The silence surrounding us makes an acidic taste coat my tongue, melting away the sugar and chocolate goodness. Not speaking, I don’t try to tug my hand free, letting him keep hold of me as we silently walk back to the studio.
Betty’s gaze turns toward the door the moment we push through it, and she looks me up and down, taking in my outfit. “Oh, ohh,” she whistles beneath her breath, turning back to the iPad in her lap.
“Hot damn, mama. You’re a smoke show,” Leo coos from her seat beside Etta at the front desk.
Without saying a word, Etta jumps up from her seat and comes over to me, pulling me into a tight hug. “God, I missed you,” I say into her pink hair, hugging her back and struggling to hold back my tears.
“Do we need to talk?” she asks, pulling back enough to look at me, but not letting me go.
“I have a client due in ten minutes. Lunch?” I ask.
“Of course. Is the big guy going to be okay with that?” she asks, turning to glance at Knight, who is behind us, my hand still held in his.
“He’ll be fine,” I assure her, without asking Knight, who most definitely will not be okay about me excluding him. But honestly, right now, I don’t care.
As the morning passes, Knight’s expression gets more and more perturbed until the muscle in his jaw is twitching so quickly, he’s starting to look like he has a tic. When Jaiden shows up with his order pad at noon, Knight almost rips his head off when I tell him I’m not hungry and just ask if he would mind bringing me a coffee.
“You need to eat lunch,” Knight growls quietly, making the sound seem even more authoritarian than normal.
“I think I’m capable of deciding when I’m hungry,” I snap, turning my back on him and focusing on the tattoo I’m shading.
When Jaiden reappears just before one p.m., Knight surges forward, taking the food he ordered and my coffee and slapping a twenty into the kid’s hand before he reaches for me. I dodge him. “I’m having lunch with Etta.”
“Octavia,” he says.
“You need to stop, okay. I’m having lunch with my friend, alone. Now go eat your sandwich and calm down,” I say dismissively, taking my coffee from him and beckoning for a concerned-looking Etta to follow me into the break room.
I feel rather than see Knight waiting behind the closed door, but as much as my body is urging me to go and throw myself in his arms, I can’t. I won’t.
“What the hell is going on with you guys?” Etta asks, sitting cross-legged opposite me on the couch.
“I’m pregnant,” I blurt, blinking widely when I realize what I’ve just said.
“Oh my god,” Etta shrieks, then lowers her voice, leaning into me. “You’re pregnant.”
“I nod. Four weeks. We found out yesterday.”
“Holy fuck,” she whisper-yells. “Okay. So are you happy, and he’s not, or is he happy, and you’re not? With the fireworks coming from you two, I have no idea which one it is.”
“Neither. We’re both happy. I know it’s fast, and I know it’s crazy, but we wanted this,” I tell her, hearing the emotions that are bubbling to the surface thicken my voice.
“So…” She trails off, waiting for me to tell her what’s wrong.
Moaning, I cover my face with my hands and exhale loudly. “This is going to sound crazy.”
“I’ve gotten pretty used to crazy,” she confesses.
“Knight, he’s…” I try to think of the word he used to describe himself. “Particular.”
“Particular,” she repeats, rolling the word over her tongue. “Okay, yeah, I don’t know him that well, but I could see that.”
“His day is structured. He gets up at five a.m. and works out. He eats breakfast at seven a.m., lunch at one p.m., and dinner at seven p.m. The same exact thing every day. If things don’t happen at the exact right time, it bothers him.”
“Okay,” she says.
“He loves me,” I tell her.
“I see that.”
