Baby For The Bear

In bed that night, under the covers, in the dark after setting a morning alarm on her phone, Samantha’s mind went for the first time to a place where it had not dared to go in all the time since she left Kenneth Brecker’s office.

Her imagination put him there, in her bedroom.

It was only Samantha, by herself, alone with the choice she had yet to make. For now she would sleep, and perhaps dream of him. Having allowed herself the waking fantasy of him, perhaps she would find him again in her sleeping dreams.

Let sleep come now, she decided. On the other side of sleep would be her decision.

*****

Her phone woke her, not with a ring but with the alarm she’d set. Samantha got herself sitting up and took the phone from the nightstand. No calls had come in while she’d slept. Well, of course not; it was early yet. And she had said she would call him—twenty-four hours from when they’d spoken last. The clock, so to speak, was still ticking. She leaned back against her pillow and tried to imagine what he was doing right now. Was he just getting up? Had he gotten up already? Had he slept naked? Samantha had heard somewhere that his kind loved to sleep naked. She formed an image of him climbing out of bed without a stitch of clothing, even as she had imagined him climbing into bed—her bed—before going to sleep last night. The image of him had rippling plates of muscle down his back, which made a spectacular show when he took a morning stretch; and two big, round, hard boulders of flesh for buttocks, which clenched and flexed hypnotically. And beneath his ass, two heroic pillars of thighs and two perfectly cut rocks of calves. Was this the way he actually looked in the morning? Her imagination of him ruffled his fingers through that dark hair and turned halfway around to burn his sexy gaze right into her with that stubbly-handsome face that he never seemed—and as far as she was concerned, never needed—to shave. He trained the look of his sexy bear libido right at her from her mind’s eye, and from the way he was turned Samantha could get a side view of the prize beneath his pubes. It was a trophy of flesh, hardened with a morning ere*tion, and the way Samantha’s imagination of him looked at her with a crooked, lusty smile left no room for doubt of exactly what he wanted to do with it—to her.

Abruptly realizing where she had allowed her mind to wander first thing in the morning, and reminding herself that the place where she had gone was not meant to be relevant to the decision she was supposed to make, Samantha shook her head hard and cleared it of the deliciously carnal image that had taken over her first thoughts of the day. That could not be a factor, she told herself decisively. In the next few hours she would have to call him and tell him…something. And whatever she told him must not be swayed or skewed by either this waking fantasy or the one that had preceded her into sleep. She put the phone back and tossed away the covers to get herself out of bed. Her decision must be predicated on her desire to stay in this apartment, to continue to feed herself, her wish to continue driving her car. Nothing more.