Beast looked at him. “What would you have done in my place?”
The smile briefly froze on Knight’s lips. “Oh. You know, I’ve always been safe for a reason. And I’m positive Elliot wouldn’t want to share me with anyone, so that’s out of the way.”
Beast shook his head. “Great. That’s exactly the support I needed.”
“I’m no dad-material. I’ve done my share of parenting before I even moved into the clubhouse, but you’ll do great. Look how well you’re handling a teenager.”
Beast couldn’t have glared at him with more contempt even if he wanted to, but Knight didn’t seem at all bothered and followed the path into a narrow ravine that smelled of damp dirt and the ferns that created a thick carpet on both its sides.
“Have you already thought about a name?”
Beast chewed on his lip. He was having a hard time calling the egg a ‘baby’. How was he to make up a name for it? “We’ll see once it hatches.”
Knight shook his head with a thoughtful look at the clouds. “‘Hatches’. So weird, right? My sister had a baby a few months ago. You know, Lana, and she named him Xavier. What’s up with that? I bet Laurent would want to call your kid something fancy too, like, Rupert, or Colette.”
Beast scowled. “Jesus Christ. My kid won’t be called a name from a period drama!” He shut his mouth when they exited the ravine and walked into a small clearing where Laurent and Elliot stood facing an old stone well, which was buried low in the tall grass.
And the egg was there too, of course, hidden in the backpack Laurent now wore every single day. It obscured the patches on Laurent’s back, the ones that proclaimed him as Beast’s ‘property’, and even though he knew it didn’t mean anything, it still felt like a metaphor.
Despite the frustration bubbling up inside, Beast didn’t wish for Laurent to fall and break the damn thing but was already considering the need of getting a more secure carrier, especially that the freaky egg seemed larger every day.
“You made it. Finally!” Laurent smiled and walked up to Beast for a kiss that soothed his strained nerves. “We were getting cold out here, so I worried the baby might be freezing too. But I covered it with an extra blanket.”
Knight pulled Elliot in for a brief kiss, but his gaze soon sought out Laurent’s. “The baby? When are you going to call it something more personal? Let me see it.”
Laurent got flustered as he took off the backpack. “Well, I like to call him Marcel.”
Beast just stared. When did that happen?
Knight smirked at him. The bastard. “Oh, is that so? Classy. Not ‘William’? After all, he was the one who indirectly brought you two together.”
Elliot pushed at Knight’s chest, but his boyfriend laughed it off. “Seriously? That fucker needs to rot, his name forgotten.”
Laurent rolled his eyes. “The name is actually that of Fane’s last victim. A poor young man, who did not get to live the life he deserved because of that monster. Naming our son Marcel, will honor him.”
Beast kicked a small stone hard enough for it to hit the side of the well. “You didn’t really mention this before.”
Laurent opened the backpack and unraveled the egg from the blanket so that Knight could see it. “Someone had to make a decision, and you were stalling. Calling it ‘the egg’. That’s not a nice way to think of our son. What if he heard you?”
Beast’s mouth felt stiff when he spoke. “It’s a fetus. It’s not going to understand what we’re saying. And besides, we live in uncertain times. I don’t want to name him when I don’t know how long this whole thing will last, or what its gender’s going to be!”
When Knight picked up the egg, Laurent wouldn’t stop watching him, as if he expected their friend to drink their kid for breakfast. “Of course it will be a boy. He’s made of you and me. What else would he be?”
Elliot snorted, running his finger over a ruby-colored pattern on the shell. “Will he be gay then? Since he’s made of you both and all that?”
Laurent’s face flushed. “Did you notice how fast it’s growing?”
Beast had to smirk, even though the topic Laurent avoided was so very sensitive, and in a way even painful. “Would that be a problem to you?”
But Knight wedged himself into the conversation yet again, carefully weighing the egg in his hands. “Growing egg. So freaky. You two have to make everything weird.”
As if Beast needed that on his plate too. “How about we get on with what we came here for?”
“Yes, exactly. The egg might by unusual, but it will produce a perfectly normal child, I’m sure of it,” Laurent said, forcing Knight to put it back into the blanket.