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“You don’t like them?” Seth asked. “There might be something wrong with a guy who can’t like kids.”
“It’s not that,” Michael was surprised to discover. “I like them well enough—at least I think I do. I love my niece a lot.”
He waited while another drink was placed in front of him, thinking he was going to have to take Seth up on his earlier offer to bunk down at his place for the night.
Seth was having another drink, too, staring down into his glass just as Michael had done.
“You find anything in there?” Michael asked.
Raising his head, Seth appeared to ponder that for a moment. “Nope. Not a damn thing.”
“You looking for something?”
Seth just shrugged. And then glanced across at Michael. “So how do you know you don’t want to be a father if you think you like kids?”
Meeting the other man’s eyes, Michael wished like hell he could explain. “Every time I even think about the possibility, I get claustrophobic, like I gotta run as far and as fast as I can,” he said, wondering if he sounded as stupid as he felt. “You ever feel that way?”
“Maybe,” Seth said. “I guess that’s how a guy feels when he knows he should do something, and knows he shouldn’t at the same time.”
“Exactly.” Michael couldn’t have said it better himself.
“Like, a man’s gotta work, and sometimes what he does just doesn’t allow him to be other things.”
“Exactly.” They drank to that.
“Sometimes his work is all he can do, all he’s trained to do.”
Well...not exactly. Michael didn’t have to take that job in Chicago seven years ago. He could’ve stayed with the firm in Cincinnati, could have grown old and died there.
“But what if it isn’t?” he asked, trying to focus on his ex-brother-in-law. This was too important to slur his way through. “Is it wrong for a man to want to love what he does?”
“Hell, no.”
Thank God for that. But... “Does it make him a self-centered bastard to pursue his goals?”
“It shouldn’t.”
“But it might.”
“I guess it could, depending on how he goes about it.” Seth nodded, as though pleased with his answer.
“I’ve always been completely honest with Susan.”
“I know you have.”
“I could’ve stayed here, you know,” he confessed, although he knew Seth had figured that one out long ago. “I didn’t have to take the position with Smythe and Westbourne.”
“Sure,” Seth said. “You could’ve stayed and rotted away.”
Michael froze. “What do you mean?”
“How happy would you have been, knowing what you’d passed up, knowing for the rest of your life that you had a chance to be everything you wanted and turned it down?”
“Does it matter, as long as Susan was happy?” he asked. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about, being selfish bastards?”
“I don’t know about that,” Seth said, frowning. “But I do know that Susan would never have been happy holding you back. Just like she wouldn’t have been happy giving up everything she’d worked for at Halliday’s to follow you to Chicago.”
“Kids hold a man back.”
