Page 27 of The Square

CHAPTER EIGHT - ALEC

“I’m pregnant.”

Fokken perfect. Just fokken perfect, man. That’s exactly what I fokken need right now. I know precisely how to deal with Death. But new life? Eish, man. And that this is happening now, just when Christine…

“Where are you going?” Eliza asks.

“Out,” I tell her, shrugging on my jacket. The rain has finally stopped.

She smirks at me in a way that I have seen her smirk before. It’s a manner that suggests she thinks she knows me better than I know myself. “How novel and very non-communicatively masculine of you,” she says, with a not insignificant amount of condescension.

I spin to face her. “Is there something you need from me that I’m not giving you right now?”

“My God. Alec van den Berg. If someone walked in on us and didn’t know better, they might think we’re in a… oh, shit, what’s the word? Ah, that’s right… a relationship.”

“What do you want?” I yell. Which I do not mean to do. She doesn’t cower or retreat. Her smile just widens. She walks toward me, slowly, as she speaks.

“You were the one who summoned me here. Do you remember that? You called me here to tend to you while you healed. And hid.”

“I’m not fokken hiding.”

“You’re not? Oh. Well, you see, I assumed that once your wounds closed and your ribs mended themselves and all that, you’d be back off into the world. But you’re not. You’re still here with me. Which, you’ll pardon my confusion, feels like hiding.”

She’s almost to where I’m standing now. I wonder if she thinks I’m going to cower or retreat, myself. She can’t possibly. She knows me too well. But lest there be any confusion, I step in toward her now, closing off almost all the space between us.

“You don’t think it’s probably just,” I begin, “that I’m still here because I like being able to fuck someone in the ass whenever I feel like it? Without having to give a shit about what they want? Because that’s what this is for me. And when seen through that prism, I’d be a daft fokker to leave until I grow bored. And I ain’t. Fokken. Bored. Yet.”

I stare down into her eyes, unblinking. She returns my stare, equally unflinching. This is the point where most others might turn and run, or slap my face, or scream at me, or any other of a dozen clichéd responses, but she is not most others.

So I grab her by the cheeks with one hand and force my lips onto hers. She doesn’t resist, just kisses me back, grabbing my balls as she does. With my other hand, I reach around and find her ass. She’s now wearing a light Spring dress and as my hand gathers the fabric into a bundle, I discover that she’s not wearing underwear. My palm curves in between her legs and my middle finger slips inside her. She gasps, grabs my crotch tighter, and bites my lip.

Spinning her around, I lift her dress, slap her ass—hard—and throw her forward where she collapses at the waist over the Roman arm of the seventeenth-century tufted sofa. And it is at that moment that I stop. Stop everything. Stop moving toward her, stop feeling, stop breathing, stop everything.

Seeing her belly hit the grand, puffy arm of the chaise, I can’t prevent my mind from landing on this new knowledge I have been given. There is a child growing inside her.

“How do you fokken know it’s mine?”

“Well, luv, I’m no midwife, but you’re the only person who’s come inside me in the last six months.”

“How long have you known?”

“Does it matter?”

“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

“Is that a real question?”

She’s right, of course. I know why.

God fokken damn everyone and everything straight to Hell.

But, shit. Maybe God already has. And we’re all already there.

She looks back at me over her shoulder. “What’s happened? Why did you stop? You didn’t suddenly find yourself bored, did you, pet?” She stands up, flattening her dress down. She faces me. “You know, Alec, it’s not as if I expected you to pop a bottle of champagne and hand out cigars to all your mates…” She pauses. “Come to think of it, you don’t really have any mates to hand cigars to, do you?” She sighs. Her shoulders rise and fall. “But I thought you might at least show something resembling, oh, I don’t know, civility.”

“How am I not being civil?”

“I don’t know how they do things in Joburg, luv, but in Kensington, we don’t imply that the mothers of our children are just there to be fucked in the arse until we tire of fucking them.”