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“I will, I am meeting Connor for dinner.” The reason for that dinner made her stomach flutter with trepidation and hope.
**
The candlelight played along Connor’s cheekbones and Sandra sat looking at him, thinking she could watch his face for the rest of her life—watch it change and grow older, watch it as she aged as well.
The phone lay on the table between them. Both of them stared at it with growing anxiety on their faces that kept their waiter from asking them if they wanted refills on their waters or if they were ready to order.
“It’s six thirty.” Sandra knew her voice sounded querulous.
“I know,” Connor’s voice sounded tense. “Maybe we should call him.”
Just then, her phone rang. It was the call that they had both been waiting for and they were both too afraid to answer it. Sandra pushed the phone at Connor and he answered it, listened, scowled a few times, said thank you a few times then hung up. Sandra, panic showing in her face asked, “Well?”
“Well…you won’t be drinking wine with dinner.” A grin split his face nearly in half.
Sandra’s breath came to an abrupt halt but her heart sped up. Tears spurted from her eyes even as she laughed. That laugh was shaky but genuine. “I’m pregnant.” She repeated it, this time with more authority, “I’m pregnant.”
“Yes.”
“We are going to have a baby.” She gulped and grabbed the glass of water by her empty bread plate. “Oh shit. I mean, you do want to be a parent don’t you?”
“Sandra, we have discussed this. I want to be in this child’s life. I want to be a father. What is more I want you to move in with me. I want us to raise this child together.”
“I will not marry you just because my birth control failed.’
“That is not what I meant when I asked, any of the times that I asked.”
“I know that.”
“Then why do you feel the need to reiterate the same things over and over again?”
“I do not know that I want to get married.” She knew she sounded stubborn and that she was being incredibly difficult. She wanted to marry Connor, wanted it with all of her heart but she had a horror of trapping him more than she feared a child already would.
“You are not your mother, or your father.”
“He came out to me today,” she blurted.
“Oh, is he still seeing Calvin?”
She stared at him, “You knew?”
“Everyone knows,” Connor replied casually. “You honestly didn’t?”
“Of course not!”
“Are you angry?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I wish he had told me long ago. It would have made so many things make sense. Calvin is such a physical person. You know he believes in empiric everything. Calvin had to be the one to tell him that nonsense he has been spouting my whole life about love being a biological function.”
“Like going to the bathroom? There might be something to that. I have had some shitty relationships.” Connor chuckled.
“You know what I mean.”
He took her hand. “I do. I think you spent your whole life watching someone who was afraid to love the person that he loved, or at least love him openly, hide himself away from that love and the entire world.”
Sandra wiped tears away, “I guess I am a little angry because I spent all these years living my life emulating him without knowing why he lived the way he did. I thought he just …I just…”
Connor knew why she was at a loss for words. Sandra had been raised to lead the life she had without ever questioning why her father lived the life he had raised her for. She continued, “I never thought that he would simply not leave the campus because he was in love with someone else on it.
