His Pretend Baby

by Theodora Taylor

  His buddies all slid knowing looks at him, and one even asked, “How’s Mindy gonna feel about that?” just low enough that Beau could hear it, even if Josie could not.

  “Look,” he said to Josie, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder, “you can talk to me when I’m at home and I need a plate of cookies or whatever, but when we’re here, I don’t know you. You’re gonna have to take the bus.”

  His friends had snickered, and for a moment, Josie looked incredibly hurt, like a puppy who had been kicked. But to her credit, she quickly rearranged her face to a neutral setting and walked away with her chin up, like Beau wasn’t worth her hurt look or another moment of her time.

  But his cruel words got the job done. After that, he didn’t have to worry about Josie finding out just how much he liked her because she went out of her way to avoid him at school, home, or anywhere else. In fact, they didn’t exchange more than two words until her stick of a best friend decided to make moves on Mindy.

  When Beau had let Mike get him riled up on beer and big talk, he’d told himself that hunting Colin down was a matter of pride.

  But as soon as he saw Josie, his body had reacted. It had been all he could do to mask how much he wanted her under the cover of wanting to fight the boy she spent most of her time with outside of school.

  And when she’d stepped up to protect Colin from Beau, talking about how much more talented he was, he’d just snapped. Before that, he’d only been planning to scare the junior a bit, but now he wanted to punch the guy’s face in. And it had only pissed him off more when Josie jumped on his back, refusing to let go, so his only choice was to hurt her in order to get him off of her, or agree not to hurt Fairgood.

  He’d been furious as he watched them walk away, furious to the point that the plan, which took form in his head, didn’t only seem like a valid way to get around the promise he’d made not to beat up Fairgood, but also the best way to get the revenge he deserved.

  Two days after the almost-fight, he went looking for her in the shed, where she’d set up a slab of wood across two piles of extra bricks that she used as a desk. He knew this was where she preferred to study on nights when it wasn’t too hot or cold.

  However, when he found her hunched over her little makeshift desk, reading a textbook with an elegant, brass magnifying glass, he almost abandoned his plan. Yeah, she had crossed him and the one thing he’d inherited from his successful father was an in-born refusal to ever let anybody get away with that. But unlike him, Josie didn’t have a bedroom of her own, which must have made it hard to find quiet places to study even in a house as big as theirs.

  But then he remembered her calling him talentless in comparison to the guy who’d stolen his girlfriend, and he hardened his heart.

  “Well, look what we’ve got here,” he said with false camaraderie.

  She squinted up at him like a myopic squirrel then jumped out of her seat, hiding the magnifying glass behind her back. “Beau, what are you doing here?”

  “I see you got into my dad’s desk,” he said, nodding toward the magnifying glass. “It’s an antique, you know, passed down in our family for at least three centuries.”

  Josie had spunk to spare most days, but he knew Loretta had taught her from her first day at the Prescott home that she was never to touch anything she wasn’t cleaning, much less take it out to the shed for her own personal use.

  Just as he expected, she responded to his joking accusation like a Saturday sinner on Sunday morning. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m going to put it back as soon as I can. Please don’t tell your daddy. It was the only one I could find in the whole house, and my mama won’t be able to get me new glasses until she gets paid at the end of the month, but I have to do my school work…”

  She trailed off when he held out a rectangular-shaped case wrapped in last year’s Christmas paper to her. “What is that?” she asked, squinting harder.

  “A gift,” he answered. “Take it.”

  She might have felt bad about stealing the magnifying glass, but that didn’t stop her from throwing him a suspicious look.

  “Why would you, Beau Prescott, be buying me, Josie Witherspoon, a gift?”

  “Because, despite what you think, I’m not the devil, and I want to make amends. Now open it, will you?”

  The look on her face said she didn’t quite believe his claim about not being the devil, but she took the present from him anyway. Then she opened the package, with the look of someone expecting a snake to pop out.

  However, her suspicion rapidly disappeared when she found the clamshell eyeglass case inside. Someone would think he’d given her a diamond necklace the way her face lit up.

  “You got me glasses?” She pulled out the cat-eye glasses and put them on, blinking her large brown eyes behind the thin lenses. “And they’re just right! How did you know my prescription?”

  “I went back, got your old glasses up off the ground, and brought them into LensCrafters. They said they could make you a new pair based on the prescription from the old pair. All I had to do was pick out some new frames. Hope you like them, they didn’t have that many cat-eye glasses in the store.”

  “I love them!” she said. Then she sheepishly admitted, “The truth is, the only reason I was wearing cat-eyes was because those were my grandma’s old frames from the sixties. You wouldn’t believe how heavy they were. I think they must have made them out of lead or something back then. But these are real light!” She took the glasses off and turned them over in her hands like they were a precious artifact. “Are these featherweight lenses?”

  “The lady at LensCrafters said those were the best kind for a prescription as strong as yours.”

  She put the glasses back on and smiled at him for the first time in almost a year. “Oh Beau, I don’t even know how to begin to thank you. I mean, you really didn’t have to. Mama and me would’ve managed, but this is just so… I don’t even have words. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  He shrugged. “No big deal. Sorry about stepping on your glasses.”

  “Sorry about jumping on your back. I was just trying to—”

  “I know what you were trying to do,” he said, finding it hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, even though that wasn’t part of the plan.

  She smoothed her hair, which she wore in long, synthetic braids, behind her ear. “I’m just real surprised, that’s all. I thought you hated me.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  She snorted. “Could have fooled me.”

  Even though this had all been pre-planned, his heart started beating faster when he insisted, “I don’t hate you. If anything, I like you too much.” He cast his eyes away. “That’s why I’ve been trying to keep my distance from you since you started at Forest Brook.”

  Her eyes narrowed behind her new eyeglasses. “Now I know you got jokes, Beau Prescott. There is no way you’re giving me more than two thoughts when I’m not keeping you from beating up kids half your size.”

  He shook his head, and took a step closer to her. “Why are you finding it so hard to believe someone like me might like someone like you?”

  Now her face went from laughing to flustered. “Because I’m not blond or rich. Because I don’t look like any of the popular girls at Forest Brook.”

  “No, you don’t,” he agreed, taking yet another step closer to her. “But you’re smart and loyal to a fault. You stand your ground, and you don’t back down.”

  He took off her glasses, so he could fully see her nut-brown face without anything in the way. And his next words were completely true: “And I don’t care if you’re not blond, you’re so goddamn pretty, I always have a hard time not staring when you walk by.”

  She blinked. “Really?”

  He shook his head at her, “You got Fairgood and me mooning after you and you don’t even know it.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Colin and me are just friends.”

  “If Fairgood and you are
just friends, that’s because you haven’t given him the green light,” he said with a lazy smirk. “Everybody at Forest Brook knows he’s got a thing for you.”

  “No,” she said with another shake of her head. “If he liked me, why was he under the stairs kissing your girlfriend last week?”

  “My ex-girlfriend,” he corrected. “And being a fellow guy, I’m guessing he was trying to make you jealous, but it backfired, ‘cause all that happened is you ended up defending him against me and getting your glasses broke.”

  She laughed, but continued shaking her head, “No, you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong,” he said. And he stepped closer.

  The smile faded from her face. “You are.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said.

  “Yes, you are—”

  He cut her off with a kiss, and she let out a little whimper of surprise before wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him back.

  The plan had been one make-out session with Josie, one make-out session only. He’d known he’d like the making out part, just not how much.

  What started off soft soon blazed into something red hot. He pushed his tongue inside her mouth and explored it with rough passion, but soon even that wasn’t enough. Making sounds he’d never made with Mindy deep in his throat, he pushed her into the nearest shed wall, his large body blanketing hers.

  “Why the hell do you taste so good?” he asked against her mouth, like cinnamon and something else he couldn’t name. It made him want to taste other parts of her body, just to see.

  And just like that, what he’d originally intended as nothing more than a make-out session raged out of control.

  He unbuckled her jeans and bent down.

  “Beau? What are you doing?” she asked and then gasped when he buried his head between her legs, kissing her there with just as much passion as he’d kissed her lips.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped out. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

  Then her pelvis went rigid against his face and she came with a sweet cry.

  Any thought he might have had about not fucking her went right out the shed window when she arched her pussy into his mouth, overcome with the climax. He stood. She looked so beautiful with her jeans and panties pooled around her ankles, in only a long-sleeved, boat-neck t-shirt covering her top half. Her womanhood glistened with her climax and called to him like no other girl’s ever had.

  Their eyes locked for what felt to him to be a centuries-long moment, during which either of them could have turned back. But then she surprised him, by reaching out to him as tentatively as she had reached out to take his gift just a few minutes ago.

  She stroked his face and looked into his eyes with what seemed like sincere wonderment. “Is this really happening?” she asked. “Or are you messing with me? Tell me the truth, Beau Prescott.”

  Now he shook his head. What had started out as a trick on his part had morphed into something else, something he’d been trying to resist but couldn’t deny himself any longer. And he spoke the truth when he said, “No, Josie, no. I want to be with you. I never wanted to be with another girl the way I want to be with you.”

  Her eyes softened and she stepped all the way out of her jeans and panties before tugging his head down, this time bringing his mouth to meet hers.

  His heart just about exploded. Could it be Josie felt the same way he did? That they’d both been trying to fight their feelings for one another all this time? He kissed her with all the eagerness of the schoolboy he was and the passion of the man she made him want to be. A man worthy of Josie Witherspoon.

  But then the time for introspection came to an end. He pulled a condom out of his wallet and put it on, stopping only to kiss her pretty lips every few seconds or so until it was finally on. He pushed into her, but then froze when she gasped out in pain and he could feel that he’d hit an unexpected barrier.

  “You’re a virgin…” he said, his face paling above hers. “I didn’t even think about it or else I would have gone slower. I would have…”

  She covered his mouth with her hand. “Beau, I’m okay. I’m glad it’s gone, and I’m glad it’s you, okay?”

  Those words sent him over the edge. He wrapped her leg around his waist, loving the way her soft thigh felt against his hard body. Then he was moving inside of her with tentative strokes that got bolder as a sweet fire began to build in both of them.

  The very last fragments of his original plan disappeared without a trace and were soon replaced with the intent to make her his. He didn’t care what his father said or the rest of town. He was Beau Prescott, and he’d make Josie Witherspoon his girl no matter what it took.

  “Beau, Beau,” she said, so goddamn pretty against his shoulder as her breath hitched faster and faster. She was almost there.

  And so was he. But he wouldn’t let himself come first, he swore. He’d think about football, Mike’s grandma in a bikini, the yard tools in the shed, anything if it meant giving her as much pleasure as possible.

  “Oh, Beau!” she whispered with awe. “I’m…”

  Her whole body arched into his again, and he couldn’t hold on anymore. “Oh hell, Josie.” He released into the condom with a groan.

  Then he collapsed against her, spent and happier than he’d been when he’d thrown that fifty-yard touchdown at the state championship game the year before. For a few moments they stood there together, arms around each other, breathing hard, both in shock over what had just happened.

  Until a sharp voice behind him said, “Josie Marie Witherspoon!”

  And all hell broke loose.

  “Oh, my God. Mama!” Josie pushed against his chest. “Get off me!”

  He pulled out of her, hastily pulling his own jeans up over his waist.

  Loretta Witherspoon stood there with a plate of food he recognized as leftovers from the dinner she’d served his family earlier that night, her face a combination of shock and anger. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Oh, Lord, help me.”

  “Mama, no. It’s not what you think.” Josie said. He turned towards her and found she was already back in her jeans.

  “It’s exactly what I think,” Loretta snapped, her eyes filled with disgust. “I can’t even look at you.”

  “Loretta, calm down, I can explain,” Beau began.

  But Josie interrupted him. “Mama, I made a mistake. But I swear to you I’m not—”

  Before she could finish that sentence, Loretta had already turned around and headed out the door, her angry words trailing back towards them both. “I don’t believe you could do this to me! After all I done told you, after all I’ve done for you.”

  “Mama, I swear I’m not in love with him. We were just messing around. Mama, please!”

  She started to go after her, but Beau who had been about to claim his undying love for Josie before she began swearing up and down that she didn’t feel that way about him, grabbed her arm.

  “What do you mean you made a mistake?” he asked her.

  She gave him a withering look. “You know exactly what I mean, Beau Prescott. You came in here with all your sweet talk and your featherweight glasses, and I ended up doing something I shouldn’t have, ever.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  She tried to snatch her arm back, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “Why not?” he asked again.

  She glared at him. “Because you’re Beau Prescott, rich asshole quarterback, and I’m better than that.”

  Her words felt worse than a punch to the gut, and he dropped her arm. “You think that’s all there is to me?”

  “I know that’s all there is to you,” she spat back. “And I must have lost my damn mind to let you anywhere near me.”

  She angrily readjusted her new glasses on her face. Then as if remembering where she got them from, she said. “But thank you for the glasses. Now we’re even, I guess.”

  With that, she ran after her mother, leaving him there like he wasn’t even worth
a goodbye. And for the rest of the weekend, she refused to so much as look at him, much less explain why she had turned on a dime like that, all hot for him one minute, then acting like he was a walking pile of radioactive waste the next.

  He tried to corner her on Sunday morning after he saw Loretta leave for church without her.

  “Josie, if it’s Loretta you’re upset about, I can make her understand. But you’ve got to give me something here.”

  Josie rolled her eyes. “It’s not my mama, Beau, it’s you. I shouldn’t have touched you with a ten-foot pole. I know it. She knows it. Everybody knows it but you. So just leave me alone, okay?”

  Then she’d walked away from him again, leaving him to simmer over the contempt he’d heard in her voice, like what he’d regarded as the single best moment of his life had been the single worst moment of hers. Really, it had seemed like more of an eye for an eye than hurt feelings when he came up to her and Colin in the hallway the following Monday at school, his body thrumming with boiling anger.

  They were laughing over something at her locker. Those two always seemed to be laughing together, like they were the only people on Earth clever enough for the other’s company.

  He interrupted their conversation by saying loud enough for everyone in the hallway to hear, “Guess what, Fairgood. I fucked your crush but good last Friday in my family’s shed.”

  Then he shoved Colin into the lockers, and it was like swallowing a whole gallon of satisfaction when the junior hit the metal compartments with a loud clang that reverberated down the now silent hallway. Everything had come to a standstill and everybody was watching with mouths gaping open.

  Beau’s next words were meant for Colin, but he looked straight at Josie when he said them, “Now we’re even.”

  Then he strutted away. However, this time, Josie didn’t walk away like the last time he embarrassed her at school.

  “Thank you, Beau Prescott,” she yelled behind him. “Thank you for showing me and everybody else you really are as big of an asshole as I thought you were.”

  His only answer to that was to give her the finger over his shoulder as he walked away. After that, they both made it a point to steer clear of each other until Beau went off to college to play football first string for the Crimson Tide at the University of Alabama.