don’t think I’ve been to bed at this time since I was seven years old,’ she said as Steele climbed back into bed. ‘I used to beg to stay up then!’
‘Do you want to watch a movie or just go to sleep?’ he asked, and they shared a very nice kiss.
‘I just want to sleep.’ She sighed, wriggling down in the covers and getting comfortable with him.
‘Then do.’
She lay on his chest, delighted with their early night, feeling the lovely crinkly hair on his stomach and wondering if she’d ever been happier. ‘I love your stomach,’ Candy said.
‘If you want to sleep you’d better stop playing with it, then.’
She didn’t.
She thought back to what she’d been about to ask in the kitchen. Whether Steele had done the cooking or if his wife had was irrelevant, she knew. There was other stuff she’d like to know, though. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You can,’ he said, staring into the semi-dark and sort of knowing what was coming and wondering how he’d answer it.
‘Why did your marriage break up?
‘We just didn’t work out,’ Steele said. Then he went to add his spiel about they’d been too young, or they’d just grown apart, yet he and Candy had always been honest with each other. They were so honest with each other that it sometimes took his breath away. Which meant he didn’t want to be evasive now, yet he had never told anyone the reason for the break-up. He’d never told anyone apart from his ex-wife that he was infertile.
And when he had told Annie, she hadn’t taken the news well.
‘I haven’t really talked about it before,’ Steele admitted.
‘Were you a wife basher?’ Candy whispered.
‘No.’ He laughed.
‘Then it doesn’t matter,’ Candy said, and gave him a light kiss on the chest. ‘You don’t have to answer.’
He wanted to, though.
‘Annie and I got married when I was twenty-three and she was twenty-six. We’d been going out for years,’ Steele said. ‘We bought the house, the dog, all good …’
Candy didn’t like that.
It was funny but she felt the little stiffening of her body as he gave his past a name and an age but then she breathed out through her nostrils and lay there, waiting for him to continue. ‘Then Annie decided, or rather we both decided, to start a family.’
‘She decided or both?’ Candy checked.
‘I thought we should wait but Annie really wanted children so we went for it but nothing happened,’ Steele said. ‘And then nothing kept on happening. I went and had a test—they usually check for issues with the guy first as it’s far less invasive—and so we found out, pretty much straight away, that the problem was me. I’m infertile.’ He waited for her to stiffen again, or some sign of tension, or what, he didn’t know, but instead she looked up at him through the darkness. ‘That’s why you broke up?’
‘Pretty much. Annie was devastated. I mean, the news completely sent her into a spin.’
‘You broke up just because of that?’ Candy asked. She really didn’t understand.
‘It causes a big strain in a marriage. Then there was all her family and how they dealt with the news.’ Steele let out a sigh. ‘Can you imagine your family’s reaction if you told them that your husband was infertile?’
Candy thought for a moment and she could and so she answered him honestly. ‘One, I’m not very keen on getting married …’
‘Come on.’
‘Seriously, I’m not,’ she said. ‘Two, I wouldn’t tell them—it’s none of their business. I might tell them that we were having problems if they nagged enough.’ She thought about it some more. ‘Steele, I do everything I can not to discuss sex and such with them—I still hide my Pills in my handbag.’
‘I guess.’ He smiled. ‘After all, you hid me in the bedroom.’
Candy nodded to his chest. ‘So I certainly wouldn’t be discussing my partner’s sperm count with them.’
Steele gave a low laugh.
‘You said that she’d been back in touch?’ she ventured.
‘Yep, her second marriage has broken up and she asked if I would consider giving us another go, though with one proviso—there have been a lot of advances in technology apparently …’
‘What a cow!’
He smiled. ‘My thoughts at the time—well, a little less politely put in my head. I just hung up on her.’
‘You didn’t consider it.’
‘I don’t love her any more,’ he said. ‘I haven’t for a long time.’
He looked a little more closely into the timeline of his marriage and divorce, something he rarely did. ‘When I found out that I probably couldn’t be a father and Annie had wrapped her head around the news, she lined us up for this battery of tests and investigations. She started to talk about donor sperm and, to be completely honest …’ Steele hesitated; it hurt to be honest at times. ‘I think I knew then that we had more problems than my infertility.’
‘Like?’
He had never really examined it. He’d just shoved that into the too-hard basket, but lying there, her fingers on his stomach and her breath on his chest, he felt able to go further. ‘Well, I’d always planned on being the complete opposite to my parents with my children. I didn’t want boarding school or that sort of thing. I wanted to be a real hands-on father. When we first started trying to have a baby, though I thought we were maybe jumping in rather too soon, I was also looking forward to it. I think we all assume, or at least I did, that I’d be a parent one day. When I got the results I suddenly lost all that. I told Annie and she sobbed and she cried and then she had to go to her family and wail with them. It went on for weeks, and do you know what, Candy?’
She heard the bitterness in his voice and now she could understand it. ‘What?’
‘I was feeling pretty awful at the time. Seriously awful. I wanted some time to get my head around it. I wanted to process the knowledge that I couldn’t have children. In hindsight we’d had it really good till that point. We’d never had to deal with anything major. And when we did, I found out that I didn’t like the way Annie dealt with the difficult things that life flings at us at times. She made it all about her, not even about us. It was all about Annie. I tried to understand where she was coming from, yet she never did that for me. I think I fell out of love. If I was ever properly in love in the first place …’ he mused. ‘So, yes, while I’ve always thought that it was infertility that broke us up, I don’t think it’s that neat.’
He loved it that she was still there. She hadn’t even jolted when he’d told her. Maybe because they were temporary, Steele pondered. Maybe because she wasn’t worried about his ability to make babies, but it was nice to have said it and to have got such a calm reaction.
‘Was she blonde?’ Candy asked, and it made him smile.
‘No.’
‘Tall and leggy?’
‘Go to sleep.’ He was really smiling now as he kissed the top of her head.
‘Can I ask another thing?’ she said sleepily.
‘You can.’
‘Why are we using condoms?’
‘Because I always have.’
‘So have I.’ She gave him a little nudge and Steele lay there smiling at the potential