33. Harper
HARPER
Iwake up before either of them does, which happens more mornings than not. My body never quite unlearned getting up before anyone needed me to.
Maddox’s chest rises and falls under my cheek, his arm tucked under my shoulders.
Asher’s wrapped around me from behind, his breath warm against my neck.
I’m boxed in, completely surrounded, and I lie there a minute enjoying it, the simple fact of being wanted enough that two grown men negotiate in their sleep over who gets to be closer to me.
The only thing missing is Killian.
I let myself remember instead, just for a second.
The way he looks asleep, which I’ve only actually seen a handful of times because the man apparently runs on willpower and spite rather than rest, his face unguarded in a way it never is awake, dark lashes resting against his cheekbones, the hard line of his jaw gone soft, lips parted just slightly around nothing.
I told him once, half teasing, that I liked watching him sleep, and he opened one eye and told me, dead serious, that it was a little creepy, and I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the bed while he pulled me back against his chest like the comment hadn’t landed at all.
The memory still makes me smile, warm and a little stupid, lying here without him.
Then it makes my chest hurt, because he’s not actually here, and some mornings now I don’t know why.
I let myself feel that for exactly one breath.
I think about Midsummer, my parents and Evelyn closing around him like he’d been waiting his whole life for it.
How perfect he and Evelyn looked walking off together, not their ages, just how she carries herself, like she got issued an instruction manual at birth the rest of us never received.
Next to her I feel like a frumpy penguin. Hair always slightly wrong, always a step behind on some social cue everyone else already knows.
I don’t let myself sit in it.
I press a kiss to Maddox’s shoulder instead and take him in for a second in the gray early light, the sharp line of his jaw shadowed with overnight stubble, dark lashes resting against his cheekbones, lips parted slightly around whatever he’s dreaming about.
He’s breathtaking in a completely unfair way.
I untangle myself slowly, easing out from under both of them, and they shift and resettle against each other without fully waking. I find my dress crumpled near the foot of the bed and pull it back on, no underwear, apparently a permanent house rule now.
That’s when I feel it. A low cramp behind my hip bones, a vague pressure that feels less like nausea and more like my stomach bracing for something.
Oh, I think. My period’s probably coming.
I grab my phone and open my cycle app out of habit, and my eyes go wide enough that I have to sit down on the edge of the bed.
I’m late. Not a little late. Significantly, inconveniently, I’ve-been-ignoring-this-for-two-weeks late.
I dig through my purse for my pill case, flip it open, and count.
I’ve missed four.
Four. Not a forgivable, life-happens two. Four, scattered across exactly the worst possible stretch of weeks, important enough to make me forget the one thing I haven’t forgotten in five years.
FUCK.
I keep it internal. Mostly.
I lean over to find Asher’s face too before I go, his jaw softer than Maddox’s but no less perfect, dusted with the kind of facial hair that somehow always looks intentional even at six in the morning, mouth slightly open against the pillow.
I press a kiss to it anyway, light enough not to wake him, and he makes a sleepy sound before settling back under.
Then I’m moving, grabbing my shoes, easing the suite door shut with the precision of someone who’s done this walk more than once this month.
In my own room I peel off last night’s dress and shove it in the closet, no way I’m walking into the village in the same thing I wore to the boutique launch, and pull on jeans and an oversized sweater instead. I order a car before I’ve even fully decided what I’m doing.
The pharmacy’s small, tidy, mercifully empty except for one employee restocking shelves. I find the right aisle and just stand there staring.
There are so many options.
Digital result window. Early detection, six days sooner, like that’s a luxury upgrade. One brand promising actual words instead of lines. I can’t find a single test without some gimmick attached, and all I want is one that just works.
And the prices. I laugh out loud, alone, in a French pharmacy, at how much they’re charging for a stick a woman pees on. Is pee in that high of demand? Did I miss a global shortage?
I grab the cheapest one that still looks trustworthy and pay cash, because the last thing I need is a transaction history that says pregnancy test somewhere Killian’s accountant or Sophia’s curiosity could find it. Some things I get to keep entirely mine.
The ride back feels longer than the ride there. I head straight for my bathroom and pull the box open with hands that have started, somewhere in the last ten minutes, to shake.
I read the directions twice even though there’s really only one way to use this thing, do what I need to do, set the timer, and fold a piece of tissue over the result window so I won’t watch it happen in real time.
She’s going to burn my Louboutins.
That’s the thought. That’s the whole thought, and I stand there holding a piece of plastic with two lines on it while the bathroom goes quiet around me, the way a room does when you stop being able to hear anything outside the little window in your own hand.
My legs stop working.
Not dramatically. Just a slow loss of structural integrity, my back sliding down the marble wall until I’m sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up and the test still in my hand. Standing isn’t currently available to me.
Two lines.
Positive.
My heartbeat fills the silence of my surroundings.
Steady. Loud in my own ears. It isn’t racing, isn’t doing the frantic thing I’d have expected.
It’s just present, insistent, making sure I notice it the same way I’m noticing everything else right now, slow and strangely clear, the marble cold under me, the test warm in my hand.
I don’t decide to do it. My hand just goes there on its own, flat against my stomach, fingers spread, like some part of me is already caught up to the math my brain hasn’t finished running yet.
There’s nothing to feel, obviously. I’m not even showing, no bump, no flutter, nothing physical under my palm.
But I know there’s something there. Something small.
A little bean, or whatever it looks like this early, tucked in somewhere it has no business being and also every business being, depending how you look at it.
How far along, I wonder. Three weeks since the festival. Maybe four since whatever actually did it.
I already did this math an hour ago, hunched over my cycle app with my pill case open in my other hand. Doing it again now feels heavier. Now it’s sitting on the edge of a sink in unambiguous pink, and there’s no explaining away two lines.
I end up with my elbows braced on my knees, head dropped into my hands, and something about the angle of it tugs at a memory I can’t immediately place.
You know that scene from. What is it.
Oh.
Oh, right. Twilight. Breaking Dawn, Part One, the one where Bella’s getting ready for her wedding night and sits on the bathroom floor with her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees, working herself up to it.
I know that scene shot for shot because Sophia made me watch the entire saga over one feverish weekend junior year, and don’t even start, because everyone picked a side back then and you can’t tell me you didn’t, the same way you can’t tell me you didn’t also read the vampire-and-werewolf-free fan fiction version that somebody slapped a different title on and made several hundred million dollars off of.
I couldn’t relate to a pose so much right now.
Except, well. I guess we already consummated—
Shit.
Am I seriously comparing my pregnancy test to a wedding night.
I don’t even know if I want to get married, mostly because I’ve spent my entire adult life designing other people’s weddings for a living, which takes the romance out of it fast. And even if I did want it, I’d be choosing between Asher, Maddox, and, yes, even though he’s currently being a colossal dick about something he won’t explain, Killian.
Three grown men. One ceremony. I genuinely can’t picture a seating chart that solves for that.
I laugh, short and surprised, the sound bouncing off all that marble.
I grab my phone, because if I’m doing this kind of math I’m at least having a soundtrack, and pull up Screwed, the Janelle Monáe one with Zoe Kravitz, stuck in my head since the festival, and there’s no better moment to commit to it fully than right now.
It’s upbeat. Defiant. The kind of song that wants you up and moving and feeling powerful about your own choices, and for once that’s actually the correct emotional register, because somewhere underneath the shock and the math and the absolute logistical nightmare of this situation, something in my chest keeps trying to grin.
I let it.
It spreads slow, pulling at the corners of my mouth without permission, eyes going hot and blurry along with it, except it isn’t sadness behind it, isn’t fear, just too much feeling with nowhere to go but out.
I press the back of my hand against my eyes and laugh again, wetter this time, grinning like an idiot at absolutely nothing, hand still flat against my stomach.
I want this.
I didn’t expect to feel that so fast, with no runway, but there it is.
Even if none of them want this. Even if Killian’s current mood is a preview of how badly this could go.
I want this baby. I will have this baby.
With their support if they can give it, without it if they can’t, because I’ve built an entire life out of doing things alone and I can do this one too.