Built for Pleasure

by Sarah J. Brooks

  “Mike, you better come here,” Teddy said and everyone got up from the couch, except Julia.

  “My water just broke,” Julia said as calm as could be. “I’m not feeling any contractions though. That’s a good thing, right?”

  “No,” I said without stopped to explain.

  I grabbed our emergency bag and gave some quick instructions to Kendra who was going to stay at the house with the boys. Going into labor without her water breaking would have been better than having her water break. Under this circumstance we had to deliver. We couldn’t just stop the contractions and continue with the pregnancy. If the amniotic fluid was all gone, then the baby needed to be delivered.

  “Mike, you’re scaring me,” Julia said as I helped her into the Uber that was waiting for us when we got downstairs. “What’s going on?”

  “I need to get you to the hospital and see if there is any fluid left in there. If not, we have to deliver.”

  “But I’m not having contractions.”

  “Then you’ll have to have a c-section. Or maybe we could induce you if both you and the baby are doing okay. It’s going to be alright though. Don’t worry, baby.”

  “Who is on call tonight?” She asked trying to hide her fear.

  “Bruce.”

  “Oh, that’s good. I don’t like that new guy you have.”

  “He’s just a little nerdy. He’s a very good doctor though,” I reassured her.

  We bypassed the Emergency Room and went straight up to the labor and delivery floor. I’d already sent a text to Bruce to let him know we were on the say and he was waiting with the team of nurses at the entrance when we got off the elevator.

  “No contractions and at least a partial rupture of the amniotic sac,” I told the crew.

  “Let’s see if we have anything to work with,” Bruce said as he and I grabbed the ultra sound machine and wheeled it into the room where Julia was getting hooked up to all the monitors.

  “Let’s take a quick look,” Bruce said calmly.

  I knew as soon as he put the scope up to her stomach that there was a problem and it wasn’t going to be a smooth delivery. The baby had no fluid around her and her heart beat was much slower than it should be.

  “Is that the chord?” I asked as he glided the scope near the baby’s head.

  “Yep,” Bruce said and lipped the monitor off. “Prep the OR,” he yelled out.

  “Surgery, what? Why do I have to have surgery? I can push. It’s okay. And did you say her? Are we having a girl?” Julia looked so excited for the news.

  “Yes, it’s a beautiful little girl but we need to get her out quickly. I need you to stay calm and we are going back to surgery. There is no time for an epidural and I know you really want to be awake but trust me, we need to move fast.”

  “Okay,” Julia said with a calmness I hadn’t expected. “You save our little girl.”

  She had tears in her eyes and kissed me as we pushed her out of her room and toward the operating room. The operating team was there and ready and we lifted the sheet that Julia was on and moved her to the operating table.

  The anesthesiologist was waiting and as soon as the IV was in her he started assessing so he could behind putting Julia to sleep. Everyone was rushing around the room and getting things ready to take care of the baby once she was born. They had all the crash cart supplies for the baby there and I desperately hoped that they wouldn’t need to use any of it.

  “I love you. I’ll see you soon,” I said to Julia as they put her mask on and started to put her to sleep.

  “I love you too,” she said through the mask.

  I was going to lose it. The tears were welling up and it took everything I could to hold back and not hurry Bruce along as he prepped for surgery. He was still scrubbing his hands in the other room as the nurses prepared Julia’s stomach for the procedure.

  Everything was moving really fast but it helped that I knew the process and knew what to expect. It was only a few minutes later that Bruce was cutting into Julia and pulling our sweet baby girl out.

  She was blue and had the cord wrapped around her next so tight that Bruce had to cut both ends as a nurse unwrapped it. The baby wasn’t breathing at all as they took her to the table and started working on her.

  “We good here?” I asked Bruce as he was working on Julia.

  “Yes, go ahead,” he motioned for me to go watch them working on my daughter.

  I’m not sure there is anything that makes a person feel more helpless than watching people trying to save your child’s life. My hands shook and I felt dizzy but there was no way I was leaving her side. Julia wouldn’t have wanted our sweet baby girl to have to fight all by herself.

  The doctor was giving chest compressions while a nurse put a mask over the baby’s face. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer that my sweet baby could fight hard enough to come back to us.

  “We got her,” I heard the doctor say and a moment later there was the sweet sound of a baby crying that echoed through the delivery room. “She’s breathing,” he said to all of us who had obviously already heard her crying.

  I was so relieved that I almost fell over. Luckily, a nurse brought me a stool and helped me to sit down. I sat there a little bit out of the way while the neonatal doctor finished assessing our newborn baby girl.

  “She looks really good, Mike. We will need to watch her over the next few days, but she is looking really good. Come over here and say hi.”

  The nurse walked with me just to make sure I wasn’t a fainter. But obviously I was alright now that I knew my daughter was going to be okay. I stood next to her and held onto her little fingers as tears rolled down my face.

  “You scared us, sweet pea, let’s not do that again,” I whispered and kissed her sweet little forehead. “Your mom is going to be so excited to meet you.”

  The doctor had to take her away shortly after that and I had to wait in the recovery area with Julia as she woke up from the anesthesia. She was scared and disoriented at first, but I just held her hand up to my lips and continued to kiss it and try and reassure her as she woke up enough for me to talk to her.

  “Is she okay?” Julia finally asked. “Where is she? I want to see her.”

  “She’s okay. She’s so beautiful, oh my gosh, you won’t even believe it,” I said softly and stroked Julia’s hair as she finally set her head back down on the pillow.

  “But she’s okay?” She asked again and started to cry. “I was so scared, Mike. I was so scared we were going to lose her.”

  “She okay, honey. They are going to keep an eye on her for a few days. You’ll have to be here for a few days too so I’m sure they will let you have her in the room with you when she gets cleared.”

  “I love you so much, Mike. You have made me the happiest women in the world.”

  “I love you too, Julia. I’m so happy we ran into each other that night at the club and that you wanted this dream of a life and allowed me to be part of it.”

  “This life wouldn’t be a dream without you,” she said as I held onto my beautiful wife.

  THE END

  Damaged Love

  Chapter 1

  Dash

  I gripped the wheel so hard my knuckles ached. My hands were dripping with perspiration, but I wasn’t about to ease up on my grasp. Our lives depended on my quick thinking. I wasn’t a race car driver, in fact, I wasn’t much of a driver at all. I’d always left that job up to someone else and had too many drivers in my lifetime, which bred an innate disinterest in the mundane task.

  I wasn’t into driving, or video games or anything else that took quick thinking and skill and that’s why it happened. I was a nerd, a scientist, and to some, a life saver. My cancer inhibitor XM, which was an X chromosome manipulator, had just been FDA approved and whispers of a Nobel Prize peppered the conversations around me.

  I knew there were competitors trying to beat me to a viable cure for cancer, but in my mind, it wasn’t a race against one another,
it was a race against the disease. My finding a possible cure, which had shown tremendous success in some cancers, wasn’t as well received as I’d hoped it’d be by some; namely my former childhood friend and now nemesis Mark Laviathon.

  He was my greatest competition in the research game, but we’d grown up just blocks from each other. Our parents played competitive Mahjong together and I thought he was down to earth, unlike most of our neighbors in the exclusive gated community. He and I built a tree fort club and fought bad guys, we dreamed of big breasted girls and being famous nerdy guys. Now we were at each other’s throats.

  His company had just created a drug that was one of the world’s best pain relievers, but he was having a hard time getting FDA approval because of the heavy narcotics in the drug. It was a better pain reliever than any drug on the market, however, there were spooky side effects which drew numerous complaints. People voiced their grievances after using the drug saying they had powerful, realistic hallucinations that were either intensely scary or eerily euphoric, making use of the drug unpredictable. Also, if it was manufactured correctly, the drug was very costly.

  There were suspicions Mark had taken this drug to the streets. He was rumored to be at the root of the Halo epidemic, which was thought to be a street derivative of his painkiller. Growing speculation supposed Mark was working with the Minneapolis drug cartel to manufacture Halo at half the cost of the legitimate pharmaceutical without waiting for final testing. The same rumors that indicted Mark also claimed there was a price on my head. My company, Rainseed was also working on an over-the-counter remedy that would help those addicted to Halo get off the drug.

  Halo tricked the brain into not feeling pain and often made the brain see and feel things that weren’t there. The danger in tricking the brain to completely obliterate any sensation of pain was it could cause people to act without any caution. Pain was the body’s own alert system, with that disabled, people could possibly injure themselves, or die because of not knowing about or not caring about the pain.

  The street version of the drug made you feel invincible. People were known to jump off buildings and cut off their own limbs when high on the drug, thinking they were impervious to consequences and believing the visions plaguing them were real.

  The strange hallucinations made people think they were able to talk to the dead, see heaven, and walk through fire. Halo, in its pharmaceutical version, was only administered under a doctor’s supervision. I’d known about the drug when we were working on our cancer blocker and decided to try and iron out the kinks with our own brand of pain reliever which didn’t have the scary side effects. What we found was a stabilizer that could dull pain, but not block it out entirely and our drug could be used to wean addicts off Halo. We were able to get FDA approval relatively quickly and it was sold over-the-counter. Many treatment centers were using it as an effective step-down drug for Halo users.

  Because of this, investigators believed there could have been a street vendetta against me and my company, propagated by the drug cartel. None of the rumors were substantiated, but we did travel with security and there had been more than one incident where the coincidences were questionable.

  Mark wanted me out of the game. Rainseed had been my passion since college and I gave everything to the company. Killing me would kill my work. It seemed like Mark was fixated on this equation. I could read his tells a block away. He wasn’t someone I cared to keep on the streets; he was dangerous, so I told investigators all I knew about him and the work he was doing.

  I was working against him, behind his back. He’d veered too far off course and a few years in prison, I hoped, would get his head back in the right place. Law enforcement and the FBI were close to nailing him on trafficking Halo the night everything went wrong, and my world disintegrated.

  My mind was a chaotic mess. Here I was saving lives and doing good for our fellow man, and yet as I looked in the rear-view mirror the black sedan was bearing down on my wife and me. This wasn’t about science. The car’s merciless pursuit at breakneck speed was about death, obliteration, and money. Kill me, and Mark becomes the hero. It was a win/win for him. Kill me, his only real competition, back away from Halo taking a behind the scenes stake in the enterprise, buy my company, and go to the bank. The only obstacle to that perfect plan was my life, which someone was trying, and very well I might add, to end.

  I looked over to Michelle, my gorgeous wife, just as the sun streaming in from the window shone through her hair. I thought myself the luckiest man in the world, being married to her. She was a woman I’d coveted in college. She was a popular, left-wing, liberal-minded activist who’d just published her first novel. I liked challenging women, people who were smart, strong, and unswayed by riches and fame. Michelle was that girl in every way. She’d just finished her second novel and was climbing the best seller’s list when the car chase stole everything.

  I could see the fear in her eyes, but she remained calm and steady as she quietly spoke with the 911 operator, “Yes, they are right behind us, two men, both are wearing face masks and one has a gun…”

  “Get down, Shelly!” I screamed as I saw a second car flank us on the right, the driver opening his window with his gun poised at Michelle’s head.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  This was it, I was going to have to just grit my teeth and test my skill. The driver had his gun aimed at us and as hard as Michelle tried to tuck herself away, still on the phone with the police, there was no way she’d avoid getting hit if he fired. He would end her life with mine. Miraculously, at that very moment, I saw a break in the traffic. To most, I was going to be the asshole that cut them off on Highway 169 and caused the accident that totaled their car, six cars in fact, but to me, it was the lifesaving chance we needed to survive.

  I pressed my foot to the floor and gunned it into the adjacent lane, the guy on the right couldn’t possibly follow me without crashing, but the dumb ass tried anyway and crashed into the cars around him. He wasn’t our problem anymore but we weren’t in the clear as the original car, the one I first noticed trailing me, had avoided the crash and was still a few cars back. As I weaved in and out of traffic, Michelle got confirmation from the authorities they were above us in a chopper and had two squad cars on the ground.

  For one moment, for one stupid moment, I let my heart beat again. I felt as if we were safe, like we were going to actually beat them. I was dreaming of a cold McClellan on the rocks and seared salmon with tarragon. I was going to make love to my wife all night long. We’d been wanting to try for a third child and I aimed to try till I passed out. I was daydreaming about keeping her naked for days, forbidding her to dress that gorgeous body as we went for round after round of exotic baby-making sex. We’d been into Kamasutra lately, and seriously, I was planning on bending over backward and seeding her from every direction.

  I only allowed myself one indulgent moment, one tiny hiccup relieving the stomach-churning fear and brain-battering stress the last twenty minutes of being pursued by a killer had wrecked on my body. I could hear the sirens, we were almost home free.

  Michelle let out a sigh, “Oh, thank god,” she told the kind 911 operator on the phone.

  Even though the car was still in hot pursuit behind me, all I had to do was get to safety and let the police do their work. Traffic was clogging up again and while we could hear our rescuers behind us, we weren’t free. I took a risk and floored it around a silver Honda Civic with a bumper sticker that said, ‘If you can read this, you’re too close.’ I thought that was ironic. I didn’t see the cement barricades tapering into our lane into the next and blocking off the road construction that was causing all the traffic. I wasn’t thinking traffic safety, I wasn’t seeing neon orange vests or yellow helmets, I was just thinking, get the fuck out of my way, they’ve got guns!

  I don’t remember much else from that night, just the sound of steal grinding and compacting in. I don’t want to think about Michelle that way, the way they said to help me unde
rstand that her death was most likely sudden and painless. I didn’t want to know how I escaped the car and the ensuing flames that engulfed the love of my life.

  There was nothing left… of her or of me. I woke up in a faraway hospital in the witness protection program, my name changed, my identity obliterated. I’d died in the crash along with my wife it was announced to save my life. I was supposed to stay where they couldn’t find me, but that kind of hiding was like a living death, so I opted for my own kind of hell, a hell in which I could manage to live the rest of my life.

  The rest of my life was an anvil of dread and damnation I wore around my neck. The rest of my life was the little existence I allowed myself. After fleeing the witness protection program, I hid out in the mountains. My sister finally told law enforcement where I was, and I made a deal with them. I stayed put, and they’d do their best to protect me and my family.

  I see Michelle in my dreams sometimes. In the dreams she comes to me, wearing white, like you’d expect an angel to be wearing, her long blond hair flowing in the wind. I look for wings, but there are none.

  She slides into bed with me and strokes my neglected cock, bringing it back to life, in the gentle way she had that was able to arouse my deepest passions.

  She’d bite my earlobe and feather hot kisses over my tender neck as I rolled into her, my cock sliding between us, ready to claim her as she glided over it, spreading her legs to let me in.

  My mouth would find hers, warm and inviting as my tongue tasted her sweetness. My hands flailed on her body, clawing her closer to me like a wild unbridled animal. I needed her. I needed to be inside her thrusting hard and deep, pumping and pumping until I’d unleashed all of me, every last drop, within her. Oh, the ache was painful and raw. I longed to lay sated by her side, my hand lazily swirling around her rose-colored nipples. I wanted to dance my fingers over her trim waist and dip them into the swollen lips of her beautiful pussy, feeling it glazed with our carnal ambrosia.