Rowan offers me a thin smile. The crown of curls at his forehead is wilder than usual. There’s a smudge on his wrist like he’s written something there and scrubbed it off.
“Hi,” I say carefully.
“Hi,” he echoes, as if the word is in a language he’s rusty in.
“Willow,” Cheyenne says sharply, “can you come help me in the kitchen?”
All three of the men look at her with gawking expressions, and she rolls her eyes. “I won’t put her to work, guys, I just wanted to ask her about…lunch.”
The men’s arms are under me, lifting me like I’m crowd-surfing at a concert. Once I’m standing, I feel weightless. Laughing, Cheyenne wraps her arm around my waist and mutters, “Okay, let’s go,” like we’re in a hostage situation and she’s breaking me free.
She stands at the sink with her sleeves shoved to her elbows, rinsing a mug that already looks clean. “You do realize,” she says, without turning, “that all three of them are in love with you.”
The word hits like the smallest stone in water—plink—then ripples run to all the edges. My fingers fumble my mug and squeak against the handle, so I steady it with two hands. One of my feet start that anxious heel-rock under the table that I haven’t noticed since college.
I open my mouth and shut it again. “That’s…dramatic.”
A small laugh coughs out of her. “Dramatic? That’s the word you want to use?”
“They’re…we’re…it’s not like that,” I say, but it feels like a lie when I say it. She’s right, and she figured it out before I did, which is embarrassing because it’s my life, my living room, and my pulse that keeps changing tempo depending on whose shadow crosses the threshold.
Heat creeps up my cheeks, and I focus on the wood grain of my kitchen table, trying to keep her from seeing. It is like that. It’s been like that with all of them at one point, but I’ve been pushing it away. It’s too complicated, itbeing like that. I don’t even know who the father of my triplets is.
Cheyenne flicks water from her fingers into the sink, then whirls around to face me. “Sean cooks and folds laundry like he’s auditioning for a domestic partnership. Declan’s been putting your nursery together like you might lethimsleep in the crib. And Rowan?—”
I wait for it to come, but it doesn’t. When I look up at her, her mouth softens mercifully. “Rowan what?” I ask gently.
“Rowan comes over to play pretend with you like he doesn’t want you and you don’t want him. But he likes reading to you and when you fall asleep, he keeps reading.”
I inhale sharply, like she’s just hit me. “I don’t—” I swallow hard and look up at the ceiling. “Cheyenne, I can’t do—anything?—”
Cheyenne wipes her hands on a dish towel with exaggerated patience. “You can’t keep pretending this is just friendly care forever, Willow. Not even with yourself.” She walks over to me and leans forward over the dining table, her forearms touching the splintered wood. “The house is starting to vibrate with all this tension.”
I look around like I could locate the vibration in the walls. The couch, the blanket with pills like tiny moons, the stack of baby clothes Sean folded into a tower, the paint cans leaning against the nursery wall with some sketch ideas like a promise we haven’t assembled. It hums. I hum.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I whisper.
She smiles sadly at me and grabs her purse. “Stop pretending you don’t feel it.” She nods toward the door. “I’m gonna sneak out and get some dinner with Dylan. I think you’re in good hands here, hm?” She kisses my temple and smooths my hair, smiling at me in a way that only a best friend can. “You can do it. Be brave.”
The men slowly peter back into the living room once they realize that I’m not coming back into the bedroom. We talk about nothing until the nothing fills the room. Sean’s neighbor who grills at odd hours—“grand if you like smoke in your curtains”—a dean at MUSC who misuses the word “quantum,” a surfer at Folly who wore jeans and socks in the water. The hum sharpens into something almost audible, and it feels like we’ve all come to a cliff we didn’t admit we were walking toward.
Cheyenne’s sentence flickers in the back of my mind like a neon sign.All three of them are in love with you.My palms are damp. I rub them on my pajama pants, which I seem to live in these days, and say something true to cut the static. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I stand up like just the standing is making a statement. Three pairs of eyes find me. Three different storms.
“Course you are, love,” Sean says lightly from his seat across from me at the table, but the lightness is threaded with steel.Declan nods, and Rowan blinks, and I can see the bobbing of their throats as they swallow.
I step toward Sean and kiss him. It isn’t sloppy or passion, but it isn’t a joke either. It’s warm and sure, a press at the edge of my mouth that feels like a door that’s been waiting to open. He kisses me back, soft at first, then deeper when my hand brackets his jaw. He tilts his head like I’m the right answer, and when my heart is in my throat, I pull back.
The hum in the room spikes. I glance over at Declan on the couch and Rowan in the chair, their eyes sharp and their necks flushed, and I make a split-second decision to approach Declan first. His mouth is a hard line, and he half shakes his head, a soft no, a warning to himself.
Then he obeys something older than warning, standing before I can get to him, and his large hands are palming my lower back, holding me as tightly against him as he can with the bump. His kiss is different. Less spark, more heat. He kisses me like prayer, mouth sure, breath controlled like he’s taming a battlefield inside his chest. His hand cups the side of my neck, fingers splayed like he’s measuring a pulse. I kiss him back and he makes a sound in his throat he didn’t mean to let out.
He draws back like he’s pulling himself from a magnet. He doesn’t step away. He looks at Sean like a promise and a challenge, then at me like he’s memorizing me for later.
I turn to Rowan. He hasn’t moved, all the muscles in his body stiff even as his body language pretends to be relaxed. He’s a statue of study, jaw set, eyes gone dark in a way that both warns and begs. The unfairness of what I want—everything, all at once—hits so hard I almost laugh.
“Rowan,” I say, almost begging, and I take the few steps to him, waiting for him to open up for me, to move his legs or his hands or to stand. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.
