Page 91 of Sure Shot
“Love you…so much,” she gasps as her body grips me tightly. She takes one more deep breath and shivers as she comes.
* * *
“Do you want me to go back on the pill?” she asks much later.
We’re curled up together after several rounds of lovemaking. We’re having the kind of soul-bearing conversation you can only have at midnight in the pitch dark, naked and sated and raw.
“You have to make that call yourself,” I tell her. “It’s your body. You should do whatever makes you comfortable. I can use condoms if you’d like. You probably thought I was an idiot for never thinking about them before.”
“I thought you were so used to married sex that you didn’t remember what it was like to be single. And I knew I had us covered.”
“So used to married sex,” I repeat slowly. “Not in a good way. I stopped caring about sex.”
“Why?”
It isn’t easy to talk about this. But hiding my pain from Bess has only caused us more of it. “At one point I asked the team doctor for Viagra.”
“What? No way.”
I run a finger across the swell of her breast. “And after the third round of failed IVF, she wanted to try naturally again. And the pressure really got to me. If it was day fourteen, I’d get psyched out.”
Bess groans. “Okay, we’renevergoing there. I’m thinking all kinds of judgmental things about your ex right now.”
“As do I sometimes. But it wasn’t all on her. There’s a lot of cultural bullshit wrapped up in being a man. My day job is, like, the essence of masculinity. But I’d go home from the manly art of hockey to a wife who blamed my body for failing to get her pregnant. And then I made the mistake of telling a teammate that we were struggling with infertility…”
Bess grips my hand a little more tightly when I break off the sentence. And I guess I owe her the whole story.
“Palacio caught wind of it. And that man lives his life just looking for weaknesses that he can exploit.”
Bess sits up. “He was a dick about it? Aboutthat?”
“He’d be a dick about anything, Bess. It wasn’t even personal.”
“That’s why you punched him,” she whispers. “It didn’t have a thing to do with his wife or your wife.”
Slowly, I shake my head. “You’re right. He started chirping at me all the time in the locker room. Like—how could Sure Shot be my nickname if I couldn’t get my wife pregnant?”
Bess makes a low noise of rage.
“One day I’d had enough. I leveled him in front of the whole team.”
“He had it coming!” Her body is full of tension now. Like she might leap from the bed and go after him.
I slide my palm down her knee, and give her leg a reassuring squeeze. “It’s okay now, baby. But you can see why I wasn’t too keen to explain why I punched the guy.”
“I get it, Tank.” She flops down on the mattress again. “I get why it happened, and why you can’t go through that hell again. And whatever we are to each other, I don’t ever want us to be like that. We can’t be all about having a child. We have to just be us and see where that leads.”
My heart gives a squeeze of pure hope. “Nothing makes me happier than coming home to you, honey. I’m happy to be on your team. But we have to take it slow, because you’re the one with a five-year plan that includes a pink nursery and a picket fence.”
“There are no picket fences in Brooklyn,” Bess says, poking me in the belly.
“What’s the Brooklyn equivalent of a picket fence?”
“Twenty-five-thousand-dollar preschool tuition,” she says.
“Twenty… Did you say twenty-fivegrand?” That can’t be right.
“It’s true. There’s a Manhattan preschool that gets forty. They have ten times as many applicants as they can handle.”
