“Not really,” Ryder said, ignoring the tightness in his chest.
“Seriously? You got the woman pregnant, and you’re marrying her, and you’re still going to say that there’s nothing more between the two of you?”
“Okay, it’s more. But I guess more accurately it always has been. It’s not love. I mean, not in love,” he clarified. “But it’s... She’s always belonged to me. And that doesn’t make sense. I know that. It sounds like a whole asshole caveman thing. And it isn’t. It’s more than that. I’d... I’ve spent the past seventeen years protecting her from the world.”
“And now you have to protect her from you, too. Because I don’t care if you think you’re in love with each other or not, there’s a hell of a lot higher stakes when it comes to feelings than there were before you were engaged. Than there were before you were having a baby. That’s just a fact.”
Ryder turned that over in his head for a moment. And he supposed that was probably true. And some of it was that it hadn’t really occurred to him since he had wanted Sammy for quite some time, so the shift for him had more uncovered things he had already known existed, rather than treated him to anything new. But he was sure that Sammy herself had never thought of him that way and so for her it was an entire sea change.
And maybe that did require something different on his part. Maybe it did require a shift. Except...
“I mean, we have great sex,” Ryder said.
West looked at him like he had grown a second head. A second head that was dangerously stupid.
“You know,” West said. “I’m not an expert necessarily on the finer feelings of women. Being that I’ve only successfully managed to carry on a relationship with one. I mean, my relationship with my ex-wife was fine until she framed me for fraud and had me sent to prison. But I’m hoping for better with Pansy. So you know you can take what I say with a grain of salt. But great sex isn’t enough.”
“It’s not?”
“No,” West said.
“Even if...” Ryder was not the kind of person who shared things like this, but he really did need to make sure. Because for the first time in his life that he could remember he had a pretty delicate situation he needed to talk over with someone, and Sammy wasn’t available to have a discussion with. He could say anything to her. He always had. Though the conversations had never strayed into advice about sex or anything of that nature, because the two of them had never really had relationships. And when it came to the actual quality of the sex, he was good. Thanks.
“Even if,” he started again, “you’re the best sex she’s ever had?”
“Bro,” West said. “I am the only sex your sister has ever had. And I still got her a ring.”
Ryder bristled up the back of his neck. “Didn’t need to know that.”
“Hey, you brought it up. And you’re being pretty dense for a guy who essentially raised three girls. I would have thought you would know better.”
“Yeah, but it feels... It feels like something.”
“Sure. Sex is like that. It feels like something. In the moment. And it takes things inside you and twists them up and makes them all feel bigger and deeper. Gets its hooks in you, and links you to another person in a way that can’t be undone.”
Yeah. That was definitely true. And he would have said it wasn’t, because before Sammy, it never had been.
But then that was the other thing. She had wound herself around his life, around all that he was, way before they had ever started sleeping together. There was a permanence to who they were that had always existed. Sex had deepened that for him, but...it wasn’t the thing that had created it.
“So I should buy her a ring,” he said. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Yes,” West said. “As big of a diamond as you can find, because you’re not just sleeping with her and marrying her. She is pregnant with your child and she probably feels like crap.”
“It would have to be an ethical diamond, or whatever they call it,” he said, racking his brain to figure out how he would find one of those on short notice.
“I imagine for Sammy, it would.”
“She’s very aware of everything to do with shiny rocks and stuff. It’s what she does. Okay. I