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EILEEN GOVDGE

“That’s funny. I’d have sworn that naked lady in Paris was you.”

She laughed, and he could see the red along her cheekbones spread down into her cheeks. “Emmett, stop. Stop teasing me.”

He kissed her then. Leaning forward, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, the other holding the nape of her neck, her cropped hair pushing up between his fingers, cool and springy as new grass, it was so easy, so natural, like breathing. She must have felt the same as he, because she didn’t pull away. She opened her mouth, and he tasted her sweetness-she tasted of the warm zabaglione that had been whipped up at their table for dessert, Marsala and foamy egg whites. He could feel steam from the vent nearby seeping into his coat, forming beads of moisture on his cheeks and forehead.

“Oh, shit,” she said softly as she drew away. Around them, pedestrians bundled in their coats hurried past, and cars and taxis formed a blinking river of headlights along the busy street. A man squatted in front of a bicycle shop, seemingly oblivious to the cold, a tattered blanket lined with earrings and belt buckles on the sidewalk in front of him. With a quick, nervous laugh, she joked, “It must be the puttanesca.”

Emmett spotted a taxi, and stuck out his hand.

The heater in their cab was broken, and one of the back windows was stuck partway open, so by the time they reached his apartment, across the street from London Terrace, they were both half frozen. The shower stall off the kitchen, for a change, was right where he wanted it to be-in plain view, just beyond the closet where he hung their coats. Without any hesitation, Emmett stripped off all his clothes, and after clamping his frozen fingers under his armpits to warm them, he began removing Annie’s. She didn’t protest.

When they were both naked, he reached into the old rust-streaked tin shower stall and cranked on the water. Pushing the vinyl curtain aside, he stepped inside. “Ever taken a shower in a kitchen?” he asked, drawing her with him under the stinging spray. He felt her initial stiffness

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begin to yield as he slowly, lovingly, began soaping her arms, now her breasts, his hands sliding down over her flat belly.

“No,” Annie said. “It feels different somehow.”

“Walk into a kitchen and what do you instantly think of? Food, right?”

“So?” She arched, and he felt a spasm in his groin at the sight of her small breasts with their dark, almost purplish nipples pointing up at him.

“So”-he bent and touched the tip of his tongue to a soap bubble shimmering on the tip of her breast-“I’m feeling hungry all of a sudden.”

“But we just-” Her words were cut off as Emmett suddenly squatted before her and drew his tongue along the wet silk of her inner thigh. He heard her groan softly as he moved higher. He felt the shower’s warm spray rolling off his back, and her fingers in his hair, tugging, almost painful, but immensely exciting too. Yet he could feel her holding back just a little, quivering like a high-tension wire. Jesus. She was so … so damn passionate. Why couldn’t she just let go all the way? What did this other guy have that was so goddamn wonderful it blotted out everything else? As far as Emmett knew, she hadn’t even slept with Joe.

Then he was tasting her, inside her, all her warm slipperiness, salty and sweet at the same time, and he was lost. Lost to reason, and to thoughts of the future. He wanted her. He had to have her. Now. Like the drumming of the water against the tin walls of the shower stall, he could feel his blood pounding in his head, and in his groin, and one word repeating itself over and over inside his brain: Annie … Annie … Annie …

He rose, flattening her against the wall, his hands squeezed about her buttocks. Annie, moaning, her head thrown back, hair sleek as an otter’s coat, water streaming down her throat, arched against him, both arms gripping him about his neck, hoisting herself up so that her legs were wrapped about his thighs.

She cried out as he entered her, a sharp high yelp

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that was swallowed by the pounding of the water and the hollow, rhythmic thump of tin.

Emmett revelled in her, the sweet weight of her against his arms, the smooth wetness of her limbs coiled about him, the flick of her wet hair as she buried her face into his neck, biting him, her cries muffled by his shoulder.

He came with a burning, almost painful, rush just as the water turned cold. Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ. He could feel her coming, too, and the cold water sluicing down, making his skin shrivel and his balls climb up into his belly … all his senses heightened, slapped alive, his pleasure so intense it was damn near excruciating.

“Cold,” Annie shrieked. “G-God, it’s freezing!”

As he lowered her and reached to shut off the water, he could hear the soft sucking of their wet skin as they peeled away from one another. He looked at her, shivering, her arms wrapped about her chest, her skin ridged with goose bumps, and they both began to laugh.

Emmett caught her in his arms, threw his head back, and let out a great hoot of laughter. He didn’t even know why he was laughing, except that it felt good. In a rusting shower stall in the cramped kitchen of his rented apartment in the sooty heart of a city that swallowed him up each morning and spat him out at night, Emmett Cameron felt as if he’d at last come home.

Laurel was soaking in the bathtub when she felt the tightness in her belly again. It didn’t hurt much-she couldn’t call it a pain. Definitely not a labor pain. Actually, she’d been having them all morning, but she was pretty sure it was no big deal. Sally Munroe from her Lamaze class, who was pregnant with her second child, had once told Laurel that having a

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baby felt like shitting a watermelon. This little pang wouldn’t be enough even for a watermelon seed.

She stared down at her huge belly, rising above the water like the hump of a whale. She watched the taut muscles ripple slightly, and felt them drawing inward. She thought of Scarlett O’Hara being laced into an impossibly tight corset. That would hurt. Now, aside from the tightness, what she felt was a sort of coldness in the small of her back, as if the water temperature in that one spot had dropped sharply.

Movie images of birthings floated into her mind: stoic pioneer women biting down on rawhide straps to keep from screaming. Anxious fathers in hospital waiting rooms pacing back and forth. Wild-eyed women strapped to gurneys, moaning and thrashing.

But this wasn’t near anything like that, certainly not labor … it couldn’t be.

She remembered her Lamaze teacher saying that false labor was common … contractions that didn’t hurt much and came at irregular intervals. How irregular were these? Earlier, she’d timed a few, but they were jumping all over the place: ten minutes, then six, then ten again. She was too tense, that was it. She’d decided that a bath would relax her.

But now, just to be on the safe side, maybe she should call Dr. Epstein.

Laurel started to pull herself up … and quite abruptly the tightness eased. She let herself sink back into the water’s warmth, feeling a guarded relief steal through her.

Why bother the doctor when it’s probably still a long way off, she told herself. He’ll just tell me to get over to the hospital, and if it is labor, they’ll start sticking me with needles, and poking fingers up me. Then, when the baby comes—

No, don’t think about it. It was as if an alarm had jangled in her brain, warning her to back off, keep all thoughts of the baby out of her head. She grabbed a washcloth, wringing it hard enough to send droplets spattering out over the rim of the old cast-iron tub.

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They’ll take it away … 1 won’t even get to hold it.

Laurel felt a sharp pain, but this time it was in her chest. It came to her then, not just the thought, but the full weight of it, slamming into her: It won’t be mine anymore.

Some other woman would come to the hospital to claim her baby and take it away. This woman and her husband, nice people, would see that her son (somehow she felt sure it was a boy) would always be fed, changed, rocked to sleep. And when he got bigger they would take him to the beach, and to baseball games, and Disneyland. They would make him honey-lemon tea when he was sick, listen to him practice the piano or the saxophone, help him with his math homework. They would love him.

She touched the shining mound of her belly, and whispered, “You won’t know me, will you? You’ll forget you ever belonged to me.”

Her head tipped back, tears slipped sideways down her temples, pooling in her ears, a hot tickly sensation. She imagined her baby curled inside her, looking like a tiny sleeping kitten, with its downy hair, its tiny pink fingers and toes.

“Please …” she whispered, not knowing quite what she was pleading for.

My choice, she reminded herself. No one had forced her to give up her baby. Rudy had merely persuaded her that it was for the best.

She remembered his phoning her the day after they’d met in the baby store, how relieved he’d sounded that she’d come to this decision. Over and over, he’d assured her she was doing the best thing … best for the baby as well as for her. And all along, she’d kept on telling herself he was right, but now she wasn’t so sure… .

Again, she found herself thinking, If only this were Joe’s baby …

Maybe he did love her after all… just a little. And maybe he’d love her more-a lot more-if it weren’t for Annie.

Annie. It all came back to Annie. Laurel couldn’t help feeling that if she ever did end up with Joe she’d be

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cheating her sister. Lying in the cooling water of the clawfooted tub, Laurel wondered, Why is this so hard? Why should I have to choose between two people I love?

Tears filled her eyes, and she pressed her hands to her belly, fingers spread like starfish.

For one sweet interlude, which she knew she shouldn’t allow herself, she imagined how it would be if she changed her mind and kept the baby. Uncle Rudy’s nice couple would be disappointed, sure, but they’d get over it. Before long they’d find some other kid to adopt, maybe one that needed their good home even more. And then she would take her baby home. She’d buy that homemade-looking oak cradle she’d spotted in the window of the Salvation Army store on Eighth Avenue, and put it right by her bed. Whenever he cried she’d pick him up. And when he was older, she’d point out the evening star the way Annie had once pointed it out to her, so every night he could wish on it.

A wonderful, warm sensation filled her, as if the water had suddenly grown more buoyant and was lifting her up, letting her float as easily as a leaf.

I could get a job, maybe work for Aunt Dolly—something to pay the bills in between illustrating jobs—then finish college later, when he’s in school. Then when I’ve saved up enough, I’ll find us a studio apartment somewhere … or maybe Annie will move out and let us keep this one. Then I’d still be near Joe.

But even if Annie did move out, Laurel thought, how could I afford the rent?

In four years of high school, why hadn’t she done something practical? Yeah, she could draw pretty well, and she could cook and sew, but so could ten thousand other people. Laurel suddenly envied her friend, Hillary Ambrosini. Laurel remembered how dumb and tedious she’d thought it was to give up your summer typing for a law firm. But now Hillary could get herself a well-paying job if she ever needed one.

Laurel remembered years ago bringing up the subject of maybe getting a part-time job to help out with their

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finances, which had always been close to desperate. And Annie would get this stretched look, her skin pulling back at the temples, making her eyes look huge and the bones in her face stick out. She’d stare at Laurel, and say, “If you have all this extra time, wouldn’t it be nice for you to join one of those school clubs? I hear the art history club takes all kinds of great museum trips … you’d get so much more out of that, wouldn’t you?”

And so she had. And a lot of good traipsing around the Frick and the Cooper-Hewitt did her now!

Sure, there was last summer’s internship at Blustein and Warwick, but what creative work had she done in those two and a half months except rushing stuff to the color labs and fetching coffee?

The book for Fairway Press she’d illustrated, that was what she wanted to do, what she was good at. And the twentyfive hundred they were paying her was wonderful, fantastic, unreal. But she couldn’t count on a windfall like that happening very often. Well, not unless she really hustled-the way Annie did, every minute of every day.

Laurel yanked out the rubber tub stopper. She watched the scummy water swirling down the drain, then she heaved herself to her feet, and stepped out onto the fluffy pink rug by the tub. Reaching for a towel, she felt that tight sensation across her middle again. She stood still, gripping the towel rack until it had passed. Was she imagining it, or had this one lasted longer than the last?

She knew she ought to time them to see if they’d gotten any more regular. Dr. Epstein always said that first labors usually took ages. So even if this was for real, it’d be silly of her to rush.

A cup of tea was what she needed, something to relax her. Then she’d sit and finish that last drawing for “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” The others had been turned in, but this was one with which neither she nor Liz Cannawill had been completely satisfied, so she’d promised to redraw it.

Laurel towelled herself off, and slipped into her old

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chenille robe, which not too many months ago had fit her like an elephant skin. Now it barely met across the front. But the hugeness of her stomach, by now, had come to seem sort of normal. What seemed unreal were her breasts. They’d grown from sunny-side-up eggs to cantaloupes. Life wasn’t fair, she thought, a rueful smile tugging at her mouth. For the first time ever she had cleavage … and no one to show it off to.