Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

41. Neo

“Why the fuck did we agree to this again?” I asked, nuzzling Willa’s neck.

She was on my lap in the kitchen. wearing the tiny shorts and tank tops she wore around the house now that it was summer. She was almost five months pregnant and her tits were as luscious as perfectly ripe peaches.

She squirmed as I slid my hand under the tank top to fondle one of her nipples.

“Because they asked,” Drago said. “And we’re not assholes.”

“I thought we were assholes,” Rock said from the kitchen island where he was carefully constructing some kind of appetizer made out of eggplant and mozzarella.

“Okay,” Drago said, “sometimes we’re assholes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Why would we want it any other way?” I shifted because I was getting hard with Willa’s tit in my hand, her ass creating friction on my dick when she squirmed.

“We’ve been holed up here alone for months.” Rock straightened and looked meaningfully at Willa. “Maybe it’ll be good to have some company.”

“I don’t need company,” I said.

Drago sighed. “Maybe Willa would like some company, ever think of that?”

Now I got what they were saying: they thought Willa might be lonely. Aventine”s campus was a ghost town, all of Willa’s closest friends home or abroad or in the Caribbean for summer vacation.

“Seems like Willa’s pretty happy to me,” I said, sliding my hand over her slightly rounded stomach and under the waistband of her shorts. I slipped my fingers over her mound and into her pussy. She was soaked. “In fact, I can guarantee it.”

“I’m pretty happy,” Willa said. “But company will be nice.”

She moved on my fingers, just tiny movements, like it wasn’t obvious what we were doing when Rock was right there making food and Drago was two seats away at the island.

“Jesus fuck,” Rock said. “Knock that shit off or I’m never going to get this food prepped.”

“See?” I said, circling Willa’s clit with my thumb. “We shouldn’t have agreed to company.”

“Daisy’s in a tough spot with the Beasts,” Drago said, his eyes on my hand in Daisy’s shorts. “Wolf thought she could use someone to talk to. Plus, they haven’t gotten the pool in up at the house and it’s going to be hotter than hell today.”

“How is any of that our problem?” I asked.

I didn’t give two fucks that our life with Willa was insulated. We had everything we needed here, and one week slid into the next in a haze of food and sex and movies and bad TV and cuddling (which I would go to my grave denying I enjoyed).

Why the fuck would we need anything else?

Most weeks we only left for groceries. I was more than okay with it, although Rock had been pushing the idea of something called a babymoon for Willa, which apparently was some kind of last-hurrah vacay you took before you had a baby.

Willa removed my hand. “That’s enough of that. I am not going to come in the kitchen while we talk about Daisy and the Beasts.”

She turned her green eyes on me, and for a second, I forgot about everything else. That was how it was when Willa looked at me — like the world stopped, like everything else fell away, even all the bad shit I’d been sure would cling to me forever.

“Our baby is going to need other people,” Willa said. “Community.”

“Community?” I scowled. “Why? They’ll have us.”

We still didn’t know whether the baby was a boy or a girl — Willa wanted it that way — and honestly I didn’t care. If it was a boy, we’d make sure he knew we loved him, make sure he didn’t grow up scared or thinking he was a piece of shit, that he knew how to treat women right.

How to protect them. How to love them, something I was just learning.

Something Willa was teaching me.

And if it was a girl, she would be like Willa — strong and funny and beautiful. Her eyes would sparkle when she talked and she would light up every room with her smile.

It would be like having a little Willa running around, except that version of Willa would be us too. She would be the best of all of us, because that was what we were going to give our baby, boy or girl.

Willa placed her hand on my face, the way she did when she really wanted my attention. And it always fucking worked too, because when she looked at me like that, like she was looking at me now, I’d do anything in the fucking world for her.

Who was I kidding? I’d do anything in the fucking world for her all the time.

“What would we have done without each other?” she asked.

I felt like my fucking heart was about to stall in my chest because I knew the answer: we would have been lost forever without each other. Fuck, I’d already been lost when Willa had come to Aventine, just like I’d been lost in that closet when we were kids until she’d opened the door.

“Our baby will have us,” I reminded her.

She nodded. “But you never know what this world is going to throw at them. Isn’t it better to have lots of people to count on?”

“Our baby won’t need to count on anybody else,” I said, because I was a stubborn motherfucker, even with Willa.

She smiled, like she knew I was in a mood and wasn’t going to give in, which was correct. “Okay, then I’d like some community. Claire and Mara are still in school. They don’t even have boyfriends, let alone three of them. And I like Daisy. I can be there for her while she sorts out this thing with the Beasts, and I’ll be able to talk to her about stuff that’s harder for other people to understand.”

Now I got it. Willa was still young — only twenty-one — and she was about to be a mother — and a wife to all of us once she decided whether she wanted to have the wedding before or after the baby was born.

It felt natural and right, but I knew not everybody saw it that way, that it was hard to understand, even for people like Claire and Mara — Willa’s two best friends — who didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

Plus, Willa was still on the outs with her mom — they talked, but they were a long way from being close — and I guessed she might feel sad that her mom wasn’t around when she was going to get married and have a baby.

So yeah. Willa might not be lonely, but she didn’t have anyone who really understood her life. She was making it clear that she wanted that, and my only fucking mission in life had become to give Willa everything she wanted, so a cookout with the fucking Beasts it was.

“Fine,” I grumbled. “But only if you let me make you come before they get here.”

Her breath caught in her throat as I slipped my hands back into her shorts.

“Here?”

“Right fucking here,” I said, stroking through her wet folds. “I want these two cookout-hosting motherfuckers to watch. It’s the least they can do.”