Not us. Never us. I snapped back into my body and stomped toward him, pumping my arms as if the room were the length of a football field. “No. No, Carson, no. Just no.”

“No what, Lane? No, I’m not allowed to ask? Or no, I’m not allowed to feel?”

“No, you’re not supposed to feel that. And no, you shouldn’t need to ask.” I stopped a foot away from him, my hands gripping my pants. “Where is this coming from? I thought we were having fun. I thought we were okay.”

“Okay?” he asked skeptically. “Is that all you want? An okay life with an okay guy in an okay apartment?”

“First off, no one would ever describe this apartment as ‘okay.’” The joke fell flat so I tried again. “I love you. And I love our life together. Don’t you?

“You know the answer to that question,” he said. “It’s never going to change.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“What’s going on? Well, my brother is getting hitched…again. This time to someone he actually loves. He has a great house, his business is doing really well, and as soon as they get back from their wedding, he and Andi will probably start popping out mini Handi’s.”

Normally, I loved hearing his shortcut expression to describe his brother and fiancée. Almost as much as I loved that he thought of us as “Carney.” Did it mean he’d call our kids Carnies? Wasn’t a big fan of that possibility. Just like I wasn’t a big fan of the intensity of this entire conversation.

“Eric and Hillary are engaged,” he continued, “and are already looking for a house together. Everyone around us is planning out their future, Lane. But we’ve never even talked about it. I don’t even know if you want kids, or if you want to stay in San Francisco, or if you even want to get married.” He took a breath. “Why don’t you ever talk about our future, babe? Women talk about that shit all the time. Even when they don’t have a guy. But you don’t. You never have. Why not?”

I scratched my head, maybe to get my brain working again. Because I didn’t know. He was right—we didn’t talk about that stuff. We talked about everything…except where our relationship was headed. He made the occasional joke about it—kids, making an honest woman out of me, those kinds of things—but we’d never talked about it seriously. I had a five-year plan for my career, but not for us. I guess I’d just been so worried about our relationship changing I’d never really considered that change isn’t always a bad thing. And it was inevitable anyway.

While I knew Carson was so much better than all the frogs I’d been with, I still couldn’t forget how hurt I’d been when my future plans had proven to be so far from reality. Expectations and happy endings were still dirty words, scary phrases. Just like What’s that crawling on your shoulder? or politician.

“Do you not think I’m going to be part of it?” he asked softly. “Is that why?”

I inhaled only halfway, my body refusing to function, just like my mouth. All I could force out was a long, pathetic-sounding, “No.” I stuttered, tried to formulate thought, but nothing happened. It was one of those moments, those horrible moments in a movie when you yell at the screen and scream, “Say something!” to the character.

A couple of words. That’s all it would take. And everything might be able to go back to normal.

But this was so unexpected, I didn’t know how to respond. No words appeared in my head. No useful ones, anyway.

I wiped my hand over my face. “I don’t know what to say other than no, that’s not why.”

“Do you want to be with me?”

I nodded so fast I had to step backwards to catch myself before I fell over.

He sighed. “You’re drunk.”

I grabbed his arm as he turned away. “I’m not drunk. I’m just…I didn’t expect to have this conversation, so I’m at a loss for what to tell you. But you’re wrong. About everything. I want to be with you. I don’t know why we don’t talk about it. But we can.”

I couldn’t tell if he believed me. The look on his face showed me nothing other than that he was hurting. And somehow, some way, it was my fault. All the things I didn’t say or hadn’t said for reasons I didn’t know. Oh, shit. I was seriously blowing this.

“Can we talk about it?” I asked softly.

He blew out a breath and then reached out to me, cradling my cheek in his hand. “Tomorrow, okay? I’m not up to it tonight.”

I held his hand to my face, not wanting him to go.

He kissed my forehead and whispered, “Maybe I’m going nuts. I don’t know. Let’s go to bed. We’ll have plenty of time to talk on the flight tomorrow.”

Without any other choice, I followed him into the bedroom, holding his hand tightly in mine.

How fucking ironic. I’d decided a good fight was what we needed. Be careful what you wish for.

I wasn’t ready for this. The idea had been to start small—little baby arguments we could handle before we tried tackling anything harder. This was emotional and deep, too emotional and too deep. We weren’t prepared for it.

And I would never have picked this battle.