Scarlet's family had been headed by her maternal grandfather, the family patriarch, who'd passed on about five years before. He'd apparently ruled his family with a benign, but iron fist, and had arranged Scarlet's mother's marriage to her father very shortly after her mother had graduated high school. Scarlet's dad was similar to her grandfather, in that he believed strongly that the father and the husband ruled the roost. The result was that both Scarlet and her mother had led mostly sheltered lives.
Things had changed a bit for Scarlet, though. Her dad had agreed that she could go to the University of Alabama to land a rich husband and further increase the family's fortunes. This reminded me of the plight of the Wesleyan daughters and how their mother had tried to set them up. Once she was out from under her parents' thumbs, however, she'd gone a bit wild.
Ashley had been happy to help Scarlet act out her fantasies; apparently one of them was for her to be tied up and have sex with a stranger. I'd been selected as the unknown stud because I was easy on the eyes, outgoing, seemed to know what I was doing, and, most importantly, was from
way
out of town. It was okay to have a bit of fun with a good-looking boy. What they didn't want was to have word get around that they'd had that kind of fun.
With the amount of partying that Scarlet had been doing, she'd apparently woken up hungover several times and hadn't been taking her birth-control pills as regularly as she should have. She'd also insisted that any guy she went to bed with had to wear a condom, more to protect herself from the risk of disease than anything else.
On the night the three of us had gotten together, Scarlet figured that I was pretty safe on the STI front. Why she would assume that, I wasn't sure. So, given her desire to have her bondage fantasy play out as realistically as possible, she'd told Ashley to forego her condom rule for the night.
Ashley was a slightly different story. She wasn't on the pill and hadn't planned to have sex with me. But then Ashley had gotten into it while watching Scarlet and me. As Ashley had
just
gotten over her period, she figured she was safe, and had gone with the moment. I thought back to that night, and if I were in her shoes, I would have done the same. What Scarlet and I did with the light bondage was hot.
The net result was that after the start of the fall semester, they'd both realized they were pregnant.
Neither of the girls was a dummy, and with the extra summer classes they'd taken, they were able to graduate early after finishing the fall semester. They'd only started to show just before Thanksgiving, and with a lot of loose clothing and sweatshirts, and everybody worrying about the end-of-term finals and papers, they'd managed to make it through the semester--somehow--without starting any kind of scandal for their families.
Ashley and Scarlet had remained close and had hidden their conditions from their respective parents until that became impossible. They made sure as well that by the time their parents found out, it was way too late for abortions. They'd been able to weather the inevitable family storms by supporting and being there for each other.
The problem was that they were from old, moneyed, religious families, and an unmarried daughter with a child was not something either of their daddies was willing to put up with. They were both being pressured to marry. The only reason they hadn't been pushed to marry before the babies were born was that they were both visibly pregnant, and those kinds of wedding pictures in the society pages were not something their parents wanted.
"Why didn't you talk to me as soon as you knew?" I asked.
Ashley's gaze was steady as she looked me in the eye.
"We were talking about it, and then you were in the news for raping a high school girl. We'd gotten up the nerve to call you when your movie came out. We were sure our families would think you were a playboy. And then there were those two women who tried to make you out to be bad news for any woman. Of course, we knew the women were just making trouble. That was quickly pretty clear.
"We kept putting it off, and putting it off, and wouldn't tell our families who you really were. Even when we had the babies and put your name on the birth certificates, they never made the connection to David Dawson, the movie star, model, and athlete.
"The final reason is you are so much younger than we are. Our dads want us each to marry someone who's stable and ready to raise our children. To be honest, until last night I was sure they weren't going to let us come today and tell you," Ashley said.
That was quite a bit to absorb. Smearing someone in the media really did have an effect on people's lives, it seemed. I absolutely could not fault the girls for their decisions. Yes, this made my life more complicated, but I was happy they'd decided to tell me. I guessed that there had to be some concern that tilted the decision to let me know.
"So, what changed to make you finally decide to get in touch with me?"
"Two guys named Brett and Clay, and our daddies," Ashley replied with a bit of a sour expression.
It turned out Brett was a rising star on the management team at one of Mr. Kincaid's warehousing businesses. He'd shown his ambition, and everyone felt that someday he would work his way into upper management at the company headquarters. According to Ashley, he was a player as well. I'd sort of guessed the player aspect.
"Brett sees me as his ticket to job security and advancement," she said dryly. "He comes from a decent family, and he's about 25 years old now, but I don't think Brett ever did a lick of honest work in his life before he graduated from college. When my father started talking him up and began to make excuses to throw us together, I smelled a rat and checked Brett out. He's living a bit higher than his paycheck would allow, so I figure he's getting some money from his family.
"The girlfriend and female-employee networks also don't have very much positive to say about him. He cut himself a swath through the girls who work for the warehouse company, and some of them are pretty upset with the way he'd wine and dine them and then stop dating them as soon as he got what he wanted."
Ashley gave me an apologetic look.
"With you, we didn't use a condom for all the reasons I told you, and because we figured you were safe as far as diseases go. With Brett, I'd make him use a condom even after we're married."
That last comment was telling. Ashley knew that Brett would never be faithful.
According to Ashley, her father was looking more at Brett's family than he was looking at Brett. The family checked out, so Mr. Kincaid just figured everything would be great with Brett, and he'd been pushing Brett on her harder and harder.
I'd noticed that Ashley didn't wear an engagement ring, even though Brett's announcement said otherwise. I didn't think their nuptials were as much of a done deal as her dad and Brett thought they were.
Scarlet's situation was a lot worse than Ashley's. She'd dated Clay while she was in high school. His family had a lot of land and were cotton farmers. Clay had been a safe date for her in high school because her father approved of him. At least it got her out of the house. Scarlet and Clay had been friends, but she'd never thought of him as more than that. She'd been a virgin when she went off to college.
Scarlet's parents, especially her father, were very religious Southern Baptists, and Scarlet's actions and her pregnancy were troublesome to her dad in particular. His best solution was for her to get married as soon as possible and have the husband adopt her little girl. He'd focused on Clay as the most likely candidate.
Now he was pushing Clay on her, but with Scarlet's dad, it was more of an ultimatum than a 'wouldn't it be nice' suggestion. He'd recently started talking about stopping all support for her unless she married, if not Clay, then someone else, and soon. The 'Clay' arrangement was supposed to be for a quick, quiet wedding, and Scarlet would live with Clay in a trailer on his parents' farm until a more permanent arrangement could be made.
