Page 65 of The Best Friend Problem
It was all just baby brain.
And maybe a little sex haze.
Once these little bundles of joy made their appearance, everything would go back to normal. A new normal for her, to be sure, but she and Finn would go back to being just friends. Like they’d always been. Like it should be.
Nothing more.
Chapter Sixteen
F: Picking you up in ten.
P: Make it five!
Finn chuckled, reading the frustrated text from Pru on his cell screen.
F: Bad day for a white wedding?
P: That joke was old the first seven hundred times you used it.
So she said, but it still made the corner of her lips curl in the slightest grin. He’d stop telling it when she stopped secretly loving it.
F: What’s up?
P: Lilly and Mo are in uber-mother-hen mode today. They’re stifling me.
F: They love you.
P: They’re going to love me into uselessness if they don’t stop freaking out over everything I do. I’m carrying babies, not the plague.
He laughed because he knew Lilly and Moira were simply showing their care for Pru. No one wanted her overly stressed right now. In fact, Mo had texted, instructing him to play Pru classical music at night to calm her because stress wasn’t good for the babies’ emotional growth. He didn’t even know fetuses had emotional growth.
F: Ten minutes
P: FIVE!
He smiled, slipping his cell into his pocket, checking on Bruiser, who lay happily in her doggy bed with her favorite chew toy, and headed out the door to his car to grab Pru before going over to his parents’ place. He and Pru had been going over what to tell them about this whole situation. The past few family dinners she’d come to, it had been easy to hide her pregnancy, but now she was starting to show. And besides, they’d find out eventually. He didn’t like lying to his family, but the truth was…tricky.
Oddly, Pru had been exceedingly open to the idea of informing his mom and dad they were going to be grandparents again. She loved the idea of the babies having a big network of family to love and support them. As they discussed, she was still doing this mommy thing solo, but she’d agreed to let him help out. But even though she practically lived at his place now, they slept together almost every night, and he went to every checkup, he still got the impression Pru was holding back, like she was scared to admit what they were really doing.
Having a relationship.
He was smart enough to recognize it. And chickenshit enough to be terrified by it.
Somehow over the past few months, he and Pru had morphed from friends to lovers to relationship status. But what really scared him was that the anxiety-twisting knot in his gut, the one that always screamed “get out” whenever he was hanging with a date that might have serious potential, wasn’t there. The only thing currently in his gut was a leftover burrito from lunch and a strange sense of comfort.
Could be the burrito. Could be Pru.
It probably wasn’t the burrito.
So what did he do with this knowledge? He couldn’t talk to Pru about it. They’d discussed a lot of hard stuff recently, but he knew Pru. If he let on for even one second that he was catching feelings, she’d run for the Rockies. He knew how Pru felt about the dangers of his job. Hell, it was the reason he didn’t do relationships.
She needed a nine-to-five guy. A partner who would be home every night to help tuck the kids in, read them bedtime stories. He couldn’t do that. He’d never imagined himself being that kind of person. But not being there for Pru and the twins…
He rubbed at the dull ache in his chest. The one that was getting stronger and stronger every time he thought too hard about the future. About what would happen once the babies arrived. He was afraid of what the growing ache signaled. Even though he knew he couldn’t be the man Pru needed, a part of him longed to be the man she wanted.
He pulled up outside her apartment building, forgoing finding a visitor spot in the small crowded parking lot because there, standing just inside the glass front doors, stood Pru. The irritated expression on her face morphed into relief as she spotted him, then she threw open the front door and practically sprinted for the car.
“Careful,” he admonished when she opened the door. “You’re not supposed to run in your condition. You could fall and hurt yourself or the babies.”
