“Oh?”
She looked afraid. Ready for battle, then, and why would she? It had always been a battle between them. There’d been so little time where they had been cordial. Where they had been anything like friends.
“Don’t look at me like that. Like I’m going to bite you. I’m not.”
“You look like it,” she said. “And not in a fun way.”
He nodded once. “Come and sit down.”
“Should I remind you that the invitations to the wedding have already been sent out?”
“I don’t need to be reminded of that. I’m not backing out of this. But I have been thinking about the future. About what our home will look like, will feel like for our child. What you said to my mother has been weighing on me heavily.”
“What?”
“She is the last remaining grandparent. And whether we would have chosen it or not, the three of us are now family. We must make a family for our child. I love my mother very much. But she is not an easy woman. She never has been. I assume she will be difficult in the future as well. Even if she doesn’t mean to be. I will always have to shoulder the responsibility of caring for her. But the way that you spoke with her, the way that you were with her, it made me… It made me realize what I truly want for our child.”
“What?”
“Peace. For the adults in his or her life to put them first. As no one ever did with us. I know that you had a better experience with your father and mother in the household, but when your father left your mother, he didn’t think of you. He didn’t put you first. Your mother did, though. And you have greatly benefited from that. My father and my mother put their own feelings first. Always. And I have always borne the brunt of that. You and I are looking at eighteen years of attempting to create harmony, and we’ve had a couple of months where we have done well with each other. And you were away for a substantial portion of it.”
“Please get to the point. You’re an infamous, ruthless businessman, and you’re talking around me like a car salesman. We both know that’s not you.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to think it’s anything you’ve done wrong. I have been cruel to you, I accept responsibility for that. This is not cruelty. But you and I need to set aside our attraction.”
“What?”
“I have only ever seen passion go badly.”
“My mother and your father loved each other very much. Until the end.”
“They had a love story—that much is certain. But I believe that it was founded very much on my father’s desire to rescue her. And in many ways, I feel that your mother wanted to rescue him. They did. But my parents… They married because of me. Because she was pregnant. They married because their passion drove them together. And it kept driving them. It was toxic. So were they.”
“If it was so terrible then why were you mad when they got divorced?”
“Because it doesn’t end—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It doesn’t burn itself out. My mother never could let go of it. And I know there are other reasons for that. I know that it has to do with her depressive episodes, but it doesn’t change the reality. Leaving my father, the dissolution of the marriage, it didn’t fix anything. Not between the two of them, and not between us. I had to be my mother’s savior, and that made me my father’s adversary, and he couldn’t pull himself out of that either because his feelings for her were so twisted up at that point. We can never be that for our child.”
He could see the hurt in her eyes, the confusion. But she wouldn’t always be hurt or confused. She wouldn’t be.
“This is a trick. Of our imaginations, of our hormones. I want for us to de-escalate the feelings. This has been good, this last month. We’ve communicated. And it feels like a foundation. Fucking on tables is not the foundation for a happy life for a child. You and I could follow that until it burns us both out, but to what end? That isn’t why we are getting married, and maybe if you hadn’t gotten pregnant we could’ve explored that. But you did. And we must be in this together.”
She took a breath, and there was a single break at the center of it. But it never became a sob. Her eyes remained dry. “You’re right. Of course you are. Because we are asking each other to do something impossible. To know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this relationship that we’re trying to build is going to last until our child is an adult. Everyone intends for that to be the case. Surely that was why your parents got married. And then they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t manage it.”
“To be fair to them, I suppose they did make it into my adulthood.”
“Close. But you still bore the weight of the consequences. And you lived in a war zone, as you said. And when we are at our worst…”
“When we are at our worst it’s very bad.”
“Yes. I agree with that.”
It was so much harder now that she was here. Because he wanted her. Wanted to touch her. Wanted to hold her. Wanted to draw her against his body and feel her heart beating beneath his hand. To move his hands over her curves and make her his. Definitively.
But they would marry. And they would be tied together. She would be his. Just not in that way.
“I’m probably going to go back to the estate,” she said. “I’m glad that I was able to stop and see you.”
“You might as well spend the night here.”
