Page 37 of All Out of Love

“That’s life. And life is tough. That’s why, what did the guy in the movie Hud say? ‘Nobody gets out of it alive?’”

But that was too glib for Toya. “Do you even think about getting married and having children?”

He shook his head. “I do not. Marriage is not for me. And neither are kids.”

There’s that, she thought, as a part of her was greatly disappointed. But at least he put it out there.

He could see that she was disappointed like every woman he’d ever said that to was disappointed. But unlike all those other times, it bothered him that he had disappointed her.

And he felt a need to know where she stood. “What about you?” he asked her.

He loved the way she didn’t pretend she didn’t know what he meant. “I thought about getting married again, yes. And I very much want children. But I’m pretty sure that dream has passed me by.”

Grayson frowned. “Why would you say that?”

She smiled. “I’m thirty-one years old, Gracie. What would I look like having a baby at my age? Why I’ll be pushing fifty when he or she graduates high school.”

“So what? I’ll be over sixty. Who cares? They’ll be happy, well-adjusted kids who’ll take great care of us in our old age. Isn’t that what kids are for?”

They both laughed. Until Grayson realized he had assumed that if she ever did get married and have children it would be with him. Which would be ludicrous. He’d only known her for two months, and barely even for that long.

Although he knew, in this day and age of social media where people were getting married within days, or after reality TV romances where the first time they saw each other in person was on their wedding day. But all of that was preposterous to Grayson too.

It wasn’t lost on Toya that he had injected himself into her biological clock story. Which was contradictory AF. He’d never get married or have kids, he said in one breath, then he was telling her she wasn’t too old to marry him and have his kid in another breath. It was both exhilarating that he would even think such a thing, but pretty confusing to her too.

She decided to move on. “What about your folks? I know about your father, but is your mother still alive too?”

His parents. Not a story he wished to know about. “They are both alive, yes.”

“Are you close with your parents?” For her sake, specifically regarding his father, Toya needed to know this information.

But Grayson was shaking his head. “Not particularly, no.”

Her heart sank. “Why not? The commissioner made your father sound like he was the most beloved man in the whole state.”

“Oh he is. To this day. He’s revered.”

“But not by you?”

Grayson thought about all the shit his father had gotten him into. He took another sip of his drink before he answered her. Anybody else he would not have answered at all. But Latoya wasn’t anybody else. “Not by me,” he admitted

“Why?”

“My older brother was beloved just as my father is. I did all the work. I was the work horse that turned our longstanding corporate decline around. I completely turned around Carrington, Incorporated, which was the company my grandfather founded and that my father and big brother ran into near receivership. I then incorporated Carrington, Inc into Carrington Capital, which is my own company, and the merger worked. But only if my father and I were fifty-fifty partners (with my father and mother owning twenty-five percent each), and my father had to remain Chairman of the Board.”

“That explains how successful you are. But that doesn’t explain why you and your father aren’t close.”

“The wrong son died,” Grayson said bluntly. “That’s why.”

Latoya felt his anguish in that moment as he stared back at her. Then he looked away and sipped more wine.

But Toya was distressed too. Not just because of Grayson’s bad relationship with his father, but what it meant for her circumstance.

“We don’t have a father-son relationship,” Grayson further explained. “We never have had such a relationship.”

“Then what kind of relationship do you have?”

“I bear my father’s burdens,” he said. “That kind.”