Angel's Baby

by Pamela Browning

  She lifted a shoulder and let it fall, a study in movement and grace. “I don’t know. I never think of it, I guess.”

  He handed her the wine and sat down beside her, keeping a careful distance between them. “Sounds to me as if you’re a workaholic. Busy as a bee,” he said conversationally.

  She took a sip, considering. “Maybe my bees’ industriousness rubs off on me. Like pollen,” she answered.

  “I’d like to see that you have a little fun before the baby comes,” he said after a moment’s thought.

  She turned to look at him, focusing her wide-eyed gaze on his face. “Why?”

  “You’ll spend the next twenty years or so caring for my kid. It seems as if the least I can do is encourage you to enjoy yourself beforehand.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Stuart,” she said slowly, her finger tracing lazy doodles in the sand. “What could be more exciting than watching a baby grow?” She lifted her eyes to his, and he saw that she really meant what she was saying, she really believed it. He felt bewildered, seeing the passion in her eyes. He couldn’t imagine feeling so committed to a child; the idea was foreign to him.

  “I never thought about it,” he said honestly. To him, the baby that the two of them were planning to create was an abstract thing, not real. By the time it became a reality, he would be long gone. For the first time, he felt slightly uncertain about stepping so easily out of his child’s life.

  “I’ve thought about the baby a lot,” she said, staring out over the ocean with a dreamy look on her face. Stuart noticed that her shirt gaped open in the front where a button had come undone. Through the opening, he saw the softly rounded curves of her breasts, the shadow of a nipple visible through the lace of her bra. He looked away. Should he tell her that her blouse was open? Or would it be better to keep his mouth shut? He decided to keep his mouth shut.

  Angel went on talking. “I’ll go to Key West for the birth,” she was saying. “Maybe I could stay with Toby the mail boat captain and his daughter for a week or so before the baby is born. Or maybe the doctor will want to induce labor so I won’t be taking the chance of delivering the baby here on the island, where there won’t be anyone to help.”

  Stuart knew he shouldn’t give a flying fig where Angel planned to give birth, but with a sense of surprise, he discovered that he did.

  He reached around the log for the wine bottle and topped off her glass. “You can’t live on Halos Island during the last part of your pregnancy,” he said in a reasoning tone.

  “Of course I can,” she said.

  “It’s too far away from everything. You don’t even have a short-wave radio for communicating in case of an emergency. Why don’t you have one, anyway?”

  “It’s never seemed important. I’m young, I’m healthy and I know how to cope with emergencies,” she said.

  “Not with childbirth,” he said.

  “I didn’t say I was going to have the baby on Halos Island, did I? I told you I’ll go to the hospital in Key West, didn’t I?”

  He wished she wouldn’t bristle at his suggestions. He was only trying to point out the deficiencies in her plan. He was pondering whether to point out to her that he was being as agreeable as he could, but he’d barely shaped his thoughts into unspoken words when Angel said, “I thought you promised me some oysters.”

  Glad to have something to do, he stood up. “Why don’t you set out the plates and forks?” he said, indicating a large, flat rock near the high-water mark.

  To cook the oysters, Stuart heaped them on the heavy steel plate over the fire. Then he waded into the ocean and scooped up water with his hands, throwing it over the shells until steam rose in billows, the fragrance of the oysters mingling with the pungent scent of seawater and wood smoke. Finally, he covered the mound of oysters with the wet burlap sack until the heat from the steam began to crack the shells open.

  While he was doing this, Angel watched attentively but made no attempt at conversation. When they sat down uneasily across from each other to eat, he had to show her how to shuck the oysters with the large blade of his pocketknife and dig out the succulent meat.

  “The oysters are good, Stuart, really good,” she said. He watched her making short work of the oysters and wished that he wasn’t sitting across from her. It was impossible to take his eyes off her face as it expressed pleasure and even bliss. What, he wondered, would her face look like at the height of lovemaking? Could a lover evoke those same rapt expressions, those same sighs of pleasure? He found himself focusing on her mouth, rosy and flecked with a bit of potato. He had the reckless desire to reach over and brush it off; thankfully, she did it first. Still, he couldn’t stop looking at her mouth, studying her delicately rounded chin, thinking that she had a face and a physique obviously made for pleasing a man. For pleasing him.

  “Stuart,” Angel said, as if from a long way off, “is anything wrong?”

  He blinked his eyes, bringing Angel back into perspective. “Uh, no,” he said. And after that he couldn’t make himself look at her mouth; it would have given him away, had she seen the look in his eyes that betrayed his hunger—which at this point was not for his dinner, but for her.

  Later, he tossed more wood on the fire and poured the rest of the wine into their glasses. They watched the moon rise over the ocean, turning the sand into a blanket of glittering diamonds and casting a silver-sheened path on the water. Stuart nursed the last of his wine, trying to think of something to say that would get him on Angel’s good side, if only for the sake of their feeling comfortable around each other.

  The baby, he thought. Her pregnancy. He focused his eyes on the lights of a distant freighter moving slowly across the horizon. “I was thinking,” he said carefully, “that we ought to buy one of those home pregnancy test kits when we’re in Key West getting married.”

  Angel shrugged it off. “Maybe we won’t need one,” she said.

  He looked down at her, thinking that perhaps she could be teased out of her too-serious mood.

  “You’d rather kill a rabbit?” he said.

  Angel looked up, unsure how to take his remark. He wasn’t being smart-alecky, she decided after taking a split second to register his good-humored expression.

  “Doctors don’t use rabbits to diagnose pregnancy anymore. It’s determined by more sophisticated tests.”

  “Fine, but a home pregnancy test sounds like a good idea. It’s not that easy to get to a doctor from this island. Why wonder, when you can know for sure?”

  She sighed. “All right, we’ll buy the test kit when we go to Key West to be married, but I’m sure I won’t need any home pregnancy test, because I’ll be able to tell when I’m pregnant as soon as it happens,” she said in a soft voice.

  Even in the darkness, she could see Stuart’s eyebrows fly up. “How?” he said.

  She’d have to be very careful how she answered. She leaned forward, looping her arms around her upraised knees and gazing up at the stars, magical pinpricks of light shining through the vast velvety curtain of the sky.

  “Oh, there’s this mystical feeling that I imagine a woman must feel as soon as she’s harboring a new life,” she said vaguely. Not to mention nausea, swollen breasts, and the urge to sleep all the time, she thought to herself.

  “Coming from a scientist, that sounds a little flaky,” he said. She turned to look at him and realized that he didn’t mean that in a derogatory sense; he was looking at her with an expression of openness and what he probably hoped would pass for understanding. The trouble was that he thought the experience of getting pregnant was as new to her as it would be to him. And he was dead wrong.

  “I was a woman before I became a scientist,” she reminded him.

  “And you think women have some inner sense that tells them, ‘Hey, guess what, you’re pregnant’?” He gazed thoughtfully at the phosphorescent glow of the waves as they tumbled on the beach.

  “Absolutely.” She allowed her surreptitious glance to fall on his long,
muscular legs, knowing even as she did so that it wasn’t a good idea.

  “Why do you think that?” he said.

  “It’s really not as farfetched as you think. It’s scientific as long as you keep in mind that, like other animals, humans have instincts. Solitary bees know to build nests and store pollen for their young, even though they can’t know intellectually or experientially that they are going to mate and lay eggs. I have a very strong mating instinct, for instance, and—”

  “Oh, you do?” he said, his eyes lighting up.

  “That is to say... Well...I mean...” she stammered. She had meant to say that she had a very strong mothering instinct; chalk it up to a Freudian slip.

  “I can hardly wait for this mating instinct to manifest itself,” Stuart said dryly.

  “That wasn’t what I meant to say, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to drop the subject,” she said. She stood up, thinking it was high time she went back to the house.

  Stuart stood, too, blocking her way to the path. The flickering flames of the firelight were reflected deep in the pupils of his eyes.

  Angel was trembling, even though from where she stood she could feel the warm glow from the fire. There was another, longer path to the house to the north, and she sidestepped Stuart and veered in that direction, walking with her head down, her arms wrapped around herself to ward off the chill.

  “I find this whole process of making a baby very interesting,” Stuart said, falling into step beside her.

  “No doubt,” Angel muttered, but now she was thinking, How am I going to get rid of him, short of telling him to get lost?

  “Would you mind not walking so fast?” he said.

  “I didn’t ask you to follow me,” she said.

  “No,” he allowed.

  “In fact, it would suit me if you’d go back to the house. I’d like some privacy, Stuart.”

  “Why? Because of what I said?”

  “You could take this situation more seriously. The conception of our baby isn’t something to joke about.”

  “You’ve been living apart from people for too long. This is how people talk to each other, Angel. Real communication isn’t accomplished by talking the way words are written in books. It’s give-and-take, it’s silly banter.”

  “What’s your point, Stuart?”

  “Talking is how we get to know each other.”

  “We don’t necessarily have to know each other,” she said.

  Stuart grabbed her arm. “Angel, when we’re married, we’re going to be doing the most intimate thing two people can do. Don’t you think it makes sense for us to be more than acquaintances?”

  She shook his hand away. “Why? Many members of the animal kingdom never know each other, never see each other again after the act that impregnates the female.”

  “We’re human beings, Angel. I hate to be the first one to break the news to you, but human beings are a higher life-form than animals.”

  “Some are. On the other hand, I’ve known a few men who occupied a spot on the evolutionary ladder that is several orders beneath pond scum,” she said.

  Stuart stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked slightly behind her for a time. “I’d sure like to know where you’re coming from,” he said.

  Her breath caught in her throat. “It’s no business of yours. All you are required to do is father a child by me. I don’t expect you to know me or understand me or care about me. I made that clear from the beginning, and I don’t want to confide in you or tell you about my past or be friends with you,” she said in a rush.

  “You don’t have to confide in me, and if you won’t talk about your past, I won’t talk about mine. I think we at least ought to try to be friends, though, for obvious reasons.”

  Caught off guard, she regarded him out of the corners of her eyes. “Friendship wasn’t in the bargain,” she said.

  “I thought it was implied.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “All right, Angel. I get it. You’re the queen bee of this island.”

  “I’m a solitary bee, Stuart. I live alone, like the female of the species of bee I study.”

  “Okay. And you’ve got this misguided idea that you can do your own work, like the female solitary bees. You build your own nest and you store your own pollen. The male bee, after he does his duty, is never around. That’s me.”

  “If you say so,” she answered. This whole conversation was so off-the-wall that she was beginning to wonder if she was hearing it correctly.

  “Tell me, Angel. How are you going to manage to be long gone by the time your little larva hatches? That’s what the female solitary bee does, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You know I’m eager to be a mother.”

  “Nevertheless, I see certain parallels between you and the bees you study. I think they’ve bee-fuddled you.”

  “You’re very clever with words, Stuart. Now will you please fall off the face of the earth? At least until tomorrow morning?”

  Stuart seized her shoulders and whirled her around to face him. With his back to the full moon, his features were shadowed. His fingers bit into her flesh. “Listen, Angel, we’re going to live together on this island until you’re pregnant, but I can’t live with you if you’re antagonistic. And it seems damned unnatural for us to climb into bed together on our wedding night without sharing so much as a kiss beforehand.”

  “All right,” she said, giving up. “Go ahead and kiss me.”

  He dropped his hands. “Not like this,” he said with distaste.

  “Like what?”

  “To get it over with. In my opinion, a kiss should be spontaneous.” He started to walk back in the direction from which they had come.

  Angel refused to let him have the last word. “Right now I’m thinking that you might have a point,” she said.

  “About your similarity to solitary bees?” In the moonlight, he looked grim and angry.

  “About—about our wedding night,” she said. “About its being difficult...to...” She couldn’t say the words.

  “To have sex?” he supplied, with a humorless smile.

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” she said.

  “I prefer to call it making love, but you can’t make love to a person you barely know. Sex is an instinct, while lovemaking is an art. It takes a caring human being to elevate the act to its highest purpose, as opposed to insects, who are only doing what comes naturally,” he said, figuring that he might as well speak his piece in terms she’d understand.

  She stared at him.

  “So am I finally getting through to you?”

  “I understand what you’re trying to say,” she said carefully, but she was thinking that he was according the act of intercourse more importance than it was due. She could never tell him how unimportant sex was to her, except for the purpose of procreation.

  “Good,” he said, though he must have seen her confusion written on her face, because he laughed under his breath and walked back to where she stood.

  His eyes glittered. “I have an idea, Angel, that under that calm, cool veneer, you’re a passionate woman,” he said.

  She wanted to scream, But I’m not! I never have been! I don’t even know what passion is!

  Failing that, she wanted to fling a curt answer in his direction and run. But she couldn’t move. It was as if she were rooted to the spot. Her stomach felt as if the bottom had fallen out, and all she could do was stare at him.

  He reached out a hand and cupped her chin, turning her face so that the moonlight shone in her eyes. She twisted away from him, but he only laughed under his breath.

  “Mating in the human usually begins with foreplay,” he said softly. “Foreplay begins with touching. It can be something as light as a finger on the lips, like this,” and he demonstrated, drawing the tip of his forefinger across her parted lips so that they began to tingle.

  “Or it can be a nuzzle, like this,” he said, before lowering his lips to the se
nsitive spot just below her ear.

  “Or it can start with a kiss.” And he touched his lips lightly to hers.

  Her breath caught as his mouth took possession of hers. She felt his tongue outline her lips before exploring her mouth. Angel stood motionless, her head spinning with the shock of being kissed by a man who knew exactly how to go about it. As her astonishment was replaced by sensation, she actually felt desire curling up from the pit of her stomach. The sensation was so unexpected, so amazing, that time halted, the world stopped spinning, and all she could do was center down into it, experiencing it, and—much to her surprise—liking it. Her self-control ebbed away as if borne by the tide.

  Without touching her anywhere else, Stuart deepened the kiss. His lips were soft yet firm, moving against hers with a sensitivity that weakened her knees. She was acutely aware of his body so close to hers that its heat seemed to surround her. His male scent swirled to envelop her, filling her senses.

  Her heartbeat throbbed like the beat of a drum in her ears. If he would touch her with his hands, settle them at the hollow of her waist, move them slightly upward, she would surely be unable to breathe. She imagined him curving his fingers around her breasts, his fingers tracing their contours, caressing her nipples. The thought of it brought a warm, liquid feeling to the juncture of her thighs so that she was restlessly aware of a longing to be touched by him, to be filled by him.

  Only an inch remained between them, and she arched toward him, willing his arms to go around her. He didn’t oblige. He held her only with his lips, teasing her with desire. How had he learned to make a woman want him by only using his lips and teeth and tongue? What was it about kissing him that made her have to fight for breath and thought and even her own sanity?

  When she thought that she could not sustain the kiss for one more minute, when she thought that she must throw her arms around him and cling to him in sheer wanton pleasure, he abruptly removed his lips from hers.

  “A preview of coming attractions,” he said.

  She caught her breath. “Coming. Attractions,” she said woodenly.