Clutch

by Drew Elyse

  We sealed my agreement with a kiss that shot from sweet to lascivious quickly, and then migrated. Gauge moved down my body, his lips and tongue firing off explosions beneath the surface of my skin. He pulled off the retched clothes hindering his descent. As he went lower, I raced higher and higher. The first press of his lips to my core had me shooting off the bed. He’d left my panties on, keeping a layer between the hot, wet roll of his tongue and me. The teasing hint of pressure and warmth was incendiary.

  “Please,” I moaned.

  “Tell me you need it,” he demanded. He nuzzled at the fabric, making me feel exactly how wet I’d become.

  “Please.”

  “Say it, babe.” His thumb went to work against my clit, circling lightly. There was not enough pressure to get me off, just enough to get me desperate.

  “I need it. Please, I need it,” I cried.

  Without a word, he yanked my panties aside and his mouth was on me. He flattened his tongue and pressed it to my clit, moving in quick, hard circles until I was screaming out his name as I shattered.

  Gauge didn’t stop. His tongue continued to work against me as I gasped through my orgasm. Before I could recover, his hands went beneath my ass and lifted my core upward. Between one breath and the next, his tongue swirled once across the lips of my sex and then plunged inside of me.

  “Fuck,” I screamed as my body bucked against him. I didn’t know if I was trying to get free or make him keep going, but there was no containing myself. Gauge held me in that position, helpless to do anything but accept the pleasure he gave me, until I came again.

  I was still lost in my second orgasm when he slammed inside of me, taking me hard, not letting up until both of us broke apart. We kept at it until neither of us could do anything but pass out, leaving the revelations of that evening behind.

  I was sitting outside the garage, getting real fuckin’ sick of the heat, taking a drag from my cigarette when Ham came over and sat on the curb beside me.

  “Today’s the day?” he asked, taking a cigarette when I offered. The asshole insisted he wasn’t a smoker, just took a few drags sometimes. Actually, he was too damn lazy to go get his own smokes and always bummed them off everyone else.

  “Today’s the day.”

  That afternoon was Stacey’s first appointment since I found out about the baby. I was actually meant to be leaving before long to go pick her up for it. I was waiting for Cami. She’d started working with Roadrunner in the shop office the previous week. The two of them were closed in there at the moment, working on something. She usually took her lunch at that time, so I was hanging out for as long as I could, hoping to see her before I went.

  Things had been…strained. Really fucking tense.

  Cami was holding her shit in tight. We hadn’t talked about Stacey or the baby since that first night. I’d told her we could wait until she was ready, and I meant it. I was starting to wonder when that was going to be. My girl was trying to act like everything was fine even though she was on edge all the time. I’d wanted to talk to her the night before about the appointment, but I couldn’t make myself bring it up.

  So, I was fucking waiting outside, hoping to see her before I left so I could have the chance to tell her where the hell I was going.

  Christ, things were already a mess and it was only the beginning.

  After a minute, Ham said, “Two o’clock.”

  At first, I thought he was talking about the appointment, and I looked over at him in confusion. No, his eyes were trained to the east of the turn in for the garage. There, parked on the other side of the street, was a black sedan. A Toyota, by the looks of it. The windows were tinted, but I could just make out the shape of a single person in the driver’s seat.

  “Can you make out the plates?” I asked.

  He had his phone in his hand, typing something down. “Got it,” he answered. Not surprising. The dude’s eyesight was like the stuff of legends. “California. They’re not government, but that could be intentional.”

  “Would think the feds would be a bit more careful, though,” I commented.

  “Maybe we should go see if they need some assistance,” he snarked.

  I checked the time, realizing I needed to hit the road. “Can’t. Gotta pick up Stace and get to this appointment. Jager’s around here working on his wheels. Grab him.”

  “On it,” Ham said before taking off.

  I looked over to the still-closed office door, as if checking for her again would somehow will Cami to walk through it. Either she was still busy, or she was avoiding me. We might not have talked about it again, but she’d been there when Stacey told me the appointment date. I wouldn’t put it past my girl to remember.

  “Fuck,” I muttered as I got to my feet.

  Hanging around any longer was going to make me late. There were enough issues going around without adding that to the pile. I hoofed it over to my Chevelle, wishing I were on my baby instead. I could use the ride, but I wasn’t putting Stacey on the back of my bike, even if she weren’t pregnant. That spot belonged to Cami.

  When I rolled up to Stacey’s place, I was in a shit mood. I tried to put a cap on my temper before I went up to the door; I didn’t need to take it out on Stacey in her condition. I knew a quick breather wasn’t going to do the trick, though. The only thing that might would be getting my girl to fuckin’ talk to me.

  Stacey answered the door all smiles. At least one of us seemed to be in a good mood. She had on a t-shirt that stretched slightly at her stomach. The bump there should probably not have grabbed my attention the way it did. It was why I was there, after all. Seeing it, though, actually being able to see the way Stacey’s lithe body was changing, freaked me out. Pregnancy in general didn’t spook me. Deni'd gone through the same shift months back, and that baby just kept growing. Never freaked me out once. Of course, there was no chance in hell the little girl Deni was carrying was mine.

  “Hi,” she greeted, full of excitement. “Let me grab my shoes and we can go.”

  She left the door open for me as she retreated inside. When she turned around, you could not even tell she was pregnant. The small swell across her middle disappeared completely. Was that normal? Should she have gained more weight?

  Shit, like I knew any of the answers. All I knew was there was a baby cooking in there that should be ready to come on out in about five months.

  Working my way toward father of the year already.

  Stacey came back into the room with a pair of sandals on. “All set,” she said, following me down to the car. “Thanks for picking me up.”

  “No problem.”

  “I hate to be any trouble. I’ve had a few dizzy spells recently and they make me a little worried about driving,” she went on. The cheer in that statement was a little odd.

  “You talk to the doctor about that?”

  “Oh, yeah. Don’t worry,” she assured me. Was I worrying? Should I be worrying? “It’s common, and I haven’t had any other symptoms that make it alarming. Sometimes pregnancy is just weird, I guess.”

  I didn’t answer. I had no clue what to say. My mind was torn in a dozen different directions. Then, I started to feel guilty about that. The woman next to me was, in all likelihood, carrying my kid. Meanwhile, I didn’t know shit about what was going on with it or what should be.

  “So, what exactly happens today?” I asked.

  It was impossible miss the flash of pleasure on her face at my interest. It didn’t seem conniving, just happy I wanted to know. So long as she appreciated I was with Cami and that shit wasn’t changing, there was no reason we could not do this as a team.

  “Well,” she began in that same happy tone, “they’ll start out with basics, like checking my weight and some blood tests and things, just generally checking to make sure everything is going well. Like I said, I haven’t had any issues thus far, so there aren’t any particular problems to deal with. Then, they might ask you about some of your family history. I know you still want to
do the paternity testing, which we can talk to them about today, but if there’s any history that might impact the health of the baby, they’ll probably want to know just in case.”

  “Fair enough,” I said when she went quiet. “Look, Stace, I’m working with the assumption the baby is mine unless it’s proven otherwise. It’s not like I’m here with one foot out the door already, thinkin’ you’re lying to me.”

  As uncomfortable as that was for both of us, laying it out seemed to help. Stacey nodded and seemed to shake off the tension talking about my role had brought up. She was back to cheery in an instant. “Okay. Um…where was I? Right. Then, the primary thing today will be the ultrasound. There’s a bunch of stuff they want to check there. The baby is developed enough now, they can even determine the sex based on how he or she is positioned.”

  “Shit. Already?” I glanced over at her in the passenger seat. That little bulge hardly seemed like enough to be housing a baby that far along.

  “Yes. I’m really hoping to find out the sex today,” she said with a smile, then hesitated and backtracked, “I mean, unless you don’t want to…”

  “No, of course we can,” I said immediately. “I was surprised it’s big enough to do all that.”

  “Oh. Yes, the baby’s far enough along now. He or she is about the size of an avocado, but everything is in place. Fingers, toes, and all.”

  Jesus. Not only was I going to an appointment about the health of this child—my child?—it was actually going to look like a baby. Finding out the sex? I was still adjusting to the knowledge there was a baby in the first place.

  “Are you freaking out?” Stacey asked.

  Maybe. Fuck.

  I cleared my throat and said, “No. I’m straight.”

  “You sure?”

  Not at all. “Yeah, all good.”

  The rest of the ride was mostly a blur. As was arriving at the hospital, walking through the halls, checking in, waiting—through it all, my mind was turning over images of a little baby. In five months, that little thing would arrive into the world. Just five months. And then what? I was supposed to be ready to raise a kid with a woman I barely knew while trying to keep my relationship with Cami alive. That seemed…fucking impossible.

  “Stacey Kerrington?” a nurse called out.

  And that was the first time I consciously remember hearing Stacey’s last name. Maybe I’d learned it once when she started working at the garage, but it hadn’t stuck. Really batting a thousand, I was.

  I offered my hand to help Stacey to her feet and we followed the nurse back to an exam room. Stacey stepped outside to be weighed while my eyes settled on a rather unsettling poster documenting the gestational period. The dozen or so renderings of fetuses were riddled with lines leading to labels spouting off information I figured I was probably better off not reading. I forced myself to look away, only to land on another display about the anatomy of the female reproductive system. Christ. Not better.

  Stacey returned with the nurse not long after, then proceeded to answer a bunch of questions about how she was feeling while getting poked and prodded a bit. I tried to stay focused, I really did, but my mind kept going back to the desire I had to pull out my phone and text Cami. What would I say, though?

  Hey. Sitting at the doctor’s with Stacey, about to see the baby for the first time. How’s work?

  Bad idea.

  The nurse—who should have been given another lesson in bedside manner if she thought checking me out so obviously in front of the pregnant woman I was with was okay—left not long after the questions ceased, leaving Stace and I alone.

  “So far so good,” Stacey said in the silence.

  “Yeah?” Shit, was it that obvious I hadn’t been paying attention?

  “The nurse said my weight gain is where it should be.”

  “That’s good.”

  I let the small talk die. Though, maybe it was unfair to call the health and progress of your unborn child “small talk”, Stacey let me make that play. She turned her eyes over to the parade of fetuses poster I’d been studiously ignoring. Maybe she actually found some good information there, or maybe she was just willing to look at it to hold back how fucking awkward the situation was.

  A knock on the door announced the doctor, who waltzed right in without waiting for an answer. The doc was a dude, which was just fuckin’ weird to me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved pussy as much as the next red-blooded, straight male. Still, I didn’t want to be all up between women’s legs in that particular context.

  No fucking thanks.

  It took nearly a half hour for the good doctor to get through all of his questions and checks, including laying out the options for a paternity test. The idea of sticking a needle into the little thing that couldn’t even survive on its own yet made me more than a little uncomfortable, no matter what the doc said. Despite Stacey’s insistence that it wasn’t necessary, I shelled out the cash to do a non-invasive test requiring blood from the two of us, no baby poking involved.

  By the time the chick with the ultrasound machine came in, I was cagey. Too much time in too small a room, still not having talked to Cami at all since that morning, and all the “watch out for this” warnings, were making me want to light up something fierce. Too bad there’d be none of that until after I got Stacey home.

  They set up the machine and lubed up Stacey’s skin with some gel before rubbing the wand against her. The quick, but steady, whooshing sound that came next had me stunned.

  “Is that…” I couldn’t even say it.

  “The baby’s heartbeat,” the doc supplied. “And it all sounds good. Did you want to know the sex?”

  Since I was too captivated staring at her small belly, imagining the little life inside, Stacey answered, “Yes, please.”

  The doc shifted the screen of the machine so we could see it better and said, “Well, say hello to your son.”

  Our son.

  Holy shit.

  It was late afternoon when I finally left the office at the garage. I had worked through lunch, not hungry enough to warrant taking the break.

  Okay, no. That was partly a lie.

  I had not been hungry. Not at all. But it had nothing to do with biology.

  He may not have said anything, but I knew Gauge had Stacey’s doctor appointment to be at that afternoon. I wasn’t upset that he had not told me about it directly. After all, it was my own doing. He promised we could talk about everything baby once I was ready. Far be it from me to be upset when he stood by that.

  The goal of staying inside had not been to avoid Gauge per se, but more so just to avoid everything. Working without pause made it a lot easier to ignore the images my head was cooking up. Images of Gauge seeing the ultrasound for the first time and finding out the sex—which, yes, I’d looked up online was something that could happen at that appointment—were too overwhelming. Stacey was going to be providing him with something awe-inspiring that afternoon. I tried not to be jealous of that—honestly, I did—I just could not help it.

  Gauge deserved to enjoy that moment, so I kept my distance to avoid contaminating it.

  I walked over to Dad’s beat down old pick up. It was as much rust colored as it was black…or dark grey, given the way the paint had lightened from the sun over the years. He’d let me take the hunk of junk until I sorted out getting a new car, which I really needed to do soon.

  I stood behind the garage with the door open, telling myself to get in and go back to Gauge’s apartment. Or was it supposed to be our apartment? He said he wanted me there, and we’d moved most of my belongings in. Still, I felt no claim on the place whatsoever. It was his apartment; I was just a guest there.