Arthur's phone buzzed. He didn't even look at it.
Killian didn't smile. He waited, face both hopeful and tense.
They weren't asking her to choose one. They'd looked at her; pranks and chaos and personality that collected revenge schemes like other people collected houseplants, and decided they wanted exactly that.
All of them.
“I want this,” she said finally. “I do. I just—” She exhaled, looking up at them. “You all have these complicated—” she gestured vaguely at all of them, “lives.”
“I don’t,” Jax said, shrugging one shoulder.
Caleb cut him a look, the kind that said he’d explain the concept of teamwork to him later.
April smiled at him and continued, “How is this supposed to work? How do we all… fit?”
The silence was brief, filled only by the quiet confidence of men who had already solved the problem.
“It isn't a struggle for space, April,” Mateo said. “We aren't competing for the same spot.”
“We’ve all slotted into orbit,” Dante added, a small, knowing smile playing on his lips.
“So you’re all… planets,” she said, her voice finally finding its footing.
Jiro stepped forward, his expression softening into something devastatingly certain. “And you’re the sun.”
Jax leaned against the counter, a quick, clever spark in his eyes. “Shared goal. Extremely clear boundaries. Honestly, sweetheart? It’s basically high-level project management just a lot hotter.”
She started laughing. Then crying. Then both at once.
Arthur produced a pen.
She wiped at her face with the heel of her hand and reached for it. "Give me a second," she said. "I have to actually read this before I sign it."
Yesterday had been a series of moments where the easier option was to laugh it off and let things reset. She hadn’t done that. She’d pushed. Asked questions. Made people prove what they meant.
She’d spent three years shrinking to keep the peace. Apparently that was over now. And apparently that got you eight men at a breakfast table with a notarized contract.
Which felt a lot like putting a quarter in a gumball machine and it ate it, so you tried again, and the whole thing broke open and dumped out eight gumballs. Except the gumballs were men. Except hitting the jackpot on a gumball machine didn’t mean you’d won. It meant the machine was broken. And a notarized contract wasn’t proof this was going to work.
"Wait." She set the pen back down. "That's not an answer."
Eight men looked at her.
"You have jobs," she said. "It's Wednesday. I never called out of work, I don’t know if you all did, I have no underwear on because I don’t know where they are. But the point is this is real life. How does this actually work? Not the sun and the planets. Not the project management metaphor." She looked around the table. "The literal, actual, Wednesday-morning logistics of this."
Arthur slid a second folder across the table.
She opened it. Looked at what was inside.
She hugged it.
Arthur picked up his coffee.
Jax already had his phone rotated toward her, color-coded calendar with her name already in it, and slid something else across at the same time. A spreadsheet. With a chart.
There were multiple tabs.
"There are footnotes," April said.
