24. Ryan #2
Iz closes his mouth. Bella gives a quiet laugh, and Ally’s eyes move to her. “Isabella.”
“He started it.”
“I don’t care.” Iz points across the room and Ally turns her head. “Do not make me say your name again.”
He drops his hand. Bella folds her arms. For three whole seconds they’re both quiet.
Kaiden starts laughing. “When exactly did you become everybody’s mother?”
“I’m not—“
“You kind of are,” Cat says. “Somebody has to keep these idiots in line.”
Becca twists on Danny’s lap. “She’s right. None of us are especially good at consistently responsible decisions.”
“You threw a lamp at my head,” Danny says.
“You deserved it.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t.”
Ally laughs — then stops. Her whole body goes still against me.
I look down. “What?”
She stares at nothing, then at me, then at her stomach. “I’m actually going to be a mom.”
The room goes quiet. Then Kaiden loses it, and Ally smacks my chest even though I haven’t made a sound.
“No, but seriously. Like — a real mom. To an actual tiny person.”
I slide my hand over her stomach. “That’s generally how this works.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I made the baby. I get to be a little smug.”
Her mouth drops open. Penny groans that they’re all like this, and Xander agrees, and it starts everyone laughing again while Ally sinks back against me, hand returning to her stomach.
“Do you think it’s a girl?” Cat asks. Half the room votes girl. Xander says boy, catches Penny’s look, and immediately amends it to girl.
“You’re pathetic,” Iz tells him.
“My girl wants a girl.” Penny softens and kisses him, and Bella makes a face like she might be sick, and I catch, out of the corner of my eye, Danny going quiet.
Becca has too. Her fingers have left his chain and found the little butterfly on the bracelet at her wrist, thumb passing over it once. Danny’s arm tightens, just enough to bring her closer, and he presses his mouth to her hair. They’re still smiling. Still here. Just quieter.
Ally sees it — of course she does. “Are you guys okay?”
Becca gives her a real smile. “We’re good.” She nods at Ally’s stomach. “Seriously. What do you want?”
Ally traces my knuckles. “I just want a healthy baby. Boy, girl, I don’t care. I just want our baby healthy.”
My throat tightens.
“Boy,” Becca says softly. Danny looks at her, and something passes over his face, and he says it back like a small vow. “Boy.”
Everyone looks at me, and I shake my head.
“I have no fucking idea. My current feeling is that there’s a baby in there, and sometime soon somebody’s going to hand it to me, and I’m probably going to lose my mind.” I kiss Ally’s forehead. “I don’t care what we have. I just want them here.”
Her eyes go shiny. “Oh, don’t.”
“What? I said one sentence.”
“I’m pregnant. It doesn’t take much.”
Bella sighs from her chair. “You people cry constantly.”
And then the guest house door flies open.
“PRIVET! BONJOUR! YA TEBYA LYUBLYU! JE VOUS AIME!” Tobias comes through it at full volume, one shoelace untied, cheeks red, hair stuck to his forehead. “SPASIBO! MERCI! LYAGUSHKA! GRENOUILLE!”
Walter follows carrying the abandoned water bottle, looking like he’s been listening to this for a while. Cassandra’s behind him with a hoodie over her arm.
“WE WENT TO THE PLAYGROUND!”
“How do you say playground in French?” Becca asks.
Tobias stops dead, eyes going up. “Aire de jeux.”
“He’s been practicing since we left,” Cassandra says.
“You said it twenty-three times in the car,” Walter adds.
“Because I’m learning.” Then Tobias spots Becca and he’s gone, launching himself half onto her and half onto Danny, since she’s still in Danny’s lap. “Privet.”
“Privet,” she says into his hair. “Ya tebya lyublyu.”
“Ya tebya lyublyu.” Danny ruffles his hair.
“Hey, Frog King.”
“Aire de jeux,” Tobias corrects him.
“Sorry. Aire de jeux.”
Becca reaches for a small container on the side table, and the second Tobias sees what’s inside he loses his mind, tripping over the word until she walks him through it — kar-tosh-ka — and he lands it proudly and yells it at the ceiling. Danny reaches for one and gets his hand smacked away.
“Mine. Becca said for me.”
“I fucking live with Becca. That entitles me to at least one.”
“No.” Tobias’s palm appears. “One dollar.”
“For what?”
"Bad word."
He digs into his pocket, mutters “highway robbery,” and pays. It becomes a whole economy in about ninety seconds — Tobias correcting Danny’s pronunciation purely to keep the fines coming, Becca laughing too hard to defend her boyfriend, Danny going broke one dollar at a time.
“This kid is a financial fucking terrorist,” he says, which costs him another dollar, and the room erupts.
Then Tobias spots the driveway through the window and freezes mid-shakedown. “Is that Kaiden’s car?”
It is. The Skyline — the R34 he had shipped from Japan and rebuilt himself.
“Can I ride in it?”
“Yeah, dude. We’ll take you out,” Kaiden says.
“FAST?”
“No,” Ally says, from beside me.
Kaiden points at her. “See? That’s not even me saying no.”
But Cat’s eyes are already bright with trouble, and Tobias reads it instantly and grabs her hand. “Can you make it faster?”
“I can make anything faster,” Cat says.
“Cat,” Kaiden warns.
“Can you build a frog bomb for it?” Tobias asks.
I choke. Kaiden closes his eyes.
Cat doesn’t even hesitate. “Yes. Green. With frogs. Anything for my Frog King.”
Kaiden looks at me like he’s reconsidering every decision that led him here, and Tobias’s hand comes up, and Kaiden pays the dollar for the swear he’s about to say, and the whole thing spirals — Penny reclaiming her Frog King, Xander getting drafted into a piggyback lap around the guest house, Tobias somehow collecting fines mid-gallop. It’s chaos. It’s the good kind.
Near the end of the lap Tobias leans forward until his cheek is almost against Xander’s hair. “Ya tebya lyublyu.”
Xander goes still. Just for a beat. His hand reaches back and squeezes Tobias’s leg. “Yeah, dude.” He clears his throat. “Me too.”
Then Tobias kicks his heels and yells GO, and Xander runs again.
When Tobias finally slides off, Iz grabs him around the middle and tickles him into a shrieking heap, demanding to be named the favorite. Tobias screams Becca, Cat, then “MON RYAN,” and I lift my head, and Iz looks at me, betrayed, and lets him go.
That’s when Tobias notices Bella. Really notices her — watching from her chair with a real smile, not the careful one from earlier.
He straightens, looks at her, looks at Iz, looks back at her, and walks right over. “Who are you?”
Bella leans forward, elbows on her knees. “I’m Bella. Who are you?”
“Tobias Alexander O’Toole.”
“That’s a very serious name.”
“I’m six.”
“Then you probably need all three.” He nods like that’s obvious. “I’d hate for Alexander to go to waste.”
He tells her he likes frogs; she says she gathered, since he’s yelled frog in two languages since he walked in. Then he studies her face.
“You’re pretty.”
Bella’s smile shifts — not awkward, just surprised. “Well, thank you.”
“No. Like really pretty. Princess pretty.”
Her eyes brighten. He offers to make her a crown — pink — and she says she’d wear a pink crown, and then he turns around and drops the grenade.
“Iz. Do you think my new friend Bella is pretty? Because I do.”
Bella’s eyes slide toward Iz. Oh, fuck.
“Doesn’t she look like a princess, Iz?”
Iz looks at Tobias. Then Bella, who crosses one leg over the other and waits. Then back at Tobias. “Yeah. Sure, whatever. She’s pretty.”
“Sure, whatever?” Bella says.
“You wanted an answer.”
“Tobias wanted an answer. You made it sound painful.”
“It was.” She smiles, not sweetly, and his jaw flexes.
Tobias, oblivious, recites a careful line of six-year-old French and lands proudly on “J’aime les grenouilles.”
“Yeah,” Iz says. “J’aime les grenouilles.”
Bella makes a tiny sound — barely there — and his head snaps around. “What?”
“Jesus Christ, Nothing.” He hands Tobias a dollar without looking away from her.
Tobias turns to Bella. "Can you say frog in French?"
Bella nods. "Oui, je peux."
Iz snorts. "Let's hear it then satan."
She smirks, leans forward, and stares down Iz. “Grenouille.”
Low. Slow. Soft enough that I feel like the rest of us aren’t supposed to hear it.
Iz goes completely still. Bella knows exactly what she did — I can tell, because her mouth curves another fraction, and his eyes drop to it. Across the room Kaiden catches my eye. Yeah. He saw it too.
Tobias didn’t. Tobias is just delighted. “Grenouille!”
“Perfect,” Bella tells him.
“I said it like fucking that,” Iz mutters.
“No, you didn’t.”
Another dollar changes hands. Tobias announces he likes Bella — she makes you give me money, and she’s princess pretty — and Bella tells him he’s her favorite person here, much more than Iz, and Iz says “fuck both of you” and pays for it.
Then I say his name. “Toby.”
He runs straight at me and I get my arms open just before he hits my chest, climbing up like he belongs there. Because he does.
“Mon Ryan.”
Two words. They get me every time.
“Hey, dude.”
“I missed you.”
“You were gone an hour.”
“I still missed you.”
My chest hurts. I squeeze him tighter and tell him I missed him too, and he stays there a few seconds, tucked into me, not moving. Then his head lifts and his eyes go to Ally’s stomach.
“Baby!”
He starts climbing down, catches me in the ribs with a knee, and has the audacity to hold out his hand for the swear it knocks out of me. Ally’s laughing. “He’s mugging me.”
“He’s enforcing the rules,” she says. “Especially against you.”
I pay. He stuffs the dollars in his pocket and lowers himself carefully across Ally’s legs, belly-down, face right beside her stomach.
One hand reaches back and finds mine, curling around two of my fingers.
I stop breathing for a second. Ally sees it — of course she does.
I move closer, my free hand settling over her bump, and Tobias puts his other hand beside mine.
“Hi, baby.” Ally’s fingers move through his hair. “Do you think it can hear me?”
“Maybe a little,” she says.