Danger, Sweetheart Read Free Page A

months and thus was quite, quite sure about the date, he’d given her an ultrasound on the spot. And there they were: twin harbingers of the coming destruction of her youth.
    â€œOh, fuck.”
    â€œExactly.” She nodded. “That is the perfect response.” She absently patted her stomach. Sorry, babies, I’ll probably come to love you in time.
    He sighed and his eyes narrowed. “So you want money.”
    â€œI want,” she replied with care, “support. From the other half of this equation. To which I am lawfully entitled.” She summoned a smile that felt as sour as her post-barfing breath. “If you’re going to be nasty about it.”
    â€œI’m not giving you a fucking dime.”
    â€œPlease don’t make me get your address, credit card information, and phone number from the nice people at the front desk.” A bluff. The nice people at the front desk thought she was a stuck-up bitch, and she thought they were boring and small-minded (in every sense of the word).
    â€œYou think you’re the first bimbo to try this?”
    â€œTo ‘try’ getting impregnated with twins by you when we were both in our right mind and fully consented? Yes. I think I’m the first bimbo to try this, unless you have other illegitimate children out in the world—then God help the world. And it’s Ms. Bimbo, jackass.”
    â€œI’m not giving you a fucking dime,” he said again, doubtless assuming pregnancy hormones caused selective deafness.
    â€œThat,” she replied, stepping to the room service cart and sticking her index finger through the hole in the metal plate warmer, “remains to be seen.”
    â€œYou fuckin’ women, you’re all the same.”
    â€œDouble X chromosomes?” she suggested. “Vaginas? Physiologically weaker but longer lived? Lack of prostate cancer?”
    â€œYou dress hot and flirt and then go out and get yourselves pregnant—”
    â€œBehold, a virgin shall conceive!”
    â€œâ€”and then comes the money grab, fuck!” Benjamin Tarbell hit her with every ounce of contempt a man who had never worked for anything was capable of. His expression was that of someone ankle deep in cow shit who blamed the cows and not himself for walking through the field in the first place. “Don’t any of you sluts have any fucking pride oh God ow .”
    â€œOh yes.” She had hit him with the plate cover, which made a lovely bwoonngg as it connected with the side of his (possibly hollow) head. “Too much pride, in fact. How do you think I ended up in this mess?”
    He staggered, straightened, then seized her arm in a pincher grip and hauled her toward the door, ignoring her pained yelp. He was holding the side of his hand over the rapidly swelling bump and mumbling, “Oh God ow that hurt so bad fuck fuck God that hurt fuck ow,” as he shoved her into the hallway, then slammed the door.
    â€œWhat?” she asked the door, hands on her hips. “No tip?”
    A shattering clatter—his dinner plate imploding against the door?—was her answer.
    â€œNot even a lousy eight percent? Fine,” she said to the empty hallway. “Fine. All right. Plan C.” Plan A: abortion, tell no one, resume her life. Plan B: confront Benjamin; make child-care and/or custody arrangements, or arrange for a monthly check if he wished to support, but not love, his sons. Plan C: crawl.
    But where? And to whom? Back to Sweetheart and disapproval and small-town gossips who thought they knew her but never would? To the casual insanity of her hometown? No. To her father, who thought her motive for leaving was to trap a rich man? Other women could rely on their birthplaces for support, but as she had known long before the pee stick foretold her fate, home wouldn’t have her, and she wouldn’t have them.
    She thought Robert Frost, the city boy who came to love the country,