“Two months? More than that.”
He smiles at me. “My little optimist.”
I bend my face up to kiss his lips. “I’ll talk to my parents and Sylvia about it tomorrow. It would be nice to have some time with her.”
Leo’s hands find my low back. “You’re amazing,” he says. “Best wife ever.” He starts to kiss me slowly, edging me back downagainst the sofa. “And I love you.” He puts a hand against my rib cage, then moves it upward. “And I love your boobs.”
They used to be a solid B cup, but since all the fertility treatments they hover at about a C+. I don’t hate them, either.
Leo starts to tug at the hem of my shirt, trying to hike it up my torso. His fingers are impatient.
“Babe,” I say. “We can’t do it here.”
Leo bends his face down to kiss the place where my neck and shoulder meet. “Oh, but we are.”
I pull him toward me. I feel his hair—slightly greasy from the plane—and the stubble on his chin. I’m sure we have, I’m sure it hasn’t been that long, but I’m struggling to remember the last time we had sex just because we wanted to. Not because I was ovulating or we were trying to top off an IUI or we were decimating from a failed retrieval. Sex has become, in a way, both an obligation and a rebellion.
Leo pauses.
“Are you OK?” he asks me. He can tell I’ve gone somewhere else.
I blink up at him. “I’m still waiting on the clinic,” I say. “I mean, I know it didn’t work.”
I feel Leo immediately retract. “Jesus,” he says.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Just say it.”
He sits up abruptly. I feel his hands leave my body.
“We said we wouldn’t let this dictate our lives anymore.”
“No, you said that,” I say. I pull my arms around my chest.
“That’s bullshit,” he says. “You don’t even believe it’s worth it anymore. We know our odds, Laur.Youjust said it.”
“Keep your voice down,” I say, although he isn’t yelling, not even a little bit.
“I’m so sick of pretending this is going to work out.”
He sits back on the couch. He puts a hand over his mouth and exhales out through it. I feel my eyes sting up with tears.
“We can’t control it,” I say. “That’s the point.”
Next to me, he closes his eyes. “Yes, we can,” he says. His head falls into his hands when he says what he does next. “We can just stop.”
I feel my body grow cold. It’s not the first time he’s expressed this sentiment, not exactly, but it’s the first time he’s used those words this bluntly.
“I don’t think it’s fair that you’re the only one who gets to choose,” he says.
But I’m not choosing. That’s what he doesn’t understand. I have no choice. If I did, we wouldn’t be here.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go to bed.”
I don’t want him to touch me. I don’t even want to be near him. I feel betrayed. More than that, my body does. Because I’m the one who has to deal with the shots and the appointments and the saline tests that snake catheters up my cervix. Whose life is this dictating, exactly?
