She purses her lips, folds her arms over her chest and glares for a while, until she realizes I’m not backing down.
She drags herself toward me and sits at the stool across from me. “What is it you so want to talk to me about?” Her tone is low, weary, like a person resigning to their fate.
It’s the day of reckoning for all the carefree shit we’ve done over the past few months. The kissing, the touching, the nights spent tangled up in bed. Our transgressions are staring us in the face. We’ve been reckless. We thought there would be no consequences. But now our feelings have caught up to us. At least mine have.
I run my palm over my skull. “Are we just gonna keep pretending that I didn’t tell you I want to be with you?”
“Walker…” She tilts her head to the side. “We can’t do this.”
“Why the heck not?” I take her hand. “I want us to be a family.”
Her eyes flutter shut. She purses her lips and shakes her head. “That’s not what we agreed to.”
“I don’t care what we agreed to. I wasn’t thinking straight when we had that conversation. I wasn’t thinking ahead. To the future. Our future.”
“Don’t make this more complicated than it already is,” she begs. “Please.”
“There’s nothing complicated about it. It’s fucking simple. I want to be your man.” I force her chin up with my finger. I force her to look at me. “And I want ‘us’, our little family. Donor arrangement or not, we did this.” I place a hand on her stomach. “It’s my DNA in those babies. We created this, together. And that feels real to me.”
She throws up her arms and lets her palms slap against her thighs. “You’re oversimplifying everything,” she wails.
“How?!”
“You don’t see it. You’re doing what you always do. You think I’m in trouble, you think I’m in over my head and you’re trying to swoop in to save me. As usual. And I appreciate that.” She gently cups my cheek. “You have the biggest heart and I’m the luckiest gal in the world to have you in my corner. But you can’t be my hero this time, Big Man.”
“What the hell are you saying, Princess?”
“You told me point-blank that you don’t want to be a father, you don’t want children.”
I shrug. “I changed my mind.”
Penny chafes at my response. “Walker, if I wasn’t pregnant with these babies, you wouldn’t even be considering a relationship with me. I don’t want you to do this—the whole family thing—because you feel responsible for me and these children.” A tear forms in the corner of her eye. “You’re trying to save me. Like you always do. But this sacrifice is too big. I can’t ask you to sacrifice your dreams for me. Because you’re going to wake up one morning down the road, feeling like I used this pregnancy to trick you into a relationship, into a life you never wanted. I may not know a lot about relationships but I do know there’s a difference between you being in love with me and you wanting to play savior because you don’t think I can handle this on my own.”
I’ll admit it—I’ve always pushed my way into the middle of her problems and sorted them out for her. She’s right about that. I can see why she might think that this situation is the same. But it isn’t. I want to share my life with her. How am I supposed to convince her of that?
“That’s ridiculous, Penny. I…want…you…” I say the words slowly so they’ll sink into her stubborn head. “Is the concept so damn foreign to you?” Is the idea of someone loving you that farfetched? Did your mom fuck you up so bad that you feel completely unloveable? I feel raw and vulnerable when I speak again. “Or is it that you just can’t see yourself ever being with me?”
Penny’s eyes glisten with tears as she slowly shakes her head. “Oh, Walker. What I feel for you, words can’t even begin to describe. What I feel for you is a big, ferocious, all-consuming feeling. A feeling that has chewed up and spit out my heart every single day for the past twenty years, at least. I won’t pull my kids into that. Yes—you are the man of my dreams but I need to be responsible here. I can’t just jump headfirst into this. We can’t do this, Walker.”
My heart doesn’t know what to do with itself. The woman of my dreams just admitted to her feelings for me. But in the same breath, she refused to give me her heart.
I grate my fingernails over my scalp. “This is bullshit, and you know it…I want to be with you.”
She’s trembling, shaking all over. Her eyes clamp shut. She sucks in a breath. “Look—there’s a whole lot of emotion in the air right now. So, maybe we should hold off on any further big confessions and declarations. Maybe we should just…stop.”
“Come on, Penn. Don’t shut down on me.”
“I don’t want us to jump into something in the heat of the moment and then six months from now we realize that it’s all wrong for us. Not only do we have a lifetime of friendship I’d like very much to preserve, but there are babies involved. Two precious children. I don’t want to fuck them up before they’ve even had a shot at a good life.” Penny slowly rises out of her seat, like she’s scared that I could explode at the slightest movement. “I—I—we need some space,” she says softly. “I think I should move out.”
Penny nods to herself. She doesn’t even give me a say in this. She just scurries off in the direction of the doorway.
I drop my head. Run my thumb and forefinger along my brow. I watch her perfect bare feet as they back out of
