Page 104 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I’m going to be a father.

I’ve said it to myself a dozen times in the last ten minutes and it still doesn’t sit all the way real, the way a fact is supposed to sit once you’ve heard it enough times. It just keeps landing again and again, fresh every time, like my brain hasn’t built the right shelf for it yet.

I’ve wanted this for longer than I’ve let myself admit out loud to anyone. Not in the loud, planned-out way some men want it, a five-year timeline and a nursery sketched out before there’s even a ring involved. Quieter than that. The kind of want that shows up in small moments you don’t expect it from, watching a server’s toddler fall asleep against her shoulder at the end of a double, catching myself lingering too long over a friend’s new baby at a wedding, feeling something pull tight in my chest every single time Sophia called me for help with something that had nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with needing someone steady. I never put it at the front of anything. There was always a restaurant to open, a menu to perfect, a version of my life that made more sense to chase first.

Monica and I talked about it, back when we were still good, before good turned into something I look back on now and barely recognize. She used to say she wanted three. Three kids, a house outside the city, the whole picture, and she’d say it easily, the way you talk about a vacation you’re actually planning to take. I believed her. I built half a future around that conversation without even noticing I was doing it.

Then we got engaged, and somewhere in the eight months between the proposal and the wedding that never happened, the picture changed without her ever quite admitting it had. She got quieter whenever the topic came up. Started finding reasons to redirect it, her career, the timing, the economy, anything that sounded reasonable enough on its own that I didn’t notice the pattern until I was already deep inside it. When I finally asked her directly, sat her down and asked if she’d changed her mind, she didn’t deny it. She just said she wasn’t sure anymore, and when I brought up adoption, brought up surrogacy, brought up every door I could think of that didn’t require her changing her mind about her own body, she shut every single one of them just as fast as I opened them.

I told myself for a long time that I’d misread the whole thing. That I’d pushed too hard, wanted too much, made her feel cornered into a life she never actually agreed to. It took me longer than I’m proud of to understand that wanting a family with someone isn’t pushing. It’s just wanting a family with someone.

She left for Winston eventually, which in hindsight explained more about those eight months than anything she ever said to my face. I don’t think about her much anymore. I think about this, though, more than I probably should for a man my age. I think about it tonight specifically, watching Harper laugh against Maddox’s mouth, her hand sliding up into his hair, looking more like herself in this one moment than she has in the eleven days since Midsummer.

She wants this baby so completely it’s rearranged the air in the room. She said so herself, sitting right there on the coffee table with her knees against Maddox’s, no hesitation in it at all, no quiet door waiting to close later once the excitement wore off. I believe her the way I never quite let myself fully believe Monica, and the difference between those two kinds of belief is doing something to my chest right now that feels dangerously close to too much.

Maddox finally breaks the kiss, breathless, grinning against her mouth, and Harper turns her head and finds me watching, her cheeks flushed, her eyes soft in a way I want to spend the rest of my life being responsible for.

“Please, don’t tease me, Maddox,” she says.

“I’m allowed to take my time, mon couer. We’re having a baby.”

“Well, they’re not here yet,” she whines, playfully.

“Doesn’t matter.” I cross the room toward her, and Maddox loosens his hold just enough to let her slide off his lap and into mine instead, easy, like the three of us have been doing this kind of handoff our whole lives instead of just this summer. “I never thought I’d have this and for it to happen with you…goddamn, Harper.”

“It was a team effort,” she beams, her arms come up around my neck, her forehead resting against mine for a second, both of us just breathing the same air. “Say it again.”

“I love you, mon coeur.” I press a kiss to her temple, then her cheek, working my way slow toward her mouth. “And I love this baby. Whatever happens with the rest of it, I already do.”

She makes a small, broken sound against my mouth that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite a sob, and kisses me like she’s trying to pour something into it that words aren’t going to manage tonight, and I let her, both hands finding her waist, pulling her in close enough that there’s no version of tonight where any of us ends up sleeping anywhere else but here.

Across the room Killian’s already shrugged out of his shirt, and Maddox is watching the three of us with an expression that’s got nothing guarded left in it at all, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I think, clear as anything, that whatever this family ends up looking like, it’s already more than I ever let myself ask for.

I pull her off Maddox’s lap like I can’t stand another second of waiting, like something inside me cracked open the moment she said yes, really said it—not to me, not to any one of us, but to all of it, to this, to the messy, breathing thing we’ve been circling since the first night she walked into the kitchen in bare feet and looked at me like I was already hers.

Her sweater tears easy down the middle, buttons flying, fabric splitting under my hands like it was never meant to last. I yank it from her shoulders and let it fall, revealing all of her—her skin still flushed from Maddox’s mouth, her nipples tight in the cool air, her breath already uneven. She’s bare now, lit by firelight and the low amber glow of the lamps, and I don’t kiss her yet. Not at first. I just look. Take her in. The soft curve of her stomach, the way her thighs tremble slightly, the delicate hollow between her hips. My hands find her waist, then slide down to grip her ass, pulling her against me as I drop to my knees.

“Mon coeur,” I say, voice low, rougher than I mean it to be. “Look at you.”

Her fingers thread into my hair, tentative, but I don’t give her time to be shy. I lean in and kiss her—deep, hard, needy. She tastes like wine and salt and something sweet I don’t know how to name. I take her bottom lip between my teeth, bite just enough to make her gasp, then sooth it with my tongue before I move down.

Shirt over my head. Gone. Chest open to the air. I trail my mouth down her collarbone, slow, deliberate, tasting the dip at the base of her throat before I circle a nipple with my tongue. She arches, her hands tightening in my hair. I suck hard, feel her shudder, then switch to the other, biting gently, then harder when she whimpers.

I don’t rush.

I kiss down her stomach, pressing my lips to the soft skin just above her pubic bone, breathing her in before I spread her open with my thumbs.

She smells like heat and sugar and fucking mine.

I growl into her, low and possessive, before I lick up her slit in one long, slow stroke. Her legs jerk, almost buckling, but I catch her, hooking my arms under her thighs and lifting her, spreading her wider, pushing her thighs up toward her chest so I can see every inch of her.

Wet. Soaked. Open.

“Fuck,” Killian breathes from behind me, voice raw. “Look at her.”

I don’t turn. Don’t need to. I feel him move, feel the shift in the air as he steps closer, then his hand is in Harper’s hair, fisting it, pulling her head back as he kisses her—eats at her mouth like he’s starving.

Maddox is naked now, kneeling beside her, his mouth on her breast, hand kneading the other, fingers pinching her nipple. His cock is hard, thick, leaking at the tip, and he’s stroking it slow, watching me.