“Clean towels in there for me?” he asked, getting up and heading toward the bathroom.
Ryann nodded, still perplexed about why he was still there, and why he seemed to want to be.
While he was gone, she stripped the bed and replaced the sheets with clean ones. By the time Spencer re-emerged, everything was in order again.
“Look at that,” he said, indicating the now pristine bed. “Like it never happened.”
“Can I get you something?” Ryann asked. “Some tea, or …?”
“Tea? No.” Spencer sat on the edge of her bed, tossing aside the damp towel.
Ryann stood a few feet away, still not comprehending what he wanted. He extended a hand to her. She hesitated, then went toward him. He took her hand, pulled her closer, then loosened the tie of her robe and slid it down, over her shoulders. Moving up the bed, he pulled her along with him, and lay back.
Reaching over, he turned out the bedside light so the room was thrust into darkness again. She wanted to ask him what he was playing at, to tell him that they had already had their fun, but that it was time for him to go home.
But she said none of that because his hands were warm against her skin; and not insistent the way they had been when they were fucking. Instead they were coaxing, and tender.
“I’m tired,” Spencer said in the dark. “So, so tired. And I feel like … I feel like maybe you are, too.”
His words, for reasons she couldn’t even begin to explain, made Ryann want to burst into tears, something she couldn’t recall having done in, well, in years. She was not a ‘soft’ woman. Tears were not her thing.
Spencer sighed, a deep, long sigh that made his body heave. Ryann felt his hand on her head, gently pressing it down toward his chest, so that she was lying partly on him. She draped a leg over his, and felt his hand on her hip.
“Yes,” she allowed herself to say.
“Then let’s rest,” he said.
~2~
No one loved coffee more than she did. No one.
But this morning, it tasted like warmed-over piss. With a splash of cream. And Ryann had watched enough movies, and talked to enough hopeful-of-being-pregnant women to know that being turned-off coffee was one of the first signs.
She never had her first cup until she was in the office. Her routine was one you could set a clock by—she left home at six-fifteen, arrived at the office by six forty, checked for urgent email for twenty minutes then walked over to the Starbucks on L Street. Standing in line, she read the news on her smartphone, and mentally mapped out her day.
After receiving her triple espresso with cream, she would walk back to her office, sipping it and watching the traffic streaming into the city, cars full of slackers who thought it was sufficient to arrive at work at eight a.m. like that was doing something. During her stroll-n-sip, she would savor the bitter taste of the coffee beans and occasionally even moan in pleasure.
One time a man standing at the cross-walk had looked over at her suggestively, like the sound of her enjoying her morning java was some kind of come-on. Ryann had cut him dead with her eyes and kept on stepping. If she needed dick, she knew how to get dick. Nigga please.
But this morning there would be no moaning in pleasure, because the coffee tasted like crap. And not like the kind of crap where maybe the baristas had messed up the proportion of water in the brewing process either. Instead, it tasted like copper, reminiscent of when you’re a kid and think it’s a good idea to stick a penny in your mouth for some reason. It was so bad, Ryann had to resist the urge to spit.
It was only now she was back at the office and standing in front of the building, considering tossing the cup with the remaining coffee into a nearby trash receptacle that it dawned on her.
Spencer. And the night of her birthday.
Ryann remembered thinking how remote the possibility was. Because she wanted to be pregnant, and had only that evening decided she would play Semen Roulette, she convinced herself that it was beyond the realm of the believable that one of Spencer’s little guys would swim upstream, find a home, and post up in one of her eggs. She had convinced herself of that so thoroughly in fact that the next morning, when she and Spencer woke up, she had—feeling his morning wood—straddled him for a quick reprise of the night before. And that time, like the last, he didn’t object to using no barrier methods at all.
But here she was, standing with a coffee cup in her hand, experiencing one of the most common symptoms of early pregnancy. She hadn’t even yet missed a period. It wasn’t due, she was pretty sure, for another week. Whipping out her cellphone, she double-checked her calendar and then dialed Ivy’s number. Ivy wasn’t only her best friend, she was the one woman Ryann knew who was least likely to judge her if she confessed precisely how it was that she came to be maybe-pregnant.
“Ryann, let me call you back,” Ivy said right away in lieu of a ‘hello’. “I’m trying to get this child ready for school and he is just trying my nerves this morning.”
“Oh … well make sure. It’s important!” Ryann hissed, ending the call.
Among her many pet peeves, high on the list was when people answered your call just to say they didn’t have time to talk to you.
Searching her mind, she tried to think of just one other person she could trust with this information. Just one. But there was no one. Women tended not to warm to her; that was just a sad and irrefutable fact. So, she didn’t have any other girlfriends she could call. Having suffered most of her life at the hands of mean-girls, one of Ryann’s driving ambitions in life had been to become fierce enough to be one of them.
And she had been. Not mean exactly, but she was flippant, and often uncaring about the concerns of other women. Once her goal of fierceness had been achieved, she wasn’t always sympathetic to those chicks who looked worried when their men paid her too much attention. And hell, sometimes she paid them attention back. Never had she actually crossed the line into taking someone’s man—at least not intentionally—but she had sometimes been careless about the Rules of Sisterhood.
For that reason, Ivy Livingstone was it—her one and only person to call.
Of course, she could call her mother, but that never ended well. So instead, Ryann walked the single block over to CVS and wandered the aisles, picking up assorted unnecessary products, like lipstick, hair-dye, chewing gum and a jar of Planter’s Lightly Salted Nuts. And then finally, she grabbed a pregnancy test, shoving it to the bottom of her red shopping basket and ambling up to the cashier.
The girl looked up at her and asked by rote about her ExtraCare card. Ryann sighed and shook her head. She had one, but didn’t feel like digging around in her wallet to find it. All she needed was to get the hell out of there and put an end to the suspense. If this little girl didn’t hurry the hell up …
Once all her purchases were in the red-and-white plastic bag, Ryann slipped out of the store and hurried back down the block. Her heels clicked against the sidewalk and she dodged other people heading for their offices. Downtown DC was never as crowded as say, Manhattan, but today it seemed as though people were deliberately stepping into her path, conspiring to keep her away from her office, and its private executive bathroom.
When finally, she was in front of her building, she spotted him and her mouth almost fell open in shock at the cruel coincidence.
Spencer. He was shoving at the revolving door and entering her building. What the …?
And as bad luck would have it, as the door made its quarter rotation, he spotted her. His face brightened and before Ryann could devise an escape plan, he had followed the door in a full revolution, stepping back out onto the sidewalk.
“Hey,” he said. “Just the woman I was coming to see.”
“Me?” Ryann said.
The CVS bag hung at her side, limp in her hand. She shifted her pocketbook on her shoulder, hoping she didn’t look as guilty as she felt.
“Yeah. I made an appointment for this morning.”
How the hell h
ad she overlooked that? Did she have an appointment with Spencer? That fucking Brittainy. Her ass was fired. How many times had Ryann told her she needed to clear people before they were put on her calendar?
“Why would you make an appointment?” Ryann asked, feeling the awkwardness of her smile.
“Because you’re avoiding me on personal time, so I figured making some business time was the way to go.”
Spencer was wearing that flashy watch of his. It glinted in the morning sunlight and Ryann yearned to yank it off. If she had her way with him, she would overhaul the man’s entire wardrobe. And what the hell was that on his other wrist? A chaparrita? Hadn’t men stopped wearing bracelets in the seventies?
“Spencer, I don’t know what business we could possibly have that would merit an early morning meeting,” Ryann said.
People had begun to arrive for work, and were skirting around her and Spencer to access the building.
“I thought we might get together again,” Spencer said. He held her wrist—the wrist of the hand that held the CVS bag—and gently pulled her out of the stream of people.
Ryann sighed. “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “We had a good time and I like you …”
Spencer grinned. He knew what was coming and was letting her know that he would have none of it.
He was sexy as hell, there was no denying that. With that caramel skin and hard, rugged, almost thuggish good looks. Ryann had been a sucker for the thugs when she was young and dumb. And even when she got older, her Thug Addiction was something she had to remind herself to hold at bay, because every woman knew that one’s upward mobility could be compromised by getting all wrapped up with the wrong kind of man.
“You ain’t blowin’ me off that easy,” he said shaking his head. “C’mon let’s go inside and talk it over in the privacy of your office.”
With that one word—privacy, Ryann imagined herself bent over her desk in a very compromising position, with Spencer behind her.
“No, I don’t have the ti…” she said, shaking the image loose, and at the same time trying to wrench her hand free. And she wrenched a little too hard evidently, or he simultaneously released her, because her arm flung a little outward and the CVS bag fell, clattering to, and skittering across the pavement a few feet away from them both.
Before she could object, Spencer went to retrieve it. Ryann froze as he picked it up. Nothing, except a dark plum lipstick she didn’t want anyway fell out. Spencer picked it up.
“Your peanuts are safe,” he said.
The jar was miraculously unbroken. Dropping the lipstick inside, he handed it to her.
“Thank you,” Ryann said, trying not to meet his gaze. When she reached for the bag, he held her wrist again and his eyes serious now, stared at her.
“I think we need to keep our meeting, Ryann,” he said. All mirth was gone from his voice as well. It was the first time she remembered him using her name in this way. For emphasis. “Don’t you?”
Ryann’s office was far more than she could comfortably afford.
In a prestigious building on K Street, it boasted large windows and an expansive modernized waiting room, with tasteful, plush carpeting and stylishly sleek furniture that came included with the exorbitant rent. Her assistant, Brittainy sat at a reception desk that acted as a barrier to the offices just beyond the waiting area. There were only two. One was Ryann’s personal office and the second, the larger of the two, had been transformed into a makeshift mini-conference room where Ryann held meetings with people she didn’t want to admit to her private space.
It was there that she took Spencer now. The office was still quiet, because Brittainy wasn’t due for another half hour. All the more reason that it boggled the mind that the girl would have put Spencer on the book for a meeting this early.
“I’ll be just a …” Ryann flipped the switch on in the conference room and indicated that Spencer should sit, then went to dispose of her purse and the CVS bag in her office.
While there, she also took a moment to collect herself, smoothing her skirt and hair and taking a deep breath.
The ride up in the elevator with Spencer had been tense and quiet. He didn’t mention having seen the pregnancy test, and she didn’t ask. But something in his tone when he insisted they still meet told her that he had most likely spotted it. But Spencer was experienced enough to know that she was also. And if he had seen the test, there was no reason for him to assume that it had anything to do with the night they spent together. Well, no reason other than the fact that they had dispensed with condoms the last two times, Ryann thought wryly.
Taking one last breath, she turned on her heel to head back into the conference room. She hated walking into a meeting without having the upper hand, so she decided to promptly reclaim it.
“I had no idea this meeting was added to my schedule,” she said huffily, taking the seat furthest from his at the table. “So I don’t have much time. There’s a grant proposal that I have to work on, and you know how involved those can get.”
Spencer looked at her. He was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, his gaze watchful, assessing.
Ryann cleared her throat. “But since you’re already here,” she said. “What was it you were hoping to talk about?”
Dammit, she’d left her coffee cup in her office. It would have been nice to have something to casually sip on so she could seem much more … unbothered.
“Are you pregnant?”
On second thought, if she had a mouthful of coffee, she would have spat it across the table. She didn’t expect, even if he had his suspicions, that Spencer would have been so direct.
Lifting her eyes to meet his, Ryann swallowed. His gaze was fixed and steely. Gone was the amusement and warmth that he had first greeted her with downstairs.
“I … I don’t know,” Ryann said. Her voice was hoarse.
“But you think you might be.”
She nodded. “Might.”
“You think it might be mine?”
“Do you think it might be?” she returned.
Spencer leaned forward, making a sound of impatience. “This is what you wan’ do?” he asked.
Ryann blinked, surprised at the abrupt shift of his tone, and his slip into colloquial language.
“If the night we spent together means you might have a kid, and that kid might be mine, I ain’ interested in the intermediate bullshit. Where I gotta pry that information outta you, or go to court for a blood test and all that mess.”
“Court?” It was Ryann’s turn to lean forward. “Are you out of your mind? All this because I might be pregnant. And it might be yours. Neither of which we even know right now? Spencer …”
“Spencer, what?” he snapped. “This is the kind of shit that makes men distrust women, y’know what I mean? This, right here. The games, the lies …” He shook his head in disgust. “I never woulda thought that you, of all people …”
Ryann blanched. “Of all people?”
“You always seemed like the kind of woman who had her act together, Ryann. I can’t lie, the package you come in doesn’t hurt either. But I been checkin’ for you because you seemed to be about some-damn-thing.”
“Slow the hell down,” Ryann said holding up a hand. “Because I might be pregnant somehow that means I don’t have my act together? What if this is something I wanted? Something I …”
Stopping abruptly, Ryann realized that she had been one second away from admitting that her maybe-pregnancy wasn’t entirely an accident.
“Then let’s talk about that. If you’re pregnant, and it’s something you want, then we should talk about it, and where we would go from here.”
“Spencer …” Ryann closed her eyes, shaking her head. “You sound real sure this involves you. And I don’t think I ever said it did. Hell, I don’t even know if there’s an ‘it’ for you to be involved in.”
“Then take the test. And we’ll know if there’s an ‘it’ for me to be involved in.”
&nb
sp; “Again, even if there is an ‘it’ why are you so sure it has anything to do with you?” she demanded.
“Because I choose to believe that around the time I was with you three weeks ago, there wasn’t anyone else. I choose to believe that even if there was someone else, you’re not the type of woman who would be as careless as we were, with more than one man. Am I wrong, Ryann? In choosing to believe that?”
He may as well have asked her whether she was a ‘ho. ‘Are you a ‘ho, Ryann?’
She wasn’t.
What she was, was a woman who took a lover when she wanted one. Who followed her libido more often than most, and felt not an ounce of guilt or shame about that, regardless of how people perceived her. She was a woman who generally took meticulous care of her sexual health, and did not have unprotected casual sex with men she had no intention of seeing again. Casual, yes. Unprotected casual, no.
But she was also a woman who had done just that on the night of her birthday, with Spencer.
Sighing, she rested her elbows on the table between them.
“No. You’re not wrong,” she said finally.
Nodding, Spencer stood.
“Then take the test,” he said, his eyes locked with hers. “Take the test. And then whatever the result, call me, and we’ll talk about where we go from here.”
“Where we go from …”
“Ryann. Just …” He sounded exasperated now. “Call me.”
~3~
“So, did you take the test?”
“Hell nah, I didn’t take it yet. He got all … mannish on me and intimidated me out of wanting to know. Got all this bass in his voice, like he was talking to a little kid.”
On the other end of the line Ivy laughed. “He handled you, huh?”
Ryann scoffed. “Tried to.”
“Sounds like he did.”
“What he did was try to shame me. Talkin’ ‘bout, if I was the woman he thought I was, I wouldn’t be in this situation.”
The Lover Page 2