The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition (20 page)

She found a box of ice cream in the
freezer. After studying it a moment, she shrugged. It was dairy!
Grabbing the box, she glanced toward the kitchen clock as she
reached for a bowl and discovered fifteen minutes had flown by
while she was searching for sustenance.

Dropping the box on the counter, she
raced into the bathroom and snatched the test kit up. After staring
at the little display window for several moments, she grabbed the
empty box and looked it over. Pregnant two lines. Not pregnant one.
She stared at the little window again, trying to decide if the
really faint pink line beside the dark one was actually the results
of the test or if the ink was running because she’d accidentally
pissed on the little window. She moved it in and out, trying to get
better focus and finally held it up closer to the light.

Still uncertain, she put the test kit
down and sat down with the instructions, scanning them for an
explanation of ‘light’ line. She didn’t see anything that
specifically referred to whether the line was dark or light, but
she did see a warning—useless if not pissed on first thing in the
morning—or words to that effect.

“
Well, damn
it!”

Throwing everything in the trash, she
stomped back to the kitchen, grabbed a spoon, and started eating
chocolate ice cream out of the box. A straw would’ve come in handy.
It was already melting.

She wasn’t going to sleep a wink, damn
it! She didn’t even have a test for the morning! She could stop and
get one on the way to work, but could she hold ‘it’ till
then?

Well, she was just going to have to
try! She didn’t see an alternative at the moment.

By the time she’d arrived at that
decision, she discovered she’d eaten almost a third of the ice
cream. Feeling suddenly queasy, she dropped the spoon in the sink
and put the ice cream up.

She stared at the kitchen
clock, considering whether there was any possibility of finding
another store that was open that also had pregnancy kits and
finally discarded the notion. She didn’t want to wait. She wanted
to
know
! But it
didn’t look like it was going to happen.

Sighing, she checked the doors and
windows and headed to the bathroom to get ready for bed. She’d
nearly dozed off before it suddenly occurred to her that she’d left
everything in the trashcan in plain view!

Leaping from the bed, she raced into
the bathroom, dug the test strip, the box, and the instructions out
and looked around for some place to hide them. The back of the
toilet?

She could just imagine the look on
Garryk’s face when he flushed and her pregnancy kit popped up in
the bowl! Surprise!

She studied the trash can, wondering
if she could shove the stuff to the bottom and cover them up and
finally discarded that idea, too. It would be just her damned luck
Garryk would drop something in and go after it, or decide to empty
the damned thing!

Carrying the trash to the kitchen, she
pulled the can out and shoved the evidence beneath a layer of
trash. “Gross!” After disinfecting her hands, she headed back to
bed.

She was still wide awake, staring into
the darkness when Garryk came in. She closed her eyes when he
glanced her way, but she didn’t hold out a lot of hope that she’d
fooled him into thinking she was asleep. Fortunately, as unnerving
as her secret fear was, she still found it soothing that Garryk was
home and the sound of the shower finally helped her grow
drowsy.

He roused her when he climbed into bed
beside her. Bracing on his elbow, he looked down at her for a long
moment and finally settled when she continued trying to pretend she
was fast asleep. Gathering her against his length, he curled around
her, ‘pillowing’ her head on his rock hard arm. He rubbed his cheek
along the top of her head and finally settled. “Whatever it is
you’re worried about, you know you can talk to me, don’t you
baby?”

Chelsey wasn’t even
almost
tempted to
confide. She struggled to think of a response and finally gave up.
“Mmmmhmm. Goodnight, baby.”

* * * *

Exhaustion was nothing new to Garryk.
He’d lived with it so long that he figured he’d gotten as used to
it as anybody could … and gotten used to running on a lot less
sleep than the average person considered essential. On top of that,
he was a man with a mission so, although he ordinarily merely
rolled over and went back to sleep when Chelsey got up and left for
work, he was wide awake when she left that Friday
morning.

Bounding from the bed the moment he
heard the front door close, he headed into the bathroom to start
his search. The trashcan didn’t contain anything but a couple of
empty bottles, a soap wrapper, and a few wads of tissue. Setting it
down again, he searched the medicine cabinet and then the drawers
of the vanity. When he still came up empty, he straightened and
scanned the room for any other possible hiding places and finally
lifted the top of the tank.

Shrugging when he saw nothing but
water, he left the bathroom and looked around the bedroom. He knew
she hadn’t disposed of the kit there, though, and headed into the
kitchen and went straight to the trashcan. Picking it up, he tilted
it and shook it until he found what he was looking for. “Ah ha! Pay
dirt!” He fished it out and moved to the window for better
light.

Briefly disappointed when he saw the
results were indecisive, he dropped the test strip in the can and
shoved it back under the kitchen sink, considering the situation
while he washed the gunk from the trashcan off his
hands.

She must have tested the night before,
he realized, shaking his head in disgust that that hadn’t occurred
to him. She wouldn’t be far enough along to get an accurate result
if she had. Blind panic—not a good sign, but not altogether
unexpected all things considered.

The problem was she was on high alert
now. If he hadn’t succeeded, he might not get the
chance.

He shook that anxiety off. He was no
specialist in that field, but he’d boned up on it and he was almost
a hundred percent certain she was pregnant.

It was the one percent of doubt that
bothered him.

Well, she was bound to buy another
test kit. He’d just have to try to get to it before she could get
rid of it afterwards.

Dismissing his disappointment with an
effort, he headed back into the bathroom to shower. The great thing
about working pretty much every hour of the day that he wasn’t
sleeping was that he didn’t get much chance to spend the money he
was trying to save. The problem was that it didn’t leave a lot of
time for shopping when he wanted to, or needed to … and he needed a
ring if he was going to convince Chelsey that he wanted to marry
her. Otherwise, the little idiot was liable to get the notion that
he was just being noble when she finally got around to telling him
she was pregnant!

He was going to be
seriously pissed off if
she
decided to be noble and deal with her ‘secret’ by
herself! If that wasn’t just like her, though, he didn’t know what
was! He decided to give her another week. If she was still trying
to hide it from him, he was just going to have to confront her
about it, as little as he liked that particular strategy. He was
damned if he could think of anything else to try to convince her,
though. He was just going to have to go with what he had. If that
didn’t work … he’d have to think of something else.

* * * *

The problem with being a
creature of habit, Chelsey reflected irritably, was that she was
always on automatic when she was tired and she was never bright
eyed and bushy tailed when she rolled out of bed in the morning.
She’d already flopped on the toilet to empty her bladder before she
remembered the damned test—which she was
supposed
to get on the way to
work!—and she discovered she couldn’t cut the stream off once she
let go.

Mentally kicking herself, she finished
getting ready for work and left, promising herself that she was
going to leave a note on the bathroom mirror for herself before she
went to bed! She didn’t think she could make it through another day
with so little sleep.

It was a rough day to face
with only a few hours of honest to god rest! Fridays always were
and this one was worse than usual. By the time school had let out,
though, she’d decided she was going to confront Lawrence face to
face instead of taking the coward’s way out and calling him up. It
wasn’t as if he could
do
anything else to her!

Well, she supposed he
could. Crazy men killed their wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends
every day, but she didn’t think he was
that
crazy. He wasn’t going to do
anything that might bite him in the ass and he had enough sense to
know he couldn’t get away with murder.

She hoped. Since he managed to get
away with just about every other low down thing in the world, he
might think he could get away with that, too, but she was pretty
sure it was safe. In any case, he was certain he had her by the
throat. He wasn’t nearly as dangerous when he was confident he was
going to win.

It seriously sucked to drive all the
way to his place and discover that no one was home! She settled in
her car again to wait, certain somebody would get home before much
longer, and fell asleep. It was nearly dark when discomfort finally
outweighed exhaustion and she woke up.

The house was dark and there wasn’t a
car in sight, she discovered, so either they’d come and gone again
while she was sleeping in the car—unlikely, she decided—or they’d
made plans for the weekend and left before she arrived.

Anger flickered through her, but she
was just too worn out to feed it. Grabbing her satchel, she got a
piece of paper out and scribbled a note for Lawrence informing him
that she would be back the following day to pick up Larry. After a
little consideration, she decided to make two more just in case she
picked the wrong door to attach the note to or it blew away. She
put one on the front door, one on the back, and then stuck the
third in the mailbox on top of the stack of mail that was in
it.

As tired as she was when she got home,
she was still too wired to rest—possibly because she’d taken an
hour and a half nap in the car. She took the test kit out of her
purse as soon as she got in the door and headed to her bathroom to
look for a place to hide it. There weren’t a lot of options. She
finally simply hid it in the drawer of odds and ends, mostly
cosmetics, figuring Garryk had had plenty of time to discover what
the drawer contained and wasn’t likely to be rummaging through her
makeup. Just to be safe, she put it toward the back under a pack of
cleansing pads.

Leave a note or not? Garryk would see
it, but she could just put something cryptic—like check test. She
was a teacher. She didn’t see why he’d think anything about
it.

Ok, so maybe it would look a little
odd that she’d taped it up in the bathroom, but there wouldn’t be
any point to leaving herself a note at all unless she put it where
she could see it first thing. She thought, maybe, she could
remember after screwing up once already, but she’d been so
distracted lately she knew she couldn’t count on it.

Restless once she’d done that, she
decided to get a head start on her weekly chores. If she managed to
run Lawrence down and wrest Larry from him she didn’t want to spend
most of the time he was with her cleaning.

Heading to the spare bedroom, she
opened the door and flicked the light on. The musty smell of a room
that had been shut up a long time hit her as the air was sucked out
of the room by her entrance. She paused, feeling her throat close
as she scanned the room. The tops of everything were coated with
dust.

Larry was supposed to spend every
other weekend with her, but she didn’t think he’d spent more than
one a month for the past six—and none in a solid month now. The
first few months after the divorce, he’d dutifully arrived right on
schedule. He’d been angry about the divorce even then, though, and
hardly a ray of sunshine, and their relationship had deteriorated
steadily ever since.

After studying the room bleakly for a
few minutes, she thrust the thoughts aside and set to work tidying
it up and airing it. She found a pair of jeans and a shirt he’d
kicked under the bed that she’d missed the last time she’d cleaned
the room. Leaving the door open, she took the dirty clothes with
her when she left and got her laundry basket from the hall closet.
She’d collected the clothes from the hamper in her bathroom and
headed out again when she noticed Garryk’s bag by the door. There
was a change of clothes crumpled up on top.

He was usually really good about
picking up after himself, but he was always in a rush to get from
one job to the other and he’d had a few lapses since he’d taken up
the habit of swinging by to check on her between jobs. Setting the
basket down, she picked up the clothes to sniff them to see if they
needed washing or if it was just something he’d decided not to wear
after he’d unfolded them. As she lifted them, something fell out
and hit the floor with a dull rattle.

She saw when she looked to see what it
was that it was a prescription bottle. Frowning, she picked it up
and looked at the label. It had Garryk’s name on it, but she had no
idea what the medicine was for.