Hard Luck (Trophy Boyfriends 4)

“So you haven’t told anyone either, eh?”

He glances at me. “I haven’t known that long, so I haven’t had the chance. I’m still kind of processing.”

Buzz with his non-filter looks at me. “What the fuck, True? Have you been lying to everyone?”

“Kind of. But I was scared, okay? I didn’t know what to do! That’s why I came here…I had to think.” I just needed a place to come and stay so I could think…

Mateo takes his hand off my back and puts it around my shoulders, pulling me in. Kisses the top of my head.

“Dude. This is so fucking weird,” Buzz blurts out. “It’s like I’m having a nightmare but I can’t wake up.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

All three of us tell him this at the same time and we laugh, because it’s funny, then we laugh some more because we all get a case of nerves at the same time.

Tears well in my eyes again, from emotions and tension and hormones, and before I know it I’m crying all over again.

Tripp, Buzz, and Mateo all look at me.

“Oh my god, this could be like Three Men and a Baby, that movie where the three guys find a baby and raise it in their swanky loft apartment in the city!” Buzz gasps on the tail end of his great idea.

“Did you seriously just say that out loud?” Mateo is shaking his head.

“How fun would that be?” Buzz is warming to his idea. “The media would eat that shit up.”

“Are you hearing yourself? You sound psychotic.”

“Okay, but you have to admit it’s a great idea.”

He does sound crazy.

I wave a hand in front of his face to remind him the mother of this child he’s talking about kidnapping and raising with his two buddies is sitting in front of him.

“Hello! I’m right here.”

I swear, Buzz can be such a tool sometimes with the worst freaking ideas. Where do the ideas even come from?

So dumb.

“I’m sorry but that movie is like, thirty years old—no one would have a clue what you were talking about. They’d have to google it.”

“Whatever. If you change your mind, let me know.”

“You are not using your niece or nephew as a publicity stunt.”

Buzz points a finger at Tripp. “No, he’s the one who does the publicity stunts.”

It’s true.

Back before Tripp was in a relationship with his girlfriend Chandler, they had a few public run-ins that made him look horrible in the news and on social media.

Chandler single-handedly flipped him on his ass, in the middle of the dance floor at Buzz and Hollis’s wedding, and the entire world saw it.

So what does he go and do? He stages a dinner date to make them look chummy, spinning the situation to look as if he planned the wedding blunder—making it seem as if Chandler actually liked him when in fact she thought he was an asshole.

Because he mostly is.

Anyway, the whole thing was a comedy of errors, and now months later they’re in love and dating when they both have the time.

“I’m a new person now—leave me alone.”

“So no to raising the baby just the three of us? Ugh, fine.”

No matter what, Buzz can always make me laugh with his shenanigans.

He means well, he just sometimes comes off harsh, and it’s on the tip of my tongue to ask about Hollis and the strange looks they were exchanging last time we had a family dinner, my sneaking suspicions nagging at the back of my brain.

Hollis is pregnant and he hasn’t said a word about it, so you have nothing to feel guilty about, True.

Nothing.

Twenty

True

Since Buzz found out about the baby, he has been over at Tripp’s house constantly—as if he has nothing better to do than drive me insane with his nonstop hovering.

The worst kind of mother hen.

Zero parts mother, all parts hen, he stands up and follows me any time I leave a room like a puppy dog tailing its owner.

Both he and Chewy follow when I get off the couch and head to the kitchen to refill my water glass, and I abruptly stop walking, causing him to smash into my back—the way we used to in the hallway in middle school as a joke on our friends or anyone behind us.

“Why’d you stop?”

“Why are you following me? I’m not going into labor in the kitchen—I’m not even twenty weeks yet. You have to get a life, man. Don’t you have things you should be doing?”

Like packing to move west for a month?

Practice?

Getting your house ready to be vacant for four weeks?

Everything and anything but standing over me?

Enough is enough.

“Give me some space—you’re suffocating me.”

“Hold up, did you say labor?” Buzz’s face is blank, his mouth turning down at the corners, a puzzled expression crossing his features. “You’re going into labor?”

I push out a sigh. “I said I wasn’t going into labor—are you paying attention?”