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Rational thought.

I felt like I was falling, instead.

Tripped up and pinwheeling on my back through the nothingness.

The ground speeding upward and falling away at the same time.

One eternal beat of shock.

Before I was on my knees in front of her, gripping onto the outside of her thighs as I stared up at her.

I wanted to ask her a thousand things. How, when we’d been careful? I wore a condom every fucking time. And I knew she had those pills to begin as soon as she started her period.

But this wasn’t about the why. It was about her. About us. About what she needed and what she wanted.

Still, she was rushing, “Brinley thinks it was probably from that time…you know, when we…before we had sex but kind of had sex.”

I couldn’t put a pin on what I felt at that. Couldn’t tell if it was shame or remorse or contrition that barreled through my being. If it was fear or joy or terror that was surging and shearing.

Because fuck, I’d acted like a reckless fucking twat. Needing her so badly that I hadn’t been able to see through the haze of lust and greed.

I brushed my thumbs over her legs, trying to calm both of us. My racing thoughts and the thunder of her heart and the energy that boomeranged off the walls like a reckoning.

We just stared at each other for the longest time through it. Every part of us entwined.

The words were low and soft and ridden with affection.

With my pure loyalty.

With all of me.

“What do you want to do?”

I think I already knew when she took my hands and settled them there. On her flat belly. As she gazed down at me with love drenching every cell that manifested her beautiful makeup.

“I want us to be a family.” It wisped out of her in a petition. A plea of hope and destitution.

“You are my family, Lena,” I rushed without hesitation. “You are my family. You are my life and my soul and the very beat of my heart. You are every minute. You are the time that makes up who I am.”

I paused, eyes frantic as they rushed over her face, and I swallowed around the bedlam that crawled my throat. “Am I scared? Yeah, baby. I’m fucking terrified. Terrified of how much I love you. Terrified of how much I want this. Terrified to think that everything I never thought I could have is right here. Right here, with you. Right here, with us.”

Wesley’s little face flashed through my mind. The bare flecks of my knowledge of him.

That hole gaped, and I knew right then that I wanted that, too. That it was time to make him a part of who I was.

That faulty thinking no longer bore a place in my life.

Never looking away from her face, I pressed my hands a little firmer to her stomach.

She sniffled and nodded. “Right here with us.”

I reached up and wiped away a tear that clung to her bottom lash, brushed back a lock of hair stuck to her face. “I’m going to tell your brother tomorrow. No more secrets. No more hiding.”

Silas was just going to have to fucking accept it.

The oath I made was no longer where my greatest loyalty lay.

Elena was.