Sugar Bear was seated on the picnic table, with his feet on the concrete bench beside it, looking just like he did the first time she saw him here. The image took her breath way and she couldn’t stifle a sob. He turned and looked at her then, didn’t say anything, just got to his feet and held out his arms and she rushed into them.
She cried there for a long time, just as she had done the first time she met him here. But he didn’t touch her, slide his hand tantalizingly up her back to unhook her bra strap. Her breasts were large, D cups, heavy and pendulous, and when he had fondled them, she understood for the first time what it meant to be aroused. She’d been panting then, gasping for air, and when he’d leaned over and kissed her there, each one, she would have collapsed from desire if she hadn’t been leaning against the table.
Now, he only held her while she cried, patting her back tenderly. She wanted his tenderness, of course, but she needed his passion. She needed to know he still wanted her, still loved her. She needed to feel his presence inside her.
But she did have his presence inside her. Carried his baby under her heart. And that’s what they had met to talk about. What that meant for both their futures.
She struggled to control her sobbing, knew that her tears had totally destroyed her makeup, that her mascara was running in twin black lines down her cheeks and if she wiped it, it would smear and she’d look like a Halloween mask. she shouldn’t have cried, didn’t want him to see her like this, their last time.
Last time.
The words threatened to send her into another round of near-hysterical bawling, but she grabbed hold of her emotions. She needed to be strong now. He would want her to be strong. And she had to show him, demonstrate to him that she could be strong … could remain silent and stoic while he waited for her.
Somehow he had guided her to one of the benches attached to the table, facing out, looking out at the view from the Top of the World, only a few feet from the post that held the dangling remains of the restraining fence.
He sat beside her and she pulled out of his arms, wishing for all the world that she’d thought to bring tissues. Why hadn’t she thought about that; she had known she was going to cry. But she hadn’t and could do nothing better than to lift the hem of her Eastern Kentucky University tee-shirt and use it to wipe the black off her face.
She was surprised that he didn’t reach out and touch her as she wiped her face, raising the shirt up over her breasts in a tantalizing display.
Then she took a shaky breath and just looked at him, looked into his face, looking for the love that softened his features when he looked at her. He was not a physically attractive man at all. Narrow shoulders, a sunken white chest and a paunch that sometimes got in the way of their lovemaking — his belly and her belly together. Unless she just lay on her back with her knees drawn up … the fit was not ideal.
He walked funny. Actually, she had noticed that the first time she met him, the day he came to pick up Toby from Vacation Bible School. He had a bad knee that sometimes just folded up under him and he had developed a hitching sort of gait to compensate, not a limp exactly. A limp would not have looked odd and his — lurching — did.
His forehead was too high, and now that his hairline had receded off it, it seemed to loom over the top of his face like a cliff. His black eyebrows grew in a single bristly line across the bridge of his nose and he never trimmed them, so they always looked unruly and unkempt. His nose was too big for his face by half, the most dominant feature above his thin lips and small chin, and the nostrils flared out when he breathed, making it look even bigger. It was also so covered with blackheads, some of them huge, that it looked like he’d spilled pepper on it.
Why was she just noticing that now? Surely she had seen them before. Several of them actually had little black stickery things poking out. If you rubbed your hand across the skin you could have felt them. The urge to reach out and squeeze them was almost overpowering. His eyes were small and dark, like little marbles with no discernible color — just dark brown that blended in with the iris so you couldn’t even see the black spot in the center.
There was an unreadable look in those eyes right now that was — not alarming, but … it was just not what she expected to see there.
“Sam said no, didn’t she?” he asked, his voice oddly devoid of any emotion.
“She said she wasn’t trained to do a … procedure like that. But she said that even if she had been, she’d have refused.” She drew in a shaky breath. “She said … it wasn’t just, you know, a clump of cells. That it was a baby, and she wouldn’t kill it.”
He had visibly winced when she said the word ‘baby.” But maybe he just hadn’t realized that she was far enough along — that it really was a baby now.
“She was right. It is …” She hadn’t admitted this even to herself, heard the truth of it in her voice as she said the word. “I’ve felt it move.” She had resolutely ignored the little fluttery feelings, told herself it was just her gurgling gut, her faulty digestive organs that had doomed her to life in a body encased in rolls of fat. Now, she placed her hand almost protectively over her belly.
“Did you tell Sam about me?”
“Sure, I told—”
“Did you tell her my name?”
He barked the words and she flinched at his brusqueness.
“No, I called you ‘Sugar Bear,’ like we agreed.”
“Who else knows?”
“Nobody.”
“You didn’t tell a girlfriend, confide in one of the people in your church?”
“Of course not. You know I don’t have any real friends. I don’t have anybody … only you.”
She hadn’t meant for that last part to sound so plaintive, so pleading. And when he didn’t respond with reassurance — that she did have him, that he would love her and — she suddenly felt the bottom drop out of her belly.
Could it be … could it possibly be that he was … going to leave her? The very thought of it made her so nauseous bile rose up in the back of her throat. It was one thing for their love to be ripped apart by circumstances, two lovers who couldn’t be together. That happened in the movies and in stories all the time. It was a horrible thought — not to see him or touch him. But it didn’t feel alone. Abandoned. That was the most awful feeling in the world.
“Howie …”
“I told you not to call me that. Not to ever call me that. You might slip and—”
He must have seen how devastated she felt, read it on her face, because he softened.
“But it’s alright. It doesn’t matter now. Everything’s going to be fine.”
She should have felt encouraged by those words. But she didn’t. She felt … frightened.