Snake (a Stepbrother Romance)(10)

Suzanne’s words had stayed with me all through the night. The seed was definitely taking a hold of me, and I knew it was a solution we had to at least explore. If only Monique would see it that way, too. This would be our last chance, I thought. The last chance to save our crumbling marriage.

“Are you giving up on me?” Monique asked quietly.

“Absolutely not,” I said. Monique and I had a rare morning off together the day after the New Year’s brunch. We sat at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and some toast between us. “I will keep trying as long as you want, but honey, we’re nearly out of money, and we’ve tried so many times.”

“Can we trust her?” I could see Monique processing everything in her mind at a thousand miles an hour. Her eyes were darting around the room, and I could tell her heart rate was a little amped because her breathing was shorter than normal. I put my hand on hers.

“She’s my stepsister. She’s family. We can trust her,” I said gently.

“Will you call her and ask her to come over?”

“Do you want to do it?” I asked, the first sparks of excitement beginning to ignite in my stomach.

“Slow down,” she said. “I want to talk to her. I’ve heard about these things going wrong, and we have no idea if she even wants to do this. She needs to know how hard the process can be before I can put my hopes on her. If we do this, it has to work; I can’t bear to have one more failure.” She shook her head as if failing one more time might break her — and I didn’t doubt that was true.

“I’ll call her,” I said and stood up, getting my phone out of my pocket. I dialled Mila’s number and mentally processed what I would say. I’d like you to have my baby… no, that didn’t sound right.

“Hey, Mila, it’s Devan. Are you around?”

“Yep, just hanging out. I’m glad you called, I was going to ask if I could come over today and check out the studio?”

“That would be great,” I said. “Monique wants to talk to you about, er, what Suzanne mentioned last night. Do you remember?” I asked as I whispered into the phone.

“Erm, I think so. You mean what I think you mean, don’t you?” Mila said, a little apprehensive.

“Yes…”

“OK then. I’ll be over in a little while.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Monique, expecting to see her smiling; instead, she was glaring at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Don’t say it like that,” she snapped.

“Say what?”

“You said, ‘Monique wants to talk to you.’ It makes me sound like this is all on me, and it’s not. This will be our baby. We want to talk to her. Not me. We, us, together.”

“I’m sorry, Mo,” I shook my head. Way to put my foot in it again. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I think it says a lot that you keep talking about it like it’s what I want, I’ll talk, I’ll do this, I’ll do that. Do you even want a baby? Because if you don’t, we are not doing this, and if Mila thinks that she’s just going to breeze in here and call all the shots, you both have another thing coming.”

“I do want a baby,” I said slowly, knowing that I needed to tread very carefully. “And I think Mila will be very willing to abide by any terms we give her.” I sat back down with Monique.

“I’m sorry,” Monique said, pulling her hand from mine and putting her head in her hands. “I don’t mean to be a bitch, or ungrateful, I just… this has been so much harder than it’s supposed to be, and I hate it. I just want a baby, and I don’t see why that’s so difficult when it’s so easy for everyone else.”

“It’s not easy for everyone,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have IVF and surrogacy and adoption and ways for people to have babies other than the traditional way. You’re not alone in this, babe. We’re not alone in this.”

I stood up to clear the breakfast plates and coffee cups. Monique never liked to drink more than one cup of coffee in the morning, and she didn’t like me doing it, either. She said caffeine was part of the reason we had so much trouble conceiving, and so now we drank decaf, but it was still a one cup only rule, and that was an argument too small to even fight.

“I’ll do the dishes,” I offered.

Monique nodded and asked, “Do you think Mila will want lunch? I could make sandwiches.”

I smiled. “I think that would be awesome.” I kissed her forehead, my hands wet with suds in the sink.

A few hours later when Mila arrived, Monique was busy finishing off making the sandwiches and I had started to make some lemonade.