by L. D. Davis
“She didn’t think that she’d ever date a guy with kids, and yet she’s practically a stepmom to Natalie and Alex,” Em said, apparently not letting it go. “Who knows how she’ll feel a year from now?”
“They haven’t been together that long,” Tabitha reminded her.
“But they were in love a long time ago. The time Luke and I spent apart was much shorter than yours.” She looked from Tabitha to Donya. “But if any of our histories are indicative of what’s to come for Mayson…” She shrugged smugly.
“Emmy, stop it,” I said, frustrated. “I’m not having any babies, so you may as well accept it.”
“Never say never,” she scolded.
“I can say never,” I snapped, slamming my knife down on the cutting board. “Why can’t you get it through your thick skull that I’m not like you? I don’t have to push a few babies out of my cunt to feel validated. You need to accept my decision and move on.”
Emmy stared at me wide eyed. “Okay, fine.” She held her hands up to placate me. “I’m just saying that you might change your mind later. Nothing is carved in stone.”
My tone was bitter and angry. “It is carved in stone. I am sterile. I had tubal ligation when I was twenty-seven. I won’t be having any damn children, Emmy. So, now you can erase the idea entirely from your mind.”
Three sets of eyes stared at me in shock. I wished that I could go back several seconds and take my words back, but it was too late. They were out there.
I turned away from them and resumed hacking at the tomato.
“Why?” Tabitha asked in a small voice. “Were you sick? Was something wrong with your reproductive system?”
“Wow,” Emmy said. “When you said you didn’t want kids, you weren’t playing.”
“No, I wasn’t playing,” I said stiffly, answering Emmy, but avoiding Tabitha’s questions.
Emmy sounded genuinely baffled when she asked, “Why would you choose to do something so permanent at such a young age?”
I put the knife down again. Sighing, I turned around to face her. She looked horrified and confused.
It’s like a sick game of Hide-and-Seek, Grant had said. You want to hide, and maybe you don’t want to be found right away, but eventually, you want someone to find you. You want them to want to find you.
Emmy wanted to find me. Judging by the similar expressions on Donya’s and Tabitha’s faces, they wanted to find me, too. They knew that something was wrong, but they couldn’t even begin to guess at it.
It was time for me to come out of hiding, to push through the walls of my cocoon a little bit more.
“You’ll recall my move to North Carolina eleven years ago.”
Tabitha and Emmy nodded, but Donya shrugged helplessly. She hadn’t really been around back then, but I didn’t feel the need to get into that aspect of the story. I went on, knowing that one of the other girls would fill her in later.
“The last time I got high before I went into recovery, I got high with the wrong group of guys,” I said, my voice whisper soft. “While I was in and out of consciousness, they r-r-raped me. All of them, or, at least, most of them. I don’t really know.”
Closing my eyes to avoid looking at their reactions, I said, “I felt so dirty, so polluted and tainted. It’s been years and I still don’t feel clean. I could not even imagine having a child growing inside my defiled body. I know that it sounds insane, but…I felt like anything that grew inside me would be tainted, too. I could not risk getting pregnant and subjecting an innocent life to this…filth inside me.”
I opened my eyes and met each of their teary and stunned gazes. “I don’t regret what I did. I don’t ever want to have a life inside me. I don’t regret it.”
Emmy opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. Tears raced down her cheeks and dripped onto the lettuce still in her hands.
“Mayson,” Tabitha started, her voice broken.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said hastily. “It’s not something I want to dissect and discuss and answer your fucking questions. It happened. It changed my life. It fucking sucks, but I can’t change it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m sorry.” Emmy sniffed.
I couldn’t take the hardness out of my voice. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to wash your tears off the lettuce and help me make the damn salad.”
As if it were a live explosive, Emmy carefully put the head of lettuce down on the counter. Without another glance or word, she walked out of the kitchen. I heard her go up the stairs and a door close a moment later.
Tabitha averted her eyes when I looked at her, but Donya didn’t. She stared at me unflinchingly for a moment before her gaze suddenly moved beyond me. Both her eyes and her mouth opened and I heard her suck in a quick breath. My brow creased with confusion before I turned around to see what she was looking at.
It wasn’t a what. It was a who.
Grant stood on the other side of the sliding screen door, staring at me as if I had just kicked him in the face.
He slid the door open without taking his eyes off me and stepped inside. He didn’t even look away from me when he spoke to Donya and Tabitha in a low, tight voice.
“Can you ladies do me a favor and keep an eye on Alex and Natalie? Mayson and I are going for a drive.”
“Sure,” Tabitha hurriedly agreed.
“Of course,” Donya said at the same time.
He finally looked away from me when he walked out of the kitchen. I didn’t immediately follow him, but glanced over at my ogling cousins.
“You didn’t tell him?” Donya mouthed incredulously.
I shook my head once before catching up with Grant on the front porch.
My stomach was in knots during our silent, short drive to Avon by the Sea. He didn’t even look at me until we pulled into a parking space and he turned the engine off. I stared ahead at the boardwalk and the sand and water beyond that, unable to meet his eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he finally asked after a couple of minutes.
I knew I should have told him about my decision not to have children, but I felt defensive and angry. It was my body! My life! And he hadn’t been there for me.
“There just didn’t seem to be a good time to mention it.”
His anger was instantaneous.
“We’ve been together for two months, Mayson! There have been plenty of opportunities to ‘mention’ that you had your tubes tied.”
“Technically, they were burned, which seems way more effective than tying.”
Grant firmly grasped my chin and turned my head, forcing me to look at him. I tried to pull away, but he refused to let go.
“Don’t do that. Don’t do that sarcasm shit. Not with me. Not now.”
“Let me know when it will be a good time for my sarcasm shit.” I succeeded in pushing his hand off my face and snapped at him. “What do you want from me, Grant? I told you I didn’t want to have children. Why should I have to even say anything more than that? Why didn’t you just believe me when I said it?”
“Why couldn’t you tell me then?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me then that you had surgery, that you had made a decision that was so final?”
I threw my hands up in frustration. “What other kind of decision is there? Now you’re castigating me for not being irresolute in my decisions? All of this time I thought that sticking to my resolutions was an admirable quality. Now that I know that you want me to be all wishy-washy, I’ll try to be an indecisive moron from here on out.”
His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, and his jaw tightened. “When you said that you didn’t want to have children—”
“You should have believed me!” I shouted, cutting him off. “I meant what I said and you should have believed me.”
Most of his anger seemed to ebb as he took a deep breath and paused long enough to speak more evenly.
“I did believe you, but believing that you didn’t want children and knowing that
you can’t have them are two different things. I’m not mad that you had the surgery. I’m mad because you didn’t tell me about it. You know how I feel about you, Mayson. You have to know that despite what you said about kids that I’d…I’d thought about it.”
That made my eyebrows rise. “You’d thought about what?”
He hesitated.
“What?” I demanded, even though I knew. Of course I knew.
His voice was so soft, so sweet, and so sad. “I’ve thought about what it would be like to have a baby with you. Yeah, I believed you, but I also thought about the possibilities. What if you changed your mind? What if it just…happened?”
He sighed, laced his fingers with mine, and rested our hands on my lap.
“We never discussed birth control because it didn’t seem like we were going to be having sex anytime soon,” he continued. “But then the other day happened. I wondered if you were on anything, and thought that I shouldn’t have finished inside you. I would have never tried to sabotage any form of birth control, but after the other day, I started to secretly hope that whatever you were on failed, or that you weren’t on anything at all.”
I swallowed hard and tried to keep my voice from quavering when I talked. “Well. Now you know.”
He gazed at me for a minute. “You can’t get pregnant the usual way, but there are other ways. You can still have a baby if you really wanted one. I heard what you said, that you feel tainted and polluted. But would you feel that way with my baby inside of you? With our baby?”
My eyes stung with impending tears as I stared back at Grant. Grant, who looked so hopeful.
“Yes,” I finally answered, my voice strained. “It’s not that you aren’t good enough, because you’re too good for me—you and your sperm.” I gave him a short-lived, sad smile. “But I would still feel the same, like my body isn’t a worthy vessel for a baby. And it’s not only that, Grant. I don’t want a baby. Maybe a long time ago I did, but I haven’t for a long time. I am terrified that I’ll do something to hurt it. What if I do get pregnant and slip up and start doing drugs before it’s born? What if I end up with postpartum depression and feel my only way out is to shoot junk into my veins? I’ve seen addicts have babies, and it’s rarely a good thing.”
I looked away from his fallen face at our interlaced hands. He hadn’t let me go yet, and it gave me some hope that he wouldn’t let me go entirely.
“All of that aside,” I continued. “Having a baby is a gift and a privilege and responsibility I don’t want or deserve. I love Alex and Nat, and I would love a baby if we had one, but I don’t want one, Grant. I can’t give you that. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” I swallowed hard again as I tried unsuccessfully to blink back my tears. “I hope you find someone who can give you everything you want.”
Before the first teardrop could slide down my cheek, he was touching my face again. His touch was more gentle than before as he made me face him.
“I don’t want someone else. I want you. You are already everything I want.”
I tried to shake my head. “But you want a baby.”
“I didn’t say I wanted a baby. I said that I wondered about it and thought about it. Even though you don’t want one, you can’t tell me that you haven’t thought about it, or imagined what it would be like.”
He raised his eyebrows as if daring me to lie. I didn’t.
“Yes. I’ve thought about it.”
His thumb caressed my cheek. The touch was sweet and soft, like his voice. “Maybe I overreacted. That’s not the way I wanted to find out. Not wanting to have a child is an important thing to tell me, but more than that, I would have wanted to know why. I would have wanted to know that you feel that way about yourself.”
“So you could fix me?” I didn’t mean to sound bitter, but that’s the way it came out.
“No, baby. You don’t need me to fix you. Some of the most beautiful and amazing things in the world are broken.”
He smiled. It was a real smile, without the sadness that had been with him earlier.
“I want to be there for you, Mayson. Always. I don’t want to fix you, but I want to prove to you that you are not tainted. You are not polluted. Not for me, and not so you’ll want to have a baby. I want to prove it for you.”
“You have a very tough road ahead,” I whispered.
“I can handle it. I’ve got stamina.” He winked at me and I laughed.
“You sure do.”
I leaned over and kissed him briefly on the lips.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He dragged a finger down my neck. It made me shiver even though it was beginning to feel warm in the car. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to kiss me.”
He wiped away the last few stray tears. Then we met halfway, and he kissed me into a stupor. I could barely remember my own name as my lips tingled during the drive back to the house.
Mandy. Melissa. Mayson. Yes, Mayson.
I was Mayson. He was Grant. He was mine and I was his.
The kids ate first, as had been the norm during the vacation. It was dusk by the time the adults were seated around the table outside.
The last thing that I wanted was to add another rope of tension to the group, but it was there. Emmy, Donya, Tabitha, and I tried to carry on as if I hadn’t just dropped a bomb on them a couple hours earlier, but I knew by the covert looks their men gave us and each other that they knew that something had gone down. It didn’t help that Emmy’s eyes were still glossy with unshed tears and Tabitha’s were red-rimmed and swollen. Donya was made of harder stuff and had the ability to hide behind her many supermodel faces.
“Are you okay?” Grant whispered in my ear as he rubbed my back. He was the only guy who knew what had happened, having witnessed it firsthand.
I smiled though it was a sad smile. “I’m not sure.”
He kissed the side of my head. “Just say the word, and I’ll sweep you out of here if that’s what you want.”
“And you said you weren’t my hero,” I teased.
“I am Repo Man,” he said, grinning. “My cape and tights are at the cleaners right now.”
“I gotta see you in those tights.”
He put his lips to my ear and whispered, “I gotta see you out of this dress later.”
Warmth spread over me and I couldn’t stop the stupid, heated smile from forming on my face. When I looked up, I met Emmy’s eyes. She’d been watching us with a melancholy smile. I looked away from her and discovered that there were a lot of eyes glancing at us, most of them with amusement.
I used to complain about their public displays of affection. Luke and Emmy flirted shamelessly with each other all the time. They didn’t care who was watching or listening.
Leo may as well had dragged Tabitha around by her hair caveman style. With every look, every touch, every embrace, and every kiss, he possessed her, owned her. She loved it, seemed unable to get enough of it.
Donya and Emmet touched—a lot. It was as if they were afraid not to touch. They weren’t obscene like the other two couples; their touches were saccharine sweet. A brief touch on her wrist, her fingers swiping his hair off his forehead, a hand on her waist. They didn’t just stand or sit side by side, some part of them had to touch.
Now I was the PDA jerk. I didn’t pull away when Grant touched me or went to kiss me. I touched him and kissed him just as much. I sometimes forgot that there were other people around us. No matter how crazy it got in the house, there were times when it was only him and me, in a bubble, untouched and unseen by the rest of the world. Is that what it was like for my cousins? In those moments, no one else existed but their significant others?
Even Sam and Fred were often caught in an embrace, and when my uncle kissed his wife, it was with such sweetness and love that it made me feel like I was intruding to see it.
“So, do you want to shake on it, man?” Luke asked Grant.
I had been lost in my thoughts and was only vaguely aware that
they were talking about fantasy football.
“Yeah, I’m in,” Grant answered.
All the men except for Fred stood up to shake on some agreement and beat their chests and display their manliness or whatever. Without thinking about it, I found my eyes darting from man to man, or rather, from man package to man package. When I realized what I had been doing, I almost smacked myself in the head. I dared a glance around the table to see if I had been caught, but to my surprise, I caught each of the other women’s eyes darting around from package to package, too, even my dear old Aunt Sam.
It seemed that at once, we all realized what we had been doing as we glanced at each other with big eyes.
“Oh my god,” Tabitha whispered on my left.
“This is all your fault,” Emmy said, pointing at her mother, but she was trying not to laugh.
Suddenly, we were all trying not to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Leo asked when he sat back down.
The innocent question undid us. Together, as the men watched, we let ourselves laugh. The tension broke and dissipated.
After dinner, Emmy, Tabitha, Donya, and I left for a previously planned night on the beach, leaving Em’s parents and our men to watch over the kids. As we spread a large blanket out over the sand and broke out a bottle of champagne, we guffawed over what had happened at dinner.
“That Pesciano Pecker is impressive,” I said to Tabitha.
“I’m very proud of it,” she said loftily.
“You should be.” Emmy had murmured so low, I almost missed it.
Tabitha surely didn’t miss it. She gave Emmy a light, playful shove, making her laugh as she popped the cork on the bottle.
“The only one I didn’t look at was Emmet’s, because eww,” Emmy said, before tipping the champagne to her lips.
“I didn’t look at Emmet’s, either.” Tabitha shuddered. She accepted the bottle from Emmy.
I shrugged. “I totally looked.”
“That’s disgusting!” Emmy cried, laughing along with the other girls.
“He’s your cousin,” Donya pointed out, taking the bottle from Tabitha.
“Oh, you didn’t know that Emmet is totally incest worthy in Mayson’s eyes?” Tabitha asked.
