He poked his head into the kitchen. “Something bad?”
“Something important to me,” I answered.
I heard him thump upstairs and then back down, and he was moving extremely fast. Then the front door slammed closed but it was only a second or so later that it opened again, and he reappeared in the kitchen. “What?” he asked me. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been thinking about the future,” I explained. “A lot about it.”
“Ah, Christ on a cracker. I knew this was too good to last.” He sat down heavily in one of the sturdy chairs that his grandma had purchased. “When are you leaving?”
“No, I don’t want to leave,” I said.
“Shit! Why did you scare me like that?” He exhaled hard. “Ok, so what’s the problem?”
“I want to do something and if it works, it will affect you and Lyra a lot.” Now I took a deep breath in. “I want to have a baby.”
“What…” His blue eyes fastened on my stomach. “What?”
I started to explain. “Having kids is something I always dreamed about,” I said. “I thought that I would marry Dax and start a family with him, but it didn’t work out. Thank goodness,” I added. “He would have been a terrible father and I would have stuck my child with him for life.”
“Yeah, having a crappy father—so who’s going to be the dad now?”
“I’m considering that. This is all very preliminary,” I said. “I’ve looked into sperm donation, for example, but—”
“What?” The previous times he’d said that word, he’d sounded confused. Now he sounded angry, which I didn’t understand.
So I started to explain how I could obtain donor materials, but Silas held up both big hands to signal me to stop. “What the hell is wrong with my sperm?’
I stared. “I don’t…nothing, probably,” I answered slowly.
“Damn straight,” he told me. “Damn straight, there’s nothing wrong with them!” He still seemed furious.
“Have I offended you?” I wondered.
“Yeah, you have,” he told me. “Do you think I’d be like your noodle of an ex? Do you think that I’d cheat and give you a fake diamond? Do you think that I’d act like my own father and try to forget that I had kids?”
“Of course not!” Now I was getting angry. “You’re nothing like either of those guys. All I have to do is watch you with Lyra and Boris and I know how you’d be as a dad. I also know that you wouldn’t lie and hurt me, and I trust you completely!”
“Good! So, if you want a baby, you should take my sperm. What’s wrong with what I’ve got?”
“Nothing! But I can’t use them.”
“Why not? Yeah, you can,” he answered himself. “Yeah, absolutely. You’ll have mine.”
“No. No, I can’t but I’m sure yours are amazing,” I assured him.
“They are and it’s a great plan.” He nodded, totally convinced.
I had a sudden flashback to our conversation months before, when he’d wanted me to come and live in this house with him and his sister, and I had argued against it. He’d managed to convince me then, and it had worked out. But that wasn’t going to happen again now. “Silas, I don’t think you’re considering the problems with this idea, like—”
I didn’t finish that thought, because he suddenly got to his feet and he looked extremely...determined?
“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.
“We,” he told me. “We are doing it. If you want a baby? We’re going to go give you one.”
“I’m not…” My jaw dropped as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. “Silas. Oh, wow. Oh.”
“All right.” He stepped toward me.
