Declan takes a beat.
A beat too long.
“I am,” I say firmly. “I’m freaking you out.”
He squeezes my hand. “Do you want the truth?”
“Yes. Now please. I’m dying.”
Declan draws a breath, maybe to fortify himself to deliver bad news. “The truth is, I honestly never thought about kids till this second,” he says calmly, neutrally. “I didn’t give it a second thought because I have such a shitty relationship with my father. I never let myself go there. I didn’t even imagine being a dad, because I have no role model. No idea how to do it well. So, it never entered my mind as a possibility.”
“Okay,” I say, breathing evenly again. That’s not bad news. “That makes sense.”
“But you’ve thought about this?” Declan presses.
“Yes,” I say on a shuddery breath.
“And do you want to?”
Nerves flood me. If I tell him the truth, will I lose him? Is our life together going to come down to him or kids?
I could answer him with maybe. Hedge my bets a bit.
But then, I got hit in the head by a pitch and I’m still here. I was outed in high school and I’m still here. I nearly lost this man and I’m here. I didn’t reach this point in my life by denying my truth. I arrived here by speaking it.
“I think I do, Declan. I would like to have a family someday. Not today, not tomorrow. Not even next year or the one after that. But after baseball, you know? When I think about life after baseball, I think about family. And I would like, someday, to be a father.”
That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever said.
But as soon as those words pass my lips for the first time, they feel so right, so true. And so does loving Declan, and I desperately want my two wishes—him and a family—to mesh.
“You’re going to be a great dad,” he says, warmth in his tone.
But he doesn’t say with me. He doesn’t say we’ll be great dads.
My heart beats too fast. Too uncomfortably.
Maybe he needs my faith in him to get there. “I think you would too,” I offer, even as my chest twists with fear of losing him.
Declan smiles softly, then shrugs. “I don’t know.”
I walk the tightrope of the next question. “You don’t know if you’d be a good dad or if you want to have kids?”
“I don’t know if I’d be such a good dad,” he says, then squeezes my hand harder, and I’m so glad he didn’t write off kids yet. “But I also never thought about being a dad till now. So can I ask you for something?”
“Anything.”
“Will you give me time to think about it?”
“Of course,” I say, half-relieved, half-terrified.
“Thank you,” he says, then hauls me in for a kiss.
A sweet, tender kiss that settles my nerves.
Some of them.
When he breaks the kiss, he slides a thumb along my jaw. “We’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” I say, with a laugh. “What else would we be?”
“Just making sure,” he says.
“We’re fantastic.”
Except when you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you kind of want to fast forward time to his answer and find out if the rest of your life is going to look the same to him as it does to you.
23
Grant
Declan makes a decision in August. Not the one I’m waiting on, but another one.
“We need to learn to cook,” he declares one Sunday afternoon.
“Cooking is overrated.”
But he signs us up for a class anyway later that week. I meet him on a Thursday after his four o’clock game—I had an early afternoon one, so I caught the tail end of his, sprawled in a seat on the third baseline, watching my boyfriend win. It was fun, and I felt like a baller, winning at life.
I still do as we walk along Market Street on our way to cooking class. “So, you still contend we’re failing at life if we can’t cook well?” I ask.
Declan nods crisply. “Yes. What if something happens and you can’t DoorDash?”
I scoff. “What would that situation be?”
“You really can’t foresee a situation where you can’t order DoorDash?” He arches a brow in question.
I screw up the corner of my lips, tap a finger against my chin. “Not really.”
“What if it’s the middle of the night?”
I lift a finger to make a point. “Aha! I thought you were going to pull the middle-of-the-night card. And that’s why I keep veggie burgers, sandwich meat, and avocados at the house, along with, wait for it, bread. I also have red peppers and hummus.” I pump a fist. “Booyah. All the food groups.”
Declan rolls his brown eyes. “You are seriously adorably helpless.”
“That’s not helpless. That’s a life hack for a midnight snack. So, unless we’re hiking the Inca trail or backpacking in Ecuador, none of which I can really see us doing, I’m all set. Big Bear Grylls fan here,” I say, patting my chest. “But I don’t need to be Bear Grylls, eating bugs or snakes or whatnot.”