Things Remembered (Accidentally On Purpose Companion Novel #3) (23 page)

“Don’t do that. Don’t do that sarcasm shit. Not with me. Not now.”

“Let me know when it will be a good time for my sarcasm shit.” I succeeded in pushing his hand off my face and snapped at him. “What do you want from me, Grant? I told you I didn’t want to have children. Why should I have to even say anything more than that? Why didn’t you just believe me when I said it?”

“Why couldn’t you tell me
then
?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me then that you had surgery, that you had made a decision that was so
final
?”

I threw my hands up in frustration. “What other kind of decision is there? Now you’re castigating me for not being irresolute in my decisions? All this time I thought that sticking to my resolutions was an admirable quality. Now that I know you want me to be all wishy-washy, I’ll try to be an indecisive moron from here on out.”

His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, and his jaw tightened. “When you said that you didn’t want to have children—”

“You should have believed me!” I shouted, cutting him off. “I meant what I said and you should have believed me.”

Most of his anger seemed to ebb as he took a deep breath and paused long enough to speak more evenly. “I did believe you, but believing that you didn’t want children and knowing that you
can’t
have them are two different things. I’m not mad that you had the surgery. I’m mad because you didn’t
tell
me about it. You know how I feel about you, Mayson. You have to know that despite what you said about kids that I’d…I’d thought about it.”

That made my eyebrows rise. “You’d thought about what?”

He hesitated.

“What?” I demanded, even though I
knew
. Of course I knew.

His voice was so soft, so sweet, and so sad. “I’ve thought about what it would be like to have a baby with you. Yeah, I believed you, but I also thought about the possibilities. What if you changed your mind? What if it just…happened?”

He sighed, laced his fingers with mine, and rested our hands on my lap.

“We never discussed birth control because it didn’t seem like we were going to be having sex anytime soon,” he continued. “But then the other day happened. I wondered if you were on anything, and thought that I shouldn’t have finished inside you. I would have never tried to sabotage any form of birth control, but after the other day, I started to secretly hope that whatever you were on failed, or that you weren’t on anything at all.”

I swallowed hard and tried to keep my voice from quavering when I talked. “Well. Now you know.”

He gazed at me for a minute. “You can’t get pregnant the usual way, but there are other ways. You can still
have
a baby if you really wanted one. I heard what you said, that you feel tainted and polluted. But would you feel that way with
my
baby inside you? With
our
baby?”

My eyes stung with impending tears as I stared back at Grant. Grant, who looked so hopeful.

“Yes,” I finally answered, my voice strained. “It’s not that you aren’t good enough, because you’re
too
good for me—you and your sperm.” I gave him a short-lived, sad smile. “But I would still feel the same, like my body isn’t a worthy vessel for a baby. And it’s not only that, Grant. I don’t
want
a baby. Maybe a long time ago I did, but I haven’t for a long time. I am terrified that I’ll do something to hurt it. What if I do get pregnant and slip up and start doing drugs before it’s born? What if I end up with postpartum depression and feel my only way out is to shoot junk into my veins? I’ve seen addicts have babies, and it’s rarely a good thing.”

I looked away from his fallen face to our interlaced hands. He hadn’t let me go yet, and it gave me some hope that he wouldn’t let me go entirely.

“All that aside,” I continued. “Having a baby is a gift and a privilege and responsibility I don’t want or deserve. I love Alex and Nat, and I would love a baby if we had one, but I don’t want one, Grant. I can’t give you that. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” I swallowed hard again as I tried unsuccessfully to blink back my tears. “I hope you find someone who can give you everything you want.”

Before the first teardrop could slide down my cheek, he touched my face again. His touch was more gentle than before as he made me face him.

“I don’t want someone else. I want
you
. You are already everything I want.”

I tried to shake my head. “But you want a baby.”

“I didn’t say I
wanted
a baby. I said that I
wondered
about it and thought about it. Even though you don’t want one, you can’t tell me that you haven’t
thought
about it, or imagined what it would be like.”

He raised his eyebrows as if daring me to lie. I didn’t.

“Yes. I’ve thought about it.”

His thumb caressed my cheek. The touch was sweet and soft, like his voice. “Maybe I overreacted. That’s not the way I wanted to find out. Not wanting to have a child is an important thing to tell me, but more than that, I would have wanted to know
why
. I would have wanted to know that you feel that way about yourself.”

“So you could fix me?” I didn’t mean to sound bitter, but that’s the way it came out.

“No, baby. You don’t need me to fix you. Some of the most beautiful and amazing things in the world are broken.”

He smiled. It was a real smile, without the sadness that had been with him earlier.

“I want to be there for you, Mayson. Always. I don’t want to fix you, but I want to prove to you that you are not tainted. You are not polluted. Not for me, and not so you’ll want to have a baby. I want to prove it for
you
.”

“You have a very tough road ahead,” I whispered.

“I can handle it. I’ve got stamina.” He winked at me and I laughed.

“You sure do.”

I leaned over and kissed him briefly on the lips.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He dragged a finger down my neck. It made me shiver even though it was beginning to feel warm in the car. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to kiss me.”

He wiped away the last few stray tears. Then we met halfway, and he kissed me into a stupor. I could barely remember my own name as my lips tingled during the drive back to the house.

Mandy. Melissa. Mayson. Yes, Mayson.

I was Mayson. He was Grant. He was mine and I was his.

The kids ate first, as had been the norm during the vacation. It was dusk by the time the adults were seated around the table outside.

The last thing that I wanted was to add another rope of tension to the group, but it was there. Emmy, Donya, Tabitha, and I tried to carry on as if I hadn’t just dropped a bomb on them a couple hours earlier, but I knew by the covert looks their men gave us and each other that they knew that something had gone down. It didn’t help that Emmy’s eyes were still glossy with unshed tears and Tabitha’s were red-rimmed and swollen. Donya was made of harder stuff and had the ability to hide behind her many supermodel faces.

“Are you okay?” Grant whispered in my ear as he rubbed my back. He was the only guy who knew what had happened, having witnessed it firsthand.

I smiled though it was a sad smile. “I’m not sure.”

He kissed the side of my head. “Just say the word, and I’ll sweep you out of here if that’s what you want.”

“And you said you weren’t my hero,” I teased.

“I
am
Repo Man,” he said, grinning. “My cape and tights are at the cleaners right now.”

“I gotta see you in those tights.”

He put his lips to my ear and whispered, “I gotta see you out of this dress later.”

Warmth spread over me and I couldn’t stop the stupid, heated smile from forming on my face. When I looked up, I met Emmy’s eyes. She’d been watching us with a melancholy smile. I looked away from her and discovered that there were a lot of eyes glancing at us, most of them with amusement.

I used to complain about their public displays of affection. Luke and Emmy flirted shamelessly with each other
all the time
. They didn’t care who was watching or listening.

Leo may as well had dragged Tabitha around by her hair caveman style. With every look, every touch, every embrace, and every kiss, he possessed her, owned her. She loved it, seemed unable to get enough of it.

Donya and Emmet touched—
a lot
. It was as if they were afraid
not
to touch. They weren’t obscene like the other two couples; their touches were saccharine sweet. A brief touch on her wrist, her fingers swiping his hair off his forehead, a hand on her waist. They didn’t just stand or sit side by side, some part of them had to touch.

Now I was the PDA jerk. I didn’t pull away when Grant touched me or went to kiss me. I touched him and kissed him just as much. I sometimes forgot that there were other people around us. No matter how crazy it got in the house, there were times when it was only him and me, in a bubble, untouched and unseen by the rest of the world. Is that what it was like for my cousins? In those moments, no one else existed but their significant others?

Even Sam and Fred were often caught in an embrace, and when my uncle kissed his wife, it was with such sweetness and love that it made me feel like I was intruding to see it.

“So, do you want to shake on it, man?” Luke asked Grant.

I had been lost in my thoughts and was only vaguely aware that they were talking about fantasy football.

“Yeah, I’m in,” Grant answered.

All the men except for Fred stood up to shake on some agreement and beat their chests and display their manliness or whatever. Without thinking about it, I found my eyes darting from man to man, or rather, from man package to man package. When I realized what I had been doing, I almost smacked myself in the head. I dared a glance around the table to see if I had been caught, but to my surprise, I caught each of the other women’s eyes darting around from package to package, too, even my dear old Aunt Sam.

It seemed that at once, we all realized what we had been doing as we glanced at each other with big eyes.

“Oh my god,” Tabitha whispered on my left.

“This is all your fault,” Emmy said, pointing at her mother, but she was trying not to laugh.

Suddenly, we were all trying not to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Leo asked when he sat back down.

The innocent question undid us. Together, as the men watched, we let ourselves laugh. The tension broke and dissipated.

After dinner, Emmy, Tabitha, Donya, and I left for a previously planned night on the beach, leaving Em’s parents and our men to watch over the kids. As we spread a large blanket out over the sand and broke out a bottle of champagne, we guffawed over what had happened at dinner.

“That Pesciano Pecker is impressive,” I said to Tabitha.

“I’m very proud of it,” she said loftily.

“You should be.” Emmy had murmured so low, I almost missed it.

Tabitha surely didn’t miss it. She gave Emmy a light, playful shove, making her laugh as she popped the cork on the bottle.

“The only one I didn’t look at was Emmet’s, because eww,” Emmy said, before tipping the champagne to her lips.

“I didn’t look at Emmet’s, either.” Tabitha shuddered. She accepted the bottle from Emmy.

I shrugged. “I totally looked.”

“That’s disgusting!” Emmy cried, laughing along with the other girls.

“He’s your
cousin
,” Donya pointed out, taking the bottle from Tabitha.

“Oh, you didn’t know that Emmet is totally incest worthy in Mayson’s eyes?” Tabitha asked.

“Ewww!” Emmy squealed.

“Emmet is a good-looking guy,” I said, pleading my case. “Incest is perfectly acceptable amongst cousins in some parts of the world.”

I took a long sip of the bubbly champagne.