The Cowboy's Baby(2)

Her face set into a scowl, the young woman rose to traipse into the bathroom. After her last day at La Reina, her white chef’s coat was splattered with an all matter of sauces and gravy, her dark hair unkempt and her necktie in disarray. For a moment, she stared into the mirror, assessing the woman who stared back at her.

Esme Carter was twenty eight years old – her dark mahogany locks yet untouched by grey. The long, wavy strands spilled halfway down her back when they weren’t piled beneath her chef’s hat, setting off her caramel hued skin and almond shaped, brown eyes. It was hard to be a woman in a kitchen on any day, but a woman of color? In the Midwest? Even getting herself taken seriously was a major task.

She removed her hat, letting her hair drop free down her back before she shrugged out of her coat and black pants. Beneath, she wore a black camisole that clung to her slender figure. Esme had always lamented the fact that she didn’t have her mother’s curves. Instead, she’s inherited her father’s lean, muscular forms. She could hardly call her breasts a b-cup and the round behind that should have been hers by virtue of her ethnicity alone was suspiciously absent.

She was a size four on a good day, and it didn’t matter how much she stuffed her face, she never gained a single pound. Her parents called it high metabolism – she called it a curse. Stripping off the rest of her clothes, the young woman stepped into the shower, letting the hot water melt the stress of her day away.

There were other restaurants, she reminded herself. Veritable tons. She would have a new job within the week. But would that make her happy? She seriously doubted it. Another job meant another lazy chef lording over her and stealing her recipes to slap his name on them. It was a cruel lesson to have to learn, and Esme had been taught her fair share of times.

There had to be something else she could do – even on the side- just to supplement her income. As it was, she was going to have issues making the rent for that month - and where next month was coming from, she had no idea.

As she toweled her hair, the dark-skinned girl moved back into her living room, completely naked. She’d never been modest, and since she lived alone, it was a luxury she could afford. As her body slowly air dried, she paced leisurely back and forth across the small room, watching TV with only moderate interest.

She was exhausted.

Being someone’s food slave all day was no easy task, and restaurants could chew you up and spit you out with ease. The fact that she’d survived ten sous chef positions with her sanity intact was a testament to her fortitude. She just didn’t know how much longer she could hold out. Esme moved into her small kitchen. The space was hardly big enough to turn around in, but she had worked magic there. Now, she extracted a beef stew she made the previous day with a duck fat and rosemary base. It would be even better on day two, and she was sure the hearty flavor would serve to cheer her up a bit.

She was sitting down to her dinner when an ad popped up on the TV that caught her attention. Blowing on her steaming stew, Esme listened to a woman prattle on about being a surrogate – the vessel which provided needing, unable parents with an outlet to create their own children. It was a position, the woman attested, for those with large hearts, who understood the struggle that infertile parents went through.

Esme didn’t know how much she personally understood the struggle, but she certainly empathized. She had been the product of a surrogate pregnancy when her own parents couldn’t conceive. To this day, her mother cited the surrogate experience as one of the best in her life – how a young woman she’d barely known had given her the greatest gift she could ever have imagined.

It seemed like the system worked. As long as the surrogate herself didn’t develop an attachment to the child and cause legal issues for the parents, the process usually went off without a hitch. Personally, Esme wasn’t looking to have children anytime soon – perhaps not ever. But perhaps she could lend her body to someone else?

For as long as the young woman could remember, she had been healthy as a horse. She had a resilience that seemed to protect her from bugs that went rampant, affecting everyone she knew. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d been sick in her entire life and even her parents admitted to being shocked at her never being ill as a child. Despite her own mother being able to have children, Esme had no such problem. She’d even been told by her doctors that she was healthy enough to have extended birthing years and would probably be fertile into her late forties – perhaps even her early fifties.

It was a surprise for a woman who had never seriously contemplated having children.