No one tried to stop me this time, though I saw Deputy Boyd in his cruiser parked by Main Street as I drove by. I tensed to see if his flashers would come on—if he started chasing me, I intended to put the pedal to the metal and go. I wasn’t going to let that bastard pull me over again and if he tried it, I was going to give him quite the interstate chase.
But he only watched me, a bitter expression on his long face as I drove out of Wolverton—leaving my hometown, this time for good. I would never come back here, I vowed to myself. Maybe now that McCain was dead the town would right itself, but whether it did or not was none of my business. I was never going to cross the Wolverton town line again.
The next month was hard. My body absorbed a great deal of Nick’s seed but on the second day after he had bred me, the seal around my entrance broke while I was in the shower. I felt a warm gush and looked down to see the last of his seed leaking out of me down the drain.
I started crying again and stayed in the shower for hours. It felt like an ending somehow. I had no idea if I was pregnant or not, but losing the last of Nick’s seed made me feel barren and empty inside. It’s not like I wanted to be a single mother, but at the same time, I wanted something to remember him by. With my breeding bump gone, it made me feel all over again that he was out of my life forever.
I went back to my life and my job at Mount Holyoke and I tried to forget again. But this time the protective veil my mind had drawn over my childhood memories, refused to come. I couldn’t forget Nick or his beast or the short time we’d spent together—couldn’t forget how much I loved him or how much he had hurt me.
About a month after I returned home, I got a pregnancy test. I had intended to take it the next morning when the hormones in your urine are the strongest, but it turned out I didn’t need to. The minute I sat down, I felt the familiar cramps and saw blood in the bowl when I looked.
I had started my period.
As I said, I didn’t want to be a single mother, but I still had to call into work sick that day. I spent the whole day crying inconsolably, missing Nick and cursing him with the same breath. That bastard! How could he do this to me? How could he abandon me again? And why didn’t he walk through my front door and end my misery with a kiss? That’s what would have happened in a romance novel, I was sure of it.
But this was no romance novel, it was my life. I probably never would have seen Nick again if I hadn’t been going through my suitcase, looking for a bra I’d lost.
I was feeling around in the pockets of the suitcase—the same one I’d taken to Wolverton—when I felt something hard and rectangular. Pulling it out, I saw it was the paperback book I’d been reading on my trip to try and find my great aunt—a romance called, Love’s Forbidden Spring.
Romance is my secret guilty pleasure. As a mature adult woman who is supposed to be liberated and who teaches Women’s Studies, the fact that I love romance isn’t something I would want known about me in academic circles. But I can’t help myself—I love the Happily Ever After endings romance novels provide—I’m addicted to the damn things.
I stood there staring at Love’s Forbidden Spring. It seemed a lifetime ago I had been reading it, but it was really only about two months ago and I was still miserable. In fact, I just didn’t seem to be getting over this grief. I felt like Nick and I had established some kind of connection—almost a bond—when his beast had bred me. And now that he was gone, it felt like someone had ripped out half my heart.
Tears dripped on the cover of the book as I flipped its pages. I couldn’t even remember where I’d left off or what it was about—I was too upset to care.
Then something white and flat fluttered out from between the pages. I frowned—was it a book mark? But no— I almost never use book marks. I have the bad habit of dog-earing the pages of the books I read—at least, the ones I own and I owned this one.
Bending down, I picked it up and found it was a folded piece of paper. Swiping the tears from my eyes, I hastily unfolded it and found a note written in Nick’s slanting handwriting.