were flared, even his nostrils. His skin had paled, making his dark whiskers stand out.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. Maybe she’d been too blunt, but a few days ago the silences had stretched out for hours, stretching her emotions, too, and she just couldn’t do that again. And when she was nervous she was bold. So she’d blurted out so she could get it out.
“Our children?” he asked. His voice was shaky. Ivy had never heard him falter before.
“You started it,” she said, feeling slightly defensive. He had spoken about promises this morning and how military life provided very few. That was talking about their future, wasn’t it?
“Ivy?”
She heard him call her name, but chose to ignore it and busied herself opening a Styrofoam carton. Okay, so they’d never talked kids and big back yards, but they had murmured a few words about a future together. Kids were the future. She wanted them. But maybe he didn’t. The uncertainty made her hands tremble.
“Yum, cannolis. That must be dessert.” She closed the lid and moved on to the next box.
“Ivy.” This time he reached across the table and took her chin in his hand. He tipped her face up so that she had to meet his gaze. “You have something to tell me?”
She could feel the tension radiating off him and didn’t understand it. It flustered her, made her voice thin, her hands pick at the stack of napkins she’d dropped on the table. And it didn’t help that his eyes were sharp, penetrating, as though he could pull answers from hers.
“Tell you? I just told you a whole lot,” she said. “I told you everything.” While he, meanwhile, had said nothing. Not that she had expected him to. Nor would she pressure him. He liked taking his time. He was thoughtful. He examined every aspect of a situation before committing or commenting. Fine. It was a quality that made a strong leader, which she had no doubt he was. But sometimes it really sucked, like when it came to intimate relationships and one in the couple was waiting for confirmation.
“Are you pregnant?”
Ivy sat back, slipping from his hold but maintaining eye contact.
“You’re kidding, right?” The words seemed to explode from her lips. “We’re one week in. We wouldn’t even know something like that. Not yet.” So that was the reason for the wide-eyed stare. She’d scared him, and something about that made her feel like she was sinking through a bottomless well. She blinked back tears and struggled to take the emotion out of her voice. “Don’t worry, Jake. We were careful. Every time. I’m on the Pill.”
She disconnected then. Lowered her head and set about finding the main course of their lunch, not that she could eat anything at this point. She tried to remember that they really hadn’t known each other long. She thought back to their conversation at dinner, before they’d ever made love. He had teased her about feet and fetishes and the fact that they still had a lot to learn about each other. She should have listened to him then, even if it didn’t feel right. Even if it felt, in her heart, like she’d known Jake forever.
“Ivy—“
“Forget it, Jake.” She opened a container and found tostada salad. “I thought it would be better if we talked. It’s hard for me not to, especially when you get so tied up inside yourself. But it was a bad idea.” She looked at him across the table. It was odd—communication was supposed to draw you closer to the one you loved—so how could they talk and Jake still hover somewhere out of reach. And why couldn’t she just respect that distance was what he needed from time to
time?
Because she felt threatened. As though, with Jake’s silence came recriminations. Regrets. A complete reversal in where they were headed. But maybe that wasn’t so. Her own words came back to her, we’re one week in. Love doesn’t come without its adjustments. She needed to remember that. And maybe the silences she found so unsettling were rooted in the silences of her childhood. Huge troughs of silence that should have been filled with words of love.
Ivy was good, now, at figuring herself out. At taking stock and fine-tuning her direction. She could do it here and now, too.
It wasn’t pulling away from each other, not exactly, but it was pulling back and regrouping—exactly what Jake was doing—and it had its merits. And so she took her first shaky steps toward