Ren took a step into the office. The sole of his slipper squeaked against the wooden floor. Brody turned his head. His gray eyes, rimmed with red, met hers. He stood still for half a second, his mouth open to say something into the phone that he never got to say.
“I’ll call you later.”
He hung up and set the phone face down on the desk without looking at the screen. He turned fully around, rested his hip against the edge of the desk, and crossed his arms over his chest. His straight black hair fell across his forehead with a carelessness that made something tighten inside Ren’s ribs. He said nothing, just looked at him. And waited.
Ren crossed the distance between them. Four steps. Five. The carpet muffled his footsteps. He stopped on the other side of thedesk. The walnut surface stood between them like a border, a neutral territory where neither of them was in charge. He took the test out of his pants pocket and set it on the table. The white plastic made a small, dry sound as it hit the wood.
The two pink lines were visible even from that distance, even in the pale light streaming through the window. Unmistakable. Brody looked down. He looked at the test. His jaw clenched once. His pupils dilated, and the reddened rims of his eyes seemed to burn a little more intensely for a moment. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He didn’t reach out to take it.
Then he looked up at Ren. Ren swallowed. His heart was pounding in his temples, in his throat, in his belly where something microscopic and irreversible was growing.
“I want it.”
Three words. They came out firmer than he expected, more whole, as if his body knew what he was saying before his mind had finished processing it.
But what came next trembled on his lips. “But I don’t know how to do this.”
The confession scraped his throat as it came out. He kept staring at Brody because he couldn’t look away. Because that man’s gray eyes were the only solid thing in a room that suddenly seemed to spin.
“I know nothing about… about this. I didn’t have a good example. My father… no.”
He cut himself off. He would not talk about Julian Valois in that office, not with the pregnancy test between them and the future taking shape for the first time. He clenched his fists at his sides. His nails dug into his palms.
“I’m scared, Brody.” He said it without looking away. Without hiding. Because hiding would have been easier, and Ren was sick of the easy way out. He was sick of running away and tossing sweatshirts across the room only to pick them up later. He was sick of pretending he didn’t need anyone. “And I don’t want to do this alone.”
Brody uncrossed his arms. He walked around the desk. Not in a hurry, not with the animal urgency with which he’d picked him up off the floor on the day of his heat. Slowly. One step. Another. Until the distance between them ceased to exist and Ren had to lift his chin to look at him, since Brody was much taller than he was.
Brody’s hand reached his face. His fingers brushed Ren’s cheek with a gentleness that didn’t match his size or the strength Ren knew they possessed. His thumb traced Ren’s cheekbone. He tucked a strand of blond hair behind Ren’s ear. He stayed there, his open palm against Ren’s jaw, and the warmth of his skin seeped straight down to the bone.
“I’m here.”
Brody’s voice promised nothing. He didn’t say everything would be all right. He didn’t say the fear would pass, that Ren would know what to do, or that Julian Valois’s son wasn’t doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes. He didn’t lie. He simply stated a concrete, immediate, verifiable fact: he was there. In that office. With his hand on Ren’s face. With the pregnancy test on the desk behind him.
Ren closed his eyes. He tilted his face toward Brody’s palm and let his weight rest on that hand as he hadn’t rested on anything since he could remember.
Chapter 18
The scent of raisins and walnuts enveloped him like a second skin. The room was dark except for the orange glow of the city seeping in through the edges of the curtains. Ren had his head resting on Brody’s chest, rising and falling with each of the alpha’s breaths, and his legs tangled between Brody’s in a way that made it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Their sweat was slowly cooling. Ren could feel Brody’s heartbeat beneath his ear, steady and slowing, returning to its usual rhythm. The alpha’s fingers traced lazy, aimless strokes across his back, as if he were drawing maps of territories known only to him.
Ren had been holding the phrase between his teeth for a while. He turned it over in his mind, chewed it over, rephrased it. But he had already learned that with Brody, there was no point in sugarcoating things.
“I want to go to the doctor.”
Brody’s fingers paused for a moment at the curve of his lower back. Then they resumed their movement.
“Are you feeling sick?”
“No,” Ren sat up a little, resting his chin on Brody’s sternum to look at him. The dim light obscured his features, but his grayeyes, rimmed with red, shone with a hint of alertness. “But I want a specialist to tell me that everything’s fine. In here.”
He brought his hand to his belly. Still flat. Still silent. But no longer empty.
Brody was silent for a moment. His hand moved up from Ren’s back to the nape of his neck and stayed there, his fingers buried in the blond hair.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been,” Ren continued. He swallowed. “My family didn’t… there wasn’t money for that. My father preferred to spend it on other things.”
He didn’t need to specify which ones. Brody knew. The whole damn house knew by now.
