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“Can I ask you something?” I say, sitting on the closed toilet seat and watching the bath fill.
“Of course,” Lori says, her voice picking up in pitch, then adds playfully, “I might not answer, though.”
I laugh as I peel my dress off and then ask, “Have you and Zichen talked about having a family?”
There’s a beat, and I wonder if Lori is putting the pieces in place, wondering if Owen and his wife had a differing opinion on kids. But then she says, “Of course. The moment you feel like your relationship is heading into the serious stakes, one of you mentions kids. In our case, it was Zichen.”
My heart flounders, as I’ve never had this conversation with any of the guys I’ve dated, only highlighting how I’ve never been in a serious enough relationship to have reached this stage.
“And what did he say?” I ask, lowering myself into the tub.
“He said he wanted five kids, all before he was forty.”
“Shit, that only gives you seven years to pop them all out,” I quickly work out.
“Five years, as he’s two years older than me, and he wants them before he is forty, not me,” Lori points out.
“Don’t tell me you’ve agreed to this.”
“Of course not. I’m not a baby machine, and I don’t think I want five kids.”
“So, how did that go down?” I ask, turning off the taps.
“We talked it through. I told him I want kids, but only when I feel ready and not before, and that I want to assess whether we have multiple after having the first because you just don’t know what life is going to deal you,” Lori explains.
“And he was okay with this?”
“Of course he was. He said he’d rather have one child with me than five with someone else.”
“How very cute.” I smile. This is the kind of answer I’d expect from someone in love.
“He can be, but only in small doses,” Lori teases.
My smile drops because as lovely as the image is, I need to know where she would stand if things were different.
“But what if you couldn’t?” I ask, then quickly add, “Have kids, I mean.”
The tap drips as Lori releases a deep sigh. “Honestly, I don’t know, as I guess you don’t think about it until it happens. But what I do know is that I agreed to stick with my husband through thick and thin, no matter what,” she says with such passion that I want to applaud her.
“That’s the thing I can’t get past,” I say as I lather the shower gel into a bubbly foam. “I’ve always been under the impression that if you love someone, you’d do anything to be with them. You’d make sacrifices for them, take the hard road just to walk it with them. Isn’t that what love is?”
There’s a silence. I think maybe the call has dropped, but then Lori speaks.
“That’s exactly what love is, and it sounds to me like you speak from experience.”
“What do you mean? I’ve never been in love before.”
“You might not have been in love before, Alice, but it sure sounds to me like you are now.”
The bath water stirs as I sit up quickly.
“What?”
“Are you sure you haven’t fallen for Mr Grumpy? Because it seems like you have.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I care about him, of course. We’ve become good friends—friends who care about each other—but to say I’ve fallen in love with him? That’s nonsense. I like him, yes, very much. And I worry about him—that goes without saying. But I also worry about climate change and black holes.”
I scrub in between my toes with the sponge, bubbles foaming up around my foot while my head spins.
