Chapter 4 - Awry

"Holy shit," her visitor whispered, and Rhiannon groaned at the voice. Not now. For Plumbob's sake, not now.

When she finally looked at Truman, he was staring at her with huge eyes and a gaping wide mouth. "Don't tell me you have a pregnancy fetish," she quipped, crossing her arms under her chest.

Truman's eyes flicked immediately up to hers, his face screwing up in further shock. "What the hell did you do to yourself?"

"That's not exactly any of your business, is it?" She liked this whole keeping distance thing between them. It helped her to ignore the fact that he was, first of all, in her room in a pair of swim trunks that looked oddly familiar and, second of all, that she was randy as hell.

"You got knocked up? You've been here like a week and you already got yourself knocked up?"

"Shut up," Rhi snapped.

As she cleared the table of her dinner dishes, she resisted the urge to grab Truman by the neck and to throw him out of her apartment. After their last meeting, she really had no desire to see him ever again. At least, not until she learned if he was seduceable or not.

"Well, what are you gonna do about the kid?"

He really couldn't take a hint, could he? Rhiannon looked at him with a furrowed brow. The man didn't look the least bit bothered. "What?"

"I mean, are you gonna go get some books or something? See what'd be best for the kid? Maybe-"

"I had no idea you were such a bookworm, Truman."

He rolled his eyes. "I'm serious. You gonna keep the kid?"

"As a matter of fact, I will." She shoved her chin in the air, more to throw him off than anything, and strode toward him. "Why? You think I'd be a shit mom?"

"Rhiannon, I don't know a damn thing about you, in case you forgot." He slowly lifted one of his eyebrows. "Besides how to make you sigh."

Her stomach flopped, and she immediately regretted approaching him in the first place. Damn, this was stupid.

"Do you even have any pregnancy books or something?" Truman turned and approached her bookcase.

Rhiannon was notably displeased.

"Truman, look." She followed behind him, though he stopped far sooner than she expected and turned to face her.

She froze. He really was damn good-looking.

"What?" he said softly, tilting his head slightly to the side.

Rhiannon had a thousand things she'd like to say in that moment, most of them suggesting some joint gratification, but instead, she looked away. "I think you need to head home, all right? And whatever you do, don't tell anyone about this. Got it?"

He left, and Rhiannon sighed. Somehow she had the feeling that this was going to go terribly, terribly wrong.

Her first order of business a few days later was to put on some halfway decent clothes and to take herself off to the library.

Truman, the freaking tease that he was, had some good points. Regardless of how long she kept the kid, she needed to figure out how to take care of it. How often was she supposed to feed it? How did one change a diaper? All of that shit.

She sat in the library for the entire day, reading pregnancy book after pregnancy book. Her extremely overactive pregnant bladder sounded the alarm once she finished her final one, and she took herself off to the bathroom with a sigh and a very ungainly walk.

Count on Rhiannon Toft's water to break right as she emerged from the bathroom stall.

Taxis seemed to hate pregnant women, so Rhi decided to jog to a subway terminal while in the midst of labor because she was apparently slightly insane.

By the time that she arrived at the hospital, she had quite a following, including several people panicking in her wake.

If anything, Rhiannon reasoned, she'd at least made their day a hell of a lot more exciting.

She emerged from the hospital some hours later, exhausted and with shaky noodle legs, and holding a baby girl that unfortunately held her skin color. Otherwise, it would've been far easier to blackmail Mr. Stanley. Glynnis was her name, a Welsh name just like Rhiannon and one that her mother had confessed to her once that she'd considered naming Rhi instead. It was the first name to pop into her mind, and Rhiannon scribbled it down without much care before taking the child and leaving.

As she approached Glynnis's crib, she realized distantly that this was a hell of a lot different than reading those pregnancy books. This was both a lot more real and a lot more annoying.

"There," she muttered, laying Glynnis in the crib. "Get comfy. Stop crying. Whatever. I've got something I need to do."

That something involved dialing Mr. Stanley's cell phone number. As the man who had approved her maternity day requests, he already seemed to know what was coming. "I'll be there in five minutes."

The conversation when he arrived was stilted and awkward. As might be expected, Alan Stanley had no desire to see the child. He seemed even more terrified that Rhiannon might try to coax him into marrying her.

"No, sir, that's not what I want."

"I know you've got an opening right now above being a Key Grip. I know you do. Give me a promotion, and we'll say this never happened."

Mr. Stanley seemed to expect this, and he was ready with a shake of his head. "Rhiannon, you've not even been here a week. I don't care what...what materialized out of our little affair. If I give someone so new a position like that, the entire studio could go down the drain."

In all of her plans, Rhiannon had never considered that her request could fail. "...what?"

"Now, if you don't mind, I'll be going..."

"No!" Rhiannon stepped closer. "You're not going anywhere! What the hell do you mean, no?!"

"I thought I made myself perfectly cle-"

"I will take that damn baby to the paparazzi and RUIN you, Stanley! I won't even hesitate!"

"And who's going to believe you?" Mr. Stanley shook his head in pity. "Look at you, Rhiannon. You're fresh out of college. You're young. You're naive. And I'm Alan Stanley. I'm on my way to winning countless awards in just a few months when this next picture goes big." He put his hands on his hips. "And...if my informant's to be trusted, that baby doesn't look a thing like me."

She stared at him, her heart sinking in her chest.

"No one will believe you. If they do, I've got an iron-clad alibi. So trust me." He turned and opened the door. "And just don't try it."

The door slammed behind him.

Rhiannon stared at it, long and hard, before she heard a soft sniffling and cooing in her bedroom.

She stared down at the child, who was currently batting at the air with closed fists. "Look at you. LOOK at you. What the hell have I got, thanks to you?" Rhi pressed her hands into the crib's bars, leaning down to look at Glynnis closer. "I'm not getting a promotion. I'm not getting a raise." She chuckled wryly and bitterly and shook her head. "Hell, at this rate, I'ma be fired instead."

Glynnis opened her eyes and focused on Rhi's face and, for some reason, Rhiannon felt the inexplicable urge to cry. When Glynnis suddenly extended a fist straight up toward Rhi, she couldn't help herself. She scooped the baby up.

Rhiannon looked each way, making sure that there was no way she could be seen, before she cuddled Glynnis silently.

She'd never admit it to a soul, but just breathing in Glynnis's faint baby scent was the only thing that soothed her to sleep that night.