Chapter 9: A New Day

Marcy opened her eyes with a sharp gasp. All she could see was blackness.

It took her a while to remember where she was.

She was in a motel room - not the cabin. The disaster at the cabin was weeks ago. It was over. She'd survived it. She was safe now.

It was only a nightmare.

Her heart was still racing, only now it was racing in terror, not passion.

It only became worse as her mind reorganized the fact she'd just relived from the fiction. Yes, she was safe; "death" was no longer stalking her. But Karen was really dead, and a new life really was growing inside her.

All those emotions she wasn't able to feel in the dream suddenly dropped on her like a shipping container.

For the longest time she was unable to navigate through the confusion of them all. She was extremely distressed, but for no particular reason, and yet, for a million reasons all at once.

Eventually, once she had calmed down, she owned up to herself with scathing honesty. What she had done with Paul in the cabin was wrong! Not just because she had slept with him, but because she did it to forget about Karen. And Karen deserved so much better than that!

Karen was sick, dying and probably in pain. Karen was alone and probably so very scared. Marcy was right there and she did nothing. She didn't tend to Karen, she didn't dress her sores, she did nothing to ease her pain. At the very least, she could've kept Karen company; could've talked to her and tried to keep her spirits up. But Marcy didn't do any of those things.

But even worse than simply walking away from Karen in the midst of her suffering, Marcy had cruelly carried on like Karen didn't even exist. She seduced Paul without the slightest regard for the hold Karen had upon his heart, nor the indecisive attraction Karen felt for him. She broke the trust of friendship. She even broke her own rules about unsafe sex. All for the sake of finding some distraction that could make her forget that Karen existed. Because being aware of Karen meant being aware of the sickness eating away at her; and Marcy was just too fucking cowardly to deal with that.

But Karen deserved better. Much better.

Now, Marcy found herself in an eerily similar situation. She was so eager to pretend that the baby inside her wasn't there; so willing to forget it. She wanted it to simply go away because it would make her so much happier if it, and all the complications that came with it, simply didn't exist.

That was exactly how she had treated Karen. It broke her heart remembering that she'd rejected her friend like that. Marcy would've given anything to be able to go back in time and undo her selfishness; to do whatever she could to be there for Karen. But she couldn't.

And yet she could. The baby inside her was just like Karen: frail and in need of Marcy's help. If she chose to reject it, it would die. This was a fresh chance for Marcy to be the better person she dearly wished she had been before. This was her chance to do the right thing and help someone who needed her, instead of just tending to her own selfish preferences.

If she kept acting as shamefully as she had in the cabin, if she made a habit of turning her back on others every time they became an inconvenience to her, what kind of shallow, lonely life would that amount to? She was only still breathing because EMTs had come knocking on the cabin door before she got as sick as Karen. What if one day she needed to be rescued and nobody cared enough about her to come to her aid?

The EMTs ... The rescue...

It occurred to Marcy that at the moment she left the cabin there were two unwanted parasites inside her body. One was the virus that eventually destroyed Karen: death. The other was the seed that Paul had planted inside her: life. As she had laid on that bed in the cabin, with Paul spooning her from behind, she had wished so dearly for life; wished that the sickness would not finish her, even though she felt that that was almost certain to be her fate. And here she was, her wish granted.

Her fortune seemed to turn when her baby was conceived. The disease took Karen, but Marcy and the life inside her were spared. While Marcy couldn't bring herself to believe that the baby had actually saved her life somehow, she nonetheless saw a parallel between their fates. Marcy had been granted the chance to live at the same time as the one inside her.

Now, to callously discard that other life seemed like an insult to everything Marcy had prayed so earnestly for. She had a renewed appreciation for how precious life was. She was immeasurably grateful that hers had been spared. Now, with another life in her own hands, Marcy felt she could do no less then to grant the same mercy.

The thoughts she was having scared her immensely. Her train of thought was taking her somewhere she really, really didn't want to go. Beginning to panic, she tried to recall Paul's counsel from before.

"Nothing you can do can undo the past."

"There's no point torturing yourself because of what we did."

Marcy remembered the words, but the logic suddenly seemed so flimsy. They were words that sounded nice on the surface, but now Marcy knew they were just what she wanted to hear. They came from a point of view that had been distorted to offer her convenience, by obscuring greater truths that she now found impossible to ignore.

She wept as she made the decision with absolute resolve. She would see the pregnancy through.

She wept for all the discomfort it would press upon her. She wept for the hormonal chaos that would assault her. She wept for the fact that it would make her fat and ugly. She wept for all the fun, booze and pot she'd miss out on over the coming months. She wept for the agony of labor she would eventually go through. But most of all, she wept for the way this wrecking ball would turn her life into a shambles.

She couldn't romanticize the thought of holding a gurgling little baby in her arms. The thought of being called "Mommy" made her gag. She most definitely didn't want this baby. She most definitely despised having it inside her. The road ahead of her was not a rollercoaster: a track that offered some highs along with the lows. Carrying this baby was nothing to her but a burden, plain and simple. But it was a burden she simply couldn't shirk.

Marcy let the full weight of her worry over her now daunting future settle upon her. She explored all her uncomfortable thoughts about what this pregnancy would do to her life; often asking poignant questions that she simply didn't have any answers for yet.

She finally let down her defences surrounding the circumstances of the baby's conception and allowed herself to openly confront the realities of the affair. She lamented what she had done, not because it had gotten her pregnant, but because it had been so inhumane. It would've made Paul sick if not for the timely intervention of the EMTs, and it denied Karen.

And at long last, she finally gave herself the opportunity to truly grieve for her dear, departed friend. Up until now, Marcy's tears over Karen's death were largely for herself. She had wept for her own uncertain future, wept for the turmoil of guilt and bitterness that Karen's death had brought up in her, wept for her own trauma from having to watch Karen succumb to the flesh eating disease and wept for the way her own life had been ruined by the same vacation that had killed Karen.

But now she mourned only for the loss of her lovely friend. She mourned for the awful suffering Karen must've gone through in her final weeks. She mourned for the loneliness and betrayal Karen must've felt while she was locked in that tiny, dark toolshed all by herself. She mourned for the bright, bubbly glow of Karen's personality that was no longer shining upon the world. And she mourned for the future that Karen had lost, all the exciting, happy and proud moments of life that she never got to have.

With her seemingly endless flow of tears still trickling down on to Paul's shoulder, Marcy said her final goodbyes to her best friend.

Marcy had confronted all the awkward, painful, distressing thoughts that she'd been artfully dodging ever since leaving the cabin, at a growing cost to her sanity. She had accepted that she was pregnant and that she would remain so for another 8 months. She had acknowledged the tragedy of what had happened in those woods, particularly to Karen. She had made a frank and honest confession to herself about her terrible, careless choices and accepted their moral and physical repercussions.

Yet as difficult a process as it was, Marcy was ever mindful of the fact that Paul was right beside her. The slack, yet warm embrace of his arm curled around her; his hip bone settled neatly into the cup of her crotch. Right now, as she was facing all these problems, Marcy wasn't alone and for that she was immeasurably grateful.

Her mind was well aware that Paul was fast asleep, that he had absolutely no idea what she was going through. But that could not diminish the sense that the weight of these heavy matters wasn't resting upon her alone. Someone was there with her in this harsh, frightening moment of reflection and decision. Someone was holding her. That made all the difference in getting her through what would otherwise have been a devastating time.

Eventually, she calmed down. The flow of tears dried up and the barely-audible whimpers fell completely silent. But Marcy was too awake to go straight back to sleep. She spent some time in quiet contemplation. Some of the things she pondered were important, such as her future and how she would manage the pregnancy. But a lot of it was not, such as wondering how friends she'd talked to at dinner were getting along. She also spent a few minutes reflecting on how enjoyable it had been to spend the night with Paul.

Marcy had no idea how long she'd been awake when Paul began to stir, though it felt like somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half.

He lifted his head for a moment, most likely to peek at the clock radio behind Marcy. Then he dropped back onto the pillow with a frustrated huff.

"What time is it?" Marcy asked him.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," Paul quietly apologized.

"It's okay," she replied.

"It's 5.10," Paul sighed, in response to her question.

"Time to go?" Marcy inquired after an ominous moment of silence.

"Yeah," Paul confirmed in the kind of voice people use to describe nuisance chores. "I want to get back home before my family wakes up. Don't want to have to face a bunch of questions about where I spent the night, y'know?"

"No, of course not," Marcy agreed.

Despite Paul's preference to be home nice and early, they continued to lay there in silence, still resting comfortably in the embrace they'd fallen asleep in. They both knew Paul needed to make every effort to keep their fling discreet, but neither of them wanted to see their temporary haven away from reality come to an end.

"One for the road?" Marcy asked him in a gentle, yet spritely tone.

"What the hell!" Paul accepted, with a mirthless chuckle.

Marcy slid over so that she was completely on top of Paul and found his lips with her own. Paul's loose one-arm embrace became a firm two-arm bear hug as they kissed. Marcy began to massage Paul's pubic area invitingly with her own mons, but made no deliberate effort to tease his cock. With the tone set for sex, she knew it would come to the party in due course.

Paul sat upright, carrying Marcy with him. They kissed for a while longer before he dipped Marcy back a little and leaned in to suckle upon her breasts, with which he was so enamoured. Marcy fondled the back of his head as he feasted upon them like a man who hadn't eaten in a week, continuing to slowly rock her hips around on his lap.

As they entered into another prolonged kiss together, Marcy felt the touch of Paul's stiffening maleness against her labia. Marcy had been a little worried that her nightmare might have soured her on having sex so soon. But thankfully, her libido proved to be quite healthy. She found the sensation of his shaft brushing over her opening to be very stimulating and increasingly, she ached to stick all that meat inside her.

Paul departed from her lips once again, to kiss and suckle upon her magnificent tits a second time. Marcy let him have his fill for a time, but when the genital stimulation became too much for her, she lifted his chin with her fingertips and stole a brief, yet firm kiss. While he was distracted, Marcy lifted her hips, allowing Paul's cock to rise just enough for her to align their sexes for penetration. Then with a gentle motion, she dropped on to his fully-erect maleness. Her pussy was saturated with fluid, making the motion as smooth as feeding her arms through the sleeves of a silk blouse.