Page 83 of Forever, Maybe
Oh, heck. She set the chocolates aside. Now was the time. Finally, after all those years. What did you do? Take a deep breath (always), prepare the words in your head (as if you hadn’t done that hundreds of times before), utter them out loud…
“Okay, let’s talk. It’s… it’s about children. Kids.”
She couldn’t see his face, but something shifted—the atmosphere itself changed, as if his smile had seeped into the air, warming it, thickening it and even altering the smell of the room.
“Have you… changed your mind?” he asked. “Want us to give it one last go? Try for a baby? The trying bit’s fun enough.”
No. No, no,no.
Nicky’s pregnancy. Of course. He must have been stewing over it all along. The moment she’d said they needed a serious talk, he’d put two and two together and landed on five. No, not even that. He’d landed on a hundred. He was galaxies off.
Sometimes she wondered if she knew him at all. The arm around her shoulders no longer felt like comfort—more like a chain. She slipped out from under it, trying to make the movement look casual, unthreatening, as she turned to face him on the bed.
Time to retreat to the practicalities.
“Danny.” She kept the tone light. “Let’s say Mother Nature miraculously cooperates, and I get pregnant easily—which is highly unlikely at my advanced age. We try for six months, maybe a year. By the time the baby’s born, I’ll be forty-four, and you’ll be forty-five. That means we’ll be in our sixties when they start secondary school and actual pensioners by the time they hit eighteen.”
Danny reached for her hand, lacing his fingers tightly through hers. “We’re fit, we’re healthy. Still young at heart. And you—Nell, you’d be a brilliant mum. I know you would. And we’d do it fifty-fifty, I promise. I’m cutting back on the hours I work.”
The same old argument, dragged back to the surface after all these years. She stiffened, her long-buried self screaming,You know nothing. NOTHING!
“Please, Nell,” Danny murmured, his voice soft but insistent. “Just think about it. Mebbe nothing will happen—it probably won’t. But there’s no harm in trying, eh?”
She looked away. The curtains were still open, but the bed sat far enough from the windows that only the most determined, sharp-eyed Peeping Tom could’ve caught a glimpse of them having sex. Still, the urge to bolt—to fling herself across the room and hurl out the window—rose up suddenly. Not to hurt herself. Just to escape.
This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to revisit, but here it was, dragging itself back from the dead. What was she supposed to say?
She’d stall. Buy time. Tell him she’d think about it—fully expecting that Danny would bring it up again before the weekend was out. After a couple of overpriced glasses of wine at the bar downstairs when he judged her more persuadable, perhaps. Or after a few peaceful hours meandering through a gallery, when her defences were down.
Nell’s thoughts tumbled ahead into a future she hadn’t planned.Mum probably has dementia. The next few years are going to look nothing like I imagined—endless trips to Norwich, a minefield of hard decisions. Dad will need constant support.
The doubts pressed in, solid and immovable. Could she really take all that on—and a child?
No. Not a chance. Saying yes would be too easy, too reckless. And maybe she wouldn’t even get pregnant—at her age, it wasn’t likely. Nicky might be forty-one and pregnant, but she and Joe could’ve been having unprotected sex since the last baby popped out. Who knew?
Still, she heard herself say, “Tell you what. Maybe. I could get checked out when we’re home.”
It wasn’t a yes—but it was enough for Danny, whose face lit up with the kind of joy most people reserved for winning the lottery or watching their team take the league title.
His thank-yous came thick and fast, absurdly over the top. She smiled anyway, lay back against the pillows, and let herself enjoy the moment. Just the two of them, naked in a fancy hotel room, eating ludicrously overpriced chocolates and laughing at their ridiculous descriptions.
He made love to her again, tender this time, as if already picturing her ovaries unguarded, the coil gone, millions of his sperm on a solo mission seeking out an egg, breaching its outer layer, fusing, dividing, embedding itself deep in the uterine lining.
(It was a wonder anyone ever got pregnant.)
Danny had reserved their table for seven-thirty. Emerging from the ensuite bathroom later that evening, Nell caught him hastily placing her phone back on the bedside cabinet.
The restaurant was one of those old-fashioned places that insisted on black tie for dinner, and Danny had brought his penguin suit for the occasion, the bow tie dangling loose around his neck.
“Everything all right?” she asked, stepping closer to fix the tie for him. “Were you sneaking a peek atStuffed!’s Insta account?”
He shook his head—too quickly to be convincing.
Oh well. A workaholic stumbling a few times on the road to a healthier work-life balance wasn’t a shock. She let it go, smoothing the fabric of his lapels.
But then her eyes landed on a piece of paper on the bedside table, one she hadn’t noticed before. She reached for it, as Danny made a clumsy attempt to snatch it back.
It read:
