Goldie and the Three Wisconsin Bears

“You made oatmeal. Good, I’m starving, bro.”

I get up and make him a bowl of oatmeal with walnuts and craisins and no sugar as he loads the groceries into the cabinets and the fridge.

“Craig says it might be more than a week before he can get to Goldie’s car. He doesn’t know how long it will take him to find a new engine for that piece of junk.”

Jeb whistles. “That’s going to make shit real awkward when you find out she’s lying.”

Instead of answering Jeb, I ask Mitch, “Did you get the test?”

“Got five different kinds, just to be sure. Let me tell you, Shannon over at the General Store’s going to be gossiping for days.”

I laugh. But of course, Jeb doesn’t even crack a smile.

“Give ‘em to me,” he says. “I’ll go wake her up and make her take all of them.”

“No!” both Mitch and me say at the same time.

“The last thing she needs is you first thing in the morning,” Mitch tells Jeb.

Then he hands me the bag with the pregnancy tests.

Chapter Six

GINA

There might be more awkward ways to spend the morning than having a guy watch as you dip five different pregnancy tests into a cup of your fresh urine. But if there is, let me tell you, I’m having a hell of a time coming up with that scenario.

“So, how did you end up being the one that got assigned this job?” I ask Nico, just to break up the cringey silence. “Did you draw the short straw?”

A smile spreads across his handsome face like he’s just been waiting for me to make some chit chat with him. “Nothing like that. We all have our roles. Jeb’s the enforcer. Mitch is the business guy. And I handle all the intimate stuff.”

I raise my eyebrows at his explanation. “So you guys do this often?”

“We used to,” he answers. “A couple of years ago, we were renting hotel suites in Chicago about every other weekend and hiring an escort to entertain us.”

It shouldn’t matter, but it feels weird to know that when it comes to this kind of sex, they’re so much more experienced than me.

“What changed?” I ask, hoping the answer will make me feel better as I arrange all the pregnancy sticks in a neat row along the counter.

It doesn’t.

“New girl, new hotel suite every other weekend got old. I’m in my thirties now. I wanted to settle down. Have some kids.”

I shake my head, not understanding. “You wanted to settle down, so you moved to a cabin out in the woods with your teammates.”

He chuckles. “Okay, now I know you’re not from around here. Or a football groupie.”

“What gave it away?” I ask as I move to the sink to wash my hands. “My Southern accent?”

Cynda liked to tease me about my soft drawl.

“If I had to say exactly what a Georgia peach sounded like, I’d point to you,” she said the first time we met, as two of the only black state princess contestants in that year’s Beauty Queen of America pageant.

“That and the fact that you never heard of us. Mitch, Jeb, and me are foster brothers. It was all over the Wisconsin sports news a few years ago when Jeb joined the team. Me and Mitch are second-stringers, but Jeb was a walk-on tryout who snagged a tight end spot on the starting lineup, so everybody made a big deal out of our relationship.”

I dry my hands on the Death Buddha t-shirt he gave me to wear before I took the pregnancy tests. It’s so large it extends halfway down my thighs, like a dress. “I honestly have never heard of you.”

But I’m curious to know more. “How did you go from foster brothers to sharing one woman in the middle of the woods.”

Nico leans against the only part of the sink that isn’t covered in pregnancy tests. “It’s kind of a long story.”

I give him a wry shrug. “I’m not doing anything but waiting for these tests to confirm what I already know.”

“Okay, well…” Nico scratches the back of his neck like he’s embarrassed to be talking about himself. “I guess it starts with how Mitch, Jeb, and me all ended up in the same foster home. I was just a kid when I lost my single mom, but other than that, I’ve always been lucky. Unlike Mitch and Jeb, I ended up in a good foster home right away. This older man named Coach Granger took me in.”

His smile turns fond at the mention of his foster father. “Coach Granger had a first name. It was Saul. But me and everybody else in Muskego called him Coach Granger. He decided to take me in for emergency foster care after my mom died, and he never sent me away. His wife had been a businesswoman, and he considered his players his kids. But then he retired, and his wife died, and he said he got tired of living alone. When I landed on his doorstep, he told me he wanted to make himself useful again. And I believed him. Anyway, he’s the one who got me into football, and I was pretty good at it. I grew up stronger and taller than expected. And by the time I’d played a year of middle school football, I was already being looked at by college scouts.”