AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’d shoot every one that ever tried.
“Why don’t you let me do it?”
Her eyes snap up to mine. I swear if there was a hole big enough, I’d climb inside it and never come out.
I hate when intrusive thoughts spill out of me unchecked and unfiltered.
“What?”
I have two choices—laugh it off like I was joking or double down. Laughing it off is the only viable option.
“I can get you pregnant.”
“Cash,” she says in a way that hurts more than it probably should.
“The guy you picked sounds exactly like me,” I say, ignoring the cut she just made to my ego. “Let me do it.”
“Is it you?” she asks.
“What? No, of course not.” If there was ever a time to lie, now is it, with the tone of her voice and the disgust I can hear in it. “I don’t want kids. I’d never donate sperm. That’s literally the exact opposite of what I’d want.”
Why I keep the lie going, I’ll never understand, but the words are out there. I can’t count a single other time I’ve lied to her. It settles inside of me like poison, like a cancer that threatens to eat me up from the inside out.
“You don’t want kids, but you’re willing to have one with me?” She shakes her head a little, confusion wrinkling that spot between her eyes.
She’s positively adorable with her pink, pouty lips, and that stray piece of fiery red hair on the left side by her ear that she always has trouble taming.
“Get you pregnant,” I correct. “Is that the deal?”
I’m trying not to press too hard. I don’t want to seem too eager.
“You wanted to save the money,” I hedge, wondering if she can read me like a book or if this is one of those times she doesn’t read more into what I’m saying.
“We’d still have to use the clinic I found.”
Now it’s my turn to be confused. “Use the clinic?”
“For the insemination.”
I suck in a deep breath, realizing we might be on the same track, but we’re hundreds of miles apart and moving in opposite directions.
“There’s a free way,” I say, wishing my brain-to-mouth filter was working a little better right now.
She shakes her head, her cheeks flaming.
“You aren’t suggesting—”
“Sex, Adalynn. I’m saying you can get pregnant the old-fashioned way.”
She immediately shakes her head again, and that sting of rejection feels like the hundredth crack of a whip against my skin.
She seems stunned into silence, but that doesn’t stop my head from imagining her placing a loving hand over her belly where my baby grew.
She might have picked my donor number, but there were things I left out. She’s worried about picking someone with too high of aspirations in life. Although it hits another chord that she’s judged that donor and decided he’s the type to stick close to home, I’m glad she did pick that one.
If she goes through with this and uses the donor, then I won’t drive myself crazy thinking about another man’s baby being inside of her.
“Or I can go to the clinic with you,” I counter when she doesn’t look less appalled.
