18. Cole
COLE
When I stir the next morning, it takes me a second to remember where I am. The apartment isn’t entirely unlike mine, but the weight in the bed is a far cry from what I’m used to, and I know at once that something is different.
I lift my head, glancing around, and then it clicks. What happened last night—the dinner, the sex, the way Millie asked us all to stay. And how we, despite ourselves, couldn’t resist it.
Yes, I know that I likely should have headed back home, especially given that I only live a few floors up, but the look in her eyes and the sweet hope in her voice was more than I could turn down. More than any of us could turn down, for that matter.
Millie is resting in the middle of the bed, lying on her back and dozing as the sunlight trickles in through the slats in the curtain.
She has already been up to get Lewis off to school—I head the two of them talking as she made him breakfast, clearly doing her best to keep him from wandering into the bedroom and seeing the three of us crashed out on her king-size mattress.
I suppose it would have taken too much explaining on her part, to help him make sense of what he was seeing, but truthfully, I missed her while she was gone.
It has been a long time since I shared a bed with anyone, let alone with three whole people at once.
But there’s no way that any of us would dare to slip out when she asked us so sweetly to stay.
There’s something about the way she looks after she’s come, all sweet and soft and delicate, that’s dangerous for me.
Because I would give her just about anything she wanted, if she asked for it.
And if she figures that out, then I’m going to be in trouble.
I glance over at Ross and James, who are still asleep.
We have to be in at the clinic by midday, but for the time being, there’s no reason to be anywhere other than here.
I rest my head back on the pillow, reaching for Millie and wrapping my arm around her so I can pull her against me.
She’s wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of panties, and my cock stirs against the small of her back.
She seems to notice, letting out a slight giggle as she moves back into me, and I lift my head to plant a kiss on her neck—
“What the fuck?”
A voice cuts through the quiet, and all four of us spring up as though the bed has been set on fire. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been—because, standing there in the doorway, is the very last person any of us wanted to lay eyes on.
“Matt?” Millie gasps, as she leaps from the bed, grabbing a blanket from the bed to cover herself up as her brother casts his eye across the scene in front of him.
Nausea stirs in my guts. I try to think of any way we might be able to spin this that wouldn’t make it downright obvious what the fuck is going on here, but I get the feeling we’re way past the point of no return.
All four of us, in bed. His best friends sleeping over with his sister in her new apartment.
That’s not the kind of shit you can just brush off like it’s nothing.
“Matt, what the hell are you doing here?” Millie asks, groping around for any way that she can spin this into something else.
“I got home from my conference early,” he mutters, his voice devoid of any emotion, his gaze flicking between us as he tries to make sense of it.
“And I…I wanted to see your new apartment. Thought I would stop by. The door was unlocked, so I came in, and…” He trails off, clearly unable to wrap his head around what he’s seeing right now.
I exchange a glance with Ross and James. Both of them look just as stunned as me, none of us sure what to say, if there is even anything we can say given the circumstances.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Matt asks again, his voice low, as if he might explode if he speaks any louder.
“Matt, just give me a chance to explain,” Millie pleads with him. “Let us get dressed, and we can—”
“I’m giving you a chance to explain,” he replies stiffly. “So, let me ask again—what the fuck is going on here?”
I take a deep breath and step forward. Someone has to break this to him, and if it has to be me, fine.
“I know how this looks, Matt,” I begin, lifting a hand and trying my best to keep him from entirely flipping his shit. “But you have to understand, this isn’t some one-time thing—”
“Cole!” Millie hisses at me. It’s clearly not exactly how she would have gone about it, but I’ve found in these circumstances that the best way to go about it is to be honest—no point trying to drip-feed the truth, knowing that it will all be spilled eventually anyway.
“You mean this has happened before?” Matt demands, his face darkening with a fury I have never seen from him before.
I’ve been friends with Matt for years, and he’s always been the chill, laid-back type of guy, the type who doesn’t let a damn thing bother him.
But here, now, it looks as though he wants to tear us apart right where we stand, and I can’t exactly say that I blame him.
“A long time ago,” I continue. “But it hasn’t happened since. And—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Matt mutters, turning away from us all, looking disgusted.
Millie casts a look in my direction, clearly telling me to keep my mouth shut so she can try and salve the harm that has already been done.
“Matt,” she murmurs, as she steps toward her brother, putting a hand on his shoulder to try and draw his attention.
He shakes it off, not even able to look at her “Don’t touch me.”
“Matt, you need to listen to me,” she pleads with him. “This isn’t how I wanted you to find out about this. We—”
“You were going to tell me?” he replies, his brows drawing together in incredulity. “Is there something to tell? What, are the four of you…are the four of you fucking dating or something?”
Nobody says anything for a moment, I guess because what happened last night was perilously close to a relationship—even if I don’t have a clue what it will look like for all of us to be together, if it would even be possible for four people to be in a relationship with each other in the first place.
But the quiet is all it takes for Matt to clock that something heavier is going on, and his face darkens to a near-puce shade of anger.
“Tell me what the hell is going on here right the fuck now,” he demands. “Or I’m going to assume that all of you have been lying to me for kicks all this time, you hear me?”
Millie takes a deep breath. She knows her brother well enough to sense when he’s not going to drop something, and like a dog with a bone, he will not unclench his jaw until he finds out what we’ve gotten into behind his back.
“The guys and I, we…we reconnected a couple of months ago,” Millie explains. “The guys, they were looking for someone to—”
“They were looking for someone and they decided it had to be my fucking sister?” Matt replies, and his voice cracks.
I can tell how much he’s hurting right now, and I know that we only have ourselves to blame.
As much as I want to believe that everything is going to be okay, this fury that’s coming off him in waves is not the kind of thing we can just snuff out in a second.
“We met at that party at college, years ago,” Millie explains. “And the guys, they had been thinking about—I mean, they had been planning…” She falters.
How to say this next part? It’s not like he’ll be okay with it, not like he’s going to do anything other than flip his fucking shit when it clicks for him that we’ve been hooking up with his sister not just because we want her, but because there’s a bond between us that goes deeper than anything we could put into words.
A bond, now that she’s going to bring our children into the world.
I hadn’t given much thought to how we were going to break the news to Matt when the time came, but I know one thing for fucking certain—this isn’t how I would have chosen to do it.
“What’s going on?” Matt demands once more, sensing something heavier in the room, something even weightier than what he’s walked in on.
“They….they were looking for a surrogate. A woman to carry their children.”
There it is. The secret’s out.
Matt stands there for a second, like he hasn’t heard her at all, and I wonder what the fuck is going through his mind. Shock rushes through his eyes, and he looks between us, almost like he thinks this could be a kind of joke and we will bust out laughing and tell him that we got him good.
“What the hell are you…?”
“We were looking for someone who would be able to carry our children, someone who’d be willing to be implanted with our embryos,” Ross explains, cutting in quickly before Matt’s mind can spin out any further than it already has.
“And we already knew your sister, knew the kind of person she was through you, and—”
“And you decided that you were going to get her fucking pregnant?” Matt finishes up. “Is that why you’re here, you’re trying to knock her up? Because if you think for a second that I’m going to let you—”
“Matt, I’m already pregnant.”
Millie whispers the words before he can spin out any further, and he turns to her, his eyes wide.
“You’re…you’re pregnant?”
His gaze flicks down to her belly, like he can’t make sense of it, like he can’t even begin to understand what she has just said to him.
As straightforward as her words are, I can tell that he can’t wrap his head around it.
Looking at her now, you would never guess that she was with child, let alone multiples, but I know it’s true.
“They came to me with a contract,” she explains to him swiftly, the words tumbling hurriedly out of her mouth like she feels the need to justify herself.
“And I—you know how much I’ve been struggling to keep up with Lewis and everything he needs, and the money was good, and I—I knew they would be good fathers, so I wanted to help them have a family, and—”
“And you decided you would get fucking pregnant by my best friends without telling me a thing about it?” Matt asks, his voice breaking as it rises furiously.
“And you guys—you’ve just been waiting for a chance to get your hands on my sister?
Make her pregnant so you could have her all to yourselves… ?”
“That’s not what this was about at all,” I protest, stepping forward to try and block him from berating Millie so directly. “We knew it would be difficult to find someone who could handle something like this, and we wanted someone we knew we could trust. Someone…”
“Someone who had the kind of family who would understand why she would do something like this,” James adds, trying to appeal to the sense of friendship that still exists between us.
I’m not sure if there’s any point even mentioning it right now, given that it seems to have been burned to ashes by this revelation.
“You didn’t give me a chance to understand,” Matt shoots back. “Because you knew that if you had come to me with any of this, I would have shut this shit down. You don’t get to use my sister like a fucking incubator—”
“Matt, that’s not what’s happening here!” Millie exclaims defensively. “I made a choice, I came to a decision on my own terms, and I’m not going to let you talk about me like a—”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he replies, lifting his hand and stopping her dead in her tracks. “Jesus, I don’t want to even look at you right now, Millie.” He glances around the room, as though reminding himself that she’s not the only one who did this.
“I don’t want to talk to any of you,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Don’t…don’t reach out. Don’t message me. Don’t call…”
He turns on his heel and makes for the door, and Millie moves to run after him—but I catch her hand before she can, not wanting her to put herself through anything more than she already has.
God knows that her brother isn’t going to listen to anything she has to say right now, and truthfully, I don’t think I can blame him.
He just walked in on the three of us with his sister, in bed with her, and now he’s finding out that she’s pregnant with our children too.
It’s a double blow, a right hook followed by a damn gunshot, and he needs time to process it if he has any hope of making sense of it.
Or if we stand a goddamn chance of preserving what remains of our relationship with him.
The front door slams, and silence falls around the room as we all just stand there, clearly too stunned to do anything other than let the quiet consume us.
Because, right now, I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to fix what has just gone down.