Page 53 of Blueline Baby

But he’s wrong about one thing. This was never going to be a question. It stopped being a question a long time before tonight.

I look up at her blotchy face and her trembling chin, her hands still wrapped in mine.

“Marry me, Chloe.”

26

CHLOE

WE’RE HAVING A BOY

“No.”

I hear the word leave my mouth before my brain registers that I’ve said it. It’s the wrong word. It’s not even close to the word I meant to say. Every part of me has wanted to say yes to him since the moment he picked me up and spun me around on the ice in that freezing rink on our first date, and the word that comes out of my mouth anyway is no.

He stares up at me from the floor, one knee still planted on my rug. “What do you mean, no?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, not right now. I can’t marry you right now.”

He gets up slowly and I want to reach out. I want to put both hands flat on his chest and push him back down and unsay it but I don’t, because if I touch him right now, if I let myself feel how warm and solid he is, I’ll say yes, and I’ll mean it, and it will still be the wrong answer for both of us.

My eyes are burning again. I’ve been crying on and off for hours, and I didn’t think I had any tears left, but here they come. I hate that he’s seeing this version of me.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

Of course he doesn’t. I can see it on his face. He’s a man of action. He made a plan, wrote a list, and came straight here as if he’d already solved the world’s biggest problem. Now he’s standing in my living room trying to reconcile the one answer he never considered a possibility.

“You’re only asking me because of the baby.”

“No, I’m not,” he says. “I’m asking because I love you.”

He says it the way he says everything he believes and that’s the part I can’t get past. Because I’ve spent the entire afternoon remembering the way those women laughed. Fastest way to go from a girlfriend to a wife. I know what this will look like to his teammates, to his family, to everyone that isn’t him.

And worse, I know what it might look like to him someday. Some night years from now, when he’s exhausted from a road trip and we’ve had a bad week, he’ll look at me and wonder if I trapped him. And I will never be able to prove that I didn’t because you can’t prove a negative.

“You came in here with a list of action items, and you just started telling me what’s going to happen.” My voice keeps climbing and I can’t stop it. “And what if I don’t even want to keep it?”

The second it’s out, I would give anything to pull the words back into my mouth.

It isn’t what I meant. What I meant was that he didn’t ask me a single question about what I wanted. What came out was the cruelest possible version of that sentence.

He flinches. “You don’t want to keep our baby?”

“Of course I want to keep our baby.” I’m crying too hard to get a full breath around the words. “You’re not even listening to me.”

He reaches out with zero hesitation and pulls me against him before I can get another word out. His hand strokes over my hair and down my back, over and over, and I stand there while everything I’ve kept bottled up since this afternoon works its way out of me.

“Okay,” he says finally, speaking into my hair. “I’m listening. I swear to God, Chloe, I’m listening. Come sit down with me. Help me understand.”

We end up on my couch with me turned sideways across his lap.

“Four days ago, everything was normal,” I tell him, wiping my face with my sleeve. “The biggest thing in my life was a four-page biology lab report. It’s due tomorrow and I haven’t started it. Whatever, that’s not the point, but it’s also not not the point. Because now there’s a baby, and all these things you’re saying like a nanny, and a wedding, and none of those things came from me.”

“The baby’s going to come from you,” he points out.

The sound I make would normally be a laugh. Right now it’s mostly frustration.

“Okay. I’m sorry,” he says. “I had a two-hour flight, and the whole time, all I could think about was how to keep you in school. How to make it work.”