Jason Robinson hated waiting rooms. There was, he thought angrily, no way to be comfortable in waiting rooms...the chairs were always too hard, the magazines too old, and the waits...the waits were always too goddamn long.
Jason had spent a great deal of time in this particular waiting room of late, pointedly ignoring the inquisitive, occasionally disapproving, glances of some of the other patients and their helpmeets. He should have been used to all of it after all of the long weeks of coming to the office.
He wasn't.
Jason yawned and rubbed his eyes with his great, brown hands. Silently, petulantly, he cursed the woman for, yet again, not allowing him to join her in the examination room. A little late, he groused with passing rancor, to worry about modesty.
Such dark thoughts quickly gave way to rosier dreams of the future...his future...their future...a sunny future filled with new life and rekindled love. Jason, ever willing to actively search out silver linings, smiled contentedly. He knew it was stupid…she had made herself perfectly clear…but he liked to think about the possibilities just the same.
And then, in turn, he thought back...back to the days when he and Kristin were fast and faithful friends despite their apparent differences. Their easy intimacy made them the butt of endless office gossip and, occasionally, lewd speculation but they pretty much ignored all that as they teetered perilously on the thin line separating friendship from romance.
However, romance seemed to have very little chance because while "everything"...their emotional compatibility, their mutual trust and burgeoning affection for each other...seemed so right, "everything"...the fact that they grew up on different coasts in very different circumstances, the fact that Kristin was almost a decade older than Jason, the fact that they were of different races...also seemed so wrong.
Their friendship had kept at a status quo until one fateful night when longing and loneliness and a shared bottle of wine combined to lead them into a wildly-passionate night of blissful lovemaking.
The uneasy admixture of relief and regret that they woke with the following morning had subtly colored the memory ever since. And when, almost as a matter of course, Kristin found that their night of indulged passion had created a child, the regret was magnified.
Kristin James smiled perfunctorily at her doctor when he patted her distended abdomen as they were re-entering the waiting room. The doctor murmured something to the receptionist and then disappeared back into the examination rooms.
She casually double-checked her upcoming appointments while Jason waited by the exit.
Once they finally got back into Jason's car, Kristin gently rubbed her belly. "He's okay," she said, casually breaking the icy silence between them, "the baby's healthy as a horse."
Jason noted a hint of bitterness in her voice but, not wanting to get into yet another argument, he let it pass without comment. The baby...his baby...was okay. He started the car and pulled out. He took a deep breath and said, "Kris, I'm..."
Kristin interrupted him with an irritated sigh. "Oh, sweet Jesus, please don't say that you're sorry again, Jason!" she said, the edge in her voice somehow being blunted by her
"You wouldn't have had an abortion no matter what," he replied resolutely though he really wasn’t sure that he was correct; at one point that was the avenue she was leaning towards.
"Maybe not," she said wistfully. "But we'll never know for sure, will we?" The sarcasm in her voice was aimed equally at Jason and at herself.
They fell silent. Kristin gazed absently out the window, lost in her own thoughts. The thought of presenting her father with a...mulatto grandchild...filled her with a dread the like of which she thought she had left in childhood. He simply would not understand. Or approve. Or accept. He simply wouldn't.
That said, the idea of aborting Jason's baby...her baby...had been almost equally abhorrent. Almost.
After turning down, with more than a little reluctance, all of Jason's dutiful proposals of marriage...her father wouldn't understand a black husband any better than a half-black grandchild...Kristin agreed to carry the child to term and give him to Jason to raise as Jason had pleaded with her to do.
She would quit
"Kris?" Jason said softly, disrupting her reverie.
Kristin glanced around; they had arrived at her apartment building.
Jason got out of the car and came around and opened the passenger door. He took one of her delicately pale hands into his leathery brown ones and helped her out of the car. "I'm really sorry that you have to go through so much discomfort," he said. "I know you're only going through with this because of me...because I twisted your arm..."
"...not completely..." she replied enigmatically.
Their eyes met for the first time that day and they both smiled self-consciously.
"Need any help getting to your place?" Jason asked.
"Don't fret so much, Jason," she replied with a dismissing wave. "I'm not an invalid," she continued, "I'm only pregnant..."
She patted her stomach and then rose up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. "Happy Father's Day, Jason," she said with an earnest tenderness that surprised both of them.
She turned on her heels and disappeared into the building before he could react or reply.
Jason touched his cheek at the place where Kristin's kiss still burned sweetly and he frowned pensively. For the umpteenth time, Jason wondered what it was he was getting himself into. Who the hell was he to think that he was ready to be somebody’s father? He sighed. Ready or not, that was exactly was he was about to be. “Happy Father’s Day,” he murmured with equal measures of wonder, fear, and rancor in his voice.
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