Page 39 of Doctor Daddies

A voice cuts through the quiet, and all four of us spring up as though the bed has been set on fire. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been—because, standing there in the doorway, is the very last person any of us wanted to lay eyes on.

“Matt?” Millie gasps, as she leaps from the bed, grabbing a blanket from the bed to cover herself up as her brother casts his eye across the scene in front of him.

Nausea stirs in my guts. I try to think of any way we might be able to spin this that wouldn’t make it downright obvious what the fuck is going on here, but I get the feeling we’re way past thepoint of no return. All four of us, in bed. His best friends sleeping over with his sister in her new apartment. That’s not the kind of shit you can just brush off like it’s nothing.

“Matt, what the hell are you doing here?” Millie asks, groping around for any way that she can spin this into something else.

“I got home from my conference early,” he mutters, his voice devoid of any emotion, his gaze flicking between us as he tries to make sense of it. “And I…I wanted to see your new apartment. Thought I would stop by. The door was unlocked, so I came in, and…” He trails off, clearly unable to wrap his head around what he’s seeing right now.

I exchange a glance with Ross and James. Both of them look just as stunned as me, none of us sure what to say, if there is even anything wecansay given the circumstances.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Matt asks again, his voice low, as if he might explode if he speaks any louder.

“Matt, just give me a chance to explain,” Millie pleads with him. “Let us get dressed, and we can?—”

“I’m giving you a chance to explain,” he replies stiffly. “So, let me ask again—what the fuck is going on here?”

I take a deep breath and step forward. Someone has to break this to him, and if it has to be me, fine.

“I know how this looks, Matt,” I begin, lifting a hand and trying my best to keep him from entirely flipping his shit. “But you have to understand, this isn’t some one-time thing?—”

“Cole!” Millie hisses at me. It’s clearly not exactly how she would have gone about it, but I’ve found in these circumstances that the best way to go about it is to be honest—no point trying todrip-feed the truth, knowing that it will all be spilled eventually anyway.

“You mean this has happened before?” Matt demands, his face darkening with a fury I have never seen from him before. I’ve been friends with Matt for years, and he’s always been the chill, laid-back type of guy, the type who doesn’t let a damn thing bother him. But here, now, it looks as though he wants to tear us apart right where we stand, and I can’t exactly say that I blame him.

“A long time ago,” I continue. “But it hasn’t happened since. And?—”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Matt mutters, turning away from us all, looking disgusted.

Millie casts a look in my direction, clearly telling me to keep my mouth shut so she can try and salve the harm that has already been done.

“Matt,” she murmurs, as she steps toward her brother, putting a hand on his shoulder to try and draw his attention.

He shakes it off, not even able to look at her “Don’t touch me.”

“Matt, you need to listen to me,” she pleads with him. “This isn’t how I wanted you to find out about this. We?—”

“You were going to tell me?” he replies, his brows drawing together in incredulity. “Is there something to tell? What, are the four of you…are the four of you fuckingdatingor something?”

Nobody says anything for a moment, I guess because what happened last night was perilously close to a relationship—even if I don’t have a clue what it will look like for all of us to be together, if it would even be possible for four people to be in arelationship with each other in the first place. But the quiet is all it takes for Matt to clock that something heavier is going on, and his face darkens to a near-puce shade of anger.

“Tell me what the hell is going on here right the fuck now,” he demands. “Or I’m going to assume that all of you have been lying to me for kicks all this time, you hear me?”

Millie takes a deep breath. She knows her brother well enough to sense when he’s not going to drop something, and like a dog with a bone, he will not unclench his jaw until he finds out what we’ve gotten into behind his back.

“The guys and I, we…we reconnected a couple of months ago,” Millie explains. “The guys, they were looking for someone to?—”

“They were looking for someone and they decided it had to be my fucking sister?” Matt replies, and his voice cracks. I can tell how much he’s hurting right now, and I know that we only have ourselves to blame. As much as I want to believe that everything is going to be okay, this fury that’s coming off him in waves is not the kind of thing we can just snuff out in a second.

“We met at that party at college, years ago,” Millie explains. “And the guys, they had been thinking about—I mean, they had been planning…” She falters.

How to say this next part? It’s not like he’ll be okay with it, not like he’s going to do anything other than flip his fucking shit when it clicks for him that we’ve been hooking up with his sister not just because we want her, but because there’s a bond between us that goes deeper than anything we could put into words. A bond, now that she’s going to bring our children into the world.

I hadn’t given much thought to how we were going to break the news to Matt when the time came, but I know one thing for fucking certain—this isn’t how I would have chosen to do it.

“What’s going on?” Matt demands once more, sensing something heavier in the room, something even weightier than what he’s walked in on.

“They….they were looking for a surrogate. A woman to carry their children.”