It was my nature to be selfish, and at this point, chances were it was too late to change. Even Evan didn’t think I could.
He’d managed to avoid me 90 percent of the time I stopped by Dad’s, content not to have me in his life at all if it meant not putting up with my disappointment. I didn’t want it to be true, but it was better for everyone to accept it was.
I could have a wife, a kid, a family—but only in my fantasies, where they’d never be at risk of me letting them down.
The reminder rang through me like the bell at the end of a losing round as I met Aubrey’s gaze. I wanted her safe from me most of all. My arm tightened around her.
“You want kids?” she asked softly, maybe sensing the shift in my mood.
I tensed, not expecting that to be what she asked in response. Hating that my first instinct was to crack myself open further and let her all the way inside.
I needed to do the opposite. To reinforce my crumbling walls that were the only way I knew to protect her.
“Used to,” I muttered like it’d been a simple matter of changing my mind. So simple it wasn’t worth discussing.
I must have sold it because she didn’t ask anything more. Just lay with me, existing. Letting me have this piece of her I shouldn’t be allowed to have.
“A part of me always wondered why my parents had me,” she said after a while. A murmured confession in a forgotten gym. The steam pipes clinked around us, keeping our words safe.
I studied her with drawn brows. “Why?”
Her shoulder dragged against my chest in a shrug. “It mostly felt like I was in the way of the life they wanted. And when they left me with my grandma, it felt like proof I was right.”
I couldn’t think of how anyone’s life would be better without her in it. She shivered beneath the blanket, and I squeezed her close. “They did us all a favor,” I told her. “You belonged here with us.” I’d known that much since I was twelve, though I’d never been more grateful for it than I was now.
“One thing I know is if I ever become a mom, I want to be the kind yours was.”
Just imagining it pinched my chest. She would be an incredible mom.
The kind who showed up for soccer matches and cheered her ass off no matter if her kid was the star player or the one sitting near the sideline picking grass. She’d probably invent her own games with them on car rides that would become inside jokes. She’d bake them the best snacks and know how to make anything better just by being there when they needed her. They’d be the luckiest kid in the world.
Hers and someone else’s.
Thinking it was like dunking my head into the coldest ice bath.
He’d be someone she ended up with after this thing with us was over. Whose wedding I’d attend as her friend, sitting next to my dad in the front pew as I watched her promise her life to another man.
The same way I’d watch her date him and fall in love. Watch her bring him to game nights so he could get to know our family as her family. Watch her touch him and smile at him and track him with her eyes as he walked across the room.
Watch from the sidelines as he raised her kids, knowing he wasn’t good enough for her. Knowing no one was.
Especially not me.
The sting of it burrowed under my skin, and I restrained my hand from stroking her belly as a different kind of longing took hold.
Not mine to want.
“You’ll cook them way better dinners,” I joked, mouth dry.
She snorted. “Yeah, but my flower arrangements still need work.”
I ran my hand over the pink roses running beneath her collarbone and over her left shoulder. “These were my mom’s favorite,” I said, studying the careful shading.
“I know,” she said, nearly a whisper. “I got them for her.”
I swallowed the emotion from my throat. “And the lilies?” I traced my thumb to the center of her chest where orange and pink petals mirrored the roses, climbing her other shoulder.
“For Nana. Her name was Lily.”
