24
kane
Hannah takes three more loads of Gatlin’s come in her before his knot deflates and he pulls free of her. By then, she is entirely exhausted, a little sweaty, and yawning. She’s probably had ten or fifteen orgasms, and she says her throat is raw from screaming so much.
We all curl around her and let her sleep.
And this is how the breeding weekend becomes only the breeding night, because the following morning, Hannah is way too sore for any more sex.
So, we all lay around on the couch in Ellis’s living room, watch TV, eat takeout, and daydream about Hannah having a baby. I’m getting caught up in the excitement of it now. I’m realizing that Hannah’s baby is another person to spoil.
That little baby can be trained to expect spoiling from me for his or her entire life, and I think that buying gifts for kids is way more fun than buying gifts for adults.
I begin making mental lists of all the things a child will enjoy playing with, will need, will want, and I start getting really hopeful that we’ve done it, even if we only bred her for a few hours.
I pull her into my lap and kiss her under her ear lobe. “When will we know?”
“Know what?” she says, snuggling into me.
“If you’re pregnant or not,” I say in an affected voice.
“Kane, you want me to have a baby,” she says, triumph in her voice.
I kiss her. “I really do, little beta.”
She breaks the kiss but lingers close, her voice soft. “Maybe someday, I’ll have yours.”
Something tightens in my chest, something that terrifies me but it also lifts me, like something with wings. My voice is scratchy. “You’ll take my knot when I breed you, then?”
“Mmm.” She kisses me again. “I will. I want your knot, Kane.”
I feel like I’m floating, somehow. I pull her closer and pepper her face with kisses. “Love you, Hannah,” I breathe. I lift my face to look at the others. “And you two, also, my omega, my alpha, I love the both of you.” I laugh, a little bemused.
I guess I have a pack.
Who would ever have thought I’d end up like this?
gatlin
Somehow, we don’t manage to knock her up that weekend.
We plan another one of those weekends, a month later, when Hannah will be ovulating again, but then she texts and says she’s going to be just looking at a few houses while she’s visiting us, and then a “few” becomes so many that there’s not going to be time to do anything like what we did in Ellis’s house.
We go with Hannah to look at the houses instead. We take two cars. When we’re leaving to go back home, Ellis and Kane say they want to hit up a drive-through, and I say I’ll take Hannah home with me.
We end up, uh, pulling over somewhere to make out, and this is my fault, probably, because I start talking to her about how I can’t stop thinking about how hot it was to knot her, how I keep thinking about when I jerk off.
It’s not just because she was crazy fucking tight and felt amazing, it’s because of the process of it, how she really had to surrender to me and let me in and it made me feel so honored to have her trust in that way, and it makes my chest tight thinking about it in some ways.
It was hot, but it also feels so loving and sweet—a testament to what she and I have together.
She tells me to pull over, and we get in the back seat and she unzips me and takes me out.
I don’t have a knot—maybe I could only get one last time because Ellis was there?
—and so when she descends on me, I’m balls deep in her as she enthusiastically bounces on me in the back seat of the car, and I toy with her breasts through her clothes and jerk against her, slipping all the way deep into her.
This is the only time we manage to have sex that weekend, because Ellis gets a call from Calliope that evening, and she’s being Calliope. She’s apparently having some kind of crisis, worried she’s not ready to be a mother or something.
Ellis calls Andrew and tells her husband that he is not going after her.
But then we get a call from Andrew that Callie’s not where she told Ellis she was, probably because she’s annoyed that Ellis didn’t drop everything and go to her.
And then Calliope ends up on Kane’s and my doorstep, and we get to meet her for the first time.
I guess I get it. She’s a potent little omega.
I can see how she’d wind an alpha up and let him spin out like a top, how she’d just do that again and again, maybe not on purpose, maybe just because she’s whatever she is.
She and Ellis, they’re like the same person in some ways.
I cannot imagine both of them at once. It sounds absolutely exhausting.
Anyway, Ellis and Hannah take Calliope halfway to meet Andrew and hand the crazy omega off to her husband. Then they come home and it’s way too late, and everyone’s exhausted and in a weird mood.
But weeks later, Hannah is texting me a picture of her positive pregnancy test.
So, that was where we conceived, right there in the back seat of the car, without even taking all our clothes off.
hannah
The weekend that I end up conceiving is the weekend that Andrew and I talk. It’s weird sometimes, when I think about how Gatlin’s sperm were all swimming around in me, honing in on me right exactly during that conversation.
We talk during the Callie hand-off.
Calliope talks a lot on the ride up to meet her husband, but it’s mostly talk of the shame, what-is-wrong-with-me variety. I’ve been through this with Ellis, and I find I have patience with him when he does it and about zero patience with Callie.
I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent too much time resenting her and feeling jealous of her and not measuring up to her, and whenever she is this—so unappealing that I can’t even understand why anyone wants her—it makes me livid.
I want to shake her. I want to say to her that if she feels this guilty afterward, maybe she could have a modicum of foresight before she acted like an idiot in the first place.
On the other hand, I have never bothered saying this to Ellis, because it’s very obvious Ellis is not actually in possession of foresight.
Or, if he is, he just doesn’t care. When Ellis gets into his little kicks, I could tell him that if he does this, he will set himself on fire, and he’d just grin a maniacal grin at me and tell me the flames would be pretty.
Fuck them both, seriously.
He’s being so nice to her on the ride back. He sympathizes with everything she says. He keeps reassuring her that she’s going to be okay, that she’s going to be a good mom, that Andrew will always love her.
Admittedly, Ellis is really careful not to touch her. Callie tries to touch him, and he evades her. He’s firm about it, too, quietly firm, when she tries again. “Callie, no,” is all he says, but even when she bursts into sobs and hugs herself, he stays firm.
Eventually, we get to the halfway point.
Andrew is waiting in the parking lot, hands shoved in his pockets, standing by his car.
He looks exhausted. His hair is sticking up this way and that, and I know it’s because he’s been running his hands through it over and over.
I’ve seen him do that when it comes to Callie.
We get there, and Callie is all, “I have to go to the bathroom. I’m so pregnant.”
Andrew looks her over, shrugs, and says, “Go.”
“Someone come with me,” Callie moans, and I guess that should be me, because I’m a girl and can enter the bathroom with her, but I simply cannot do that, so I look away.
Ellis takes her.
And then it’s me and my brother.
“Stop it,” he says, when we’re alone.
“What?” I said.
“You’re judging me,” he says.
“I’m… not.”
“You’re in a pack with three men, two of whom are gay—”
“They are not. They’re bisexual. I mean, for sure, Kane is.
And Gatlin likes… women.” I think. I think the father of my baby is sexually attracted to me, anyway.
Have Gatlin and I ever had sex all alone, just him and me?
I mean. Only the time when I conceived. But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s fine.
“Well, I’m only saying, you do not have room to talk.”
“I did not say anything,” I rejoin tartly.
He takes his hands out of his pockets. “If you were an alpha, you would understand.”
I shift on my feet. “Would I?”
He gestures. “She feels like an earthquake, like she shakes the ground under your feet, and I don’t think you understand what that’s like.”
“Sounds destructive,” I say.
“Maybe some people want a relationship that’s boring and safe and cozy,” he says. “I want this one. I want her. She’s worth it.”
“Clearly you want her,” I say. “That’s very fucking obvious. What no one understands is why.”
He bows his head and chuckles to himself. He rubs the back of his neck, and when he raises his gaze to mine, he’s smiling.
It isn’t fair, what I’m saying to him. Gatlin and I have had all those conversations about being drawn to Ellis and Kane, about how they are exciting precisely because of their rough edges, how we all balance each other, and I can see it’s the same with Callie and my brother.
Is it because she’s female? Am I being too hard on her because of some Madonna/whore complex in my head?
If so, I should probably stop. I’m in a relationship with three men.
What is Callie’s crime? Sleeping with Ellis when she was married?
It was not as if I am faithful to one man myself.
Sure, I can claim it’s different, but how different is it?
I know that Ellis gets crazy jealous of me with the others sometimes.
I know it, and I guess I tell myself that Ellis deserves it.
Gatlin doesn’t get jealous of me, but he does get jealous of Kane. And Kane… his jealousy is always pushed down because to admit jealousy is to admit vulnerability. Kane does not like to admit he’s vulnerable.
My relationship is not perfect, and I am not better than Callie.
On the other hand, whatever, fuck that, I am way better than she is. Way better.
Witness the fact I have a pack, as a beta.
Of course, that’s not really because of me, it’s because Ellis wanted me.
And Ellis, the reason he wanted me, at first, was because he was sure I wouldn’t put up a fight, because I was a pathetic doormat.
So…
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” I say to Andrew.
“Okay,” he says, bemused.
“Why does anyone fall in love with anyone?” I say. “Love is madness.”
“Totally,” says Andrew. “Love is madness.”
“Just… you can handle her, though?”
Andrew gives me one of his pure alpha looks. His voice goes scoured. “Oh, I can handle her.”
Yeah, maybe I even get it. She’s a challenge. He’s an alpha. He likes a challenge. The fact she keeps him on his toes is part of why he loves her.
I know that Gatlin is going to be over-the-moon about the baby, but I’m surprised at how excited Kane is, and I’m surprised at how all-in Ellis is.
Ellis is a surprising sort of person, really, but he is an omega, and maybe some kind of instinct kicks in, I don’t know, but once there’s a baby on the way, Ellis is all about making very comfortable and secure homes for the baby, because the baby ends up having several homes.
This is probably down to a bit of privilege, I guess, that there are four of us, and we have three different homes to live in?
Mostly, it’s two, because we move into a house that is only a ten-minute drive from Gatlin and Kane when I’m only four months along.
Ellis decorates the entire place himself.
He asks for my say-so about things because he’s not a dick, but then he does all the work himself.
He paints and puts up wallpaper and sits around screwing together furniture and putting down peel-and-stick tiles in the bathroom and adding new light fixtures, all of it.
He turns that house into our little oasis. The nursery? It’s a thing of beauty. He’s amazing.
And Kane? The minute Kane knows there’s a baby, I am buried in gifts.
He gets me every single thing a woman could conceivably need while she’s pregnant.
I have all the mint candies and ginger candies and seabands, and I barely have a chance to get morning sickness before Kane is overkilling the cure.
I have pregnancy pillows and an entire new wardrobe of adorable maternity clothes.
Gatlin subscribes all of us to some pregnancy email list that sends us a message telling us what fruit the baby is now the same size as.
Your little bundle of joy is now the size of a kiwi, that kind of thing.
He plays relaxing music for my belly, resting his hand there and talking directly to the baby from practically day one.
My favorite afternoons are ones where I spend them curled up against Gatlin, with one of his hands absently on my swelling belly.
The afternoons where he’s just talking to the baby, telling the baby stories, being the dad already, and I can feel his love enveloping our little one, like a huge, warm hug.
Or maybe my favorite afternoons are the ones where we talk about the future, where we dream about more babies, growing our family, Ellis making homemade baby food in sexy aprons, Gatlin reading the kids stories at night before bed, Kane buying an entire playground for the backyard, me kissing boo-boos better and cheering the kids on as they learn to ride bikes.
I feel it, deep down, that this is forever, that we are lucky to have found each other, that our pack is something special and perfect. That it is ours, and that we have each other always.
I am anti-homebirth, firmly anti-homebirth, but this is probably just because of Callie and Andrew overselling it to the point of nausea, so I spend a bunch of time talking about how much I am going to have the most modern, medically assisted birth of all time.
And then we end up deciding on a birthing center with a big tub and I hold off on getting the epidural so long that they say it’s too late, and I end up giving birth in the water and all of my mates are there, pulling our tiny girl up to the surface so that she can scream at the top of her lungs for the first time.
I watch them all crowded around her, their strong muscles and their huge bodies. She is just red and tiny and squalling, and they are ever so tender with her, all peering down on her with love on their faces.
Our daughter.
I know we have something special.
I know that I am neither plain nor vanilla. I am the extraordinary thing that holds these men together. I am the mother of our baby. I am the beta that makes this pack work.
And that is what we are. A pack. A family. Something that is bigger than all of us, but something that gives us all a place in the world.