I shot her a smile as I slipped her straps back into place, making her dress cover her breasts, then tucking myself away.
“There we go. Perfectly normal couple,” she declared.
And it was about right that moment that I realized something was off about her sundress.
See, it looked like flowers all over it from far away.
And it was.
Except, up close, you could see actual cocks coming out of the center of the flowers.
Yeah.
Perfectly normal couple.
A one-percent, arms-dealing biker and his dick-dress-wearing woman.
Billie - 2 years
“Why are you crying?” Layna asked, stopping short as she walked into my house.
It looked a little different than it had when I’d seen it for the first time. The bones were still the same, of course, but like Rowe had mentioned before I officially moved in, there were crystals scattered on the surfaces, there was art on the walls, there were some colorful carpets on the floor.
It was the perfect mix of Rowe’s laid-back, rustic, masculine style and my over-the-top, colorful, eclectic one. And much like me and Rowe as a couple, it shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
“She’s always crying lately,” Hope grumbled, not the best at dealing with soft emotions like that.
“You guys are being mean,” Gracie said, patting me on the shoulder. “She’s full of hormones right now. She can’t help it that she’s emotional.”
“It’s not that,” I admitted, reaching up to wipe the tears off my face.
“What is it then?”
“I don’t like it,” I declared, and it was a low, choked sound because I hated thinking it, let alone saying it.
“You don’t like what?” Layna asked.
“I can’t. I can’t say it. You’re going to think I’m awful.”
“We could never think that,” Gracie assured me, giving my hand a squeeze. “What do you not like?”
“Being pregnant,” I whispered, my hand moving over my mouth as the admission finally escaped me. After months of thinking it. “It’s supposed to be so beautiful, so magical. I always pictured myself as glowing and radiant and blissful as a pregnant lady. But I was tired and sick and achy and moody and bloated. God, I was so bloated. My face was retaining water.
“Well, that’s not a surprise,” Hope said, shrugging.
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah, well, I mean you have this thing inside of you leeching off of you,” Layna chimed in. “And if it wasn’t enough that it was stealing all your nutrients, it plays on your bladder like a trampoline and, well, you’re kinda puffy, y’know? Sounds pretty miserable to me.”
“And you literally spent three months with your head in a toilet day and night,” Hope added.
“I’m supposed to love this!” I objected, a pathetic sob catching in my throat.
“Says who? Aside from you,” Danny said, coming in with a bag of groceries. Including about ten pounds of chocolate I’d asked her to pick up since I’d given up on having a health-based pregnancy at the five-month point. “Do you not remember me when I was in your position the first time?”
“I vaguely remember you telling me that you wanted Fallon to have to carry the baby and push it out of his dick,” I recalled, smiling a little.
“I still stand by that,” Danny said, putting the bag down, patting her steadily rounding out tummy. There was some comfort in having her pregnant at the same time, in having her there to tell me that it was okay if I was a complete whiny bitch for nine months if I wanted to be. “You know the worst part?” she asked, plopping down on my other side, kicking her swollen feet up on the coffee table.
“The way my nose has gotten wider?” I asked, reaching up to touch it, surprised with how self-conscious I’d been when that had started.
“No. That will go back down. The fact that your little gremlin is going to come out looking just like his damn daddy,” she said. “You’d think with all the work we do incubating them that they would have the decency to come out looking like us.”
“I mean, I don’t mind a little Rowe walking around,” I admitted.
“Yeah, he’s not bad to look at,” Danny agreed. “Did he steal my spawn?” she asked, looking around for her son.
“He did,” I said, smiling softly at the memory of him bouncing the toddler around until he was squealing and letting out a belly laugh that it was impossible not to smile back at. “They went to the stream. The ducks came back this summer,” I told her. “Shaw wanted to feed them peas.”
“He’s cute as hell,” Danny said, smiling. “He was worth all of that,” she said, waving at me. “And she will be worth all of this,” she added, waving at her belly.
Then, as if we’d summoned them, there was Rowe with a passed out Shaw asleep against his chest.
“Uh oh. Are we discussing doing a home vasectomy with a dull set of scissors?” he asked, grimacing at all of us looking at him.