Hendrix passed over his son, and I cradled the little boy, kissing his chubby cheek while he mercilessly got his fingerstangled in my hair and pulled. He’d gotten so much bigger, and that made me cry anew.
“Forest,” Phin lightly admonished as he untangled the baby’s death grip on my locks. “Be nice to Auntie Clover. She’s having a hard day.”
I felt steadier with Forest’s warm weight against my chest. “Okay, I need to get horizontal sometime soon.”
“We rented a limo,” Meadow told me. “I figured you would want to stretch out after being on the plane.”
“You’re an angel.”
“I’m a little sad you weren’t here to see them struggle to put the car seat in the limo,” she said with a laugh. “You’d think they’d never touched a car seat in their lives.”
“Hey,” Arlo defended. “We figured it out eventually.”
“You did,” Meadow agreed, lifting onto her toes to kiss his cheek.
Beckett collected my suitcase from baggage claim, and we transferred to the limo, where I sat perpendicular to Forest with my legs stretched out.
I slept for most of the trip to the pack house.
Meadow stayed behind at the guesthouse after her pack retreated to get Forest down for his nap. “Clover, I say this with so much love, but you look like shit. What’s going on?”
I shrugged, already climbing onto my bed that looked freshly washed and made.
“Are you still feeling sick? Or just really tired?”
“Both.”
“Well, in that case…” Meadow rooted around in her purse and set a cardboard box in front of me.
I sat up, blinking a few times to get my eyes focusing enough to read it. “A pregnancy test? Meadow, I haven’t had sex in months.”
“And you’ve been feeling like shit for months. Go pee on a stick.”
I grumbled, but snatched it up anyway, since I had done the same to her when she’d gotten pregnant with Forest. Turnabout was fair play. I lifted my shirt in front of the mirror to see if I had a bump. If I squinted, I could maybe believe one was there, but this far in, I’d be showing, wouldn’t I?
The instructions for the test itself were simple, and I followed them to a T, then set the test aside to wait. Meadow got a timer started and sat on the edge of the bathtub next to me.
“This is dumb.”
“Maybe it is,” she agreed with a shrug, “but better to know for sure, right? There’s no risk of a false negative this many months in.”
What if the test was positive? I wanted a baby one day, but what the fuck would I do with one now? Roll up to Logan’s pack house, tell them I was almost five months along and had no idea which one of them might be the father?
“Sit down on the floor,” Meadow ordered. “I’ll brush your hair while we wait.”
I parked myself in front of her and pulled off the hoodie so it wouldn’t be in her way. Her touch was gentle as she worked through the tangles, but when she froze, I could feel the ice of her anxiety in the air.
“What’s wrong?”
“Clover…is that a bond mark?”
“Where?”
Meadow tapped the curve of my throat, and I hauled myself up to go stare in the bathroom mirror. A silvery crescent marred my skin. I frantically shoved my hair out of the way and tugged down the collar of my shirt for a better look.
“When did you get bonded?” Meadow asked.
“Fuck if I know.” I traced the crescent with my fingertip until a wave of dizziness washed over me and I braced myself on the sink.
