Page 21 of Lily, Unwritten

Zack looked at me, a sudden tension in the air. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “She’s heartbroken, Zack. If you could fix that for your best friend, you would.”

“That depends. She’d have your baby? It would be running around with all your genes and stuff. You’d be ok with that?”

“For a start, babies don’t run…”

“You know what I mean. It’d be yours and Guy’s baby. That’s not going to be normal, is it?”

“It would be Guy and Cassies baby,” I said.

“But we’d all know. You’d end up distant, I’m sure. She can get an egg donor, it’s not up to you to fix this. She’s already got two kids anyway.”

“I know it’s not, but she’s my best friend, and if I can find a solution to something for her—” I began to say.

“Do you not think we’ve had enough best friend trauma?” Zack’s eyebrows bundled up together above stormy eyes.

“Zack… Please don’t.” I sat up and grabbed my drink from the table. “It’s not a bad thing to want to help her.”

He sat and wrapped his arms around me as he pressed his face to my hair. “I know. You just want to be lovely. But I thought we said we were going to focus on us?”

“I do want to focus on us.” My voice shook as I spoke, emotions barely held in check.

“I want us to move into our new house, get married, have babies, be happy ever after. Wasn’t planning on a half-sibling running around.”

“It wouldn’t be like that…”

He stroked his hands down my arms. “Come on, first night back together, let’s not spend it talking about this. We’ve got plans to make.”

I leaned back against his warm chest as he slid his hands inside my t-shirt, his fingers tracing over the curve of my hips. He obviously felt like working the tension off.

“So, I know we said house first,” Zack began. “But what kind of wedding do you want?”

I twisted around and placed a gentle kiss on his chest. “I don’t know. I guess girls are meant to plan it out from the age of seven or whatever, but I never did.”

“Let’s start with the basics then. Church?”

“Hmm, I’d rather not,” I said.

“Here or abroad?”

“Here, or else we couldn’t invite everyone.”

“A big wedding then?” Zack asked.

“Yeah, how could we not?” I grinned with pure excitement, but my mind was still on Cassie. “Maybe not as big as that castle, but there’s a lot of people to invite.”

“We’ll have to make a list.”

“It doesn’t seem fair to Cassie, though,” I sighed again as I returned to the previous conversation, unable to stop myself.

Zack pulled his arms away from me and pinched at the bridge of his nose.

“You know, sometimes it feels like you just don’t want us to move forwards. There’s always an excuse.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m doing everything I can to try and build our future here, and at the point I’m thinking it would be right to try for a baby, you want to put that at risk by going through a procedure you don’t need to make someone else happy. Even though she has other ways to solve it.”

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