Sure Shot (Brooklyn #4)(68)

“I know, baby. But sometimes life is a little cruel, and I need you to know why I walked away from you.”

All the fight goes out of me. I step back and let Tank into the room. After closing the door, he walks over to the sofa, sitting down.

But I don’t follow. I stand here, arms crossed, because it hurts to look at him. I didn’t know I’d be seeing Tank tonight. If I had, I would have put on some emotional armor. Or at least a nicer T-shirt.

And slammed a shot of tequila.

“You asked me if I could ever get married again and have a family,” he says, his green eyes studying me.

“I recall.”

“The answer is no, but not for lack of trying. I spent five years trying to give Jordanna a baby. After lots of old-fashioned sex, we did six rounds of IVF. She got pregnant twice and miscarried.”

“Oh,” I gasp. Oh hell.

“Those injections you were talking about? I’m a pro at those. I’m also a pro at making eye contact with the fertility specialist who’s delivering bad news. And I’m a pro at going to practice the next day and pretending like everything is fine when my teammate announces that he and his wife are having twins, while my wife is at home crying.”

“Oh,” I say again. I feel like a giant idiot right now. Because it never once occurred to me that Tank wanted kids and couldn’t have them. On the other hand, there was a simple reason for why I hadn’t known. “Why didn’t you say so?” I squeak. “I just spent a whole month thinking I wasn’t…enough for you.”

“No, baby,” he says, dropping his head. “You’re everything to me. But I couldn’t man up and tell you.”

“You didn’t trust me,” I say in a low voice. “I was ready to trust you completely.”

“Were you?” He gets up and crosses to me. Then he gently grasps my hand, rotating my arm until the scar on the inside of my elbow shows. “Then how’d you get this scar?”

I look down at the evil mark, and feel my chest flush with embarrassment. I remember lying about it to him. I hadn’t even thought twice about it. “Okay.” I sigh. “Maybe you have a couple of good points.”

“Sit with me, honey.” He gives my hand a little squeeze. “Let’s talk.”

Chastened, I follow him to the sofa and sit down. I feel all torn up inside. And it doesn’t help that he’s close enough to touch, or that I can smell the lovely scent of him. Like clean towels and spicy aftershave.

“Bess, you deserve everything. You really do. But I can’t try again. It was…” He sighs. “I don’t mean to be melodramatic. But it was torture every month when we failed. We’d both get depressed. And that was just the start of it. Depression gives way to blame and mistrust. And so much dread. I cannot get back on that tilt-a-whirl.”

“Shit.” I’m still trying to wrap my head around five years of brutal disappointment. That’s a lot of praying not to get your period. That’s a lot of trying to reassure each other that it will all turn out okay.

“And then when she got pregnant—twice…” He swallows roughly. “That was even worse. We got so hopeful. It seemed like we’d finally make it. And then…” He slowly shakes his head. “Brutal. And nobody understands. They say, ‘You’re young, you can try again.’”

“Oh, God.” I think I’d murder anyone who said that to me.

“Yeah. There’s no way for me to leave that experience behind. I cannot go joyfully into the future with you, knowing that history will just repeat itself.”

“But…” I’m still catching up. And there’s a lot to this story that I don’t understand. “What about sperm donors? What about adoption?”

“She wanted our baby. And since neither of us had any significant health problems, that seemed reasonable. Even after a few failures, we thought we’d succeed. But we never did. And I was stubborn, too. I thought there’s no reason why I can’t have what everybody else has.”

“Did they know…” I stop myself before asking who had the trouble. “Did the doctors determine why you had so much trouble?”

“Not exactly. I have, uh, not the highest sperm count.” He looks away. “But IVF still should have worked for us. And most miscarriages are mysterious. After all those years, doctors were still saying that we had a lot of bad luck. But at a certain point you start blaming each other.”

“Oh.” My eyes are leaking. I hadn’t noticed until water started dripping off my face.

He reaches over and brushes a tear off my cheekbone. “Eventually you get burnt out. All the love and optimism gets used up, and you can’t remember why you wanted this thing together in the first place. Everything stops making sense.”

I can’t stand the distance between us anymore. So I lean over and put my head against his chest, and he wraps an arm around me. I can feel his steady heartbeat against my face, and it calms me.

We stop talking for a little while, and I try to take it all in. I never gave infertility very much thought. I don’t know anyone who’s struggled with it.

Or—wait—I guess I probably do. It wouldn’t be an easy topic to bring up in casual conversation. Tank just led me to the edge of his own personal abyss, showed me how deep his fault-lines run. And I had never seen them before. I never even knew they were there.