Baby For The Bear

Chapter 4

Thank goodness it was gym day. Working out at the pool had a way of helping Samantha focus her mind. She would swim, and she would swim, and she would swim some more. Pushing her body would free up her mind. Launching herself through water would launch her decision-making better. The clock was ticking.

Pushing her body. That was the way she’d thought of it. If she accepted this offer, if she did this thing, it would push her body—and her mind—in ways they had never been pushed before. And then there would be the experience that she could not even comprehend, the experience of having to push Kenneth Brecker’s baby out of her body. It amazed her that any woman under any circumstances was ever prepared for that.

Nevertheless, after breakfast and a shower and a long brushing of her hair, she got herself dressed and out to the car and over to the gym. And once there she got herself to the locker room and into her one-piece swimsuit, and from there into the pool.

Samantha’s normal workout was sixty-seven laps for half an hour. She did seventy, then climbed from the water and stretched herself out on a deck chair. Watching others swim, she wondered how many of them, if any, were facing life-changing decisions such as the one that she was facing. Get real, Samantha. You are the only person in this place, maybe the only person in this whole city, who stands to make three-quarters of a hundred thousand dollars, plus generous living expenses, by having a rich werebear’s cub. Everyone has decisions to make. No one else in here has a decision like this.

The decision was not coming, and Samantha wondered exactly what was holding it up. Did she not need the money? Did she not want it? Of course she did. But was this really the best way, or the only way, to get it? What would it take just to pick up the phone, make a call, and say the words? Yes, Mr. Brecker, I will be the mother of your cub.

But somehow it just wasn’t happening. She knew she could. She knew she probably should. But she wasn’t making herself do it—yet. It wasn’t tomorrow morning yet. She owed herself every possible minute to think about it.

She went back to the pool and did thirty more laps for fifteen minutes, then climbed out and headed for the showers.

*****

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. Samantha went home. She made herself lunch and ate it. She took a nap. It occurred to her that she could spend some of this day online, going through the job listings again. She had not looked at any postings since she made the appointment with Kenneth Brecker that had put her on the horns of this decision, and it made her feel a bit guilty to know that. Diligence in job hunting was expected of unemployed people.

It occurred to her as well that she could call her mother and ask for advice. How could she possibly ask her mother for advice about a thing like this? How could she even bring up the subject? Her mother would no doubt find the whole thing bizarre and just plain crazy. Hi, Mom, it’s Samantha. Guess what: I’ve got a job offer. There’s this Ursine billionaire who needs a woman to have his cub. He wants to take me to a fertility clinic and hook up my eggs and his sperm artificially. I’ll carry his baby, which will be a little person who can turn himself or herself into a bear, and he’ll pay me a small fortune for it. What do you think?

Sitting up on her bedspread, she shook her head, turning her hair into a cloud of gold that settled into an unruly mess when she stopped. Of all the lectures, all the admonitions, all the pronouncements of judgement that she had ever heard from her mother in twenty-four years—and Lord knows there were enough of them—she was sure that the reaction to her wanting to get pregnant with a werebear’s baby for money would be the lecture to end all lectures, the judgement to end all judgements. And then there was her father. How shocked would he be? How incredulous? How disappointed? How just plain worried?

No, bringing her parents into this at all, whether actually or in her imagination, was no good. Samantha resolved to leave them out of the loop, at least until the decision had been made, one way or another. If she decided yes, she would have to deal only with their reaction to her decision to go through with it, not with her coming to them with just the idea of it.

All right, then. No Mom. No Dad. This matter was to be settled by herself. She was a big girl and it was her body. Actually, that would be the perfect thing to tell her parents. But she would tell them only if she were actually going to do it. Which she was not sure that she was.

Was she?

She made herself dinner and took it to the living room to eat in front of the television. She decided not to watch anything new or modern—only old television, old movies. Things made in the days before television talked about subjects like s*x and pregnancy, when Hollywood pretended there was no such thing as s*x and pregnancy happened between married people, often couples who slept in twin beds. That always struck her as funny. How did the couples in those old shows and films have kids? They must have rearranged the bedroom and pushed the beds together between scenes. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go through for s*x (which wasn’t supposed to exist). Joking to herself about the whole thing made Samantha feel a bit better, and less anxious about the morning that soon would be just one night’s sleep away.