“And what is this?” she asked, unable to hide her smile.
“This is the tent of intent.”
“The what?”
“You avoid talking about us. And I get that it’s hard with two kids in the house and the business and now your sisters and all this solstice stuff. So, this is the tent of intent, where we set aside time to talk about us.”
“Talk?” She balked. Her hopes for an afternoon of torrid tent sex were deflating fast. Such a pity; she’d never had sex in a tent before.
“I’m not ruling out other activities,” he said with a lazy smile and a raised eyebrow. “But in the tent of intent, talk comes first.”
“Like dinner before pudding.”
“Exactly like that.”
“You didn’t go for a run at all, did you?”
“No.”
She had known her stalling would catch up with her eventually. If she’d discovered his cunning plan sooner, she would have feigned an excuse, but she’d been so eager to get laid, she hadn’t bothered to ask. That’ll teach you to think with your lady parts!
She tried a different tack: she sidled up to him and began to trail kisses down his neck.
“What if my intentions for the tent of intent are physical rather than verbal?” she whispered.
Joe cleared his throat and shook himself, and she was pleased to see she had him flustered. But he took her hands in his and used them to gently push her arm’s length away from him.
“My tent, my rules,” he said. “We are going to have a grown-up conversation about us.”
“God!” she huffed. “So unfair!”
Joe smiled and lifted the flap to the tent. “After you,” he said.
She sighed and climbed inside. The floor was lined with cushions and a double sleeping bag lay unzipped across them. She fixed him with a stare as he climbed in beside her.
“That’s a little presumptuous,” she said, gesturing to the sleeping bag.
Joe settled next to her and zipped up the tent flaps. “Oh, I think not.” He grinned knowingly at her. “But first, we talk.”
She rolled her eyes as though disinterested, but inside she felt leaden with dread.
“I am in love with you . . .” She opened her mouth to protest, but he held up his hand for her to be quiet. “Please, Mags, I need to tell you this. I have fallen in love with you, and I want to be with you. Properly with you, not sneaking around, not pretending we are only friends with benefits. I want people to know about us. I know that you’re stressed with the flat and the shop and everything, but losing the building needn’t be the end of something. We can make a new start together, find a place and put both our names on the lease. Start a business together. And if that feels like it’s too fast or too much for you, then we’ll go at any pace you like, so long as we go public.”
“Public?”
“I don’t want to hide in the shadows like your dirty little secret anymore. I want us to be a couple, and I want the people that matter to us to know it. I want us to sit down with Patrick and Verity and tell them we’re going to be a family.”
“I haven’t even told the kids we’re being evicted yet. I think one bombshell is enough to be going along with, don’t you?”
“Why would your kids finding out we’re together be a bombshell? What we’ve got going is a good thing, a positive, life-affirming thing. Don’t put our relationship in the same category as your eviction.”
She pulled her knees up and hid her face in them. She so desperately wanted all the things Joe wanted, but it wasn’t realistic. Sooner or later he would see it too and it would be messy, and she would be heartbroken, and Patrick would say “I told you so” and he’d be right. She pulled her head away from her knees and took a deep breath.
“I am not a good bet. You could have anyone you wanted . . .”
“I want you!”
“Joe, I let you talk, now you have to listen to me. I’m forty-four years old. I am not going to have another baby at my age—I don’t want one, I’ve done the baby stuff. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’m perimenopausal, so the clock is ticking on that one anyway, even if I did want another baby, which I absolutely don’t. And by the way, do you really want to be with a perimenopausal woman when you could be with some perky little thirtysomething? You’ve seen me have a hot flash, right? It’s not pretty and it’s probably going to get worse. I can’t deny you the chance to have a child of your own. You would make a wonderful father, I won’t stand in the way of that. And that’s before all the complications that come with me, my kids, and my precarious financial and living status, not to mention a myriad of hang-ups about allowing myself to depend on somebody. If I was on the outside looking in, I would see a whole lotta baggage and very few benefits to recommend me.”
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“Did you hear all the things I just said? Think seriously about what you would have to lose by being with me.”
“I am not afraid of menopause, Maggie.”
“That’s what they’ll start calling me, you know? Menopause Maggie! Do you want to be associated with that?”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Make a joke to avoid talking about this.”
She began to play with a tassel on one of the cushion trims. Boy did he have her number. “Sorry.”
“As for your other worries. I’m not fussed about procreating. I mean, kids are great, and I’d be happy to be someone’s dad, but I’ve never felt that push to have children of my own, it’s just not a big deal for me. But I know I could be a good father to Verity and, with time, a good friend to Patrick.”
Maggie sighed. “I can’t commit to someone who might change their mind in a year or two years or five years, I just can’t. And that’s why I can’t tell the kids. Not yet. You have to understand, I loved someone and he died, and everyone else I’ve loved has left in some way or other. I don’t think I could stand that kind of rejection again, I just can’t risk it.”
Joe had been staring at his feet but now he looked her dead in the eyes.
“So your only objection to being with me is your belief that I am somehow in denial of my need to father my own children, and your worry that I will break your heart because of it, or that I’ll die?”
“Well, I mean, obviously that’s the oversimplified version, but essentially yes.”
“Firstly, I can’t promise you I won’t die; I’m afraid that’s out of my control, but I will do my level best not to, at least not until I’m in my nineties.”
She let out an amused huff of a laugh.
“Now let me put something to you. Say I was fifty, never had kids, and told you I never wanted to?”
“Well, that would be different, wouldn’t it? You’d be older . . .”
“So, what, at thirty-three years of age I’m too young to know my own mind? Immature for my age?”
“Joe!”
“Answer the question.”
“No, obviously not. But . . .”
“I am in love with you, Maggie North. I am in it for the long haul. You are the only woman I see in my future. I promise you that is not going to change. I just. Want. You. Now, I’ll ask you again: Do you love me?”