Due Date_A Baby Contract Romance

by Emily Bishop

  I strutted through my cabin room, listening to the trees creak around me. On the other side of the window, I gazed out at a black Pacific. The moon crept down over the waves. I reaching into the fridge, drew out a brew, and popped it, sipping it with heavy drags. I couldn’t imagine a more lonely feeling than the one immediately after being rejected by someone you’d once loved.

  “Fuck it,” I sighed to myself, resolving that I wouldn’t do this fucking asinine “baby contract” bullshit with my father. My father’s line didn’t deserve an heir. And maybe I didn’t deserve that money. I’d done all right on the road so far. Maybe I’d burn out in a few years. Go down in some kind of wild Mexican-cartel murder or blast my motorbike over the Grand Canyon, all Thelma and Louise style. I wasn’t going to work myself to death, like the rest of them.

  And, at the end of the day, all I had to live for was my freedom. No heir. No woman. No artistic pursuit. Just the open road.

  Already, I was itching to flee.

  Quintin rang me up the next morning. I answered it knowing he could be hankering to murder me, post-conversation with Remy. But his voice was boisterous, telling me about some girl he’d taken back to his place the night before. “These mountain tits, Wesley,” he said into the phone. “Damn, it had been too long. I can’t imagine what kind of ass you get when you’re driving across the country like that. Sometimes I think Frisco girls are too… too techie, or too crunchy, maybe. Maybe I should get the hell out of this town.”

  “Want to ride your bike east with me?” I asked him, feeling my throat strain with nostalgia. How much I wanted to turn my head left and see him tearing up the road beside me. “Think I’ll skip town already, honestly. My father is a piece of shit.”

  “Oh yeah,” Quintin said, sighing slightly. I could feel the hesitation, the bitterness that I was always rearing to go. “How did that go? He wanted to see you?”

  “Man, fuck him,” I said. “He just wanted to nag me about getting married. Settling down. The same old bullshit.”

  “Yeah. But that’s not my boy,” Quintin said, trying to sound brave, jocular. “You need more than this small city can give you.” He paused. Silence hung heavily on the phone between us, really highlighting the distance. “I guess Remy can open the pub, if you want to meet me in the Mission. I can ride along. For a few miles, maybe.”

  I tore back toward the Mission, my heart feeling strange, heavy. I spotted Quintin, who lurched into the road in front of me, waving his hand. Suddenly, I felt sixteen again—ripping through the mad California night with Quintin by my side, Remy wrapped behind my back. These people: they were the only family I truly had. My father, demanding an heir from me. As if, without one, I was nothing to him.

  We blasted our bikes toward Oakland, the shoddier side of the Bay Area. Homeless people crumpled down the walk, darting their eyes at us. I felt a stab of sadness, deep in my gut. Why the fuck was I already leaving?

  Quintin and I paused at a corner coffee shop. He darted inside, paying with ragged one-dollar bills for two doughnuts and two black coffees. It was a tradition, a world we’d built when doughnuts had been something we, teenagers, had scarfed back, hungry for more.

  “Man, we ate so fucking much as kids,” Quintin said, filling the silence. “I miss feeling like the world was ours, you know? Like no one else fucking mattered.”

  “Ha.” This was the only response I could muster. I sipped the coffee, which was burnt and far too black—just the stuff swimming in the bottom of a coffee pot, I felt sure. The doughnut was stale, making sugar scatter across the table.

  “I think you really stirred up something for Remy, being back,” Quintin finally said, addressing the elephant in my mind. “I know she always kind of considered you the one who got away, or some bullshit. Always wanted to have your kids. Settle down with you. ’Course, it’s funny how things turn out. It was never going to be that way.”

  “Right,” I said, an arrogant smile across splitting my lips. I felt the lie roar up in my lungs. “I have too much to fucking do before I can ever settle down. And maybe I’d rather die than do it.”

  Quintin clapped me on the shoulder, shaking it. His dark curls rushed over his forehead, rolling around his ears. “That’s my fucking man. Living while the rest of us squander our time. I’m proud to call you a friend.”

  I roared away from him a few minutes after that, tearing across the land and toward God knew where. I cranked the engine louder, ripping past pickup trucks and minivans and feeling my muscles grow tense with the passing miles. I couldn’t shake Remy from my mind: that goodie girl, with a director’s dream. Who the hell was she kidding? She’d regret this moment in her life—sending me back on my way. I was sure of it.

  6

  Remy

  The night Wesley asked me to “carry his child,” or some bullshit, I couldn’t sleep. Just down the road in the Mission, someone was screaming at someone else, their voice tearing through the night like a stray cat’s. I tossed and turned in bed, alternating between dreams. In one, Wesley was my husband. How generic. I nagged at him endlessly. Fix the sink in the bathroom, Wesley. Come on, Wesley, please drive the kids to soccer. My dream-self was fat and bulbous, running after my dream-husband and telling him to stay home with me. I hadn’t realized that this had been a fear when I’d been much younger.

  I supposed that was an issue now, as well. I blinked into the night, feeling sweat pooling beneath me on the sheets. I imagined myself thick in the belly, taut with Wesley’s baby. I would be alone, eating, sweating, aching, while Wesley would tear through the night, more or less allowed to forget about his responsibilities, even as I gave him the “gift” of an heir.

  Although it was true that Wesley hadn’t run around on me when we’d been teenagers. He’d always said I was different. And just the way he’d stuck up for me with Marshall reminded me of it. We weren’t different to one another, necessarily. Despite the passing of so many years.

  But I didn’t want to be a tool for him. I had always wanted to be more than that. And wouldn’t giving him this heir almost taint the memory of us? Wouldn’t it mean that whatever “love” we’d had as teenagers would be filtered out, replaced by whatever this was? Becoming parents for the convenience of it?

  I paced my apartment, my toes recoiling at the spongy nature of the shoddy carpet. It was a shit place, a place I’d found on an internet listing. “No cats,” it had read, along with, “Might have trouble getting packages.” The guy who’d leased it to me was moving to North Carolina with his girlfriend. “We’ll see if it works out,” he’d shrugged, passing me the keys. “I mean, what is love, anyway, but a weird chance?”

  They were strange words to hear from a San Francisco native with dark purple locks and thick glasses. But at the time—fresh from a breakup with Tyler—they’d reverberated through my soul, forcing me to reckon with myself. With who the fuck I was.

  At around four in the morning, I slipped into the kitchen chair and stared down the screenplay. It was speckled with Marshall’s beer: wrinkled and unkempt, the way I felt. But I began on page seventy-four, drawing lines and making hard edits. I imagined myself in some kind of writer’s room, trying to imagine the changes other writers might make. “This, what she’s saying here? It’s not believable. Nobody would say that.”

  Sunlight streamed in through the kitchen window. I blinked into it, realizing I’d lost myself in edits. It was almost nine in the morning, and I’d have to open the pub by eleven for the “morning alcoholic rush.”

  A text buzzed in from Sam, my best friend since age twelve. Of all the things about my return to San Francisco, she was the greatest—sitting with me long nights, with a bottle of wine, and listening to me moan about Tyler, about my horrendous decisions in life.

  “You used to be so hopeful,” she said to me a few days before, almost mocking. “All caught up in that whirlwind Wesley romance.”

  “Well, time does that to you, I guess,” I’d returned. “Really makes you realize wh
at it’s like to fall flat on your ass.”

  “I’m bringing coffee,” Sam texted. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  She was. She appeared at the other side of the busted screen door, her smile beaming out from behind bright red lips. She was always the girly one of the two of us: the one with the perfect curls, the long lashes, the dresses. She spoke frequently of “beauty sleep” and would have called my long hours over my script the previous night “a detriment to personal beauty.”

  “You look tired. Are you tired?” she asked me, ducking into the shadows of my apartment. “You really shouldn’t work in that bar. I think it’s going to mess up your schedule, you know? Your hormones.”

  I took the coffee and gave her a quick hug. We eased into our now-familiar positions at the kitchen table, with me slipping the script to the side. Her eyes glanced at it.

  “I read it, you know,” she said. “When you sent it to me last week. I tore through it quicker than I’ve read anything in ages.”

  Sam and I had both wanted to be actresses. Sam had lived in Los Angeles—just three streets away from my busted flat in Los Feliz—for a good three years before giving up and moving back to San Francisco. We’d run lines together for hours at a time, talking about the intricacies of characters and precisely how to exhibit emotion with just a flicker of our eyes. But this? This was the first time we’d discussed that sort of thing in… Well, it had probably been five years.

  “What did you think?”

  “Remy, Remy, Remy,” Sam sighed, clicking her fingers along her Styrofoam coffee cup. “Why the hell weren’t you doing this all along? I swear, you’re a better writer than actress. And you know I think you’re pretty brilliant at everything.”

  I felt my cheeks burn. My stomach swelled with a deep, unquenchable desire to make the thing myself. “I have no equipment. No actors. No money,” I sighed. “I edit this thing for hours at a time, every day, and still… It’s not like it’s building to anything. I feel lost. Frustrated.”

  “I wish I could help you,” Sam said, her voice soft. “But there’s not much of a salary in the teaching world. Guess I could get the second-graders to be your assistants, provided you find actors. They can’t even memorize their multiplication table. I wouldn’t bet they can handle this very adult dialogue.”

  “Ha,” I said. Outside, I watched as the garbage men stomped down the street, tossing black bags into the back of their truck. I felt a strange sense that nothing would be exciting ever again.

  “Last night, Wesley came back,” I finally sputtered. “I hadn’t seen him in, what? Twelve years?”

  “Jesus,” Sam said, her eyes growing large, showing their whites. “Why? Just to see Quintin?”

  “He had to see his dad for some reason,” I said. “I hadn’t seen him since, since before so much. Since before I tried and failed at the acting. Since before Hank died. Jesus, I mean, he looks like a man now. Not the boy I loved.”

  “I’m sure he thought you looked so beautiful. The one who got away,” Sam said, giving me a small smile. “Don’t tell me he didn’t try to sleep with you. That guy, he’s probably sleazy as fuck now.”

  “He— Well.” I brought my script papers against my chest, running Wesley’s question through my mind once more. If I verbalized it to Sam, what would she say? Surely, she’d tell me it was irresponsible. That just having Wesley’s baby for the money—so that I could reach my dreams, create—was wrong? “You can’t just bring a baby into the world for cash. A baby should be wanted. A baby should be loved.” I imagined these words, and they echoed from ear to ear. I knew they were correct.

  “What?” Sam finally asked, breaking the silence. “What did he do?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m still insanely attracted to him,” I said, ultimately deciding against telling Sam the truth. It wasn’t like I was going to go through with it, anyway. For all I knew, Wesley was already miles away. “But how couldn’t I be? We had so much, once.”

  “You should date someone,” Sam suggested, not for the first time. “I think you’ll find that the guys here are a little less materialistic than they were in LA. Maybe you’ll find someone who wants babies. I could so see you as a mom.”

  “But that means giving up my dream, doesn’t it?” I asked her, gesturing toward the script. “Doesn’t that mean this would all be over?”

  Sam shrugged, drawing up and lifting her sweater over her shoulders. She tapped toward the door, preparing to leave. Her purse swung at her waist. “Maybe that’s what getting into our thirties is?” she asked. “Maybe being thirty means… Well, for me, it means dating this random guy named Chad I met on a dating website. Maybe it means never being late to work. Maybe it means going to bed at a reasonable hour. I don’t know. I don’t know the secret to happiness. But it doesn’t sound like Wesley does, either.”

  I stood at this statement, sensing she could feel my need for Wesley sizzling behind my eyes. I padded toward the door with her, wanting to tell her so badly, what Wesley had proposed. He wanted me to have his child. Me. Of all the women in the world. And he was willing to give me some of the inheritance—from one of the richest men in the world—to do it. Was I a fool to turn that down?

  “Have fun with Chad tonight,” I told her, shrugging. “He sounds—nice?”

  “He’s in finance, Remy,” Sam said, giggling. “Fun isn’t a part of his vocabulary. But fine dining is, at least. Ciao.” She kissed me on the cheek and sauntered down the staircase, toward her car below. I watched her go from behind the screen, my stomach aching as I felt us separate, driving down very different roads.

  With her gone, I gave myself back over to thoughts of Wesley, completely.

  My lips still ached with the memory of Wesley’s. My pussy felt hot, growing wet, pulsing with desire. I slipped my hand along the flatness of my stomach, bringing the pink pussy lips apart beneath the silk of my underwear. Immediately, I felt the warmth of myself. My clit was a tight ball. The moment I touched it, my shoulders grew lax. I tossed my head back, leaning against the wall. My nipples became hard brown nubs against my white T-shirt.

  I glanced at the mirror in the hallway, watching as my legs drew apart. My finger traced a line from my clit toward the opening of myself. I slid a finger deep inside, imagining it was Wesley’s tongue. I imagined his eyes, burning from between my legs. I imagined his cock—dark red, straining with veins, dripping with cum. It had always filled me so tightly. My fingers had traced his growing eighteen-year-old muscles, fingers toying with his nipples. I had inhaled him. Biting him. My tongue had found every crevice of him, before sucking his cock, so thick, down my throat…

  I stroked at myself until I came: my muscles spasming, my lips parting. My tongue traced my lips, hunting for any last taste of him. In my last moments before I fell into the couch, exhausted, I imagined that this body could take on Wesley’s heir. I felt strong enough, big enough, womanly enough. And, somehow—despite how horrendous I knew this offer truly was—I began to give myself over to it. What else was I doing? And wouldn’t this mean, on some level, that Wesley couldn’t disappear for twelve years again? He’d have to stick it out at least eighteen.

  7

  Wesley

  After leaving San Francisco, I tried to shake off the memory of Remy. Sure, it had been fucking wild to see her. It had drudged up sensual memories of years past, when sex and love had been intricately linked. Tasting her lips, feeling at the curve of her breast—it had all been the same, yet different. Like we’d both become fine wines over the years, both simmering with experience, yet excited to see what came next.

  But she’d rebuked me. And now I was tearing across the American continent, hunting for what came next. I felt the cash burning out of my pocket, forcing me into shit motels, between dirty, muggy sheets as I neared the desert. The lights of Las Vegas—and the promise of making a hefty profit simply by buying up a few chips—lured me closer. I’d done it before. Twenty-five years old and marching from the B
ellagio with over twenty-thousand dollars. I'd been fresh, alive, unafraid to rip apart my life and start over. Now, I wanted to bottle that feeling, to generate new cash flow. Maybe I could hunker down in Las Vegas for the better part of the year. Make enough to get by. Enough to toss something in my father’s face, tell him, “See. I don’t fucking need your cash.”

  Las Vegas was a bizarro alien world—all flashing lights, neon, tourists milling about with domestic beers sloshing in their hands. I revved the bike up to one of the larger casinos, tossed the keys to the valet driver, and strutted into the lobby. I bought five hundred dollars’ worth of chips and sauntered into the main area of the casino, taking up residence at a blackjack table. And in that first evening, I made more than three thousand dollars—enough to book a room on the fiftieth floor of the grand casino hotel. I stood out on the balcony, feeling the air whizz through my hair. Some girl I’d met in at the casino bar smashed around behind me in the room, sipping premium champagne and rattling on and on about how she was going to be an actress someday. She was maybe twenty-three, twenty-four years old. Her eyes glittered with stupidity. Naivety. She tried to touch my chest, to kiss me, but I stomped away from her, wanting only to sit alone with my thoughts.

  Of course, I was incredibly conscious that whatever girl I brought in with me could give me an heir in a second. I knew this girl from the bar would spread her legs and fuck till the sun came up, in hopes one of those fuckfests produced a son. She would have done anything for the cash. But imagining my baby… in her? I’d brought up this gorgeous image of my Remy, pregnant, sleeping in the sunlight on a bed we, in this fantasy, shared. She wore a white nightdress, and her hair curled wet with sweat. She was angelic, dammit.