she’d finally e-mailed, near the end of May, she’d told him that the police hadn’t arrested anybody, and she’d missed too many classes to go back to school. Maybe in the fall. Her message had concluded, Thanks for the flowers and your good wishes, Caleb. But…can we not talk about what happened?
Their e-mail conversations over the next year had been surreal. She wanted to hear every detail about his village, from the goat that chased toddlers and finally ended up in the dinner pot to his work organizing schools. She was evasive about her own life except for the most superficial details. He knew she’d given up her apartment and was living with her father in Shoreline, just north of Seattle. She had decided not to go back to school that fall.
I’m still feeling some physical effects, she’d written, in what he guessed was a masterly understatement. The dean says whenever I’m ready. Next fall looks better.
She talked about autumn leaves and lilacs coming into bloom, about windstorms and politics, but not herself. Mention of mutual friends became rare. In fact, he began to suspect she wasn’t seeing anyone but her father and sister.
She always responded to his e-mails, but started to take a couple of weeks to do so. When the time for his return to the States neared, she wrote, So, are you coming back to the Seattle area? If so, we’ll have to get together some time.
Some time? They were best friends. What did she mean, some time?
A couple of his buddies were at the airport along with his parents to greet him when he landed at Sea-Tac. Not Laurel. When he called and tried to set up a dinner, lunch or anything else, she had excuses. Caleb called Nadia and found out that she hadn’t seen Laurel in six months. She’d given up. Finally, he just went by her dad’s house.
Laurel was shocked to find him on her doorstep, but not as much as he was by the sight of her. It wasn’t so much the injuries—he’d expected those. A scar ran from the crest of her cheekbone into her hairline. Her face wasn’t as perfectly sculpted as it had been. But that didn’t matter.
What got him was the weight she’d lost, the paleness of her face, the dullness in her eyes. She was thin, washed out. Her arms were wrapped around her waist instead of outstretched to draw him into a big hug. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
He couldn’t say, What in hell happened to you? He already knew. He just hadn’t known how far the effects went beyond the physical.
He hugged her, pretending he didn’t notice the way she shrank away. He talked about his flight, about his culture shock, persuaded her to take a walk to a small park he’d noticed driving there.
The next time he called, she made excuses again. He dropped by again. And again.
She quit even talking about going back to law school, but she did heal to the point where she got a job at a downtown law firm and with her dad’s help bought the house and moved out on her own once again. By that time, few of her old friends came around anymore. Even Nadia, now married and working full-time as a marketing executive, had given up. Only Caleb stuck it out. Sometimes he wondered why he persisted. But…she was Laurel. He’d known from the first time he saw her that she was special. He’d said friends forever, and meant it.
He used to think they might get together sometime. As in, sleep together, or maybe even fall in love and go off into the sunset. At first it didn’t happen because their timing wasn’t right. He had a high school girlfriend when they first met; by the time he and Danica called it quits at October break, Laurel was dating some guy. It worked that way until their senior year, when they were both briefly single. He thought about making a move on her. He wanted to make a move on her. Damn, he’d wanted to. But then he looked at her and thought, Yeah, but she’s my best friend. It can’t work out long term. I’m leaving for two years. What if screwing her now ruins what we have?
In the end, it hadn’t seemed worth it. But he’d left for a summer in Europe believing that someday Laurel would be the girl for him. If he had a choice between time spent with Laurel and anyone else, Laurel always won. Once he got back, he thought, then he’d get bold.
That wasn’t how it happened, of course, or how it ever would happen. They’d stayed friends, since he wouldn’t let her quit on them. But romance was not a possibility anymore. She wouldn’t let it be.
Nonetheless, he’d been royally pissed when she told him she had chosen Matt Baker to father her baby. She’d decided to pick a friend, and she hadn’t picked him? He hadn’t even made her goddamn list? For a minute, he’d seen red. Or maybe green, because he was jealous as hell. If any man’s sperm was swimming inside Laurel Woodall, it was going to be his.
It would, that is, if he could get it up and manage to jack off in her bathroom, knowing she was sitting out in the living room pretending to watch TV. Him, he’d never felt less aroused in his life.
And this was the big day, outlined in red on his calendar. The day of the month she deemed her most fertile. Something he had never expected to know about her.
Of course, instead of being the big day, it was going to be a humiliating one for him if he couldn’t perform.
To start with, her bathroom wasn’t conducive to erotic activities, even self-managed ones. The damn room was tiny—as in, you could wash your hands while you were still sitting on the toilet. For that matter, you could stick your head in the shower and wash your hair without leaving the toilet, either. Good thing if he ever had to take a shower here, because his entire body sure wouldn’t fit in that stall.
His real problem, though, was that the bathroom felt virginal. White-painted cabinets, wallpaper—although there wasn’t much wall—that was also white strewn with violets. He used to think it was funny that tough, argumentative, take-no-prisoners Laurel had a secret girlie side. Right now, gaze on the tiny, green-glass bottle with tiny white bell-shaped flowers in it that sat next to the sink, Caleb wasn’t so amused. Trying to get worked up, he felt as if he was raping her in a figurative if not literal sense.
She wants your damn sperm.
No, she didn’t. She wanted an immaculate conception. But she couldn’t have one, so she was hoping for the next best thing. A tube of some unacknowledged substance that she could use like a douche. She didn’t want him, she wanted a baby.
Well, if that was all she’d take from him, that’s what he’d give her, Caleb thought grimly, and unzipped his jeans.
Think about that beauty who flirted with you in Santo Domingo.
The idea of sitting here in this girlie bathroom, Laurel a room away, getting aroused by imagining the exotic, coffee-skinned beauty who had tried to lure him into her rooms on a back street in the colonial Dominican Republic city struck him as dirty.
It had to be Laurel, Caleb realized, desperate. How could he give her a baby if it wasn’t even her he was thinking about? Whether she would like it or not, he was going to close his eyes and imagine making love with her. Maybe this wasn’t the normal way for a man and woman to conceive a child, but he figured it wasn’t as much the physical act as the emotions that were important. By God, he was going to feel as close to what he should be as he could manage.
But it was the old Laurel he pictured, the one who laughed at him and challenged him and, yes, flirted with him. He fantasized about the young woman he remembered from brief glimpses, in tiny panties and bra. By her senior year, her body was slim and pale but for nicely rounded hips she grumbled about, but looked more than fine to him, and generous breasts she tried to minimize with baggy shirts. It was the
