“God, no,” she said. “Why, do you want me to?”
“No, no, never,” he said. He looked down at his hand, realized he was tapping the table, and laid it in his lap. He had a small plaster on his cheek (from some football injury) which made him look even more boyish than he usually did. She scratched his beard. “I—damn, Jocelyn, I really don’t know what to say.”
“You want to leave me,” Jocelyn said. “If that’s it, just tell me now. I’d rather know.” But the truth was she would rather sink into the earth and never have to hear those words. If he left her now, not only would she hate him, but she would hate herself for starting to fall for him. She would question her judgment, she would question everything. He bit his lip, and then released it. A tiny fleck of blood marked the place she had kissed so often. “Well?” she said, unable to keep the impatience out of her voice.
“I’m not leaving you,” he said quietly. “Of course, I’m not.”
She heaved a sigh. “Then . . .”
“What are we going to do?”
“Yeah.”
“We in two months,” he said. “I’ll be going East—”
“I’m still so proud of you for that,” she said. She didn’t want him to think that just because she was pregnant, she wasn’t proud of him for the momentum his football career was gaining. He was going to New York after graduation to play for some team there (Jocelyn didn’t know much about the sport). They had celebrated with a glass of wine, and kissing, and then more. That could’ve been the night they conceived the child, in fact.
“Come with me,” he said, lurching to his feet. “I know it’s crazy, but there will be lots for you to do in New York. Isn’t one of the publishers you applied to in New York?”
“Well, yeah . . .” She trailed off. One of the publishers was in New York, one of the jobs she had applied for, but hardly thought they were lucky enough for that to happen. “But what if I don’t get it?”
“You will,” Zack said. He looked hard into her eyes. “You will, Jocelyn, because you have to.”
“I never planned for this,” she sighed, rubbing her eyes with her thumbs. “I thought, if I ever had kids, it would be years from now, when I’d graduated college, when all of this was behind me, when I was settled.”
She hadn’t heard him rise from the couch. She only knew when he gently pulled her hands away from her face. He knelt before her, and then kissed tears she hadn’t known she’d shed from her cheeks. “People rarely plan it,” Zack said. “But it has happened. We can’t spend our lives looking back. We can only look at where we are now and decide what we want to do.”
“Are you sure about this?” Jocelyn asked. “I mean, really sure?”
“I am,” he said, with such certainty that Jocelyn fell exhausted into his arms.
They made love that night like they never had before. Usually, their love-making was more akin to rutting. It was hungry, and crazy, biting and scratching and hard pounding. Tonight, they made love softly, their eyes locked together. Afterward, she fell asleep in his arms, as she had dozens of times before. But this was not like those times.
Now, she was sleep in the arms of the father of her child.
*****
Jocelyn wouldn’t let the pregnancy affect final’s week. She made herself go to the library every night, like she would have if she’d not been pregnant, if her life hadn’t been flipped on its ass. It was the night before her first test – when she and Zack were in bed together – when she received the email from the publisher in New York. Her phone buzzed, and she reached across to the bedside table and opened her email. When she saw who it was from, she almost felt like not opening it. Suddenly it was three years ago, and she was waiting for the college letters to come through the door.
She stared at her phone until Zack leaned over and plucked it from her hand. “Hey,” she said, but weakly. She was secretly glad for him to take control.
He pressed the screen a couple of times, and then read the email. She thought he might try that stupid trick guys sometimes did. Oh, you didn’t get in. Oh, ha, ha, just joking! You did really! But he didn’t. Maybe he’d been planning to, but his face gave him away. The smile started small, as all of Zack’s smiles started, and then it twitched upward, the corners of his lips lifting into a wide grin. “Yes, yes, yes!” he exclaimed, punching the air with the phone. “Hell yes!”
Jocelyn jumped onto her knees and yanked the phone away from him. She read the email, and a sibling of Zack’s smile twisted her lips. They would be happy for her to join the company as a junior editor, it read, as long as she got the required grades in the upcoming finals. She gulped at that, but truly there was no reason to. She had studied like crazy for three years. Her scores were solid. And, she thought (hoped) they would stay solid for the next week.
“Of course they will,” Zack said, when she voiced her concerns.
He wriggled underneath the bed and blew on her skin, kissed her belly, tickled her feet. She squealed and wriggled away from him. “Get off me, you animal!” she giggled. “Get away from me!”
He rolled crawled from under the covers and brought her close to him. “I couldn’t be happier,” he said.
“Really?” She looked up into his eyes, to try and see if he was truly happy, if he truly meant it. She didn’t want Zack to be one of those men who regret their lives, who sit up late at night sipping whiskey and wishing that they were somewhere else, somebody else. She didn’t want him to look back on this moment in twenty years as the defining failure of his life. If that was how he felt – as she sometimes feared – then she really would prefer that he ended it, despite how painful that would be.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly, moving his fingers over her face. “I do. I get to play football professionally. You get to work the job you wanted. Of course I’m happy!”
“If I get the grades,” Jocelyn muttered.
“You will. Of course you will. I remember the woman in English class, who schooled us all on Hemingway. I remember the jealous faces of the other students and the stunned expression on the professor’s face.”
“You’re more eloquent than a regular quarterback lately,” Jocelyn teased. “What’s happened?”
He ignored the teasing. “You happened,” he said seriously. “There’s no mystery. I think those study session really helped me.”
They went to sleep soon after that. Jocelyn had a test and Zack was going to the gym. Jocelyn was crazy-nervous for the test, as she always was, no matter how much she had studied. There was something imposing about the plain, long room with its rows of tables and chairs and the students filing in like men and women going to trial. The pen shook in her hand, as it always did, but when she started to write, when she started to get into it, Bright Jocelyn took over, the Jocelyn who had studied hard for every test since she could remember.
The pen moved across the paper, and her words turned into thoughts, and the thoughts turned into paragraphs, and when the test was over and she looked over what she had done, she thought: Pretty good.
*****
They rented a two-bedroom apartment in the city at first, but soon they would have enough money to put a deposit on a house. Jocelyn’s job paid quite well for a junior position, and Zack was fast becoming the brightest young star in the football scene. Jocelyn didn’t know a great deal about the sport, but sometimes when she mentioned his name to colleagues, they asked if he was that Zack Underwood. Jocelyn replied, laughing, that yes, he was that Zack Underwood. She had been partly afraid that the publisher wouldn’t hire her because she was pregnant, but it turned out that that had been a silly fear after all.
Summer turned to autumn, and the bump grew larger. She was seven months into the pregnancy, and the bump was kicking, and she knew that the bump was a he (and yet she could barely believe it, could barely believe that soon there would be a child and no bump at all), when Zack came home from practice one day with a smile on his lips that was even larger than usual.
; He was normally smiling when he came home anyway. He loved his job, loved playing football all day, practicing the drills, and eventually (hopefully) making it into the Big Time. That was her first thought to account for the even wider smile: that he had been signed to some big team and was going to become the star he deserved to be. She was sitting on the couch, a book propped on the bump, laughing as her baby kicked the paperback up and down. When Zack came in, she placed the paperback on the floor and ushered him over.
He knelt beside her and placed his hands on her belly. His eyes seemed to shine with happiness. Whatever news I have, those eyes said, can wait. This is more important. The baby tired of the attention after a little while, however, and Zack lifted Jocelyn into a sitting position. Even as heavy as she had become, he was still able to lift her like she weighed nothing. His formidable muscles didn’t even tense when he moved her. It made her wonder if she was in fact as humungous as she felt.
He kissed her softly on the forehead, his lips leaving a warm impression on her skin, and reached into his pocket. When he brought it out, she blinked rapidly. She didn’t even realize she was doing it, but her subconscious was sure what she was seeing was a cruel hallucination. But when he opened the box, a diamond ring glittered from within. It was not the biggest diamond she had ever seen, it was not the most expensive, but that didn’t matter. The man she loved, the father of her child, was giving it to her.
“Jocelyn Jones,” she said, his smile cocky and boyish and endearing and full of love all at the same time. “Neither of us planned for this life.” He said it with the air of a student who’d learned a speech by heart. She felt a flutter in her heart. He’d written a damn speech for her. He was a football player, and he’d taken the time to write a speech for her. “We didn’t plan on getting pregnant, we didn’t plan on living with each other. We were just two kids, really, who liked to fuck. And now look at us. It’s a two-bedroom apartment, fine, but it’s just the start. There’s more coming. I know there is. One day we’ll have a house, a family, a life. And I want to make that real. I want to make it solid. Please, Jocelyn, marry me.”
He held her gaze. Jocelyn opened her mouth, but words stuck in her throat. She made to speak, but her voice was a rasp. She threw her hands up, as she had done in a café with a British woman that was now back in England, and with whom Jocelyn sometimes exchanged emails. She threw her hands up because words were not enough. She coughed, cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said, words finally forming. “Yes, of course I will!”
He took the ring from the case and slid it onto her finger. “How did you know . . .”
“Your ring size?” His smile grew as he slid the ring on. It fit perfectly. “I bought a ring-measuring tape online and measured your finger when you were asleep.”
“You creep!” she cried, slapping his playfully on the shoulder. “What an invasion of my privacy.”
He laughed his boyish laugh, and then wrapped his arms around her shoulders. They laughter threw warm air on the other. And then the baby started to kick again. She laid her hands on the bump, and Zack laid his hands upon hers, feeling their child through her. “He kicks so much it makes me think he’ll be the kicker—punter—thing in football.”
“The kicker-punter thing?” Zack laughed. “Babe, don’t try and talk sports.”
Jocelyn slapped him playfully again, and then he lifted her (heavy as he was, he lifted her) and carried her to the bedroom. The proposal and the pregnancy combined to make her crazy-horny. She lay on her back as her fiancé made love to her, and came more times in a row than she ever had before. Afterward, he spooned her, his cock already growing hard again against her bare ass cheeks.
*****
“Daddy on the TV!”Ryan giggled. “Mommy, Daddy on the TV!”
Jocelyn scooped up her son and plopped him down on her knee. She wrapped her arms around his tiny torso and bobbed him up and down. Zack really was on the TV. He was crouched behind the huddle (?) waiting for the football to be thrown to him, so he could throw it further up field. It was his third time on the field, and already he was becoming a sensation.
Jocelyn smiled as her husband hiked the ball downfield (all terms she only half-understood, but that didn’t matter; her husband’s success did). She found herself going over her own successes, as she sometimes did in quiet moments like this. She thought about the author she’d discovered who’d become a bestseller, and how she had made suggestions that the critics and the readers had loved. She thought about her promotion, and her increased salary. She thought about their four-bedroom house. And, most of all, she thought about Ryan’s sister, growing so fast in her belly.
“Mommy, Daddy on the TV!” Ryan laughed, pointing, bringing Jocelyn back into reality. “Do you’ll think he’ll do it, Mommy? Do you? Do you?”
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Jocelyn said, kissing the back of her son’s head.
The man to whom Zack had thrown the ball caught it and slammed it into the end zone (?). He threw Zack a melodramatic salute. This was the part where Zack saluted back, but he had promised his family he would do something else.
He turned to the camera and blew Jocelyn and Ryan a kiss, and then winked at the camera.
“He did it!” Ryan gasped, and then burst out in laughter.
“He did!” Jocelyn laughing too, her chest warm, her heart so full of love it could burst.
Taken by Her Dad's Boss
Samantha Bines had never been really close with her dad. It wasn’t that they didn’t get on – she supposed that they got on as well as any daughter and father – but they had never been close like some children and their parents. She went over this as they sat in the car, Dad at the wheel, driving them to Lake Diamond in some obscure wooded area in California for their one-yearly father and daughter trip. She was twenty-five now and had been doing this for five years, since her second year in college, and they still weren’t that close. But they were closer than they had been, and that was something, she supposed. Andrew Bines was a wealthy man. Samantha had known that ever since Mom left when she was too young to know what it meant, and Dad had randomly taken them on a two-week summer holiday tour around Europe. He worked for an advertising agency that catered to the some huge clients.
She watched the countryside flit by, fields of green and wide trees and beauty all around them in the July summer air. Her mind moved forward to her sixteenth birthday when she had first seen Jason Sykes. Her mind whirred. Jason Sykes was her dad’s boss, and he was hot. She’d known it was wrong to feel that way about him even back then when she was a naïve teenager, but it didn’t matter so long as she kept it to herself. He was hotter than a man twenty-five years older than her had any right to be. She’d had some dirty dreams about him.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Dad went on. “He asked if he could come, and I couldn’t exactly say no.”
“It’s fine, Dad,” Samantha said, absentmindedly tapping the glass, as though she could tap-tap-tap away her secret feelings for the man that would now be joining them at Lake Diamond.
Yes, she and Dad had never been close, but that didn’t seem to matter so much now that he’d dropped this bombshell on her; Jason Sykes was holidaying with them at Lake Diamond, for three days. She had never had an extended conversation with the man, and yet the thought of seeing him there thrilled her. She felt an aching in her chest. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears. She kept curling her toes, seemingly against her will.
“Are you sure?” Dad asked, as he turned a corner into the road that would lead to Lake Diamond. A sign read “Lake Diamond: It Glitters!” as they drove into the gravel-paved road. Dad had bought a house here a few years ago. It had impressed her then. Her dad was a millionaire. But Jason Sykes, his boss, was a billionaire, with a B.
“It’s a bit late to ask me that, Dad,” Samantha said, pointing to the sign. “We’ll be there any second.”
“I know,” Dad sighed. “I just couldn’t say no.”
“It’s fine,” she assu
red him. “Really, don’t worry about it.”
Dad nodded and continued to drive silently. Samantha did a bit of quick mental calculation. She was twenty-five now, which meant Jason Sykes was fifty. Fifty. It seemed a lifetime away. He was old enough to be her dad. She couldn’t have dirty thoughts about him anymore. She couldn’t let herself feel that way. She willed her heart to stop its drum beating, willed her feet to stop their immature curling, willed her body to stop its longing. She suppressed some of it, but beneath the surface, everything bubbled, threatening to explode over the top. He had been the first man she’d had a crush on, but it hadn’t seemed like a crush back then. It had seemed much more important, in that way only teenage emotions can.
She shook her head, trying to shake the thoughts away. Stop it, she told herself. Just stop it. He’s your dad’s boss, Samantha. This isn’t even close to appropriate. You do not feel that way about your dad’s boss. It’s just something you don’t do.
She could tell herself that as much as she wanted. She could tell herself over and over and over until it was like rote-learning in her mind. She could lie to herself and she could lie to her past self, lie to the teenage self that had written “I want Jason Sykes” on her notebook at school. But she couldn’t lie to the deep desire she felt in her chest. She couldn’t lie to the way her nipples tingled, aching for the touch of a real man.
The car slowed, and then stopped. “Are you okay?” Dad asked.
“I’m fine,” Samantha muttered.
They climbed from the car and looked out over Lake Diamond. The road disappeared behind them in thick forest, and all around the lake forest dominated, making it seem as though they were alone here, as though the rest of the world could not intrude—or did not exist. The lake itself dominated the clearing, and in the summer sunlight it glistened like – yes, the sign hadn’t lied – like diamonds. There were lodges at the far side of the lake, where couples came to spend their honeymoons or to simply get away. At this end of the lake there was the four-bedroom house that opened right onto the lake. That was where she, Dad, and Jason Sykes would be spending their long weekend.
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