AllFreeNovel
Share Us
What could she say?
CHAPTER10
Two more days. That’s all that was left before Stacy had to leave to return to New York. Two days and Luis wasn’t ready for this to end. And yet, he couldn’t promise her anything. He couldn’t even tell her that next week things would be different. It wouldn’t be fair to her if he asked her to stay.
Sitting in the kitchen sipping on his first cup of coffee, he glanced outside and saw Trevor coming back from the barn. It was early. The sun had just risen and he had left their bed, unable to sleep.
Fear had ridden him hard all night long. Fear that somehow he had impregnated Stacy with the broken condom. And yet he was the only one who seemed to be concerned. But he couldn’t be a father.
The sun was up, but that was about all.
Trevor walked in the door with a basket of fresh eggs.
“The chickens were productive yesterday. We have almost a dozen fresh eggs,” he said taking them to the sink and rinsing them off.
Luis wished he would do that outside, but he’d clean the sink after Trevor left the kitchen. Chicken poop was not something he wanted in the house sink.
A pregnancy was something he didn’t want either, not with him suffering episodes of PTSD.
“Are you all right?” Trevor asked. “Yesterday, you really concerned me.”
Last night was what concerned him. He’d learned to live with coming out of an episode to people staring at him like he’d lost his mind.
“I’m fine as long as no loud noise startles me,” he said.
Last night, he had a hard time sleeping. The image of his mother and the excited way she had spoken to Stacy played in his head. When he told her that Stacy returned to New York, he was going to break his mother’s heart.
They were not getting married as much as he liked the idea. No woman deserved to have to live with a man who often returned to battle.
He was the only one who seemed concerned about his PTSD episodes, the others seemed to accept it as a part of him.
But he wasn’t ready to accept that. All night, he’d lay there thinking about the condom breaking with Stacy. What if she were pregnant?
As much as he enjoyed her, he was not ready to settle down, and he never wanted children to witness their father going crazy. It just couldn’t happen.
This morning the answer to his problems had come to him out of the blue. And while it wasn’t the perfect solution, he knew it would keep him from worrying about an unwanted pregnancy.
“If I make an appointment to get a vasectomy, would you take me to the doctor?”
Trevor turned from the sink and stared at him. “Are you certain about this? You always wanted children before you went into the Navy.”
If his mother ever learned the truth, she would be so upset with him. But after the scare last night, it was better that he take care of it. That way a breaking condom wouldn’t put the fear of God into him.
“Little children would be terrified if they saw me having an episode. They would be so afraid of Daddy and it wouldn’t be fair to them.”
Trevor seemed frustrated and Luis didn’t understand why. Before, they had always understood one another.
“What about if you were married? Would you tell the woman before you married her that you will never have children with her? We had planned on marrying a woman and sharing her. I want children. I want a wife and family. I want it all. And now after we’ve bought the ranch, you’re changing your mind. That’s not fair to me.”
This was the hard part. This was the part that Luis wasn’t certain about. And yet it wouldn’t be right for anyone’s children to see him fighting an unseen battle.
“We had always planned on it being the two of us sharing a woman.”
“Someone like Stacy,” Trevor said. “Have you considered that most women want children? If they find out you got a vasectomy the woman is not going to be happy.”
That thought had swirled around in his head, and he knew if he married, eventually something would happen and he’d have babies. A family. And yet his chest warmed with the idea of a little boy who looked like him or a little girl who looked like…Stacy.
“It would be for the best if I never had children,” he said. “I don’t want them to be afraid of me or to think I’m some kind of monster.”
