Love Has The Best Intentions by Christine Arness Page B

the omission of a toast deliberate and cruel. To
us?
    My mouth dried as the strong fingers which
knew my pleasure zones so intimately gripped his glass in a
stranglehold, betraying the tension he refused to allow into his
voice.
    I swallowed the lump formed from unshed
tears. “What if I don’t?”
    The slender stem of the glass snapped like a
fragile bone and I recoiled from the sound. Ken moved his hand in
an angry arc and the wine bottle he’d insisted on uncorking before
dinner tipped over and passion red, blood red liquid flowed across
my best linen tablecloth.
    His temper escaped, mimicking the wine’s
eager flight, spread out to engulf me. “We can’t put our lives on
hold, Claire. Not when our relationship is based on freedom, the
enjoyment of our sexuality—living life to the fullest! I refuse to
be trapped into pushing a designer stroller around the mall.”
    The bitter set of his mouth betrayed that
this last hurtful thrust was intentional. We’d met at a shopping
mall nearly six months earlier, exchanging names over fat, salty
pretzels. He carried a shopping bag full of black socks with the
aplomb of a diamond courier.
    “I’m a fanatic about the quality of my
socks.” Ken’s tongue flicked out to lick the salt from the dough’s
yielding surface. “And my women.”
    His smile was heart-stopping, darting into
the inner core of my being and expanding until it left a void only
his love-making could fill.
    That smile was nowhere in evidence now and I
resented his scornful reference to the site of our first meeting, a
place that until tonight I still thought of as magical.
    “This is our baby we’re discussing, not a bad
spot in an apple to be dug out and thrown away!”
    The candles sputtered in derisive response to
my passion. Drops of wax burned like hot tears on the back of the
hand I extended across the table to Ken.
    “Touch me, darling,” I pleaded. “Hold me
close again, tell me you love me. Tell me that everything will be
all right.”
    Instead, he pulled away, as if I’d jabbed him
with my fork. “I can’t make love to a woman with a belly like a
sack of potatoes. I don’t want a brat whining for attention. Make
your choice, Claire. You can have the baby—or you can have me.”
     
    * * * *
     
    Once in the department store, Sandi had a
difficult time choosing a toy. The visual testimony of my dilemma
concealed again behind the dark glasses, I watched my niece sort
through a selection of plastic balls.
    “This one,” she said suddenly with the
conviction of a mother hen picking out her chick form the scattered
flock.
    Her choice featured a design of floppy-eared
puppies in a basket. As I made the proper appreciative comments, a
woman pushing a stroller—a designer stroller—down the narrow aisle
begged our pardon. We moved aside.
    I caught myself patting the waistband of my
shorts in an unconscious imitation of Rachel’s gesture and jerked
my hand away as though the material had been threaded with red hot
wires.
    A nearby sign decorated with a tumbling clown
pointed the way to the maternity clothes. A child hurried past
bearing a golden-haired baby doll in her arms. To me, the air
seemed suffocatingly thick. Cloying whiffs from the perfume counter
mingled with the fresh, clean scent of the powder patted onto
Sandi’s soft skin after her morning bath.
    I couldn’t help my runaway thoughts.
Yesterday, drained from hours of weeping, I had curled up in the
closet which still contained an elusive hint of Ken’s cologne and
reached a decision.
    I wanted this baby. But without Ken, I would
shrivel up like a plant denied the life-giving rays of the sun. He
had been gone for less than two weeks and I already hated eating
alone every night, dreaded facing the lonely expanse of the
bed.
    My lover’s ultimatum could be read in the
jangling, hanger-filled emptiness of the closet, in his absence in
the bed where we’d made what I thought was love every night.
    I could see it in the absence