They are in the Expedition, poking along in rush hour traffic on South Flagler Drive. Once Rog switches to Dixie, and then Belvedere and 95, things should open up.
There's no hurry. The main work is done. The action scenes, the facial, all the stills. After dropping Wally home Rog will return to his little studio and create a rough cut. He prefers to do this by himself, and Wally trusts him. Then he'll post it for Wally to view late tonight, Wally will make his suggestions, and Rog will color correct and add music and put the master on Lazlo's FTP server. On time.
"Weird," Rog says again.
"Yeh well..." Wally is no longer drunk or high. He just feels strange. Depleted, yet so restless he fumbles his words. "Made deadline, don't we?"
"And it doesn't bother you," Rog says, "that this bitch might get pregnant?"
"No. I don't — I still don't get what you mean on that."
With patronizing patience, Rog explains. How holding her legs in the air was a foolish attempt to help Wally's sperm travel deeper, find purchase.
"Well why should I mind?" He means to be light but something chimes in his voice, and his eyes are throbbing. She loves me, he thinks. OK, that's stupid. But she kissed him, stroked his face. She made him come in her. She thanked God for him, prayed to God through him. "In a way it's cool, kind of." He's breathless. Confusion flits like a fly in his chest. "Flattering."
"Oh yeah...you'll be flattered when you have to pay child support."
"So. I got money." He imagines himself writing a check every month. Who do you make it out to? The mother or the kid? "For my kid...I'll pay."
"Wally Junior?" Rog smirks.
"I'm the last Wally," Wally says curtly. "The name would be...Well, whatever his mom wants." He wonders where you find a list of baby names. Then he realizes with a jolt that he'll never see his baby. So he'll make Roger pull a screen shot of Shane for him. He can look at it every day, and imagine the face of his child, who he's now certain will be a girl.
"Well," Rog says, "she was a freak. She was wild with you. Great facial!"
Wally knows they did it but hardly remembers it. "She gave you what you needed."
"Uh, not really." For the first time in hours, they laugh together. "What you paid her, she should have done us both."
"My first child payment." Another laugh. "And now, her other daughter's got this great pair of shoes. I wonder..." The thought gets away from him. "Sorry man. Next time."
"Aaah, she was almost ugly anyway..." Rog talks, but Wally no longer hears him. He hears a gasp, not her gasp when he came over her face (she was silent), no his gasp when he tried to pull out and she held him and he shuddered and spent inside her. That was the moment of change, but not in her; she already knew what she was doing. It was Wally's moment, and Wally's change, and Wally who will never be the same. He's fine with that. But he wishes he understood the reason.
Can the sleaziest among us—even Wally the MILF Chaser—experience an epiphany? Tim Millas thinks so. Tim lives in New York and Florida. His fiction has been published in Adirondack Review, Amarillo Bay, Cause & Effect, Confrontation, Conte, Eclectica, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction Warehouse, and writethis.com. This is his second story to appear in Unlikely 2.0.