Chloe woke up to the smell of bacon, and she hurried downstairs, her nauseous tummy wanting some of that right now.
“Morning,” she said breathlessly. “You’re cooking again.”
Tom looked up from buttering toast and gave her a quick nod before resuming his task. “Hey. How’d you sleep?”
She’d had better nights. She’d tossed and turned and thought about him a million times, and at least once, she woke up to hear him lightly snoring from the couch, and it had hurt her to be so close and yet so far.
In every book she’d ever read with a couple stranded in a snowstorm, one bed and one blanket, they figured out a way to share both. Why couldn’t she do that? She thought about going downstairs and curling up with him on the couch, covering them in her afghan, and sinking into the warm comfort of his body.
But her bruised heart wouldn’t let her.
And now in the light of day, she felt off-kilter in a whole different way. How had she sleep? No way could she tell him the truth there. “Okay,” she said, proving herself a total liar. “You?”
“Same.” Another quick glance up. “Okay.”
Maybe he was lying, too.
Of course he’s lying, you ninny. He didn’t have a blanket and you made him sleep on a couch made for a normal-sized man, and he’s built like a lumberjack. “You could, uh, take the bed tonight, if you—”
His head jerked up again, this time his gaze holding on her. Sharp. Piercing. “No. The bed is yours.”
Oh, it was going to be an awkward morning. She swallowed and reached for a cracker to nibble on. “I’ll make coffee, then?”
That got a smile. “Sounds good.”
Chloe grabbed the milk from the fridge and was shocked to find three more packs of bacon waiting there.
“Did you bring…” She counted on her fingers. “Five pounds of bacon with you yesterday?”
“I guess. I grabbed what I had in the freezer. It’s easy to cook anywhere, nutritionally dense.”
“You make it sound like you have bacon emergencies regularly.”
That made him laugh.
She closed the fridge and leaned against it, watching him cook. “You always order sausage at the diner.”
He shot her a quick look over his shoulder. “Do I?”
“You do. I didn’t even know you liked bacon.”
“But you knew I liked sausage,” he said quietly, and how he said it—as if he liked that she knew something so mundane about him—made her stomach flip-flop in a new, non-pregnancy related way.
“I know things about you,” she said. She wasn’t sure why she was feeding that feeling, but the flip-flops got stronger, and they were better than feeling queasy. “I know you don’t put sugar in your coffee.”
“You can put sugar in my coffee if you want.”
She smiled, remembering yesterday’s Thermos of double-double sweetness. Today they were having instant coffee, from a canister he’d already set out. “I won’t do that to you.”
As if right on cue, the kettle started to boil.
She prepared their cups with instant coffee grounds and hot water, then added milk to both. After putting sugar in her own coffee, she brought his Thermos lid to him, setting it on the counter beside his hip.
“Thank you,” he said, turning, and she stepped back, bumping into the counter.
He was suddenly right in front of her.
“The thanks should be all mine,” she whispered. “You’re stuck here with me, feeding me and making sure I’ve got all the things I hadn’t thought about. This isn’t the greatest way to spend a holiday break.”
He braced his arms on either side of her body and leaned in. His eyes bored right into her, hot and promising and very, very dangerous. “Don’t think for a second I want to be anywhere else. Okay?”
She nodded, a tiny little wiggle up and down. She got it. She didn’t know if she could trust it, but she believed him.
Every muscle in his face tensed as he searched her expression, then he roughly stepped back. “Good.”
A lump formed in her throat as the space in front of her suddenly went cold.
He took a long, ragged breath. “You know what we should do?”
She couldn’t think straight. Kiss? Fight? Kiss and fight at the same time? “What?”
“Go for a walk.”
Spinning around, she looked out the window. “It’s storming out there. It’s so bad you can’t drive across the two-hundred-foot-long causeway in your monster truck. We’re not going for a walk.”
He closed the gap between them, and there was that delicious warmth again. Right up against her back. He lowered his voice, his breath warm against her ear. “We’ll just walk around the house. We’ll go slow, but it’ll be good to move and get some fresh air.”
“That would take an hour in this weather.”
“So it takes an hour.” He said it like that wouldn’t be any kind of hardship at all.
That was hard to argue with. She straightened up and looked at the oven. “Your bacon is burning.”
He got the tray out of the oven, and it wasn’t burnt, just extra-crispy. It was perfect, actually, and Chloe ate more than she thought she would.
After breakfast, they got bundled up and headed outside. The wind immediately got under her coat, cooling her down, but with Tom in the lead, making a little trail for her to follow, it wasn’t that hard to make it around the house.
And he was right—when they collapsed on the porch again, she was warmed up and it had felt good to move her legs.
“Now it feels good to not move,” she panted. “That had to have been like five hundred knee-ups, don’t you think?”
He nudged his leg against hers. “Your knees had to lift higher than mine did.”
“Good point. Is it too soon for me to invoke the whole exercising-for-two excuse?”
He chuckled. “Nope. That’s a get out of jail free card you get to use for nine months. Milk it.”
“I will.” She shivered, and he thumped his hand against the porch.
“All right, inside we go. We can’t have you freezing for two.”
Back inside, she kicked off her boots, then shucked off the too-big slush pants Tom had pulled from the magical, all-giving truck cab for her. She carried all her wet stuff to the hearth where Tom was adding another log to the fire.
He pointed to the coffee table. “Cards again?”
“You want to redeem yourself?”
“Hell yes.”
And he did. He won two games in a row, and then when she insisted they could do best out of five, he won the third game, too.
“If we’d bet on that, I’d call you a card shark,” she muttered. “Where was that Slap skill last night?”
He laughed long and hard. “Slap skill. Chloe, I grew up in the middle of four kids, and am best friends with four brothers. You don’t want to know about my training in this regard.”
She poked him with her big toe. “Sure I do.”
“So many kidney punches. It was brutal.” He grinned. “Probably a morality tale for leaving children to fend for themselves in a pack.”
She wouldn’t know.
His face sobered. “Your childhood was nothing like that.”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“Tell me about being a single child.”
So much of her childhood had been defined by the battles back and forth between her parents. The divorce proceedings went on and on. Custody disagreements, child support fights.
“Resentment,” she finally said. “That was the theme. But I think that’s more about my parents being who they are, rather than me not having any siblings.” She touched her fingers to her belly. “I want something different for this baby. No drama. No conflict. Just a perfect acceptance of them, and us as co-parents without any societal stricture forcing our hands to be anything else. I just want us all to be happy, Tom.”
His face darkened. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to.
She sighed. “You don’t agree with that idea?”
“For others, absolutely. People shouldn’t stay together for the kids, and they shouldn’t fight each other if they decide not to be married. But yesterday, you said we weren’t a couple in love. Something like, that’s not what we were.”
“It’s not.” She believed that so strongly.
“Because it wasn’t a possibility for you.”
“For good reason.”
“I get that now.” He didn’t mean it to sound loaded, she could tell, but it was. She hadn’t told him about her parents. Hadn’t had any reason to until she found herself at risk of repeating their mistake. “I swear to you, I do, Chloe. I see you. But I don’t know—I’ve been thinking about where we went wrong. At what point could I have said something and sent us down a different path? Because clearly we went too far down the friends-with-benefits track. And I can’t see it.”
“Can’t see what?”
“The point where you would have been open to hearing how I really feel about you.”
“What are you saying?”
“On some level, I always knew that you couldn’t risk your heart with me, so I never asked you to. But you want to know the truth?”
No. Yes. “I don’t know,” she whispered, her heart hammering and her vision going blurry.
Tom rocked back on his heels, then pushed up to stand. He paced back and forth as he let loose a stream of words she never expected him to say in any form. “I fell in love with you the first minute that I saw you. Not lust. Love. I saw you, wanted you, craved you. The only thing on offer was sex, so I took it. I grabbed it with both hands.” He stopped pacing and looked at her helplessly, his hands swinging at his sides. “But I’ve been hopelessly, pathetically in love with you for a year. Every time you crawled into my bed, every time you made me feel so unbelievably good I wanted to shout about it from the rooftop, I had to bite my fucking tongue. I almost told you a million times that I loved you, and now it feels like you’re punishing us both because I didn’t.”
“I’m not punishing you. I’m sure as hell not punishing myself. I’m making the safest, clearest decision I can for myself and my baby. So you say that you love me. What am I supposed to do with that information? Throw myself at you regardless of how I feel?”
“No.” He sagged. “I shouldn’t have said that last bit.”
“Probably not. Because every time you chose not to tell me how you really felt, there was a reason for that.”
“I was working within the terms you set out.”
“The terms we both liked.” He truly didn’t see himself the way she did. She stood up, too. Her voice cracked. “You didn’t want our relationship to be different. Not then. Maybe now in hindsight you’re filled with regret, but over the last year? You wanted it exactly as it was, with this extra layer of feeling good about yourself painted on top. Maybe that was exactly what you needed—you could pretend to love me without having to do any of the hard work of actually being in love with someone.”
“So let me do the hard work now. Let me prove to you that I’m here, that I’m all-in.”
It was so tempting. She could see, maybe for the first time, why her parents got married.
But it hurt, too, because she would never know if he was actually choosing her for who she was, or her for being his baby’s mama.
So she shook her head. It was the only thing she could do, because hot tears rushed to her eyes and closed up her throat.
“Ah, Chloe, no…” He stalked back, stopping right in front of her, and pulled her into the front of his warm, flannel shirt. “I said the wrong thing. You’re not punishing me. I see you. I see what you want, for yourself and the baby, and I want to give you that. Whatever you need. I can love you and let you be free.”
“I just lived the wrong life for any of this. We are not supposed to repeat our parents’ mistakes, you know? And yet, here I am. Doing exactly the same thing my mother did. Desperately hoping I might be loveable when I’m really just fuckable.”
He swore under his breath and pressed his lips to her hair. “I don’t think that. That’s never in a million years how I’d describe you. Think of you. Anything. At all.”
“But it’s how you treated me,” she whispered. “And I treated you the same right back. I know that. I know what I did, what I chose. And it was fine. I liked being friends with benefits. I really did. But I won’t have that kind of relationship with a child in the mix.” The thought actually hurt. Physically caused her pain, and the tears flowed harder as the agony of it all racked through her body. “I hate crying,” she said as she desperately wiped her eyes. “God, what a mess.”
He wrapped his arms around her tighter. “I’m sorry.”
She tried to catch her breath and shake it off. “It’s hormones.”
“It’s also losing your job and having a shitty boyfriend. You’ve got a lot going on.”
“You’re not my boyfriend,” she muttered.
“I want to be.”
That made her head swim. “I think we both deserve a cleaner start to parenting than that.”
He breathed in, his whole chest moving against her. “Maybe.”
She stepped back. The hug had been good, but too much could be dangerous. Taking another deep breath, she tried to make light of what had just happened. “One of those horrifying parenting books said that pregnancy hormones can make you cry.”
“Did you throw it across the library?”
“I would never throw a book,” she said disapprovingly. “But I did consider taking it out of circulation.”
He chuckled gently. “Is that how a librarian takes a hit out on a book?”
“Yeah.” She sniffled. “Listen, about earlier…and now…the hugging….”
He stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Got it.”
“It’s just—”
“No, I understand.” He shoved his fingers through his hair. “Listen, I’m going to chop some wood. Then I’ll get dinner started.”
She frowned. “We could cook together.”
He nodded, a short, hard clip of his head. “We could.”
“Do you not want to?”
He gave her an incredulous look. “Do I not— Chloe, there is nothing I don’t want to do with you. I want to cook with you. Play cards with you. Read a book with you, go to sleep with you. Keep you warm, chop you wood, hold you tight until you believe how much you mean to me. There is nothing I don’t want to do with you. You’re the one throwing up boundaries. I’m just trying to respect your limits.”
What was she supposed to say to that? What could she say over the too-fast, too-hard beating of her heart?
“Let’s cook together,” she finally whispered. “Please. And then after we eat, let’s go for another walk.”