Fools Rush In

by Lilliana Anderson

  Here with the Cartwrights, I was accepted, encouraged, challenged. I was alone in that I was apart from them as an outsider, but I wasn’t lonely. I could actually feel myself beginning to hope again, hope that maybe, when our relationships were eventually tested as all relationships were, the Cartwrights wouldn’t turn away like my biological family did, like my best friend did too. I hoped above all that Sam would stand beside me, and that he’d do it because he wanted to, not because he had to.

  As I pinched my cheeks, I let out a sigh, telling myself that there was no sense in dwelling on something I didn’t have the power to change or affect. Things were just different now. I was different, just as my life was different.

  The smell of bacon cooking tickled my nose. My stomach growled in anticipation, and I allowed my thoughts to file themselves away while I threw on a pair of shorts and a crop singlet before skipping down the stairs. I fucking loved bacon.

  Male voices stopped me before I made it to the kitchen. “So, Jasmine forces you into this marriage and you’re suddenly all in love?” Toby. He had a note of disbelief in his voice.

  “That’s not what I said,” Sam replied. I think he had a bowl and a whisk, based on the tapping and scrapping sounds that went with his words.

  “You skipped a morning surf to make her breakfast in bed, you walk around with a permanent smile on your face, and I can hear the constant banging you two are doing through the walls half the night.”

  “We like each other,” Sam said. He sounded like he was smiling. I was too, quite liking this conversation.

  “Jesus, look at you. You’re so whipped.”

  “Man, I don’t know what to tell you. Married life agrees with me.”

  “Maybe Jasmine should be one of the matchmakers on that Married at First Sight show.”

  “Maybe you should get her to find a wife for you.” I thought that was a great idea. Toby seemed lonely to me, something about his eyes that I recognised from seeing it my own for so long.

  “Find? Don’t you mean kidnap?”

  Way to put a damper on a fun conversation, Toby. I’ve been trying to ignore that fact.

  “I don’t think Leesh sees it that way.” Sam’s tone changed as the pan hissed and sizzled. He was right, I didn’t see it so much a kidnapping as a limited choice. And I didn’t hate this choice. I actually quite liked it.

  “Have you asked her?”

  “I don’t have to.” Something to add to Sam’s list of qualities—arrogance. He was obviously also a mind reader.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I met her family. They’re arseholes.” I could see why he thought that after meeting my father and being told about my mother. Then there was our discussion about Holland…. “She’s better off here where people care about her. We can start our own family, and she won’t even need to think about that bigot of a father anymore, or any other fucked-up relative who couldn’t be bothered with her. I’ll take care of her.”

  “Back up a sec. Start your own family? As in you want to have kids?” Holy shit. Kids?

  “Uh, yeah. We’re not getting any younger, Tobes. Don’t you want kids some day?”

  “I guess, but I’m pushing forty. You’re only thirty-five.”

  “And Alesha’s thirty-two already. We don’t have a lot of time. Women can’t have babies forever.”

  “I’m familiar with the semantics of it all.” Toby paused for a moment, and my heart thumped in my ears. Oh God. He wants kids. “What’s she got to say about this?”

  “We haven’t exactly spoken about it, but we aren’t being careful. She’s an adult and knows what that means.”

  “What if she’s on birth control?”

  “She’s not.”

  “How do you know.”

  “Because I know, all right?” Of course he did. There wasn’t much of a reason for a virgin with no romantic partner to protect herself from unwanted pregnancies.

  “All right. So what, she could be pregnant already?”

  “I guess.” There was another pause, and I felt like I could hear Toby staring at Sam with an assessing gaze. “Actually, she might be. We haven’t taken a monthly break yet, if you catch my drift.”

  “Wow. And you’re cool with that?” Toby continued. “Having a kid with someone you’re not fully in love with? Having a kid when a relationship is so new? She won’t be all about you once a baby comes along.”

  “What’s with you and all this love crap? What the fuck is love, Toby? It’s just a feeling that comes and goes. It’s want, it’s attraction, it’s something that can grow over time. If she has my kid, if she stands by me and this family, if she keeps being even a quarter of the woman she is right now, then I can handle anything with her.”

  “You are so whipped.” Toby laughed. “And you’re going to be a dad. You’re too whipped to be a dad.”

  Sam’s laugh seemed to lift from the pits of his belly, a joyful sound that hurt my heart to hear.

  If I have his kid.

  I closed my eyes, placing my head against the wall, my heart swelling and weeping at the same time. He was saying everything I needed to hear, and better still, he had backed up those words with the way he behaved around me. I knew he cared for me, just as I knew I cared for him. But we couldn’t call it love, and there were still problems. I couldn’t ignore them and get swept away with my attraction towards him. Not when there was so much we didn’t know. Hell, we hadn’t even discussed the L-word yet. Just like we hadn’t even discussed kids. Oh fuck. Kids!

  “It’s rude to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations,” Jasmine said, scaring the crap out of me. I turned around and found her a couple of steps above me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It just… it just happened.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t,” she said with a wink. Then she tilted her head to the side and dropped her eyes to my stomach. “Do you think you could be pregnant?” There was a tinge of hopefulness in her words, proving she had also been listening for longer than she should have been.

  A surge of emotion charged up my throat and hit the back of my eyes. I shook my head. “No,” I whispered.

  “Are you on something to prevent it?”

  “No.” I looked down at my hands. It was time to come clean. “I just…I, um, I can’t get pregnant.”

  “Excuse me?” she gasped, slightly shocked, slightly curious, slightly annoyed.

  “I… um… I don’t bleed.”

  Her eyes seemed to grow. “You don’t get a period?”

  I shook my head, pressing my lips together and hoping she wasn’t going to toss me out on the street for being defective, or worse.

  “Why?”

  “My mother. She, um, was a user. Heroine. Maybe other stuff. We thought she didn’t have a problem until she went off the rails and left us. But it turned out she was self-medicating while pregnant with me.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It caused a d— a deformity.” It was called amenorrhea—the absence of menstrual bleeding. When I hit sixteen and still hadn’t gotten my period, I went to the doctor. After extensive testing, it was discovered that my fallopian tubes hadn’t formed correctly and therefore couldn’t allow passage of an egg. There was no way I’d ever have children naturally, and even then they didn’t know if my uterus could carry to term.

  “You can’t have children at all?”

  “I….” I bent my finger back until the knuckle clicked. “I don’t know. Maybe. But definitely not without help.”

  “Like IVF?”

  I nodded.

  She took a step back. “I see.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Jasmine held up her hand, her head down as if she was trying to regain her control. I held my breath, bracing for the worst. This was the moment I’d been dreading, because at some point in my life, if I married, I’d feared having to tell my future husband that I couldn’t conceive a child. Obviously, in this situation, it hadn’t come up. I shouldn’t have said sorry to
Jasmine though. I had done nothing wrong, but still, I felt guilty. I felt I was letting her down, when I really shouldn’t feel that way. Learned behaviour. It was then that Sam decided to appear at the base of the stairs, a wooden tray in his hands laid out with plates of bacon, scrambled eggs and toast. There was even fruit juice and a plunger of coffee, topped off with a flower from the garden. It brought a tear to my eye. Here we go, the moment I knew would come. Will he keep me or send me away? Everything between us felt so fragile in that moment.

  “What’s going on?” he asked cautiously.

  I looked at Jasmine, silently begging her not to tell him. But she didn’t even look at me. She turned her head to Sam and deadpanned, “She can’t get pregnant.”

  “What?” The crockery on the tray rattled as he looked at me.

  “I can’t get pregnant naturally,” I confirmed, my voice squeaking a little. “I’m not made right.”

  “I don’t understand.” Sam took a step backwards as he looked between us.

  “What’s to understand?” Jasmine blurted. “You’re wasting your time, fucking her for no reason.” She lifted her hands in the air and stormed down the stairs, slamming the front door behind her as she left.

  My entire being cracked. So fragile was my sense of belonging, my sense of worth that it took seconds for her biting words to break me apart, reminding me that I was less. Always less. Tears streaked down my cheeks. I looked at Sam, needing some sort of reassurance. Moments before, he’d said I belonged, that he’d care for me, look after me. If I gave him kids.

  As our gaze caught, my heart lodged inside my throat. There was an emotion in his I couldn’t place—betrayal? Anger? Did he think I was a waste of time now too?

  Please don’t turn me away.

  “Is that true?” Sam asked, setting the tray on the step closest to him. My entire body shook. “You can’t have kids?”

  With a quivering hand, I wiped at my cheeks and sniffed. “Honestly? I don’t know.” It wasn’t my fault, but I felt like an absolute failure. Insufficient. Again.

  He looked around, anywhere but at me. The man who was always so sure of himself was completely lost for something to say.

  “I need to surf.” Each word felt like a stomp, the dismissive heel of a boot grinding all the pieces of me into the ground, telling me I was unimportant and not worth fighting with or for. He turned on his heel and followed Jasmine’s cue.

  If she has my kid, if she stands by me and this family . . . then I can handle anything with her.

  But I can’t have his kid.

  So he has no reason to stand by me.

  It’s always been easy to leave me so why should I be disappointed—devastated—by this?

  Everyone I loved left me.

  Eventually.

  I gasped, the air leaving my lungs in a punch of emotion. I knew this day would come. Kris's words had just been fanciful. "Once you become a part of the family, you’re a part of it for life. We always take care of our own.” I was sure he believed it, but it’d never truly been tested. They took care of their own because they were all they had. No one had encroached on their precious family fortress before me.

  I would never be enough. Not for my mother. Not for my father, my friend. And now, not for my husband or his family either.

  No one wants you.

  Sliding down the wall, I tucked my knees against my chest and cried. I’d been so strong up until that moment, but I just couldn’t anymore. What’s going to happen to me?

  “Hey.” I flinched when Toby sat down next to me. “It’s going to be OK.”

  I shook my head, placing my hand on my forehead. “No it won’t. I can’t give them what they want.”

  Releasing a heavy breath, he slid his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in a little too tight. The contact and the kindness behind it had me crying even more. But he wasn’t the man I needed acceptance from. “Life isn’t about getting what you want, Leesh. It’s about learning to live with the things you have and making the best of it.”

  “What do you live without, Toby? Seems to me you all have exactly what you want.”

  He pressed his lips into a sad-looking smile. “Appearances are often deceiving. In this house, family comes first, our individual dreams a distant second.”

  “What are your dreams?” I asked, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.

  He shifted, taking his arm back before he clasped his hands, forearms resting on his knees. “They’re just dreams, fanciful thoughts about being free and unencumbered. I’m no different to anyone else. We all want things we can’t have, and we all have to learn to find happiness in what we do have instead.”

  That was the thing. I had been happy with what I had. I’d accepted everything about my life and what it was lacking. I never expected to end up married at all, let alone to a man who seemed desperate to have children. He hadn’t even consulted me. And I had naively never considered that the reason he wasn’t using protection was because he wanted me to bear his children. How blind can one girl be. Of course that’s what he wanted—that’s how babies were made, after all.

  Wait. Was that what Jasmine had wanted too? I remembered another moment when I was caught listening on the stairs by Toby. Sam had been telling Jasmine to let him do things his way or she’d never get what she wanted from me. Was that about children too? Was I brought into the family as some sort of breeding stock? It would explain Jasmine’s reaction.

  Fuck. Now I was questioning everything.

  “Am I only here because Jasmine wants grandkids?” I blurted out, the question burning in my gut as tiny pieces of conversations began to fit together.

  Toby’s light eyes met mine and I immediately knew the truth. “My God, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It may have been a selling point.”

  I was so fucking stupid. Of course they wanted something huge from me. It wasn’t just about keeping us quiet and letting Nate have Holland. It was about furthering the Cartwright lineage, producing tiny thieves. And now that I’d been found defective, would I be put out to pasture, sent to the proverbial farm?

  “My God, I’m an incubator. A broken incubator.”

  Toby took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “That’s not how we see you, Alesha. We all think of you like family.”

  “But I’m not your blood, Toby. Sam doesn’t love me, you heard him say that yourself. There’s no reason for him to keep me if it turns out I can’t give him kids.”

  “Sam isn’t that guy.”

  “Then why did he walk away?”

  “Because he had a picture in his mind, and going for a surf will give him some time to change it.”

  “So he’s just going to come back and magically be OK with this?”

  He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. It was the first time I’d ever seen Toby dishevelled. “You need to understand the life we’ve led. It’s not one that ever allowed space for relationships.”

  “Are you trying to say none of you have ever had girlfriends?”

  “No,” he said, giving me a look that told me if I’d shut up and listen, he’d make his point. “We’ve all had girlfriends of a sort, but never anything serious because every relationship was based on a lie about who we were. We all live with our feet straddling different lives—our respectable public life and our behind-the-scenes reality. We couldn’t risk falling for a girl and telling her the truth about our family only to have that relationship end badly and her going to the cops out of spite. We learned not to trust in anything that felt vaguely like love, because those kinds of feelings put the family at risk, and the family always comes first.”

  I had to wonder if something like that had happened in the past to make them think like that.

  “So none of you believe in love. I get it. But why risk bringing me and Holland into the family? You didn’t know us, couldn’t trust us. What if we produced these children, then decided to run to save them from becoming criminals too?”

  He raked th
rough his hair again. “It’s ridiculously complicated. But it mostly has to do with Nate. He’s always been the wildcard of the family, playing his own games and making up his own rules. What he was doing with Holland was reckless. Had you two gone to the cops instead of snooping around here, his actions could’ve brought the entire family to our knees. We needed to give him what he wanted to keep him happy, and I pointed out that you both could produce grandchildren to keep Jasmine on side. Then you were threatened with your lives and the lives of your loved ones to keep you both compliant.”

  “You knew we’d stay out of self-preservation.” It was starting to make sense now.

  He nodded. “It’s a stronger emotion than love.”

  I placed my hands on my face and sighed. “This is so fucked up.”

  “Initially, yeah, it was. But you and Sam are great together. He’s legitimately into you. If you heard him saying he wasn’t in love before, you also heard him saying how happy you made him and how important he thought you were. He wants you, Alesha, and I’m positive that when he gets over the shock and whatever other shit is going through his head right now, he’s going to come back here and tell you he’ll take you any way you come.”

  I shook my head, his words so hard for me to believe in that moment.

  “And what about Jasmine? Is she going to be fine with me if I can’t give her grandkids?”

  “Yes.” The voice wasn’t Toby’s, it was Jasmine’s. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  Shit. How long has she been standing there?

  “I thought you left.” I sniffed.

  “I did. But then I came back.”

  “I’ll give you two the chance to talk,” Toby said, giving my shoulder a squeeze before he got up and took the tray of food with him. Jasmine climbed the stairs and occupied the space Toby vacated.

  “I reacted poorly,” she said. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you or about you like that.”

  My natural instinct was to want to wear the blame, to suggest that it was all my fault that I hadn’t shared something so deeply personal to me.