The Baby Maker’s Club

His eyes darken and he looks tormented. I hate seeing him this way. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have judged you like that.”

“No, you’re right. Those things they said about me online are terrible. But they aren’t true. It’s all a mistake. I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t believe me either after reading those accusations. This is why I’ve stayed away from dating, why the club seemed like a good idea when I started. Women always react like this when they hear about my past. I don’t know why I thought things could be different with you and that maybe we …”

His words trail off. I lean in as if I might hear the tail-end of something if I got close enough. But he’s done talking. He stands up.

“I need to go,” he says. He turns his back on me and walks away.

I’m too stunned to follow at first. I can’t let him leave. Not like this. What did he think could happen with us?

I chase after him through the gardens. “Chaucer, wait,” I say.

He stops and turns to face me. I throw myself in his arms. His hands cling to me, arms wrapped around me tightly as he squeezes me in a hug.

When he pulls away, he looks deep into my eyes. I know he cares about me the way I care about him. I’m still worried about his past, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to be part of his future.

“They’ll never let me back into the club after this,” he says. “I’ve broken too many rules.”

“You’ve only broken the one rule about learning my name. I can keep a secret.”

“That’s not the only rule I broke,” he says.

“What’s the other one?”

“Rule number three, the most important rule of all: Never fall in love.”

My heart grows humming bird wings and flutters in my chest. A lump sits in my throat. I struggle to swallow it down.

“I want to see you again outside of the club,” he says. “I want to be with you.”

A hundred thoughts clamor to the forefront of my mind, battling for my attention. But the one that keeps trumping all others is knowing he’s in love with me and I’m in love with him. I want to be with him more than anything.

He grips me by the waist and pulls me toward him. His lips crash against mine in a long and passionate kiss. I don’t care who sees. I don’t care about anything right now except for being with him.

When we part I say, “Let’s go.”

His lips are red from the kiss and his eyes are glazed over with lust. If I knew we wouldn’t be caught, I’d let him fuck me right here and now in the garden.

“Where?” he says.

I grab his hand and lead him out of the garden. When we’re back inside the building, we run into Megan. She’s looking curiously at me. She walks up to us and I can tell by the look on her face she knows we were up to something in the garden.

“Who is this?” she says.

Megan and I have been friends a long time. We tell each other everything. Keeping a man a secret is not part of the deal when it comes to our friendship, but I don’t want to tell her that I broke the rules of the club she helped me get into.

“This is Chaucer. We met at the bar last night.”

She smiles from ear to ear. “When were you going to tell me about this?”

“I was about to tell you before he showed up here.”

“I knew you were keeping something from me.” She looks Chaucer up and down and the look on her face is definite approval. “You don’t look like you’re feeling too well, Kate. Maybe you should take the rest of the day off,” she says with a wink.

My smile bursts across my face. “Thank you.”

Chaucer and I don’t linger a single second longer. He pulls me through the hallways and out of the building. He leads me to his car, a black SUV parked around the corner from my building. He opens the backdoor instead of the passenger side. He must have been reading my mind.

I get in. He quickly lays the back seats down so that they’re flat. Urgently he reaches for my blouse and lifts it straight off my head. Wasting no time at all, he unbuttons my skirt and I shimmy out of it. It’s a good thing his windows are blacked out with dark tinting. Pretty soon this car is going to be shaking like crazy.

He removes every stitch of clothes except my panties. When they don’t come off right away, he rips them off instead and tosses the frayed remains in the front seat.

“Every waking moment since I met you, all I can think about was fucking your sweet pussy,” he says to me while he takes off his own clothes. “And now that we’re together, we can have this all of the time.”