by R. R. Banks
Rue
Chapter Twenty
Richard
“Is Dr. Finnegan in?”
Sarah, a particularly bubbly receptionist who I sometimes worried had lied about her age just so she could work with the doctor I saw her ogling every opportunity she had, glanced at her computer screen and then back at me. She nodded enthusiastically.
“She is.”
“Would I be able to go in and talk to her for a few minutes?” I asked.
I felt like I was talking to a small child, but I figured that was a good thing. I might as well get accustomed to it.
“Sure,” she said. “The other doctors are out to lunch, but she should be in her office.”
“Thank you.”
I walked through the doors to the honeycomb of offices doing my best not to shake my head.
Why didn’t she lead in with that?
Dr. Finnegan’s office door was partially open when I approached, and I rapped on it before pressing it open. Flora’s doctor sat behind a massive scrolled wood desk that swallowed her small frame, her hand holding her phone close to her mouth as she made notes into it. She glanced up and waved me in. I stepped in gently as she finished her recording, not wanting to blot out any of her words with my footsteps. She set her phone to her desk and gestured at me to sit.
“Hi, Richard,” she said pleasantly. “What brings you here?”
“Well, Happy Valentine’s Day, to start,” I said.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she replied, somewhat cautiously as if unsure of my motivations.
“Flora and I have a little bit of a celebration that we wanted to share with you.”
She looked around me.
“Where is Flora?” she asked.
“Oh, she couldn’t be here. But she sends her best.”
It was a total lie. She had specifically said that she didn’t want to go with me as I delivered the news to our friends and family that we were expecting a baby. She said it was distasteful commandeering a holiday that was supposed to be about lovers and making it about the contract baby, but I refused to listen to her. This was something that I had been bursting to tell people for weeks and I had gotten it into my mind that this was when I was going to do it. It wasn’t as though Flora and I had ever shared a special Valentine’s Day. She refused to eat chocolate, she said that roses were woefully cliched, and after three years in a row of me trying to plan special experiences for us and her rejecting them, I had given up.
“Alright,” the doctor said, the word drawn out with expectation.
I drew in a breath, preparing myself for the first reveal after my parents. That had gone spectacularly horribly. I was still trying to get the image of my mother clutching her heart and apparently getting the vapors out of my mind. I was dearly hoping that this reveal would go better.
I took the red paper heart from behind my back and handed it to her. She looked at it for a moment before it seemed to occur to her that she was looking at a sonogram image, the one taken just the day before.
“You’re having a baby!” Dr. Finnigan said.
“We are!” I replied.
She came around the side of the desk and gathered me into a hug.
“That’s wonderful! How is Flora feeling?”
I took a step back, looking at her quizzically.
“Flora?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Has she gotten over her morning sickness?”
Shit.
A sick feeling was forming in my stomach, but I knew that it wasn’t morning sickness.
“Flora isn’t pregnant,” I said. “We have a surrogate.”
“Oh,” the doctor said, looking confused. “But why? Flora is so young and healthy. Why would you need a surrogate?”
****
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Flora looked at me from her stair stepper, seemingly unfazed by my storming into the home gym. She continued her workout and I stalked toward her, reaching around to slam my fist onto the controls of the machine and turn it off.
“Get those fucking things out of your ears and listen to me.”
She glared at me as she pulled her earbuds out and got down from the machine, picking up a towel to dab at the slight sheen of sweat on her chest. This was the most intensely that she ever exercised, and I realized in that moment just how much it sickened me.
“What’s wrong with you today?” she asked as she swept past me.
I reached out and grabbed her arm, whirling her around to face me. She gave a disgusted gasp and yanked her arm away from me.
“I just went to see Dr. Finnigan,” I said through gritted teeth.
“I wasn’t aware that you were in the market for a gynecologist.”
“Apparently you aren’t, either.”
“What are you going on about?”
“I went to see her to give her the news of our baby. I thought that she would be thrilled that our surrogate choice conceived on the first try. It turns out that she was shocked that we have a surrogate at all. How could you lie to me like that? How could you tell me that you couldn’t get pregnant?”
Flora stared at me, a look in her eyes that said that she knew she had been caught and that this was the one time in her life when she couldn’t talk her way out of it.
“I thought that it would make you shut up about wanting a baby.”
The answer hit me even harder than I anticipated it would.
“What?”
“You wouldn’t stop talking about having a baby. It’s all you cared about. You never even proposed to me. We’re supposed to be getting married, but we aren’t even engaged, and all you would ever talk about is how much you want a child.”
“You talked about it, too.”
“Because I felt like I had to. It was the only way that you would interact with me. I hoped that if I told you that I couldn’t get pregnant that you would stop. I hoped that you would think about me and what I might be going through, and that you would get over the baby thing. That way we could actually move on with our lives. Do you know how humiliating it is for me that we’re not married?”
“Don’t try to turn this around on me,” I said, a warning note in my voice. “Don’t you dare. You lied to me. You should have just been honest with me. How could you let me go through all of this? Why did you even agree to go along with the contract? Just to save face?”
“I can’t do this, Richard.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t do this. I can’t stay here. I can’t be a mother.”
“You’re telling me this now? Rue is pregnant! She’s in her second trimester. We’ve signed contracts, written checks. This isn’t just an idea. There’s a real baby now.”
“I know that. That’s why I can’t do it. I thought that I might be able to change my mind. I thought that maybe as we went along I’d see what you saw and start feeling what you feel. I thought for sure that when I saw the ultrasound I would connect with the baby and be excited, but that’s not what happened. When we were at the doctors’ yesterday and I saw the ultrasound---” she shook her head as if just the thought of it was horrifying. “It terrified me. I wanted to just get the hell out of there and never look back.”
“What are you saying?”
I knew exactly what she was saying, but she needed to say it. For once, she needed to be accountable.
“I want out. I don’t want this.”
Without saying another word, I turned and walked away.
Chapter Twenty-One
Rue
I barely had time to process the front door crashing open before I saw Richard stalking down the hallway toward me. His eyes burned into me, an intensity in them that left me breathless before he even touched me. I started to say his name, but before I could, his mouth was on mine. His arms wrapped around my waist and he scooped me off of my feet, kissing me with a possessiveness that seemed to reach down into my soul and touch something that had never been discovered. I clun
g to him, not caring what brought him here, not caring about anything. I couldn’t deny myself any longer.
Richard held me to him and sank to his knees, tipping me back so that I lay across the kitchen floor. We tore at each other and for a moment I wondered if I was dreaming again. This was dizzying, overpowering, and I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was real. In an instant, though, Richard had tugged my pants away and plunged his fingers inside of me. I cried out, knowing that this was utterly, undeniably real. As his fingers explored my core, coaxing my arousal upward, I reached down and pulled off my shirt, exposing my breasts to him, not wanting anything between us.
He reciprocated, and I could finally see his body. I ran my hands down his chiseled muscles and he leaned down over me again, catching my mouth again. He tore his mouth away from mine and reached down to grab his pants. I saw him fish in his pocket and come up with a condom. He tore it open and rolled it down his cock in record speed, and suddenly he was inside of me. My body was only just ready for him and I screamed out at the intensity of the sensation of him filling me. Richard didn’t slow down. It was as though all of the need, all of the tension that had built up between us had reached such a fevered pitch that it could no longer be controlled and all we could do was let it burn.
I gave myself over to the power of his thrusts, luxuriating in the feeling of our bodies together. He dropped his head down and caught one of my nipples in his mouth, sucking it in and encircling it with his tongue. I gasped at the feeling and arched up into him. Richard tucked his head into the curve of my neck and shoulder and continued to stroke deeply, his grunts shivering across my skin and his sweat mingling with mine. Suddenly his sounds grew desperate and he thrust into me hard one more time, roaring as simultaneous orgasms slammed over us. My body clenched down on him, drawing him deeper and milking him, seeking as much of him as I could bring into myself.
****
Richard
I felt the plane touch down, jostling me out of my sleep. In the first few seconds that I was awake I wondered if I had imagined it all. Had I just made it up? Was I going to look down at my phone and see a message from Flora complaining that I hadn’t done something at the house before leaving? Had I dreamed of Rue, imagined what it would feel like being pressed deep inside her on the kitchen floor?
As the plane glided to a stop, though, I knew that I hadn’t imagined it. It had been real, every moment of it, and I couldn’t help the smile that spread over my lips thinking about it. Rue’s body had been sweet and compliant, ready to accept me, wanting me as much as I wanted her. I hated that I had only gotten to spend such a short time with her before leaving. We had been sitting on the same floor, not trying to hide our nakedness from one another, eating cold leftovers, when my phone rang, and the sound of Ellery’s voice had brought me back to bitter reality. I had to go to the office for a presentation and gather up the papers I would bring on my trip with me, then pack and get to the airport in time for my flight. Leaving Rue had been the most difficult thing that I had ever done, but I had to do it. There were things that I needed to do, and I couldn’t just turn my back on them because I wanted to do nothing but explore every inch of her body in every room of her house.
Could I?
Five hours later I was pulling back into Rue’s yard. Lights were burning in the windows, so I knew that she was still awake. I let myself in and made my way to the living room where I found her curled up on the couch beneath a blanket, her face calm and peaceful under the flickering light of the TV. I touched a kiss to her lips and her eyes fluttered open.
“Richard,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I didn’t want to be away from you,” I said. “Not yet.”
She opened her arms to me and I folded into them, taking my place on the couch so that she sprawled across my chest. I ran my fingers down her back and tried to figure out what she was watching.
“What are they making?” I asked.
“Pies,” she said dreamily.
“They don’t look like pies.”
“They’re full of meat.”
Everything felt calm, contented, like this was the way that it was always supposed to be. She knew now that Flora was gone, though I hadn’t told her the full story of what happened. I didn’t want her to feel betrayed or taken advantage of. For now, all that she needed to know was that Flora was not a part of my life any longer. The peaceful quiet was suddenly broken by a whooping sound in the distance followed by what sounded like a low explosion.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Probably just some of the guys doing target practice.”
“At night? That doesn’t seem wise.”
“They want to make sure that they can still hunt even if they went blind.”
She said it in complete seriousness, as though it made all the sense in the world.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why did you come back here?”
She pressed on my chest to lift up so that she could look at me.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Why did you come back here? Why did you leave your apartment in the city to come back here?”
“It’s my home. It was going to be foreclosed on. I needed to save it. That’s why I agreed to be a surrogate.”
“It was?” I asked, stunned.
“Yes,” she said. “I needed the money.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“No one ever asked.”
“Yes, they did. That was literally one of the first things that Ellery asked you during your initial interview. You just said that you had reasons for needing the money. Then you seemed to have a panic attack when he walked out of the room. Maybe that should have tipped me off that you weren’t telling the total truth.”
Her eyes narrowed at me.
“How did you know that?”
Heat burned across my cheeks.
“I was watching you through a hidden camera,” I admitted.
“You were what? ”
“I wanted to make sure that I was getting the full picture of each prospective applicant.”
“So, you spied on us? You let us think that we were alone and then you watched us?”
She sounded horrified, and I knew that she was justified.
“Look,” I said, trying to deflect the situation. “That’s not the point. I wish I had known that this was your motivation all along. I could have just bought it for you.”
“I didn’t want you to.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s my responsibility, not yours. Money doesn’t always just automatically fix everything. My family earned every day in this house, and I wanted to earn it, too. If you had just paid for it, it wouldn’t have had any meaning.”
I tried to understand, but I couldn’t, so I pushed the thought aside.
“Now that you’ve paid for it, though, what are you going to do with it?”
She tilted her head at me.
“Live in it,” she said.
“Always?” I asked.
“That was kind of my plan for the foreseeable future.”
“Look, you don’t have to do that. And you don’t have to drive so far just to come to the medical center. Let me get an apartment for you in the city. You can live there, be close to everything, and it will make it much easier for all of your appointments especially when the baby gets closer to coming.”
“I don’t need you to get me an apartment,” she said.
“But it will be so much better than this.”
I knew as soon as I said it that I shouldn’t have. I was right back in the position that I had been in on Thanksgiving and she was looking at me with the same disappointment and pain in her eyes.
“Don’t you have a plane to catch?” she asked, standing up from the couch and disappearing into the bathroom.
I heard water rushing into the tub and I knew that I had been dismissed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rue
Dear Baby,
You’re a girl. A girl. I can’t stop saying it enough. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve thought of you for so long as just “the baby”, but now I know that you are a little girl. You are going to be so incredibly beautiful. I hope your hair is like your daddy’s. More than anything, though, I hope that you are strong. I hope that there is a little bit of Grammyma in you somewhere. Even if you never know it, she will be there to carry you through, to help you know that you can do anything. Don’t be afraid. Don’t ever be afraid. Even when something scares you, face it down and refuse to be afraid. One day, you will know the difference. At least I hope that you do.
I wish that your daddy had been able to be with me today when I found out. He was supposed to be. His trip was supposed to end last week, but it didn’t. Something delayed him, and he doesn’t know when he’ll get back. I’m sure that I could have rescheduled the ultrasound so that he could be there, but frankly I didn’t want to. He’s so used to getting his way all the time and expecting the world to just mold to him and change anything to work around him. I’m not going to do that. Unfortunately, I worry that you are going to be waiting for your daddy a lot in your life. He would never do anything to hurt you, and I bet he wouldn’t even understand why you were upset, but that’s just the way that his mind works. There will be many times when you have to wait, and I wasn’t going to let that start now.
This was for us.
I can feel you moving. It’s the most incredible feeling. I thought that it would be hard and that I would know for sure what was happening, but it’s more like bubbles. I asked Kathryn about it, thinking that it might be something wrong or that I could do something about, and she just smiled and told me that it was you making yourself known. Now all I want to do is press my hands to my belly and feel you. Soon you’ll be able to hear my voice. Try to remember it, OK? Tuck it away in your heart somewhere so that it’s always there.
Love,