Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 85950 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 430(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85950 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 430(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
She nods in my direction, relief washing over her before turning back around and guiding us into the house.
We settle around the table after Adalynn and I set the plates, napkins, and silverware out.
I know it’s more me than the food that makes the chicken taste dry and flavorless in my mouth. In all the years he’s been grilling, Charlie has never ruined a piece of meat he’s cooked.
After dinner, Adalynn suggests my house for a change, but I decline, reminding her that she has to get up earlier than I do. It makes sense for me to go to her place, so she can go to bed sooner. In all honesty, I need to be able to escape if it gets weird like it did last week.
The day after she got annoyed with my lack of help with picking out a donor, things were right back to normal. I’ve seen her a half dozen times since then, and the subject has never been brought up again.
So I don’t know why I ask her about it nearly the second I walk into her house.
“What?” she asks from the kitchen.
“Did you decide on a donor?”
She frowns at me when I step around the corner.
The girl isn’t a fan of people yelling from two different rooms to have a conversation.
If you respect someone, you face them when you speak, she has said so many times.
“I figured you didn’t want to talk about that.”
I don’t, but I can’t keep going without knowing what her decision is.
“You’re my best friend. Of course I want to know what’s going on in your life.”
She frowns, and it makes me wonder for a flash if the referral of her being my best friend is what’s causing her such a reaction. Madison Kelly, her female best friend from school, recently moved back home, so maybe I’ve been demoted.
I stand a little taller, ready to take the correction even though the thought of it makes part of me die inside.
“I did pick a donor.”
I tilt my head to the side when she doesn’t give further details.
“Who?” I ask after a long moment of silence.
“I picked the grandpa.” Her lips curl up in a smile. She’s so damn cute I just want to kiss it right off her lips.
“Number sixty-four ninety-two,” I say.
“You remembered the number?”
I shrug, wondering if she’s going to figure out that there’s a reason that guy sounds a lot like me, one I haven’t been proud of since I walked into that clinic in Houston so many years ago.
“Have you considered not using a donor?” I ask when she starts to look like she isn’t going to let me off the hook without answering her question.
“There isn’t exactly a line of guys waiting outside my door to jump my bones,” she mutters, her eyes downcast on the watermelon she’s cutting up.
I’d shoot every one that ever tried.
“Why don’t you let me do it?”
Her eyes snap up to mine. I swear if there was a hole big enough, I’d climb inside it and never come out.
I hate when intrusive thoughts spill out of me unchecked and unfiltered.
“What?”
I have two choices—laugh it off like I was joking or double down. Laughing it off is the only viable option.
“I can get you pregnant.”
“Cash,” she says in a way that hurts more than it probably should.
“The guy you picked sounds exactly like me,” I say, ignoring the cut she just made to my ego. “Let me do it.”
“Is it you?” she asks.
“What? No, of course not.” If there was ever a time to lie, now is it, with the tone of her voice and the disgust I can hear in it. “I don’t want kids. I’d never donate sperm. That’s literally the exact opposite of what I’d want.”
Why I keep the lie going, I’ll never understand, but the words are out there. I can’t count a single other time I’ve lied to her. It settles inside of me like poison, like a cancer that threatens to eat me up from the inside out.
“You don’t want kids, but you’re willing to have one with me?” She shakes her head a little, confusion wrinkling that spot between her eyes.
She’s positively adorable with her pink, pouty lips, and that stray piece of fiery red hair on the left side by her ear that she always has trouble taming.
“Get you pregnant,” I correct. “Is that the deal?”
I’m trying not to press too hard. I don’t want to seem too eager.
“You wanted to save the money,” I hedge, wondering if she can read me like a book or if this is one of those times she doesn’t read more into what I’m saying.
“We’d still have to use the clinic I found.”
Now it’s my turn to be confused. “Use the clinic?”
“For the insemination.”
I suck in a deep breath, realizing we might be on the same track, but we’re hundreds of miles apart and moving in opposite directions.