Chapter Forty-three
Abby
My eyes open to the sun peeking through my bedroom curtains. Did I really sleep straight through the night?
I guess that’s what happens when you get exhausted from devastation.
As much as I thought I wanted to be alone, I’m so happy that Jenson went and got Don. I’m not sure how I would have faired through the night without him.
Speaking of which—I reach over to the other side of the bed and feel for him, but he’s nowhere to be found.
I think it’s Thursday. I guess he went to work.
Much to my surprise, Snowball jumps on the bed and makes his way toward me. I half expect him to scratch me or hiss. He’s not always the happiest of cats. But instead, he curls up into the crook of my arm and starts purring.
“Really?” I ask. “You pick right now to actually start being nice to me?”
I guess he’s taking pity on how pathetic I must look right now. I lay with him for a few minutes, lightly rubbing his back before my bladder demands that I get up.
I quickly go pee and head into the kitchen to make coffee. Maybe caffeine will help me get some clarity about this whole situation.
A deep voice says, “Good morning, beautiful.”
“Shit!” I cry, jumping a foot in the air. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Sorry.” Don smiles. “I just thought I’d make you something to eat. I was going to bring you breakfast in bed.”
“As much as I appreciate that, I think I need to get out of bed for a little while.”
“Whatever you want, beautiful.”
I take a seat on one of the stools at the kitchen counter as Don hands me a steaming cup of coffee. “You’re a saint,” I tell him. I take a sip and then add, “Thank you for coming over last night.”
He leans his elbows on the counter and looks into my eyes. “Well, you’re welcome. But I need you to know that when you need me, I’ll be here. I don’t care what it is. I will be here no matter what.”
“You’re too sweet,” I tell him. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Didn’t you just hear me? I’m here when you need me. Right now, you need me. There’s nowhere else I’m going to be.”
“I’ll be okay,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to get in trouble or anything.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. You and I are going to eat some breakfast, and then, we are going to talk about some stuff.”
Trying to lighten the mood a little, I ask, “Is it about your out-loud reading of the smutty book yesterday?”
He grins. “That…among other things.”
My stomach instantly tangles itself in a knot as I wonder how this conversation is going to go. Is he going to leave me? Is he going to be disappointed by my recent medical diagnosis?
Why did my baby maker have to revolt against me?
He sets down a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast in front of me.
“Where did all this come from?” I ask. “I know none of this stuff was in my fridge.”
“I ran to the store.”
“How long have you been up?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. A while.”
He sits down next to me, and we both dig in. I’m not quite sure what to say or how to get this conversation off the ground, so we just eat in a comfortable silence. After a few bites, I tell him how good it is, but that’s about it.
I know the second we start talking, I’m probably going to lose any appetite that I have, so I may as well get full now. And hope that it doesn’t come back up when my stomach starts to lurch with nerves.
When we finish, I take the dishes to the sink and start washing them, but Don walks up behind me, setting his hands on my shoulders. “Leave them. We can do them in a little while.”
I turn off the water and dry my hands before following him to the bedroom. He takes a seat and says, “I thought we may as well be as comfortable as possible.”
Comfortable so you can let me down easy?
He begins with, “Tell me what happened at the doctor yesterday.”
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I start. “I went in because I realized my period was late, which isn’t a normal thing for me. I assumed I was pregnant, and because of my health issues, they wanted to see me to make sure everything was okay. But after tests, they discovered that all my lady problems have gotten worse.”
I pause for a moment to take a breath before continuing. “Without getting into a lot of the medical mumbo-jumbo, I can’t have kids. Even if I did manage to get pregnant, chances are, I would lose the pregnancy. I was then advised that due to the state of my lady parts, I should consider having a hysterectomy. It would help with my endometriosis.”
“So, surgery?” He asks, clearly worried.
I explain to him a little more in detail what’s going on, and he holds my hand the entire time I talk.
When I’m finished, I say, “So, there you have it. I’m never going to be able to have kids.”
“Abby, have you ever wanted to be a mom?” He asks. “I’m genuinely asking.”
My eyes fall as I struggle to find the words. “Before yesterday, I hadn’t thought about it much. I’m so focused on the now that I don’t often think about the future. When I did, it didn’t involve kids. But when I thought I might be…” My voice cracks with emotion.
“Me too, baby,” Don says, bringing my hand up so he can kiss the back of it.
“I just started picturing what it could be like. And it sounded…nice, I guess. But then, it all just got ripped away. Maybe I had the right idea before, never thinking about it. And now, I can’t give you what you want either.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, Don. You just said yourself that you got excited. You can’t tell me that you don’t want to be a dad.”
“Baby, listen to me. Did I get excited at the thought? Sure. But I’m like you. I’ve been so focused on the present that I haven’t thought about kids…not in a long time anyway. I’m not sure that they fit into my plans anymore. But if I were to have kids, I’d be damn lucky if they were with you.”
“But they won’t be,” I interrupt.
“Abby, just because you couldn’t carry a child doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have kids if that’s what we wanted. There’s surrogacy. There’s adoption. I know that there are a ton of kids out there who need good homes. I don’t care that you can’t get pregnant.” He stops for a second. “That sounded wrong. I know that it’s a big deal to you, and I wish I could make it better. But that’s not make or break it for me. You not carrying our baby isn’t going to be a reason why I run away. There’s no reason I’m going to run away.”
My eyes well up with tears again, but this time, they are full of relief rather than sadness. “I really love you. Do you know that?”
He pulls me against his chest. “I love you too, Abigail Jones. Forever. Speaking of which, I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Oh, my gosh. Are you going to propose?” I blurt without even thinking about it.
“I wasn’t planning on it. Do you want me to propose?”
“No! I mean, not right now. One day, yes. But right now, it just seems like it wouldn’t mean as much. But if you were going to, I don’t want to stop you. I’d still say yes. Good lord, Abby, stop talking.”
He laughs at my rambling. “Well, no proposal. Yet.” He winks at me. “But there is another step that I thought maybe we could take together.”
“Okay?”
“It occurs to me that you and I are spending a whole hell of a lot of time together. I don’t think we’ve spent more than a night apart since this whole thing started.”
“Pretty close,” I agree.
“Maybe you and I start just sharing one place instead of two…”
He looks at me, waiting for me to catch up. Apparently, I need a little bit longer, though.
“What do you mean?”
He chuckles. “I mean, maybe you and I move in together.”
“Oh. Are you sure?” I ask. “You’ll see how weird I am.”
He grins. “Baby, I think I have already seen how weird you are. But I don’t care. I want to wake up next to you every morning in a place that we share. Plus, we would only have to pay one rent.”
I lean forward to kiss him. “Well, when you put it like that, I would love to live with you.”
“Really?” He asks as I climb into his lap to straddle him.
“Really.”
“You make me the happiest son of a bitch in the whole world,” he says before grabbing onto my hips and kissing me deeper.
It doesn’t take long before he’s pulling my shirt over my head and then unhooking my bra. I’m so focused on the amazing things he’s doing with his tongue while he kisses me that I barely realize when he lifts me in his arms and lays me beneath him. Without taking his lips off mine, he removes my pants like some magical wizard or something.
When I’m fully naked beneath him, he starts undressing himself.
“Hey, babe,” I say.
“Yes, beautiful?”
“You know what the silver lining of this whole broken uterus thing is?”
“What’s that?”
“We don’t have to use a condom,” I say, grabbing him and pulling him back on top of me.
“Are you sure?” He asks, looking at me.
“Positive. I want to feel you.”
Without any more hesitation, he slowly slides inside. With nothing between us, it feels even better than usual.
I guess Don thinks so too because he groans, “Holy shit, baby.”
He kisses me again as my hands roam all over his body. As much as I always love the hard and crazy sex that we have, this is nice too. It’s full of love and all the raw emotion that lies between the two of us.
Every touch…every kiss is filled with passion.
It’s perfect.
We spend the next hour completely locked in on each other, shutting out the rest of the world.
When we finish, I get comfortable, lying on his chest. This might be my new favorite place to lie in the entire world.
“You know,” I begin. “We are going to have to decide where to live. Your place or mine? Or maybe we should just think about getting something bigger.”
“Actually, I think I’ve got a solution to that.”