Chapter Eighteen #3
“I don’t know,” Rose said. And then she couldn’t stop herself. She started to cry.
“Oh my God, are you crying?”
Her chest shook and she folded into herself. “What is wrong with me?”
“I thought—” Poppy took a deep breath and a harsh beeping blared through the phone. “Sorry, I need to stop climbing stairs for this. I thought you didn’t want kids?”
“I thought I didn’t, either.”
Knuckles rapped on the door. “Can I come in?” Landon asked from behind the thick oak.
“I have to go,” Rose said into the phone. “Talk later?”
“Obviously. And hey, tell Landon to watch his head on that door frame.” Rose snorted and wiped her eyes with the back of her hands, streaking her skin with black mascara and eyeliner.
Landon eased the door open, a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses balanced in the other. “I come bearing gifts.”
“I really need it,” she said, voice cracking. Landon took in her puffy red eyes, ringed with streaky black.
“You’re sad.” It was a statement with the slightest inflection of a question, like he couldn’t quite decide which tack he wanted to take.
“So are you,” she said, reaching for a glass.
“You told Poppy?”
“Yeah,” said Rose. “She wants you to know that you’re still annoyingly tall.”
“Message received.” Landon poured the wine all the way to the top, so high it sloshed over the rim when he moved.
“Is there room enough for two in there?” They’d only ever tried to do this once, on their first night in the new house.
Rose had begged and begged him to watch the sunset from the new clawfoot tub, and he’d finally relented and tried his best to contort his long legs into a shape that wouldn’t do any permanent bodily damage.
The fact that he was proposing they try again now spoke to how desperately he must have wanted Rose to feel loved.
“More than enough,” she said.
He undid the buttons of his perfectly pressed shirt one by one, undid the buckle on his sturdy black belt, pulled down the black boxer briefs she’d gifted him for Valentine’s Day, and clumsily slipped into the bath behind her.
His hands circled her waist, slippery from the oils and bubbles he’d added at the start.
Rose leaned into him, helping his hands find her breasts, showing him how she wanted to be touched.
“Tell me what it would look like,” she said, “to have a baby with you.”
“The making part or the having part,” he whispered in her ear.
“I’m pretty well versed on the making.” She smiled and pulled one of his hands off her breast, trailing it down her slick stomach.
“I think it would be hard,” he said. “Sleepless nights and all that. And scary. I mean, they’re so small and helpless, and the first few years seem like a struggle to just keep them alive.
But God, would it be fun. We’d get to see the world again with fresh eyes.
We’d go on camping trips, and take them to all the best national parks, and in the summer we’ll spend time on the beach with my parents, and take them to that little mini golf place we always wanted to try, and you can help them with their English homework while I struggle through calculus.
” Rose wasn’t sure if Landon realized his language had shifted from speculation to anticipation, or if he was aware he’d referred to two children in this hypothetical scenario.
“But none of that gets at the why of it all,” he continued.
“You are the most incredible woman I’ve ever known.
And maybe it’s selfish—it’s probably selfish—but I want the world to have more you in it.
A little person who is half you, half raised by you. ”
Rose moved his hand lower, past her belly button, down between where her thighs met, and pressed his fingers into her. “I might want to try,” she said.
“You might?” His fingertips strummed her smooth skin, sending shivers through her.
“I might.” She reached a hand back for his hair. “We should practice tonight.”
He moved his fingers faster, then slower, then faster, playing with her breath. “I’ll practice with you until the end of the world.”
The moment before release, Rose wondered whether she would always have to lose the thing she wanted most to find out she had wanted it at all.
The day the test flashed with two lines, one faint and one thick and clear, Rose had an incredible sense of knowing, something like a premonition: a vision of a full life, rich with everything she’d ever wanted.
That knowing coincided with the very first news coverage of a new drug.
The recently divorced wife of an Italian billionaire consented to an interview with BBC News, which soon got picked up by outlets worldwide and aired on Rose and Landon’s flatscreen television in the basement, where they’d curled up on the sofa, Landon’s hand already draped protectively over Rose’s still-flat stomach.
The woman’s statement boiled down to this: “I feel unbridled optimism for the future. I feel the possibilities are endless.”
Rose placed one hand over Landon’s and smiled. Because in that moment, she felt the same way.