Page 114 of A Really Bad Idea

“You’re not leaving this room until you finish what you just said.” His words are an order. A hot-blooded command.

I close my eyes and revel in the feel of his heat. “I can’t have a baby with you.”

“Not that part,” he growls, releasing his hold on me.

I feel him take a step back, and I turn around. Confusion and hurt mar his features.

“You love me?”

When I don’t respond, he looks disappointed and frustrated. Raking his fingers through his hair, he fixes me with a stare. “So, that’s it? You just end our dream … just like that?”

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him refer to it like that. I’m taken aback.

“Christian, you’ve been my friend, my best friend, and that has always given you this important place in my heart. The truth is, it’s always been you. I knew you didn’t feel that way about me, so I suppressed it. I even loved someone else. Did you know you could love another even though your heart belonged to someone else? It’s true. But it doesn’t make it right.

“I guess I thought I could ignore it, and technically, I was—and doing a fabulous job of it, too. Then, you swooped in with your promises and made love to me, and that changed everything. How do you suppress your true feelings after you find out just how magnificent it is to be made love to by the man you’ve always wanted to love you back?”

I might not have known how I would talk to Christian about this, but now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop. “I could have a baby with you and know that it was created out of love, and damn it, I still want to. But—and there’s a huge but—I’d want you to be a family with us. I’d want more than your promise. And I don’t want you to feel guilty or tricked. You have a plan, and I respect that plan. I saw what you did for my mom, and I can’t even begin to explain how much admiration and respect I have for your brilliant mind. Yet here I stand, knowing what you want and telling you that it wouldn’t be enough. It’s so messed up, and I’m sorry. That’s why I can’t do this; it’s not the right thing to do.”

His head is bowed a touch as he listens. With the purse of his lips, he seeks clarification. “Let me get this straight. You’re in love with me, and because you love me, you don’t want to have a baby with me?”

“No. Wait. Yes. Everything you just said is right.”

“Why?”

I close my eyes and sigh. I can’t look at him anymore because, every time I do, I see my future, everything I want … everything I’ve dreamed of … wished for.

Everything I can’t have.

“I want it all. I want you and marriage and kids and the house Upstate and the baseball games and bad pop music and flowers at work and quiet reading on the sofa and coming home to you fixing the sink and me making you lasagna and … I want it all. Watching my parents, seeing how they love each other … God, how much he cherishes her … it makes me selfish for wanting that, too. I want to have a family with someone who loves me as much as I love him. I want you to love me as much as I love you.”

“Meadow—”

I cut him off. “Please don’t tell me you love me or that you think you could grow to love me. That’s just insulting, and it would hurt.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Everything.

“Nothing.” I swallow.

He nods in understanding, his eyes looking down as he rubs his jaw.

“Then, I guess that’s the end of our friendship,” he says.

I swear, my stomach just dropped to the center of the earth.

My heart? Shattered into a million pieces.

“Oh,” is all I say.

Of all the scenarios I played in my head, this gut-wrenching feeling of loss and abandonment wasn’t a part of them.

With my eyes heavy with unshed tears, I rush out of the break room and dash through the office, passing Angela without a wave good-bye as I storm out of Park Avenue Cardiology.

I have things I have to do and a mother I need to see, but my broken heart has me crossing the street and running into Central Park. As fast as I can, I run to the center of the park to the place that has always been my spot of peace and solace.

When I get to the edge of my fountain and look up into the angel of the water and her bronzed cherubs, I curse her for the first time ever.