Page 94 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

How far along, I wonder. Three weeks since the festival. Maybe four since whatever actually did it.

I already did this math an hour ago, hunched over my cycle app with my pill case open in my other hand. Doing it again now feels heavier. Now it’s sitting on the edge of a sink in unambiguous pink, and there’s no explaining away two lines.

I end up with my elbows braced on my knees, head dropped into my hands, and something about the angle of it tugs at a memory I can’t immediately place.

You know that scene from. What is it.

Oh.

Oh, right. Twilight. Breaking Dawn, Part One, the one where Bella’s getting ready for her wedding night and sits on the bathroom floor with her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees, working herself up to it. I know that scene shot for shot because Sophia made me watch the entire saga over one feverish weekend junior year, and don’t even start, because everyone picked a side back then and you can’t tell me you didn’t, the same way you can’t tell me you didn’t also read the vampire-and-werewolf-free fan fiction version that somebody slapped a different title on and made several hundred million dollars off of.

I couldn’t relate to a pose so much right now.

Except, well. I guess we already consummated⁠—

Shit.

Am I seriously comparing my pregnancy test to a wedding night. I don’t even know if I want to get married, mostly because I’ve spent my entire adult life designing other people’s weddings for a living, which takes the romance out of it fast. And even if I did want it, I’d be choosing between Asher, Maddox, and, yes, even though he’s currently being a colossal dick about something he won’t explain, Killian. Three grown men. One ceremony. I genuinely can’t picture a seating chart that solves for that.

I laugh, short and surprised, the sound bouncing off all that marble.

I grab my phone, because if I’m doing this kind of math I’m at least having a soundtrack, and pull up Screwed, the Janelle Monáe one with Zoe Kravitz, stuck in my head since the festival, and there’s no better moment to commit to it fully than right now.

It’s upbeat. Defiant. The kind of song that wants you up and moving and feeling powerful about your own choices, and for once that’s actually the correct emotional register, because somewhere underneath the shock and the math and the absolute logistical nightmare of this situation, something in my chest keeps trying to grin.

I let it.

It spreads slow, pulling at the corners of my mouth without permission, eyes going hot and blurry along with it, except it isn’t sadness behind it, isn’t fear, just too much feeling with nowhere to go but out. I press the back of my hand against my eyes and laugh again, wetter this time, grinning like an idiot at absolutely nothing, hand still flat against my stomach.

I want this.

I didn’t expect to feel that so fast, with no runway, but there it is. Even if none of them want this. Even if Killian’s current mood is a preview of how badly this could go. I want this baby. I will have this baby. With their support if they can give it, without it if they can’t, because I’ve built an entire life out of doing things alone and I can do this one too.

I already ran the other math too, the one about who the father might be, lying awake at two in the morning more nights than I’d like to admit. Asher, complicated but survivable. Maddox, a crisis but a forgivable one. Killian, a biblical event that ends with Sophia looking at me like a stranger.

I had it all worked out. That math assumed all three of them were still where I’d left them, Killian’s hand at my back, all of it still humming the way it was those first two weeks after the festival.

It didn’t account for the last nine days. It didn’t account for Midsummer.

Before Midsummer this was easy in a way I still don’t have language for. The four of us tangled together in Killian’s suite the morning after the festival, nobody performing anything, just warmth and Asher making coffee like he’d done it a hundred times. Two weeks of feeling more wanted than I’ve ever felt by three men who never made me choose between them.

Then my parents showed up at the boutique launch wearing borrowed confidence and worse intentions, and Killian told them to schedule something properly instead of telling them to leave, and something behind his eyes closed in a way I haven’t been able to get back open since.

He hasn’t really looked at me since. He’s polite. Professional. Asks Mallory for updates instead of me even when I’m standing right there.

“You couldn’t just talk to me,” I say out loud, to the empty bathroom, to a man who’s somewhere on this property and absolutely can’t hear me. “You had to go full brooding billionaire about it and make me guess.”

The bathroom doesn’t respond. Neither does Killian, obviously, which I’m aware of, thank you.

I haven’t slept in the shared condo in nine days. Asher’s suite, mostly, sometimes Maddox’s, trading off like they’ve worked out a rotation neither’s explained. It’s good, genuinely good. But the place where all four of us used to end up together has just stopped happening.

I haven’t asked Killian what’s wrong, and I’m not going to. I made that decision a month ago, after the maze, when I realized how much space all three of them had taken up in me at once. I don’t chase. I don’t perform for attention. I don’t compete with another woman for a man who isn’t sure he wants to be fought for, and I learned that lesson the hard way.

If he’s pulling away, that’s information. What I can’t do is reorganize my whole self around a man’s silence the way my mother did for twenty years with men who never explained themselves.

Which means the version where the baby’s Killian’s doesn’t get to be a clean biblical event anymore. It gets to be that, plus nine days of silence I can’t explain, plus a man who can’t look at me finding out he might be a father while he’s still deciding if he wants to be in the same room as me.

I don’t know what he does with this. I don’t know if he leans in or leans further away, and the not-knowing sits in my chest like something with edges, right alongside the grin that hasn’t fully gone away.