47. Ellie
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
ellie
WE STAYED ON THE dock until I couldn’t feel my nose and Chloe’s soft snores echoed in the night air.
Cameron carried her up to the house first, and then the rest of us slowly followed.
We found Anne curled up with a blanket on the deck, in a perfect position to be able to look down on us all. But like Chloe, she was out cold.
Sully gently roused his mother before dropping a kiss on her head, along with a good-night, and then we waved to everyone else. We planned to swing by for brunch tomorrow before people left to catch their flights, so the long Minnesota goodbye could wait until then.
A peaceful silence settled in the space between us on the way back to Rosewood. I was exhausted, but in the best way. My cheeks hurt from smiling, my throat sore from cheering, and my eyes ached from squinting at the stars.
“Did you have a good time?” I asked Sully when we were only a few blocks away from home.
“I don’t know, El.” He shot me his classic charismatic smile that I loved seeing again. “I got to see my brother win a football game with my entire family and the love of my life. What do you think?”
Every cell in my body seemed to come to life at his words, like I could feel him and his love moving through me.
“I think it was a great day.” I returned his smile to make sure he knew I meant it.
“Missed you, though,” he added, offhanded, and I frowned.
“Missed me? I was with you all day.”
“When we were at Mom’s, you were sitting all the way across the deck. So far, El. I could see your pretty lips moving, but I couldn’t hear a single word. Fill me in?”
His eyes darted over to me, and then he winked, and I could have melted.
“Just catching up, mostly. Gemma confirmed that Noah does know Wednesday Elevett, and she’s even met her.
I had to withhold my envy. Then we were guessing how long it would take Chloe to convince Cameron that her bedtime should be extended when he was trying to get her to go to sleep. ”
Seeing Natalie get to relax because she had someone so capable that she trusted at her side was beyond amazing. I couldn’t be more happy for my best friend, especially because she seemed so happy.
“So you didn’t miss much,” I finished with, and Sully made a humming noise in the back of his throat that I couldn’t quite decipher. “What were you talking about with your brothers?”
He blew out a breath, his mood twisting. “Nothing as titillating as that, I’m afraid.”
Something about the vagueness and tone of his voice made me pause.
But then, a second later, he sighed again.
“I don’t want you to be upset.”
“Why would I be upset?”
Sully chewed on the inside of his cheek for a long moment. “I asked Noah about his experience with Gemma’s pregnancy, and I asked Blake about vasectomies.”
“Oh.”
The high I’d been riding from the excitement of the day came crashing down, but I didn’t blame Sully.
It was odd, actually, for me to go so many hours without thinking about pregnancy, about loss, and about the future.
And while it wasn’t necessarily a thought I was trying to push away, it had been nice to give my overprocessed brain a break because it exhausted me sometimes.
So much so that I’d been thinking I should make an appointment to talk to someone.
Sully noticed my deflation.
“I’m not upset, Sawyer,” I said before he could spiral. Because I wasn’t. We didn’t need to be each other’s only support systems. “They’re your brothers. I want you to have people you can talk to.”
“I should have asked you if you were okay with it first, though,” he said, readjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “But Noah asked how we were doing, and…”
“And you told them what was on your mind,” I finished for him. “I’m glad you talked to them, Sawyer. I know how you bottle things up sometimes.” It was actually comforting—knowing that he’d been able to let down his guard and confide in his brothers. “Was it a good conversation?”
He nodded. Hesitated. And then admitted, “Blake did caution me that vasectomies were not generally recommended for people who thought they might want to have kids one day.”
My insides tightened. It wasn’t news to me, but I wondered if it was for him. We hadn’t talked about it more since that morning in bed. “And how did you feel about that?”
“Unsurprised, but…” He pursed his lips. “I just wish there were more options.”
I sighed, knowing he badly wanted to be able to fix and solve and relieve the pressure of everything, especially surrounding birth control and the future.
Sometimes, though, as much as I hated to admit it, that wasn’t life.
Sometimes perfect solutions didn’t exist, no matter how much we wanted them to.
Sully longed to solve this, but with reproductive health, unfortunately, the onus had always been placed on the one with the uterus, despite the whole two-to-tango aspect of it all.
It was an unfair, uphill battle against the patriarchy, but it wasn’t something that he deserved to carry completely on his shoulders.
“There might not be a lot of men’s birth control options, but there are options, Sul,” I said softly as he parked on Maple Street.
The porch light twinkled, welcoming us home.
“It’s something I wish I could have wrapped my head around when I was younger, and maybe things would have been different.
But I didn’t know what I was doing. Didn’t know how to accept that there are options to have a family that don’t involve me being pregnant.
Or that there are options that do, but maybe they look different.
Medicine is amazing and terrifying. It’s all scary, and it’s a lot, but I don’t think we have to make any decisions right now. ”
They would still be there, whenever we were ready.
I wasn’t as afraid of the choices anymore, the ones that used to suffocate me because I was worried I’d make the wrong one.
I felt like the entirety of the last several months, ever since I found myself in an elevator with Sully, had been the universe’s way of proving to me that I couldn’t control everything, no matter how hard I tried.
I had to let go of that a little—the concept that I could manipulate every outcome to be the one that caused the least amount of harm to everyone involved.
That was what I’d thought I was doing when I told Sully I wanted to move to Boston, and look what had happened as a result.
I might have caused the most harm, and it was so hard to forgive myself for it.
Especially because, after all that, I became pregnant anyway. And yes, it had been the result of a choice—if I hadn’t slept with Sully, none of it would have happened, but this never would have happened, either. Us, together. Today. All of it.
Did perfect outcomes exist? Perfect choices?
Or were there only perfect chances and possibilities that I could dream about but never really be able to control?
Maybe that was okay, though; maybe that was the better reality.
Because in some ways, it was debilitating and exhausting to prescribe yourself to a philosophy that your brain had more power than the rest of your body and everything that moved around it.
All I could do was my best. My best to move every day toward the future that I wanted, even if that future wasn’t perfectly clear. And while that was hard—God, so hard sometimes—I remained unbelievably grateful to be getting a second chance to do it with Sullivan London.
“I feel comfortable without making any decisions right now.” I wanted to clarify that before he went too far, because maybe it was different for him.
“I feel comfortable learning more about my body, my cycles, and maybe being smart with timing and using condoms—carefully—to prevent pregnancy while we sort out our options and feelings, but if that’s not something you’re interested in, we can talk about it more.
And I know using condoms means it’s maybe not as good for you—”
“Not as good?” Sully, who’d been sort of staring off into the distance as he absorbed my words, turned abruptly to look at me. “Eleanor, there is no universe where being inside you isn’t a fucking dream come true—condom or no. Got that?”
I could feel my cheeks burning as though I were a teenager and not talking to a man who I’d been intimate with more times than I could ever count.
“Okay,” I breathed. “Why don’t you just think about it, though. How you’d feel about that plan. You were pretty apprehensive before, and I want you to feel comfortable, too.”
“You know it’s just because I love you, right?” He was looking at me in a way that made all the worry of the world vanish. What a gift he had, to be able to give that to me. “And I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you? It has nothing to do with the future I want with you.”
My throat squeezed, and I choked, “I know.”
“I love you,” he reiterated, more firmly. “I love you, Eleanor, and I’m so grateful for today. That I got to have you there with my family.”
“I love you, and I’m so grateful, too,” I said, giving him my best wobbly smile. I didn’t really want to cry after such a good day with my favorite people.
I could see the way my words affected him, from the smoothing of the lines around his eyes to the softness in the blue of them.
He gave a little nod before returning my smile and reaching for the door handle to get out of the car.
I mimicked him, shivering as the cool autumn air wrapped around me while I stepped toward the curb.
My brain lingered on our conversation as I heard the echo of Sully’s car door closing, the jingle of the keys in his hand, the ones that would unlock the house we grew up in.
And something about it all made me announce, “I would have wanted them to be a London, you know.”