“What are you doing?”
With a heavy amount of assuredness, he says, “I don’t want to use one tonight.”
I don’t respond. He doesn’t want to use a condom? Am I reading his intent wrong?
Graham walks back to the bed and lowers himself on top of me again. He kisses me, then pulls back. “I think about it sometimes. About you getting pregnant.”
“You do?” I was not expecting that. I hesitate a moment before saying, “Just because you think about it doesn’t mean you’re ready for it.”
“But I am. When I think about it, I get excited.” He rolls onto his side and puts his hand on my stomach. “I don’t think you should get back on the pill.”
I grip the top of his hand, shocked at how much I want to kiss him and laugh and take him inside me. But as sure as I am about having children, I don’t want to make that choice unless he’s just as certain as I am. “Are you positive?”
The thought of us becoming parents fills me with an overwhelming amount of love for him. So much, I feel a tear fall down my cheek.
Graham sees the tear and he smiles as he brushes it away with his thumb. “I love that you love me so much, it sometimes makes you cry. And I love that the idea of us having a baby makes you cry. I love how full of love you are, Quinn.”
He kisses me. I don’t think I tell him enough what a great kisser he is. He’s the best I’ve ever had. I don’t know what makes his kisses different from the men I’ve kissed in the past, but it’s so much better. Sometimes I’m scared he’ll get tired of kissing me someday because of how much I kiss him. I just can’t be near him without tasting him. “You’re a really good kisser,” I whisper.
Graham laughs. “Only because it’s you I’m kissing.”
We kiss even more than we usually do when we make love. And I know we’ve made love a hundred times before tonight. Maybe even a thousand times. But this time feels different. It’s the first time we don’t have some kind of barrier preventing us from creating a new life together. It’s like we’re making love with a purpose.
Graham finishes inside of me and it’s the most incredible feeling, knowing that our love for each other might be creating something even bigger than our love for each other. I don’t know how that can even be possible. How can I possibly love anyone as much or even more than I love Graham?
It’s been such a perfect day.
I’ve experienced a lot of perfect moments, but entire perfect days are hard to come by. You need the perfect weather, the perfect company, the perfect food, the perfect itinerary, the perfect mood.
I wonder if things will always be this perfect. Now that we’ve decided to start a family, part of me wonders if there’s a level of perfection that we haven’t even reached yet. What will things be like next year when we’re possibly parents? Or five years from now? Ten? Sometimes I wish I had a crystal ball that could actually see into the future. I’d want to know everything.
I’m tracing my fingers in an invisible pattern over his chest when I look up at him. “Where do you think we’ll be ten years from now?”
Graham smiles. He loves talking about the future. “Hopefully we’ll have our own house in ten years,” he says. “Not too big, not too small. But the yard will be huge and we’ll play outside with the kids all the time. We’ll have two—a boy and a girl. And you’ll be pregnant with the third.”
I smile at that thought. He reacts to the smile on my face and he continues to talk.
“You’ll still write, but you’ll work from home and you’ll only work when you feel like it. I’ll own my own accounting firm. You’ll drive a minivan because we’re totally gonna be those parents who take the kids to soccer games and gymnastics.” Graham grins at me. “And we’ll make love all the time. Probably not as often as we do now, but more than all of our friends.”
I press my hand over his heart. “That sounds like the perfect life, Graham.”
Because it does. But any life with Graham sounds perfect.
“Or . . .” he adds. “Maybe nothing will change. Maybe we’ll still live in an apartment. Maybe we’ll be struggling financially because we keep moving from job to job. We might not even be able to have kids, so we won’t have a big yard or even a minivan. We’ll be driving our same, shitty cars ten years from now. Maybe absolutely nothing will change and ten years from now, our lives will be the same as they are now. And all we’ll have is each other.”
Just like after he described the first scenario, a serene smile spreads across my face. “That sounds like the perfect life, too.” And it does. As long as I have Graham, I don’t know that this life could be anything less than what it is now. And right now, it’s wonderful.
I relax against his chest and fall asleep with the most peaceful feeling in my heart.
Chapter Thirty
* * *
Now
“Quinn.”
His voice is raspy against my ear. It’s the first morning in a long time that I’ve been able to wake up with a smile on my face. I open my eyes and Graham looks like a completely different person than the broken man who walked through Ava and Reid’s front door last night. He presses his lips to my cheek and then pulls back, pushing my hair off my face. “What did I miss while you were sleeping?”
I’ve missed those words so much. It’s one of the things I’ve missed the most about us. It means even more to me now, knowing he only stopped asking me because he didn’t want me to hurt. I reach my hand out to his face and brush my thumb across his mouth. “I dreamt about us.”
He kisses the pad of my thumb. “Was it a good dream or a bad dream?”
“It was good,” I say. “It wasn’t a typical weird dream, though. It was more of a memory.”
Graham slips a hand between his head and the pillow. “I want to know every detail.”
I mirror his position, smiling when I begin telling him about the dream. “It was our first anniversary. The night we decided to start a family. I asked you where you thought we’d be ten years from now. Do you remember?”
Graham shakes his head. “Vaguely. Where did I think we’d be?”
“You said we’d have kids and I’d drive a minivan and we’d live in a house with a big yard where we played with our children.” Graham’s smile falters. I brush his frown away with my thumb, wanting his smile back. “It’s strange, because I forgot all about that conversation until I dreamt about it last night. But it didn’t make me sad, Graham. Because then you said we might not have any of that. You said there was a chance that we’d be moving from job to job and that we wouldn’t be able to have kids. And that maybe nothing between us would change after ten years, and all we’d have was each other.”
“I remember that,” he whispers.
“Do you remember what I said to you?”
He shakes his head.
“I said, ‘That sounds like the perfect life, too.’ ”
Graham blows out a breath, like he’s been waiting a lifetime for the words I’m giving him.