The Lion's Surprise Baby

by White, Jade

  All that remained, then, was to decide what to do about the consequences. A decision had to be made. There could be no ignoring it, no sloughing it off. She had to do something.

  With a gulp, Tara arrived at the next daunting thought. She did not have to go through with being pregnant, if pregnant she was. She'd had the choice to let herself get that way. She also had the choice to stop it.

  Hardly aware that she was even doing it, Tara unwrapped her arms from around her legs, lowered her legs, and let her body come to rest on the bed. It was not a tranquil rest by any means; it was a disconnection, for the time being, of her body from her mind. It was an uncoiling of her body and a coiling of her mind deep into itself.

  Tara turned her thoughts inward, to the deepest parts of herself, a place deeper than body or thoughts or anything else. She went into the core of her being to ask herself whether she were even capable of doing the thing she had just contemplated. Could she not have the baby? Could she simply stop it?

  To ponder the question, Tara had to banish all other voices from her mind. Her mother and the other older women in her family could not exist for her now; they could have no place. There could only be Tara and the idea—and the decision. Could I really do that? Could I really end this? Am I capable of that?

  Tara had proven herself capable of a number of difficult things in her life. She had shown herself to be brave enough to leave the stability of being an employee and become an entrepreneur; brave enough to own her own life instead of leasing it out to someone else in exchange for a paycheck and benefits. And she had made it work. But now she had to decide the course of another life, a tiny little life growing inside her. She had to decide whether that little life would even have a course at all, or whether she would cut it short.

  The choice presented her with the quagmire of morality and guilt and social and cultural pressures, and everything that had been put upon and expected of women for thousands of years. Before her were the questions of whether her body were her own, or whether she was now just a vessel and incubator for the baby, and even whether Brenton, having created this little life with her by the enraptured joining of his body with hers, had any further claim on her body and her life now—and what claim he had on the life she was carrying.

  There were all the objections that anyone could possibly raise to terminating the pregnancy. Some of them were superstitious and irrational and hypocritical. Some of them were arguments that claimed to be about the rights of the unborn, but which Tara knew very well were about churches and political factions and outside authorities wanting to assert their control over her body.

  There were those to whom a pregnant woman was not even really a person; she was just the bearer of a baby. They claimed to be advocates of life, but they were really just advocates of birth, who declared that a woman’s only real purpose for existing at all was to bring forth children. And once the child was born, they didn’t even necessarily care anything for it. All that really mattered was keeping women in their ordained place.

  Tara considered all of those things, and all of those people, and decided they were not worth considering. With a hard frown, she muttered, “You can all just go to hell.” It was not their body that would have to endure the rigors of pregnancy and birth, and it was not their lives that would be transformed forever if she did so. This was her body and it was her life, and she was a person; a whole, thinking, feeling person, not just the carrier of a fetus. So they could all take their fear and their superstitions and their cherry-picked verses from holy books and their assumed authority and dominion over women and go to the hell of their choice; this was about Tara, and Tara alone. Her body, her life, her decision.

  And yet, it was still a decision that would affect that little life that she and Brenton had made; a decision that would determine whether it would even be a life at all.

  She rested her hand on her stomach, imagining what she knew must be growing inside her, and remembering again how it got there. Brenton. He’d had a part in the beginning of this. Shouldn’t he have a part in the ending—or whatever came next? Shouldn’t he know that he had created another little Morgan? Tara thought she should tell him. He deserved to know. He even had a right to know.

  What she reflected upon now was not just the sex itself, raw and savage and delicious and passionate and relentless as it had been. It was not just what Brenton did, or how he did it, or how much and how long he did it. All of that had been an odyssey of erotic joy, but that was not what Tara considered now. It was who Brenton was, the kind of person he was, beyond the all-consuming erotic physicality of him. It was not just the body, but the whole person, the whole man—the humor, the warmth, the kindness. She remembered the look in his eyes when it was not just desire but appreciation.

  She remembered the way he touched her when it was not just arousal and not just the rapture of oral sex and copulating, but the quiet, soft tenderness of the times in between. She remembered his kiss, not just when the two of them were preparing for or consumed in the act, but in the quieter times, when they just lay together, communicating with fingers on skin and on the parts down there.

  And she recalled the way he spoke to her, not only the deliciously dirty and filthy, sexy things he grunted and moaned when he was on top of her, but the way he spoke of his own dreams and his own thoughts—and the way he listened to her when she talked. After all that, did Brenton not deserve to know that he had given her a child?

  Brenton was pure, unadulterated sex. He knew no such thing as “enough”. But there was no question in Tara’s mind or heart that Brenton was good. He cared about the world around him. He was sweet and he was kind. Would it not have been wrong to keep it from him that he might be a father?

  Tara sighed, warmed by the memory of everything that Brenton did and everything that he was. She had spent these long moments pondering the full meaning of her missed period, something that had never happened to her until now. She still believed she knew what it meant, but it was still just the unusual behavior of her body’s cycle.

  She had not taken a test, nor seen a doctor. It was just something she had decided was true. The next thing to do, actually, was to make sure it was true. No matter how hard and flat a fact it had become in her mind, she had to make it real by confirming it. At least get a test first, she told herself. Get yourself a test and know for sure.

  One final realization came to her. Whether or not she told Brenton, she could not be in this alone. Tara was a smart, mostly level-headed, competent, generally responsible woman, but she could not face or go through a thing like this alone. She would need help.

  Felicia. Tomorrow she would tell Felicia.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sleep came with great difficulty that night. Directly in the morning, Tara got herself up and over to her bedroom desk to pull up a search engine on her laptop. She entered Brenton Morgan Napa California and held her breath for the results.

  The links came up immediately: Napa Realtor for County Legislator. Local Real Estate Developer Enters County Legislative Race. Herald Realty Exec Runs for Legislator… It was in the papers. He was doing it, just as he said he would. Brenton had announced his candidacy and was running for office. For a moment Tara actually forgot her dilemma and smiled at the page of links on her screen. She was proud of him.

  She brought up some of the articles from the links and read the reports of his early bid for County Legislature. She skimmed the pieces to find his quotes; she wanted to read his words. His position statements appeared in text and reminded her of the things he said to her in person the day they met. He was running on a platform of responsible use of land and water, business and job growth balanced with conserving resources for the future. He favored development of alternative energy sources, reduction of carbon emissions, urban agriculture, and training workers for new and emerging industries.

  He was a friend of wildlife conservation. Tara looked at videos from local TV stations in Napa for interviews with him. There he was
, just as personable and charming and almost as gorgeous on camera as he was in real life—with a difference. She immediately noticed the haircut. They had talked about this at the hotel cafe, how the image of him with his beautiful straw-blonde locks tumbling over his shoulders was not the image that a politician wanted to project.

  Brenton had cut his hair. It was still luxuriously thick and golden, but the sexy cascade of gold over his shoulders was gone. He’d made the sacrifice, but it was such a shame. It almost broke Tara’s heart to see him that way, except that even with his locks shorn away he was still the same vision of ultimate male sexiness that she’d lain with. He looked somehow like a tamed animal, a beast that had taken on at least a surface appearance of civilization. But he was still Brenton.

  His smile radiated from the screen. He looked fantastic in a suit. And she thought of all the women in Napa—and not a few men—who would envy her if they knew how many hours and days she had spent with a nude, long-haired, and aroused Brenton Morgan, and everything he had done to her with his clothes off. Which brought her back to the present, and the reason she was watching him now.

  “Oh, Brenton, what am I going to do?” Tara wondered aloud. Here he was, embarking on his great ambition, wanting to help the world, wanting to make a positive difference. As a political candidate, Brenton would be watched. Not just watched, he would be scrutinized. Everything he did, every place he went, everyone he was seen with, would be weighed and judged. And people, she knew, could be very judgmental.

  People often deliberately looked for things to hold against someone, and when they found it they could be callous, harsh, mean, vicious. Any little flaw that anyone found in him could be magnified into something gigantic and ugly. Any little mistake he made, any little thing that could be taken as an imperfection of character, was apt to be blown up to many times its natural proportions.

  Sitting at her desk, eyeing her computer with a blank expression where there had been a frown, Tara touched her stomach again. Well, here was something that many people would take as a mistake, all right. Here was something that many of his prospective constituents would call a major flaw in character. He had bedded a woman to whom he wasn’t married and made her pregnant with his illegitimate baby.

  To many people it would not matter that this was the twenty-first century; it might as well have been the seventeenth. Having gotten a woman pregnant out of wedlock would be inexcusable in a would-be public official. They would brand him as irresponsible at best, and a cad, a bounder, and a man-slut at worst. There would go all of his political ambitions, and there would go everything he wanted to do for his community, his state, and the country. A reputation for shagging women and leaving them pregnant would be the undoing of all of it.

  And yet, Brenton deserved to know. There were so many things at stake: his future, her future, the future of the tiny life inside her—assuming she actually wanted to have it, and she still wasn’t sure of that. It was all tangling up in her mind now, and the only way she could untangle it was to talk to someone. She had to get to the office. She had to talk to Felicia. Just getting it out in the open with one person who'd understand, with her best friend, could make all the difference. Further resolved to tell Felicia and share the whole thing with someone who could help her sort it out, Tara put the laptop to sleep and rose from behind the desk. She had an important day ahead of her.

  _______________

  When Tara took Felicia aside at the front office and asked her to join her in the back office, Felicia could tell something was up. She just wasn’t expecting it to be this. When she gave Felicia the news, Tara thought her friend’s eyes would come popping from their sockets and hit her square in the face. Felicia had to sit down. Tara, not wanting to sit behind the desk but needing a seat of her own after saying that out loud to someone else for the first time, pulled up another chair and joined her.

  “For real? For sure? Definitely?” Felicia asked anxiously.

  “It must be,” said Tara. “It has to be. I’ve never been late, Felicia. Never, ever, ever. Not once, since my very first cycle. I’ve always been like clockwork. The only thing that could possibly make me late…is this.”

  “But you haven’t taken a test or anything, or been to a doctor yet.”

  “No, not yet. I just noticed this last night.”

  “Then you can’t really be sure.”

  “Yes, I can, Felicia,” Tara insisted. “I’m just never late; I never have been. I must be pregnant. If I’m not pregnant, there must be something else wrong with me, and I really don’t think there is.”

  “Then you’ve got to take a test and see a doctor, and find out. You haven’t had a physical since before you went away, right? So, you’ll take a pregnancy test and go to a doctor. You’ve got to do that before you do anything else.”

  “I know, I know,” Tara said, sounding as if she could melt into tears at any second. “But I just know I’m right. Brenton got me pregnant, I know it.”

  The genuine sympathy in Felicia’s voice belied her words, which might have come in a very different tone from someone else. “Oh, Felicia, honey…neither of you was using anything all that time?”

  Tara shook her head. “There wasn’t a chance to use anything. It was right upstairs to his suite, then right out to his place on the plane. And you know, I’d stopped filling my prescription after George died and I didn’t see any need to fill it again because I certainly wasn’t sleeping with anyone else…”

  Felicia put a comforting hand on Tara’s knee. “I know. I can see that. I get how it happened. But still…oh, Felicia…”

  Tara looked almost as ill as if she were in the throes of morning sickness—to which she expected she could look forward to now. “I just don’t know which way to go, Felicia.”

  “Well, you’ve got to tell him, that’s all.”

  “How can I tell him? Do you know what that will do to his life, to his plans?”

  “Never mind his plans!” Felicia argued. “What about you? Is he gonna carry this child? Is he gonna go through everything to have this child?”

  “Right now,” Tara admitted, “I don’t even know if I’m going to go through everything to have it.”

  Felicia bit her lip nervously. “Could you really go through with that?”

  “I spent all last night asking myself if I could go through with not having it, and I don’t know,” said Tara. “And if I do…stop it…it’ll be gone without Brenton even knowing it happened. He could go on never knowing he was going to be a father. I don’t know if I could do that to him or to…” She touched her stomach, indicating the other affected party.

  “That’s why you have to tell him,” Felicia pressed. “One: It doesn’t matter how much of a player a man may be; I don’t care how much he likes to sleep around without protection and not care what happens. If he’s gonna be a father, a man wants to know it. Two: If you really stop the pregnancy without telling him, you’re gonna have to live with it, and I know you—you can’t do it. It’ll eat you up inside. Honey, you need to tell this man what he did, and you both have to figure out what you’re gonna do.”

  Tara looked off, feeling sicker by the minute. Everything that Felicia just said, while in her own words, was everything that Tara had told herself in the sleepless hours of the night gone by. True as it was that it was her body and her choice, the choice did not exist in a vacuum. There were other factors that made it truly less of a choice than it seemed to be.

  “If I tell him,” said Tara, “we’ll both have choices to make. He’ll have to figure out what to do about his own life and his own plans, and how this fits in with all that. There are things he wants to do, things he wants to accomplish, things he wants his life to be about. He might not be able to do any of that if it gets out that he made a baby with a woman he’s not married to. The public seems to like him now. But if people knew, they might turn away from him. Or worse, the people he’s running against could smear him with it, ruin his name. That would humiliate hi
m. I don’t want him to face that. It would break his heart, and that would break my heart.”

  “Well, it’s not like he was married and slept around behind his wife’s back. He was single, you were single, you were attracted to each other. These things happen.”

  “I don’t think anything ‘just happens’ in politics, Felicia. The public is weird about people in office. They want politicians to be these spotless people—or not show that they have any spots. They’re fickle, and once they stop trusting they might never trust again. I don’t want that to happen to Brenton. He’s doing so well up to this point. Let me show you.”

  Tara got up and stepped behind the desk. Felicia got up with her and stood at her shoulder while Tara brought up the news videos that she’d watched earlier in the morning. Felicia looked at the male magnificence that had taken Tara to bed, and blinked, and blinked again. In response to Felicia’s gasp, Tara said, “Believe me, out of those suits he only gets better. Imagine what you’re looking at now, wearing long hair and nothing else, and hung like a zucchini.”