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“Elephant in the room,” he says.
I kiss his chest. “Yeah.”
“Have you been thinking about it?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
His hand stills on my back. “And?”
“Am I right in thinking you’d rather not go through IVF?”
“I’d rather not. But I would, for you.”
I rest my lips on his skin. I’m deeply touched. After everything he’s been through, he’d still do it for me.
It’s such a shame, though. I’d rather him do it because he really wants children. I’m sure the urge to have them is what carries most couples through the regular disappointments. If he’s reluctant going in, and the first round doesn’t work… what then?
Ohhh… life is so hard sometimes, so complicated. And it’s ridiculous, because we haven’t even dated properly. Hell, I haven’t even finished my old relationship. Talk about run before you can even crawl. The last thing we should be discussing is having a family.
But we’re not like Rangi and his girl—we’re not sixteen. We’re heading toward thirty, and although there’s still plenty of time, his infertility is a cloud hanging over us that is going to force us to look at things differently.
“How do you feel about not being able to have kids?” I ask.
He studies me, his eyes like silver discs in the moonlight. “I’m not used to talking about it.”
“Really? Shaz never asked?”
He shakes his head and resumes drawing on my back. “It’s hard not to see it as a failure,” he says eventually. “It’s the whole reason for existence, isn’t it? Procreation. Continuing the line. If Darwin had his way, I’d have been weeded out long ago.”
I blow a raspberry.
“I’m serious,” he says. “If we were a prehistoric tribe, I’d have been sitting in the shadows without a woman, all skinny because they wouldn’t give me any food.”
“Bullshit. Even if you couldn’t knock up the women, you’d still be running the place, bossing all the cavemen around and telling them they’d used up their holiday quota.”
That makes him laugh. “Yeah, maybe.”
“We’ve advanced a long way from procreation being the major reason for existence. So many people, like James, choose not to have children nowadays, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to live. You contribute to mankind in a huge way. You enrich people’s lives, including mine. Darwin can go fuck himself.”
“Yeah, all right.”
“I’ll get that put on a T-shirt for you.”
He laughs again.
I kiss his chest. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever talk about having a sperm donor with Shaz?”
“No. We never really got that far. Things were going wrong between us before we got to the IVF and donor discussion.”
“So… what do you think about it?”
He hesitates. “I don’t know. Donor children can access details of the donor when they’re eighteen.”
“Ah, I didn’t know that.”
