Wretched Love

He’d lost his wife and daughter.

He’d lost his child. Something I could not fathom. Something that you never recovered from.

That pain had stayed with him, so it made sense that he might not ever want another child. Might never want to know that pain again.

Beyond that, neither of us were particularly young. A child was hard work. Was years of hard work. All-encompassing but rewarding hard work. Swiss lived a particular lifestyle. He liked freedom, liked partying, staying up late, doing what he wanted.

I liked that too. I’d just discovered that. And for the first time in my life, I could make choices for myself.

My daughter was grown and out of the house. Of course I never stopped being her mother, but I’d entered a different season of motherhood. Did I want to start all over again?

With Swiss.

With a baby with his eyes, with his smile, seeing him hold that baby in his arms. Seeing him as a father.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly after processing for a while. “Maybe. I want everything life has to offer with you. And I know that a child deserves to have you as a father.”

Swiss’s expression was carefully blank. He didn’t speak for a long time. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he confessed hoarsely. “If I can face that fear.”

There was incredible, heartbreaking vulnerability in his voice.

I reached up to stroke his face. “Well, if you can’t, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. I want you. That’s all I want. Everything else is just gravy.”

A ghost of a smile twitched the corner of his lip. “Just gravy, huh?”

I smiled, nodding. “You’re all I’ll ever need.”

His smile flattened. “You too, Countess.”

Eventually, we found our way back to bed. But even in Swiss’s arms, I didn’t find sleep for a long time. We had had sex unprotected. Not something new for us. When he learned I was on birth control, Swiss had been adamant about taking me ‘raw.’ I wasn’t one to protest that.

But I’d been in the hospital in intensive care. Then I’d been recovering from those wounds in a new home. Then I’d been pissed at Swiss. I hadn’t exactly prioritized getting my birth control prescription filled.

And we’d just had sex. A lot of it. In what could be described as my ‘fertile window.’

In the wake of everything we had just gone through, the choice very well could’ve been taken away from us.

That thought kept me awake for a long time.