I’m not sure which of us moves first, but we kiss, and it’s as though everything goes right with the world all at once. She clutches my collar, holding me to her, and the small imposition of her fingertips against my throat does something to me.
I pull her closer, and without meaning to, onto my lap. Or maybe she works her way there. It’s hard to know where I end and she begins when her tongue slides across mine. I lace my fingers into her hair, and she sighs in my mouth. Eager. Warm. Ravenous.
But she comes up for air. “You know I can’t?—”
“I know. You don’t need to remind me, Sage. I am happy to take whatever you want to give me.”
She smiles, then kisses me again, making the edges of the world blur in the best way possible. It is heaven just to touch her. Kissing is something beyond that limit.
I could fall for this woman. I know that in every bone in my body.
Maybe some part of me already has.
21
SAGE
Moving forward should bethe natural thing to do. But life keeps dragging me backward, and I’m really tired of it.
The morning after the paternity results is the first morning in months that I wake up without an unresolved thing sitting on my chest like a second mortgage. The babies are still here. The situation is still complicated. I still have three newborns and half a degree and a fitness business I’m running from my phone. None of the practical realities have changed.
But the unresolved thing is resolved, and I didn’t understand how much space it was taking up until it was gone.
I get four and a half minutes of lying in the gray morning light before Bossy registers an opinion about breakfast. This is, I’m learning, roughly the maximum available window. Bossy does not believe in prolonged silence. Bossy believes in immediate and comprehensive service, and she communicates this with a directness I respect even when I’m running on five hours of sleep.
I get her sorted, then Baldy, who wakes up blinking and affronted in the way of someone who had not planned to be conscious yet and would like the record to reflect this. Boy wakes last, as usual—he opens his eyes, looks at the ceiling, looks at me, and waits to see what the morning has to offer before committing to any particular emotional response. He is, I think, going to be a very measured person. His father’s child through and through.
I think about Ronan while I feed them in rotation, because apparently that is what I do now. What he said last night, and the particular, unhedged way he said things. No performance. No checking to see how it landed. Just the truth, offered directly, and then the door closing quietly behind him and the sound of his car in the street. I lie there replaying it with the slightly embarrassing focus of a person who is developing feelings and can’t fully stop themselves from examining the evidence.
Connor used to say nice things too. I want to be careful not to let that comparison flatten everything into the same shape, because the things Connor said and the things Ronan says are not the same things.
Connor’s compliments were always slightly about him—look at this interesting, perceptive thing I’ve noticed about you. Ronan’s are just observations. Plainly delivered. Like he’s reporting findings rather than performing.
I am not going to be reckless about this. I have three brand-new humans who need me to make good decisions, and my history with men is not, objectively, a strong foundation for confidence.
But I’m also not going to spend the next several months pretending I don’t feel what I feel, because pretending has never done me any good and I’m too tired for it besides.I tried pretending for the better part of a year with Connor—pretending things were fine, pretending I didn’t notice the drinking, pretending I wasn’t slowly becoming a smaller version of myself—and it got me nowhere except Galway in March, getting dumped.
I am done with pretending.
I’ve just gotten all three back down—a minor miracle of coordination that I’m not going to examine too closely in case examining it breaks the spell—when someone pounds on my front door.
Not knocks. Pounds.
Connor is on my front step in last night’s clothes. He hasn’t slept. He has the look of a man who has spent the dark hours building a case and is here to present oral arguments.
“Paternity doesn’t matter,” he says, before I’ve fully opened the door. He has clearly been practicing this. “I want you back regardless. Biology isn’t the only thing that makes a family.”
I look at him for a moment. There’s something genuinely sad about this—how close he is to an insight that could actually serve him, aimed squarely at the wrong target. He’s not wrong about biology. He’s just wrong about everything else.
“You’re right. Biology isn’t everything. But Connor, I don’t want you back. That’s not about the babies or the test or any of the past week. You ended things in Galway, and I was sad for about forty-eight hours, and then I was relieved. I was relieved, and that told me everything I needed to know about where we actually were.”
He flinches. I don’t look away from it. He says, “You’re choosing him.”
“I’m choosing me.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit—this is about my father?—”
“This is about me telling you clearly that I don’t want to be with you. I’m not a fallback plan, Connor. I’m not a reason to grow up. You need to find what you’re looking for in yourself. A wife and babies shouldn’t be the thing that does that for you. That’s not fair to the wife or the babies, and honestly, it’s not fair to you.”
