Need a Little Company Ch. 12

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the movies or characters from the "Cabin Fever" franchise. All "Cabin Fever" movies and their characters belong to their respective owners. I don't make any money from the writing of this story.

Comments/Kudos are appreciated.

*****

"Thanks man," Paul said as he exchanged a fifty for the two heavy plastic bags the deliveryman had brought to the front door. "Keep the change," he smiled.

"No problem, dude," the young man replied, turning on his heel once the second bag was clear of his fingers and bounding back towards the street without really looking at Paul.

The guy's arrival had been a welcome relief. Paul still didn't have much of an appetite, but dinner would put an end to the painfully awkward wait he had been enduring for the past hour and a half.

After they had given each other some much-needed physical release, Paul had relaxed on Marcy's bed for a good long while, even after Marcy had finished her shower. Eventually, he grabbed a shower himself.

When he emerged from the bathroom, Marcy suggested ordering Chinese for dinner as she couldn't be bothered cooking. Paul had no objections. She pointed out a menu from the local Chinese restaurant that she'd left on the counter for him to peruse.

By this point it was still only late afternoon and felt far too early to sit down to dinner. Earlier, Marcy had been typically candid about her intentions to fuck him again. But Paul got the distinct impression that she had no interest in working up another coital sweat so soon after freshening up. This left him with the glaring question of what he was supposed to do in the meantime.

He took his time browsing the menu, carefully inspecting every single item for no reason other than to eat up some time. But all too soon he had to conclude this ruse before his fixation with the menu began to seem absurd. The tension over the next hour or so was intense, as he shared the small house with the woman carrying his surprise lovechild, in cold silence. He tried to occupy himself by watching TV, while Marcy sat on the opposite end of the couch for a while, seemingly engrossed in a magazine crossword. But the monotonous yammer of the TV bought no comfort to Paul's racing, anxious mind; it was only another pretense for him to retreat in to.

Marcy's declaration of, "I guess we should probably order dinner now. Do you know what you want?" had been encouraging, but only when Paul finally heard the knock of the deliveryman on the door was the ordeal truly over.

Closing the door behind the deliveryman, Paul carried the hot bags in to the modest kitchenette/dining area and placed them on the dinner table, where Marcy was just in the process of sitting down.

Sorting out whose boxes were whose had the jarring effect of emphasizing to Paul just how massive Marcy's order was compared to his own. It seemed like he couldn't escape the constant reminders of her pregnancy.

"Well... Dig in," Marcy instructed, as she enthusiastically opened one of her containers and attacked its contents. Her voice was soft, not so much that she was difficult to hear, but just enough to suggest she had shared Paul's sense of discomfort over the past hour or so.

That wasn't so surprising, all things considered. The sudden reappearance of the man who got her pregnant; having her secret discovered, must have surely been almost as big a shock for her as the discovery had been for him. It takes a long time for a person to completely compose themselves after a shock like that, even a smooth operator like Marcy.

Nonetheless, it was abundantly clear that she was once again trying to gain control over the situation in her typical manipulative style. For the most part, she was succeeding, too.

Following her shower, she had changed in to a sleeveless navy blue blouse that had been buttoned sparingly to offer an amazingly low neckline. The air around her was thick with a fragrance. Though it seemed more a casual deodorant than a perfume, the sporty aroma was undeniably attractive.

It was obvious that Marcy was deliberately teasing him. For one thing, the evening was just a little too cool for such an airy garment to be a natural choice.

It pleased Paul that she was making an effort to arouse him.

Once upon a time these seductive little mind games of hers infuriated him. He'd resented being treated like her personal little lapdog who would heel whenever she stroked his libido. More to the point, he'd hated the fact that he was indeed so incapable of resisting her seductions.

But they were well past that now. Too much ground has been lost for Paul to concern himself with luxuries like control or self-respect any more. The blunt truth was that he was here in Oregon because he was desperate to fuck Marcy once more, and everything about her behavior said loud and clear that his appetite would be well and truly satisfied before the sun rose. It was a delightful thought.

With everything that had happened over the past couple hours, there was still far too much going on in Paul's head for him to be focused on dinner. But eventually, he got around to prying open his first box and eating an egg roll.

"Good?" Marcy inquired, with an expression of seemingly genuine interest.

"Hmm?" Paul snapped out of his daze, barely aware that he was even eating. "Oh yeah. It's nice," he replied.

"That's good," Marcy nodded with a satisfied smile. "I don't order from these guys very often. When I do buy dinner, I normally go to this Mexican place across town. They don't have home delivery, but ever since my second trimester, I have these days where I'm really jonesing for spicy stuff, like crazy. But for some reason, tonight I'm just not feeling it.

"Fucking hormones, man. They're driving me insane," she remarked, shaking her head in frustration.

Paul forced a sympathetic chuckle.

The level of detail she'd gone in to didn't feel natural; it was an obvious effort to break through the silence between them and make the atmosphere more casual. To a point, she had succeeded, but there was still some ways to go before either of them would feel comfortable.

"So," she began a moment later, after swallowing a mouthful of dumpling. "Where are you off to tomorrow?"

"San Francisco," Paul replied.

Marcy nodded.

"I think I saw a turnoff on the road here that led to route 97? So if I understand right, I just pick that up and head south?" he asked her. Even though Marcy was only a new resident to the town, he figured that she'd have picked up at least some local knowledge on the best routes to California. At the very least, asking her couldn't do any harm.

"Yeah," Marcy concisely agreed. "Pretty long trip," she remarked.

"Yeah," Paul said with a sigh, indicating that he wasn't looking forward to the long drive. "But if I get an early start I should get in before 5 o'clock."

Again, Marcy simply nodded in response.

"So, what's in San Francisco? Job?" she asked with a hint of hesitation, as if she was concerned that it might be a sensitive topic.

Something about the way she'd asked the question made Paul wary. Perhaps it was the mention of him having a job. Was she trying to assess his financial wellbeing? Earlier, in the diner, Marcy had assured him that she didn't want any support from him whatsoever for the pregnancy. Nor would he need to worry about child support, seeing as she was giving the baby up for adoption. But now Paul began to wonder if sooner or later Marcy was going to put the screws to him for a little financial assistance.

Was it possible that she was having second thoughts about giving the baby away? That was a scary thought!

In spite of his suspicions, Paul decided to maintain the veneer of polite conversation that they'd managed to build up together quite well over the past few seconds.

"Uh, no," he replied. "I've got an old friend who moved there. I'm gonna crash at his place for a few weeks. Just taking some time off after college, y'know?"

He watched Marcy's face carefully for any sign that she might be disappointed with his lack of solid employment. If she was unhappy to hear about it, she concealed her true feelings flawlessly. As far as he could tell, Marcy couldn't have cared less that he didn't have a job. She even seemed quite sympathetic to his desire to take a little break after the stresses of college.

"Oh, cool," she responded. "And you figured that seeing how we were both on the same coast, you might as well drop in and say 'hi'?" she suggested in a light-hearted tone.

"Yeah," Paul chuckled with a snort and an ironic smile. Of course, a more honest explanation for his visit would have been, "I figured that seeing how we were on the same coast, I might as well drop in and try to sweet talk you in to fucking me again." But even keeping with the classier euphemism, it was obvious that the last thing he'd expected this afternoon was to discover Marcy was pregnant with his child.

Marcy matched Paul's faux amusement with a false smile of her own, before a look of concern suddenly washed over her face.

"Did you tell anyone else about... coming to visit me?" she asked in a calm but serious voice.

"Hmm?" Paul raised an eyebrow. It took him a second to understand the question and the apprehension behind it. "Oh! No, no!" he emphatically assured her. "All I ever said to anybody was that I was gonna take my time driving across the country. I never went in to specifics about the route."

"Good," Marcy nodded, seemingly relieved. "The fewer people who know where I am, the better.

"How the hell did you find out where I was, anyway?" she inquired, before devouring another dumpling. There was displeasure in her voice, but no accusation. It was more like she was just generally angry that her attempt to hide herself away had failed than she was at Paul for finding her.

"Oh, uh... A guy from the office at college gave me your forwarding address," Paul explained.

"What? He just handed it over?" Marcy asked with a furrowed brow.

"Well, yeah, pretty much," Paul said. He figured telling Marcy he'd paid someone off to get her address sounded a bit too stalker-ish. "When you didn't come back, after a while I started wondering what had happened to you, so I guess I started asking people if they'd heard from you. One time this guy from the office overheard me and said he check to see if the college had your contact details," he elaborated.

Marcy seemed rightly concerned about the breach of her privacy. Paul could only hope the lie didn't come back to haunt him.

Paul could appreciate her discomfort with the idea of her location being so easily traceable. Or to be more precise, he could appreciate her discomfort with the prospect of being discovered in her present state.

That bulge on her belly would have a profound effect on the way others looked at her and treated her, especially given her reputation as a promiscuous girl. The story behind how that bulge was made would tarnish her image even more, if it ever came out, or was deduced.

But at the same time, Paul couldn't help but pity her for her self-imposed exile. Here she was, all alone in a town of strangers.

Like himself, she would still be bearing raw scars from all the terrible things that had happened in the cabin those 8 months ago. She was probably still privately mourning Karen, who had been a good friend to her. Perhaps she was also nursing a broken heart from having Jeff abandon her in her hour of need. On top of all that, she was carrying a baby inside her.

She carried all these heavy burdens more or less alone, cut off from the friends who cared about her. It's not that Paul didn't understand her isolationism; he understood it very well. It just didn't seem right that this was the best choice she had.

"You really haven't told anyone else where you are?" he gently pried, calling back to her previous remark about how 'the fewer people who knew where she was, the better'.

Marcy looked at him and shrugged in a way that said, "Yes and No." She seemed to be deciding which details she was and wasn't prepared to reveal to him, as she continued to chew her food. But before she could give a proper answer, Paul interrupted.

"Does your family know about..." he began, stalling as he considered the most tactful way to refer to her pregnancy. Marcy stared at him in bewilderment for a silent second, before a brief chuckle escaped her lips, ejecting a single grain of rice that landed on the table.

"My family thinks I'm backpacking through Europe right now, trying to 'find myself'," Marcy explained. Her expression of subdued amusement and polite tone of voice were the manners people display when they try to answer extremely stupid questions without embarrassing the asker.

"Right now, I'm in Budapest," She elaborated as she tucked in to another ball of fried rice. "And in a couple of days, I'm catching a train north to Prague."

"Wow. That's specific," Paul remarked, genuinely impressed with the speed at which Marcy had delivered the fine details of her cover story.

"Yeah, well, you have to keep track of things, otherwise it would all fall apart," she told him.

Earlier, Paul had noticed a couple of clocks in Marcy's house that were running several hours fast; a small analogue egg-timer type on her kitchen counter, and a green LED one beside her laptop in her modest study. But at the time, the uncomfortable atmosphere between them had deterred him from asking about them. Now he realized that they were probably tuned to Hungarian time to help Marcy keep on-track with her lie.

A moment passed without any reply, then Marcy made eye contact with Paul. She couldn't read the expression on his face.

"My family would... they'd... they wouldn't be able to handle... this," Marcy told him, gesturing to her fruitful belly as she tried to justify her actions.

"Hell, I think my mother still tries to convince herself that I'm a virgin," she chuckled.

Paul chuckled sympathetically.

"So you keep in touch with them?" he inquired, shifting the precarious direction of the topic.

"Of course," Marcy replied. "I send them regular emails. Call about once a month. 4pm in Eastern Europe is about 8 in the morning in New Mexico; 7 here. So I call them before they go to work... Before we go to work," she chuckled awkwardly.

"I even have a friend who actually lives over there mail me blank European postcards. Then I write messages on them and send them back to her so she can mail them, so they arrive at home with European postmarks," she said, her voice reflecting her pride in her own brilliance.

This detail caught Paul's full attention.

"So, you've told her about the baby?" he asked.

Marcy nodded.

"A couple girlfriends know," she finally revealed, "girls I really, really trust."

Paul nodded in understanding.

"How much do they know?" Paul asked, his tone of voice betraying the stake he had in the answer. Marcy understood his concern immediately.

"Just that I'm pregnant. And that I'm giving it up for adoption," she told him in an assuring tone. "They don't know when it happened or how it happened. I told them I didn't want to talk about it.

"My guess is, if they try to speculate, they'll assume it's Jeff's. And they understand I don't want to see him again, so there's no way they'll ever let word get out to him," she said.

"Thanks," Paul replied with evident gratitude.

"Hey, I look just as bad in that story as you," Marcy casually dismissed his sentiment.

The room fell silent for more than a minute as they both continued with their meals.

"You mind if I ask you something?" Paul eventually asked in a dead serious tone.

"Eh," Marcy answered with a shrug, implying that nothing he could say would phase her. Though privately, the fact that he felt his question required a forewarning made her nervous.

"Back in the diner, you told me that when we were together after the funeral, you were thinking about having an abortion. Obviously you decided not to. But you're giving the baby away. You're not going to keep it. So why have the baby at all?" he asked, in a tone that wasn't judgemental in the slightest, just profoundly curious.

Marcy sighed deeply as she leaned back in her chair and stared off in to space. The question hadn't struck a nerve as she feared it might, but it was extremely difficult to answer all the same.

"If you don't want to talk about it..." Paul began after several seconds without a response.

"No, no," Marcy cut him off, "I don't mind trying explaining it. It's just - I don't know if I can.

"I guess...

"A lot of bad shit happened up in that cabin, you know? Karen got sick, and died. Jeff and I broke up. Pretty much all our friendships got fucked up. And you and I wandered off to fuck, while Karen was bleeding to death all alone on the floor of some shitty old tool shed," she met Paul's gaze with this last remark and could see the reminder cut him deeply. But whatever animosity he may have retained against Marcy for her role in their regrettable hook-up was hidden behind a veil of polite attentiveness.

"I suppose when it turned out I'd gotten pregnant, I just wanted something good to come out of all of it. I wanted to believe that something good could come out of it. And I guess I wanted to believe it so badly that I had to see this thing through," she explained.

"Maybe my good ol' Catholic upbringing just came back and talked me in to believing that a baby being born would be a blessing. You know, like some kind of good to balance out the bad? But, you know, thinking about it now, when I look at how Charlie and Greta... the adoptive parents... when I think about how excited they are about having a baby soon... I don't know, but I guess in a way it really is a good thing," she said. Paul couldn't help but notice that she'd begun subconsciously caressing her womb with a tenderness he hadn't seen her express towards it thus far.

"I dunno. I guess that sounds like bullshit," she backtracked, "But...

"No! No!" Paul quickly corrected her, "I think I get it. You go through something like we did in those woods and you can't help but ask yourself why it happened. Why did Karen have to die? You can't help but try and look for a reason for it all. Because you can't really understand how shit like that can just come along and end someone for no reason.

"God knows, it's been on my mind all the time since she died and I still haven't made any sense out of it," he told her.

"Me either," Marcy softly replied.

She spoke again after a brief, but powerful moment of silence. Her business-like tone instantly changed the atmosphere of the room.

"Listen Paul, back in the diner, I think we came to an understanding. But all the same, I know I'll sleep a lot easier if I actually hear you say the words.

"Can I count on you to just walk away and not fuck up this adoption?" she asked, glaring at him with a keen but non-threatening gaze.

Paul sighed and his gaze dropped as he clearly descended in to deep thought. Marcy was surprised and concerned that his answer wasn't immediate. But for Paul this was a pivotal moment of his life, not to be glossed over carelessly. If he committed himself to Marcy's request now, it would mean he would never, ever know the son or daughter that, up until a few hours ago, he never knew he was going to have. Yes, the idea of immanent parenthood was scary. But for some reason he also felt that surrendering his paternal rights could also deprive him of a precious opportunity for real joy.

"Sure, Marcy," he eventually answered with a warm smile.

Marcy sighed in relief.

"Like you said: who wants to be a parent at 21?" he added, with a shrug that belied the significance of the words.

Despite the countless "what if..." questions, that would likely haunt him till the day he died, the simple truth of the matter was that he didn't want to be a dad. Not now, anyway. Perhaps even more importantly, he wasn't ready to be a dad, neither financially nor emotionally. His grief over Karen, his confusing lust/hate fixation with Marcy and the surreal sensation of being freshly out of college were an emotional triple-whammy that assured he was nowhere near stable enough to begin raising a child.