by Reagan Shaw
“No, actually. I was thinking about pizza,” I replied then grimaced. “And I’ve got to pee again.”
“Now, that’s a good combination. I’ll call for the pepperoni.”
“Extra anchovies.”
“If I didn’t love you so much, I swear…” Luna trailed off and hopped off the sofa, skedaddling through the tiny living room and toward the attached kitchen.
My apartment was small but big enough for me and for my coming baby. And it was home. It felt like the perfect first home to me. I heaved myself off the sofa, grunting and groaning like the cow I was—only in size—and mooed my way into the bathroom.
I finished my business as quick as a pregnant woman could, flushed, washed my hands, then checked my reflection in the mirror.
Holy crap. Look at the size of your nose. I’d never been particularly vain, but a woman had to marvel at how that sucker had stretched out. My entire face was doughy and looked like it had been stretched to cover my skull.
“Sheesh,” I muttered, and pressed my hand to my belly. “The things I do for love.”
Pain speared through me. The muscles in my abdomen tightened, and I gripped the edge of the sink. “Oh my. Oh my, oh my. Oh my.”
“Extra anchovies ordered,” Luna called from the living room. “The things I do for love.”
The pain abated, and I exhaled, slowly released my hold on the sink. I cleared my throat. “Luna?”
“Yeah? I told you, I got the anchovies.”
“Luna, can you come in here for a second?”
“I swear, if you need me to help you off the toilet again, I’m going to take a picture. Nobody at work believes that’s a thing.” Luna’s voice drifted through the door, clearly bemused.
“Luna,” I hissed.
She opened the door and took a step inside, then froze. My pale face and her pink one stared back at us in the mirror. “I’m leaking,” I said, just realizing it for the first time.
“What? What do you mean you’re leaking?” Luna asked, and it was as if she’d just spoken to me through a tunnel. “Huh? You peed your pants?”
“No, I think—Luna, I think my water just broke.” Another contraction came, right on cue. “Oh my, and the contractions are already close together. Oh my god. I need to get to the hospital. Like, now.”
“What? What? You’re joking. Are you joking? You’re—”
“Luna, snap out of it,” I said, gritting my teeth through the pain, and practicing my breathing. “Whoosh, okay, whoosh.”
“Whoosh?”
“Get the bag,” I said. “Whoosh.”
“Why are you saying whoosh?”
“I’m breathing! Get the bag!”
Luna rushed out of the bathroom, squeaking like a mouse that had been trodden on, and I followed her out. “OK, we’re fine. How far apart are they?” I muttered.
“I can hear you talking to yourself!” Luna called from the master bedroom. “And it’s freaking me out.”
“Shush!” The contraction had abated again. “Where’s my phone?” I muttered and waddled over to the kitchen counter. I swept it up and tapped through my apps until I reached the timer. “OK, start on the next one. Can’t be more than 5 centimeters, surely.” Unless I was about to have the quickest labor in history. “Whoosh,” I said.
“The whooshing thing too,” Luna cried and skidded into the kitchen, carrying my overnight bag, “is seriously freaking me out.”
“You know, for the person who’s not in labor between the two of us, you sure complain a lot.”
Luna laughed hysterically. “Oh my god, let’s go—”
Another contraction came, and I hit the timer with a shaking finger. I continued whooshing, gripping the underside of my belly. The pain was intense, and I squeezed my eyes shut, focused on my breathing.
“What are we doing?” Luna asked. “Why aren’t we moving?”
“Whoosh. We’re. Whoosh. Timing. Whoosh.” Finally, it abated and I hit the stop button on the timer, sweat beading on my forehead. “Sixty seconds.” I hit another timer. “Let’s see how long until the next one.”
We called a cab, hurried out of the apartment and down to it, and another contraction came. “Oh my god,” I screeched and clutched at my phone. I hit the lap button on my timer. “Five minutes. That’s way too close together. That’s... This baby is coming. It’s coming now.”
“The hospital is an hour away,” Luna replied, in a muted wail.
“Anything closer?” I asked.
She swallowed, nodded. “Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said.
Luna nodded again. “What do you want to do?”
The contraction subsided and I exhaled, glancing at the reflection of the cabbie’s wide eyes in his rearview mirror. A beat passed.
Just because he worked there didn’t mean he had a shift today. Maybe I’d get lucky. As if.
“Erika?”
I sucked in a breath. “What I want to do? What I want to do is have this baby. Fast.”
Luna squeezed my hand, then focused on the driver. “St. Katherine’s Hospital. On the double. Like put your foot flat against the pedal, aight?”
The taxi screeched off, just as another contraction took hold.
Noah
Months had passed since I’d last spoken to Erika, since that fucked-up day in my office at the hospital, but I hadn’t quit thinking about her. She was in my mind, every day, clouding my judgment, my thoughts.
I couldn’t move on from her. Couldn’t think about anyone else. I was on autopilot.
Go to work, work, go home, watch some shit on TV, eat takeout, workout, bed, repeat. That was it. I’d been reduced to the worst version of myself. The nothing version I’d kept alive for far too long. It was the version I hadn’t realized was empty until Erika had come along and showed me just how much more there was to all of this.
I’d chosen to work late tonight and the night before that, to avoid the shitty thoughts that came right before bed. It was pathetic. It was as if the crush I’d had in high school had come back to haunt me and turned into a full-blown bug. I was infected with my need for her.
I walked past the nurses’ station, heading back toward my little office with a cup of substandard coffee in my hand, refusing thoughts of Erika.
“Dr. Cox!” a voice yelled behind me. “Dr. Cox!”
I turned as a nurse rushed up to me. It was Maggie, who’d always been a favorite of mine—she cared about every patient who came under her care. The same couldn’t be said for every nurse. Maggie was the above and beyond type.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Sorry, doctor, but I think they’re about to page you. They—there’s an admission, and it’s an emergency. A woman who’s being rushed to the labor room, now.”
The intercom crackled, and the call for me to attend came over the loudspeaker.
“You’d better hurry.”
“Thanks,” I said, and abandoned my coffee on the desk and rushed off. It took me three minutes to scrub in—I’d got that time down to an art by now—then accepted the information that the nurse outside the labor room had on the patient.
I flipped through the clipboard as I entered and ascertained the name.
I halted, just inside the room, my stomach dropping like the beat in a deep house track.
This isn’t possible.
“Doctor?” The nurse nudged me. I’d frozen right in the fucking doorway. “Dr. Cox?”
The woman in front of me, on the bed, with her legs spread open, panted and breathed. She dripped sweat, and her hair was slicked back from her forehead. She held another woman’s hand, clenching it and releasing it. Her eyes were shut tight.
“Doctor?” It came from afar as I stared at her.
Erika, lying in my delivery room, her stomach distended, her body ready to bring a little life into this world.
She had never been more beautiful. More perfect.
“Doctor?” The nurse be
hind me squeezed past. “Dr. Cox, are you all right?”
“Cox?” Erika’s eyelids fluttered open. She spotted me and her eyes went round as fucking donuts. “No, no, no, no. Not like this. No.”
“And it’s nice to see you too,” I said.
Luna rose from the bedside, still gripping Erika’s hand, or rather, the other way around, and glared at me. “Absolutely not,” she said. “No. We want another doctor.”
“I’m afraid I’m the only one who’s free,” I said and moved past the nurse. “So, it’s either me or no one.”
“Then it’s no one,” Luna said. “I’ll deliver the darn baby myself.” She wrenched her hand free from Erika’s and pranced around to the covered portion of her friend’s body.
I took my seat between Erika’s legs before she could get there, lifted the cover back and assessed the situation. “She’s crowning,” I said. “Good god, Erika, you’re ready to go.”
“I’ve been ready for half an hour,” she howled.
“I told you,” Luna said, still on her ridiculous tangent. “I won’t let you—” She caught sight of what was between her best friend’s leg, the baby’s head pressing out of the cervix, bloodied, and went pale as a sheet. She grabbed hold of one of the nurse’s. “What is that? What is—?”
“That’s enough,” I said calmly, keeping my focus on the baby, on my job, forcing emotions that had been broiling my brain worse than usual for the past two days to the background. “Enough, Luna. You’re here to support your friend, not make a scene. Now, if you don’t get back where you belong, I’ll have you removed.”
There was silence, broken only by Erika’s practiced breathing, the occasional prompt from a nurse about blood pressure. Luna returned to her friend’s side, and they held hands again.
Where’s Jason? If that motherfucker abandoned her now, I’ll... It wasn’t the time. I refocused on the baby, on Erika, and looked up at her from between her legs, my mask sitting just beneath my chin. “All right, Erika, now, listen to me. You’re there, OK? You’re ready to go. So when I tell you to push, you push. Got it?”
“Not my first time in one of these rooms,” she said, between breaths.
“It is on that side of the scenario,” I replied, getting closer still. “You ready?”
She grunted. “Hurry the hell up!”
“Push, Erika. Push for the baby.”
What followed went so fast it became a blur of images. Erika’s baby emerging, first the head, the two little eyes screwed closed, face pink, scrunched, bloodied, then the shoulders. Chest, cute little belly, complete with umbilical cord, legs, feet, toes. There was the moment I cut the umbilical cord, held her little baby in my arms, my heart pounding harder than it’d done before.
Erika stripped off the top of her gown with Luna’s help. The baby was laid, bloody, on her chest, mewling. Erika wept, tears of joy streaming down her cheeks. Luna ugly-cried, her mouth turned down at the corners. And my heart, my fucking heart.
Fuck.
I wanted to pop. I wanted to rip my scrubs off and go to her. Hold her in my arms. Make believe the baby was ours, that we could be together. That none of the past nine months had happened without me. That I’d made things right. That I’d never meddled in her life. That I’d done things the right way instead of being a toxic fuck who couldn’t control his emotions.
Instead, I helped with the placental delivery. I stepped away to allow the nurses to finish their job. I left the delivery room and changed out of my scrubs, cleaned up, the lump in my throat refusing to budge.
Outside the delivery room, I rested my head against the wall, both fists next to it, and cursed myself.
“At least she’s happy,” I muttered. “She’s happy. That’s all that matters. Erika has a baby, and she’s happy.”
I pushed off from the wall and headed away for the cafeteria, anywhere but here. Once there, I collapsed into one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs, my hands fucking shaking like I was the one who’d pushed out a little human being.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “Jesus.” It was the most intimate moment I’d had with Erika, and it was probably the last time I’d see her or her child.
Where’s the father? Why didn’t he show up?
“There you are,” a voice said, and I lifted my head.
Luna stood in front of the table, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other. Her red hair stood up on top of her head as if she’d run her hand through it one too many times.
I stared at her, speechless.
“Thanks for what you did back there,” she said, and huffed a sigh. “Obviously, it doesn’t change how much I hate your guts, but thanks anyway.” She slurped her coffee. “She’s probably going to want to talk to you now.”
“Huh?”
“Your brain working, doc?” Luna checked her watch. “I mean, I’m not going to stand here and pretend I care. I should probably get back. They’ve moved Erika to a private room, and she needs my support, since you wouldn’t offer yours.”
The words and thoughts formed slowly. “Why would she want to speak to me?” I asked.
Luna’s expression turned dark. “Still an asshole. I don’t get why she puts up with you. Why she would want to—anyway, I’m not in charge of that. I can’t stop her, see? So, it’s whatever.”
Another thought struck me. I licked my seriously dry lips. “Why isn’t he here?”
“Who?”
“You know,” I said.
“Marc? Because she hasn’t called him yet. Ugh, I should probably do that too,” Luna said, and unwrapped her candy bar. She took a bite and her eyes rolled back. “Thank god for candy.”
“No, not Marc. Jason,” I said, hating that his name had come from my mouth. “Why isn’t he here?”
Luna looked at me as if I’d sprouted an extra set of balls. “Are you—? What? Why the hell would he be here?” She blinked at least twenty times. “Look, I think you need, like, some meds or something. You’re clearly stressed out.”
My brain ticked over, grasping for facts, for anything that made sense. “Why isn’t he here?” I repeated.
“Because he’s not a part of her life?” Luna asked, quizzically.
“Not a part of... He abandoned her?! He abandoned the—?” I trailed off.
“Yeah, like two years ago,” Luna replied, chewing noisily. “What’s with you? Look, just, it’s whatever. Just go talk to her. She asked to see you. I can’t—”
I was out of my seat and running before she could finish the sentence. That uncomfortable sensation that something wasn’t right was back, and it had grown stronger.
I had to talk to Erika. Had to find out the truth.
Erika
I lay back in the hospital bed, my baby in her bassinet beside me, tucked up in pink sheets, swaddled and sleeping. I hurt. Every part of me hurt, but I had never been as happy in my entire life. She was perfect and precious, and she had the tiniest mouth.
Which meant my nipples had their work cut out for them. “Honestly, the weirdest tired thought I’ve ever had,” I muttered, and stifled a yawn.
Not the weirdest. Not the most uncomfortable, even.
Noah had delivered my baby. He’d helped bring her into this world, even though he’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her. The pain of that sat in my chest and was exactly why we had to clarify our boundaries all over again.
Oh god, I have to talk to him. I have to contact Mom and Dad. And Marc.
And I still had to figure out latching with a newborn. That part excited me. And naming her. There was so much to look forward to with my little one, and so much to dread with everyone else.
The door creaked open and I turned to it, smiling. Luna had promised she’d come back as soon as she’d gotten something to drink and eat, and I couldn’t wait to talk to her about my baby—about naming her, specifically.
But Luna didn’t step through the open door.
Noah entered, his cheeks red and his eyes gla
ssy. “Erika,” he said.
“Oh,” I scooched up, as gently as I could, and kept my voice low in case my girl woke up. “I guess now’s a good a time as any to talk.”
“How are you feeling?” Noah shut the door behind himself quietly, then walked over to the bed. He halted, pressed his hands to his sides. “Do you need pain medication?”
“No,” I said stiffly. “I’m fine.” It was too difficult seeing him like this. My heart ached for him. Every part of me needed him in some way, and it wasn’t just physical, either. I had missed him so much.
I had missed the scent of his cologne, his actual presence, the half-smile when he found something I’d done funny—like insisting on buying Christmas decorations. I’d missed the sound of his voice, the reverberation of his laugh in a room. I’d missed his opinions on life, on business, on the past.
“Erika,” he said, and took another step closer. He was softer than the last time I’d seen him, in his office.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to focus. The truth was, it didn’t matter how much I missed Noah or what silly fantasies I’d had about being with him as a young woman. I had a baby to look after now, a life to shape, and I would do everything in my power to ensure that it was fruitful, happy, and uninterrupted by an irresponsible parent.
“All right,” I said, still softly, but just as firm as I’d planned. “I understand that today wasn’t exactly the best outcome for either of us, but it happened. So let’s deal with it. I assume you still don’t want anything to do with me or the baby?”
Noah’s jaw dropped. “Erika...”
“That’s fine. Then we can put this past us and move on with our lives.” My heart shattered for what had to be the third time around him. Because of him. Oh no, it was more than that. How many times had he broken my heart in high school too? “You can forget it ever happened. Just pretend like you were doing your job as normal, and I was another single mommy who needed some help delivering her child. That suit you?”
“What’s going on?” Noah asked. “Erika, I had no idea you were doing this on your own. If I’d known, I would have been there for you every step of the way.”