She laughed and turned to me, putting down the iPad. Then, she wrapped her arms around me and I pulled her into my arms for an embrace.
“You are very sophisticated,” she said and kissed me. “Beat off does sound so much better.”
We stood like that for a few moments, our foreheads pressed together.
“Is everything okay now?” I asked, not wanting to let things drop if she still felt guilty or upset about finding me masturbating. "You're feeling better about the whole fake email thing?"
“Everything’s fine,” she said softly. “Everything will be fine.”
I nodded and buried my face in the crook of her neck, inhaling the scent of her hair, the trace of her perfume, and a definite baby-momma smell.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said and led her into our bedroom. “I’m tired and the dragon is out of fire.”
So we did. She crept in beside me once I was naked except for my boxer briefs, and we spooned, her back pressed against my body, my arm around her waist. Sleep was a long time coming for me, for I was trying to figure out what Lisa had done to make it look like I wrote her personal emails. Damn… She was a nutcase. A very dangerous nutcase, but still insane if she thought any of this was going to win me over.
I tried to blank my mind of thoughts about Lisa and the case, but it was hard. In addition to thoughts about Lisa and the police, I still had a bit of blue balls, a sweet ache in my body that spoke of unmet need, but I had Kate.
That was everything.
Chapter 4 : Kate
The night went as usual, with Drake getting up in the middle of the night to feed Sophie one of the bottles of expressed breastmilk that was stored in the freezer. I stayed in bed, although I could have given Sophie a feed because my breasts were getting quite hard and full of milk. She’d want another feed in a few hours and I’d be mor
e than ready by then.
When I woke several hours later to the sound of Sophie making noises on the baby monitor, not quite upset but starting to work up to a cry, I left Drake sleeping and slipped out of the bed. I took a quick pee before I went to get her.
Inside her bedroom, the early morning sunlight was peeking through the blinds and she looked like a little angel in her crib, her eyes wide open, her arms flailing around when she saw me. I smiled and picked her up, then sat on the glider chair beside her crib and proceeded to feed her. She ate hungrily from one breast and then the other, stopping only for a brief time, during which she cried lustily as if the worst thing in the world had happened when I pulled her off the nipple for a burp.
When she was finished, she was ready for a change, and then I laid her back into her crib, pacifier in her mouth, and she went back to sleep. She was usually sleepy in the early morning, and today was no different.
I yawned and went back to our bedroom, only to find the bed empty and Drake gone. I checked in the bathroom, but he wasn’t there as well. Then I remembered the Herald magazine’s online edition. Maybe Drake was checking it out.
I also remembered the whole email business and of course, my day went from great to bad. I didn’t want to believe he wrote her any email, even innocuous email that she could twist to her own devices. I wanted to trust Drake.
So I did. I put the email issue out of my mind. I was sure when we got the chance to see the email, Drake would know they were fake. I thought about my own email program and was sure I couldn’t just go in and change them. They had to be forgeries of some kind.
I went downstairs after I finished washing up a bit, brushing my hair and teeth, and found Drake sitting on the sofa, his laptop open, a browser with the latest edition of the Herald open.
He was reading, leaning close, his eyes moving over the screen.
“How bad is it?” I asked and laid my hand on his shoulder, squeezing softly to offer him some comfort.
“Bad enough,” he said, his voice low. He kept reading, so I went into the kitchen where Drake had the coffee brewing and squeezed myself a glass of fresh orange juice. I opened a cupboard and found some bread and popped two slices into the toaster, planning on having toast and eggs for breakfast.
“Would you like some scrambled eggs?” I asked Drake.
There was a pause. Finally, he responded. “Maybe some Hemlock would be better.”
I frowned at his reference to Socrates’ choice of poison. “Is the article that bad?”
I brought in a cup of coffee for Drake and placed it on the coffee table. I tried to read the article over his shoulder, but the text was small. All I could make out was a line about him being a renowned neurosurgeon who was one of only a very few performing specialized robotic surgery for movement disorders.
“What did they say? Did they mention Sunita?”
Drake flipped through a few screens to another page with a pic of the back of Sunita’s thighs, which had long welts on them. I had to admit I felt a little sick to see those welts. Had Drake done that to her? It made my throat choke.
“Did you do that?” I said, my voice barely audible, my throat dry.