His Pretend Baby

by Theodora Taylor

  No answer. Where was she?

  He walked to the bathroom to take care of his bladder and also scrub the last twelve hours off his body. He easily found his own way there and got himself showered.

  I must be getting used to this blind stuff, Beau thought, because lately he’d been navigating his room a whole lot easier. He hadn’t become disoriented nearly as much as his first few days in the house, and save for his trip to Josie’s room, he hadn’t tripped over anything in almost a week. He even managed to get dressed despite the fact that neither Josie nor Mac had laid anything out for him this morning. A few foot sweeps across the bathroom floor, and he found the sweatpants he’d discarded the morning before—sweatpants that wouldn’t have been there if Josie had done her job this morning, which she obviously hadn’t.

  A fissure of fear then interlaced with his hungry grumpiness. It wasn’t like Josie to leave someone in a lurch like this. He followed the carpet runner he’d only realized was there a few days ago into the hallway and another one down the stairs to the kitchen.

  “Josie!” he called out again when he made it to the kitchen, this time somehow managing not to bang his legs against any heavy furniture like the last time he’d tried to find the kitchen on his own.

  “Hi,” a voice said from the direction of the kitchen table. “I’m thinking I should alert you to my presence. Sorry for being in your kitchen unannounced.”

  The voice was feminine, and it almost definitely belonged to a black woman, but not a southern one. “You’re not from here,” he said.

  “No, actually, I’m from Detroit. But I’ve been living in Birmingham for the last five years. It’s actually where my mama was from. She and my dad came up to Michigan to work in the car factories toward the end of the Black Migration. So I’m like a lot of black people from the Midwest, first generation Midwesterner with southern parents. And I’m sorry, I know I’m rambling, but when Josie asked me to meet with you, she didn’t tell me you wouldn’t be wearing anything but a pair of sweatpants.”

  Beau ran a hand over his bare chest, and almost started to explain that the sweatpants he wore as pajama bottoms had been the only thing he could easily find, but then he realized there was a more important question that needed to be asked.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “And what are you doing in my kitchen?”

  At this point, he was bracing himself for the worst, for this woman to tell him she was the person Josie had hired to replace her, because she was quitting after what happened the night before.

  “Oh, Josie didn’t tell you we were meeting or who I am?” The woman sounded as surprised as he felt to have an unannounced stranger in his kitchen.

  “No,” he said. “And if you’re here about the housekeeping position, then tell Josie if she wants to quit, she needs come back here and tell me herself.”

  “Okay, I am so confused, because obviously you have no idea who I am, and I thought Josie would have—” She broke off. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter, because I’m here now, so I’ll just tell you…”

  He heard her take a deep breath. “My name is Sam. And I’m in your kitchen because Josie asked me to talk to you.”

  17

  A bomb could have dropped in the kitchen and Beau doubted he’d have been more surprised.

  “You’re Sam,” he said, his voice sounding dull and hollow in his own ears.

  “Yes, I’m Sam,” she answered, still sounding confused.

  She wasn’t the only one. “So Josie sent you here to tell me she’s a lesbian?”

  Sam laughed outright. “No! Not that I know of, at least. She’s actually the best friend I have in Alabama, and she said you had some questions, and I should answer them.”

  He frowned but made his way to the kitchen table and dropped into the chair beside her. “Okay, then my first question is why has she been spending all her Friday and Saturday nights with you?”

  “It’s not exactly with me. Josie is one of the most dedicated volunteers at Ruth’s House, the domestic violence shelter I started when I moved here. She used to be there just about every day, but then she got this job.” He heard the sound of Sam shifting in her seat. “At least I think it’s a job. I’m assuming if she asked me to come in and talk to you, it’s become more than that.”

  Regret and remorse exploded like a landmine inside Beau’s chest. “Why didn’t she tell me she was going out to volunteer? I would have been fine with that, but she let me assume the worst. Was she toying with me? Trying to drive me crazy?”

  Sam didn’t answer right away, but when she did, her voice was very careful. “I’m not sure you fully understand the situation here. A lot of women volunteer their time for pet causes, but nobody volunteers at a women’s abuse shelter on Friday and Saturday nights.”

  And it all started to fall into place. “She didn’t want me to know how important the shelter was to her, because she knew I’d ask why.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Beau’s hand curled into a fist on top of the table. “It was her ex-husband. He hit her, didn’t he? That’s why she came back to Alabama. That’s why she was so down and out when my mother called her about taking this job.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I can’t answer any of those questions for you. That’s Josie’s story to tell. I’m just here to help you understand some things. Like why she wouldn’t necessarily want to tell you where she was going on Friday and Saturday nights, and why she’d rather let you believe she was seeing someone else than tell you she was volunteering.”

  “She said it was none of my business,” Beau said.

  “Well, she’s right about that,” Sam answered, with a hint of humor in her voice. “But you also have to understand if she’s romantically involved with you, she might be a little bit more wary than someone who hasn’t been through what she’s been through. A woman with Josie’s past isn’t going to respond well to anyone trying to monitor her comings and goings because that’s one of the first signs you’re in an abusive relationship.”

  He felt Sam place a hand on top of his. “Also, in situations like Josie’s, shame is an ongoing thing. Sometimes, even after a woman manages to get out of an abusive relationship, she’ll beat herself up for years with blame. She’s not necessarily going to want to explain how she’s feeling or why she’s feeling it, especially to someone she’s dating.”

  His mind reeled, trying to take all this in, even as more and more things started falling into place. That was why Josie had screamed when he grabbed her last Saturday. That was why she’d sounded so distant when he asked her to come straight home from the grocery store. And the thin scar on her breast…

  “Where is she?” Beau asked. The need to talk to Josie felt like it was burning a hole in his chest.

  “I’m not done,” Sam told him. “There are other things we should go over—”

  ““I need to talk to her,” he said, yanking his hand away.

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I do understand,” he said, trying to calm down. “But you don’t understand that I can’t talk to you because she thinks she can’t talk to me. She sent you because she’s afraid of me. That’s why I need to talk to her. I need her to know she can tell me anything. Anything and I’ll still—”

  He broke off.

  He felt Sam’s gentle hand on his shoulder. “You’ll still love her. That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it?”

  He shook his head. He was done talking to Josie’s best friend. “I need to talk to her.”

  A pause, then Sam’s hand came off of his shoulder. Next he heard a tapping noise that he could only hope was the sound of her texting Josie.

  * * *

  “Girl.” Sam’s message blinked onto Josie’s phone a mere ten minutes after she heard Beau making his way downstairs from the confines of her little room.

  “That bad?” she texted back.

  “He says he won’t talk to me, only you. If you want, I can tell him it’s me
or nobody else, but I think he wants to apologize for whatever went down between you two.”

  Josie nearly wrote back, “Prescotts don’t apologize.” But then she realized she was not only putting Sam in an awkward position, she was treating her like a high school go between. “Okay, I’m coming down,” she texted. “You can go.”

  Next came some more back and forth texts, with Sam asking her if she was sure several times, then turning around and texting, “Okay, but you had better call me later with details. Dude is waaay sexier than I was prepared for. Luckily he’s blind or he would have seen my day-um! face when he walked in all shirtless and yummy looking.”

  Josie chuckled. Leave it to Sam to pull a joke out of the situation, even one as intense as this.

  As if reading her mind, a new message popped up on her phone. “You think I’m joking, but I’m not.”

  Josie sucked on her teeth and typed. “I will call you later, Sam. Now pls go. And thanks.”

  Sam must have taken her at her word, because when Josie entered the kitchen, Beau was sitting at the table alone.

  “Beau,” she said.

  But that was as far as she got before he was out of his seat. He lurched toward her, gripping the nearby island counter, then one of the bar stools, then walked forward without support.

  Josie, having never seen him navigate a room blind, watched mesmerized.

  But the scene didn’t last long. He snatched the air a few times, found her shoulder, and dragged her into his arms.

  She could feel him breathing heavily against the top of her head. “You should have told me,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”

  He gripped her even tighter. “I’m not him, Josie. I would never hurt you like that. No matter how angry I get, I would never lay a hand on you.”

  “I know,” she said. Because despite the times she had been afraid of him, and as angry as she had gotten with him, she knew deep down in her heart Beau wasn’t like Wayne. He’d never hit her, and unlike Wayne, he would never pretend to be her Prince Charming. He was Beau Prescott, amazing lover, ridiculous asshole, and he’d never pretended to be anything else. “I know you’re not him,” she said.

  He rocked her in his arms for a few beats. “Any chance of you telling me where your ex-husband lives or are you going to make me have Mac Google him?”

  “According to the text I got from Mac this morning, you fired him,” she reminded him. “And he’s not my ex-husband.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, pulling back from her. “Are you still married to that bastard?!”

  “No, but not because we’re divorced.” She looked away from him and finally confessed, “I’m a widow.”

  Then for the first time in her entire post-college life, she told a man about what had happened between her and Wayne. The angry words that had turned into shoves, which had turned into occasional hits, then amped up to not-so-occasional beatings.

  That was bad enough. She couldn’t even look at Beau as she told him her story. But then came the worst part, when Loretta died.

  As sad as her mother’s passing had been for Josie, she realized it also meant freedom. She no longer had to live in fear that her mother would go hungry if Josie didn’t do exactly as Wayne said. And she began quietly making plans to leave him.

  She’d made sure to clear her browser history after looking into Atlanta shelters, and when Wayne got home every night, she tried to be as perfect as she could for him.

  And maybe it had worked for a little while, because Wayne talked down to her but didn’t hit her for months after the funeral.

  But apparently he didn’t believe all was as peachy keen as she was putting on, because he kept pressuring her to make an appointment with a fertility specialist. He wanted to make sure she was all right “down there” because they’d been married for several years and still no kids.

  Josie made the appointment but ramped up plans to leave before the blood tests revealed what Wayne didn’t know, that she’d been taking birth control. But then two days before the appointment, she came back from the grocery store to find her walk-in closet in total disarray. Clothes strewn about everywhere, every box removed from the shelves above. But the sight that really stopped her heart was her favorite pair of jeans from college lying on the floor—the back pocket of which was where she’d been hiding the birth control pills she snuck into her mouth and dry-swallowed every day.

  She’d run then, knowing exactly what would unfold if she stayed in this house even a minute longer. But Wayne, who had been nowhere to be seen when she first entered the house, suddenly appeared at the bottom of the stairs. A steak knife glinting in his hand.

  She screamed and turned tail, dashing back up the stairs, but she couldn’t get away fast enough. At the top of the stairs she felt his hand around her ankle and then she got the wind knocked out of her when she fell against the steps.

  Before she could fully gather herself up, Wayne turned her over and with nothing but stone cold malice in his gleaming eyes, and plunged the knife into her chest.

  Josie thought she was dead, she was sure of it. But here’s the funny thing about trying to stab someone in the heart. Despite it often being depicted as directly under the left breastbone, in most people it resides slightly left of center in the chest. As it was, Wayne took her breath away when his knife ripped through her left lung, but he didn’t, in fact, kill her.

  And despite her punctured lung and years of abuse, or perhaps because of it, she saw an opportunity and quickly took it. With a rough grunt of exertion, she lifted her foot, drew it back, and planted it squarely in Wayne’s chest.

  She’d always remember the expression on his face after she did this, almost comical. His expression suddenly morphed from one of undisguised, maniacal glee to one of shocked disbelief, his eyes bugging out in the moment after she pushed him backwards when he realized what had just happened. He grabbed out frantically, trying to find something, anything to hang on to. But there was nothing to grab, just air, and eventually he fell backwards, toppling heels-over-head down the stairs, until he landed at the bottom, his neck snapping upon impact.

  Wayne died that day and Josie lived, but not without consequences. She’d found out later that despite lording his high-earning status over Josie for years, Wayne had been in debt up to his neck and everything, including the house, had to be sold to pay it off. And that was how she ended up back in Alabama in her grandmother’s old trailer, reeling from the end of what had started out as a fairytale romance.

  “I wish you had called me,” Beau said, rubbing her back. “I would have paid for Loretta’s apartment, gotten her anything she needed. She raised me.”

  She swiped at her tears with the back of her hand. “I was so ashamed. I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone,” she whispered to him. “I shouldn’t have let him trap me like that. I should’ve been smarter.”

  “Ssh, darlin’” he said. “You want know something? I couldn’t be prouder of you right now.”

  She shook her head, confused. “Why?”

  “Because you saw you were in a bad situation and you tried to fix it. That’s more than a lot of women would have done… men, too. You had me fooled into thinking the old Josie was gone, but you’re still in there. Even though I’m blind right now, I can see that girl clearly in you.”

  She clamped her lips together to keep from bursting into a fresh round of tears. She hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear that. That she was still her old self, that Wayne hadn’t taken the best parts of her with him to his grave.

  “Thank you,” she said. She stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips softly to his.

  But he stiffened and dropped his arms from around her.

  She nearly wheeled back, she was so embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have guessed after that story I just told you, there was no way you’d still be interested in me like that.”

  “Josie…”

  But J
osie couldn’t bear to hear him let her down easily. “I’m just going to go… I don’t know, clean or something.”

  She started to leave, but his arm snaked around her waist like a vice.

  “Josie,” he said again. Then he grabbed her wrist and placed her hand on his crotch.

  Josie’s mouth fell open. It felt like he had a steel rod hidden underneath his sweatpants.

  “I want you,” he informed her. “I feel like an ass right now because I want you so bad, even more than before now that I know Sam’s a girl and I’m the only one.”

  “Really?” she said, finding it hard to believe the hard proof under her hand.

  His mouth hitched into that half smile of his. “Josie Witherspoon, it would take a lot more than that to make me ever stop wanting you.”

  “Then why didn’t you kiss me back?”

  “Because I can’t think straight when I’m kissing you, and we need to talk about a few things.” He brought her hand up to his face and laid it against his bearded cheek. “Are you still on birth control?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m going to need a yes or a no out loud,” he reminded her with a teasing smile.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And I’m scrupulous about my condom use. I took an STD test a couple of weeks before my accident. For charity.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m not kidding. L.A. takes HIV awareness very seriously. Last year a bunch of us Suns took the test for World AIDS Day and tweeted the results. You can look it up on the internet if you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Good, because Josie, I don’t want anything between us anymore. No more secrets.” He kissed her. “No more condoms. Nothing but you and me, darlin’.”

  Josie wasn’t sure how it happened, but somehow they ended up in one of the kitchen table’s chairs with Beau sitting down and Josie straddling him, bottomless, in nothing but one of her plaid shirts.

  No words were exchanged, but they kissed and kissed until her kit kat was aching with desire. She let out a sigh of relief when his thick cock pressed in. Without waiting for a command, she began riding him and soon felt his hands on her buttocks as she bounced up and down on his lap.