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So I get out, splashing water everywhere. Yeah, I’m making a mess, but I don’t care. I’m not angry exactly, except maybe I am. Rory started this. She’s the one who turned around and climbed on top of me.
Now she’s sitting, still wrapped in a towel, on the edge of my bed.
God, I’m trying. I’m trying to do what she needs here. I’ve got a rock-hard cock and a woman who spent the afternoon crying in her car on the side of the road.
I wrap a towel around my waist and join her on the bed. “I’m not a mind reader. You’re going to have to talk to me, Rory.”
“I don’t know how to say what I need to say,” she says.
“This is me. The man who loves you. Say whatever you want to say.”
“I… I really wanted to be pregnant.”
“I know you did.”
“Part of me wants to try again now. To get pregnant right away. But…”
“But what? You’re the one who got off me because I wasn’t wearing a condom.”
“I know. Because as much as I want a baby, I don’t want to force you into anything.”
“You’re not forcing me into anything. And you’re right, I don’t want a baby. Not now. But I do want one in the future. I want one withyou, Rory.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
RORY
A surge of warmth spears through me. Hedoeswant a baby with me. He just doesn’t want it now.
I stroke my abdomen through the towel.
I guess I really thought you were in there. A part of me really thought I’d meet you in nine months.
“Rory,” Brock says, “I love you so fucking much. But you’ve got to help me out here. Where am I going wrong?”
“I love you too,” I say, “and where you’re going wrong is nothing that either one of us can control. I’m twenty-eight, and I want a baby. You’re twenty-four, and you want to wait.”
“Rory, sweetheart, this is not an insurmountable problem. We both want the same things. It’s only our timing that’s a little off.”
“Timing is everything, Brock.”
“That’s ridiculous, sweetheart. What about compromise?”
I don’t reply, partly because he called me ridiculous, and partly because I want my way, which I know is childish and—dare I say it?—ridiculous, just as he said.
“Rory, you understand compromise. I know you do.”
He’s not wrong. I understand compromise better than the average person. When you have your dreams torn out from under you and the best you can do is teach music to the students in your town, you know compromise.
You also know settling because that’s what compromise is a euphemism for.
Why should I settle now? I had to settle on my career. I had no choice. New York didn’t want me. They didn’t care that I was the most beautiful woman in Snow Creek. They didn’t care that I was the most talented woman in Snow Creek. I was never more than Colorado good.
I don’t want to settle anymore.
I don’t have to wait to have a baby.
I can have one now.
