He Banned a Baby in Our Contract, Then Found His Daughter novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Counter

In the narrow yellow house on the Battery, with the baby asleep upstairs, an angry first night on the kitchen counter ends with his lawyer's letter and her demand for a pen.

His house stood on a ledge of the Battery under Signal Hill, narrow and yellow, with a gallery over the Narrows.

We got there at eleven that night, after three and a half hours in which he said nothing and I said less.

Sadie slept the whole road.

He carried her up the stairs himself, in her blanket, with his big hand spread under her head.

At the top of the stairs there was a room I had never seen.

It held a white crib with the price tag still on the rail, a lamp, a chair, and a video monitor in its box.

He had stopped at a gas station near Whitbourne and made two phone calls while I fed her in the back seat.

One had been for the crib.

The other, I found out later, had been for a lawyer.

I settled Sadie on her back and set the monitor on the dresser.

She turned her face into the sheet and sighed.

I stood over her until my hands stopped shaking.

Then I went down to the kitchen, because I could hear him down there, and because I was done being afraid of him.

He had taken off his coat and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

He stood at the long counter with a glass of rye he wasn't drinking.

The kitchen was the same.

The same dark counter, the same window, the same kettle on the same ring.

I had stood at that counter every morning for five months.

"She's down," I said.

"Good," he said.

"I'm not sorry I left."

"I'm not asking you to be."

He put the glass down and looked at me properly for the first time since the Co-op.

I had flour on my sleeves still, and my braid had come half undone in the truck.

His eyes went to my mouth, and he looked away, and he looked back.

"There's a bed made up at the end of the hall," he said. "It's yours. You can go to bed."

"Don't you dare look at me like that and tell me to go to bed."

"Millie."

"I've thought about this counter for ten months," I said. "You can be as angry as you like. Be angry with your hands."

For a moment he didn't move at all.

"Tell me to stop," he said, low.

"Fuck off."

He crossed the floor in two strides and took my face in both hands.

He kissed me hard, with his whole mouth, and I opened for him at once.

He tasted of rye and cold air.

I had my fingers in his shirt and I pulled until the buttons went.

They ticked off the floor.

His chest was warm and furred and I put my palms flat on it.

He caught my wrists and lifted my hands away.

Then he let go and took hold of my hips and set me back against the counter.

I turned myself around.

I put my palms on the dark wood and looked at the window, and in the glass I saw him behind me, undoing my jeans.

"You turned," he said.

"I want you to mean it."

He dragged my jeans and my underwear down to my knees in one pull.

His hand went between my legs from behind, and he found me wet, and he made a sound in his chest.

"Ten months," he said against my neck. "And you're like this for me in the first hour."

"Don't talk about it. Do it."

He pushed two fingers inside me, deep, and I rocked back onto them and gasped.

He worked them slowly, and then not slowly, and his thumb found my clit and pressed in tight circles until my knees shook.

"Please," I said.

I heard his belt.

I heard the zip.

Then the head of his cock was at my entrance, thick and hot, and he took my hip in one hand and my braid in the other and pushed in.

I cried out.

It was ten months, and he was big, and my body remembered every inch of him and stretched around it.

He went in all the way and stopped, with his forehead against the back of my head.

"Christ," he said. "Millie."

"Move."

He pulled back and drove in again, and the counter edge dug into my thighs, and I didn't care.

He fucked me hard and deep, with the flat slap of his hips against my arse, and every stroke pushed a sound out of me.

The kettle rattled on its ring.

The window showed me my own face, open-mouthed and flushed, and his over my shoulder, with his teeth set.

He tugged my braid, just enough, and my head went back.

"You left," he said. "You left."

"I know."

"I'd have found you in a week."

"I know that too," I said. "Fuck me harder."

He did.

One of his hands went around my front and found my clit again, and he rubbed it fast and rough while he drove into me, and I felt it gather low in my belly.

"Come for me," he said.

"I'm going to."

"Now."

I came with a shout I had to bite back, because there was a baby upstairs.

I clenched around him in long hard pulses, and my forehead hit the counter, and he swore and kept going through it.

When it let go of me, he pulled out.

He turned me around and lifted me onto the counter, with my jeans still hanging off one ankle, and stood between my knees.

His shirt was open.

His cock stood wet and heavy between us.

I took hold of it, and he shut his eyes.

"I never stopped," I said. "Not once. I want you to know that."

His eyes opened.

"I told myself I would hate this," he said.

"Do you?"

"No."

I put him against me and wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him in.

This time he went in slowly, looking at me, and I held his face and looked back.

He fucked me in long deep strokes, with his mouth on my throat and then my mouth, and I rolled my hips to meet him.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and ran my nails down his back, and he shuddered and drove in harder.

"There," I said. "Right there."

"Here?"

"Don't change it."

He didn't.

He held that angle, steady and deep, with my heels locked at the base of his spine and my breasts rubbing his bare chest, and I felt a second climb start in me before the first had even cooled.

"You feel that?" he said against my ear. "You're squeezing me."

"Because you're good," I told him.

"Say it again."

"You're so good, Lorcan."

He groaned.

I said his name.

He said mine, rough, over and over, and I felt him swell inside me.

"Inside," I told him. "All of it."

He drove in once more and held there, shuddering, and I felt him spill hot and deep.

His forehead dropped to my shoulder.

We stayed like that, breathing, on a kitchen counter in the Battery, with the kettle ticking as it cooled.

After a while he stepped back and pulled up his trousers.

He didn't say anything.

I got down and found my jeans and put them on while he took a folded sheet of paper from the drawer under the telephone.

He laid it flat on the counter and smoothed it with his palm.

It was typed.

It said that Millicent Dwyer and the minor child Sadie would reside at the Battery address for ninety days from this date, and that at the end of it the matter of custody would be put to a court.

"My lawyer sent it at nine," he said. "That is what happens, unless I'm given a reason it shouldn't. You stay under this roof, and I decide where she sleeps."

I read it all the way through.

I read the part about where she sleeps twice.

My legs were still shaking from what we had just done, and I was colder than I had ever been in that kitchen.

"Ninety days," I said.

"It's the law."

"It's a letter."

I looked at him, at the shirt hanging open and the line of his throat, and at the man who had written clause seven in a typeface I could still see with my eyes shut.

"Get me a pen," I said.

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