38. Positive #2
"Sawyer told me he'd handle it." And here's the thing that surprises me even as I say it: "And I believe him. Fully. I've watched that man solve six impossible problems this month before lunch. When Sawyer says he's got something, the knot in my chest just... loosens. I trust it."
"Look at you," Juniper murmurs, wobbling. "Trusting a man to handle something. Out loud. Voluntarily. Do you know how long it's been since I heard you say you trusted anybody with anything heavier than a seating chart?"
"Don't make it weird, June."
"I'm making it exactly as weird as it deserves to be," she sniffles.
Marlowe studies me for a long beat, and then she nods, slow, like something's confirmed for her.
"You know what I think?" she says. "I think the second Sawyer walked into your life, he changed the whole board.
Those other three spent five years telling themselves the story that leaving you was survivable, that you'd keep.
Then a good man shows up, plants his flag, treats you like the prize you are — and suddenly they're staring down the very real possibility of watching somebody else love you right.
It scared them straight. Sawyer standing on business is the thing that made your men remember they never, ever want to feel what they felt the last five years again. "
I let that sink in. It lands truer than I want it to.
For five years I told myself the story that they left because I wasn't enough — not pretty enough, not important enough, not worth the fight.
Marlowe just handed me a different story, one where the leaving was never about my worth at all.
I don't know yet whether I believe her version. I know I want to.
I look down at my own stomach. My hand drifts there without asking permission, resting light against the flat of it, and for the first time all night the truth stops being an argument and starts being a fact.
There's someone in there. A whole someone.
Ours. The apricot in my scent has been doing something strange for days — going warmer, rounder, threaded through with a sweetness like honey and warm milk that I kept blaming on stress.
I know what it is now. My body's been announcing it to everyone with a nose long before three plastic sticks made it official.
Sawyer's voice loops through my head, maddening and smug and, apparently, correct.
Blockers aren't birth control, my Blooming Apricot.
The right pack can trip a body into fertile faster than anything.
I told him he was ridiculous. I told him nothing had changed.
Now I am going to have to look that man in his handsome, insufferable face and tell him he was right, and he is never going to let me forget it.
"And the only one who missed all of it," I say quietly, "is Cade."
Neither of them argues.
"If this is real — and I guess it's real, God — then he had no part in making it.
We haven't kissed. Not once since everything.
We've never been intimate, not in this life.
He hasn't joined the others, hasn't set a single boot back inside the house, hasn't fought for a single inch of ground.
" I look up. "This baby is Beckett's, or August's, or Sawyer's.
It is categorically, biologically, not Cade's.
He removed himself from the equation before the equation even existed. "
Juniper's brow furrows. She crosses her arms over her big cardigan. "And he's genuinely okay with that? Just — pulling away? Sulking off like a kicked kid while everyone else builds a life?"
"It isn't mine to decide whether he's okay with it.
" I hear how steady my own voice has gotten, and it startles me a little.
I look at the two of them — my ride-or-dies, the two women who held my hand through the worst year of my life and never once let me talk myself smaller — and I feel something in me set like concrete.
"You two have been telling me the same thing for five years.
That I'm worthy of being fought for. That I'm worthy of being loved.
I finally believe you." My throat tightens, then clears.
"If Cade's no longer in the cards, then Cade gets left behind, because I am being swept off my feet by men who actually want me here.
I am done fighting for a man who wants to be coaxed and babied into loving me a second time.
I made that mistake once. I still have the scar from it. I'm not making it twice."
"Okay," Marlowe breathes, a slow grin starting. "There she is."
"You want to know what changed?" I keep going, because it's pouring out of me now.
"I know what it feels like to be adored.
I know it in my bones. I wake up between men who fight each other for the privilege of brushing my hair after a night of loving me stupid.
Who draw me a bath and wash it out again.
Who show up with soup and blankets the second I so much as sniffle.
Who rearrange their entire days to make mine easier for no reason except that my ease pleases them.
" My voice cracks, and I let it. "I never have to ask if they love me.
I never have to wonder. They just — prove it.
Constantly. Without being begged. I am spoiled absolutely rotten, and the standard is now so high that Cade can't even see the bottom rung of it from where he's standing. "
Juniper is openly crying now. Marlowe's eyes are suspiciously bright, which for Marlowe is the equivalent of sobbing into a pillow.
"For the record," Marlowe says, her voice rougher than usual, "I have wanted to hear you say every word of that for five years.
I used to lie awake furious on your behalf while you smiled and rebooked their weddings and pretended you were fine.
" She swipes at one eye like it personally offended her. "So. Good. About damn time."
"And if I'm really having a baby," I say, and my hand presses flatter against my belly, protective, certain, "then I need her — because part of me already knows it's a her — I need her loved and cherished by men who will put her first as fiercely as they put her mother first. Especially if she comes out an Omega.
I know exactly what this world does to an unprotected Omega girl.
My daughter is going to be armored in love from the day she's born.
" I lift my chin. "Cade doesn't fit that equation anymore. I'm sorry. He just doesn't."
For a moment nobody says anything. The tap drips. The string lights hum.
Then Juniper launches herself off the bathmat.
Marlowe stands up off the tub. They crush me in a three-way hug so fierce it nearly topples us all into the shower.
Juniper wails something about being an aunt.
Marlowe mutters "took you long enough" into my hair.
The whole knot of us rocks there in the tiny bathroom, laughing and crying at once.
Then Juniper pulls back with a gasp so sharp I think she's hurt herself. "We have to plan the baby shower."
"Oh, hell no."