Page 2 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I would like to formally file a complaint with whatever cosmic entity is responsible for the fact that the most inconveniently attractive man I have ever encountered in my entire life is my best friend's dad, and that I have spent three consecutive weeks doing absolutely nothing to fix that particular problem.

If the baby is Killian's, I'm not dealing with a crisis. I'm dealing with a biblical event. I'm dealing with Sophia Thorne learning that her best friend has been sleeping with her father, on purpose, for almost a month, and is now carrying his child. I'm dealing with a conversation that I cannot even begin to script in my head because every version of it ends with Sophia looking at me like I'm a stranger.

I've been ignoring this particular possibility for going on two weeks now. Telling myself I'm being dramatic. Telling myself the nausea is anxiety and the exhaustion is just what happens when you're sleeping in three different beds and none of them are technically yours, and the way my body feels wrong and hypersensitive and weirdly tender is just stress finally catching up to me after everything that happened in New York.

I've been lying to myself with impressive commitment.

But I also know myself. I know my body. I've been taking care of it entirely alone since I was sixteen years old, and somewhere in the last week my body started sending me a message I couldn't keep ignoring no matter how good the distraction was.

So here I am. Marble bathroom. Seven in the morning. Pregnancy test sitting face-down under a folded piece of tissue on the counter, like I can somehow change the result by not looking at it.

Thirty seconds.

“It's fine,” I tell my reflection. “Whatever it is, it's fine. You've survived worse. You survived your parents showing up at your office. You survived getting laid off. You survived moving to a different continent with basically nothing. You can survive this.”

My reflection looks like she's considering pointing out that none of those things involved potentially being pregnant by three men at once, three men who happen to currently be the most stable, consistent, devoted relationship she's ever had in her entire life, but she keeps it to herself.

Twenty seconds.

Okay so here's the other thing. The thing underneath all of it.

I actually want a baby. Someday. I've always wanted a family, a real one, the kind that stays and shows up and doesn't disappear the second things get hard. The kind I didn't have growing up. The idea of having something that's mine, someone who is mine and who I get to love without conditions or manipulation or strings...

But not like this. Not now. Not three weeks into the strangest, best, most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me, with three men I still don't have a clean word for and a relationship nobody outside this estate would understand if I tried to explain it.

Not when I'm still figuring out where I belong in it.

Ten seconds.

I stare at my phone.

Nine.

Eight.

I think about the wine festival. The lights strung through the vineyard. The way that night felt like it existed outside of regular time, like the normal rules had been suspended for approximately twelve hours, and I'd made every possible use of that suspension and then, somehow, never quite found my way back to the normal rules afterward.

Three weeks ago I came as each man came with absolutely zero restraint and apparently zero regard for consequences. And I've been doing some version of that almost every night since.

FUCK.

Three.

Two.

One.

The timer goes off.

The sound fills the bathroom and I stand completely still for three full seconds, hands still braced on the sink, staring at the folded tissue on the counter.

Then I reach out and lift it.

I look at the window.

I feel the room clutch its pearls.

Because there are two lines. Clear, unambiguous, deeply committed to ruining my morning, two lines.