Baby For The Bear

Chapter 9

Ken was in his charcoal-grey Porsche, parked on the street outside her apartment after dark, when he finally got her on the phone.

“Sammie, don’t hang up the phone. I’ve been texting you all day. I thought you’d be there when I got home. I’m parked outside your place right now. Let me come up.”

He looked out of the driver’s side window, up to the window of her apartment where the light was on. He saw the silhouette of a long-haired girl with a phone to her ear come to the window, pull aside the curtains, and peek down into the street.

“Ken,” said her voice on the other end, “I don’t think you should. I still need to be by myself for a while.”

“So that’s why you left? Without even telling me? Not a text, not a voice mail—anything? I just come up and find you’ve cleared out? If you’d still needed time to yourself and wanted to come back here, you could have told me and I would have brought you. There was no need for you to just disappear like that.” He looked up at the window again. The silhouette was still there, motionless. “Let me come up.”

“You should go, Ken,” her voice came over his phone. “I’ll get in touch after I’ve done some more thinking. Please.”

“Sammie. Samantha. I’m here now. I was worried when you weren’t there when I got home. I’m staying right here. I’ll stay all night and be here in the morning if I have to. Let me come up.”

And again he looked up at her window. Her shape behind the curtains seemed to be wavering, as if she wanted to pace around the room, wrestling with her thoughts. In his mind he called out to her, Come on, Sammie, I’ll do it. You know I will. I’ll stay parked right here or I’ll drive around and circle this block all night.

At last her voice returned, sounding somber. “All right. Come up, Ken.”

A few minutes later, after ringing him up, she opened her apartment door and there he was, in his jacket, shirt, slacks, shoes, and no tie, with the upper buttons of his shirt open. Why did he have to come over? It pained her to see this unbelievably gorgeous man standing there, so obviously wanting her.

She let him in and closed the door. “I’m sorry I left without saying anything,” she said.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m all right, Ken. I’ve just been thinking about things. About…all of it.”

“Thinking is good,” he said. “But it would help things if we talked. I wanted to talk some more.”

“I’m sorry. I just wasn’t ready.”

“I’m ready. I’ll be ready whenever you are. Sammie, I need you to know it’s not just the cub that’s important to me. It’s you. Not just as the one who’s going to carry my cub—I hope—but for yourself. I care about you. I have all along.”

She sat down on the sofa. Ken stayed standing. He tried to read her expression, her body language, for anything that would tell him that she felt something besides confusion and doubt. At the moment, he couldn’t find it.

“If you’re not ready to talk,” he said, “maybe you can just listen. I didn’t come over here just to turn around and go home. So maybe you can listen to me.”

“All right,” she replied.

“Okay, then.” He paused for a beat, searching for the words. “I’ve been going over everything we said before, last night. I think maybe there were some things we should have said differently or maybe not said at all. Well, no, maybe it’s not that we shouldn’t have said them, but now they’ve been said…” He stumbled over his own thoughts. “Sammie, that idea came up about you just having the cub and handing it over, like it was…a project you’d taken on for me. And about you not having any other obligations after the ‘project’ was done. I think that was the wrong way to think about it. And I asked you if you thought you could really do it, and the whole thing just snowballed from there. We started tripping over all these feelings…”

“…and then tried to cover it up with s*x,” she cut in.

“Which was fantastic. And I’m not sorry about that. I’m never sorry about that. But you’re right. We just covered it all up. Sammie, I’m not interested in covering anything up now. We need to have these things out. It’s important to us, important to our future. Yours, mine—ours. Both of us.”

“What’s wrong is that we’ve been going about this as if it were a business, like everything else you do,” said Sammie. “This isn’t business. This is life.”

“You’re right,” he granted, sincerely.

“And…it’s not the kind of life I was ever prepared for, where having a baby is like making some kind of deal. It’s not a deal, and it’s not a…a relationship between a contractor and a client. It’s a child. And when we talked about what kind of relationship I’d have with the child—if I had any kind of relationship at all, if I were any part of its life… Ken, I never saw myself as a mother who visits her child. A child is this little person you live with and love and care for, not someone you drop in on.”

“I appreciate that,” said Ken.

“And Ken…there’s something else. It’s not about you or the cub or the whole…arrangement. It’s about me.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not ready to be pregnant yet. That’s the biggest thing I’ve had on my mind. This isn’t the time for that, for me. I’m twenty-four years old, Ken. Just twenty-four. I haven’t even started really living yet. This isn’t the time for me to be thinking about marriage. The whole thing started because I was out of a job, and we’re both past holding you responsible for that. But right now…things are about making a life for myself, not making another life. And all that went off the rails when I lost my job. I was scrambling for something else, and what came along was you. I’m not even ready to be married yet, and here I was, thinking about having a baby. Ken, that’s a huge thing. It’s bigger than I thought it was.” Into her mind through the back door came the thought of something else huge that was bigger than she expected, and she ignored it. “This isn’t a twenty-four-year-old thing, Ken. How old are you? Thirty?”

“Twenty-nine,” he said. “Going on thirty. That doesn’t put us that far apart, Sammie. Five years, six years, it’s not that much.”