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Once that image punctured the wall she’d had between thinking about Jason and thinking about sex, she couldn’t get it out of her head.
Those eyes. Thinking about those eyes made her tingle between her thighs, like his smile brought an answering smile to her face.
“No kids. You have to have sex to have kids.”
“Not necessarily,” she countered. “I could find a donor. I make a good living. I could do it on my own.”
“Then why are you dating online? Why not find the nearest sperm bank and do it that way, no spark needed?”
“Because I want…” She stopped.
One of his brows was raised. “Do I have to say it?”
She shook her head. “Because I want that connection. Because I don’t want to be alone. Because life, like movie theater popcorn or a bottle of wine, is better when shared.”
“No spark and you might as well be raising a child with a roommate. That’s a shared life, but not what you’re looking for.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “But I still don’t think your way is right. Your way, all connection and no substance, could just as easily lead to a stranger in the bed next to you. And then what do you do? You don’t even have anything to talk about.”
If she was going to lie in bed next to someone after sex and not have anything to talk about, she might as well hook up with random men at bars. Or hire a male escort service. That sounded better—at least in theory he should be good in bed.
Being single was better than the isolation of being with someone and feeling alone.
“It worked for my parents.” Water sloshed in his glass as he shrugged. “I think they developed things to talk about as they built a life together. Who needs to talk about a shared interest in music or what Greek life was like at your college if you can talk about your job and your day and what’s for dinner?”
She shook her head, though at the back of her mind she wondered if her parents had even tried that. “I just don’t understand how that doesn’t lead to chaos and heartbreak.”
“Have you had your heart broken?”
“Well, sure. Hasn’t everyone?”
“I mean since you were twenty. You had that serious boyfriend, right? Did your heart break when that ended?”
She knew heartbreak. Had felt the life drain out of her as she sobbed, collapsed on the floor, uncertain how to go on.
That had been her college boyfriend. She’d cried when Richard had moved out. She screamed and yelled. But life hadn’t felt like it was ending. It hadn’t felt like the rotation of the earth had stopped and the moon no longer had any pull on the oceans.
“No. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. I understand that now. But that’s one man. You can’t generalize to the entire dating experience, love and marriage based on that one example.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing with your parents?”
“So are you,” she snapped, smarting from being called out.
His head cocked to the side, and she felt the force of his gaze. He was going to be irritated with her for pointing out the obvious. More than irritated. She was irritated that their argument had come out at a draw—if she was being generous to herself. But men could be different, and often were, when arguing with a woman.
“You, girl, made me look stupid,” her calculus teacher had hissed as he’d handed down his sentence. She’d explained to him, in the middle of class, that her answer was more right than his was. “I covered this in my summer session at Berkeley,” she’d said with the snootiness of a too-smart teenager. The detention had been fair. She’d backtalked and she shouldn’t have.
But neither should he have told her that she was the dateless one in school because boys don’t like girls who are smarter than they are.
She and her best friend had kissed later that week. Her friend was going back and forth between coming out and not. Marsie was hoping she was a lesbian; girls probably liked smart girls. The kiss had been disappointing for both of them, though for different reasons.
So Marsie waited. She’d know the difference between Jason being irritated at the argument and being irritated at her.
