Holt pulls me onto the couch and across his lap. His hands lock together at my hip. He holds me tight as if I might get up and dart out the door.
Again.
I reach up and touch the side of his face.
“We need to talk about what this looks like,” he says. “There are a lot of moving parts that we don’t know.”
“I know.”
Fear flickers in my gut. I don’t know what he’s expecting.
I think about my life and what it is and what I want it to be. I’ve worked really hard to get to where I am in my firm, and I’m not ready to give that up. Not even for him. Not yet.
His stubble is rough and bites against my fingers. I wonder if he forgot to shave this morning or didn’t bother. Did he stay awake all night like me? Or was he able to find sleep despite the circumstances?
I’ll never know. And I don’t want to ask because it just reminds me of the pain of not being with him.
He grins at me softly.
It’s good to remember your sources of pain. I know that from my life experiences. It’s just as important to give yourself grace and allow yourself the peace to move on. And right now, moving on is just as much about me and my growth independent of Holt as it is about our life together.
“My life is here,” I tell him.
“And my life is in Savannah.”
“What does that mean for us?”
I look around my cramped apartment and think about the stinky office twenty floors above. The city smells like sewage in the summer and is bitterly cold in the winters.
But my family lives not too far away in the sleepy town of Linton. And Yancy, someone who has tried to be my friend for two yearscomes in the office despite my cantankerous attitude, shows up for me every day.
There are things here that I’m not ready to part with. Maybe someday, but not yet. I have to finish this chapter of my life before I start a new one. The end has not been written.
“I’m not ready to leave Chicago,” I admit.
He doesn’t miss a beat. He bends forward and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Okay. We will figure it out.”
“You don’t expect me to move to Savannah?”
“I mean, at some point in our lives, I hope you do,” he says. “Or I’ll have to move to Illinois, but it’s fucking cold here. We need to consider that.”
I grin.
“But, yeah, we will have to live in the same place to grow old together,” he says. “And if we want to make babies.”
His smile fills with mischief and promises of lots of sex. My ovaries combust.
“But we have time,” he assures me. “We don’t have to rush anything. We won’t rush anything. This is our life. We’ll build it the way we want.”
I rest my head against his shoulder and feel his arms around my body. Never once in my wildest dreams did I expect to be talking about having babies with a man who I met on vacation, let alone with a man who I had a one-night stand with.
The world is a weird place.
I close my eyes, and my thoughts drift to Nana. She’ll be so happy to meet Holt. She’ll be thrilled to hear him talking about babies.
I smile softly.
She always tells me not to block my blessings. She might be right. The first time I allowed the universe to work for me—look what happened. It gave me Holt. The biggest blessing of my life. So far, anyway. Who knows what could happen in the future?
