Chapter Twenty-six
Tap, tap, tap .
I whine in my sleep, slapping the side of the bed.
“Kat, knock it off.” Little kitty is probably playing with the blinds cord again.
One day I’m going to put in some nice wooden blinds so my fur babies can’t destroy them.
Tap, tap .
“Seriously, Kat!” I growl, and I fling myself over.
My stomach jumps straight into my throat as I topple to the floor with a thud.
“I know karate!” Holland shouts as she sits up, her arms out and her eyes covered by a fuzzy blue night mask.
I rub out the pain in my elbow from where I hit the ground and stifle my laughter at the both of us.
“Sorry,” I say, turning on the light as Holland slowly lifts her mask.
“I thought I heard—”
Tap, tap.
A wrinkle appears above Holland’s nose.
“Is someone knocking?”
I stare at the door, fumbling for the remote, the only weapon in my arsenal.
“Grab your phone. Have 911 at the ready.”
“Maya… ”
My toes creep across the run-down carpet, past the bathroom and the small closet.
There’s an iron in there, I think.
I can use that if the remote proves useless.
“Hello?” I test, pressing my eye up to the peephole.
Blond hair is all I see, the man’s head dipped as he leans against the wall, his back moving up and down with what looks like labored breathing.
The remote falls clean out of my hand, thudding against the floor as a gasp sucks into my throat.
“Who is it?” Holland hisses, her eyes wide, maybe a little hopeful even, but I’m too stunned to think straight.
“It’s… it’s my… Cooper.”
She blinks fast, then her mouth splits into a grin.
“Answer it.”
“What?”
She chucks a pillow at me, and it somewhat jerks me out of my shock.
“Open the door.”
My fingers pull at the handle, but the door only gets about an inch open as the chain catches it.
“Oh!” I squeal and slam the door closed to fix it and by the time I actually get it open, my face is a ripe tomato.
Cooper’s eyes meet mine, his hand slowly dropping from its place on the wall.
We don’t say anything for a good ten seconds.
“How…” I start. “How did you know I was—?”
“I can’t,” he says on an exhale.
“I can’t do it, Maya. I can’t be without you.”
My heart stutters in my chest. “Cooper…”
“No.” He stands to his full height.
“I’m not going to let you talk me out of it. I’m not going to let you push me away this time.”
I shake my head.
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Yes,” he argues, stepping into me, stepping inside and allowing me to shut the door behind him.
“ I have. I’ve changed and I want whatever you want because I want you .” His fingers grasp mine, his skin warm and rough and so familiar, like I’ve come home after a long day at work.
“I want these hands, these arms, this smile, this heart. All of these, everything that makes up the person you are. That’s where my family is.”
I lose my breath, and my brain is somewhere in a cloud and my feet are somehow keeping me upright.
Why does he have to make it so hard?
Why does he have to be the man who wears his heart there on his sleeve, profess his love only for me to have to reject him yet again?
But his eyes… they’re saying everything he isn’t—words I know will eventually fall off his lips, but they stay inside.
He really means it. He really believes he could give up a life with a family for one without.
“Only me?” I ask, my voice a rough whisper.
“You’re okay with only me in your family?”
“Well, and me, too.” His lips tilt upward in his signature half-grin, the smile line a heart-pounding indicator that he’s telling me the absolute truth, and I feel a dip in my stomach, a sick taste on the back of my tongue that I, too, need to be completely honest with him.
“You really mean it?” I ask, building up the courage to say what I need to so we both know for sure.
“You’d be willing to give up having children?”
He puts his hands on my cheeks, sets his forehead on mine and looks straight at me with those soulful blue eyes.
“Yes.”
And with one syllable, my trepidation, my worries, my every fear flies out the window and off into the night.
My hands find his wrists, grasping onto him and holding on to keep steady.
I take a deep breath, let it fill my lungs and let it slowly seep out.
He’ll understand, won’t he?
He understood without the entire truth.
“Cooper…” I pull his hands away.
“I can’t have kids.”
“I know,” he rushes out.
“This isn’t some trick I’m playing. I’m not just telling you I’m okay with it while secretly holding out hope for something different. If you don’t want kids, I accept that.”
“No.” I lock on his eyes and hold them until he understands what I’m saying.
“I can’t have kids.”
The realization hits him slowly, the light brightening across his expression.
His lips part, but his breath is gone away, and I gulp and shake my head at the floor between us.
“I… I thought I was pregnant. I thought we were pregnant. But the doctor told me I won’t ever be.”
A warm hand presses against the small of my back and pulls me up against his strong, firm chest. He wraps me in a cocoon that not a single negative thought can penetrate—a place I needed the day I found out, but I was too scared to venture into.
His breath comes out in a long, sad sigh over my head, his arms a warm blanket on a cold day.
“Why didn’t you tell me? ”
“I didn’t want you to feel obligated to stay with me,” I say into the comfort of his chest. “I didn’t want to be the broken woman who took away any possibility for you having children.”
He coaxes my chin up.
“You are not broken, Maya. Don’t ever think that.”
A hint of a smile plays at the corner of my lips.
Can we really move forward like this?
Could I really take the life he wanted away from him?
I consider other options; I know there are more.
Adoption, surrogacy…
but it all seems like too much right now.
I quickly push away from him for some much needed air.
“I’m not ready to talk options,” I tell him.
“I don’t know if I want any other options. I’m thirty years old, and it feels like I’d have to fast forward the process because it takes so long for everything, and I’m not ready for that. My brain, my body, my heart…” I settle a hand on my chest, begging my tears to stay under control, but they rarely listen to me.
“I saw that future you painted for us. I caught a glimpse of it when we…”
“When you scared the hell out of me in the pool?” he teases, and I smile, grateful he knows to make me laugh when I feel so low.
My brain fast forwards to future moments when I hope he’s still there to do it again.
“I saw it, Cooper. I saw a wedding and a house and a backyard with a swing set and kids with your blue eyes and my baby fat. I didn’t only see it, I wanted it. I wanted everything.” My shoulders slump, and I fold my arms, hoping to find the same comfort from myself that I had from him.
I’m unsuccessful. “I’d hate myself forever if I took that away from you.”
He shakes his head.
“I see something different for us now. Something just as good, if not better.”
“Don’t you want to be with someone who can give you everything you want?”
He steps forward, enclosing us in a tight bubble that no one can pop.
His hands find my cheeks, and his eyes hypnotize me into not moving a single muscle.
“ You are everything I want.”
His words melt me into the floor, and I fly to the moon as his lips come down on mine.
He pushes me against the wall, his hands soft, his mouth anxious, his pulse pounding under my fingertips.
He kisses away my pain, my hesitation, my worries, and I kiss him back with everything I have.
“I still wish you would’ve told me,” he says, breaking away to breathe.
“You wouldn’t have had to go through this alone.”
“I’ve got my cats,” I tease, loving that he can make me feel happy enough to tease in the middle of something so sad.
“I’m never alone.”
He wrinkles his nose at me.
“Can I take you somewhere?”
I’ve missed his blurting almost as much as I’ve missed him.
“Where?”
“Cabo.”
“How did you…?”
“Facebook,” he says, and a lightbulb pops on over my head.
Now I have the answer to how he knew where I was.
“ Let me take you.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
I look over my shoulder at Holland, my cheeks warming at the fact that she’s been listening to this entire exchange.
Her eyes are so wide and her grin so full, put a bucket of popcorn in front of her and she’d be all set for the show we just gave her.
“I can’t,” I say, turning back to Cooper.
“My friend needs me.”
“There you go, making me fall even more in love with you.” He shakes his head and plants a kiss to my knuckles.
“After?”
“I suppose.”
“All right, you go take care of your friend.” His eyes flick over my head.
“Nice to meet you by the way!” Then he leans into me as Holland and I both laugh.
“Weird to have an audience when you rip your heart out and hand it over.”
“I’m pretty sure you just won her over, too.”
He grins and plants a kiss on my lips.
“Now, take care of her, and resist every urge you have to text me all the time or call and talk to me from dusk until dawn.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“One more thing, because I can’t keep it in.”
“You never can.”
He takes a deep breath and sets his hands on my waist, pulling me up against him.
“This is what I’m gonna do… When you get back, I take you to Cabo for a week of beautiful love-making intertwined with sweaty, dirty sc rewing. I ask you a million times to be my wife while you jokingly shrug it off. We get home and I live a painfully long month alone before finally breaking down and asking you to move in. I sign on that piece of crap house, and you help me plan and renovate, and we’ll fight on every single decision, and you’ll stop me from trying to do everything myself and hire a contractor. We get it done, you move in with your demon cats, and because I know how much you like them and we have the room, I buy you another one and you name it something with three letters. I build a swing set in the backyard, then you get someone to fix it so it’s not a safety hazard, and we babysit your nieces and nephews because they love their aunt so much, and they love to drive her nuts. I wait six months to propose, and it’s so romantic and amazing that you definitely say yes this time, because you can’t resist my charm. How does that all sound to you?”
It sounds like everything.
It sounds like family.
“It sounds crazy.”
“You like my crazy.”
“Lucky for you.”
He rests his forehead against mine.
“I love you.”
My eyelids close, and I bask in the sweetness of his words.
He’s said he’s fallen for me, he’s implied love, but he hasn’t flat-out stated it like he does with everything else, so I know just how important this moment is and just how much he means it.
Maybe family can mean a million different things.
That giving up one version of it doesn’t mean I’m giving family up entirely.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and I like the idea of that, and I can feel my feet rise slightly off the floor as I let myself dream of the possibilities.
“I love you, too.” And because I need a million reassurances, I ask, “Are you sure you are okay with this?”
He squeezes me to him, chest to chest, heart to heart.
“You are my family, Maya. And I can’t wait to start it.”