Chapter 14

It was quite a while later before I heard sounds from inside the cabin, letting me know that Paula and her mom were back from wherever they had been. By that time, I'd started to work on a sketch of all three women and had really gotten involved with it. Since I really wanted to get more done as quickly as I could so I wouldn't lose the concept I had in my mind, I didn't get up to check on the sounds from inside the cabin. At the same time I was feeling a bit insecure about that sketch, I really didn't want any of the women to see it yet.

You see, all of them were in the vignette and I want to have it much more complete before they saw it at all. One reason for that was the fact that all of them were nude and the second reason was the similar expression on all of their faces. I suppose that morning had influenced me, but each one of them appeared as if she wanted something, the problem being that in order to get the effect the way I wanted it, the sketch had to be refined much more. So, when I heard Paula come to the door onto the deck, I flipped that sheet underneath and brought up a sketch of Sydney that I'd been working on previously.

"Hi, CJ. How are you today?" Paula asked quietly.

"Okay I guess." I looked up at her and smiled. "Did you two get done everything you wanted to do? Sydney said you were both seeing a new doctor."

"Well, yes and no." She sighed, then looked at me appraisingly. "How was your morning?"

"Enlightening." I answered calmly, then frowned. "And, upsetting."

"Oh?"

"Unh huh."

"Excuse me, CJ, good morning. Where is Sydney?" Aileen asked from behind Paula.

She looked like she was wasted, worn and frazzled. This was the first time I'd seen her looking tired and worn down, but I wasn't about to say anything, not in the mood I was in. Since her first words were about Sydney, I didn't even ask what was wrong.

"Morning, Aileen. Sydney went for a walk down toward the lake. I think she went toward the main dam, but I'm not positive of that."

"Thanks." Aileen answered quickly, then hurried off to follow Sydney.

With both Aileen and Sydney gone from the cabin, I knew Paula wanted to talk. I steeled myself for what I felt I had to say, knowing that I might have to offer support to Paula afterward. Then I waited, still fiddling with my sketches.

Paula didn't say or do much for a few moments, instead she spent some time looking out toward the lake, but finally she must have realized that I was willing to outwait her. She turned toward me with a resolved look on her face.

"I guess you and Sydney talked already, did you?"

"You could say we talked, yeah." I tried to keep my voice neutral.

"Well, since you don't exactly look happy and she's gone for a walk, I suppose things didn't go the way she hoped it would, did it?"

"I doubt it." I felt myself growing uptight and tried hard to fight it off.

"Well, she told you her idea then." Paula sighed and flopped back into a chair, staring at me and looking like she was worried concerning whatever I was about to say.

"Yes, we agreed to disagree." I said quietly. "But, let's forget that for a minute. What are you worried about?"

"Um, do you think I'm worried?"

"Yeah, if you were acting the way you usually would, by now you'd be sitting in my lap and I'd be getting hugs and kisses."

"Oh." She looked chagrined. "I guess I was a bit afraid that if things went wrong, you'd be p'd off with everyone, even me."

"Well, I'm not p'd off, not really. I am upset that you didn't warn me and talk to me about what was going on. I'm annoyed that Sydney considers me as a... well, I guess a commodity or something. If I was to be p'd off about anything it would be the idea that somehow I'm nothing more to the bunch of you than a source of sperm to make babies. That really gets under my skin."

"That's not it at all." She protested. "First off, I didn't know what was going on, so don't blame me. Mom and I were halfway back from our trip to town when she told me what Sydney had planned to try to do while we were gone. They'd been talking about you and teasing me earlier, or I thought they had, but it turned out they meant some of the things they said. I guess I was being gullible or something, but I really did think they were kidding me earlier. So I didn't know anything to talk to you about. Besides, Sydney had made a special arrangement for us to see a new gynecologist and you were sleeping so soundly when we left that I didn't want to disturb you."

"Okay, I guess I can believe you're gullible if you want me to." I sighed. "But why haven't you given me a kiss or a hug yet?"

"Well, Mom was worried that you might be mad and to be honest, so was I." She looked ready to cry.

"Your mom wasn't that worried, or she wouldn't have run off chasing after her girlfriend and leaving you here with me." I growled, folding the sketch pad so I could carry it and getting to my feet. "But, you didn't even trust me enough to give me a chance, none of you really have. You've all just assumed various things about me and tried to make me conform to your ideas. That is the one thing that does piss me off! However, none of you are in danger of suffering a beating or anything like that, even if I did get angry. The worst that might happen is that I might just tell you all to get into your new car, take along everything that you brought with you and just fuck right off! At the moment I'm damn close to doing exactly that."

"I'm sorry." She whispered. "I really don't know what to do to repair the problem though."

"Well to start off with, you could ask your mother and her lover to at least pretend to think that I'm human and that I have feelings and desires too. I have a personality of my own and I don't like being pigeonholed as 'just a man' and expected to act a certain way simply because I happen to have a penis. Next, you can start to show some backbone around your mom and Sydney. They may be older and more worldly than you are, but that doesn't mean that you can't make up your own mind about what you want, as well as what's right and wrong. If you can't, then you're just being a puppet of those two man hating bitches, and I'd probably be wise to simply walk away and give up on you."

With that said, I turned and walked inside with my sketch pads and pencils, putting them away in a locked cupboard. At that moment I certainly didn't want anyone to criticize the drawings I had been doing. Paula had scarcely gotten to her feet before I marched back out onto the deck and leaned against the railing, staring out toward the lake.

"I really don't understand why you're so mad at everyone?" Paula whispered. "I thought Mom and Sydney were treating you wonderfully. I mean they include you in everything and they wouldn't be teasing you if they didn't like you."

"Oh, sure they do." I snarled as sarcastically as I could. "What I've heard half of the time is praise laid on so fucking thick that it sounds like criticism, as if they doubt every fucking thing I say. I've done my best not to react until now, but that session this morning was just too fucking much. Sydney was trying her best to get me to act the way she expects a man to act. Maybe she does want a fucking kid, I don't know, but trying to get me to get her pregnant when I haven't even really gotten to know you is just too damn much. Hell, woman, I've hardly gotten used to calling you by name and she's trying to get between us. I don't really know you. You don't really know me. We haven't spent a lot of time talking about ourselves. In fact, I think we've spent more time screwing than we have talking."

"Oh, it's not that bad." I could barely hear her speak, her voice was so quiet.

"Oh come on now, what do I really know about you? Not very damn much other than that you were raised in a strange situation and you were over protected most of you life. From what I understand of things your mother practically abandoned you when you were young, leaving you to be raised by a weird woman with wild ideas. Then she dropped back into your life and is suddenly trying to run it for you. Now it looks to me almost as if she and her gal pal see that you've found a good thing. I looks to me like they want to dive in to grab their share or else fuck it up for you. At the moment I don't know which. At the same time, you're letting them fuck you around and not saying anything about it. Where the hell is your backbone?"

I realized then that I was probably hurting her and it really wasn't her that I was pissed off with. As soon as that dawned on me, I spun away before I said anything worse. At that moment I was as near to blind rage as I had ever been.

"Dammit, where are you going, CJ." She suddenly screamed as I went down the stairs and across the lawn toward a path in the bush where I could wear off the built up adrenaline in my system.

"For a walk, I need it." I hollered back without turning. "I'll be back in an hour or so."

Normally I went walking along the paths amongst the trees to observe and appreciate nature. That morning I slipped off into the woods to be away from people and to calm myself down. I had a place that I often went where I was usually able to relax and think. A few feet off of a trail, it was under the hanging boughs of a dogwood tree; one of the very few dogwoods I'd ever seen that had 'weeping' branches. A long time ago I'd shifted a section of log under it and set it so I could sit in comfort as I looked out toward the lake.

I hadn't realized it before, but that morning I found that spot let me watch for anyone coming on my back trail without being noticed as well. The hanging branches must have made it almost impossible to see me unless you looked directly at my face. The reason I found out was that Paula must have decided to follow me. I had hardly gotten sitting down before she came charging up the trail, her face looking like a thundercloud.

While I had come for a walk to get away from everyone, I couldn't very well let her go charging into the bush on little more than a game trail, either. She could either get lost or hurt herself far too easily. All it would take would be for her to slip as she was climbing over a deadfall along the trail and she could break an arm or a leg. So I waited until she was nearly even with me and I spoke up.

"If you want to scream at me, I'm over here." I said, loud enough for her to hear, but not loudly enough for my voice to carry far.

"CJ?"

"Yeah." I tried not to sound too angry. "I'm trying my best to calm down."

It took her a couple of moments to find me, but finally she was looking at me from behind a small shrub.

"Are you really mad?" She sounded close to tears.

"Yeah, but not really at you. I'm not angry enough to get physical in any way eother, so it's safe to come over here."

"Hmmph. After listening to you, I think you might be inclined to want to paddle Mom and Sydney." She sighed. "I don't think you understand them at all."

"You're right there." I agreed. 'I certainly don't understand them, and at this moment I'm not even sure that I want to understand them."

"To be honest, you keep surprising them in various ways, me too for that matter."

"Why, because I have some scruples? Because I refuse to screw another woman, just so she can have a kid? Because I insist on being involved in raising any kid I sire? What's so damn surprising about any of that?"

"Whoa there. What the heck are you talking about?"

"Oh come on, you know what happened. Sydney woke me up this morning by bringing me coffee. She was nude and doing her best to look provocative as hell. Once I was awake, she proceeded to tell me that she wanted a kid, my kid, then she announced that she was ovulating today. She wanted me to impregnate her the 'old fashioned way' because the other way was too much fuss and might not work as well." I spoke loudly, my voice showing my anger. "Then as if that wasn't enough of an insult, she blatantly told me that the kid wouldn't be my worry, almost as if she wanted me to forget about the fact that it would be my kid. The final insult was the fact that she told me you had insisted that she had to be nude when she brought me my coffee and told me what she wanted."

I paused, then thought about the bit after I'd had my shower, so I laid that on Paula as well.

"That wasn't at all what I meant or what I thought she'd do." Paula's face showed shock and astonishment. "All of us were teasing each other and I guess I did say she could tease you by coming to wake you up nude, but I didn't expect her to actually do it. On top of that, I really didn't think she meant to ask you to get her pregnant, not really. I mean, she was on about all sorts of genetics stuff and I don't know what all. Somehow I thought all of that crap was just teasing me, the way they've been doing for the past couple of days. I really didn't think she'd do anything like that."

She just stared at me for a minute, then broke into tears.

Okay, so I'm like most guys; I'm a sucker for any women in tears. For the next few moments I simply cuddled her as she cried on my shoulder. During that time my anger dissipated, which meant I was left feeling empty and suffering from adrenaline withdrawal. At that point I was unsure how I felt or what I wanted to do so perhaps the next few moments were quite important. I had time to think about what had happened and to contemplate what I was about to do.

I glanced at my watch and realised that it was still before ten in the morning. Suddenly things didn't add up very well. I knew I'd been up and around for more than two hours and when I'd awakened, Paula and Aileen had already left to see Paula's new doctor. It was Sunday. Nobody, especially a doctor, had early opening hours on Sunday. Even pharmacies didn't open early on Sunday; the earliest opening I knew of was one that opened at nine thirty or ten. Somehow things just didn't add up for me. Since Paula was still cuddling close to me, but no longer crying, I decided to ask her about what had happened earlier that morning.

"Paula, what time did you get up this morning?"

"Oh, about five." She sniffed. "Mom and Sydney were still partying and I thought it would be best if I tried to get them to go to bed. Instead they kept me up and started to give me a rough time. Then we started talking about the idea of me going to see a new gynaecologist. Sydney blew me away when she grabbed the phone at about six in the morning and woke her friend up to get me an appointment to talk to her. I think perhaps she was still drunk from the night before, but I can never tell since they drink vodka."

"I was wondering if she was drunk." I sighed.

"Perhaps not drunk, but certainly affected by the alcohol she'd been drinking all night." Paula sighed. "I'd put the booze away and had given her some coffee, but there's no way that the vodka was flushed out of her system."

"I'm surprised I didn't smell it on her though."

"Huh! If she showered and used a body wash, then brushed her teeth and used mouthwash too, she could disguise that. What else would you expect a woman to do if she was out to seduce a man?"

"You're making her sound like a cold, calculating bitch." I looked at her in surprise.

"I'm not sure about cold." She snorted. "But, I can certainly see her as calculating. That's why I really can't understand why she would act the way she did. She always seems to think things through so thoroughly, but she's not mean, so this doesn't really make sense to me. It's like she was just drunk, but rather stupid as well."

"Well, she did say that her biological clock was ticking." I sighed. "I don't know if a woman can go that silly over having a baby, but..."

"Oh fuck!" Paula sat up straight and spun to face me. "Look at me for fuck sake! All my life I've wanted to learn how to paint and to become an artist. So I went to school to learn all I could about painting and right now I'm willing to throw all that out the window to have your kid. It's like my body has taken over my brain, so I can sure as hell see that."