Being Their Baby (2 page)

Elizabeth looked at her long and hard in the way children might do when trying to solve Magic-Eye posters. Sophie could nearly hear the gears in her brain churn as she worked through Sophie’s situation.

Sophie puffed out her chest, hoping that what she wanted, which was no big stink to be thrown, was what Elizabeth wanted as well.

Finally, Elizabeth sighed, loudly and unhappily. “I don’t like bastards thinking they can get away with stuff like that!” she huffed. “Why would he do this to you? Did you get bad grades in school or something?”

Sophie tilted her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. She was unsure if Elizabeth had gripped reality hard enough today. “Um… Miss Button,” Sophie said, “I haven’t gone to school for, like, two years now. They can’t make you go after sixteen.” Sophie had never said anything before about this, positive that Elizabeth couldn’t have possibly been thinking Sophie was actually attending school, because she was at the office all day long and she had mentioned that she worked in the evenings at her second job.

Elizabeth’s face began to pale with sympathy and sadness. Sophie firmed up her bottom lip, hating that look. The woman really had thought that Sophie was on the college track, and now she had the nerve to be disappointed about the obvious reality she had been ignoring.

Sophie sighed and opened her hands as if physically grasping at patience. “Look, Steve—my stepdad—just saw that I had some stuff, you know, because of the gift card you got me. He sort of went off the deep end, and I’m used to it. I can handle myself.”

That gift-card was the single most generous gift Sophie had ever gotten from anyone. The temperatures this year had been record-breaking low for this time of year, and Elizabeth had been obliged to give Sophie a birthday gift of unusual size: she had handed Sophie an envelope with a
five-hundred-dollar
gift certificate to Kohl’s, with instructions that Sophie had to buy a new coat with it, since all it seemed she owned was an old hoodie (which was a correct assessment). Although Sophie was normally loath to accept charity, she had been also extremely happy about the prospect of buying something that was both warm and new. She bought a coat and saved the rest for later, unable to make any decisions about what to get. Once Steve saw her wearing a jacket so obviously not from a secondhand store, the evening turned into a full-scale inquisition pretty fast. In the end, he’d demanded that she give him the rest of her gift.

After she had refused and clutched her wallet like it was life support, Steve had smacked her a few times before he let fly a punch, and then had taken it out of Sophie’s hands. Her mother had just watched the whole exchange with a jealous glare, as if Sophie had been keeping it from her, too.

“He took it from you, didn’t he?” Elizabeth quickly pieced together.

“After I got my jacket,” she assured, not mentioning how her stepfather had thrown it into the dumpster, just to spite her. Sophie had had to dig the jacket out and mourn at the old beer and lunchmeat stains on it.

Elizabeth shook her head, ran her fingers over her temples like she had a headache, and then dropped her arms altogether, looking incredulous. “I am so, so sorry, Sophie,” she told her, and then began to fish for her wallet in her purse. “How can I help?”

Sophie stifled an eye roll. This was also one of the things she feared Elizabeth would do—waste even more money on her. “No, I’m cool! Really, I got a place! Besides, I meant to move out soon, anyway; it’s not like I had an open invitation to stay at Mom’s as long as I wanted or anything.”

“How much?” Elizabeth clarified, ignoring her.

“I’m not accepting anything else,” Sophie refused stubbornly, even tensing her shoulders and crossing her arms in front of her.

Elizabeth looked up, challenging her for a long, frightening moment with her stare. Sophie did a good job at not pissing her pants from it, so Elizabeth just shook her head with exasperation and pulled a simple card out of her purse—in lieu of her wallet—and handed it to Sophie. “Take it,” she instructed as Sophie kept her arms crossed, yet leaned forward to suspiciously inspect it.

To avoid another stare-down, Sophie pinched the card between two fingers and brought it up to her face. It had Elizabeth’s
personal
number on it. Sophie flushed, feeling quite honored, since Elizabeth was sort of a celebrity, yet she actually trusted a girl on the other side of the tracks with her contact information.

Sophie would never, ever use it, of course, but the gesture wasn’t lost on her.

Elizabeth looked very somber. “That has my cell and my home phone number on it, Sophie. If you need anything—
ever
—I want you to swallow your pride and call me. Day or night. Got it?”

Sophie nodded and turned the card around in her hands like one would an ornament or a knickknack they thought was quite clever.

Elizabeth pointed one of her nails in Sophie’s face. “Put it in your pocket before I tattoo that number to your forehead.”

Sophie immediately complied, stuffing the card into her jeans’ back pocket. “Can I go back to work now?” Sophie asked wearily, as if she’d been put upon by Elizabeth’s concern.

“Yes, but I’ll be checking up on you,” Elizabeth announced; it sounded very much like a threat. In the next moment her eyes softened from their normal intensity. “Don’t try to avoid me just because I care, okay?”

Sophie nodded. “Yes, Ma’am… Thanks,” she added shyly, and then hightailed it out of the room.

* * *

A Few Days Later

“I’ve never said it before, but after commentating for three games in a row, I’m really hating football.” Charlie put his big, solid arm around Liz and pulled her against his chest as she sat on the sofa, clicking through emails on her cellphone with frustration. “After I saw the Cowboys spank the Packers like little schoolgirls, I really just wanted to curl up into a ball and cry. But my makeup girl told me she’d kill me if I did that.”

Liz gave a hum in reply to pretend she was listening to him. She was in no mood to laugh; it had been days since Liz had seen hide or hair of Sophie. The week had been short because of Thanksgiving for the office, but Sophie hadn’t come in at all. She hadn’t called in, either; she had just disappeared.

Charlie leaned over, trying to entice a kiss out of her. She pecked his lips dutifully and then rested her head against him, even though she wasn’t a particularly cuddly person with him.

They used to share a girlfriend—one that used to give Charlie all the cuddles that he required. That relationship had ended last month, and now the man seemed to be going through withdrawals; he was trying to cuddle on her far more than she’d remembered him doing in the past.

Apparently, Charlie could sense there was something wrong, so he said, “I know. I miss Lacey, too,” as he petted Liz’s arm.

“That’s actually not what’s bothering me,” she mumbled distantly. Truthfully, she’d known Lacey would leave them for quite some time before the event occurred, and so the official ‘dumping’ had filled Liz with relief more than anything else. She hadn’t even thought about the girl the entire month, although she knew Charlie was obviously still broken up about it.

Honestly, Liz had been surprised that Lacey had stayed with them for two whole years. Lacey had been sexually oriented as straight
more than Liz would have preferred. Anytime Liz had braved anything sexual with Lacey, the girl would tense up too much, which had made Liz feel a bit self-conscious.

Elizabeth had always prided herself on being the epitome of a bisexual. She had no more preference for one sex over the other. In fact, she would have missed having a girlfriend if she only had a boyfriend, and vice-versa. That was why both Charlie
and
his brother, Josh, had never truly seemed like enough… she needed a girl. A
submissive
girl, in fact, that she could control and dominate, which was why she had gotten so easily swept up in age-play way back in college when she’d discovered the idea of being a ‘mommy’ to someone. After sharing the idea with Charlie, who seemed to be a born ‘Daddy’, history was put in motion.

“All right,” Charlie said with an amused grunt, “spill.” He sat a little straighter. He seemed very excited to hear about anything not-Lacey. Boy, her leaving Charlie for a vanilla guy must have really kicked Charlie in the gut!

“Sophia didn’t show up at work yesterday,” Elizabeth divulged with a sigh, “and it’s not like her. In the past, she’s come in no matter what; in sickness and in bad weather.”

“Sophia…” Charlie drawled, eyeing the ceiling thoughtfully. “Sophia… Wait—that’s the sixteen-year-old mail-girl, right?”

Liz straightened and arched her eyebrow at him. “The kid’s not a vampire. She’s
aged
, you know. She just turned eighteen last week, and then she didn’t come to work. She didn’t even call in sick; she didn’t call in
at all
. She’s not the type of girl to just fall off the face of the earth.”

“Well, kids her age aren’t exactly reliable,” Charlie replied. “She’s probably out having fun.”

“
Fun
? I guarantee you she wouldn’t know fun if it bit her on the ass. She can’t
afford
fun. That girl is too poor to buy a
bra
! She’s living alone, she’s estranged from her parents, she’s practically invisible to everyone else at work; I know she doesn’t have any friends there. She’s not even allowed to die since she can’t afford her own funeral!” Liz huffed angrily. She wasn’t angry at Charlie, just at the world they lived in. A world that could put a girl like that at its mercy at such a young age…

Happy for an ear to rant to, Liz told him about Sophie’s abuse, and the fact that she wouldn’t take any of Liz’s money (except that one case with the birthday gift card, which had gone awry). Sophie had apparently dropped out of school midway through her sophomore year to work; so she had no real future… No friends, no connections, nothing.

“Hm,” Charlie grunted with a deep frown. “And I didn’t think I could have been any more depressed than I was five minutes ago.” He winced. “And the fuckwad just took her gift card? What kind of depraved asshole—?”

“I know,” Liz agreed, putting up her hands.

“Why don’t you call her?” Charlie asked next.

“I don’t even think she owns a phone,” Liz lamented. “Even if she did, though, you can bet your shirt she wouldn’t give me her number. She’s as stubborn as a goat! There’s no way in hell to get a hold of her… If something happened, nobody would probably even notice but me, and there’d be nothing I could do about it.”

Charlie rubbed his callused hands over her shoulders, shushing her soothingly. She hadn’t realized it until then, but Elizabeth was shaking. She was startled at her own reaction; she never got this upset.

“It’s okay, honey. She’ll turn up,” he assured her.

“I just hate not being able to
do
anything,” Liz admitted. She knew that Charlie would understand at least that much of her feelings. He’d known that Liz was a control-freak since they were small children playing in the sandbox, where she kept demanding that he make his sandcastles “the proper way.”

Charlie continued to massage her shoulders, turning her back toward him to give him better access at her stiff muscles. She felt Charlie begin to kiss her neck, and then his voice purred in her ear, “You know what you need to do? Relax. When you can’t do anything, then you need to find a way to take your mind off of it.” He obviously wanted to take his mind off his own matters, because he unbuttoned the top of her blouse and cupped one of her breasts through her lacy bra. Quickly, his fingers moved around the barrier and found her taut, attention-starved nipples.

Damn Charlie—he knew her breasts were her weakness! All it took was the littlest tweak of her nipples and she would turn into putty in his hands. There had been a reason why she hadn’t found the reason to find another man other than Charlie or Josh… rather, Elizabeth had a complete lack of reasons to go searching for another man. Why would she need a new man when Charlie and Josh knew her inside and out? Both of them knew every trick in the book that could get her cumming and screaming to the rafters every time without fail.

He laid her backwards until she was sprawled out on the sofa. He took her red nipples into his mouth and began to flick his tongue over them as he released himself from the confines of his pants. It was all about
her
tonight, apparently, because he batted her hands away from his stiff cock and continued rubbing and sucking and making her melt into the furniture.

Her mind began to change; her body was slowly charging into “the mood.” Hoping that tonight he’d actually let her dominate him, she pushed back, growling eagerly and wanting to mount him. “I’m gonna ride you like a lazy horse.”

Her tactic didn’t work; apparently he was in no mood to let her take the reins, which was normal for Charlie. “What do you think this is, your birthday?” Charlie growled back. They both pushed and clasped each other until they fell onto the carpet. He wrestled her until he had her pinned face-down on the floor. “Now, raise up your ass to me like a good little slut who needs my cum inside of her.”

She’d lost her virginity after a wrestling match with him when they were teenagers. Ever since, that’s how sex for them was: one trying to dominate the other. Their battling hadn’t lasted long—Charlie joined the football team, and after enough weight-training to make even Arnold Schwarzenegger cringe, Charlie could always win and pin her into the position he wanted with stellar speed and efficiency.

She didn’t raise up her ass for him. “You’re such a bastard,” she grumbled into the carpet under her chin.

He gave her a firm swat on her backside. “Up,” he repeated, “or it’s going right into that sexy bottom.”

For a moment, Elizabeth considered that threat as possibly something she wanted. The short-lived pain from the anal penetration would definitely keep her mind in the present, and away from Sophie. Yet, Liz never did very well when being dominated to that extent; it would give Charlie too much satisfaction. With her shoulders still pinned to the rug, she dragged herself up to her knees so that her bottom was up and presented for his taking.