Nobody's Baby But Mine

“God, I hate you!”

“Not any more than what I think of you!” Cal’s eyes blazed with anger and something else that was now so clear Jane couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it all along-a keen, biting intelligence.

She wanted to throw herself at him and scratch that intelligence from his eyes, chop open his cranium and pluck it from his brain. He was supposed to be stupid! He read comic books! How could he betray her like this?

The last of her self-control shredded, and she knew she had to get away before she fell apart. With an exclamation of fury, she whirled around and dashed back into the kitchen, where she flew out the rickety back door.

As she began to run, she heard a roar of rage coming from behind her. “You get back here! Don’t make me run after you, or you’ll be sorry!”

She wanted to hit something. She wanted to throw herself in a deep hole and let the earth close in on top of her, anything to stop the awful pain raging inside her body. This baby that she already loved more than she’d ever loved anything was going to be a freak.

She didn’t hear him come up behind her, and she gasped when he spun her around. “I told you to stop!” he shouted.

“You’ve ruined everything!” she screamed back.

“Me?”His face was pale with rage. “You damned liar! You’re an old lady! A goddamn old lady!”

“I’llnever forgive you for this!” She balled her hand into a fist and hit him in the chest so hard the pain shot into her arm.

He was spitting fury. He began to grab her by both arms, but she had been transported into a place of vengeance and she wouldn’t be restrained. This man had harmed her unborn child, and she, who had never hit another person, wanted his blood.

She went wild. Her glasses flew off, but she didn’t care. She kicked and clawed and tried to damage him in any way she could.

“You stop this right now! Stop it!” His bellow shook the very treetops. Once again he tried to restrain her, but she sank her teeth into his upper arm.

“Ouch!”His eyes widened with outrage. “That hurt, dammit!”

The violence felt good. She lifted her knee to slam it into his groin and found her feet swept out from under her.

“Oh, no, you don’t…”

He went down with her, breaking her fall with his own body, then twisting to pinion her against the ground.

The fight had taken everything out of her, but he was a man who took hits for a living, and he wasn’t even winded. He was, however, enraged, and he let her have it.

“You settle down right now, you hear me? You’re acting like a crazy woman! You arecrazy! You lied to me, cheated me, and now you’re trying to kill me, not to mention the fact that you can’t be doing that baby any good with your carryin’ on. I swear to God I’m going to have you locked up in a mental ward and shot full of Thorazine.”

Her eyes stung with tears that she didn’t want him to see, but couldn’t hold back.“You’ve ruined everything.”

“Me?”He bristled with outrage. “I’m not the one who’s acting like a lunatic. And I’m not the one who told everybody I was twenty-eight fucking years old!”

“I never told you that, and don’t you curse at me!”

“You’re thirty-four! Thirty-four! Were you ever planning on mentioning that to me?”

“When was I supposed to mention it? Should I have told you when you were stalking me in my classroom, or when you were screaming at me over the telephone? How about when you pushed me on the airplane? Or maybe I should have let you know after you locked me up in your house? Is that when I should have told you?”

“Don’t try to weasel out of it. You knew it was important to me, and you deliberately misled me.”

“Deliberately? Now there’s a big word for a dumb jock. Do you think it’s cute putting on that asinine hillbilly act and making everyone think you’re a moron? Is that your idea of a good time?”

“What are you talking about?”

She spit the words at him. “University of Michigan. Summa cum laude.”

“Oh, that.” Some of the tension left his body, and his weight eased on her.

“God, I hate you,” she whispered. “I would have had a better chance at a sperm bank.”

“Exactly where you should have gone in the first place.”

Despite his words, he no longer sounded quite so angry, but acid churned in her stomach. She knew she had to ask him, even though she dreaded hearing the answer, and she forced out the words. “What’s your IQ?”

“I have no idea. Unlike you, I don’t keep it tattooed on my forehead.” He rolled to the side, which allowed her to struggle to her feet.

“Then your SATs. What were they?”

“I don’t remember.”

She regarded him bitterly. “You’re a liar. Everybody remembers their SATs.”

He swiped at some wet leaves on his jeans as he rose.

“Tell me, dammit!”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.” He sounded annoyed, but not particularly dangerous.

That didn’t calm her. Instead, she once again felt a swell of hysteria. “You tell me right now, or, I swear to God, I’ll find some way to murder you! I’ll put ground glass in your food! I’ll stab you with a butcher knife while you’re sleeping! I’ll wait until you’re in the shower and throw in an electrical appliance! I’ll-I’ll club you in the head with a baseball bat some night when you walk in the door!”

He stopped brushing his jeans and gazed at her with what looked more like curiosity than apprehension. The fact that she knew she was only making herself appear more irrational further inflamed her. “Tell me!”

“You are some bloodthirsty woman.” Looking faintly bemused, he shook his head. “That electrical appliance thing… You’d need an extension cord or something to reach all the way into the shower. Or maybe you weren’t planning to plug it in.”

She gritted her teeth, feeling prodigiously foolish. “If it wasn’t plugged in, it wouldn’t electrocute you, now would it?”

“Good point.”

She took a deep breath and tried to regain her sanity. “Tell me your SATs. You owe me that much.”

He shrugged and bent over to pick up her glasses. “Maybe fourteen hundred, or somethin’ like that. Mighta been a little lower.”

“Fourteen hundred!” She punched him as hard as she could, then stomped away from him into the woods. He was a hypocrite and a fraud, and she felt sick down to the very depth of her soul. Even Craig wasn’t as smart as this man.

“That’s dumb compared to you,” he called after her.

“Don’t ever speak to me again.”

He came up next to her, but didn’t touch her. “Come on, Rosebud, you’ve got to settle down enough so I can take you apart for what you’ve done to me, which is a whole lot worse than my damned SATs.”

She whirled on him. “You didn’t do anything to me! You’ve done it to my child, don’t you see that? Because of you, an innocent child is going to grow up to be a freak.”

“I never told you I was stupid. You just assumed.”

“You said ain’t! That first night we were together, you said ain’t twice!”

A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. “A little local color. I’m not apologizin’.”

“There are comic books all over the house!”

“I was just livin’ up to your expectations.”

She collapsed then. She turned her back to him, crossed her arms against the nearest tree trunk, and rested her forehead against her wrist. All the humiliations of her childhood returned to her: the taunts and cruelties, the