Page 62 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

I breathe once, twice, three times, and let truth line up.

“What I know,” I begin, rocking Luca without meaning to, the motion setting my voice to a rhythm I can keep. “I left the morning after that night because I was terrified. Not of you. Not of the way you touched me. Of wanting, in a way that made my bones feel like wet paper.” I swallow.

Roman’s jaw tightens.

I continue, “If I had stayed, I would have had to admit that what happened was not a mistake or an accident or a storm trick. I would have had to tell you and myself that I wanted all of it. All of you. Not for one night. For longer than anyone in my family has ever forgiven.”

I do not look at the carved rules.

I do not look at Roman’s mouth.

I look at Cruz, because he looks at me like a man who has seen worse things become better.

He hums to Gabe and nods for me to keep going.

“I found out I was pregnant weeks later,” I say. “I threw up on the subway and blamed a bad egg sandwich until I could not pretend to be that naive. I bought a test at a pharmacy where the lights are too bright. I watched a plus sign arrive like an orchestra. I sat on the curb outside with a stranger’s cigarette smoke in my hair and cried because I felt so stupidly, stupidly happy and so stupidly, stupidly afraid.”

Luca screws up his face, then relaxes when I run a finger along his eyebrow.

He has a tiny, pointless cowlick.

I love him so much I have to laugh or I will open my own chest and hand them my heart like a pie.

“I kept telling myself I would call,” I say. “That every day I waited made it harder, which meant I should stop waiting, which somehow made it harder. I told myself things to make the ache tolerable. That you had better things to do than learn how to hold a bottle at four in the morning. That I had no right to want you to try. That wanting that for myself was selfish and childish and embarrassing.”

Cruz’s mouth softens into a shape that makes my throat burn.

Deacon looks at the babies and not at me, which is him not giving me privacy so much as him lending it.

“The babies are yours,” I say, and because the truth likes precision, I add, “Not one of you. All of you. I do not know whose blood runs where.” I lift my chin because I refuse to make this a confession the way my mother taught me. “I thought about testing paternity. I held a kit in my hand and hated it for the way it tried to turn love into numbers. I put it back on the shelf. The only thing I have done correctly this year is keep them safe and alive and so loved they fall asleep in the middle of their own joy.”

Silence folds over the room, warm as the blanket on my shoulders, heavy as confession.

The fire throws a pop that sounds like a polite cough.

Somewhere deeper in the lodge a pipe ticks awake, deciding to be generous.

Cruz breathes a small laugh into Gabe’s hair and the baby answers with a squeak, a sound like a cork popping out of a bottle of something celebratory. It steadies me more than any water could.

Roman’s voice comes low and even. “We would have wanted to know.”

It is not an accusation. It is a simple line drawn on the floor, chalk white, impossible to ignore.

I look at him. The gray of his eyes is iron under a storm.

His hands are still on the table, palms down, like he is promising not to move until I finish.

He is unfairly beautiful, even when he is furious. Especially when he is furious. A laugh escapes me, small and unhinged.

“I kept writing the first line,” I say. “Hi. It’s Marisa. I am pregnant. I think you should sit down. I hit send in my head every day. I deleted it with my thumb every night. I told myself you would not care, then told myself you would, and somehow both made me cry.”

Deacon steps out of the room then returns, setting a mug down on the table near my elbow. Steam ribbons up. Cocoa and cinnamon.

“For the mother,” he says. “Because she has been very brave.”

“Thank you,” I say, and my voice behaves like it has manners. I blow on the surface, take a careful sip.

It tastes like childhood if childhood had been allowed kindness.