Bentley Little: The House

She wasn't sure she was ready for the responsibilities of taking care of a kitten, let alone a baby.

What if she was pregnant? Would she abort it? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so, but she couldn't rule it out. At this point, she had no feelings for whatever might be growing inside her, no protective maternal urges, no bond of any sort. But how could she tell? She might keep it and it might turn out to be a good thing.

It might force her to make just the changes she needed in order to slough off this midlife malaise or whatever it was that seemed to "be afflicting her.

Or maybe not.

Laurie looked once more out the window, once more toward the bay, then walked back over to her desk and tried once again to get through theMieger file.

Before heading home, she stopped by the bookstore.

Josh was busy, discussing Taoism with an obviously likeminded customer. She wasn't in the mood to hang around for an hour or however long it took for him to wind down, so after browsing politely, waiting a respectable ten minutes, she smiled at him, blew him a kiss good-bye, and started out the door.

"Wait!" he called after her, holding up a hand.

She mimed dialing a phone. "I'll call you," she said in the exaggeratedly simplistic tone she'd use on a deaf person attempting to read her lips.

Her brother nodded from across the store, circled his thumb and forefinger in an "OK" gesture, and turned back toward the customer.

It was late afternoon, the sun already hidden behind two of the taller buildings, and in the shadows of the city this morning's cheerful warmth had disappeared.

Above, the sky was still blue and cloudless, but the hidden sinking sun had robbed it of its attraction and Laurie felt cold, lonely, and curiously uneasy as she walked down the littered sidewalk toward her neighborhood.

There were a lot of cars on the street but very few pedestrians, and something about it all didn't seem right to her.

Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe her hormones were all out of whack and affecting her emotions.

Twenty minutes later, she was out of the downtown business district and passing through an interim area of old buildings and Victorian homes that had been converted into boutiques and coffeehouses when she saw up ahead, parked by the curb in front of Starbuck's, Matt's Mustang.

Her heart started racing. Maybe it wasn't Matt's.

Maybe it was someone else's, someone who had the same car in the same color and a similar bumper sticker on the back window. She took a few steps forward, then stopped, looking at the license plate.

It was Matt's.

What was he doing here? He didn't even like coffee.

He was probably here on a date.

But why was he staying this close to her neighborhood?

She'd expected him to keep as far away from her as possible, had assumed that out of common decency he'd relocate to another area of the city. The last thing she figured he'd do was hang around here. Didn't he have any shame?

Maybe the bitch he was with lived in this area.

That would make sense. He'd probably met the slut when he'd been off one day, cruising around the neighborhood, pretending to work on his art, while she really had been at work at Automated Interface.

She thought of waiting for him by his car, embarrassing him, causing a scene, informing him loudly in front of a group of strangers that she was pregnant, but she knew that was just a fantasy. Even now, looking at his car, her heart was pounding so hard it was interfering with her breathing, and there was no way she could get up enough nerve to face him. Not now. Not yet.

She considered continuing down the sidewalk, pretending as though she hadn't noticed, ignoring him if he happened to walk out to his car at the exact moment she passed by, but she decided against it and opted for crossing the street and cutting down the alley that led to Union.

The alley was dark, the flanking buildings blocking out what was left of the late afternoon light. Her uneasiness returned. The shadows here made her nervous, and she hurried over the pitted, eroded asphalt toward the opposite end, not running, not wanting to make that concession to fear, but striding quickly, hoping that her anxiety did not show. She pretended as though it was only the normal physical dangers of the city that worried her, that she was afraid of gangs and muggers and derelicts and drug addicts, but that was not the case. She could spin it that way, rationalize it, but her nervousness was based on something less concrete, something ephemeral that she could not even put her finger on, and whether it was stress or hormones or another entirely unrelated cause, all she wanted was to get out of this alley and off the streets and back home.

The girl was waiting for her at the alley's end.

Laurie was almost to Union, about to step off the rough asphalt onto the sidewalk, when she saw movement in the shadowed darkness to her right, a flash of white that startled her and made her suck in her breath.

It was a girl of about ten or eleven, a thin waiflike child with dirty hair and face and even dirtier clothing:

a white party dress covered with smudges and handprints and mud-edged rips. Her physical appearance resembled that of someone who'd been beaten or abused, but there was no sense of victimization about her, no fear or hesitancy or the sort of emotional withdrawal that would be expected after such an attack. Indeed, the child seemed remarkably self-possessed, and she stepped in front of Laurie, looking up at her. "Hello."

"Hi," Laurie said, and she wasn't aware of it until she'd spoken the word, but there was something old fashioned about the girl, an anachronistic formality evidenced by her "Hello," by her purposeful walk and self-assured bearing, that under other circumstances would probably be cute and charming but here, in the alley, seemed unnatural and more than a little disconcerting.

There was also something vaguely erotic about the child, something sensual in the way her hair fell over the left side of her face, the way she stood, hips out, bare legs slightly spread beneath her dirty dress.

What kinds of thoughts were these?

Laurie looked into the girl's face, saw raw beauty beneath the dirt and grime, saw a knowing, adult expression on those child's features, and she felt a strange and unfamiliar stirring within her, a feeling that was almost... sexual.

Sexual?

What the hell was wrong with her?

The girl smiled up at her slyly. "Do you want to see my underwear?"

Laurie shook her head, backed away, but the girl was already lifting up her dirty dress, exposing clean white underpants beneath, and Laurie was looking. She didn't know what was going on here, but the tight cotton and clearly outlined private parts were somehow arousing, and she was unable to turn away.

The girl laughed, a high child's giggle that segued halfway through into a woman's throaty chuckle. She turned around in a circle, still holding up her dress, exposing her pantied buttocks.

Laurie was frightened more than anything else. She did not know what was happening, but she had the sense that she should, that she was supposed to know who this child was and why she was doing this.

The girl was once again facing her, and she smiled knowingly. "Do you want to see my pussy?"

Laurie turned and ran.

She was almost to Union and could've walked around the girl and out to the street, but even the idea of running back through the shadowed alley and perhaps meeting up with Matt seemed preferable to moving any closer to the child and risking accidental contact.

She was out of breath when she reached the sidewalk, but she turned left and kept running, past Matt's unmoved car on the other side of the street, past businesses and houses, up the hill, not stopping until she was home.