Page 56 of Swept Away

“If by interesting you mean damaged and jaded, yes.”

“That’s definitely not what I mean. That’s so…that’s so far from how I see you.”

She says nothing for a while. “I don’t know whether it’s better or worse that you’ve been with older women before.”

I smile slightly. “Why does it bother you so much? The fact that there’s an age gap between us?”

“It doesn’t.”

I wait.

“All right, it does a bit. A woman over thirty with no home of her own, who goes back with a twenty-three-year-old she meets in the pub…she sounds a bit of a mess.”

“Not to me,” I say, running my hand up and down her arm. I remember doing this in bed, how soft her skin had felt. It’s difficult to match the woman in my lap with the woman I took home on that first night. She’d been a stranger then, and this is my Lexi, my only person in the world. “She sounds like someone who didn’t really get her twenties. It makes sense she’d want a person who’s at a similar stage.”

Her eyes fly open again. Wide-wide.

“You’re not at a similar stage to me,” she says, staring at the bathroom wall instead of up at me.

“No?”

“Zeke, I’m a thirty-one-year-old woman. I want kids of my own. I should be with someone sensible to father my children, not a beautiful twenty-something who makes me feel alive for a night, or whatever.”

“What, I’m not sensible? And how do you know I don’t want to have kids soon?” I say, my hand stilling on her arm.

At last, she looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, and her eyes are still dizzy-looking, but they’re sharp, too. Missing nothing.

“There’s more to a person than their age,” I say quietly. “You can’t just decide who I am because I’m twenty-three. I wouldn’t say every thirty-one-year-old woman wants, like…” I reach around for a handy cliché. “To get married, or to have a baby, or to get Botox, or something.”

“No,” she says after a moment, with slight amusement. “I wouldn’t advise saying any of those things.”

I give her a small, tight smile. She frowns.

“That’s fair. I’m sorry,” she says.

I watch her swallow. I can see it hurts her, and I wish I could smooth that away.

“Doyou want kids?” she asks.

Her wide eyes are vulnerable. Maybe defiant. It’s hard to tell the difference with Lexi.

“I can’t wait to be a dad,” I say. “I think about it all the time.”

She breathes in, a sort of two-part hiccup. The way she might inhale if I’d just got down on one knee.

“It’s part of what made me go to therapy. I didn’t think I could handle a relationship, but knew I wanted kids, a family, and…it didn’t add up.” This is harder to talk about than I thought it would be. “I think Nicky—the woman I really fell for when I was sixteen—I think she just confirmed for me that I wasn’t worthy of real love. But she did make me feel like I was good at sex. So…I did a lot of that.” I shrug. “I wasn’t being honest with myself about what I wanted. Or I was too scared to go out and get it. Sex, that’s easy,” I say.

I feel her tense slightly and I wince.

“I mean, like…I know I can…”

“It’s OK,” she says. “I get it. You were saying: sex is easy…”

I take a deep breath. “Trying to fall in love? Find that one person, raise a family with them, trust them to love you forever? That scares me. That’s hard.”

She nods.

“But yeah, I want kids. I can say that now. I want to be a dad who does everything. Middle-of-the-night get-ups and school drop-offs and all the heart-to-hearts. I want my kids to know I’m always there for them.”

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