SIX
The rest of the weekend proceeded as planned. Laura spent almost the entirety of Saturday night to Monday morning in bed with Grant. When he did not have her in bed, he had her against the kitchen counter and the refrigerator, and on the sofa, and up against the wall in the shower, and in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. When he did have her in bed, he had her under him and riding him and folded up against him and sitting in his lap. The soundtrack of their weekend was the sounds of her moaning and whimpering in harmony with his curses and swears and grunts and groans. The rhythm of their music was the steady, unceasing beat of Grant penetrating her and sliding inside her, slamming against her mount and beating against her buttocks. Their mouths held together in kisses that melted from one to the next and made a counterpoint to the pounding of Grant’s tool inside her. And in the quiet, still times in between there was the firmness of Grant’s hands groping her breasts and the savory, slippery feel of his man-smoothies leaking out between her legs.
They whiled away the time between couplings—which never lasted long—with Laura lying in Grant’s arms and resting her head on his marvelously hairy chest, playing with his long and temporarily limp hose, which was moist from being inside her and fondling the sac of large berries whose juice he had emptied into her. She stroked the length of it, pulled the turtleneck of foreskin up and down over the tender head, and coaxed out droplets of his seed from the tip, letting them make her fingertips slick. One such time, late Saturday night, Grant lay propped up on a pillow on the bed with one arm around Laura and made a contented noise that sounded like a long, deep growl. “Mmmm… You like that, don’t you?”
“It’s the best,” she sighed, running her fingers up and down along his member. “Absolutely the best.”
“Yeah,” he said, licking his lips. “You and Little Grant have gotten to be real good friends this weekend, haven’t you?”
“‘Little’ Grant needs a lot of attention,” she replied. “He’s a big boy.”
“He’s always needed a lot of attention. He’s played with a lot of girls since I was fourteen.”
She shifted in his arms and looked up at him, mildly startled. “Fourteen? Really? You started that young?”
“Couldn’t wait,” he said with a lascivious grin. “And once I got started, I couldn’t stop.”
A distant look came over her. “Fourteen…”
“That a problem?” asked Grant.
“No,” she said, putting her head down on the pillow next to him. “It’s not a problem. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“It just reminds me of the way I’ve always been, my whole life.”
“How’s that?”
“Careful. Thoughtful. Cautious. Safe. You did it for the first time when you were fourteen. I didn’t go to bed with a boy for the first time until I was twenty. I’ve always over-thought everything, planned out every last detail of everything I ever did.”
“Yeah? Did you plan for me?”
“I did—in a way. I planned exactly where I’d go, what I’d wear, what I’d look for…”
“Well, considering how it turned out, I’d say it’s not that bad to plan things.”
“Maybe,” said Laura. “It’s just…I’ve spent my whole life circling around things before going ahead and doing them, never just jumping in.”
“Is that right? Well, for a woman who never jumps in, you’ve been jumping into bed with me pretty good.”
“And it’s the only thing like this I’ve ever done, Grant.”
He leaned over and burned the blue fires of his eyes into her as he had done so many times since they met. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I wouldn’t have known it. The way you’ve been with me this weekend, how you’ve been on my body, the things you’ve done to me, the way you’ve been while I did things to you… It’s been totally natural. You and I make a hell of a hot lay, Laura.”
Laura touched his face, the handsomest face she had ever seen or touched in her life. She never wanted to take her hands off him, any part of him. “It’s easy to be ‘natural’ with you. The one time in my life I’ve done something really crazy, it turned out perfectly. You’re perfect. Your face, your body…”
“Little Grant…”
“You keep calling it that,” she almost giggled.
“Yeah, well…ironic, you know?”
“It’s ironic,” Laura sighed. “And wonderful. Every bit you is wonderful.”
He rolled on top of her, captured her mouth in a kiss that made her feel as if steam would pour from her ears, and held his beautifully manly face close to hers. “I’ve still got a lot more ‘wonderful’ to give you, babe.” The stiffening and throbbing of what was not at all ‘little’ against her abdomen gave truth to his words.
Laura shut her eyes and prepared her body to submit joyously to his once again. “Give it to me, Grant. Give me all of it.”
“Here it comes, sweetheart,” he said, his voice sounding like a growl again. And joy unfolded in her once more with the feeling of Grant’s fully hardened piece slipping deep into her.
_______________
Neither of them remarked on the fact, but in that second half of the weekend, the character of Grant’s sex grew subtly different. His pumping of his erection inside Laura was as urgent, passionate, and lusty as ever—but the aggression and force of it were not as constant now as when they’d started. The orgasms he had, and those he gave her, were as electrifying as ever. But something ever so subtly began to change. He rained warm kisses and licks, not only on her mouth and neck and shoulders, but all over her breasts and stomach and the insides of her thighs. He lay on his stomach and asked her to kiss his ass, and she did. She kissed and licked every inch of his buttocks and nuzzled them with her nose. And she had him flip over on his back and spread his legs, and not only did she gorge herself on his livid meat and succulent berries, not only did she linger with her tongue on the sweet spot behind his pouch, but she kissed her way up and down the insides of his thighs. And all of it made it that much more sensuous when Grant again put Laura on her back, hitched her legs around him, plunged his rod in and out of her while resting on all fours, and spilled the contents of his honey sac into her. And in the between times, when he held her, they would roam with their hands all over each other’s body while Grant poured out words of tender desire. “Babe, you’re so soft…you’re so good…inside and out, you’re so good, babe.” She held her head against his chest and inhaled his musky man scent, and he spoke his words of consuming ardor to her in a voice that sounded as intoxicated as she felt. And on it went.
And so it was, on Monday morning, that Laura did something that under most circumstances, she would consider less than responsible. They awoke early and were at each other for morning sex immediately. And as business hours approached, with Grant lying beside her and playing with her breasts, making her barely able to talk without giggling and moaning, Laura called the office and told them she was taking some of the personal time that she seldom used to give herself the morning off. She then spent the rest of the morning under Grant, receiving his humping and thrusting as if there were no one else in the world but the two of them. He took her to the shower and ate her out and did her again there. And after toweling off, they returned to the bedroom and fell across the bed, and Grant was atop her and drilling between her legs to a wetly explosive climax yet one more time.
Finally came the one thing during the whole weekend that neither of them enjoyed: Laura dressing to spend the rest of the day at work, and Grant dressing for the road. In all the world, there were never two people who appreciated less having to put on their clothes. They dressed grudgingly and resignedly, and Laura felt as if she were dying a little inside to see him cover up all that beautiful muscle and body hair with a shirt and a pair of jeans from his travel bag. She smiled a little, though, noticing that even now he was not putting on any underwear. Zip those jeans carefully, she thought. I couldn’t bear to have Little Grant get hurt.
Laura prepared brunch for them, and it felt odd to eat together with their clothes on after the way they had spent all their time since Friday night. But eat they did, and after loading the dishes in the dishwasher came the hardest part of their time together, the thing they both had looked forward to the least.
At the door to her apartment, Grant held out his arms to her with the sweetest look on his handsome face. He had changed back to the man she had first met at Scarlet and Crimson, the casual gentleman who was raw sex waiting to happen instead of raw sex in the act of consuming her. Laura let Grant fold her up into those arms that had pinned her to her mattress for so many hours, and she held herself against the now-shirted chest that had rested heavily and sensuously on her bosom so many times. She rested her head on his shoulder and said, “I’ve only known you for a few days, and I wish you weren’t leaving. I wish that when I come back from work today, I could find you still here, waiting for me.”
Grant kissed her head and stroked her hair, and replied, “I’d be waiting for you in bed. Naked, hard, and ready.” And he gave her bottom a squeeze to tell her, as if she needed reminding, that he meant business.
“You are just all the sex in the world,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone like you. Fantastic-looking, sweet, funny, absolutely dirty-minded—and you never get enough.”
“No such thing as enough, babe,” he replied. “Not when I’m banging someone as beautiful as you.”
Laura lifted up her head to look him in the bright sapphires of his eyes. “Grant,” she asked, “I know we only meant this to be for the weekend before you went home, but…do you think you’d ever like to get together again?”
And there it was: the question that Grant had been wondering about. Would she ask him that, or would she just let him go and let it be? Deep down, he knew she would ask. The way she had responded to his body and his more than ample tool; the way she had so joyously, ecstatically submitted to his relentless demand for her own body; the way he knew she liked him and he had truly meant it when he said he liked her—it was always coming to this question, this moment. This question was always going to be asked, and it could not go unanswered.
He wanted to tell her that as much as he had loved every insatiable, carnal minute of their time together, it was meant to be nothing but a fling, and they should part with a memory they would always hold as something deeply sweet and special. But when he opened his mouth, the answer came instead: “You know, Talon Valley’s just three hours to the north. All you’ve gotta do is jump in your car and come and see me, and we’ll jump back in bed and I’ll screw the living daylights out of you all over.”
There, he had said it, and the moment he had put the words out there, he knew that he meant them. He wasn’t feeding her a line; he was being sincere. Grant would be more than happy if she called him and came to visit. He would see to it that she spent her visit coming. And when she flung herself into a happy kiss, he welcomed Laura as she had welcomed him in her bed and in every part of this apartment. To his amazement, he had somehow gone from never getting enough sex to never getting enough of Laura Winslow. He felt his piece growing and stiffening in the denim of his jeans at the thought of having her again on his own home turf. And the way she pressed herself against his crotch, he could tell she felt it as well.
Eventually, the kiss ended, but she stayed in his arms, still not wanting to let him go. “Thank you, Grant,” she said. “Thank you for being with me and for making me so happy.”
“You deserve a guy to make you happy,” replied Grant. “I think we kind of lost track of how many times I made you happy.”
She touched his face in a way that made Grant think his heart would melt in his chest and said, “I want you, Grant. I’ve never met anyone like you. I thought a guy had to be nineteen years old to do it as much as you do. And you’re just so beautiful. Maybe that’s not a word you’re supposed to use for a man, but…”
He pecked her on the lips. “No, that’s okay. I’ll take beautiful.” He kissed her again, longer. “Takes beautiful to know beautiful.” And he smiled seductively at her. “I’m gonna be a few weeks settling in when I get up there. But call me. I mean it. Call me, and I’ll show you what banging really is.”
“I will,” said Laura. And they drew together in another kiss.
“Damn, I can’t seem to let you go,” said Grant. “I wanna take you over to that couch, tear our clothes off, and…”
“I know. I’d love that, but…”
“But we’ve both got responsibilities, I know.” And he cursed out the word for what he had in mind.
“Hold that thought,” she said, referring to the word.
“Yeah, when you get your luscious self up to Talon Valley, you know what you’re gonna be holding. For starters.”
“I know,” said Laura. They kissed yet again, longer, pouring into their kiss a desire that would have to wait—for the time being.
With all his might, Grant forced himself to let go and to take his arms from around Laura. In his jeans, his member complained hotly and bitterly at him, making him ache as he took a step back toward the door. There was a sad but tender look on his face as he lifted a hand and grazed her jawline with his fingertips. “Bye, babe,” he said.
She took his hand and kissed his fingers before letting him go. “Bye, Grant. I’ll call.”
His expression turned from sad back to sexy. “You’d better.” And he pointed to himself, then to her, then made a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand and jabbed the index finger of the other through the circle, the sign for what had been going on between them all weekend and what they looked forward to resuming.
Laura gave a little laugh and a nod. “Sweet, gorgeous, dirty guy.”
He bent down, picked up his travel bag, and opened the door. Before stepping out of the apartment, he shot one last look back at Laura, a wicked grin of pure, unadulterated lust—but with something deeper underneath it. Laura smiled and waved, then let him go out, clicking the door shut behind him.
The sound of the door closing made Laura’s heart feel like a falling soufflé. Her shoulders slumped, and her smile fell into a vacant expression. Where she had felt light and bright in Grant’s presence, she now felt dull. She looked around her living room and dining area, playing back in her memory the hours and days between Friday night and now, the sight of Grant naked all over her apartment. Her skin and muscles recalled the feeling of him all over her. She had never felt the emptiness of being alone in her place as keenly as she did now, not even when she had broken up with Joss. Something unlike anything she had ever had in her life had passed through this place and into her, and already, she missed it so much that she felt as if she would crumple up inside like a piece of discarded paper in her office wastebasket.
Speaking of which, it was now time to return to her regularly scheduled life.
_______________
Laura’s life as she knew it resumed, with one pleasing difference. Now, a regular part of her day was the e-mails and the texts that passed between her and Grant. This was another new experience for her. She had never “sexted” with anyone until now. She and Grant talked about how far they would go with this practice, and they agreed that they would not send nude pictures, or pictures of the “fun” parts of their bodies, to each other online. Or actually, Laura made it clear that as uninhibited as she had been in bed (and elsewhere) with Grant, she drew the line at e-mailing him or texting him naked selfies or shots of her private anatomy. She may have thrown caution to the wind by going to bed with him after just a couple of hours at Scarlet and Crimson, but she was still not that particular kind of girl. Grant was another matter. He did not send her naked selfies by text, but her e-mail was quite another matter. In the weeks that followed their weekend, she received e-mails from Grant with shots of his body—and selected parts of his body—attached. What impressed her the most about some of these attachments was that when he concentrated his phone camera on what he never bothered to enclose in underwear, he was able to get it all in one shot. Looking at those photos and feeling decidedly moist at remembering how big it was and what Grant could do with it, Laura was surprised that those pictures did not have to be “continued in the next shot.”
In keeping with his dirty mind, Grant always sent those pictures with the e-mail subject line, “Something for your inbox.” Laura was quick to pick up on the double entendre of that, of course, and felt ever wetter at the thought of how full he had kept her “inbox” during their time together. Before retiring every night, she would sit up with her phone and flip through the collection of pictures that Grant had sent her and linger over them, running her eyes up and down them the way she wished she could run her hands over them. And her lips. And her tongue. Grant sent her pictures of himself naked, lying down and standing up, in the bedroom, in the shower, and even outdoors. She admired the shots of his entire spectacular body and that one spectacular part of his body, and simmered inside at how much she still wanted him.
And then there was the typed content of those e-mails and texts. Another inhibition that Laura had, and could not get over, was actually talking in certain ways out loud, so they confined to typing their expressions of what they wanted to do to each other. Grant proved to be as expressive in e-mails and texts as he was in bed, if not more so. Especially in the e-mails that accompanied his pictures, he sent her whole paragraphs—delicious, decadent, dirty paragraphs—about everything he wanted to do to her when he saw her again. He told her in detail what would happen when he got her back into bed and all the other places he wanted her. He described for her places that he knew outdoors around Talon Valley where he wanted to mount her on blankets and in sleeping bags and in quilts in the bed of his pickup truck. He wrote her the juiciest, most explicit letters she could ever have imagined and made her toes curl with his descriptions of what he had in store for her when he saw her next. And they began to plan her visit to Talon Valley, during which the main sights she would see were the ones he attached in his messages. Laura couldn’t wait.
Which brought her to that one morning at the office when something unusual happened.
It was the morning of the day when the staff held its weekly meeting—those meetings that were deemed so necessary, where all the same things or variations on them were talked about and nothing of any import ever really happened. Everyone wondered why they even bothered meeting that way at all and whether the professional staff should all simply send their notes on what they were doing to the secretary and have her collate them all and disseminate the results. Surely that would be far better than the tedium of sitting through those insufferable hours in the meeting room, and it would be easier on the poor secretary whose job it was to glean nuggets of semi-importance out of all that monotonous talk when she took down the minutes. Everyone knew the bureaucracy was hidebound and set in its ways, but it was the elephant in the meeting room that no one discussed. If they did talk about it, perhaps they would actually get an interesting discussion out of it, but no one ever brought it up, and the practice continued as it always did in its same dreary way, and this morning, Laura thought, would surely be no different.
Except that the meeting was scheduled for ten in the morning, and at fifteen minutes past ten, Laura found her nerves suddenly shocked by the bleating of her desk phone that brought her out of a deep, sound sleep.
She jerked upright in her seat, nerves wired, eyes blinking, head shaking, thoroughly confused. Had she actually been asleep? Asleep, at her desk, right in the office?
The insistent bleat of her phone commanded her attention. She picked it up, and Sylvia’s voice came through: “Laura, are you there? Are you coming?”
Laura shook her head, clearing away the last of her drowsiness. “Coming…?”
“The meeting,” said Sylvia. “You’re late for the meeting. Is everything okay?”
Laura looked up at the clock on her office wall, and her mouth dropped open wordlessly. The last thing she remembered was coming into the office, sitting down behind her desk, setting down her coffee, turning on her computer, and starting to go through her daily agenda. The last time she had checked the clock, it was fifteen past nine. It was now a full hour later. What had happened?
“Laura?” came Sylvia’s voice again. “Are you all right?”
Somehow, Laura found her own voice, halting and stammering at first. “Yes…yes, yes, of course, I’m fine. I think I just…lost track of the time or something, that’s all. The meeting’s started, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it has. I just stepped out into the hall to call you and see if you were coming. Everybody’s been asking where you are.”
“Oh God, are they mad? Is the boss mad?”
“Not yet. But I don’t know how long it’s gonna stay that way.”
“All right,” said Laura, half-stammering again. “I’ll be right there. I’m sorry, I’m on my way.” And she quickly hung up the phone and sat there with her hands gripping the edge of the desk and gave a long, perplexed exhale.
She truly did not know what could have happened. She had just been asleep at her desk for a whole hour. If someone had knocked at her door and gotten no answer, then opened her door to find her that way…she didn’t want to think about it. Laura had never done a thing like this. She always got to bed on time and always got up on schedule. She always slept soundly during the night. And she had never, ever, for any reason, under any circumstances, gone to sleep on any job.
Until now.
And now, she had no time to puzzle over it or worry about it. The time for that would be later. Right now, she had to move fast and stave off in the meeting room a scene like the one that could have happened here if someone had walked in on her. Even as she gathered up her iPad and her now cold coffee and headed for the door, she began to tick off all the possible reasons for her slip into sleep. She had been eating right and keeping her meals on schedule as well. She didn’t feel a temperature or a scratch in her throat that would have signaled her coming down with something. Perhaps she would have to schedule a doctor’s appointment to check out all the things she couldn’t anticipate off the top of her head. In the meantime, she would have to come up with a plausible excuse for her lateness—something else that she never did.
_______________
The next thing that never happened to Laura came immediately the next morning, when the most body-wrenching wave of nausea that she had ever felt in her life brought her lurching out of bed and sent her scrambling to the bathroom, where she flung open the toilet lid, fell to her knees, and emptied her stomach of the undigested part of the previous night’s dinner.
After flushing, she got herself shaking back to her feet, rinsed out her mouth, and looked into the mirror at the palest reflection of herself that she had ever seen. With a bitter gulp at the way she looked, she began to suspect the reason for this very rude awakening as well as her impromptu morning nap yesterday. She hardly had time to contemplate it further before the next wave of nausea tackled her like a player in one of Joss’s Saturday morning football games, and she lunged for the toilet again.
Laura took only some lightly buttered toast and a cup of tea for breakfast that morning and felt queasy driving to work and going through the routine of the first half of the day. She hardly spoke to anyone that morning, not even Sylvia, and was grateful that yesterday was the meeting and not now. She did not think she could have gotten through those hours of dullness feeling the way she now felt inside. Mostly, she stayed behind her closed office door and tried to work as best she could, even though a dread suspicion, something that she could not bear to think about, let alone give voice to, twisted and wrenched around inside her from the start of work all the way to lunchtime. Even silently, in the privacy of her own mind, Laura could not put together the words for what she was thinking. The thought remained an unexpressed, unformed thing that she covered up with the idea of a stomach flu. Yes, that’s what it was. Everyone got sick, after all, even responsible people. You could be the most conscientious person in the world, and that would not protect you from a virus. She had come down with a stomach flu, and that was all. She would go to the drugstore during lunch and pick up something for it.
At the drugstore, she purchased two products that came in boxes. One was a stomach remedy; the other was something else entirely. She kept the stomach medicine and the other item in their bag and clutched them closely against herself in her purse. When she returned to the office, she would put her purse in her desk and lock it. And the thought of it being only a stomach flu would be her closest companion for the rest of the day.
But when she arrived home late that afternoon, Laura went directly to the bathroom and followed the instructions on the box of the item that was not a stomach med. When she saw the result, she sank, horrified, onto the toilet lid and wished she could flush herself away.
The stick showed a plus sign. Plus for “positive.”
It was the most negative thing Laura had ever seen in her life.
She lost all sense of time, just sitting there numbly on the seat of the toilet. She wondered which was worse, the nausea that had prompted her to buy the pregnancy test or the numbness that now clutched at her body and spirit. It became clear to her that the numbness was far worse. The nausea could be held at bay, even removed, with care and patience. The numbness would be nowhere near as easily dispelled and was a barrier behind which different, more terrible feelings pounded and howled to be let in. Shock was among the least of those feelings, shock and disbelief. The greatest of them was fear—a fear for herself; a fear for her life, no part of which would be left untouched or unaffected by this; and a fear for her entire future. She had gone from losing Joss and the future she thought lay ahead of her to a future she could hardly even comprehend.
Laura felt disconnected from her body—which was an unsettling feeling in and of itself, given that she was now no longer alone in her body—as she somehow got herself up and out of the bathroom and onto the bed, where she sat curled up against pillow and headboard and hugged herself. The silence in the apartment was deafening, but she was afraid to hear anything else, any reminder that there was a world around her, a world in which everything that happened had a consequence. Laura was now awash in consequences.
Her very presence in bed was a reminder of what was now happening to her, what was now upon her. It was probably right here in this bed that it had happened. It was probably during those long, rapturous, sensuous hours that she had given herself over to the greatest pleasure and joy that she had ever experienced. It was probably one of those times when she lay under Grant, or rode him, or let him lie against her and lift her thigh and fill her with bliss from behind. It was likely during those hours when she rolled naked in this bed with him, oblivious to everything in existence but his body and the massive, pumping piston that he drove so powerfully and passionately into her. Or if it was not here, then it was in her shower or any of the other places that she had submitted to his beautiful, wonderful, insatiable lust and let herself be as intoxicated with him as he was with her. Inevitably, she came around to knowing that it did not so much matter where it had happened as that it had happened.
Something broke loose inside of Laura, and she began to cry. The tears and the sobs came in bursts and waves, wracking her body and pouring out sounds of fear and sorrow and remorse into what had been the quiet stillness of her bedroom. She pulled herself into a ball and buried her face in her knees, as if to hide from some invisible presence. If she could give voice to anything but her sobbing, perhaps she might have cried out, Why? Why is this happening? Why me? Tell me why!
And the little voice that Laura carried around in a corner of her mind, the voice that her parents, especially her mother, had probably put there, had an answer for her. It was her own voice she heard, but it might as well have been her mother’s. Because you did this without thinking. Because you went ahead and did this, and you didn’t think about anything but what you wanted. You wanted to enjoy yourself. You wanted pleasure. You wanted fun. All you thought about was how good it would feel. You took your pleasure. Now you have to pay for it.
But to pay for it with the rest of her life, or at least with every day of her life for the next eighteen or nineteen years and likely longer? Was that just? Was that right? It was true, all she had wanted was something in her life that would make her feel good and happy. But was the payment really equal to the pleasure? Really?
When she had caught Joss in bed with that stupid teller, when she had kicked him out of her life, something in Laura had snapped; this she knew. Something in her had stopped caring. She had spent her whole life being the good girl, doing what was expected of her, doing what she had been told was right. And what had it gotten her? A broken heart, a derailed future, and a heap of dashed and crumbled expectations. And there was a part of her, she realized now, that had stopped caring about anything. Something in her had dismissed everything she had ever been told was the right and proper thing to do in life because the right and proper thing had utterly failed to bring her true and lasting happiness. There was some corner of her mind where she had thought, Why should I care anymore? You can do all the right things and still be thrown under the bus, so what’s the use of any of it? And that was when she had gone off the pill.
Hindsight, frequently the clearest vision, told her that she should have restarted her prescription the first time she had ever even thought of going out and finding a fling. It also told her that her first stop before going back to work the morning that Grant left should have been a drugstore to get herself a morning after pill. But she had done neither of the above. She had simply acted without thinking for one of the fleeting few times in her life. And what Laura now faced because of it would not be something fleeting. It would be something permanent—unless she undid it.
And the thought of undoing it brought up a whole new set of feelings, emotions that scratched and clawed at her as if to spill her heart and intestines out onto the bed. Undoing it? Really? Could she really bring herself to do such a thing?
Even worse: could she bring herself to do it and never tell Grant?
At length, the sobbing stopped. There were so many feeling vying inside Laura now that they crowded out her need to cry. Embattled by so many emotions, and none of them good, Laura shut herself down again. She uncurled herself and simply sat upright against her pillow and returned to the numbness that had first possessed her in the bathroom. Her more rational impulses, the caution and reason that had governed most of her life to this point, slowly began to take over again. So…she had taken a pregnancy test. One pregnancy test. And it had returned a positive result. Okay then, what now? The sensible, practical, responsible thing to do was to make an appointment with a doctor and confirm the result. Yes, that was it, go to a doctor and have it professionally confirmed. And after all, these over-the-counter pregnancy tests were not perfect. They were not infallible. It was possible for this test to have given her an inaccurate result, a false positive. She could go to a doctor and find she had nothing to worry about, right?
Right?
Laura sighed, heavy-hearted. She frowned. The odds of that were slim. She contrasted her slim odds of not being pregnant with how fat she would be before very long. The changes to her body would be only the beginning of the changes awaiting her.
Well, you got what you wanted, she told herself, realizing she was sitting on the side of the bed where Grant had lain when he was not lying on top of her all those times. Now do you want what you’ve got?
And it was at that moment she heard a “ping” from her phone.
The sound of it drove a spike through Laura’s heart. There were any number of people who might be messaging her right now. And there was one that it was most likely to be.
Laura reached over to her nightstand and picked up the phone. The name and the head and bust shot on the screen were of exactly whom she was expecting. Every other time Grant had messaged her, it had made her heart leap and her body sing with the memory of him. This time, her heart sank as if dragged down by an anchor to the bottom of the sea. Her eyes grew wet again. Inside, she wept, Oh, Grant…
She tapped the phone and opened the message anyway.
Hey babe, the text read. What r u doing?
Laura hovered her finger over the phone, considering whether to answer. She had never not answered him before. She had always been eager to talk to him, eager to read the salacious things he wrote to her. But this time, she seriously wondered whether she should respond. What would he think if she did not? Would he be disappointed? Hurt?
With a pained exhale, Laura typed back, Nothing. Just sitting up in bed.
All by urself? he typed back. That’s no good. Wish I was there. U know what id be doing. And he attached a picture of himself shirtless, putting the index finger of one hand through the loop of the thumb and index finger of the other while grinning lustily into the camera. It must have been a timed selfie. And it was one of the tamest pictures he had ever sent her.
The tears began to roll down Laura’s face again. She thought again of the things she might have done and added what she might have asked him to do. How many boxes of condoms might they have used that weekend? Grant had done it to her so many times, they would have gone through a generous supply of them. But a condom after the fact was no good.
I know, she simply typed back.
U OK over there? he texted. Not saying much.
Laura sobbed reading that. She had something to say, all right. But would it be anything he wanted to hear? She got her fingers moving again and sent him, Sorry. Not feeling well tonight. Think I’ve come down with something.
Poor babe, came his reply. Sorry. Here I am practically banging u on the phone and ur not feeling good. Get some rest, talk soon.
Thank you, Laura typed back. Yes, we’ll talk soon.
OK, he replied. Lie down and take it easy. Want u, babe.
She made a terrible, gasping sob, and her tears became a cascade, almost blinding her. “Oh God, Grant,” she wept openly. “Oh, God…” The most awful part of it all, perhaps, was that she still felt the same desire for him as he did for her—the same desire that had gotten her where she was now.
Have to get some rest now, she typed. Bye.
Bye, he typed back.
Laura shut off the phone and almost slammed it back on the nightstand. She rolled to one side of the bed and curled up again, pulling a pillow into her arms. The sobs went on, the tears soaking the pillow case.
The next time she got in touch with Grant, she knew, would have to be by voice. Not texting or e-mailing, but an actual call. What she had to tell him—what she must tell him—was not a thing that one put in a text or an e-mail. She had to speak to him. He had to know, and he had to hear it from her.
But for now, she cried.