“Doesn’t matter, surely. Whatever it is, the deed’s done. And I’ll be rapt about either one, no worries.”
“Huh,” I said in surprise. “I thought men always wanted a son. But that was what I told Guy. Karen’s dad. He only wanted a boy, and he was positive he could get one. He insisted that my mom buy only boy clothes. You never saw a girl baby with so many outfits featuring dogs and fire trucks and dinosaurs. Why are dogs a boy decoration? I told him the baby was already made, and he said, ‘Anything can happen.’ Dumbest thing I’d ever heard. I already knew about chromosomes, and I was nine. But then, he was an idiot.”
Hemi was smiling again. “The brains must’ve come from your mum, then, because you got them too, I’ve noticed. But I’d love a daughter, and I’d love a son. In fact, since we’re meant to be communicating here, and this one has been a curious hole in our negotiations, I’ll tell you that I’d love two or three. Four, if you’re willing. I want all the babies you’ll give me, and I’ve been thinking about that since well before I asked you to marry me.”
I was going to be a mother. I was going to make Hemi a father, too, and he was going to be such a good one. “Was that supposed to be another thing I didn’t need to know?” I asked him, staying sassy with an effort. “Didn’t work out so well, did it?”
“No, because you surprised me. I didn’t even have to bring it up.”
“Antibiotics,” I explained. “Apparently they interfere. And apparently we’re both fertile.”
“Well, that’s good news, anyway. Since I’m betting you’ll make me some pretty good babies, and I want to keep you doing it. So. Do we get to go home, so I can watch the process and keep you as spoiled and satisfied as I want you? Whilst remaining fully independent, of course,” he added, not entirely convincingly.
“Ah. Well, no.” Here we were. The tricky part. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. This is all so new. I’m just figuring it out, and it’s too easy, when everything we have is yours, and it’s all on your schedule and your rules, for me to feel like I have to fit into that. I want to do it differently, but I think I need . . . practice first. And time to figure out my future.”
“Practice.” He wasn’t inscrutable now. His face was hard. “What kind of practice?”
“Well, here’s Koro. Probably going home tomorrow, and he needs somebody to stay with him, right, while he’s still fragile? What if that somebody was me?”
“I can hire somebody. And you know the whanau will be coming round as well.”
“He’ll hate you hiring somebody. And of course they can all come around. But he’ll need somebody to sleep there, don’t you think? And I’ll bet he’d like it to be me. Keeping his eye on you and me, giving me advice on how to deal with your highhandedness? It’d make him feel useful, and he’d be useful, because I could use all the advice I can get.”
“You think you’re helping your case,” he said. “You’re not. You and Koro? How’m I meant to stand up against that?”
I turned toward him a little more and put my hand on his cheek. I loved him so much it hurt, but that wasn’t enough. “Hemi,” I said, keeping it soft. Keeping it loving, because that was what it was. “I want to work this out. I want it more than anything. But I also need to see if we can do it without sex, or without so much sex, because it’s so easy to take all our . . . frustrations there, to do all our communicating that way, and not talk enough. Especially since that’s all I want to do right now. I’m dying for you, and I’m guessing you’re dying for me, too. But I need to know that you will talk to me, and that I can hold my own. I need to get clear, and I need to get strong, and that’s so hard to do with you right there.”
He didn’t say anything at all, and I waited, then waited some more. Finally, he said, “I want to say, ‘Absolutely not.’ I know that’d be wrong, but I can’t think what else to say.”
“Because you only know how to be in charge. That’s why.”
He was all the way past “hard” now. He was scowling, but somehow, it didn’t intimidate me as much as it might have. “I’m hating this.”
I had to laugh a little at that, and to give him a kiss, too. He hadn’t kissed me yet, and I needed to brush my lips over his, to feel that electric zing as every nerve ending lit up from my mouth to my toes. I needed to feel his hand coming out to hold me at my waist, because he couldn’t help it any more than I could help touching him.
It was only a moment, but it was a good one. I pulled back and said, “Well, how about if I had Karen, too? I miss her like crazy, and that way, you could have your orderly life back for a while, and we could both think about how we’d . . . how we’d work better together. We could talk. We could work it out without the sex there to make us think we’d solved something we hadn’t. Koro’s in the cast until around the last week of September, they say. We could use that as a rough time frame, don’t you think?”
“Karen’s school has to start up before then. When?”
“Early September, right after Labor Day. So I send her back, if you’re willing to take her. It would still get us through that first month with Koro, which is when he’ll need the most help. And then I could be there to make sure he was all right at night.”
“Karen has this fella,” he said, surprising me. “Noah the Unattached Buddhist. Had him at the house the night you left, in fact, while I was going after you. Gave her the biggest love bite on her neck you ever saw.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow. All right. That’s not too surprising, I guess, even though she didn’t tell me. Huh. She’s catching up fast.” Too fast for me.
“I wasn’t sure what to say about that,” he said. “Told her he couldn’t come over when she was alone, but about the ‘why not’ of it . . .”
“Hemi Te Mana at a loss,” I teased. “Not being able to make a decision.”
He was half-scowling, half-smiling. “It wasn’t funny. Bloody uncomfortable, tell you the truth. She asked why she shouldn’t have sex, since I’d probably done it when I was younger than her, and with girls her age. Couldn’t come up with a proper answer for that one.”
“So how old were you?” I glanced at him sideways from under my lashes.
“Not telling,” he said promptly. “And I never wanted to hurt anybody, but now? I wonder. I probably did. Not ‘hurt’ hurt,” he went on hastily. “Not if . . . anyway. Just that I was never serious about anybody. I didn’t do force, and I didn’t do coercion. Then or now.”
“Except for telling women who worked for you that you wanted to fuck them,” I pointed out.
“Ah. That was an experiment.” His smile was a bit sheepish. “We’ll call it a fail, eh.”
“You read me wrong.”
“I saw the response to me. Didn’t see the rest of the woman. My loss.”
“Mm. But Karen. I’ll have to think about that. How to talk about it. Birth control. Responsible choices. But I think it’d help if you tell her what . . . what boys can be like, maybe. I think you’d have more impact. Though you know you’re going to get the rolling eyes.”