Page 33 of Second Chance Baby

Not anymore.

But he didn’t force me to speak until I was ready, just waited me out the same way he was clearly used to waiting out Carrington.

He gripped my hand, holding on even when it started to shake. “Take your time. There’s no rush.”

I had to laugh at that one. “Obviously not, since it takes me an eternity to face what everyone else just does naturally.”

“How do you know that?”

“I canseethem, Travis. All the women I knew in school who are now parents just knew how to do it naturally. They tackled it head on. None of them ran away.”

“And you know that by watching from the outside, right? That’s the way to find out every detail about a situation, isn’t it? If someone watched us, they’d get the truth of us just studying our lives from the outside, wouldn’t they? And if so, what is that truth? Tell me, please. I want to know.”

He made me laugh again, though this time, it was far more subdued since none of this was actually funny. “No, of course not. I just made assumptions because I saw what looked like so many happy families. Like your family. Your parents are so incrediblyfunctional. How could I ever compete?”

“Who ever asked you to?”

“Me,” I whispered. “I figured that’s what you wanted, and I just couldn’t compare. That I would end up disappointing you, since I wasn’t made to be a homemaker.”

“So what? I kind of like being the house husband. So, you can be the international super model and support me, and I’d be finewith it. I wasn’t sure I would be, but having you with me again is worth everything. I’ll just stay at home and take care of the kids.”

“What kids? We have one. Unless you haven’t told me something…”

“Nope. Just conveniently didn’t wear a condom today.” He jerked a shoulder and played with my fingers. “It wasn’t intentional but now that it’s done, I’m fine with it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “It wasn’t intentional?”

“No. Just never even considered it. Didn’t care about it. It wasn’t even in my brain. And if it had been, I didn’t have one in any case. Granted, it’s been a damn long time since I’d been in that situation.”

He obviously meant being with me sexually. Not being with anyone. Because a guy with his kind of sex drive wouldn’t put it on ice for years just for some chick.

Even if that chick was me.

But didn’t you do the very same thing for him?

“What if I don’t want more kids?” I asked quietly, needing to know.

“I’m fine with that too. I already have the best daughter on the planet. Maybe our best is in her, and if so, that works for me.”

“Everything works for you. You’re so fucking well-adjusted. No matter the situation, you just shake it off and deal. You don’t have the basic dysfunction some of us are born with where we can’t just roll with the punches. Where everything seems too hard and we’re sure we aren’t capable of handling it. So, we make sure the worst happens despite ourselves. We just look up one day and realize we are all alone by our own doing. Because we don’t deserve anything more.” I buried my face in my hands, well aware he was stroking my back.

“Says the fuck who?You? Well, guess what, Killer, I’m still fucking here after all this time. So, what does that say? GuessI’m not as perfect as the pedestal you put me on, though I have no clue why. I definitely don’t roll with all the punches. I loved that little girl from her first scream, so that was the easiest part of all of this. But I didn’t know what I’d done wrong to make you stop loving me. I figured there was something, but I didn’t know what. But I had a piece of you, and I was going to do the fucking best I could by her.”

I lifted my head. “I didn’t stop loving you for one second. I stopped thinking I had any right to believe I was good enough for you. Other women told me all the time. What kind of dumb bitch would do what I’d done to a man like you? I didn’t deserve you. And they were right. They wereright.”

“Says who? Not me. If you were so not worthy, why did I not want anyone else? Why did I kneel down next to my window night after night and ask what I could do to make you come back and want to stay? It didn’t matter what it was, I would do it. That was all I wanted. For you to come back and say you’d missed me even 1/10thas much as I’ve missed you. Even that much would be a dream come true for me.”

“Travis,” I whispered, staring at him through streaming eyes.

“I fell in love with you when you were fourteen and I never could fall out. Never tried. Somehow it just kept growing. The longer you were gone, the more I wanted you back. So, you know what? If you were a dumb bitch, so was I, because no one else in the world even existed for me. I couldn’t see them, and I didn’t want to. I’ve been looking at you and foryou this whole time.”

I swallowed hard and reached for him, hanging on for all I was worth. “I’m right here. And today, I went to the drugstore to get those Plan B pills, and I couldn’t buy them. Because there never was a Plan B for me. You were every damn letter in the alphabet I wanted. I didn’t want to walk away. I pretty much crawled away. No part of me wanted to leave. But I had such bad postpartum depression and there were no women in my familyto ask what was happening to me, since my mom was long gone and back then, so was my sister. Later on, we found our way back to each other, and she told me she’d gone through the same thing when she had her baby. But she hadn’t had someone to leave since her baby’s father had been a dick who hadn’t even stuck around for Amerie’s birth. She called me a dumb bitch too, by the way.”

“Oh, baby, you weren’t dumb. You just didn’t have any good role models, and you had hormones and all of that. You can’t blame yourself for not doing more than you were physically capable of.” He brushed away my tears, his thumbs so gentle on my cheeks. “You did the best you fucking could. As we all do every day. Do you think I don’t second-guess myself? I do all the time. I blamed myself for you leaving. That I hadn’t spent enough time asking you how you felt. But I didn’t know to do that, either. We both fumbled hard.”

“But you didn’t fumble with Care. You put her first in every situation. Youstuck.And that was the best possible thing you could do.”

He smiled sadly. “Yet it didn’t keep you with us, so it wasn’t enough. I held on because I couldn’t do anything else. Even when my fist was empty, holding on so tightly was all I knew to do. That maybe if I stayed in the same place long enough, one day I’d look up and you’d be back in my arms again.” He swallowed hard. “It’s not heroic if you’re not capable of doing anything else. And I wasn’t. I had more days than not where I didn’t want to get out of bed and face a world you weren’t in. I didn’t want to deal with reality. So, I just closed my eyes and kept plowing ahead because I didn’t know what else to do.”

---