Chapter 8 #3
“You’re going to be friends with Keira, right?
” Evan says as he hops back into the tub the moment Keira stumbles off to use the restroom.
He’s been glued to her all night, standing behind her instead of swimming or chilling at the firepit, so I figure he’d be nervous letting her wander off, wasted, with a bunch of single dudes everywhere, but no.
As soon as she gets onto the solid boards of the deck, he fully engages with me.
There must be so much trust here. What these guys do, at the level they do it, is so dangerous. I can see how protective they are with their girls, but they also trust their teammates to take care of them. It’s kind of amazing.
“Yeah, I like her,” I tell him. His giant grin and intense gaze are infectious, and I laugh.
“You don’t have to say that because she’s my wife,” he says way too seriously. “Be honest with me. You’re going to be her friend?”
I nod, a little confused. “Yeah. I’m not lying. Does she not make friends well? Everyone seems to love her.”
“Yes, she’s amazing. Everyone loves her. It’s just . . . I want another baby, and she’s being cagey about it, and I promised I wouldn’t trick her this time, sooooo . . .”
Right. That’s right. Joss did mention Gabe isn’t the only guy here who’s done shady shit to get a girl pregnant.
Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about that.
Already preggers here. If anything, I was the shady one, but when my gynecologic oncologist recommended saving the ovary that didn’t have any tumors, it was for hormonal reasons.
They even had me put a bunch of eggs on ice in case I wanted kids later.
So this wasn’t my fault, not really. Not sure where this lands on my luck spectrum.
“So . . . you want her to hang out with everybody who’s about to have a baby so hopefully, she’ll decide she needs another one, too?”
“You are so smart,” he says earnestly.
And he doesn’t need another baby soon, I’m thinking. He’s gotta be like 23. This isn’t something that needs to be rushed unless he’s planning on a dozen kids.
Unless he is planning on a dozen kids.
“Mouth margaritas, bitches!”
I spin in my seat at the new voice coming from the house, fairly sure it’s not someone I’ve met yet. Standing there in the light coming from both the house behind him and the floodlight overhead is Blaise Sinclair.
Holy cow.
I knew he was handsome. Everyone knows he’s handsome. I lost sleep over that damn ad he did last summer, although in my defense, it happened to come out right when the pregnancy hormones had kicked in and I thought I was going to explode if I wasn’t getting off every second of the day.
But in person, even in the unflattering lighting, fully dressed, sporting a hoodie, he looks like sin.
His warm, dark skin is radiant. His hair, temporarily out of the twists he’s known for, is free and wild, that backlighting from the sliding glass door making it look like a shimmering black cloud.
He’s impossibly tall and lean, and that smile of his?
It would give Evan’s a run for its money.
Except there’s a tightness to it. To him. He’s here to party, hoisting a bottle of tequila and some margarita mixer in the air, but I get this vibe that something is wrong. He’s not here to party.
He’s here to drown.
I told myself I wasn’t going to like Blaise, and considering the first thing he does is tilt his head back to dump the bottles into his mouth, making a mess everywhere and leaving his gray hoodie streaked in electric green, I don’t. But he catches my heart.
He swallows, recoils, and tips his head back again. I’m fairly sure I hear a collective sigh of relief over the hot tub’s jets when Merrick uses his crazy long arms to snag the bottle from Blaise.
And then thrusts it at me.
“Well, I don’t want this.”
“Just take it, Tilly,” Merrick says in such a commanding tone that I understand the slightest bit better why Cora keeps falling into this asshole’s trap.
“You can’t give tequila to pregnant girls!” Evan whines.
It’s enough to have me standing and reaching for the bottle, just because I don’t need their insanity and Blaise doesn’t need this bottle.
But it’s been over six months since I touched alcohol last — and barely touched it the year before because I was so sick from the chemo.
As much as I thought I’d miss alcohol, I don’t. I don’t want this.
I don’t want this.
I start to hand it back, but then I lift my head and see Blaise staring at me.
His eyes move slowly, but it’s not the same sort of perusal the other guys were giving me, the scan that just kind of ends at the sight of my belly because the rest of the story of my body pretty much writes itself at that point.
Blaise goes right to my boobs at first, lingers there.
Reasonable, since they’re enormous and this bathing suit that fit up top through most of my second trimester is now creating a mile of cleavage.
The only thing that’s keeping it in place is the fact that my nipples have been hard for the last month.
Hell, when I’m at home in the mirror, it’s hard for me to look anywhere else. So rock on.
But then his eyes slide down to my belly, and what was appreciation, I swear even a hint of a smile because a lot of people are just genuinely happier when they see a pregnant woman, suddenly morphs into something else.
Something bad.
He glares at me.
I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong. I recall the thing I did before, tapping my belly to flash my naked ring finger, and try that again. Maybe he liked what he saw until he saw that I was pregnant and figured I was someone’s girlfriend?
But then his eyes run back up to mine. With the crazy directions the lights hit him at, I can’t see his eyes very well, but I feel them boring into me. I feel their hatred.
I’ve done nothing to him.
I don’t understand.
The world feels like it stops in his glare. My heart pounds in my chest, and there’s this peculiar devastation, this horrific foreboding, that sweeps over me.
It’s like he’s my person, but he’s ripping himself from me.
I have this urge to climb out of the hot tub like Evan did, just to grab Blaise and beg him to stay with me. I’d injure myself. I’d probably end up in the hospital in one of my usual tragedies that a miracle comes out of.
If it were a year ago, two years ago, I would have taken that gamble. But now there’s something more than myself at risk. The worst tragedy is no longer my own death.
I put my hand on my belly again, protectively this time.
He spins and returns to the house, slamming the slider shut so hard it rattles. Everyone’s really quiet despite the fountains of alcohol until Evan says, “Man, usually I want Blaise to be my friend, but not right now. You wanna play ping-pong?”
I don’t want to play ping-pong. I want to go home.
I want to take a shower and wallow in bed and hide from the world for a couple days.
Order a pepperoni pizza and binge on food the doctor tells me I can’t eat and I promise I’m not, but I have terrible self-control. I want to drown in grocery store sushi.
Blaise hates me, but Evan doesn’t. Gabe doesn’t. Wes doesn’t. Actually, as much as I don’t like Merrick, I don’t think he does either. They’ve accepted me.
“Umm, yeah. Let’s play ping pong.”