Baby For The Bear

He saw Samantha to the door to his suite, and there they paused with his hand on the handle. There were a number of things on which Samantha might like to have his hands on, but she certainly wasn’t about to bring up any of that. “Bright and early,” she said.

“Bright and early.” And Ken turned the handle to open the door to let her out.

Once she was on the other side of the door and he pulled it shut, Ken sighed heavily and muttered, “Fu*k. If I were any kind of bear at all, I’d have offered to tear up the damn contracts and do this the natural way.”

But the contracts were signed and the final deal was struck. As he’d said, what now remained was the procedure. The sterile, clinical procedure that he could accomplish much more pleasurably himself. Alas, what would now be, would be.

*****

Samantha was fully dressed and had finished breakfast the next morning when his call came. When she went to the living room to look out the window and down to the street, a grey limousine was waiting with a chauffeur standing outside.

Startled, she pulled back from the window and felt the bulge of her eyes and the heat on her face. A limousine! He had actually sent a limousine—no, he was down there waiting for her in a limousine—to take her to have her eggs collected. Oh my God, I’m going to the baby-making lab in style!

Calming herself and self-consciously straightening her clothes, trying to imagine what the neighbors must be thinking, Samantha grabbed her purse from the coffee table and left the apartment. On her way downstairs she thought that if Ken could have arranged to come for her in a horse-drawn carriage that used to be a pumpkin with a chauffeur who used to be a mouse, he would have done it. The whole thing was suddenly so Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo.

Outside, the chauffeur gave her a welcoming smile and led her around to the back door of the passenger’s side of the car that seemed as long as a submarine, and helped her inside. There, sitting in a soft leather interior that could have come from half a pasture of cows, was Ken, dressed for business as usual, next to a tray with an open bottle of champagne chilling in ice.

As Samantha sat down opposite him, they greeted each other and Ken poured them each a bottle of champagne while the driver got under way. “It’ll probably be a few weeks before your part of our little effort is ready,” he said, “but once we’ve got everything completely in process, you’ll be wanting to skip the alcohol. So you might as well enjoy some champagne this morning. Think of this as christening our voyage.”

She took her glass—“Thank you”—and they clinked together and drank. He was, of course, referring delicately to the four to six weeks it would take for the eggs that the doctor would take from her this morning to be ready to combine with his sperm. This man-bear to whom she had entrusted—or contracted—her future was being a complete gentleman about the whole thing. Samantha liked that.

*****

The woman physician at the fertility center sat Samantha and Ken down in her office and mapped out the whole process for them. They would not take her eggs right away, as Samantha’s normal cycle would produce only one egg a month. First they would administer and prescribe fertility drugs, which would begin with a shot in the lower abdomen. Samantha felt a little trepidation about that at first, as she had never liked getting shots as a little girl. But she reminded herself that she was not a little girl now and what she was doing was not a little-girl kind of thing. The doctor also informed Samantha that while taking the medications she might experience cramps similar to those she might have from her period. Samantha appreciated knowing this in advance. Knowledge was preparation; it meant no surprises.

During the cycle, as during the pregnancy itself, Samantha was to eat properly (which was no problem, except that it might mean having to cut back on bacon) and drink plenty of fluids (but no alcohol), and it simplified matters that she was already a non-smoker. The whole cycle would take over two weeks (Ken cringed inside, reminding himself of his personal promise to abstain from s*x while trying to get Samantha pregnant this way). A couple of weeks after the first shot, Samantha would come in for a second. Then, about three days later, the doctor would determine the readiness of the eggs for harvesting. If everything was a “go,” a procedure to extract the mature eggs from Samantha would be done, and they and Ken’s donation would go to the fertilization lab. In a little less than a day, the doctor would be able to determine whether they’d succeeded in producing embryos. If they had, the embryos would go into Samantha. At that point they would hope for a pregnancy. Within about two weeks after successful completion of the cycle, they would know whether a little werebear cub was on the way.

And then there was one other wrinkle to the whole thing, which unnerved both Samantha and Ken. It was something that they both knew about, but had overlooked in the midst of her need to keep herself financially solvent and his need to keep himself in the family fortune.

With an IVF procedure there was always the possibility of multiple embryos implanting—which meant a multiple birth. There was a chance that Samantha could find herself carrying not one werebear cub, but two or three, and Ken becoming the father of twins or triplets. Was either of them really ready for this? Really?

The physician was well accustomed to people having misgivings, second thoughts, even outright cold feet, at this point. She advised Samantha and Ken to take a little more time and talk out this whole thing a little more, particularly in light of their not being a married couple. The fertility center even had a special room where a couple could just sit down and talk at the last minute about what it was they were planning to do—or what they were having second thoughts at the last minute about—and clear their minds for a final decision. Sitting across the desk from the fertility specialist, Ken and Samantha instinctively joined hands as if they actually were married. They exchanged a profound look filled with more feelings than they could name—and Samantha asked if that room were available right now. Something in Ken’s heart sank at the question. But something in Samantha’s voice told him the necessity of it.