Chapter 23 Angelie
ANGELIE
“Hey!”
Dylan greets me with his trademark grin as I open the door, pressing a bottle of wine into my hands as he brushes past me and into the house. “Damn, that smells good…”
“I think you’re meant to let her invite you in first, Dylan,” Callum calls after his brother, pulling me into a hug and dropping a kiss on my cheek. “Thanks for having us, Angelie. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”
“Me too,” Joe interjects, as they all head into the living room, where the quads are currently hanging out together.
I set them up with some paper and pencils so they could draw while I made dinner for the guys, but I know I’m going to have to get them to bed soon enough so I can talk to my visitors about the matter at hand.
I stand for a moment in the doorway to the living room, just watching all of them together.
Callum is down on his haunches, peering with great interest at a picture Chuck is drawing, while Dylan has already taken up pencils himself to add something to Chrissie’s picture.
Carlisle and Joe are on the edge of the couch, paper in both of their laps, admiring the work that the kids have already done.
My heart twists for a second in my chest, seeing them like this, all four of my men with all four of my children.
Well. All five of my children, to be exact…
“You think you could give me a hand getting everything served up, Callum?” I ask him, and he glances up, grinning.
“Sure thing. Joe, come on, you know this place better than I do.”
“Not sure there’s room for all three of us in there,” Joe remarks, flashing me a grin. “Though I guess we’ll find a way to make it work.”
I giggle, biting my lip as I follow them through to serve up the curry that I’ve spent the day cooking.
I wanted to make sure they had something substantial, given that they’ve been working on both construction sites over the past few months.
Not that it seems to have done them any harm, given that they look even stronger than ever, their bodies bronzed from spending so much time outside in the sun.
My teeth rest on my bottom lip for a moment as I watch Joe pull some plates out of the high cupboard, unable to not notice the way that his body moves when he’s right there in front of me.
But that’s not the point of tonight.
No, the point of tonight is to come clean about what I know to be true now—about what the doctor confirmed to me a few days ago. That I am really, truly pregnant.
The part the doctor couldn’t tell me for sure, though, was how they’re going to take it.
With the construction drawing to a close, I know I have to jump on the chance to make sure that I share how I feel with them.
But it’s not as though it’s exactly easy, laying it all out like that, given that I hardly have any experience actually looking to the men I’ve been with for support.
“Okay, just give me a few minutes—I’m going to get the kids to bed,” I tell Joe and Callum, as they start dishing up the food onto plates, cracking into the wine that Dylan brought.
I wonder if I should tell them not to pour me a glass, but I get the feeling that they would catch on to me in an instant, and that’s the last thing I need.
“Okay, calling all babies,” I announce as I step through the living room door.
Dylan raises his eyebrows at me, grinning. “Sure you can’t spare another half hour? Chrissie and I were just getting started on this picture…”
“Maybe you can finish it up some other time,” I reply as the toddlers swarm around my legs. “But I really need it to be just us tonight, okay?”
“Fine,” Dylan replies, pulling a face like he can hardly stand it. “You need any help, getting these four up the stairs?”
“Might be useful to have some backup,” I reply. “Carlisle, you think you can hold down the fort here?”
“I’ll do what I can,” he says, stooping down to clear away some of the art supplies.
Dylan picks up Chrissie and Chuck, who rest against him like they’re used to his presence by now. As I follow him up the stairs, my mind flashes back to what he said when he first showed me the blueprints for the new house, when he told me that he could be a one-woman kind of guy.
I think, despite myself, I’m actually starting to believe him.
Once Dylan and I have the kids in bed—though it takes a little longer than it normally might, given that he insists on tucking each of them in one at a time—we head downstairs, to find that Joe and Callum have served up our food, mismatched glasses half-filled with wine dotted around the coffee table.
“Thanks for…for helping out,” I say, as Dyan flops down on the couch, reaching for his food.
It’s strange, having them all here in my house like this for the first time—this space that has been all mine for so long, a place that I’ve made for my children, suddenly filled with all this energy and company.
“You made the food,” Carlisle remarks. “Least we could do, right?”
“Yeah, but—I mean, thanks for coming at all,” I blurt out, feeling a little stupid for allowing myself to get so emotional about all of this.
I know I should keep myself together, stop myself from getting drawn in to the feelings that are threatening to get the better of me.
I need to stay focused, not let myself get too wrapped up in the possibilities of everything that might happen now that they’re here with me.
I take a seat, squishing myself in on one of the old couches next to Dylan—there’s hardly room in here for all five of us, but as we begin to eat, it feels homely. Cozy, instead of crowded.
“This is great,” Joe tells me through a mouthful of food, reaching for his wine to wash it down. “Didn’t realize what a good cook you were, Angelie.”
“Nice to have an excuse to make something other than toddler food for a change,” I reply, and the others laugh.
“And soon you won’t have to stick to that tiny kitchen either,” Callum adds. “The house should be done by the end of the year, at the latest. Plenty of room in there for you to try out new recipes.”
“Well, when I get the time away from work,” I protest. “I thought I was going to get at least a year off when the school burned down, but you guys had to go and build it up again like that…”
“Yeah, we should have known better,” Carlisle replies. “Let you take a sabbatical.”
“Not that we’re much good at those,” Dylan reasons. “We hardly took any time off, after we…” Suddenly, he trails off, and a heavy weight clings to the air in the room—none of them want to say it, but I can sense it, the matter that they’re dodging.
“After the military?” I ask, as delicately as I can.
I don’t know if I have any right to go delving into all of this, but at the same time, I want to know what happened—why they left, why they seem so reluctant to talk about everything that happened there, why they’ve abandoned that part of themselves as though they never want to acknowledge it again as long as they live.
“Yeah, after the military,” Dylan agrees, and all of a sudden, none of them are eating, all of them reaching for their wine like they want nothing more than to forget it.
I chew my lip. I could just leave it there…but if I’m going to come to really understand these guys, really support them in the way that I want them to support me, then I need to ask the hard questions.
“What…what happened while you were in the military?” I ask softly. The words seem to hang there in the middle of the room, so heavy nobody wants to be the one to grab on to them.
But after a long silence, Carlisle finally begins to speak, his voice weighted with the pain of something that he has long-since wished to leave behind.
“It was my idea, for us to join up,” he admits.
“We were—shit, I was sick of sitting around on my ass in this town, feeling like I was doing nothing but making life harder for people. Feeling like they hated me and my family, and they wanted me gone, sooner rather than later. And the guys…”
He looks around, a slight smile curling up the corners of his lips. “They said they were coming with me,” he replies. “Wouldn’t let me do it alone.”
“Not like we had much else going for us,” Dylan interjects, trying to lighten the mood, but it doesn’t seem to change much.
Carlisle glances in his direction, acknowledging him with a slight smile, before he continues.
“And I had it in my head that this would be some kind of way to…I don’t know, fix all the shit that my father did here,” he explains, shaking his head.
“Like it would put it all behind me, and I would be able to actually do something useful with my life. I had this stupid, romantic idea of the military in my mind and I was sure that I would be able to feel like I actually had some kind of purpose if I signed up and did what they told me. Maybe I was looking for direction, maybe I was—I don’t fucking know. ”
As his words fail him, Joe picks up, locking eyes with me and downing another generous gulp of wine. I wonder if any of them have noticed that I haven’t so much as laid a hand on mine, but they seem so caught up in the conversation at hand, I doubt it’s crossed their minds.
“We went through training together, the whole nine yards,” he explains. “And we got deployed together too. Sent out to—well, you know damn well where they were sending new recruits like us four years ago, right?”
I nod. Hard to miss that kind of thing, even if I was up to my eyeballs in diaper changes at the time.
“And it wasn’t what any of us thought it would be,” he continues gruffly, glancing around the room for confirmation, which he soon gets. The others nod, none of them so much as looking as each other, as though locking eyes with the others will bring back memories none of them want to deal with.