“Willow,” he says, and the seriousness in my name skims something raw. “You know I’ll be there, right? No matter what the tests say. No matter…anything.” His smile is there, but it isn’t armor. “You can count on me.”
He’s said versions of these words before, but this time I pry. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I murmur, twisting into his elbow.
“I’m only promising things I can.” He tips his head, a little crooked. “I’m daft, not a liar.”
I glance at his lips, all that longing still in me, and he sees it. He sees the wanting and he sees the recoil, and he takes neither personally. He just waits, his elbow beside me and his body warm next to me.
“I’m…” I start, and the truth feels like trying to thread a needle on a boat. “I’m afraid of what it would mean.”
He nods once. “Me too.”
Honesty comes so easy to him. It makes me brave enough to look at him full-on. His eyes are the gold of a field of sunflowers, a shining hazel-green.
He reaches up, slow enough to stop a hundred times, and brushes a curl back from my cheek. “May I?” he asks, so quiet I only hear it because the room is listening.
I don’t speak. I nod. His kiss is careful, his mouth soft at mine, his hand at my jaw answering a question by closing the inch between us once again. He tastes like a sip of a milkshake, and I wonder which one he snuck. A knot between my shoulder blades loosens. Heat builds in my stomach.
When he draws back the barest bit, he laughs against my mouth, the sound shaky. “God, I’ve wanted to do that for weeks.”
“Just weeks?” I whisper, and he groans, forehead dropping to mine.
“Don’t make me admit it’s months.”
It would be easy to let the moment stay a kiss. To hold at the shoreline and not wade in. But I’m tired of salt-stiff edges. I’m tired of restraint masquerading as safety. I slide my hands up under his shirt, palms against warm skin, and feel the breath go out of him.
“Willow,” he says again, like a prayer and a question, and I nod against his mouth.
We move slow. He undresses me like I’m allowed to take my time. His eyes turn down at the sight of me—at the curving belly that’s only gotten bigger since he last saw it, at the freckles on my shoulder that the sun has been exposing. He kisses theunderside of my wrists, and something hot prickles behind my eyes.
“Tell me if anything pinches, pulls, or feels wrong,” he says, already reaching for extra pillows, his fingers grazing my arm. He’s maddening. He’s perfect. We arrange a gentle nest, the same side-lying position Mabel taught, modified by a man who remembers every instruction and adds tenderness where the handout forgot. He lies down behind me, chest to my back, one arm under my head, the other sliding low to anchor me. The babies shift, curious, and he laughs into my neck. “Sorry, lads and lasses. Borrowing your mother.”
He touches me like he’s learning a language he’s wanted to speak his whole life. His fingers find me and I melt. He builds a slow, steady heat instead of a spark. He keeps whispering stupid, lovely things into the crook of my neck—that I’m beautiful, that I’m brave, that he can wait, he can always wait. I don’t make him.
When I’m ready—wet and open and aching—I reach back, find him, guide him. I arch my back to let him inside me. He groans and it’s so involuntary it makes me shake. He presses into me inch by careful inch, the fit perfect and impossible. My hand curls around his forearm; he mouths a thank-you into my shoulder like I’ve given him a gift and not simply myself.
We move together the way we laughed earlier—without hurry, without needing to prove it. He keeps a hand splayed over my belly as if asked to witness. I rest a hand over it, and we tangle fingers. His other hand plays with one of my nipples, pinching it lightly, and I tip my head back in ecstasy, gasping. “Good?” he asks me, as if afraid he suddenly misunderstands everything about the female body.
“Good. Yes,” I say back, nodding with my eyes squeezed shut.
“Good,” he whispers back, closing the loop, and turns my face to him. I open my eyes and see all the wanting and the curiosity in his, and I kiss him back, the kind of kiss that tells me everything I’ve wondered about what this is like for him. His hand on my chin tells me how afraid he’s been to be a father and his tongue touching mine tells me how excited he is to have me, maybe evenmoreexcited to share me.
Sean opens my mouth wider with his and hooks his leg under my top leg to open them as he slides in and out of me. The hand that sat proudly on my belly before slides down to my clit, and he circles that eager and swollen button while he rhythmically thrusts into me.
His other hand, almost as big as my head, cradles my jaw still, fingers splayed awkwardly across my cheek, as he kisses me. I touch my nipples myself, and Sean whispers into my ear, “If Rowan and Declan were here, you wouldn’t need to touch any part of yourself. You’d have more than enough hands.”
My climax had been teasing me like a tide, creeping up to my toes and then backing away, but hearing him say that—the tide takes me all at once. I press my face into the pillow and cry out—“Sean!”—but his hand on my face turns me back to him to keep kissing him. My lips are open against his, my kiss barely formed, and our tongues dance together as we share breaths and groans. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says into my mouth while I gasp, “Sean, Sean, Sean.”
A low sound seems to be dragged up from whatever part of him isn’t humor and gloss. He holds me through it, shaking, whispering nonsense and endearments. After, we don’t move for a long time, the ceiling fan stitching us back into ourselves with each turn.
He’s the first to speak. “Are you okay?”
I turn my head. He’s close enough that I can count the little green flecks in his eyes that only show up in the right lighting. “Aye,” I tell him teasingly. “You?”
He laughs and kisses the corner of my mouth. “Double aye.” After a pause he adds, “Yeehaw?”
“Sure, why not?” I say sarcastically, giving in to the chaos. I scoot back up against him, feeling him soften inside me. He snuggles up against me, his forehead touching my back, and I think,I could live here.In this single, floating moment where I don’t care about being pregnant or being in love with three men or that one of them is the dad of my triplets and I don’t know who.
The faintest press of a headache pushes at my temples, and I file that away like I promised Declan I would. Real life has a way of reminding you it’s still there.
