Moonlight

Chapter 7: Future

Carter

Dylan yanks me into our room, causing me to pull my arm back. I look at him like he's lost his mind. I was patiently waiting for him to return with our popcorn, but instead he pulls me away frantically.

"What—" he shuts the door and instantly presses his ear against my stomach. I try to pull away but he holds my waist firmly. I furrow my eyebrows as he sighs in relief. He stressfully rubs his face before standing up to face me.

"Do you want kids?"

What kind of a question is that? We've barley turned 18, and frankly I'd like to be established in my career before I even entertained the thought of kids.

"Not now." I say nervously, peering at him anxiously. Did he want kids sooner than I did? We'd never really talked about it. Frankly, we'd never even talked about marriage. I feel like we've just been dealing with so much, we didn't have time to focus on our relationship within itself.

He nods in agreement.

"What's going on?"

"Someone in the house is pregnant... and I was just worried it was you."

Pushing aside my curiosity of who's pregnant, I pull him down to sit on the bed with me. "We've never really talked about it. We haven't had a lot of time to talk about what we look like after graduation."

"We can have that conversation." He places his hand on my knee, and I can feel it shaking slightly. "I just don't want what my parents had."

"We won't—" "We could be. They were mates too ya know?"

I drape my legs over his, snuggling into his side. "We're not our parents."

"What if we want different things?"

"We compromise."

He's quiet for a while, and I run my fingers softly up and down his arm.

"I just want to make sure you're taken care of. I want a good job, one where you don't have to work if you don't want to. Like you have the option of being barefoot and pregnant."

I snort. He's really adorable. He might be the kind of guy who goes hunting and wouldn't be caught dead showing much emotion to his family, no matter how many toxic masculinity rants I go on.

"You laugh, but I'm serious!" he playfully bumps my shoulder with his. "I want like a house in the outskirts with like land and maybe even horses I don't know."

You can take the boy out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the boy. Horses, I scoff.

He places a hand on my knee, rubbing it slightly with his thumb. "We want different things don't we?"

I feel the energy in the room shift, and I stay silent, trying to focus my attention on his hand on my knee.

"You can't hide your thoughts from me forever."

"I know." I say, but suddenly the air feels heavy, and the feeling I have in my chest is enough for me to know that we did indeed want different things.

I wanted to live in a city, because I think my job would require so. I hadn't given much thought to what I'd become. Sure, college was in eight months, but you have to register for classes in summer. So essentially, I had six months to decide what career path I wanted to embark upon. Though I have no solid plan, the few ideas I've dappled with wouldn't exactly work in an off-the-grid farmhouse with horses and chickens befriending my children. I was looking into journalism or criminology or teaching. I wasn't looking into being barefoot and pregnant, especially anytime soon. But even then, I've always been goal oriented. I needed something driving me. Something progressive that I worked toward, and being a stay-at-home mom wasn't in the cards for me. I wish it was, because it's clear that's what he wanted, and I wanted to give that to him, but I knew I couldn't.