by Maisey Yates
This was his vulnerability. His weakness. The situation they were in, it was the man’s worst nightmare. And she couldn’t make it work with him if she was continually trying to hold her position, fighting him just for the sake of it.
She wanted her freedom. Her life. The chance to make a future for herself the way that she wanted it made. But not at the expense of their child having the best life he or she possibly could.
Creed might irritate her, but he was a good man. She knew it.
He could be the kind of father her own had never been.
Right now, they had the freedom to make whatever future they wanted. Whatever future they thought was best. She wasn’t under the tyranny of her father, and she didn’t have to pass any of her pain, any of her issues, on to her children.
Something her own parents hadn’t managed.
But it all needed to start here. It had to start with this.
She took a breath, and then she sat down at one of the tables. “Okay. Get a notebook.”
“What?”
“Get a notebook. We’re going to write out what we both need. What we both expect. Creed, we are not going to make it through this if we don’t trust each other. I can understand that you want marriage in a legal sense. If you need that, I can give it to you. But, during the pregnancy, that doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s not like we need to live with each other or be in any kind of relationship until the baby is born.”
“You think that, huh?”
“I do,” she said. “I think we need to focus on putting our child first. And we need to build some trust between each other. I would not take your baby from you, Creed. But I understand why you don’t just take my words at face value. And, I’m not going to suffer for it either. I just found my life. I just found my purpose. Everything in my world got turned upside down when my dad... I’ve had to rethink everything. Everything I believe in. Everything I am. I’m not giving everything up to you. Sorry.”
He looked hollow. Almost helpless, and that made her stomach drop into her feet.
“I can’t bend on this,” he said.
She looked at him. And she knew he was telling the truth. His face was drawn and haggard, his tone was tortured.
“I know you can’t. I’m going to bend as much as I can right now so we can find someplace where we can meet.”
He stood, left the room for a moment, then returned with a pen and a notebook. He thrust it into her hand. “All right. Start listing your demands.”
“First of all, if you want to be involved, you need to be involved. It’s really important to me that you’re either hands-on or hands-off with our child. All in, or all out.” She looked at him, her jaw set, her posture determined.
“Why is that?”
“Because I won’t have any of this lukewarm BS. That’s how my dad was. He was there just enough to make us...try to perform for him. To make us try to do the very best we could to please him. But he never gave us anything back. Not really. I’m not going to put my kid through that. I want more for them.”
“I want everything,” he said, his voice rough. “I lost eighteen years with my son. I’m not losing any more time. I’m not losing that ever again.”
“I won’t ask you to. I promise. And that’s why...my next thing. No more sex.”
“Are you out of your damn mind?”
“No. I’m absolutely in my mind. We need to be able to deal with each other, and with this. I need to be able to have you at my house. You need to be able to be around for whatever you want, whenever you feel you need to have time with our child. If we have our own feelings in the way, our own situation, then this isn’t going to work. We have to be able to be in the same room and not fight. And not... Well, you know that other F word that we seem to be so fond of.”
He snorted. “If we had that kind of control, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“But you know as well as I do that getting out of control isn’t going to work. It just wouldn’t. It couldn’t. We have to make this list and stick to it so we can give each other what we need. And I don’t think we can do that if we get...all that emotion involved.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Well, don’t you? Don’t you think it’s too big a risk?”
His face went hard. Neutral. And then finally, “You’re right. And really, it’s all just a little control. Which, I had plenty of until you.”
“Well, that’s flattering. But, I don’t doubt you can find it again.”
“Sure. What else?”
“Holidays?” she asked.
“Together. Obviously. At my family place,” he said.
Always with his family. Was he kidding? But the child was currently a zygote so as pressing matters went, that wasn’t a huge one. “Okay, I think we can actually wait on that.”
“Marriage,” he said. “For the first year.”
“Until the baby is born,” she said. “I’ll give you that. Marriage until the baby is born so you can be sure you have your legal protection. And then we can work out whatever custody agreement you want. We can cohabitate, whatever. But, if the primary concern is custody, and you making sure that you have all your parental rights... I’ll go that far.”
“I can deal with that. For now. Let’s go get a marriage license, then,” Creed said, fully and completely matter-of-factly, as if they’d worked out everything.
“What, right now?”
“Do you have a better time frame?”
“I don’t... I wasn’t exactly thinking of a time frame. But... I’m like six weeks pregnant, Creed. We can chill out.”
“Nope,” he said. “It may have escaped your notice, Wren, but I don’t have any chill.”
“It didn’t escape my notice at all. Nothing about you suggests that you have chill.”
But he was already gathering his things, and he was ushering them both out the door and toward his truck.
“I can’t... We’re just going to go get a marriage license?”
“This isn’t Vegas. We can’t get married the same day. We need to figure out all the specifics.”
She made an exasperated sound and got into the truck behind him. As they drove to town, she was completely and utterly overwhelmed by an out-of-body sensation.
Because surely this wasn’t actually happening to her. She wasn’t really going down to the courthouse to get a marriage license with the man who irritated her more than...
“You don’t even like me,” she said.
“I’m not pretending to like you.”
That shut her up, because it was true.
He wasn’t pretending to like her. He wasn’t pretending that there was anything to this other than a legal practicality.
And that was how she found herself standing in front of a clerk’s desk in the old brick courthouse, filling out forms.
They could get married three days after the license was purchased.
“Then we’ll get married in three days,” Creed said.
She didn’t reply, or say anything while they finished signing off on all the papers. But when they were back outside the courthouse, and walking on the sidewalk down Main Street, heading back to where they had parked the truck, she gave him the evil eye.
“You have to be joking,” she said. “Three days?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Do you want a hamburger?”
“Do I look like I want a hamburger?” Her stomach growled. She frowned furiously at it. She did in fact want a hamburger.
“I think you do,” he said. “Let’s go to Mustard Seed.”
“You don’t know what I want more than I do, Creed Cooper,” she groused, trailing along after him as he abruptly reversed course and headed to the small, unassuming diner that was just off the main drag.
“I believe I’m pretty good at anticipating
what it is you want, Wren Maxfield.”
“In bed,” she muttered as he pushed open the door, holding it for her.
She stepped inside and looked around. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been here. Maybe once. When she was a kid, and she had tried to hang out with some of the local teenagers during the summer. The floor was made of pennies, all glossed over with epoxy, making a coppery, shimmering surface. There was quirky local art everywhere. Little creatures made out of spoons and forks.
The tables were small, and there was a bucket of dry-erase markers on each one, everyone encouraged to create their own removable art on the surfaces.
“Do you come here often?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he answered. “My favorite burger place.”
“Oh.”
A waitress who looked like she was probably the same age Wren had been the last time she had come into this place approached the table. “Chocolate milkshake,” Creed said. “Cheeseburger, extra onions, French fries.”
“I’ll have a Diet Coke. And a cheeseburger. And sweet potato fries.”
Then they sat staring at each other across the small table.
He was her fiancé.
A hysterical bubble of laughter welled up in her throat.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, of all the ways that I imagined getting engaged, it wasn’t being dragged down to a courthouse to sign papers, then being taken out to a diner for a burger.”
“Oh, right. I imagine you figured it would come with something fancy.”
“And a diamond.”
“Do you want a diamond?”
She had a sudden image of him getting down on one knee. Sliding a ring on her finger. And that felt...
That felt too close to real.
And the feeling in her chest was far too tender.
“No,” she said. “A diamond won’t be necessary.”
“So what is it you think this is going to be?”
“In name only,” she responded. “You want legal protection, and while I’m sure we could manage that without a marriage, I can appreciate the fact that this is maybe the simplest route. And... It’s fine with me. We’re having a baby together. I’m not going to act like this is somehow...going to bond us together in a way that it isn’t.” She sighed heavily. “It’s weird, though. Because I certainly never expected to be starting a family without being really married. I never expected I’d do it with you.”
“My brother seems to think it was inevitable.”
“The baby?”
“No. The events leading up to the baby.”
“My sister seemed to think that, as well.”
“What do they know?” he asked, smiling ruefully.
A few moments later their food appeared, and Wren realized how hungry she was. The food was amazing, and she mentally castigated herself for any snobbery that had kept her away from a burger of this caliber.
“Okay, good suggestion,” she said.
She tucked into the burger, and between bites, he looked at her. Hard. “So, you think this is going to be an in-name-only marriage. Does that mean you’ve changed your mind? You think it’s all right if we sleep with other people?”
“Well, we can’t sleep with each other,” she pointed out.
“Right. Because you seem to think that’s unreasonable.”
“I do. It will only cause problems. I don’t know what kind of marriage your parents had. My parents’ marriage is a disaster, and it’s only gotten worse as time has gone on. You know, for obvious reasons. I just... You and I don’t have a great relationship. It’s a weird relationship, but all the fighting... It’s not personal. I think we can be okay. I think we can make something out of this and be good parents. And I have a lot more confidence in our ability to do that if we keep it simple.”
“So, again, you now think it’s all right for us to sleep with other people during this yearlong marriage?”
Discomfort rolled through her, and something like sadness. “Well, I’m not going to be sleeping with anyone.”
“Why not?”
She stared at him. “I’m pregnant. Not exactly going to go out and find a new lover while I’m gestating a human being. I can’t imagine anything less sexy.”
He lifted a shoulder. “A lot of men like that sort of thing. I think you could find someone if you had a mind to.”
“Do you want me to go find someone else to sleep with?”
“Just checking.”
“For your information, I was celibate for eighteen months before we had sex.” She dipped her French fry into the pink sauce so hard it bent. “I’ll be fine for the next nine.”
He leaned back in his chair and fixed her with a bold stare. “I don’t do celibacy.”
She was surprised at the zip of emotion that shot through her. Possession. Anger. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like the idea of him sleeping with other women. She stared at him. And she had to wonder if that reaction was what he was pushing for. If he was pushing to see if she was actually okay with all of this.
“Maybe I will find someone, then,” she said. “How about this, I’m probably not going to be actively looking for a lover, but if one presents himself... Who am I to say no?”
“Hey, you have needs, I’m sure.”
Now he was just making fun of her.
“Do you have to be such a pain in the ass? What is it you want? Why can’t you just say it?”
His gaze went sharp, intense. And everything inside her...shivered.
She wished she hadn’t asked for honesty, because she was sure she was about to get it. Now she wasn’t entirely certain she wanted it.
“Here’s what I want,” he said. “I want for no man but me to ever touch you again. How about that? But that’s not reasonable, is it? Because this is just a temporary marriage and you want it to be in name only. And we need to have a relationship for the sake of our child, not based on F words that involve nudity—your words, not mine.”
“Oh,” she said.
She was equally surprised by how satisfying this was, that he was showing he was possessive. It went right along with the possession she had felt a moment before.
This was all very weird.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“Well, what do you want me to say?” she asked. “You’re right, it is unreasonable.”
“And you’re totally fine with other women touching me while we live together? While we have a marriage license?”
“No.” She bit into her French fry fiercely and chewed it with much more force than was necessary. “I hate the idea about as much as I hate you. Which is a lot.”
“What are we going to do about that? Because it seems to me that it’s going to be pretty difficult for the two of us to find neutral ground. We’re never neutral. You want to prevent hard feelings by us not sleeping together, but we’ve got hard feelings already. If there’s another lover in play neither of us are going to be nice, and you know it.”
“We can’t make it worse,” she said, feeling desperate and a little bleak. “And we would. We could. It seems obvious to me. I mean, look at us now, after just a couple of... I don’t know. Just after a few times. It’s already an issue. We can’t... We can’t do that to our child.”
“We could,” he said, his tone horrendously pragmatic. She wanted to punch him. “Plenty of people do.”
“I...”
“I know,” he said. Something in his gaze shifted. “This is my only chance to do it right. I didn’t intend to ever have the opportunity to do it again.”
“I can’t imagine,” she said, her heart squeezing. “I can’t really explain how it felt to find out I was pregnant. Because I was terrified. And it wasn’t like I had completely positive emotions. I didn’t. But I feel conviction. I know having this baby i
s what I want.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know. When she told me she was pregnant I was terrified, too. I was sixteen. I wasn’t ready to be a father. But I knew what I would do. I knew I’d be there for her. That I’d be there for the baby. Even if it felt scary. And then suddenly... The whole story changed. She acted like she didn’t know me. She acted like we never slept together. It was losing the opportunity to be a father that made me realize how much I wanted it. But even then, I didn’t really know. I was a kid. There was part of me that was relieved. Relieved that I didn’t have to change my life at all. And damn, there’s a lot of guilt that goes with that.”
She nodded slowly. “I can imagine there is.”
“But I’ve seen him, over the years. So there’s never been an opportunity to really forget what I’m missing, what I don’t have.” His voice went rough. “I can’t get over feeling like a piece of myself got stolen. It’s just out there in the world, walking around. And sometimes I ask myself if it can’t just be enough that he’s happy. Because all the rest of it is selfish, I guess. He’s got a dad. He’s got a family. He’s not missing anything because I’m not in his life.”
“That’s not true,” Wren said. “He doesn’t have you.”
She was treated to a rueful, lopsided smile. “That’s weird that you think not having me is a deficit, Wren.”
“Well, what I mean is... Creed, if I didn’t think that you would be a good father I wouldn’t have bothered to try to include you in our baby’s life.”
“Maybe that’s the thing,” he said. “Maybe she just didn’t think I would be a good father.”
“She was sixteen. I imagine it’s more that she didn’t think. At least, not about anything much deeper than herself.”
“Well, that probably is true.”
“We’ll do this right,” Wren said.
He nodded. “So what do we do about the two of us?”
“We have nine months to figure it out. To figure out how we navigate sharing...a life. Because that’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be complicated, and we don’t need added complications. I’ll tell you what... No relationships for either of us. For nine months.”
