Lucky Bastard by Charles McCarry

hold on to me. I feel like I’m falling apart.”
    Gingerly, Jack put his arms around her. She hugged him back, shaking, Jack thought, as if she were freezing and only the warmth of another body could save her. He imagined she was thinking of Danny. After a few moments she relaxed, then fell asleep.
    Almost immediately she woke with a start, crying, “Don’t let me fall asleep. I don’t want to be in that dream again.”
    Jack said, “Okay, I’ll turn on the radio.”
    They listened to music for a while. Cindy made no attempt to move away from him. Finally, intending to push her gently away from him and start the car, he kissed her lightly on the forehead. She looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to understand who he was and what he wanted.
    Then she kissed him, chastely, on the lips. Jack kissed her back, lightly. She responded. Up to this moment Jack had not had a sexual thought, at least not one he felt he could act on. But the kiss triggered the essential Jack. He was overcome by desire. He kissed Cindy lingeringly; she accepted his tongue, then turned her head violently aside, as if she were the one who tasted vomit.
    But, as Cindy was to remember in years to come, she did not say Stop; she did not push him away.
    Jack was moving her body, arranging their positions. And then, yes, he did what he had done so many times before in similar situations.
    Cindy said, “Oh my God!”
    But Jack had gone too far to stop, so he continued to the end, and through the haze of alcohol and grief, Cindy felt her body responding. She tried to make it stop. She was as limp as a rag doll; she felt incapable of movement. Nevertheless she was moving, responding. She fought against this. Owing to Jack’s peculiar method of approach, Cindy was still wearing her panties. They had been twisted into a sort of tourniquet, shutting off the circulation in her left thigh. This was painful. She concentrated on the pain, tried to fill her mind with it. But her body took over, and though it was the last thing in the world she wanted to happen, she was taken by the wave.

5 Cindy had realized that Danny’s furlough would coincide with her cycle of fertility. Before he came home, before she ovulated, she went to a gynecologist who removed the intrauterine birth-control device she had worn since adolescence. Cindy told Danny nothing about this, and as they made love every day, several times a day, he supposed that nothing could come of all this copulation except pleasure.
    A week after Danny left for Vietnam, she missed her first period. Ordinarily this would not have upset her. Her cycle was irregular and she had been late many times in the past. When this had happened in the past, she and Danny always renewed their promise to each other that if she really was pregnant they would marry and have the child.
    However, this child might very well be Jack’s—and if it was, she realized that she was capable of killing it with no more thought than was required to crush an insect. There was no way to know which man was the father—the one she loved or the one she hated. Even after the child was born she could never be sure. How could she ever love it if she could never know for certain to whom it really belonged?
    The desire for control was very strong in Cindy; it was her real religion. She had learned in Sunday school that good actions produced pleasant consequences and bad actions, unpleasant ones. All her life she had avoided unpleasant consequences by behaving herself, by planning ahead, by making things come out the way she wished. Now she was losing control of everything at the same time—her own body, her own life.
    Cindy longed to hear from Danny. He had not called her from California before his plane took off for Vietnam. He had never written a letter in his life. The rational part of Cindy’s mind told her that he had not called because he had not been able to get to a