by C. M. Albert
“What’s wrong? It’s not cancer, is it?” Brighton asked.
It was my turn to smack his arm. “Shut the hell up with that cancer bullshit.” I turned toward Liv. “Please tell us it’s not cancer.”
She smiled. “No, it’s not cancer.”
“But something else is wrong?”
“Not exactly.”
“Stop being evasive, woman. What is it?”
“You guys—I’m pregnant.”
Chapter Twelve
Olivia
THE ROOM WAS dead silent as I waited for their reaction.
“Holy shit! Are you serious?!” Ryan stood and paced the small room, his hands going to his messy brown hair. He’d been out running with Brighton when I was admitted, so his hair was wild and untamed. He came back over to the bed and held my face in both hands, staring deep into my eyes.
“Truth?” he asked, his face pained.
I bit my lip and nodded. I was still getting used to the news myself. “Truth,” I promised.
“Oh my god!” Ryan screamed. He jumped up and down and hollered so loud a nurse came running in.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“I’m going to be a dad!” Ryan shouted again.
“Well, congratulations, sir. But if you could just be a little less loud in your enthusiasm. Not everyone in the ER is here for joyous reasons, you know.”
“Oh, right,” Ryan said, putting his finger to his lips as she left the room.
I glanced over at Brighton, who was surprisingly quiet. “I think you both need to sit,” I said to Ryan.
“How come?” he asked, oblivious.
He sank to the bed and looked between us, and I saw in his gaze the exact moment when the reality of our situation washed over him. “Oh, god. You don’t know if it’s mine, do you?”
“Ours,” she corrected. “And no. I don’t. Not really. The doctor thinks I’m about two and a half to three months pregnant. That would put conception date right around the time—”
“We were all intimate the first time around,” Brighton answered.
“Yes,” I said, sighing. This should be the happiest day of our lives. Instead, it was crowded with fear, confusion, and guilt. It was one thing to think we all could lead a cozy, polyamorous lifestyle in secret. It was another thing altogether to bring a baby into the mix. The truth was, I wasn’t even sure my body could hold this pregnancy, let alone to worry about whether my husband or Brighton was the father.
“We don’t really know the exact timing because I haven’t been getting my periods consistently since Laelynn was born. The doctor told me to schedule an appointment with my regular OB/GYN so she could do more testing and determine a more accurate due date. That might help us back into conception timing a little better.”
“Fuck,” Ryan said, sitting on the bed beside me.
“Can you find out for sure which one of us is the father? Before the baby’s born?” Brighton asked.
“I don’t know. It’s obviously not something that’s ever been an issue for me before,” I answered. “I believe there is such a thing as an in vitro DNA test, though. I can ask my doctor how soon we could have a paternity test, if we decide to have one done.”
Brighton’s head jerked up. “Why wouldn’t we want to know? Don’t you want to make sure it’s your husband’s baby? What if it’s mine, Olivia? God. What if it’s mine?”
I shook my head. “I can’t worry about whose baby it is right now. What matters is whether I’m healthy enough to even carry it. I was having an extreme case of nausea and morning sickness, which is why I lost so much weight. In turn, I’m a little dehydrated, anemic, and am severely lacking Vitamin D with all the isolation I’ve been putting myself through.”
“Liv, you can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know.”
I rolled my eyes. It was completely my fault, but I wasn’t arguing with Ryan today. Today, my heart was oddly at peace, no matter who the father turned out to be. It would crush Ryan’s heart, though, if after all this time and all these losses I finally got pregnant, and it wasn’t even his. What were the odds of that happening? I was on the pill, for god’s sake. It was one of the main reasons we hadn’t been as careful as we should’ve been.
“I have lost three babies,” I said morosely. I looked back and forth between my two loves. “If I can carry this baby to term, it will be a miracle. I will never care who specifically brought this baby into the world. I love you both. This baby will be a miracle either way. So . . . you guys are going to have to come to some sort of grip with this. Because I’m not ever going to be sad about this baby growing inside of me.”
Brighton picked up my hand as tears slipped down my cheeks.
“Of course not, Liv. It is a miracle. It’s just a shock, is all. We have even more to consider now,” he said practically. “If the baby’s not mine, it changes things.”
“It doesn’t,” I insisted. “We just promised to see where all this goes. That doesn’t change just because we accidentally created a baby together. Regardless of who the biological father is, this baby was born from a love that was sparked by all three of us. Without that, this baby would not exist.”
“We have a lot to think about,” Ryan agreed. “It doesn’t all need to be decided today, though. For now, nothing needs to change—except for getting you healthy. That’s going to be our number one goal. Right, Kerrington?”
Brighton rested his head on my stomach and began to cry quietly. There was nothing I could say or do to change the circumstances we found ourselves in. I ran my fingers through his thick, blond hair and comforted him the best I could. Ryan was holding my other hand, and we stared at each other over Brighton. No words were spoken, but I’d been with him long enough to know when he was terrified.
“It’ll be okay. It’ll all work out like it’s supposed to,” I whispered to no one in particular.
Maybe it was simply a prayer.
Chapter Thirteen
Brighton
THERE ARE KEY moments that define and change your life forever—altering the trajectory you were once on. Seeing Olivia for the first time was one of those for me. The day I met Ryan hadn’t been an accident. I’d started the renovations on my uncle’s home a few weeks before that. I would never forget my third day on the jobsite, when I first laid eyes on Olivia.
I was in the backyard chucking an old sink into the bright blue dumpster we used on all our construction sites. Maybe it was by chance that I looked up that morning, or maybe it was fate. Who knows? It had been drizzling, and a movement in the sunroom of the house next door caught my eye. I could barely make out the ghost of a woman’s silhouette leaning against the glass windowpanes. Her body shook as tears transformed her posture, breaking me to the core as I watched her. I’d only ever seen a few people cry like that in my lifetime: My parents when my youngest sister died of cancer at seventeen, Caroline and her parents when we lost Sam so unexpectedly, and me.
I knew when grief was etched into someone’s bones, just as they were mine.
I’d seen the husband coming and going a time or two, so I knew the couple was on the younger side. That’s when I first became drawn to Olivia like a magnet, constantly curious about who she was and what made her so sad. I’d caught glimpses of her through the windows of her home, often looking despondent. She didn’t move with the ease and grace of a woman her age. She moved with the weight of the pain she was carrying while hiding in the shadows of her home.
Something about her made me want to meet her and get to know who she really was. The only problem was, I never saw her leave. It was always Ryan hopping in his SUV for groceries and dragging out the garbage cans to the curb. He was an athlete, and I watched him jog away from their home several times, a look on his face too serious for a man who was about to release some major endorphins. One afternoon I noticed Olivia’s silhouette in the sunroom again, watching as Ryan headed off for another run. When he was out of sight, she slid down the wall of glass windows until
she was sitting on the floor sobbing. When I looked back thirty minutes later, she was still there, her head resting on her folded arms, her body shaking in the silence that surrounded her.
By the time I finally got to see Olivia in flesh and blood, she’d somehow become a familiar fixture in my mind, taking up more real estate than I cared to admit. I was tearing down interior walls on the first floor that day when I heard the neighbor’s SUV start up. By the time I made it to the front window, it was already pulling out of the driveway. I caught a glimpse of blond hair in the passenger seat as the car rounded the corner. She was getting out of the house for once. I didn’t know why, but a smile spread across my face, and I turned on some music as I continued ripping out drywall. Images of her soft, blond hair slipped in and out of my consciousness all afternoon.
It had been a long, labor-intensive day by the time Ryan and Olivia returned. I was pounding down a glass of ice water when I heard Ryan slam the trunk of his car. As I glanced out the window, I noticed that Olivia was already in their backyard. I couldn’t see her face from where I stood though, because she was leaning over and playing with a puppy.
Ryan was juggling a cardboard box as I bounded down the front steps, not even bothering to throw a shirt on I was in such a hurry to finally see her. That was all I’d wanted. Just one glimpse of the mystery woman next door to put a face with all the stories that were racing through my mind.
“Hey, man. This your house?” I asked Ryan.
“Yeah,” he said, setting the box onto the hood of his SUV and making his way over.
He was older than I was; I could tell by the lines that crinkled near his eyes when he smiled. He was almost as tall as me, and in decently good shape. Ryan’s beard caught my eye right away since I never wore more than a day’s worth of scruff. It was neatly trimmed, matching the color of his whiskey-colored eyes. He seemed kind and affable, a smile stretching across his face as he extended his hand to me.
“Brighton,” I said by way of introduction.
“Ryan,” he said and grinned. He shook my hand just as firmly as I clasped his. “You doing some work over there?”
“Oh, yeah. It was my uncle’s place. The family’s doing some renovations this summer. Probably putting it on the market in the fall. Thing sat here empty for way too long.”
“We were wondering if anyone was gonna fix the place up.”
I tried to focus on what he was saying, but it was Olivia who had captured my attention. I caught a glimpse of her profile and inhaled sharply. She was too far away to see the small details on her face that I would come to appreciate when we finally got to know one another, but I could see the perfection from where I stood, dumbfounded.
Olivia was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Always wondered what it looked like in there after being vacant so long,” Ryan hinted, pulling my attention away from his wife.
“Wanna come take a look?” I asked, using the T-shirt I’d slung over my shoulder to wipe my sweaty brow.
“We’d love to sometime, but you look like you’ve put in a long day. And we just got back home with a new puppy, so I should probably go give my wife a hand.”
“Nice,” I said. But my attention wasn’t on the shaggy, brown dog. It was on the leggy, mysterious blond. It wasn’t just her killer figure that caught my eye, though. Her smile captured my heart as I watched her. Liv was in their backyard, holding onto a small rope toy and teasing the puppy as it jumped to capture it with his mouth.
Time slowed like it does in the movies. Liv’s face was flush with pleasure, her cheeks a dewy pink as she tossed her head back in laughter with her long, blond hair tumbling in gentle waves down her back. With her face now exposed, I caught sight of a set of adorable dimples bookending the fullest, most kissable lips I’d ever seen.
When Ryan gently cleared his throat, I finally tore my eyes away. “What a cute dog,” was all I could manage to say. I suspected he was aware of how captivated I was by his wife. It was hard not to be. Olivia was the epitome of the sexy-cute girl next door. Except she was all grown up and even more beautiful as a woman.
I drank in her energy, unsure when I would have a chance to see her again. Ryan was one lucky SOB.
“It’s gonna take some getting used to,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. “Just swing by sometime when you have a free minute to show us around. We’d love to hear your plans. We got lucky when we moved in here. The whole place had been restored immaculately. We didn’t have to do a thing to it—thank god.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s what I’m hoping your new neighbors will say someday.”
“You’re welcome to come check out our place if you want. Whoever renovated it paid an insane amount of attention to the littlest details. It’s what made Liv fall in love with it.”
“Liv?” My heart fluttered hearing her name for the first time. What the hell was happening to me?
“My wife,” Ryan said a little sharply.
I shook my head. I needed to pull my head out of my ass before Ryan could tell what I was really thinking: Now that I’d seen her, it wasn’t enough. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I had to meet her in person.
“Yeah,” I said absently, my mind still engineering how to make that possible. “Well, I better head out. It’s been a long day and I could use a beer about now.”
“Nice meeting you. Good luck with the reno.”
“Thanks.” I yanked the gray shirt from my shoulder and shrugged it over my head before climbing into my pickup truck. I needed fresh air, so I rolled down the window before cranking some Tom Petty as I pulled away.
I knew it would be a mistake to meet Olivia in person. I was already drawn to her in ways I didn’t understand. But god help me, I knew nothing would keep me from squelching that curiosity.
I waved at Ryan before making a right turn at the corner, risking one last glance at Liv on my way out of the neighborhood.
It was hard to believe that was less than four months ago.
That was the day I knew my life would change forever. I just never suspected it would alter it as drastically as it had.
I’d always dreamed of meeting a sweet girl, getting married, and settling down in Watertown near my family. And hopefully, god willing, having more kids of my own someday. I worked hard to build my business after graduating from Duke, and I was damn proud of all my accomplishments. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compared to the feeling I had when Olivia told me and Ryan that she was pregnant.
She may have mistaken my tears for worry as I folded over onto her stomach and kissed it, resting my head there. But they were happy tears. Tears that came from the depths of my soul as I recognized it for what it was: another life-altering, trajectory-changing moment centered around Olivia. There was no denying our fates were meant to be entwined. No matter how messy it got with Ryan and me both loving her, I knew in that moment I would never walk away from either of them.
For some, it may have sounded like a scandal in the making: A married woman. A three-way affair. A shocking, unexpected pregnancy. But for me, it was my life. It was a pregnancy born out of love when the three of us had fused our hearts and bodies together so raw and openly in those early days. We were all searching for something in that bedroom the first time. Without even realizing it, we were each other’s answers all along—just not how we ever imagined it.
We were able to take Olivia home from the hospital that night. There was no question whether I was staying over this time. Ryan helped his wife up the stairs as I filled a glass of water for her. He was helping her out of her clothes and into the shower when I entered the room. I set the glass onto the table next to Olivia’s side of the bed. Though, technically, I guess it was my side now since Olivia liked to snuggle between us.
Ryan cocked his head for me to join them. I quickly undressed, eager to peel away the running clothes I’d been wearing all day.
Four months ago, I saw Olivia for the first time. Tonight
, I was seeing her with our baby inside her for the first time. And she was even more beautiful, knowing she was carrying it for one of us. I slid into the shower behind Ryan and let the water wash over us.
We washed the day away from Olivia’s aching body, worshipping it the way she deserved. Her hands folded over her belly at one point, and she glanced down at it in awe. After losing weight from the morning sickness, her stomach was flatter than ever. But soon, it would expand as our baby grew inside of her.
I couldn’t explain why, but I felt an overwhelming need to be buried deep inside of Olivia. It was like a driving, primitive force to be as close to her as I could possibly be in this moment of such deep love for her.
“I need you. All of you,” I whispered.
She nodded, letting me lift her from the shower and carry her to our bed. I didn’t waste time drying us off, and I was pressed deep inside of her before Ryan even turned the shower off. Liv clung to me as I unleashed every emotion I was storing in my body’s memory of her. Each thrust had me calling out her name as if it would bind us together forever.
“Fuck!” I cried out. Her body trembled around mine as I pinned her with my hips and we both came. She pulled my head down and kissed me thoroughly as she rode out the aftershocks. We’d come a long way from sharing secrets in the backyard in the middle of the night. Everything had changed, and there was no more hiding the feelings developing between any of us.
“I love you, Liv. More than I’ve ever loved anyone.”
She ran her fingers through my wet hair, even as droplets fell to her shoulders, getting her pillow wetter. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was she was really, finally, mine in some small way. Ryan would be the only man to ever truly have her as his wife on paper. But, somehow, I knew she would always be the only woman to hold that title in my heart.
Chapter Fourteen