An Innocent Thanksgiving

“I moved here.”

My heart skipped a beat and my stomach dropped like a stone. “You—what?” I was sure that I was gaping but I couldn’t help myself.

“I moved here,” Cal repeated. He wasn’t looking at me, but watching Fern.

I swallowed a few times, trying to find my voice again. “What—what are you doing here? Why would you do that?” He must’ve uprooted everything for that, and to do it in only a week and a half? What the hell?

Cal turned his head, looking me dead in the eye. “I’m planning to be a part of my daughter’s life.”

“We already talked about this.”

“No, you talked at me, and you didn’t give me a chance to respond.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. What was I supposed to say to that? He was right.

Since I didn’t know what to say, I just sat there, waiting for him to speak. Cal was never the kind of guy who hesitated to speak his mind. I was sure that this wouldn’t be any different.

Sure enough, after he waited a moment to see if I was going to say anything, Cal spoke. “You think that I won’t be around to raise my daughter, but that’s why I’m here. I want to prove that I will be. Maybe I didn’t give you a reason to have any faith in my… in my desire to be a father, and I can understand that. But I’m here now, ready to prove that I am. I think it’s only fair that I get a chance to know Fern and see how I can fit into her life.”

I felt like I’d been hit by a hurricane. I had never expected—out of all the things I thought would happen, Cal uprooting his entire life to come to Nashville, to live in Nashville, was not one of them.

It was kind of flattering, I had to admit. He was clearly making an effort. Now he would be near Fern and he’d easily be able to see her. And you, my traitorous heart whispered. I ignored that.

He could have walked away, honestly. I had made it easy for him. I’d made this as much of a no-strings-attached situation as possible. I had insisted that he didn’t have to pay for anything, and basically cut him loose. I hadn’t wanted him to owe me anything and I’d meant it. Most men would’ve taken that happily and gone on with their lives, not thinking anything more about their fling and the product of that. But instead of that, Cal had literally chased me down.

I supposed that I should have seen this coming, or at least expected Cal not to sit idly by. He had never been a jerk. The only time he had been anything less than kind and considerate to me had been right after we’d had sex, when he had insisted that it was a mistake and that we could never do anything like that again. That rejection had stung, and for the first time in my life, I had felt something other than safe and comfortable with him.

Since then, I’d told myself that Cal was always a jerk, that he was awful, that I should’ve known better. But it was just self-defense. And now he was taking it upon himself to be in his daughter’s life when I’d given him every opportunity to walk away. In fact I’d been awful to him, giving him even more reasons to turn his back—pushing him away so that he wouldn’t consider getting close.

Of course, I knew underneath it all the real reason: if I let myself think of him as a good person, I’d never get over him. It was hard enough already.

But now—now he was saying that he wanted to be in his daughter’s life. And of course he wasn’t going to rekindle the connection between the two of us. Not that I’d hoped for that, or realized that I’d hoped for that until now.

Could I handle having him in Fern’s life, and therefore in mine, even while knowing that we could never be together? I had been carrying a torch for him all this time, unable to stamp out the flame of my feelings no matter how hard I’d tried. Even with how awful our parting had been, I was still drawn to him, as last week had proven. Could I accept that he would never feel the same way about me that I felt about him, especially if I was forced to be around him all the time?

Could I really put myself through that? Risk having my heart hurt in that way all over again?

13

Cal

Maggie still seemed to be contemplating. If I had to guess, I would say that she was softening towards me, or at least towards me being in Fern’s life.

It surprised me to realize that I’d once been able to know her moods so well, and I only became aware of it as I saw now that I couldn’t really guess her moods at all. I’d known Maggie for years before we’d ever slept together, and while she’d grown in leaps and bounds emotionally and intellectually, at her heart she had always been the same person, same sense of humor, same honesty, same upbeat spirit.