Author's note. After a long break and in response to many recent messages, Penny is back! The whole story is being turned into full length novels so the style is slightly different but it's really Penny and it's really me writing.
I hope you still enjoy it.
Chapter 22
"Can you see?" the young radiologist asked, running the square plastic sensor over my lower belly.
Pete and I were in a private examination room in the discreet clinic in which the Gynaecologist I had previously visited was based. It was far enough away from home for our visit not to be noticed by our friends or colleagues and the consultant himself was known for his discretion.
I was lying on my back; my slightly swollen tummy was bared and covered in goo to allow our first ultrasound examination to take place. Everything on the screen appeared as it should; for better or worse I had passed the twelve-week watershed with my pregnancy intact.
"Oh my God yes," I exclaimed, amazed; for all the world as if this was my first pregnancy rather than my fourth.
But I could be forgiven for this; the last time I had felt the cold slimy conductivity gel on my skin had been over twenty years earlier when the contents of my womb had been Isobel, Pete and my third child. It was easily long enough ago for me to have forgotten just how great a miracle it could feel having a new baby growing inside me.
From his body language, my husband was clearly feeling something similar even though this time he knew that the baby in my belly had no genetic link to him at all. This child had been conceived in the bed of a twenty-nine-year-old Personal Trainer during my first ever one-night stand.
The sex that had resulted in my complete loss of common sense and subsequent pregnancy had been some of the best in my life -- at least, the best I had known up till then. Unknown to me, the very best was still to come. During the full night I had spent in his grubby bed in his chaotic, messy bedroom, young, fit Darren had fucked me in any and every way he wanted, inseminating my unprotected body at least four times.
I had then passed the entire night on my back with his semen inside me.
In the throes of the many orgasms he had given me, the 'breeding frenzy' had struck with a vengeance, making me so aroused that I had begged the boy to knock me up; to fuck a baby into my belly just as I had begged my first lover Tony to do the same so many times.
Unknown to either of us, my wish had come true; I left Darren's shared house the following morning a pregnant woman.
"It's still amazing even after all these years."
Pete agreed, squeezing my hand, nobly keeping up the pretence that he was the baby's father.
It wasn't hard to be amazed. As we stared open mouthed at the image presented on the screen, my mind flew back decades to my first pregnancy. Enraptured, we watched as the girl pointed out a clearly distinguishable head, spine, arms and legs. We gasped helplessly at the rapidly-beating image of a tiny heart as if we had never seen such a miracle before.
Before us was the clear outline of a child though blurred by the machine's resolution and the early stage in its development. The image wasn't clear enough to tell whether the foetus was male or female; the radiologist thought probably a girl but to Pete and me, that didn't matter.
"The baby looks fine, Mrs. Barker," the girl said with a reassuring smile. "Something of a miracle, isn't it?"
She was right; for a woman nearly fifty-two to have become pregnant in the first place was a miracle in itself, let alone having apparently been impregnated by a man whose vasectomy had taken place over a decade ago.
I felt my husband's hand gripping mine tightly and the tears beginning to form in my eyes.
We looked at each other searchingly; after so many years of marriage each of us knew instinctively how the other felt. My pregnancy wasn't just a problem anymore; it wasn't an embarrassment or evidence of shame.
This was now a real, living human baby growing inside me; a new son or daughter being created.
Nothing was said; nothing needed to be said. This was a real child and no matter what the consequences to our lives might be, we both knew there was no way either of us could deliberately harm that unborn child.
The always-remote option of a termination had just become a total impossibility. Now, if nature permitted, at fifty-two years of age, Dr. Penny Barker PhD was going to have another baby.
The child of a man not her husband.
***
The prospect of becoming a mother again would have been frightening for any woman at my time of life. The prospect of having what my grandmother would have called call a love-child and of a small but important proportion of our friends suspecting this was simply terrifying.
And as for what our children would say; that was beyond the realm of nightmares. But at least the most important man in my life was supporting me, even if he couldn't possibly be happy.
"Are you really sure you can live with it?" I asked Pete as we drove back to our city after the appointment.
"Hmmm?" he asked, distracted.
"Bringing up another man's child," I said quietly.
He thought for a moment.
"I'm trying not to see it that way," he eventually said.
"How do you mean?"
My husband reached across and ran his fingers gently over my softly swelling belly as he spoke.
"I'm trying to make myself see things more positively. Okay, I'm not the baby's genetic father; that's not a great start but it's not everything. I reckon I could do a good job of being its Dad."
"You really mean that?"
"Right now I do," he replied. "There's a long way to go but at the moment I can handle that idea."
My husband is an amazing man. As many of you have brutally observed, I do not deserve him. I squeezed his hand as he continued to talk.
"At the moment I don't feel jealous. It's odd, but I don't."
"Really?" I asked, surprised.
"Really. It's not like someone else made you pregnant when I couldn't," he continued. "We have three kids already."
That was certainly true. The idea of having to tell them they were about to have a new brother or sister more than twenty years their junior did not appeal to me at all. But Pete hadn't finished.
"And it's not like a second marriage where the child's genetic father is always in the way, trying to interfere and maybe take the child out at weekends," he went on as we turned onto the city's ring road. "Darren doesn't even know he's going to be a father and never needs to know. If we're careful and lucky, only you and I need ever know the truth."
