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“Don’t mind me,” I said without offering him a seat. “You wanted to talk; you don’t need to wait for me to finish eating. Let’s get this over with.”
Yeah, I get bitchy when I’m hungry. Who doesn’t? It was also a defensive mechanism. I didn’t want him to know how happy I was to see him. I didn’t want him to know how much I felt like I needed him, especially in a time like this. Maybe I wasn’t doing the best job of looking like I had my act together — in my sweats and old t-shirt (the same outfit I wore when I went over to his house drunk that night, I suddenly realized) along with the messy way I had attacked the food I’d ordered, I was sure I looked like the very definition of someone who’d given up on life — but I could make up in feigned confidence what I was lacking in appearance.
He grabbed a chair from the kitchen table and brought it across from me, where he sat down, folded his hands and patiently began to speak to me.
“Something funny happened to me just an hour or so ago,” he said. “And I wanted to tell you about it.”
I was listening, but the food gave me an excuse to not look him in the eyes while he was talking. I’m not sure I had the emotional strength to do that right now.
“Between you running out of the office and disappearing on me, I hadn’t fully considered the gravity of what you told me. Because I was too focused on getting you back, I didn’t get the chance to sit down and fully sink in the idea that I was going to be a father.”
Here it comes, I thought. This is the part where he tries to convince me he actually wants to be a father despite never mentioning it to me before.
“And despite everything else that was going on, I was overjoyed. I couldn’t believe this was happening and then I was saddened again because I wondered if I’d ever get to meet the little guy.”
“Girl,” I said, mouth full of noodles.
“Sorry?”
I chewed for a bit and swallowed the bit I had in my mouth. “She’s a girl and her name is Grace.”
He looked at me strangely. “They can tell that early?”
“I’m the mother,” I said. “I can tell. She’s a girl.”
Wesley wasn’t interested in arguing with me, even if I was saying something ridiculous. “Okay,” he said. “I wondered if I’d ever get to meet the little girl.”
“If you were so excited…” A noodle got stuck in my throat and I started to cough.
Wesley got up and went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and grabbed me a water bottle.
I unscrewed the lid and took a sip.
“Thank you,” I said meekly as he sat back down. “How come you never mentioned wanting to be a father before?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see it as something that was possible.”
I laughed. “But we were dating, and we were banging. You do realize that was a possibility, right?”
“I just thought whatever was going on would happen and eventually end when you got bored of me. I wasn’t expecting a future. All good things come to an end, or at least that’s what I told myself.
“But it doesn’t sound like you’ve gotten bored of me,” he continued. “It sounds like, if anything, you’re scared of me leaving you at some point. And you don’t want to do that to the baby.”
That was exactly what it was. A baby could change a lot about the dynamics of a relationship. Grace was going to grow up and I wanted to provide her stability. That’d be much more difficult if her father left her at an early age.
“I’m not going to leave you,” he told me. “I will never leave you.”
At that point, I did look up into his eyes and saw that he was absolutely sincere.
“I’m not just ready to be a father,” he said, “I want to be a father to Grace. And this has all been so fast, but if it’s time for the next step, so be it. There’s nothing I’d rather do than start a family with you.”
It was so frustrating: he was doing exactly what I expected him to do. He was reminding me why I’d fallen so hard for him in the first place.
After a deep breath, he asked, “How does that sound to you?”
I didn’t want to answer him directly, not right away. I clearly made a mistake by leaving, but I wasn’t going to admit it just yet. “Go grab a fork and come here,” I said. I pointed to the noodles. “This is really good and you’re going to want a bite.”
He hesitated for a moment, unsure of how to take my invitation.
