Page 59 of Enemies with Benefits

"Would she have told me at all if I hadn't come in here that day?"

"Do you want the honest answer to that?"

"She probably wouldn't have, I know."

"Probably not."

His shoulders slumped at that, and he sighed heavily, looking back toward Micah, who was now using one of the rails at the pool ladder to stay afloat, clearly having given up on trying to float. "I just...I still don't know how to feel about that. I get why she didn't tell me in the first place, but it just doesn't sit right with me that I had a kid out there the whole time and never knew. Never got the chance to decide if I was ready to be a parent or not."

"Would it help if I said that she was fucked up for making that choice for you? You deserved to know."

He snorted. “What a weird place in my life, where you, of all people, are backing me up on something."

"Yeah, well, life is weird."

"Tell me about it."

I didn't have to think too hard to put myself in his shoes. I absolutely knew I didn't want kids, and being an uncle was the closest I ever wanted to get. Yet if my vasectomy had failed and I got a woman pregnant, I would want to know if she carried that kid to term and decided to raise it. Not only would I deserve to have a say in whether I was in that hypothetical kid's life, but that kid would deserve a chance to have a father in their life as well.

It was that last thing which really bothered me, even more than deserving to have a choice. My sister knew just as well as I did what it was like to grow up without a father. Sure, Marcus was a good man, and it was nice to have a father figure, but even then, I had lost someone who meant the world to me. Sure, I had gotten over it...mostly, but that event still left its mark on my life, and I knew it had been the same for her.

So what was it like for Jace, whose father had been an abusive piece of shit from what I'd heard? To be the sort of person who was terrified of the idea of being a parent, not just dead set against it, to find out you actually had a kid? I could barely imagine how awful it had to be, knowing you had a kid the whole time and now trying to figure out if you were the right person to be a father. Parents left a mark on you, sometimes it was the gentle touch that carried you through life, or in Jace's case, the scars left behind by the person who should have been your protector and caretaker.

"You're an insufferable asshole," I told him without thinking.

His eyes widened, and he turned to glare at me. “Thanks, like I didn't already know you thought that."

"But you're not an awful person," I told him quickly, knowing I'd already dug the damn hole, so now I had very little time to recover. "You're not your dad."

Fear flashed through his eyes before the shutters came down, and he frowned. “What would you know about me? You can't stand me."

"There's a difference between being an insufferable prick and a monster," I said with a shrug. "We're not doomed to become our parents, even if we're terrified of it sometimes."

He gave me a confused look. “What would you have to fear about becoming your parents?"

"I don't know, the thought of being dead before I hit forty is a pretty big thing."

"Oh. Right."

"You know," I said, arching a brow. "It's ironic that you get so pissed off when I say stupid or insensitive shit, but you do it all the time."

"I do it by accident. You do it on purpose to get to people."

"True, but what's worse, someone who says shit because they know it'll get a reaction, but could choose not to. Or the person who keeps stumbling into saying shit all the time but obviously can't help it, so they're just gonna keep doing it."

"Someone doing something by accident is a lot better than someone doing it on purpose."

"Oh, cool, so if I didn't mean to shoot someone while screwing around with a gun, then I should be able to get away with it without any trouble."

"That's different."

"How?"

"First off, you killed someone, not hurt their fucking feelings."

"Still, you seem to think that intent matters more than results. Which is always funny to me."

"Of fucking course you find it funny, everything about people is funny to you even when it's not funny to anyone but some asshole who likes mocking people."