Man-Berry Sauce Page 2

  I shake, my whole body having a delayed reaction to the shock, the confusion, the orgasm—who knows? I wrap my arms around myself and try to stop the shaking.

  “Why?” I say, and the sound of my own desperate voice, choked with tears, breaks my heart. “Why did you do that?”

  “Oh, Christ, Jen.” He cuts his gaze away from mine, then bends to pull his boxers and jeans up. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you dare be sorry!”

  He pauses, then nods. His hands fall to his sides, leaving his buttons undone. “Of course. I didn’t mean—”

  “Why did you do that? Why couldn’t you have stayed downstairs?”

  But if he’d stayed downstairs, I wouldn’t be able to taste his kisses. I wouldn’t be remembering all I’ve lost, but I’d be so alone.

  I’d have been better off being alone.

  “Caleb, we’re not together anymore,” I say, softly. “That was your choice. I still don’t know why.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “You can’t just … do this, and then walk back out of my life until whenever the next time is. You can’t just crook your finger and—”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Bullshit.” I glare at him. “You didn’t invite yourself up here for no reason.”

  He has the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, that’s—”

  “Do you think we’re going to have an old-times-sake shag every Thanksgiving? How about Christmas?” I’m shouting now, and I vaguely hope that no one can hear us, but does it really matter? “When do you let me go, Caleb? At what point do you face the fact that you threw a dozen years of us away for nothing, and let that be an end to it?”

  “Don’t say that,” he says. “You don’t know why—”

  “Yeah, I don’t know because you never told me.” Swiping angry tears off my cheeks, I button up my blouse with shaking fingers. When he reaches out to help, I slap his hands away. “I can do it!” I snap.

  “Yeah, I know you can!” he snaps back. “You can do everything, you don’t need anything from anyone else, right, Jen? And if someone is less capable than you are, if someone else has a problem, how are they supposed to tell you?”

  I throw my hands in the air. “You are incomprehensible,” I say. “If you had a problem, this is the first I’m hearing of it. That’s on you, not me.”

  “Look at yourself,” he says hotly. “Just look at your life. Orphaned foster kid rises above it all—valedictorian, first in your class at college, Harvard Law, youngest DA ever in the whole state. Do you have any idea how fucking intimidating you are?”

  “Are you saying you dumped me because I’m smart?” I can almost feel my blood boiling in my veins. “Because I did well in school?”

  He sit heavily on the edge of the bed. “No,” he says, and the anger is gone from his voice, replaced by a terrible sadness. “I’m saying I let you go, because you’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever known. You’re … you’re fearless, and funny, and so smart you take my breath away, Jen. You’ve never once not done something you set out to do, and you…” He rubs his face with his hands, looks everywhere but at me. “You deserve a lot more than I can give you.”

  This stops me dead in my tracks. “What are you talking about? I never wanted you to give me anything. I don’t care about things; I never have. I just wanted you—wanted us—and the life we were supposed to have. And you just took it away for no reason.”

  “That’s exactly it,” he says. “The life we were supposed to have … I can’t do that. I couldn’t give you that.”

  “What? What are you even saying? You couldn’t give me what? You didn’t want to get married? You didn’t want kids? You didn’t want to grow old with each other and love each other and just … be?” I’m crying again, big heaving sobs that wrack my whole body. “Because that’s all I ever wanted, Caleb. Nothing fancy. Just the normal. Just you and me, and a couple of kids, and our lives together. The normal.”

  He looks up at me, and I’m shocked down to my bones to see his cheeks wet with tears. “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t have kids.”

  “Of course you can have kids,” I snap. I move over and stand in front of him so he has to look up at me. “What a ridiculous thing to say. You’re amazing with Neveah—”

  “No,” he says, “I can’t. I figured out last year that … something was wrong. I had some symptoms—”

  “What symptoms?”

  “Jen, come on,” he says. “Just … some stuff. I found a weird lump, and—”

  “A lump?” I sputter. “Did you have cancer?”

  “No, nothing like that.” He shakes his head. “It’s so stupid, actually. You know I had scarlet fever when I was a kid?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, apparently a high fever can, like, mess stuff up. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know.” He looks at the floor. “I found this lump, which turned out to be literally nothing, but during all the testing they found out I have a really low sperm count.”

  My mind is reeling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Christ,” he says. “Cut it out. It was personal.”

  “Once a woman has had your cock in her mouth, nothing that happens with it gets to be personal anymore,” I tell him. “You made choices about us, based on this, and I should have known. I should have been able to make the choice with you. You chose for me, without even asking me if I cared, or if it mattered.”

  “Of course it mattered,” he says. “And it was embarrassing.”

  “So did our relationship,” I say. “So was getting dumped with no explanation.”

  “I explained it—”

  “You lied!” I explode. “If what you’re saying to me right now is true, you lied.”

  “I did not,” he insists. “I just didn’t … elaborate.”

  “You told me ‘We want different things,’” I spit out, “and then you refused to explain what those things were. I’ve spent the last four months assuming you meant you were fucking someone else, Caleb. Did I deserve that?”

  “I would never have—”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I thought.” I wipe away more tears. “I thought you didn’t want me anymore, and now you’re telling me it was over this? Like I would have cared? Listen—”

  “No, you listen,” he says, reaching out to grab my wrist. “It’s so easy for you to just dismiss it, to say it wouldn’t have mattered. It mattered to me. Do you know what it does to a man, to be told that the very thing that makes you a man isn’t there? Or might as well not be?”

  “What are you saying to me?” I ask. “Are you saying you dumped me because you didn’t feel macho, or something silly like that?”

  “It’s not silly,” he says. “Are there any less masculine words in the English language than ‘low sperm count’? I mean, literally any?”

  “You didn’t seem to have any questions about your masculinity a few minutes ago—”

  “That’s not what makes a man, Jen.”

  “Then what does?” I demand, my voice shaking. “The teaspoon of goo at the end of it? You think that’s what determines how much of a man you are?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re saying.” I yank my wrist away. “You put me through hell.”

  “You weren’t the only one going through hell.” He looks at me helplessly. “I knew that I’d never love anyone again, that I’d die a little when you found someone else. But I had to give you that chance.”

  All the anger goes out of me, replaced by an ache in the pit of my stomach. An ache for what we lost, for what was thrown away because of pride. I drop onto the bed beside him, staring at the wallpaper pattern and just feeling so lost.

  “I left you because … because you’re going to be an amazing mother. You’ve talked about having kids since you were a kid yourself. I can’t give you what you need, and I love you too much to ask you to settle for l
ess.” He runs a shaking hand through his hair. “It’s that simple. How could I be the one to take that from you?”

  “You didn’t have the right to make that choice.” I put my face in my hands. “People grow their families in so many ways. My God, look at how your family took me in. We had options.”

  “Oh, Jen.” He pulls my hands away from my face and leans in, his forehead pressed to mine. “You hated being a foster kid. You hated not having any real relatives; you told me that when we were, what, twelve years old?”

  “Yeah, well, news flash, Carter: I grew up, and developed the ability to appreciate nuance. I do have real relatives. I had your family, for starters. I had you—the family I chose. And we would have made the rest of our family however we had to.”

  “But I wanted to make a baby with you. I wanted that for you. I wanted so badly to hold our baby, a little mix of you and me. A little boy with your eyes, or a little girl with that same dent in her chin. Something from us.”

  Tears spring to my eyes. I reach out and take his face in my hands. His handsome, earnest, beloved, idiotic face. “People do in vitro and stuff like—”

  “Oh, sure, great, that’s awesome.” He pulls away and shakes his head. “Since I can’t get it done the normal way, let’s do something expensive and unromantic.”

  “For the love of God, what is the matter with you!” I stand up and start pacing—literally pacing, because that’s how annoyed I am right now. “If you seriously think it makes any damn difference if your little swimmers meet up with my whatever the old-fashioned way, or in a test tube, you’ve lost your goddamned mind.”

  “Jen—”

  “Shut up!” I throw my hands in the air again. “You kiss me and my fucking legs shake so bad I can’t stand up, you can make me come in like thirty seconds, and when you’re inside me I want to cry because we were made for each other. You’re telling me I should throw all that away because we might have to try a little harder to get knocked up?”

  “It’s more than just trying a little harder—”

  I stomp back over and shove his chest with both hands. He falls back on the bed and I stand over him, furious and determined—and desperately, desperately in love.

  “Jen—”

  “I’m not done,” I say.

  I crawl on top of him, feel his cock twitch in his pants as my body slides against his. We just had mind-blowing up-against-the-wall sex a few minutes ago, and he’s already ready to go again … but he’s worried he’s not man enough for me?

  Well, fuck that.

  Straddling his waist, I look down at him—his broad chest, the ridges of his six-pack. His incredible arms. His face. His hands, which he doesn’t even seem to be aware have moved to stroke the insides of my thighs. His eyes are locked on mine.

  “Let me tell you something, buddy: If we’re going to have to try harder, great! Bring it on.” I shift backwards, press my pussy against him. He’s so hard it takes my breath away. “If you think for one second that having to try over, and over, and over again”—I bump his cock every time I say the word “over,” and feel myself start to throb again—“is going to be a problem for me, then you never knew me very well.”

  “Fucking was never the problem,” he mutters. His hands move to my hips and pull down, pressing the length of his cock against me. My nipples stand up in painful points, and I see him noticing how they push against my shirt.

  “No, it never was,” I say. “And it’s never going to be.”

  I flex my thighs, putting a couple of inches of distance between us, and reach down with both hands. One of them pushes his pants down; the other wraps around his cock.

  “But neither is anything else,” I say. “Your noble sacrifice is noted, and dismissed. I don’t need to be coddled, I don’t care about the stupid tests, and I will choose for myself who and what matters.” I meet his eyes with my own. “You’re what matters. We’re what matters. Everything else will fall in line behind that, you hear me?”

  He nods.

  I lift up, take him in, sink down.

  His moan vibrates through my whole body, and fills up my soul. This man may be an idiot, but he’s my idiot. He may have hurt me, but it was because he loved me more than himself.

  So I ride him, slowly, teasingly. I let him see it in my face, hear it in my breathless cries: he’s my man. The only man I will ever want. The only man I will ever need.

  And when he spills himself inside me, it doesn’t feel like settling. It doesn’t feel like anything is missing.

  I collapse on his chest and listen to his heart galloping inside his ribcage. His fingers feather up and down my spine, slowly, so softly I can barely feel it through the fabric of my shirt.

  “Well,” he says. “I guess we’re back together.”

  “I guess so,” I say.

  Caleb was right.

  IVF was expensive and extremely unromantic. We promised each other that if this first try didn’t take, we would adopt instead. The “your eyes, my nose” thing does in fact have an upper price limit, and we nearly hit it.

  But the first try did take. And with a vengeance. I’m standing here in our kitchen just before dawn, tired and sore and very thoroughly pregnant.

  I rest my hands on my belly, which is swollen beyond what I would have thought a human body could bear. There are two of them in there—one boy and one girl, so we don’t have to try again if we don’t want to.

  And I honestly do think we’re done. I can’t wait to be a mom, but being pregnant is the absolute pits. I am not one of those dewy, “glowing” pregnant women; I’ve been bloated and cranky and couldn’t keep anything but ginger ale down for the first four months straight. And they’re later than expected; I’m at a little over 37 weeks, when most twins tend to come earlier than that. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for eight hundred years.

  So, yeah, I think we’re done. One boy, one girl—that ought to be plenty. That’s a family.

  Strong arms come in low and wrap around me from behind as the last member of the family envelops me in a hug. His forearms under my belly take the weight of the babies off my back, and I sigh and lean back against him, tilting my head to accept the tender kiss he places on my temple.

  “You’re up early,” I say.

  “You didn’t sleep well.”

  “And probably neither did you.” I sigh. “I felt restless and crampy all night. I couldn’t get comfortable. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he says. “I think we’ll both be getting far less sleep than we’re used to for a bit.”

  When he says stuff like that, I just melt. That casual assumption that we’re in it together, that I won’t be the only one rocking babies to sleep in the wee hours, that I have a partner by my side and a man who will always help and support me … well, I can’t say how other women should feel, but I think it’s the sexiest thing in the universe, frankly.

  I open my mouth to tell him so—I make a point of telling him how I feel now, of not holding back. But before I get any words out, a huge cramp hits me, like my insides are a giant rubber band and someone just pulled it and let it snap back.

  “Owwww,” I breathe. “What the hell—“

  And then there’s a rush of something between my legs, and I’m standing in a puddle. My heart speeds up until I think it will burst, and I turn around and look up into Caleb’s eyes, wondering if he feels as suddenly panicky as I do.

  But he obviously doesn’t. His eyes are calm on mine, his hands don’t shake as he lays them on my belly, which is rock-hard and doesn’t yield to his gentle pressure.

  “Oh, my God,” I say, to him, to the room, to no one in particular. “Holy shit. Your shoes.”

  He shrugs, because shoes don’t matter. What am I even talking about? Pregnancy brain is the worst.

  “I guess we’re going to have some babies,” he says, and then he sweeps me—sweeps us—up into his arms and heads for the door.

  * * *

  Considering the absolu
te and seemingly unending misery of my pregnancy, I get off easy when it comes to giving birth to not one, but two babies. They’ve both been facing in the right direction for the last couple of weeks, so our plan to have them without a C goes off with very little trouble. I get the epidural the instant I arrive at the hospital, and Caleb coaches me through contractions and pushing, and the whole ordeal takes just under six hours.

  And then there’s a blur of activity, APGAR scores called out, and two tiny warm bodies, one in a pink cap and one in blue, are laid on my chest.

  A nurse covers us with a blanket and says, “Just let them rest there for a few minutes; they need their mama.”

  She moves away, and I look up at Caleb, who’s standing beside the bed, holding my hand and staring down at our babies with tears in his eyes.

  “Look what you did,” he says. “Look at this. Oh, my God, Jen, look what you gave me.”

  A sob swells in my chest and my eyes, too, fill with tears. I tug at his hand, forcing him to bend over, and lift my face to his. He kisses me, but his eyes never leave our babies.

  And that’s just fine with me.

  “What I gave you?” I shake my head and kiss him again, softly, then take his hand, still in mine, and lay it on our daughter’s back. “What we gave each other, Caleb. What we made together.”

  He nods, and rubs our baby girl’s back—so, so gently. “Stella,” he says softly. “Stella Renee.” His hand moves to touch our son—again, so gently. “Jameson Bradley.”

  Names after my parents, and his. Names that speak to our history, to the lives we’ve tangled together.

  He bends over; he kisses each of our babies on their tiny, cap-covered heads. “Welcome to this world,” he says softly. “Welcome to this family.” His eyes flick up to meet mine. “Our family.”

  “Meet your dad, kids.” I close my eyes and lean my head back on the pillow. “The most amazing man I know.”

  * * *

  Acknowledgments