Page 107 of Perfect Cowboy

Chicken parmesan, Cesar salad, and garlic bread have the house smelling divine. When Ashley walks in, there’s a glass of wine waiting for her.

“Wow,” she says, “I was expecting frozen pizza.”

“Funny. Keep it up and I’ll eat yours.”

She comes into the kitchen and wraps her arms around me from the back, kissing my shoulder blades and making me shiver.

“You should cook naked,” she suggests.

“You should do everything naked.”

She steals a piece of bread off the platter on the counter and takes a big bite, moaning in a way that should be illegal unless I’m between her legs.

“Are you going to tell me where you went yet?” I ask, because it’s killing me not to know.

She hops on the counter and pulls me to her, wrapping her legs around my waist. “Have a bite of bread.”

I chuckle and bite the crunchy goodness that she brings to my mouth, but the look on my face lets her know that she isn’t off the hook.

If she has a secret boyfriend, she needs to tell me now so I can kill him.

“Ashley,” I warn.

“I went to a fertility clinic,” she admits.

Thousands of thoughts cross my mind all at once. Did she start treatment to try and get pregnant? She said that she was putting the whole having a baby thing on pause until she was settled in a stable relationship, but maybe she changed her mind.

And if she did start, who is she doing treatment with given she just told me that she loves me? Is she using donor sperm? How would I feel about being with her when she’s pregnant with another man’s child? It’s her body, her choice, but fuck, that would be hard.

If she swells from pregnancy with anyone’s child, I want it to be mine.

But none of those questions or concerns are what comes out of my mouth.

“How was it?”

She eats another piece of bread before answering me, a stall tactic if I’ve ever experienced one. But at least she isn’t running away from the hard conversation or excluding me from the discussion.

“I had to do a bunch of blood work. We planned the appointment to hit the right day of my cycle for the most accurate results. And they did a sonohysterogram.”

“What is that?”

“They inflated my uterus with a saline solution to check for abnormalities.”

“Did it hurt?”

“It wasn’t the most fun thing in the world, but I’m okay.”

“You should have let me come with you.”

But even without her explaining, I understand why she didn’t. We aren’t exactly a couple – though we aren’tnota couple either – and we’re not trying to make a baby together. It would have been awkward if I wasn’t there as her boyfriend.

And I’m not sure what she considers me.

I have no doubts that neither of us is with anyone else, but does that just make us a couple by default? These are all hard, heavy questions that need to be addressed sooner than later. I learned a long time ago that unfortunately, love alone isn’t always enough.

“They wouldn’t have let you in the room with me anyway,” she says. “After these preliminary tests, they’ll be able to tell me if I’m broken or if my ex and I just didn’t mesh in the baby-making department.”

Heat rises to my face because whether or not a woman can have a child, she isn’t defective. Women don’t just exist on this earth as baby-making factories. And maybe it was her ex shooting blanks regardless of what he claimed happened in high school.

---