Jackson
"Dude." I stop and let my end of the mammoth fucking couch drop. We're still a long way from the service elevator, and I have questions. "You're a billionaire. Why are we doing this?"
Bennet leans his back against the wall, barely breathing, sweat rolling down his temple like he's proud of it.
"It's for my baby girl. I don't need some random-ass delivery person I've never met handling her furniture."
I suck in a breath and feel my back crack.
Fuck's sake.
"Questions. One: she's not born yet."
"That's not a question."
"Why does a newborn need a couch this size, and what good are you going to be to her if you no longer have a functioning spine?"
"Don't be dramatic, Jackson."
"Did you hear that crackling sound, Bennet? That was my fucking back. All I did was breathe."
"So breathe shallower. Lift with your legs."
"I have been lifting with my legs, motherfucker.
Don't 'lift with your legs' me." I brace my hands on my knees and glare at the couch, this beige monument to one man's complete inability to be normal about impending fatherhood.
"You know what delivery people have that we don't? Dollies.
Straps. Health insurance that covers exactly this kind of stupidity. "
"My daughter," he says, calm as ever, "will never sit on furniture that strangers have breathed on."
"She's going to be a baby, Bennet. She's going to produce fluids you cannot imagine directly into these cushions."
"And they'll be her fluids. On her couch. Carried by her family." He claps his hands once and points at my end. "Now lift. We've got the crib after this."
I stare at him. "The crib."
"And the dresser."
He stares back, sweaty, deranged, happier than I've ever seen him.
"I hate you." I grab my end of the couch again with a grunt. "I hate you so fucking much."
The walk, and I use that word generously, to the service elevator is excruciatingly slow, but we make it inside.
The second the doors close, we both collapse onto the couch itself and lie there sucking in air like we've completed some kind of heroic expedition instead of moving one overpriced piece of furniture.
When the doors open, Joe is standing there waiting.
"Hey there, gentlemen. Nap time?"
"Fuck off, Joseph." Bennet peels himself off the cushions, and I can't entirely blame his reluctance. It is, objectively, a comfy fucking couch. Then he points at me. "You sent for backup, didn't you?"
"Clearly."
"Coward."
"Unhinged asstwat."
The name-calling continues without pause as we maneuver the couch out of the elevator and down the hallway.
Furniture tyrant. Spineless snitch. Beige-obsessed lunatic.
It's still heavy as fuck, but a third set of hands makes it almost survivable, and I mentally pat myself on the back for the call because physically patting anything is no longer within my current range of motion.
We finally get the couch into Bennet's place and wrestle it into the guest room, which has somehow been completely transformed into a nursery in the single week since he found out he's going to be a father.
The walls are pastel pink with massive plaster flowers in a deeper rose scattered across them in different sizes.
There's a white rug over the dark hardwood, soft lighting, little shelves already lined with books and stuffed animals.
The whole room looks finished enough that I half expect a magazine photographer to step out of the closet.
"How the hell did you do all this in a week?"
Blaire appears in the doorway. "Because your best friend has been a hyperfocused robot twenty-four hours a day for seven straight days."
"I can believe it."
"How do you like it?" she asks.
"It's beautiful."
Bennet is standing in the corner with his arms folded, staring at me with a weird smile.
A creepy fucking smile.
I keep one eye on him. "What?"
"What about the walls?" he asks. "Do you like the walls, Jackson?"
Joe wanders over beside him wearing the exact same unsettling grin. "Yeah, what about the walls?"
What the actual fuck is wrong with these people? It's not even nine in the morning.
I look around again because everyone is staring at me now, waiting on my official architectural review of a nursery wall.
Fine. I turn slowly in the center of the room for dramatic effect.
"Pink. Beautiful." I raise my hands. "Flowers. Gorgeous. Rug. Plush. Name. Bea—"
Wait. I turn back.
Jaxon Rose Sullivan.
The letters are mounted above the crib in soft gold script.
I read them once. Then again. Then my brain finally catches up.
"Jaxon?"
I look at Bennet. Then Blaire. Then point at myself because I've suddenly become incapable of forming a complete question.
"Like...?"
"Yeah, buddy." Bennet's grin goes huge. "We're naming her after you."
Blaire's already crying, both hands pressed over her mouth.
The breath leaves me as I look back at the wall.
Jaxon.
They spelled it differently, but there's no mistaking it. My name. The name these people have called me for most of my adult life.
"But isn't his name Marcus?" Joe asks.
"No." Bennet doesn't take his eyes off me. "For us, his name has always been Jackson."
Fuck.
I don't even know what to do with that. I stare at the letters again while everybody politely lets me malfunction in peace.
"Hellooooo. Why is your door standing wide open, people?"
Rose.
Her voice carries in from the living room, and every thought in my head immediately reroutes. A second later Rose walks in, and James is right behind her.
I stop breathing for an entirely different reason. She went to him. Does he know? How did it go? A year ago I'd have gotten the call before she went and the full debrief afterward, whether I asked for one or not. Now I'm finding out from a doorway like everyone else, and yeah, that fucking hurts.
"Wow, it's gorgeous in here. Look at the flowers! Aww, elephants. You know I already bought her an elephant, I meant to bring it."
Rose circles the room taking everything in, but I keep looking at James. Then Bennet drops an arm around his shoulders, easy and familiar, and James doesn't even react to it. He just leans into Bennet while they exchange a few quiet words.
What the fuck have I missed?
Rose finally catches the name over the crib, and her hand flies to her mouth. "Shut up." She whips around toward Bennet and Blaire. "Shut up. Really, guys?"
Blaire nods through fresh tears, and Bennet gives her the same ridiculous grin he's been wearing all morning.
Rose screams, actually fucking screams, jumping up and down before launching herself at Bennet.
Then she's hauling Blaire into it, James gets dragged in, and suddenly the four of them are one loud, crying pile of people while Joe and I stand off to the side like we weren't invited to the family cult.
"God, I got so distracted." Rose finally breaks away and grabs James's hand. "James, this is mostly everyone. Blaire, my sister-in-law. Bennet, my brother."
"I know Jamie-boy. We go way back, don't we?" Bennet hooks James into a headlock, and James laughs while trying to shove him off.
Like this happens all the time.
Because it does, apparently.
I'm standing five feet away realizing there are whole pieces of Rose's life I used to know before anyone else that I don't know at all anymore.
"That's Jackson and Joseph."
Joe and I wave at the exact same time, which does nothing to make this introduction less awkward.
"So." Bennet looks between Rose and James. "Does this mean what I think it means?"
"What do you think it means?" James asks, smiling, and that's when I really look at the two of them standing beside each other.
Fuck.
You don't need a DNA test. You barely need functioning eyesight.
James is definitely Rose's son.
The next thought takes another second to arrive, and when it does, every good feeling I had about that name over the crib gets shoved aside.
Wesley.
The man who raised me, the man I called Dad for most of my life, raped Rose and fathered her child.
I look at James again, and my brain immediately starts trying to sort out what that makes us.
Wesley isn't my biological father, so James and I don't share blood.
I know that. But biology feels like a technicality when I'm staring at the son of the man who raised me, standing beside the woman I've loved for most of my adult life.
This family needs a fucking flowchart.
Bennet looks at Rose, and whatever he's seeing makes his expression soften.
Rose notices.
"You knew?" she asks, barely above a whisper.
"Yeah, sis." His voice is gentler than I've ever heard it. "I've always known."
Beside me, Joe leans closer. "Knew what?"
I pop him on the back of the head.