined the words tumbling out now, just to save him. “Remy. You remember Remy? She’s going to give birth for me, for us. She’s going to carry my son.”
But I held back, watching as my father slid his arm through Thomas’s. He clucked his tongue at me, pressing a final hand against Hank’s grave. “Think of all your brother did for this family. He didn’t do it because he had to. He did it because he was capable of love. Why the hell aren’t you, Wesley? What the hell happened to you?”
* * *
My father whipped toward the exit of the graveyard then. He left me gazing down at my black shadow, my hands drawing into fists. My foot dug a slight indent into the dirt in front of Hank’s grave, wanting to feel a part of whatever world was now his.
“Why the hell did you leave me here with him?” I muttered to Hank. Always, I’d spoken to him in a gruff tone. Hank had looked at me without judgment, his own eyes open to the mystery of me. Wanting to understand. Even riding motorbikes with me a time or two, tearing his tire across the upstate gravel and blasting his arm into the nearby tree. God, Dad had nearly fucking killed me after that one.
A wave of grief—something I hadn’t felt since the funeral—fell over me. Straining to breathe, I staggered toward my bike and fell onto it. I kicked it on and raced back toward the Mission. Every muscle in my arms, my legs, ached for her. For Remy. I wanted to count every minute we’d been away from each other. To learn where she’d been.
I’d lost so much time with Hank.
Maybe it didn’t have to be that way with her.
12
Remy
“Remy, you have to make sure you clean these glasses all the fucking way,” Quintin spewed at me, tilting one my direction. I blinked at him, feeling like a deer in the headlights. There, at the edge, was a classic red lipstick stain, probably from the fifty-something woman who’d spent all late afternoon cackling her way from one conversation to the next.
I gripped the glass and pulled it from Quintin’s grip.
“Are you going to stop treating me like a second-class citizen soon?” I asked my brother, giving him a heavy sigh. “Because it’s getting old.”
Quintin hadn’t been able to look me in the eye since he’d learned of the baby contract. I’d been walking through my bar shifts with him in a cloud of shame, my eyes to the floor. Asking customers what they wanted became soft grunts. But when Quintin wasn’t watching, I placed my hand on my lower stomach, my eyes closed and hope growing wild, like a crashing wave against my heart. “Please,” I ached. “Please. Become someone. Become mine.”
“You should have thought of that before,” Quintin began.
But I snapped my free finger near his face, feeling a sudden rush of confidence. “Quintin. When was the last time I ever listened to your advice, huh?”
Quintin bucked back, surprised. He shifted his weight, crossing his burly arms across his chest. He waited, suddenly aware of the changing power dynamics.
“Well, I didn’t want to say anything about that asshole, Tyler,” he began.
“All right. Sure. I shouldn’t have fucked Tyler,” I spewed, my voice growing louder. “And maybe I never should have moved to Los Angeles in the first place. But dammit, Quintin. This baby with Wes? Maybe it’s something I want. Maybe I’m finally doing something for me, after stretching myself thin for the stupid acting industry, and for people like Tyler, who say they love me and really don’t.”
“So you’re saying you think Wesley actually loves you?” Quintin scoffed, sliding the metaphorical knife, so stiff, so sharp, through my heart.
I tried to hold my face firm, to not let the hurt show. My eyes searched his. “I told you. It’s a contract. He isn’t contractually obligated to do anything but pay me the cash, if I do get pregnant at all. And after that, Q, I can make my film. I’ll actually feel like, like I have a purpose. I’ll actually be someone I’m not embarrassed of. Someone my baby could be proud of.”
It was clear the words were impacting Quintin. But he wasn’t willing to give in, not yet. He bolted toward the door and drew his smokes from his pocket. Poised at the door, popping a stick in his lips, he muttered, “Listen, can you close up tonight?”
Surprised at the quick shift in conversation, I gave him a subtle smile. He was allowing me to win this round, at least. “Sure thing,” I said. “Any time.”
Quintin marched down our stretch of road, back toward his grimy apartment. I swiped a towel over the countertop, watching as much of the night crew filtered out into the humid night. The lipstick-wearing woman near the window eyed me with dilated pupils, coughing into her hand. “I don’t suppose what your brother said was true? You’re pregnant?” she said. Her voice seemed to be made of the stuff at the bottom of an ashtray.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. Even as I spoke, I felt my skin glow, a smile stretch out. Even for this woman, this nobody, I felt aching with desire to tell her this news. “I’m still waiting to find out.”
* * *
“You’ve got it, baby girl,” the woman grunted, tapping the side of her nose with a gnarly finger. “I can see it on you. Your
skin. It’s like a fruit in the sun.”
I floated after that, lost in a kind of daydream. For perhaps the billionth time that week, I drew my phone to my chest, searching for the right words to say to Wesley. “Where are you?” I’d typed out so many times. “I think I miss you.” “You didn’t go back to Vegas, did you? I’ll meet you. We can marry, like all those other suckers. Maybe there’s something to the spontaneity. Maybe that’s where true love lies.”
But I held back, certain that when Wesley wanted to contact me, he would. Otherwise, he waited for my body to pace its way toward pregnancy. Or, I’d get my period, and we’d start all over again.
Just the thought of trying again put my heart into a pitter-patter. Of having to tell him, “Dammit, Wesley. You have to kiss me again. You have to fall asleep beside me again, your strong arms wrapped around me, our hearts beating as one.”
I turned my back to the road, sweeping glasses through the sink. I hadn’t had a lick of booze in a week nor a drip of coffee. Sam had noticed my tea drinking, waggling her eyebrows. “Don’t suppose you’re pregnant and not telling me?” she’d said, laughing.
“As if I have anyone to sleep with,” I’d lied. God, it was unlike me to lie to her, my best friend. My heart ached with it, seeing the humor, the goodwill in her eyes. She was eternally on my team. And I was flitting on the outskirts, daydreaming about my long-lost love.
The bell on the door jangled seconds later. I called into the growing darkness of the bar, my voice strained. “We’re actually closing in a few minutes!”
* * *