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I stared at him for a moment. I still didn’t quite understand what he was getting at. Was I being stupid for not keeping up? I sat there in silence for another moment, waiting for him to go on, to shed some light on this.
"I want you to come with me, Abigail," he told me, finally, once he realized that the pieces weren’t slotting into place for me the way he had expected them to. He took my hand and lifted it to his mouth, closed his eyes, and kissed it softly.
"I want you to come with me," He repeated, his eyes soft and his words certain. I had heard him the first time, but it was taking a moment for me to wrap my head around what he was saying to me in that moment.
"You want me to...?"
"I want you to come out there with me," he explained. "I don’t want to leave you all the way back here. You said that your boss would give you a good reference, right? So use that, get a new job out there, a new start. With me."
My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to tell himyes,a million times over until the word had lost all meaning, but there were things that he needed to know about me before I could let him commit to something like that. He might have loved me, and I knew and was sure of the fact that he did, but he didn’t know everything about me.
"What’s wrong?" He asked, sensing the reticence from my side of things. I closed my eyes and buried my head into his shoulder, wanting this moment to last forever so that I didn’t have to go ahead and tell him what came next.
"You don’t want that?" He asked. "We could go out there together, leave all this behind – get a house, get jobs, start a family..."
I lifted my head from his shoulder and looked at him. This man, this perfect man – he had brought a perfect storm with him, of course, but out of it I had gotten him and I wouldn’t have changed that. I reached out to touch his face, trying to calm myself, but the look in his eyes was nervous and I knew that I was going to have to come out and tell him the truth. The truth that I should have told him a long time ago.
"I want a family with you, Joseph, I really do," I promised him. "But I can’t..."
I trailed off, caught myself, pulled myself back, I could do this. I had to say these words to him. He had to know what I had kept from him. It was only fair.
"I can’t have children of my own."
He stared at me for a long while, like he could hardly get his head around what I was saying to him.
"What do you mean?" He asked softly, after a long silence.
"I mean, I’m infertile," I admitted. The words tasted like ashes in my mouth, and it took everything I had in me not to spit out the taste of them from my tongue.
"I’m sorry, I should have told you sooner," I went on, the words tumbling from my mouth. I needed him to know that I knew that I had messed up, to know that I understood that keeping this from him all this time had been the wrong thing for me to do. I should have been honest from the start but I had kept it to myself, frightened that everything that I was giving to him would be too much for him to take.
"But I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t even know if that’s what you wanted from me," I continued, the words coming faster and faster until they threatened to blur into one another entirely. "I didn’t want to assume, but then you...and I just couldn’t..."
I lowered my face into his shoulder again, and tried to calm myself. I wasn’t doing a very good job. I was just so scared that he was going to take one look at me now and walk away. There was too much baggage for him to carry with him into this new life that he was starting. He might have loved me, but love only went so far, and there was only so much that I could expect him to take as part of that love.
But then, I felt his arms wind around me again, and he pulled me close. His grip was strong and sure and a promise that he was never going to let go of me, no matter what. I looked at him, slowly, worried that if I moved too quickly I might do something that would blow all this up.
"I don’t care about that," he told me. His voice was low, quiet, but it was certain. I stared at him.
"But how can you...you just said you wanted to start a family..."
"And there are plenty of ways that we can do that without having to get you pregnant, aren’t there?" He pointed out. "You knew a lot of kids in that school who came along through – well, through routes that weren’t the most traditional. And did their parents love them any less? Did they feel any less like kids to you?"
I smiled at him, even though the tears were still threatening. I shook my head.
"No, they didn’t," I echoed, and he tightened his grip around me.
"Abigail, I love you," he told me. "And I love everything that comes with loving you. It’s that simple. There’s nothing you could tell me now that would scare me off, I want you to know that."
"Hey, don’t try me," I joked, and I managed a slightly shaky laugh. I couldn’t believe this was happening. My man, my man was still here, even though he knew that I would never be able to give him that part of myself.
Once I had gathered myself, I looked at him, deep in his eyes. I needed to know that he understood what he was getting into with this. I needed him to be certain.
"You know, this is the reason that my ex and I broke up," I told him. "The baby thing. And I know that you love me, but I don’t want you committing to something that you don’t fully understand yet and then getting hurt later down the line-"
"Hey, now," he protested gently. "I might be young, but I know what I want. You should know that by now, shouldn’t you?”
I smiled. It was hard not to. When I was here in his arms, it was impossible not to feel that wave of utter joy, of utter contentment. I didn’t know what it was I had done in a past life to make it so that this glorious man had chosen to be with me above all the other women in the world that would have long-since fallen at his feet and vowed to give him anything he wanted, but I owed that previous version of myself a thank-you.
