Sam pressed his fist to his mouth, but it didn't stifle his laughter. "That's it?" he asked. "I have weaksauce sperm, and you're going to massage my balls and hope for the best?"
"Yeah," I said slowly. "I want us to have tiny humans, and if your balls need some extra love and attention, I'll happily provide it for them. But…" I paused, and looked up to meet his eyes. "I don't want this to be the only thing in our lives."
"Really? I've seen your tablet, sweetheart," he said. "All the earthy-crunchy natural pregnancy books. The prenatal nutrition ones. I've even read a few of them."
"You creep onallmy stuff, don't you?"
"I wouldneverdo anything like that," he said. "But let's go back to the total honesty for a minute. What if it doesn't happen for us?"
I stared at his gingham shirt. I didn't want to think about that. It was easier to believe that we would have a family, but that we weren't among the ones who got lucky on the first few tries.
A knock echoed through the little room, and Sam yelled, "In a minute."
"What if we give it a year?" I asked. "One year, and if we haven't had any luck on our own, we go back to the doctors. We explore fertility treatments, and adoption, and all the other options."
"Really?" he asked. "Just wait and see?"
"Yeah, we need to wait and see," I said, "because you were stressing about this so hard that you went to a urologist on your own and spent the week beating yourself up about your lumberjack sperm, and that meant I spent the week imagining all the terrible things that could be going on, and all of that hurts my heart. We can't do that again."
Sam cupped my face and tilted me up to meet his eyes. "I'm really thrilled that you didn't say beating myselfoff."
"I thought it," I said.
"Oh, I know you did." Sam laughed. He brought his lips to mine for the first real, non-forced kiss we'd shared all week.
"I hate that you were struggling and you didn't tell me," I mumbled against his jaw. "You should have told me about this. I would have gone with you."
"No," he cried, rearing back and pinning me with wide, alarmed eyes. "No.That's not the kind of appointment a husband and wife should share. And you would have tried talking me out of it, and we never would've known that the lumberjack sperm were in limited supply."
"But you're not allowed to keep this shit to yourself, Sam. Look what happens. You get all dark and moody, and fail to eat for an entire day." I pulled his blood glucose monitor from his pocket and scowled at the low reading. "This is not okay."
"I know that I violated the laws of the trust tree. Believe me when I say I didn't enjoy keeping it from you. And now that we've dealt with the issues I didn't want to discuss" —he looked down at his lap and gave his crotch a pointed frown— "we're going to deal with the issuesyoudon't want to discuss."
Oh, shit. He knew. I'd been off my 'pretend everything at work is great' game since the end of the semester brought a flood of grade-grubbing undergrads to my office, and my department chair had been dropping none too subtle hints about my dearth of published papers, and now Sam knew all about my failure, too.
"What would that be?" I asked with all the innocence I could muster.
"You hate your job," he said.
"No, I don't," I said.
Another knock at the door. Simultaneously, we called, "In a minute."
"Yes, Sunshine, you do," he argued. "You might be the only person who doesn't know it. Now, I was surprised when you picked that gig last summer. You've never loved academia, and you had incredible offers to work directly with special needs children, and I still don't understand why you passed them up."
"Because those weren't responsible jobs," I said, exasperated. "Those were short-term fellowships or experimental initiatives, and it was time for me to have a stable job. The kind that came with health insurance and retirement plans and growth opportunities, and…important shit like that."
"Why?"
I rolled my eyes at his question. "Because you've always had a real, professional career, and I didn't want to be the same old flaky grad student girlfriend anymore. I wanted to be taken seriously."
"You are serious as sin, Tiel. You are too fucking brilliant and talented to be taken any other way," he said. "And yeah, things are going well for me, which means you have even more reason to take on the experiments and short-term programs."
"How?"
"How are you still asking me that?" he said. "I want you to lean on me. I don't want you to worry about money or health insurance or anything other than doing things that give you joy."
"You secretly crave a 1950s housewife, don't you?"
