Chapter Five
I ended up being the one to break the news to the family.
It was obvious something was wrong from the moment we got home. Samantha was still a mess, while Mona, Caroline and I all looked shell-shocked. This was not the cheerful, dirty-talking group who'd been so excited to go blow the minds of Fiona Hall's listeners a few hours before.
You could literally feel the atmosphere shift as everyone noticed the change.
The snacks and drinks still got passed out, but conversation was muted as the whole harem filed into the living room to hear about Samantha’s podcast appearance.
Sam, Kiki and I took the couch, with Samantha in the middle so that both Yukiko and I could keep her close.
“Okay,” Yukiko said once everyone was ready. “Clearly, Call Your Daddy did not go the way we anticipated—”
Samantha began to sob.
“—so we’re going to hear the whole thing,” she continued, putting an arm around her fellow wife. “Jack’s going to tell it. And we’re going to be here for Samantha.”
Everyone waited.
And I made it about four sentences into the speech I’d been preparing in the car before I shredded the whole thing and decided to say 'fuck it' and just tell the story.
They got the briefest version of the first half.
Then Dawn’s appearance, the news of which turned the room from quiet to silent in the blink of an eye.
My women were smart. They could put ‘Samantha’s mother was there’ and ‘Samantha looks absolutely wrecked’ together and guess how bad this was going to be.
But none of them were right.
“Samantha’s mother is sick,” I said, throwing myself over the cliff.
Yukiko blinked. “Sick how?” she asked.
Samantha buried her face in her fellow wife’s chest and came apart.
And everyone’s face filled with dread.
The rest of the story came out on autopilot. I felt like a robot, even when I was putting emotion into the words: Huntington’s. Hereditary. Fifty percent.
“And that’s about where we are now,” I said as I finished. I hadn’t ended my speech so much as run out of words to say. I’d taken everything out of the box and left it empty. “I don’t know what to say, exactly. We’re all sort of processing…”
Nobody said anything.
The silence was heavy. Like the awful moment between a bomb going off and the screams starting from the survivors trapped in the carnage.
I’d been in that silence before—it couldn’t not remind me of the moment I’d arrived at the hospital to see Lauren and learned I was already too late—but I’d never experienced it in a room this full before.
One that was normally filled with so much light and sound and love.
It was awful.
Yukiko looked up at me from where she held Samantha, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Maria’s coffee cup had frozen halfway to her lips somewhere around the part about genetic disease and hung there cooling, never to be drunk.
Lakshmi had her hand over her mouth and was trying not to cry.
Tasha was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with her arms folded, the look in her eyes telling me she was thinking of all the times she’d had to deliver bad news to a parent or a spouse while she was a police officer.
Heather and Eva had taken it the worst—probably because they’d been the most excited to hear about Samantha’s trip to the Call Your Daddy offices and to listen to her dish about the naughtiest podcast episode ever recorded.
The two sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, staring at Samantha like they were trying to make themselves believe what they were hearing and couldn’t quite manage it.
Their bodies had not yet caught up with their brains.
Yukiko broke the silence first, as only the head wife could.
“Okay,” she whispered into Samantha’s hair, her arms wrapped tight around her fellow wife. “Alright. That’s… Jesus, Sam.”
“I know,” the blonde sobbed.
“It’s going to be okay,” Yukiko promised her. “I love you. I love you so much.”
I recognized the look on my princess’s face. It was the look she got right before she jumped into a problem feet first—the moment the spreadsheet started assembling itself behind her eyes even before she opened her laptop and got to work.
I watched her planning a half-dozen things at once, ready to tackle the world.
And then I watched her stop.
Deliberately.
“I don’t… I don’t have a plan,” she admitted, clutching Samantha’s shoulder. “Not yet. I can do that soon. I just…right now, I want you to know that I am here for you.”
It was contrary to all of Kiki’s instincts. Samantha knew it, too. As did all of the other women in the room. For Kiki to consciously and deliberately decide to set those instincts aside, even for a short while, showed how deeply she loved and respected the wife she was embracing.
“S’okay,” Samantha mumbled.
“I will have one,” Yukiko promised. “Because I always have one.” Her voice cracked open, full of emotion. “In an hour or two—”
“I’ll handle it,” Mona said quietly and firmly.
“—but Sam,” Yukiko continued, the words shaky. “Right now, I’m just going to sit with you in this for as long as you need me to sit with you. Okay?”
Samantha nodded numbly.
“You didn’t just marry Jackson Avery, Sam—you also married me. I’m your wife. And I love you. I love you so goddamned much…”
Yukiko’s words broke off in a sob as she planted a kiss on Samantha’s forehead.
The two hugged each other, sobbing, and it was like my princess had set off a secret signal flare to let the rest of the harem know that now was the time to act.
Before she could get out another word, they were there, crowding around my babygirl to let her know how loved she was.
Maria got there first, setting down her coffee and whispering something to herself in Spanish I couldn’t catch as she wrapped her arms around both Samantha and Yukiko at once. She looked furious, and it took a second for me to understand why.
“That…” Maria broke off with another swear, gripping Samantha’s shoulders. “I can’t believe that fucking woman!”
“It’s okay,” Samantha tried to say. “It’s…”
“Chica, listen to me.” Maria pulled back, looking my babygirl in the eyes. “You’re going to win that coin toss, okay? You and that pretty little baby. That girl’s going to be a hell-raiser, just like her mama, and there’s nothing in the world that’s going to stand in her way. Or yours.”
Samantha wiped her eyes. “We don’t even know I’m having a girl—”
“The doctors don’t. I do.” Maria chuckled. “You’re not going anywhere, manita. You’ve got too many daughters to give our fearless leader.”
Lakshmi came next, carrying—where had she found time to grab that?—a full glass of ice water. She pressed it into Samantha’s hands with a caring look, her prim and proper manner stretched to its breaking point by her distress.
“Drink,” she said. Then, in a kind tone: “This is no excuse to be dehydrated.”
Samantha managed a chuckle and drank.
While she did, Lakshmi talked. “One day, I hope that you’ll be my fellow wife,” the Indian girl said, treating it in the same matter-of-fact manner she discussed everything from business plans to sex toys.
“But even if that doesn’t happen, Samantha—you will always be my president.
Delta Rho girls stick together, remember? Sisterhood and sovereignty?”
Remembering the sorority caused a change in Samantha. “Delta Rho,” she said, like a woman remembering the drawstring on her parachute. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got the whole sisterhood behind me, don’t I?”
“Of course,” Lakshmi insisted. Then: “Tell me what I can do for you. Whatever it is, I’m there.”
Samantha blinked. “You’ve done a lot already, Laks.”
She nodded, almost businesslike, and stepped back to let the others have their turn.
Good woman, I thought. I hadn’t spent nearly enough time with her lately.
Tasha moved in from her position by the kitchen.
It was quite the thing—my head of security, the ex-cop who’d kicked in my front door at two in the morning to stop a potential intruder without a single thought for her own safety, pausing just outside of Samantha’s radius with a nervousness I’d never seen from her before.
Her hands stayed crossed beneath her breasts like untucking them would untie something she was desperately trying to keep knotted.
Samantha noticed. She glanced up from the huddle. “Hey, Tash.”
Tasha’s bottom lip trembled. “Hey yourself, girl,” she said, sounding wrecked. “You just had to add some drama to that interview, didn’t you?”
My babygirl managed to smile. “You don’t have a playlist for a moment like this, do you?”
The question caught Tasha completely off-guard. “I just might,” she said after a second. “I can definitely work on it.”
“Please do,” Samantha whispered. “I’d love to listen to it—”
My babygirl trailed off. Because Heather and Eva had just stood up.
The whole harem turned their gazes as one to look at them.
Heather rose first, half a smile on her face, already reaching for the thing that we all associated the two virtual twins with.
A joke with a filthy punchline—one that usually had a thinly-veiled offer to let the person involved take their stress out by using the pair sexually tacked onto the end.
I watched her reach for it, the old reliable, the way she’d reached for it a hundred times since the two cheerleaders joined my harem.
And this time, it wasn’t there.
Next to her, Eva had the same realization. I watched both of them stand in the middle of the living room, speechless, trying and failing to do the thing they always did in times like these.
Both their expressions collapsed in the same moment. And then the cheerleader twins sat straight back down on the floor, hitting the carpet so hard it had to rattle their spines.
They buried their faces in their hands and started wailing.
“No no no,” Heather whimpered. “I’m okay, we’re okay, we’ve gotta be okay—”