Beautiful Mistakes

"So I'm not wrong?" Julie asked. "You're positive that she was pregnant?"

"I bought the test myself, Julie. I was there with her while we waited to see if it was one line or two."

Nodding, Julie felt a little bit of the guilt ease up off her shoulders. "Okay, thank you. He just… seemed so sincere, and for a minute I wondered… if I was jumping to conclusions."

"No, you were right on," Aaron assured her.

Feeling that she was probably not going to have another chance, she decided to go ahead and ask, "But…one thing I don't understand, Shannon was your girlfriend, right? So… when she got pregnant… how do you know the baby wasn't actually yours instead of Matt's?"

His gaze dropped to the couch cushion then and he said quietly, "It just wasn't."

"But couldn't it have been? I mean, you can't get a paternity test done before a baby's born, right? Especially not before you can get an abortion—I mean, that's early. How do you know?"

"I just… do, Julie."

She still didn't understand, so she persisted. "Did you guys break up or something? I mean, you guys would have had to not be together for quite a while to—”

"I'm infertile," he blurted a little loudly, interrupting her.

Julie's jaw dropped open again.

"I can't have children," he explained a little more gently. "That's how I know it wasn't mine."

Her mouth moved and she attempted to formulate some sort of response, but no sounds would come out of her mouth.

Sighing, he said, "Whenever she told me she was pregnant… that was when I first started to suspect something was wrong, but I didn't want to think about that. I was hoping that… it was one of those stories you hear where an infertile couple will miraculously conceive, and the likelihood of it happening is… ridiculously low, but sometimes… it happens. And I hoped that was what it was, but… it wasn't."

"You… can't have children?" she finally managed.

Shaking his head, he confirmed it. "No."

"Why?" she asked, puzzled, her mind racing again.

He merely shrugged. "I don't know. My uncle is a doctor, and he and his wife tried for years and years to have a baby, and he finally had some tests done… and he found out that he was infertile. Out of curiosity he wanted to see if any of the other males in the family were. I don't think he expected to crush his nephew," Aaron said with a ghost of a smile on his face, "but mine was the one that came back with bad results. At 19 I was told that I could never have kids."

Unable to wipe the sympathetic look off her face, she said, "That's… so terrible."

He shrugged. "Shit happens. Not everyone can have kids, I guess. I just think it's a little ironic that I can't have kids at all and my brother seems to have the sperm equivalent of Miracle Grow—he can just sit too close to a girl when she's ovulating and –boom!—she's pregnant."

Without meaning to, Julie's hand went to her stomach, protectively stretching out over the still bump-less surface.

There she was whining because the timing of her pregnancy wasn't exactly what she had planned, and Aaron couldn't even have kids—ever.

"Did you want to have kids?" she asked.

"Not when I was 19," he said, smiling slightly. "But yeah, like most people I intended on having kids someday."

Suddenly, having his problem to dwell on made her feel a whole lot better about her own. "I'm so sorry," she said.

Shrugging, he said, "Nothing you can do about it."

"You know, they do have… medicinal help that you could get if you really wanted to."

He shook his head. "Yeah, I know, shots and… shit like that. No, that's not really… how I wanted to do it. It doesn't matter, I've had a decade to adjust to knowing that I'll never have a family—it's okay. You don't have to try to make me feel better, although I appreciate the attempt," he told her, half smiling.

There was a knock on the door then, and Aaron frowned, standing up and going to the door, opening it up and giving the person on the other side a hard look.

"What do you want?" Aaron asked.