Page 48 of The Lover
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I want us to be happy.
Happy. Could I get there? Could I do that knowing the man I was married to, the man who was the father of my child, didn’t love me? Or I should say, wasn’t in love with me. Jake loved me. I couldn’t not feel that. But there was something holding him back from a full-blown commitment.
It could have been something as simple as my age. Or something as hopeless as he just never thought of me in a romantic light. That even though he wanted me physically, he still wasn’t at a place in his head where he could see me as anything other than little Ellie Samson.
Me too, I texted him back quickly. I didn’t want him to know how much I was thinking about all of this. Jake liked to keep things simple. We had sex. We made a baby. We got married. We would be happy.
We’re going to have a baby!he wrote.
That made the tears come. I wiped them away and tried to sniff them back. I knew he would be thrilled by the idea. Once he got his head around the concept. Once he started thinking about what this meant. I knew it. He’d want a boy. Then he would change his mind and want a girl.
I would get there. I would get on theJakeandElliewerehavingababytrain eventually. I just wasn’t there tonight.
We are tired again.. must be a baby thing Night, Jake
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Night
It wasn’t the greatest answer to his exclamation mark, but it was the best I could do for now.
I put the phone back on the table next to the bed and then put my hand over my belly. It was just a dot right now. This bean that was going to change our lives forever. I knew eventually I was going to love it. It was Jake’s, after all. That love, my love, it would have to be enough for both of us. Yes, soon I would love the heck out of the thing. But right now I couldn’t help but think this kid had really poor timing.
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“You arethe weirdest person on the planet.”
I was sitting across from Chrissy the next day at Frank’s. I was on a shift, but taking a break and stealing her fries when I told her the situation.
“I know, right?”
“No, seriously,” she said. “This is like, bizarre the way bad stuff that happens to you.”
That was my first moment of parental guilt. I didn’t want anyone to think I thought my baby was a “bad” thing that happened to me.
“I wouldn’t say bizarre,” I mumbled.
Slightly unusual at best.
Then Chrissy started counting stuff off. “Your mom died. Your dad died. You had to get married at sixteen. You had to get divorced at eighteen. And now you are part of the two percent population in the WORLD where the condom didn’t do the job. And you have to marry your ex-husband.”
When she said it like that, I suppose bizarre was back on the table.
“And that’s just you. Jake’s mom ran out on him when he was a boy, completely wrote off her only son. His dad drank himself to death, his mentor and stand-in father died. He has to marry a sixteen-year-old so the whole town wonders if he might be a perv. Then he divorces you, which makes everyone think he’s a jerk. Now he’s knocked you up and everyone is going to think…I guess I don’t know what I think.”
“Jake is not a perv,” I said, angry at the use of the word. Then I thought about everything she listed and thought about how hard life had been for him too. I always thought about things from my perspective, but had I really considered Jake’s? I was sad that he couldn’t find a way to love me, but now I could see again why being that vulnerable would be so hard for him.
He’d lost so much, too.
