I led her to Elle’s office, which I knew had a nice, comfortable sofa. As I closed the door behind me, I took a breath and figured out my plan of attack.
When I turned, she was seated on the sofa. “I thought you might not come.”
“Elle asked me to stop by Sweet Mandy B’s for cupcakes, and the traffic was hell.”
She nodded. “I worried you couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me.”
“We had an argument, Doc. That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped talking, does it?”
“Generally, that’s exactly what it means.”
I’d had some time to think about this. To give her space. Typically, I resisted thinking things through, but I figured I’d take a leaf from the doc’s big book of wisdom and wait until she came back to Chicago.
“Can we talk about what happened?”
She gestured to the sofa, and I took a seat at the other end.
I inhaled deeply. “I’ve never been all that interested in settling down. Relationships seemed like such hard work. I’d seen how my dad treated my mom and marriage looked like trouble. But then I started thinking more about kids and what that would look like. As I got older, panic set in, I suppose. I knew the women I dated weren’t ever going to make good moms. Does that make sense?”
She nodded.
“Then I met Everly, and she fit the bill. Hot, interested in hockey, young enough that I could see a Theo Kershaw-quantity brood in my future. I’m not sure we ever had that much in common, but it was easy to gloss over the cracks when you spend as much time on the road as I do. You come back and it’s great sex and let’s party. You’re never really talking about the deep stuff. About six months in, I brought up the topic of the future, and she made it clear she didn’t see me that way. And I was pissed. Here was this chick shitting on my dream, so when I was acquired by the Rebels, it was a good time for us to break up.”
“And then she met someone else.”
“Pretty quickly, maybe even before we broke up. To be honest, I didn’t even mind that much, until I heard she was pregnant. Turns out she wanted the same things as me, just not with me.”
She rubbed my arm. “That had to hurt.”
“It did. I’m not gonna lie. I saw this dream I had of a family, slipping out of my hands.”
“And then you saw a chance to get part of it back.”
“Yep.” I stood, reminded of that first time I came over to her place to plead my case. I was a nervous, pimple-scored kid trying to win the approval of his teacher. “Opportunity knocked, this stroke of amazing luck just when I needed it. And I like to think it knocked for you, too. We both went into this with a baby as the only goal, Franky. But something changed along the way.”
She took a steeling breath. “I let my hormones start making the decisions.”
“Not just your hormones. Don’t tell me your heart isn’t engaged.”
She glared at me. “Is this why you’re here? To force a declaration out of me?”
“I’m here to tell you that I love you. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t come into this looking for anything more than?—”
“An incubator.”
“If that’s how you want to look at it.”
“That’s how it is, Jason. I have no doubt you care for me, in your own way?—”
“In my own way? What the hell does that mean?” Like ‘my way’ wasn’t good enough for her? I’d suspected this all along. My kind of love wasn’t what a smart, intelligent woman like Dr. St. James craved. She wanted it neat, tidy, and reasonable instead of messy and unpredictable.
“If you’d let me finish, I would tell you that we’re both guilty of getting swept up in the emotion of it all.”
“Are you saying you don’t love me, Francesca? Even in ‘your own way’?”
“I don’t know how to separate it. But it doesn’t matter if I can or can’t. You want a big family, this idyllic life you imagined from the moment you figured out your dad was a jerk. You would do it better than him. You wouldn’t make the same mistakes. You would be the perfect dad. And I still think that can happen. I know you’ll love our baby, but I don’t trust that you’ll love me the way I want.”
She didn’t trust … I had just told her I loved her. I didn’t even tell Everly, and she was the woman I had planned to spend my life with.
