“I’m falling for you, Katrina,” I murmur against her lips. Her eyes open in surprise, and just when I expect her to say something along the lines of this is moving so fast, she does what she always does.
She surprises me.
“It’s about time you caught up,” she replies, and jumps into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist and kissing me for all she’s worth.
“So, you’re an arsonist,” Kat says as I arrange the logs in the fire pit and work at setting them on fire.
“Or, I’m just starting a fire so you don’t freeze to death. I’m a man, keeping my woman alive.”
“Well, there’s a warm condo right over there,” she says reasonably.
“Don’t rain on my parade,” I reply, and satisfied that the fire isn’t going to fizzle out, begin spreading blankets and pillows over the sand.
“I’m just teasing. This is nice.” She sits next to me on the blanket and watches the fire grow. “The stars here are amazing.”
“No light noise from the city,” I reply, following her gaze to the heavens. “There’s Orion.”
“And the Big Dipper,” she says with a grin. “When I was eight, my parents gave me an assignment to map out the constellations.”
“At eight?” I ask, surprised.
“It was fun,” she replies with a nod. “I had to map it from scratch, using this really cool telescope and books that they bought me to study.”
“At eight.”
“It wasn’t that hard,” she replies, a bit defensively, and I lean over to kiss her cheek.
“You really are a genius.”
“According to my IQ, that’s what they say. But honestly, I think a big part of it was my parents. They expected a lot from me, academically speaking, and they began teaching me when I was only a few months old.”
“Wow.”
“I went to work with them, and listened to conversations between literal rocket scientists. I was around some of the most prolific minds of the twenty-first century from the time I was in the womb. So, I don’t know how much of it is nature versus nurture, but my guess would be some of both.”
“And what about when you have kids?” I ask, surprised when she starts shaking her head furiously.
“I’m not having children.”
“Why not?”
She pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them tight, still gazing up into the stars. “Because I don’t want to do that to them. I don’t want to put so much pressure on a child to learn quickly, to get it right all the time.”
“To get what right?”
“Everything. My parents are awesome, and they’re smart, but they are intense. Failure was never an option for me, in anything that I chose to do. When I was a teenager, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at something normal. So I signed up for volleyball through the high school.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah, I was homeschooled, but it had to be affiliated with a local school, and we had the option of participating in their elective classes and sports. So I thought it would be fun to join a sport and be around other kids my age.”
“Seems reasonable. How did it go?”
“It was a fiasco.” She laughs and turns to me. The glow from the fire lights up her face, making her hair look even redder than it is. “I was horrible at it.”
“That’s okay. You can’t be good at everything.”
“But that’s just it: my parents thought I should be.” She shakes her head and looks down at her hands. “It was humiliating just how bad I was. I wanted to quit, but they wouldn’t let me. ‘We finish what we start,’ they said. So I had to spend the entire season on the bench, and the other girls were not friendly. It was the first time I’d ever experienced bullying or just plain meanness from other kids.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All I’m saying is, I don’t want to have kids just to make them feel like they have to excel at every little thing.”
“You’re not your parents,” I remind her gently. “I don’t believe that you’d parent that way.”
“Not on purpose,” she replies. “But my parents would expect certain things from my children, and I’d feel obligated to make sure those expectations were met.”
“Like?”
“Like putting them in the right schools, having them tested for IQ levels, which I don’t give two shits about.”
“Well, here’s a news flash for you: any children you have are yours, Kat. Not theirs. So while they are free to voice their opinions whenever they want, that’s all it is. Their opinion. You’re not obligated to do what they say.”
“I know, it’s just tough. I like to please my parents.”
“I think that’s pretty normal. Is that the only reason you don’t want kids?”
“I don’t really like kids,” she replies, wrinkling her nose. “I mean, they’re not horrible, but they annoy the shit out of me after a while.”
“I’m going to call bullshit on that. You were great with Kenny today.”
“I only had to talk to him for like six minutes.” She chews her lip, thinking it over. “Although, he wasn’t so bad. His mom annoyed me more than he did.”
“Okay, no more kid talk.”
“Oh, good.” She grins and starts rooting around in the bag I brought down with the blankets and pillows.