49. Callie
Callie
I could not stop crying and I was furious about it.
Cole's arms were around me and I was pressed into his chest and I was furious at his chest for being exactly what I had wanted.
Luke was behind me, his palm warm at the small of my back, and I was furious at his palm for being warm.
Ben had his forehead against my temple and I was furious at his forehead, I was furious at his temple, I was furious at the weight of a man who cared about you pressing against the side of your face when you had spent days deciding he didn't care about you.
I could feel all three of them breathing.
The rise and fall of Cole's chest under my cheek, Luke's slow exhale against the back of my neck, Ben's thumb moving in a small circle on my shoulder that he probably wasn't even aware of doing.
I was so angry and so relieved that both feelings were occupying the same space in my chest, and they were taking turns, and it was making me cry harder, which I had not thought possible.
They had hurt me and I loved them and I was furious.
"I hate you all a little bit," I breathed, into Cole's chest.
"That's fair," Cole said. His voice was low enough to feel through his sternum.
"And sometimes more than a little," I admitted.
"Still fair," Ben said.
I pressed my face harder into Cole's chest and tried to breathe and mostly just cried some more, and Luke pressed closer from behind, and I thought: this is the problem. Being near them felt too good in a way I had never been able to talk myself out of.
And then Luke snorted. It was a full-on pig-snort directly into my hair, and it was so unexpected that my whole body jumped.
"Did you just," I started.
"No."
"Luke."
"It was nothing." He cleared his throat. "Ignore that."
"Did you just snort into my hair."
"I inhaled a curl."
"You inhaled a curl."
"It went up my nose and I panicked."
Ben made a noise that was trying very hard to be a cough and was failing completely. Cole's chest shook under my cheek. I felt it before I heard it, the silent vibrations of him trying not to laugh.
"I've been standing here crying for ten minutes," I said, "and Luke Carter got taken out by my hair."
"In my defense," Luke said, with great dignity, "it was a very aggressive curl."
That was it. I laughed so hard my legs gave out, and Cole went down to the floor with me because he refused to stop holding me, and Ben collapsed after him, and Luke, who had the most legs and the least floor space, ended up sort of draped over all of us like a six-foot weighted blanket with hazel eyes.
We were four people laughing on the floor of Tessa's guesthouse kitchen in the morning light so hard that I almost felt like I might pee a little. It took a while to get back to something resembling upright.
"Okay…. Okay…," Luke said eventually, still laughing from the floor, where he had not moved, one forearm over his eyes. "I have to go grab something from the truck."
He got up and flew out the door. Cole and Ben both straightened with scandalous smirks on their faces.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing," Ben said, too easily.
"That was not a nothing face. That was very specifically a something face."
"I don't have a something face."
"Ben. You have the most expressive face of the three of you, and that one was the face you make when you already know the ending and you're enjoying watching someone else try to figure it out. TELL ME."
He looked up at the ceiling and started to whistle.
I turned to Cole. "You're not going to tell me either."
"No."
"This is outrageous. You are all supposed to be begging for my forgiveness right now.
You are supposed to be on your knees. You are supposed to be groveling.
Actual groveling. On the floor. Which you were, briefly, but then you ruined it with whistling and secrets and I feel like I'm losing the thread of my own narrative here. "
One corner of Cole's mouth moved. The dimples were threatening to appear.
Cole Ramirez's dimples were a public safety hazard and whoever had given them to him should have included a warning label because I did not have the structural fortitude for them right now.
His ice-blue eyes were soft in a way that sat completely wrong with how big and still and terrifying the rest of him was, and I had been staring at the ceiling thinking about those eyes for two weeks.
I looked away before I did something I couldn't take back.
The front door opened and Luke came back in sideways, because whatever he was carrying did not fit through the door any other way.
He angled his shoulders and turned and brought through six feet of dirty, ripped, and absolutely filthy stuffed bear, the same bear that had apparently witnessed my entire driveway meltdown, and my hand flew to my mouth.
"Oh my god. I thought the trash men had taken him away."
"We went back and saved him." Luke's voice had gone a little rough at the edges. He set the bear down against the wall and the bear slumped there like a very large toddler who had been running errands all day and was done. There was a safety pin on the bear's chest with an envelope attached.
"You kept the bear that saw it all," I said. "The bear that witnessed the whole thing. The bear that knows too much." I looked at the bear. The bear looked back at me with his dead stuffed eyes, deeply unbothered. "He's been stuck in a truck all week and he still looks better than I do."
I touched the envelope on the bear's chest. "What is this."
"Open it," Cole said.
I pulled it free and opened it. It was a real estate printout and it took me a moment to make sense of it, my address, my name, the numbers.
"This is an offer on my house," I said slowly.
"It's our offer," Luke said. "We're the buyers."
I looked up.
Ben had his hands in his pockets. Cole was watching me steadily. Luke shoved the dirty-blond hair off his forehead and it fell straight back because his hair, like the rest of him, did not take direction from anyone.
"So either I can keep it or you buy it….," I started. I took a breath. "Either way I don't lose it."
"Either way," Cole said. "You keep it yourself and we'll help however you need. You take the money and start fresh somewhere. You figure out something else, we figure it out with you. Your house is yours, Callie. It was always going to stay yours."
I put the envelope down on the table next to Oliver's Arctic tern worksheet. The tern migrates forty thousand miles a year and always finds its way back home. I couldn't wait to tell Oliver we would find our way back to ours.
Cole sat back down on the kitchen floor.
Ben folded down next to him. Luke found a spot on the other side, and all three of them looked up at me like I was an exhibit they had paid admission to see.
A woman in a stained pajama top with cried-off mascara, and they were staring at me like I was the Sistine Chapel.
"We came that day," Ben said, from the floor, "to tell you that you had options.
That you could have one of us if you wanted, or all of us if you wanted that instead, and none of us was going to walk away from the other two over it.
That was the offer. That was what we came to say.
" He rubbed the back of his neck. "And then we drove up and saw Vaughn and our brains fell out of our heads, which we've already covered, and we never actually got to say what we really wanted to say to you. "
I looked at the three of them on the floor.
Cole, huge and tattooed, trying very hard not to look nervous about my response.
Luke, golden and rumpled, hazel eyes fixed on me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
Ben, broad and scruffy and steady, leaned back on his hands like a man with nowhere else to be, watching me with a half-grin that said he already knew how this ended.
"You absolute walking fucking morons," I laughed.
All three of them went very still.
"Do you have any idea what I have been telling myself?
I have been on a pullout couch for two weeks running the same loop in my head every single night.
I can't pick one because picking one means the other two find out and then a fifteen-year friendship explodes and I am the grenade.
I am the grenade, and I refuse to be the grenade.
But I also can't let myself want all three because what kind of person wants all three, what kind of woman sits on a bathroom floor crying because she can't stop missing three men simultaneously and in completely different ways, clearly there is something wrong with me, clearly I am too much, clearly I am greedy and broken and I need to locate a therapist and a good carbohydrate and just accept that my romantic instincts have the self-preservation of a love bug in May, which anyone who has ever owned a windshield can tell you is none.
" I took a breath. "And you had already figured all of it out.
You've already made peace with sharing me. "
I pressed my hands over my face and then dropped them.
"The answer is yes," I said. "To all of it. To the bear. To the house. To your kids. To all three of you, which is what I wanted and what I was too ashamed to want."
Three faces went through relief and disbelief and landed on joy so fast and so identically that for a second they looked like brothers.
Then Ben said, quietly, "Fair warning, Cupcake. You just said yes to three men who've been starving for two weeks. I'd give you a head start, but there's nowhere in this house we wouldn't find you."
"Before any of you touches me," I said, "there's something you need to know."
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside a bird was tweeting away, having a completely normal morning, and inside that kitchen three large men were holding their breath.
I had rehearsed this seventeen times in my head over two weeks.
I had planned a build-up. A gentle landing.
I had, at one point, drafted the whole thing as a three-act structure with an introduction and supporting evidence and a conclusion that transitioned naturally into next steps. None of that was happening.
"I'm pregnant," I said.
Nobody moved. The refrigerator kept humming like nothing had happened.
Cole put his hand flat on his own chest, over his heart. He swayed. Cole Ramirez, a man who didn't so much as flinch when a paintball took him in the throat, put his other hand out and caught the counter. His mouth opened but nothing came out.
Luke slid down the cabinet until he was sitting on the floor.
His head went back against the wood. He closed his eyes, opened them, fixed them on me, and his left hand clenching, the muscle in his forearm jumping with it.
His hair had fallen into his face and he was not shoving it back. His eyes were wet.
"Cupcake," he said, in the voice of a man holding it together by the bare hairs. "I am going to need a minute. And then I am going to need a lifetime."
Ben laughed. The realest laugh I had heard from him, the kind that started in his chest and took his whole face with it, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and his eyes went bright and wet, and he said, "Of course you are," like it was the most natural and inevitable sentence in the English language.
All three of them came toward me at the same time.
Ben kissed my temple and put his warm palm against the side of my face and looked at me like I had handed him an extraordinary gift.
Cole stopped in front of me. He was so much bigger than me, and he looked down at me with those pale wolf eyes and said, very quietly, "Can I."
He gestured towards my stomach.
"Yes," I said.
He put his hand on my belly. His palm was warm through the thin cotton of my pajama top, and he was so careful with it that my eyes started their nonsense again.
Luke's hand came to rest next to his. Ben pressed his palm over Cole's.
All three of them, just standing there with their hands on me in the kitchen at ten in the morning, holding onto our future.
Then Ben kissed my temple again. His mouth moved to the corner of my jaw.
"Hi," he said, against my skin.
"Hi," I said back, and my voice came out wrecked and small.
Luke's hand had not left my belly. He looked up at me, and I could see him working the question over before he asked it.
"How far along."
"Doesn't have to be far. The math points at the lake."
"The lake." His hand spread wider on my stomach. He looked at Cole. He looked at Ben. He looked back at me, and the slow stunned smile that broke across his face was one I had never seen on him before.
"All three of us, then."
"All three of you."
"Cupcake." His voice was a little wet at the edges, but he was holding it. "I spent two years in therapy learning to share my feelings with one person, and I am apparently about to share a child with two assholes I love. I am going to need extra sessions."
Cole snorted. Ben's hand went still as he tried not to laugh.
"I'm in," Luke said. "Whatever this is going to look like. I am in."
Three hands on me at once, promising me and the little baby growing inside me a future together. There were no more tears to cry. I was finally, stupidly happy.
And then something else entirely woke up, and it was not maternal.
I was standing in a kitchen soaked through my pajama bottoms for three men who could smell it on me like sharks. Cole's nostrils actually flared. The only coherent thought left in my head was: I hope they devour me. I hope they take turns. I hope Tessa's guesthouse has thick fucking walls.