Chapter 21

Patrick only stayed a week, long enough to determine that he had, indeed, put the fear of God into Terry Davis. Within three days Davis’s lawyer contacted Rayleen. All Davis offered in a bid to settle was two million, but he offered it in cash, payable within twenty-four hours of the paperwork being signed. Rayleen insisted that her legal expenses be added on, which included the percentage Bobby had offered her of any actual settlement. Davis agreed, in the end, because that let him keep his business, and his house, though that’s about all he was left with.

So one would expect it to have been a pretty tumultuous week for The Hermit of Scarecrow Valley. It isn’t every day a man becomes a millionaire overnight, after all.

But the fact was, Bobby only thought about the money every now and then. That’s because he had something else to think about that was more important, at least to him, than a million dollars.

And that’s because in the middle of that week, on a night when it was Mindy’s turn to have Bobby in her bed, she was exultant, relaxing in the aftermath of a glorious orgasm while her lover continued to slowly move his delicious, stiff prod deep into her body, when an errant spasm in her uterus reminded her that she hadn’t had to deal with cramps for a long time.

A very long time.

Much too long, in fact.

Her gasp was so quick, and her body’s reaction so violent, that Bobby noticed instantly. That they had become so close ... so tuned to each other’s behavior during such times ... was evident as he stopped.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, panting softly. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” was her immediate response, but her hands came to his chest and pushed gently.

He withdrew and slid off her, to land on a hip and elbow as she sat up and, without a word, swung her legs to the side of the bed and stood. The nightlight she had plugged in when he first started sleeping with her, so they could see each other a little bit without having to get up and turn off a light afterwards, was still there. It wasn’t enough for her to read the calendar hanging on the wall by a nail next to the side of the mirror of her vanity, though, and because she was so starkly disturbed by her premonition, she simply turned on the room light without warning him.

“What?” he asked, worried now as well, shading his eyes with his hand.

Her eyes went to the paper, and her heart sank as she realized the page displayed was two months old. There, neatly printed in the middle of the square for the fourteenth, was the number seven. She numbered her periods, adding a number each month because that was the simplest way for her to remember when it was time for her annual trip to the gynecologist. When the number got to eleven, she scheduled an appointment. Had she had that period ... the seven would have a circle around it, and she would have put a numeral eight in the appropriate box on the next page.

She lifted the page and looked. The next page was blank. So was the next page, which was the one for the current month. She didn’t consider herself a mathematician, but her disturbed mind managed to come up with the correct number almost instantly.

Seventy-five days. It had been seventy-five days since she should have had a period ... and did not.

She didn’t have a photographic memory either, but she didn’t have to look at the calendar to know what had happened eighty-nine days in her past. She had broken her sexual fast with Bobby Higginbotham. She turned and stared at the man with that name ... lying in her bed ... naked ... just as he had lain in her bed eighty-nine nights ago. Her eyes went to his penis, which was soft now, sheathed safely in a translucent tube of latex.

But eighty-nine nights ago ... it hadn’t been covered in latex. It hadn’t been covered in anything.

“I’m pregnant!” she gasped.

And then, as the room suddenly grew dim, she felt the strength drain from her knees, just before something hard slammed into her buttocks. Then everything went black and her last thought was, “What will I do now?”

Her faint only lasted ten or fifteen seconds, just long enough for Bobby to jump from the bed and get to her limp body. By the time he pulled her to a semblance of a sitting position, her eyes were already fluttering open. She was still groggy enough that she didn’t notice he wasn’t saying anything, as her mind tried to make sense of what it discovered when it turned back on.

The light was still on, and Bobby’s scent, as well as his naked flesh against hers registered. She looked at him, and everything flooded back into her mind.

“I’m pregnant!” she gasped again. Her voice edged toward panic and tears.

Bobby, being a man, responded as most men would.

“How do you know?”

“I must be,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

“Too long for what?” he asked. Men don’t have periods, so they don’t think about them.

It didn’t feel dignified to sit on the floor.

“Help me up,” she said.

Off kilter, and worried because of her strange behavior, not to mention her pronouncement that she was pregnant, Bobby simply helped her up. Her arms went around him on impulse, or maybe for stability. It wasn’t a lover’s embrace, but they were still naked, so it was inevitable that they would both notice that flesh-on-flesh sensation. It was also inevitable that she would look at her stomach, and she had to push him away to do so. Her hand went to smooth across her abdomen. Was it slightly rounded?

“Pregnant?” Bobby’s voice sounded like it came from deep in a well.

He looked at his penis, instead of her belly. The condom looked wrinkled and cold. He pulled it off and held it up in front of his face. “How?”

The majority of their lovemaking had been under the auspices of safe sex. Of course there is no such thing as safe sex, really. Not when the woman is capable of being fertile, and the man is capable of supplying viable sperm. But when one of the barriers marketed as making sex “harmless” fails, there is usually some confusion as to how that could happen. That was the problem with Bobby’s thinking at that moment. Mindy, on the other hand, had the statistical data of her missed period to help her out. Missed periods, actually. And she remembered only too well being delighted beyond measure to have a man’s deliciously stiff penis deep inside her again after all those years in a sexual desert, while at the same time being mildly terrified that that penis was bare. She also remembered how that terror had only heightened the ecstasy. The danger had heightened the pleasure.

And now, Paul had come to demand the payment stolen from Peter, two and a half months ago.

“But we used these!” complained Bobby, holding up the wrinkled, slimy looking condom.

The strength had returned to her body. His tone, completely lacking in any shred of happiness about the situation, annoyed her. Of course she wasn’t happy about it either, but that was a rational comparison, and she was working on emotion at the moment. She pulled him to the vanity and put her finger on the calendar.

“That’s when I should have had my last period,” she said.

“Okay,” said Bobby. Part of his brain found it interesting that he was more uncomfortable that they were suddenly talking about her periods than he was about her announcement that she was pregnant.

Her finger slid across the paper to the name of the month.

He blinked. “It isn’t May,” he said, confused.

“I didn’t turn the page,” she said, patiently. “I didn’t pay any attention to this calendar. I also didn’t have that period.” She lifted the page and put her finger on a square on the new page. “And I also didn’t have that one.” She lifted that page, exposing July. “And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have that one, either,” she said, putting her finger on the square for the twenty-third of August.

“I don’t understand!” he moaned. He wagged the condom. “We used these!”

She let all the pages drop back into place, putting May on display again. She had to guess, but it was easy to simply go two weeks back from that un-circled seven and put her finger there.

“We didn’t that first night,” she said softly.

Eventually Bobby asked the same question she had asked herself.

“What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I need to go see the doctor. Get a pregnancy test.”

“But you are pregnant,” he responded. “You said so!”

It was that simple, innocent comment that reminded Mindy that she was dealing with a boy, for all intents and purposes. He might be a man, chronologically, but by removing himself from the world for so long, he had denied himself elements of a “normal” education. She had known the danger. She had surrendered to her lust. He had just been a man.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she said. “I believe I’m pregnant, based on dates, and things like that. I can’t just feel inside myself and know there’s a baby inside me. Not yet, anyway. I still need to see a doctor to make sure.”

“Oh,” he said.

It was silent for a long stretch, as both people reflected on the situation.

Mindy had some experience with this phenomenon, though it was more than a decade old. The circumstances had been remarkably similar then. She’d been seventeen, and not planning on having a baby. She’d been terrified on a number of levels. But now, her fear was less, and about different things. She wasn’t terrified of what it would be like to be pregnant and have a baby. She knew what to expect there, and while she wasn’t looking forward to it, it didn’t scare her either. And she wasn’t terrified about what her parents would say or do this time. In fact, “terror” was probably too strong a word for what she was feeling and thinking about. There was angst about the finances, and the fact that the house was too small to raise both a baby and a teenager in. There was a bit of dread about going through all that with diapers and a small human who thought it was the center of the universe again. But at the same time, she remembered the unadulterated joy of holding Jennifer in her arms ... of watching the little girl suck eagerly at a breast and murmur in her happiness of being held and fed. Other memories flooded her mind, and her tense face relaxed, as a dreamy smile slowly replaced frown lines.

It was very different for Bobby. He had no previous experience to guide him. He felt the weight of the responsibility, as he thought of it, for causing a serious problem in Mindy’s life. Never once did he doubt that he had fathered the baby she spoke of. He firmly believed she was, in fact, pregnant. The way she had said it would be seared into his memory for years to come. Her voice had sounded like the voice of doom, somehow. He’d never held a baby in his arms. In his experience, the overriding things babies did was cry. And now, he had somehow visited that fate on this woman, who meant more to him than any other woman he’d ever met, with the possible exception of her daughter.

“I’m sorry,” he said, miserably.

She heard the pain in his voice, and measured it against what she was feeling. She didn’t like the comparison. She didn’t think of what had happened as demanding anything of Bobby. That might change in the future, but right now, she didn’t blame him. And she didn’t feel like he should be in that kind of pain either.

“I’m not,” she said, softly. His head jerked, and his eyes stared at her, wide with surprise and confusion. “Not in the sense that you’re thinking about it,” she guessed.

They stared at each other for a few seconds.

“Let’s go back to bed,” she said.

“What?” He was clearly confused.

“It’s chilly,” she said.

He stood, blinking slowly as he stared at her.

“We can talk about this tomorrow,” she said. “Come back to bed.” She reached for his hand and took a step, tugging until he followed her.

Minutes later, with him spooned against her back, she pulled his arm over her and held his hand in both of hers.

It was almost half an hour before they once again slept.

The next morning, they didn’t get a chance to talk very much, because Jennifer woke them by bouncing onto the bed.

“Get up, sleepy heads. We have to go get Uncle Patrick and take him to Rapid City! And I’m starved, too!”

“Then go get breakfast started,” growled Mindy, whose mind was already on other things besides either the man both she and her daughter called Uncle Patrick, or her stomach, which was also growling.

They got up. For the first time since that first time, there was an awkward silence as they contemplated each other, naked, in the morning light. It took Mindy back to the morning after that first night ... the night on which, in fact, this man might very well have gotten her pregnant.

“It couldn’t be,” she said.

“What?” His eyebrows rose.

“I was just thinking back to that first night, when Jennifer brought you here.”

“You mean when she gave me to you?” he said.

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The Hermit of Scarecrow Valley

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