Page 31 of Beautiful When He Breaks

I watch him go with my pulse beating high and confused in my throat, and when the door clicks shut behind him, the room feels emptier than it should.

I look down at Mila asleep in her bassinet, one tiny fist tucked under her chin, and then toward the door Julian just walked through. The different feeling in my chest stays right where it is, warm and unsettling, and impossible to explain away now that I’ve felt it this clearly.

For the first time in my life, looking at my best friend doesn’t feel simple.

9

Julian

When Eli gets Mila down for the night, the whole house looks like a hardware store and a daycare had a nervous breakdown together.

There are cabinet latches on the kitchen counters that Ryan installed wrong twice before Sage took over with the kind of patient fury that only rich fraternity boys somehow manage to make elegant.

There are outlet covers lined up in a neat little pile on the dining table because Liam sorted them by room, like we’re running military logistics instead of trying to stop a baby from electrocuting herself in ten months. There are foam corner guards on the coffee table now, which makes the whole thing look faintly ridiculous, especially in a mansion built to impress old-money assholes.

Thorn screwed the baby gate in at the top of the stairs with enough force to survive a natural disaster, and Roman spent the last hour bitching that the place now looks “aggressively suburban,” even though he was the one who ordered a set of soft duck-print drawer liners online without realizing what he was doing until Adrian pointed it out, and all of us just stared at the product photo in silence.

That part has started happening more than any of us are willing to admit. Somehow, every single thing bought for Mila lately has ducks on it—near ducks, adjacent to ducks, or in the same emotional zip code as ducks.

It started with the yellow sleeper Eli brought back from a late-night pharmacy run because it was the first thing he saw in her size. Then Sage found a duck-shaped bath thermometer and insisted it was practical. Then Liam came home with burp cloths patterned with tiny cartoon ducks and swore he hadn’t noticed until he unfolded them. Ryan bought what he claimed was a “high-performance plush bath companion,” which was just a rubber duck from a boutique baby store with a ridiculous price tag and a knitted hat.

Nobody’s doing it on purpose. That’s the creepiest part. The duck shit just keeps multiplying around the house as if the universe itself looked at Mila and decided this was a bit worth committing to.

I’m sitting on the edge of Eli’s bed while the shower runs in his bathroom, listening to the water hitting tile and trying very hard not to let my mind go places it has absolutely no business going.

Mila is finally asleep in the bassinet beside the bed after a long evening of fussy half-cries and tiny outraged noises because babies, apparently, can sense stress in a room and respond by becoming little scream-powered demons.

Eli handled most of it himself tonight, which was a quiet kind of victory. He’s learning. Not in the big cinematic way people write about parenthood, where some switch flips and suddenly a guy knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s learning in the real, exhausted way.

He also realized that he needs to go back to attending his classes.

We don’t love the idea of leaving Mila with someone outside the house, but the reality is classes still exist, football still exists, life keeps grinding forward even when a baby detonates in the middle of it. So, Eli and I sat at the kitchen island, going through the references for Mrs. Alvarez, the woman Killian’s lawyer recommended for weekday childcare.

If it’s not one thing, it’s something else, I guess.

The shower cuts off, and my whole body reacts before my brain does. I hate how automatic it is, and how nothing about this is new.

He comes out of the bathroom with a towel draped over one shoulder, and water still clinging in a line down the side of his neck. He’s wearing only a pair of dark boxer briefs and nothing else, and the sight of him lands square in my chest so hard I nearly feel it physically.

His skin is tanned from football, his body solid and cut in that naturally powerful way that comes from being a tight end and using every inch of his five-foot-nine frame like a battering ram against people much bigger than him. His shoulders are broad, his waist narrow, his thighs thick with muscle, and there’s still that tiny scar near his left hip from when we were fourteen, and he caught himself on barbed wire trying to jump a fence because I dared him. I know exactly where to look for every familiar detail, and my body does it before my conscience can intervene.

I look away too late, and I hate myself for it.

Eli doesn’t notice. He crosses the room barefoot, rubbing the towel through his hair while glancing automatically toward the bassinet first, then toward me. The softness in his face when he checks Mila is becoming second nature to him now. That gets me every time, too.

“She stayed down?” he asks quietly, keeping his voice low even though Mila is dead asleep and would probably snooze through a tornado after the evening she put us through.

“Yeah,” I answer, forcing my tone to sound normal while my eyes stay very carefully on his face. “She fussed for about thirty seconds after you went in, but then she gave me one dirty look and passed out.”

Eli snorts and tosses the towel onto the desk chair. “That tracks. She’s already judgmental as hell.”

“She’s your kid,” I say before I can stop myself.

That earns me the ghost of a smile, and God, even that nearly undoes me. He’s been smiling more lately. Not enough to cancel out the stress in him, or erase the grief, anger, and deep, ugly confusion about Celeste and what happened. But enough that I notice every single one now and eat them up.

He sits beside me on the bed, and the mattress dips under his weight. I can smell the cedar bodywash and shampoo, and because the universe apparently hates me, that smell is still so familiar it almost feels like childhood layered over present-day torture.

He drags a hand through his damp hair and lets out a tired breath. “Killian said he would text Mara again while I was in the shower,” he says. “There’s an addendum getting added to the papers tomorrow because of the test results and the hospital report. She said the language around the surrender needed to be updated now that paternity’s confirmed and they’re moving ahead with the restraining order request too.”