She’d been forced to move on. And was only these last months realizing that a mother never let go. Or, at least, she hadn’t.
And couldn’t. Not completely. She’d always love the baby she’d never known. Always wonder if he was okay...happy...loved. If he knew he was adopted...
“And you started a business whose emphasis is on open fertility donations, focusing not only on the parents’ rights, but on the rights of those who contribute,” Jamie said.
She shrugged. Life taught you lessons and if you wanted to be happy, you used them for good.
“But you know his name. Ryder.”
Shaking her head, she stopped when the movement affected Jamie’s hand on his baby. “That’s just what I called him. To myself.” She didn’t like how pathetic that made her sound. She wasn’t pathetic at all. She was a strong woman with a great life that she loved.
“So...” He moved his hand and she stiffened, expecting him to take away his warmth, and relaxed when he settled his palm on the left side of her stomach. Then his fingers moved slightly, adding a little pressure, as though playing with his son, and a fissure passed through her. Lighting up her body. “What happened to the father?”
She should have expected the question. Hadn’t. Nathan wasn’t part of a baby discussion. Wasn’t a detail she’d ever have shared with clients in her office.
Weighing the advisability of staying in the SUV with Jamie or going in the house, she searched for words.
“Chris?”
She turned automatically to look at him. Then realized maybe she shouldn’t have done so.
“You’re sacrificing so much for me, changing my entire world. Please let me give back.”
Sirens went off inside her. They didn’t come with particular words. Just clear warning. “You’re giving me far more than most surrogates get,” she said. This was a business deal.
She’d lost sight of the goal. That wasn’t good. No way that was good.
“I think you know I’m not talking about money. But what do I get to give for the maternal gift you’re bestowing upon my baby?”
She didn’t love his baby.
He hadn’t said love.
“I care about you, Chris. It’s ridiculous for us to keep pretending that’s not the case. I get that there are boundaries we can’t cross, but let me at least be your friend. Accept my gift of caring as I’m accepting yours.”
She had friends. A lot of them.
None that had ever called her Chris. Not more than once. She always corrected them. Always. She was Christine. All grown-up.
A grown-up could tell a little story from the past.
“His name was Nathan. I met him my senior year. He was a foster kid, also a senior, but new to Marie Cove and the high school so you wouldn’t have known him.”
Jamie and Emily had gone to USC and hadn’t even been in Marie Cove during the year and a half she’d known Nathan and then spent birthing Ryder.
“Nathan was responsible, grounded. More like me than any of the other kids. He knew life’s realities and thought of others. Life wasn’t just all about him. He wanted to join the military and loved talking to Gramps about Gramps’s time in the service. He wanted to spend time with me here, at the house, with my grandparents, and jumped right in and did things for them when he saw a need.” Had she reinvented the guy over the years? Romanticized him?
She’d certainly replayed those months over and over and over again. Far too many times.
“He told me repeatedly that it was so great to be part of a real family. When I got pregnant a few months before graduation, I was scared, of course, upset with us for not being more careful, but I was also kind of excited. I figured life was going to be different than I’d thought, but still be great for all of us. Until he balked. He didn’t want a baby. Didn’t want me to have it. Didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He’d been planning to see the world. Was just biding his time until he turned eighteen and could get out of Marie Cove and start living. His whole plan to join the military was so that he could travel to faraway places. He turned eighteen a couple of weeks before the end of the school year and left town the day after graduation without even saying goodbye.”
There. She’d given Jamie what he wanted.
His hand moved. Or the baby did. And the next thing she knew, she was sobbing. Big, gross, childish sobs all over the man who’d somehow found a way past the thirteen years’ worth of thickening walls protecting her heart.
Chapter Nineteen
Sliding his hand from Chris’s belly to her back happened naturally. Jamie didn’t consider options or consequences. The second she broke, he had her, pulling her to him, cradling her head against his shoulder. He was no psychiatrist or trained counselor, but he’d seen this one coming.
There was nothing to say, no words that were going to help. He could only sit with her. Share her pain as best he could.
He’d known his own kind of grief. Sometimes being with another while the onslaught raged was just better than being alone.
Time passed; he wasn’t counting it.
The neighborhood around them was quiet, unaware of the storm inside their cocoon of darkness. At one point as she sniffled, he leaned over enough to grab some napkins out of the glove box, handed them to her and then wrapped his arm right back around her. Shielding her from the outside world just long enough for her to purge some of the pain trapped inside her.
And feeling some of that pain. At first, when his throat tightened, he didn’t get what was happening. But as his gaze on the street outside started to glisten, he recognized the sorrow gathering up inside him. Not for him. Not for Emily or their losses. But for Chris.
All for her.
“I’m so sorry.” She didn’t pull away as her sobs eased. Just lay against him for the moment. He wanted to be her support for as long as she needed him.
“Don’t be. Please, don’t ever look back on this moment with remorse,” he told her softly.
She turned her head to look up at him, her eyes raised in question, and he lifted his thumb to the tears on her cheeks, wiping them away as though he could somehow take away the pain that had caused them.
He couldn’t return her to thirteen years in the past. Couldn’t reverse choices or return her son to her.
She continued to hold his gaze, letting him see the woman behind the mask, while he gently brushed her skin. She was so ungodly beautiful he ached with it.
Drawing his thumb down the trail of her tears, he ended up at the corner of her mouth. Gently moving from her mouth, over an inch and down, to return and repeat the gesture.
There was no motive anymore. No forethought. Just a need to be there, connected to her. Her lips opened when he brought his thumb back to them, only inches away from his own, and he lowered his head.
The kiss was instinctive. A way to bring them closer still, to join their pain, their lives. He didn’t ask what he was doing, he just did it. And when her lips opened farther, moving against his, he deepened the touch, opening his mouth fully, finding her tongue with his, melding them. He wasn’t going anywhere with any of it. Just living in the moment that was there.
Doing what felt natural. Right.
His arms pulled her closer, cradled her neck, as he broke contact only to deepen it more, to kiss her in a way he didn’t know, didn’t recognize. Fire burned through him, need so hot it erupted, obliterating any thought he might have had. He had to take them further, go with her into an unknown. His erection straining against his pants, he moved, straining toward her pelvis, her hip. He didn’t know until she pressed forward, joining their intimate parts through their clothes, how badly he’d needed his penis to find welcome against her.
“No!” With an emotion-filled cry, she pulled away from him. Her eyes glinted with tears in the streetlight as she wiped her mouth. “No,” she said, more calmly.
>
Christine had just entered the vehicle. He didn’t have to ask or wonder—he knew.
And instantly respected her right to be there.
Feeling blindsided, like a deer in headlights, he tried to make sense of what had just happened. When what he’d just been denied had him in such a stronghold he could barely form coherent thought.
“This is wrong.”
He didn’t deny the point. Couldn’t. He had no frame of reference for what he’d just experienced. It didn’t feel wrong. But it made no sense, and in his world if it didn’t make sense, there was something wrong.
But...
“Caring about someone isn’t wrong,” he said. “Chris” almost slipped out of his mouth. He refused “Christine.” “Being present when someone is hurting is one of the purest forms of expressing humanity.”
Where in hell were the words coming from? Certainly no math equation.
Her nod was the first thing that had made any sense to him since he’d been brushing a tear off a cheek.
“The kiss,” she said. “It’s wrong and it can’t happen again. If you even try, I’ll have to enforce the clause in our contract that states that I can, with cause, refuse to see you, which would deny you access to your son until his birth.”
He heard the words, saw her hand reach for the door.
“It won’t happen again.” He wasn’t going to lose her. Or these months with his son.
She nodded. Pulled up on the door handle.
“But, just for the record, it wasn’t all me.”
His parting shot was cheap.
But it was also the truth.
* * *
The consequences of sexual passion had almost ruined her life once. Almost killed her, if she were honest and considered the darkest hours just after she’d given birth to Ryder. They’d given her something to help her sleep and for a moment there, as she’d been drifting off, she hadn’t wanted to wake up.
Falling for the notion that she had a good partner who would hold her when she had a weak moment had been the catalyst that led her to having sex with Nathan. They’d only done it once. It hadn’t been planned. She’d been crying because her grandfather had had a dizzy spell and had fallen that day. She’d seen it happen, been unable to help him.
The doctor had said he’d be fine. They’d only kept him in the hospital overnight as a precaution. Gram, of course, had insisted on staying with him. As was right.
And Christine had been home alone, reliving the moment. Coming face-to-face with the proof that the source of her strength was getting weaker.
That Gramps wouldn’t be around forever.
When Nathan called and she told him what happened, he’d come right over. Had held her as she’d cried...
She’d thought he was the real thing. Her soul mate. The man she’d been meant to find. The “Gramps” to her “Gram.”
Then she’d grown up.
That first night after Jamie had kissed her, she’d taken a hot bath and had gone to bed. Determined to be kind to herself, and others. To get up in the morning and go to work. To help others have children to feed.
She didn’t sleep all that well.
By noon the next day, she couldn’t sit still and pushed Jamie’s speed dial on her cell phone. If work, helping others, wasn’t sufficient, she’d done something wrong.
She knew she had.
“I’m so glad you called,” he said, picking up on the first ring. She’d waited until his lunch break from class. It would have been wrong to do otherwise. She knew his schedule. “I apologize profusely, Christine. I can guarantee you it won’t happen again.”
It sounded as though he’d rehearsed the words. Or listened to them repeating in his brain too many times for too many hours.
“Christine.” Thank God he’d reverted.
And to the sadness within her at the loss of his “Chris,” she told herself to grow a pair.
“I’m calling to apologize for my overreaction last night,” she said, hearing the stiffness in her voice and finding that a good thing. “I realize I am as much or more to blame as you were and that it was wrong and weak of me to threaten you with the ‘cause’ clause.”
Silence hung on the line and she took advantage of it. “That said, there cannot be a repeat of last night. Not any of it. We have an emotional project going on here. It was bound to bring forth intense feelings in both of us. But we’re aware now. We’re adults. And I have complete faith that we can both handle this.”
He answered immediately. “I agree. I’m embarrassed, ashamed, and I do apologize. You were having a low moment and I pushed my way in to a space in which I didn’t belong. It won’t happen again.”
His tone, the distance and sincerity, spoke volumes. Grateful that the call had gone better than she’d imagined it could, she hung up.
And started to cry.
* * *
“I wanted to have sex with him.” The words flew out of Christine’s mouth the second Olivia slid into the booth that night at a pub they often frequented. Christine had been facilitating a women’s health class early that evening, with the volunteered help from Cheryl Miller, but had called Olivia to ask if her friend could do a late dinner.
“Did you?” Olivia hadn’t even put her purse on the seat beside her. It hung suspended in air, as her friend looked over at her.
“Want to? Yes.”
“No, did you do it?”
Would Olivia be disappointed in her if she had?
“Of course not.”
“But you wanted to.” Purse on the seat beside her, Olivia leaned forward, her hands folded on the table.
She’d just said she had. What more did the woman want?
Orange and black garlands hung between their booth and the ones behind them on each side. Streamed mellow pop music played softly in the background, and the staff was all wearing spider antler headbands. Christine had helped the staff decorate the clinic for Halloween, but she hadn’t even so much as put up a Christmas tree at home since Gram had died.
“So, why didn’t you?”
“You know why! It would have been completely unethical! Unprofessional!”
When Olivia nodded, she calmed. And added, “And because I’m not going to make the mistake of letting a man comfort me into sex twice.”
She knew, when she said the words, what she was doing. Opening the door to the question she’d known Olivia would ask...
“There was a first time?”
And it all came out. The waiter came to take their order. Olivia asked for more time without interruption. Christine was aware, but didn’t get involved. And as soon as the young man was out of earshot, continued with her story. All of it. Every single detail she could remember.
At some point Olivia ordered club sandwiches for both of them. Christine ate every bite. She had a baby to feed.
And when she was done with her story, she felt physically full, and otherwise, no better. If anything, she felt worse. Weak. Like a victim instead of the survivor she was.
She pulled out her wallet to pay and get the hell out of there. She needed rest.
Olivia’s hand covered hers on the little tray holding their bill. “Whoa, wait, what are you doing?”
“I’m paying,” she said firmly. “I asked for this dinner. I spent the whole time whining. I’m paying.”
“We aren’t done yet.”
Christine frowned. Looked across at her friend. “We can be done.”
Shaking her head, Olivia asked, “Why did you tell me all of this?”
Yeah, it had been a mistake. They’d been friends for years and didn’t spill beans that had long since been consumed. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not like me. All I can do is play the hormone card and get this baby birthed.” She still had a little over four months to go. Tried to chuckle.
An image of Jamie, his face so close it seemed like she could read words in his eyes, sprang to mind.
And she longed for him. Right then. Right there. Longed to be near him. To hear his voice. To kiss him again and not stop.
She was birthing the baby he’d created with another woman. A baby they had created out of deep and abiding love for each other.
What in the hell was the matter with her?
“No, seriously.” Olivia’s tone was soft, soothing. “Why did you tell me this?”
She didn’t know. Wished she hadn’t. She shook her head. Wanted to go. And to stay.
“It wasn’t right, sweetie, what they did to you back then. A teenager, being left to care for aging grandparents. Not only taking on the day-to-day responsibility, but bearing the weight of it in the bigger picture. It might have been what you thought you wanted, but they were adults—they should have known better...”
“It was my home. Is still my home. I love it there.” And truly couldn’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else.
“So maybe someone else should have borne the responsibility of their health so that you could live there and still be a kid.”
Maybe. But like she’d told Jamie, life wasn’t always neat and perfect.
“Taking care of them... I love that about me. I don’t resent one single second of it.”
“You don’t regret not getting to sit in the lunchroom with friends and be privy to the gossip? Or to try out for cheerleading or band? You must have been lonely. Didn’t you ever wish it could have happened differently?”
Of course she had. The loneliness had been acute. Which was why she’d been so ripe for Nathan’s support and companionship. “They couldn’t help getting sick,” she said. “Just like Mom couldn’t help dying in childbirth, trying to give me the sibling I wanted. Or like any of your patients can’t help getting diseases that end up requiring great sacrifice of, and pain to, their parents.”
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