The Intern Pt. 04 - Finale

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Have you ever had one of those mornings where you know you screwed up badly, so you just keep your eyes shut to avoid dealing with the situation? I mean, it's only logical. It's probably the last moment of peace you're going to have for some while, and it's probably a good idea to use the time to make a plan. Then, you do a fact inventory to determine exactly how much trouble you're in, and decide whether it's worth it to open your eyes, or if you should just keep pretending to sleep until the sweet release of death comes to claim you... hopefully before your boyfriend can break up with you for very good reasons.

Fact Inventory: I was in Greg's bed. I knew that just from the feel of the sheets and the incredible smell of the pillow next to me. The fact that I was pretending to be asleep in Greg's bed was definitely a good sign. It didn't mean that I was still Greg's girlfriend, but at least it meant that he hadn't shipped me off to outer Mongolia or something... not yet, anyway. It was a weird feeling. I'd never awakened in Greg's bed before. Against his protests, I always left his place after we were done having fun because I tend to hide under things or in closets or accessible plumbing walls (long story) in my sleep, what with the whole freaky sex cult childhood. Then, when I wake up hidden in a place I don't recognize, I tend to scream. It's embarrassing. If I did that at Greg's, I figured that would result in having the awkward sex-cult childhood trauma conversation that I'd been avoiding, so that's why this was my first time waking in my possibly ex-boyfriend's bed.

That was when I smelled bacon. My eyes opened almost against my will, like someone had a remote control for them. I fucking love bacon. Greg knows this. Well, he knows that I will resort to near-felony-level criminal offenses to steal his bacon, so the fact that he was cooking bacon was a *really* good sign. God, the smell was everywhere. They should make a cologne that smells like bacon and Greg. Fuck yeah.

The door to the bedroom opened, pushed open by Greg's back because he was carrying a covered breakfast tray! Totally cliché romantic gesture? Best sign ever!

Then, he turned and his warm brown eyes moved over me like I was on the menu for brunch. "Good morning, Princess. Hungry for breakfast?" he asked, calling me by a pet name and failing to mention anything at all about me locking myself in his office, breaking his glass thing, and possibly calling Trudy a gargoyle! Oh, thank God, I was home free!

"Starving, Daddy... thank you so much," I said, tearing up suddenly and brushing them away as he put the tray down next to me on the bed and lifted the domed lid with a flourish and showing me the great big pile of crispy yet juicy and salty... oatmeal. What? I scanned the tray in confusion. By some mistake, there was no bacon anywhere on the tray. Only a glass of milk, a half grapefruit, some almonds and a steaming bowl of whole-grain, high-fiber, steel-cut oat slurry that only those that are insane or are being threatened at gunpoint resort to eating. I pulled the corners of my mouth sideways, hoping that it looked like a smile as I subtly glanced around, expecting to see a small red wagon filled with bacon was obscured by the edge of the bed or something. When I looked up at Greg, he was just smiling expectantly at me. "Oatmeal... yummy. Thank you so much, Daddy," I said, my smile beginning to freeze on my face. "Um... do I smell bacon?" I asked, deciding to take the direct and legal route to bacon, instead of palming the jagged-edged grapefruit spoon and brandishing it at him menacingly at an opportune moment.

"Oh yes! I forgot, one moment!" Greg said, giving me a wink before leaving for the kitchen.

I sat up in bed and moved the tray over my lap, glancing around for any small decorative containers I could use as secret oatmeal storage units, but the room was almost devoid of knickknacks. Just a picture of a frail, but beautiful, woman surrounded by lush foliage, her graceful head completely hairless, and her large eyes filled with love. So, I closed my eyes, shoveled three spoonsful of the slop into my mouth, and swallowed quickly, gagging as it went down, rather than defile the picture of Greg's dead wife Kelly with secret oatmeal storage. Karma, don't fail me now.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself silently regarded by a pair of wide yellow-green eyes filled with bored disapproval. "Um... hello. Who are you?" I asked the unimpressed tuxedo cat sitting at the end of the bed, staring at me. In response, he blinked. I felt strangely judged.

"That's Seymore..." Greg said, walking in. "He had been hiding every time you came over, but I guess he's decided you're one of us, now." The sexiest man in the world was carrying a large plate piled high with perfectly cooked bacon. It had to be two or three pounds he'd cooked up, at least! Greg and a giant pile of bacon in the bedroom. I felt myself getting wet.

"Well... I'm honored," I said, trying to entice Seymore to come to me by wiggling my fingers under the sheet. Seymore looked at the mouse-like wiggling, then turned one ear sideways and walked over to where Greg was sitting in a chair by the bed, more interested in bacon. I couldn't blame him. I'd be more interested in bacon, too. Wait, why was Greg sitting in a chair instead of feeding me that bacon? Something was wrong here.

A crisp "snick" sound and then low crunching noises filled the bacon-smell saturated air. Greg was eating the bacon while watching me, smiling pleasantly as he chewed. This... this was not good. Something was very wrong here. Then, he groaned like a man with his cock in a very pleasant place. Goddammit.

"Can... can I have some bacon?" I asked, bowing my head slightly and slowly blinking my eyes up at him. "Please, Daddy?" I pushed my boobs together, creating a precarious display of cleavage in the decolletage of my nightie, just for good measure. I really wanted that bacon.

"It's 'may,' Princess," he corrected me, just like any good, generous, bacon-giving Daddy would.

"Oh! Right - may. May I have some bacon, too, Daddy? Please?" I asked, ever so nicely, with one nipple just beginning to creep into view.

"No, Princess, I'm afraid you can't," said Greg the Sadistic Bastard, happily feeding a small piece of bacon to Seymore, now. "No, you see, when we took you from my office to the hospital, they ran labs on you. The labs showed that your blood had extremely high levels of cholesterol, human chorionic gonadotropin - also known as hCG, as well as methylenedioxy-methamphetamine - a.k.a. MDMA or MDMH or as it's known on the street: "Ecstasy" or "Molly" or "Adam" or "Beans" or "Disco-Bisc—"

"What? What the hell? I didn't take any street drugs!" I yelled, but then my mind flashed back on seeing the boobs girl leaving two lifesaving pain relievers on my desk when I was doubled over with cramps. "Or if I did, I didn't know that was what they were... I just had some bad cramps and—"

"And you took two tablets of a completely unknown substance into your body when you already had a concussion without even thinking about the consequences," Greg finished quietly for me, with a flash of his eyes showing a crack in the thinning veneer of his composure. Greg the Infinitely Patient Calming Guy was very pissed at me.

"I... I..." I began, then slumped back in the bed, realizing that there was nothing to say in my defense. "Yeah... yeah, that was really stupid. I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. I'm sorry I scared you... and for everything else," I said quietly.

Greg looked at his picture of Kelly next to the bed, seeming to have a silent conversation with her while petting the cat who was angling for more bacon. "You were in pain. It's not stupid to want relief when you're in pain. I just wish you had come to me for help. I thought I had earned that much trust, at least," he said, the hurt in his voice somehow more unbearable than his quiet anger was.

"Well... you know... that stuff can be kind of embarrassing for a wom—" I began, when Greg put the bright green Size 5 dilator on my breakfast tray, quietly stopping me from passing off my pain as menstrual cramps. Then, my lips puckered and I started crying. I cried and cried and cried, all the while confessing to him about the sex cult childhood, my parents, the Leader, the abuse, the trial, going from foster home to foster home after my grandparents died, hiding and screaming in my sleep, and just generally what a complete mess of a person I was, no matter how hard I tried to be better. I ran out of tears at about the same time as I ran out of things to confess, feeling a little sick to my stomach. I really hated oatmeal.

Eventually, I looked up at Greg, expecting to see him wearing that barely-masked look of alarmed discomfort that good guys get when they find themselves in a situation where a normal person would just scream and run, but good guys just don't have those survival skills and they stand there wondering how to still be a good guy and not be in that situation anymore. Greg the Good Guy was licking his fingertips, though, having just eaten several more pieces of bacon. What the fuck?

"Did... did you even hear what I said?" I asked, offended. I'd put a lot of effort into keeping that whole glut of information from coming out, so now that it was echoing throughout the room like a fart in church, the least he could do was give me a proper freak-out!

"Oh, yes... forgive me, though, I'd heard it all before," he said. "You told me quite a lot in my office, on the way out of the building, riding in the ambulance, in the emergency room, holding my hand while waiting for your CT scan, and while I checked on you every hour for 24 hours to make sure your symptoms didn't worsen. I have to say, I really missed the musical numbers this time around..." he said, feeding another tiny piece of bacon to Seymore. "You still have yet to explain how you managed, while almost completely out of your mind, to finish that clear plexiglass puzzle on my coffee table in 30 minutes, when I had been working on it for over two years! It's impossible to even tell which side of a piece is up!" he said, exasperated.

"Oh... is that what that thing was?" I asked, chagrined.

"Yes," he said, tersely.

My heart sank. In my altered state, I had unintentionally committed the cardinal sin of dating a man: I beat him at something he was proud of being good at. Sometimes, I hated being the way I was... female and smart. I always had to dumb down what I wanted to say because I didn't want to turn a guy off. Forget about making jokes, too. Funny, in a woman, seemed to shrink a guy's cock even faster than a brain did. "Well, um, you know... I'm kind of... smart," I admitted, with a twinge of embarrassment.

"Obviously..." he said, his face unreadable.

"So, uh..." I said, completely at a loss as to how to relate to him, now that he knew everything about me. "What now?" I asked, mentally going through the various items I'd left at Greg's place to take them with me when I left. If I didn't, I could just see Trudy come flouncing down to the intern ant farm and banging a box of them down in my cubicle wearing the most genuine smile I'd ever seen on her face. She'd probably order a salad every day now, just to make me come up there and deliver it and be ignored by my ex-boyfriend... my heartbroken, squirming, discomfort being the highlight of her day. Who am I kidding? I'd probably just quit. No trust fund is worth that.

"Well, first of all, you need to finish your breakfast and get dressed. We've got a big day ahead of us. Trudy and Gladys Fernbridge should be over any moment to set things up in the garden with Daryl," he said, as if that somehow made sense.

"Um... why?" I asked, slightly alarmed that my cantankerous trust fund executor's name had figured into the plan.

"Well, Trudy arranged things for the license, Daryl is an ordained minister and is rather helpful in moving larger items, and Gladys insisted on being a witness, especially when she saw the dress," he said, slowly making another piece of the bacon disappear.

"The dress...?" I asked, following his eyes to the gorgeous, knee-length, sleeveless Naeem Khan beaded fringe dress hanging from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. I exhaled in reverence; all thoughts of bacon temporarily having left my mind. "That's... a wedding dress..." I said, astutely. Because I'm smart, see, I'm really good at observing things like that.

"Yes," Greg said, beaming.

"So, we're... getting married," I said, continuing my brilliant assessment of the obvious.

"Well, all things considered, it seemed like the right thing to do," he said, blithely oblivious to my utter confusion.

"Okay..." I said, stunned. Stunned, but thrilled beyond my wildest imaginings. "Can I have some bacon, now?" I asked, figuring that since I was obviously immersed in the perfect dream, I'd be getting some of that bacon at any moment.

Greg chuckled and gave me a bacon-scented kiss on the lips, "That would be a definite 'no,' Princess. While, by now, the MDMA has metabolized out of your blood, you still have high levels of cholesterol and hCG in your system. So, until your cholesterol and hCG come down, I'm afraid your diet is going to be very, very healthy."

"High cholesterol? That's bullshit! I'm only 23! I'm entitled to decades of rampant bacon-eating before I have to think about that! This is ridiculous!" I complained, as Greg continued eating a plate of what he wouldn't let me have. Then, Greg put the plate aside, though out of my reach, and casually covered his mouth with his hand as I ranted about the temporal nature of any scientific findings regarding the healthiness of any particular food. Eventually, something in his eyes made me pause and realize that he wasn't just torturing me for scaring him... he was glowing. I had missed something. Something big. "Wait... the hCG... What is that? Was it something mixed into the pills?" I asked, thinking back on what he'd said about my labs, "Who gave it to me?"

"Unless I'm very mistaken, Princess," he said, leaning down to whisper in my ear, "I did."

"What are you talking—"

Greg snorted. "For someone having an IQ higher than my salary, your knowledge of your own reproduction system is appalling," he said, 'Having high levels of hCG in your blood means you're pregnant, Princess. I didn't realize this before, but vaginal penetration is not the only way that a woman can conceive - apparently if the woman is sufficiently aroused, having a man's ejaculate in contact with her labial area can be quite sufficient. And while I am incandescently happy to be a father, I am almost more flattered by the compliment your condition represents to my sperm quality and lovemaking skills. I'm considering having a t-shirt made for myself. Now, hurry up and finish your oatmeal," he said, walking away eating his plate of Mean Daddy punishment bacon.

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So, that night, under a rare starry sky and twinkling lights strung in the garden's trees, I married the love of my life. Trudy and Gladys Fernbridge alternated between sniffling and making smartass comments as Daryl led us through the ceremony. Afterward, we signed the marriage license, witnessed by Trudy and Gladys Fernbridge - oh, and did you realize Fernbridge was Trudy's last name, too? Yeah.

Trudy Hartman had just gone back to her maiden name Fernbridge after going through a rather crappy divorce. Apparently, it made her a little grumpy. Trudy must have taken after her father, though, because she looked nothing like her mom, Gladys. After that revelation, I was thinking about taking it easy on Trudy, seeing as she probably saved Greg's job and helped get me to the hospital after I called her a gargoyle, but then I noticed something. On the marriage license that she arranged for us, Trudy decided that after I married, I would legally hyphenate my last names. Hi, I'm Gillian. Gillian Sherwood-Forrester. Nice to fucking meet you. Now, instead of "Barbie," Trudy calls me "Maid Marian."

"Trudy Fernbridge..." I said, shaking my head as I danced with Greg on the rooftop, alongside Daryl and Gladys. "That's how a data guy believed in love at first sight... she got you volunteering with Gladys," I said. "You knew all about me before you even saw me in that elevator," I said.

"I'd hardly say I knew 'all' about you," he said, twirling me under his arm. "I was just helping Gladys organize her accounts, work through some of the bookkeeping, then one day she gave me a nameless accounting file. Said she couldn't make heads or tails of what this trust fund recipient was up to. Said the woman was given a substantial sum of money from her trust on a weekly basis, but she still lived in a crappy studio apartment, wore cheap clothes, and was obviously spending nothing at the spa, so... where was the money going? Said she wanted me to look through things to make sure the recipient wasn't being taken advantage of..." he said, smiling as I rubbed my nose against his chest through the opening in his shirt.

"Gladys..." I called over to where she was putting her shoes back on as Daryl took another turn dancing with Trudy. "You told him you thought I was being taken advantage of? Seriously?" Gladys shrugged and gestured feebly, as if she was a poor, confused little old lady instead of a complete con artist. Yeah, right. Life is Short: don't believe the innocent act of little old ladies.

When Sting's "In the Moonlight" started playing, and Trudy and Daryl went to look at one of the darker corners of the garden together, I laid my head against Greg's chest to hear the rest of his story. "Well then, after I found a stray receipt with your name on it, I came to know a person who, after a life of unrest and trauma, quietly paid medical bills for people she knew when she had stayed with them in various foster homes. I saw her paying tuition for others to go to college and trade schools, when they graduated from the foster system without any other kind of support in life. I saw her paying off all the fees for libraries in danger of closing, paying off school lunch programs where kids' accounts had gone into the red... and I fell hopelessly in love. I asked Trudy to give me the chance to meet you and she suggested the idea of an internship. Once you started, though, I couldn't think of how to introduce myself to you... I could barely breathe when I saw the name on your ID badge that day in the elevator," he whispered, his eyes filled with joy and his arms tightened around me. He was squishing me, but I didn't say anything. Sometimes when you finally get a hold of that impossible thing, you need to squeeze it tight just to be sure it's really there.

"And then I grabbed your ass..." I said, leaning up on my toes to steal a kiss from my incredibly sexy, patient and kind husband.

"And then you grabbed my ass..." he murmured, laughing.

"Damn, I'm good..." I said, smiling up into his eyes as tears rolled down my cheeks. "I love you so much, Daddy. You're my favorite person," I whispered.

"I love you, too, Princess," he said, leaning down to kiss me again before whispering sweetly in my ear, "but you still can't have any bacon."

Dammit, he was on to me already... he was on to me from the very beginning.

So, that's the long and short of it. Life is pretty good now. Except that Greg found out that I had skipped over doing a critical part of the vaginismus treatment recommended by my doctor, and boy, did he give me hell for it... very sweetly, while eating a plate of bacon. Yeah, as many of you have probably suspected, I had to bite the bullet and go get some therapy with a professional that listens attentively as I talk about stuff, asks me obvious yet uncomfortable questions, and generally calls out my bullshit, ever so nicely. Apparently, growing up in a sex cult, being abused, having my caregivers failing horribly or dying like flies, and then bouncing around in the foster system can leave you with a few emotional issues to work on.