While you make a point of sounding open to everything, the Rayne case sets off some alarms in the back of your head. You are in this, of course, primarily for the sex, but you also pride yourself a little on that ultimate testament to potency, the siring of offspring, and the Rayne case seems pathetically weird that way. Trying to make a baby doomed to die in two months? Was Ms. Jackson really counting on him to miraculously overcome a defect in the mother as well as the father? This would need more clarification before you could seriously consider it.
You keep to yourself how this reminds you of your own situation. You are the ex-husband of local TV news babe Ingrid Goode, and if anything magnificent came of that marriage it was your daughter Friday Heiss, a sweet and hardworking college girl currently getting around in a wheelchair. She got hit by some distracted kid driver, breaking her legs and nearly her neck in the bargain, and the judge's blatant prejudice against motorcycles no doubt ripped them all off.
You study Ms. Jackson and wonder: does she know about Friday? She doesn't seem beyond driving such a Faustian bargain, and still the offer echoes in your head that with twenty pregnancies you could have unlimited medical care for yourself and your immediate family. Friday on good prosthetic legs ... even more to the point, Friday able to breathe without a tube at her neck, without having to worry that some sneeze or cough will induce the final fatal seizure ... it's all you could ask from the world right now, and she could give that to you.
You want to get Ms. Jackson to open up, but she remains coy and guarded with her patient devilish smirk. You try to cozy up to her, not so much out of arousal but as an exercise in working off some spite, but she is quite firm on that, calm and cool but still firm. It's wild, but this woman who encourages infidelity seems to be fiercely loyal to some lover of her own.
This leaves you the prospect of Mrs. Nguyen, and you say Yes. |