Chapter 16

Alexander

The last time I was this nervous was over a decade earlier, at my interview for Emory. The feeling I had when the admissions officer shook my hand was still fresh in my mind, as if it were yesterday. I had all the same symptoms, if that’s what you could call it. My hands were shaking, I could feel drops of sweat making their way from the back of my neck downward, and I could barely form words into proper sentences. Walking up to Casey’s doorway, I told myself that the worst thing that could happen was that she could turn me down, once and for all.

But that worst thing was pretty damn terrible. I was falling in love with Casey, and I didn’t know if she wanted me in her life at all.

Knock, knock, knock. I stood with my legs slightly apart, wondering how my knock had sounded. Was it too aggressive? Too weak? Too many knocks? Too few? Get it together, Alexander, I told myself.

The chain clanked against the lock as the doorknob slowly turned. “What do you want, Alexander?” Casey asked. She seemed less than thrilled to see me, but that wasn’t what caught me off guard. In an athletic tank top and yoga pants, Casey’s baby bump was visible to me for the first time. She wasn’t much more than four months along so the bump wasn’t enormous, but it was enough to make me take the smallest step backward.

“I... uh…” Just as it happened in my Emory interview, I froze. I didn’t know what to say next.

“That’s what I thought,” Casey said. She began to close the door, but I reached my arm out to stop her.

“Can we please talk?” I said. I reached forward and handed Casey the bouquet of roses I’d been clutching for dear life.

She sighed. As peculiar as it was, her voice didn’t sound angry. It had notes that more closely resembled curiosity. “Fine.” She stepped aside and made room for me to squeeze inside her apartment, taking the flowers from my hand.

Though the sight of the baby bump caught me by surprise, I had to admit that it wasn’t a disappointment. That was our child, whatever that meant right now. I hoped Casey understood that this was all as new for me as it was for her. I just hoped that Brett’s advice would serve me well.

Casey looked absolutely stunning. Even with a quarter of the makeup she had worn on most of our dates and wrinkled clothing she had obviously slept in, she was beautiful. Her delicate skin crinkled around her eyes in a way that said she hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep, but her eyes were still as brown and bold as ever. “You look gorgeous, as usual,” I said, hoping to break the ice.

“Thanks,” Casey whispered. A faint blush appeared on her face. She walked across the apartment and sat on the couch, motioning for me to follow.

“Casey, there’s something I want you to know,” I said.

Her eyes met mine. “What’s that?”

“I want to raise this child together.” I had never heard my voice sound more confident, but I knew in my heart this was the move I was meant to make.

“You…what?”

“I know that our relationship started off a bit, well, unconventional,” I said. “But I really care about you, and I’ve started to care about this baby. I thought things were going really well, but you haven’t returned my calls in weeks. I guess I’d just like to know why.”

Casey opened her mouth to speak, but tears came falling down instead. What had I said to upset her? I thought I had been as polite as I could while still being matter-of-fact. Seeing Casey cry broke my heart into a thousand tiny pieces. I pulled her in and laid her head on my shoulder. She let out slow, desperate sobs, and all I could think was that, if I was the source of this hurt, it would be best for me to leave Casey and her baby alone.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” I said, trying to hold back my own tears. “I should go. I’m sorry that I’ve upset you.” I slowly stood up from the couch and turned my head to face Casey, trying to memorize every detail of her. God, I hoped this wasn’t the last time I’d ever see her.

“Wait,” Casey said, grabbing my hand. “It’s not you.”

In the gentlest voice I could muster, I asked, “Then what is it?”.

I listened in awe as Casey’s walls came down and she went through her childhood in meticulous detail. For the first time since I’d met her, I felt like I was seeing the whole picture. It turned out that Casey’s upbringing was much rougher than I could have imagined. Her father had never been in the picture, and she lived a relatively normal life until her mother died in a car accident when she was ten years old. As if that weren’t enough to turn a young girl’s world upside down, Casey had no other immediate family, so she was sent from foster home to foster home until she turned eighteen.

Casey walked over to the end table and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. As I traced my fingers over each first and last name, she explained that these were the names of the fourteen families she’d lived with over the course of eight years. Fourteen. That meant she’d spent an average of only seven months with each family. What kind of life was that for a teenager? I was completely shocked, and also heartbroken that Casey had endured such a tough time.

“Once I was eighteen, I was on my own,” Casey explained. “Some of my friends in foster care got lucky and ended up being adopted by their foster parents. Others at least had consistent foster parents who they lived with for years. I wasn’t so lucky.”

I didn’t know the proper response, so I simply said what I was thinking. “That’s awful, Case. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Most people don’t,” Casey said. “I don’t really like to talk about it. It brings back a lot of hurt, plus a lot of people see it as an excuse or sob story.”

“Sob story? For what?”

Casey nodded as though she’d answered this question a dozen times before. “All different things. Foster kids have a reputation.” She paused, choking on the words that followed. “My childhood was ruined the second I was called to the principal’s office to be told my mother was in the hospital. I don’t think any good foster parent could have changed that.”

“Were there any?” I asked. “I mean, good foster parents.”

“Some were better than others,” Casey said. “The Foresters threw me a birthday party when I turned twelve, and the father of the Baez family gave me a few driving lessons. In the long run, though, no one wanted a teenager for the long-term. I was an old mutt in a pet store full of puppies.”

I wished so badly that I could take Casey’s pain away. So much made sense now—why Casey wanted a family, why she was hesitant to get involved in a relationship, why she hadn’t been able to finish school. For a split second, I was upset that she hadn’t told me sooner, but I realized how much courage it must have taken for her to open up at all.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. I knew how lame it sounded, but it was the truth. “I wish there were something I could do to make it better.”

Casey looked down at her stomach and smiled. “You already are. You’re giving me the greatest gift I could ask for… a family.”

I frowned and looked down at the floor, knowing that the family she meant was likely just her and the baby, not the three of us. “I’m glad.”

“I’m sorry,” Casey said. “I guess this is why I, uh, haven’t been returning your calls. It’s just hard for me to let people in.”

“It’s alright,” I said.

Casey shook her head. “No, it’s not. And I’m sorry. I really had a great time camping with you and I sort of just freaked out.”

“Case, if this is what you want, you and me, we can work through this together,” I started, not exactly sure where I was going to end up. “I’m not only here for the good times. I’m here for the good and the bad.”

“Did you… did you mean what you said earlier?” Casey asked.

“About what?”

“You know… about us raising the baby together.”

“Of course,” I said, meeting her gaze. “Look, I know things started off on a weird note for us. Ok, beyond a weird note. But why should that have any bearing on our future?”

Casey hesitated before responding. “I suppose.” She cracked a smile. “I can’t believe such a hottie wants to raise a kid with me. Damn.”

The mood had changed, and it was absolutely exhilarating to know Casey felt the same way about me that I felt about her. The dark cloud above our relationship had been lifted, and we shifted gears in the conversation to fill each other in on the past few weeks of our lives. Casey told me stories of the craziest patients that had come into the clinic, while I showed her an ‘80s rock band parody I found online that I’d been dying for her to see.

Casey’s infectious giggle gave me the courage to push a step further. “I do have one more question.”

“Don’t press your luck, Mr. Preston,” Casey said with a laugh. “What is it?”

“With the holidays coming up, I was wondering if you wanted to come to Tampa with me to have Christmas with my family,” I said. Casey was quite the mystery, so I didn’t know what to expect in her response.

“A real Christmas?” Casey asked, seemingly confused and excited. “I’d love to!”

I’d come to Casey’s apartment not knowing if this was going to be the end of our relationship or the start of something more serious. It meant everything to know that it was the latter. We didn’t talk too much about the baby—after all, we’d still only been dating for a few months—but it was nice to know that it was no longer a topic to avoid. If someone had told me a few months earlier that this was the situation I’d be in, I would’ve told them to stop joking… or given them a drug test. Now, Casey was all I could think about. The idea of bringing her to meet my family brought a smile to my face.

Casey curled up against me on the couch, and, for a moment, the rest of the world didn’t seem to matter. “Casey,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to donate sperm anymore,” I said with a laugh. “I think I’ve already done pretty well.”