Happily Ever Habits

by Hart, Staci

  “Doing okay?” I asked the guy.

  We’d been at it over two hours, and he was starting to look peaked.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Think you could … I don’t know … talk or something?”

  I frowned a little. “Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?”

  “I dunno. Anything. Got a girlfriend?”

  My frown relaxed and drew itself up. “Rose.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  “Years. Feels like my whole life.”

  A pause. “Man, you’re shit at this.”

  I laughed. “You’re not the first to say so.” For a beat, I considered what to say. “I thought I’d lost her once. I was scared and ran. Brought another girl to the bar where she worked while she was bartending.”

  He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Fuck, that’s savage.”

  “I’d convinced myself she was fine, that we were friends. I think I was trying to prove us both wrong.” He chuckled, and I kept talking, “Getting her back wasn’t easy. She’d sworn me off for good, and once Rosie decides something…” I shrugged. “Well, that’s usually that. That was years ago though. She’s actually pregnant now, due a week ago.”

  “Bet she’s a real peach right now.”

  I shot him a look that was only eighty percent teasing. “Far as you’re concerned, she’s always a peach.” I dipped the needle in the ink cup and got back to work. “But we’re ready. She’s definitely ready to evict.”

  “It’s got to be any day. My wife went late every time. Drove her nuts. But she was never past a week. I’m sure it’ll be any minute.”

  “So long as she waits until I’m back on the Upper West, any minute’s fine by me.”

  My phone rang from the table behind me, chirping Rose’s ringtone. I rolled over, pulling off my glove on the way.

  “Hey,” I answered. “You okay?”

  She was panting, and in the background, I heard Lily speaking over a shuffling. “Nope, my water broke.”

  A zing shot up my spine and down my arms, lifting every hair on the way. “Just now?”

  “All over Lily’s rug. We’re going to the hospital.”

  I was already standing, setting my gun down on the tray and ripping my other glove off. “I’m on my way. Lily’s going with you?”

  “Uh-huh.” She took a trembling breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was tight with wonder and emotion. “It’s time.”

  A smile brushed my lips, my heart expanding in my chest, brushing against my ribs with every painful beat. “It’s time. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Hurry.”

  “I will.”

  We disconnected, and the guy on my table shifted to sit.

  I whirled around my station, packing up my things. “I’m sorry, man. That was—”

  “Yeah, I figured. Honestly, I didn’t know how much longer I could have gone without puking.”

  I smirked. “I’ll hook you up. Just call Tonic. They’ll know how to get ahold of me.”

  “No problem, Tricky.” He extended his hand, and I clasped his with a sweaty palm. “Get ready to get knocked on your ass. There’s no greater job in the whole world. As soon as you hold that baby in your arms, you’ll know.”

  “Thanks,” I said gratefully, swiping my bag and trotting out. I jerked a chin at Pauly, the owner. “We’re having a baby!”

  “Go get ’em, tiger. I’ve got your station cleanup.”

  I gave him a two-fingered salute before running out the door.

  It was Friday afternoon, and traffic was already thickening with early travelers looking to get home or get away for the weekend. I was almost an hour away from the hospital with no traffic. I just hoped she could hang on until I got there.

  Baby.

  My heart skipped a beat, squeezed, and jolted into rhythm again. I thought of all the little clothes we’d washed, all the breast pump parts we’d sanitized, the car seat in the baby’s room. I wondered what she’d look like, if she’d be different somehow from West and Lily’s kids or Maggie and Cooper’s boy. If she would somehow feel less scary. If I’d somehow know instinctively that she was mine.

  Holding their babies had made me anxious. I’d turned down every offer. A couple of times, I couldn’t get out of it, and I’d found myself sitting on a couch with a warm little thing in my arms. Their eyes were almost always closed when they were that small, but I remembered holding Hazel once. She had been so tiny, her hands impossibly small with nail beds as delicate as rice paper. But she’d blinked her eyes open and looked up at me, her pink little mouth stretching in an O, and I’d gotten it. For that brief moment, I’d understood something elemental, something I’d never considered, and something I hadn’t grasped since.

  My biggest fear, I thought as I trotted down the steps of the High Street station, was that I’d drop our baby. Nightmares had plagued me wherein I dropped her in the tub. On the subway. In the park. In the kitchen. I’d been sure I had her, protectively cradling her to me, and the next thing I knew, she was slipping from my fingers.

  West, Cooper, and I had actually gone to the park one afternoon that spring with a five-pound bag of flour to practice. Which meant I’d had to try to walk around with the flour in a football hold while they tried to knock it out of my arms. Cooper had ended up with a busted lip, and I’d given West a black eye, but I had not dropped the flour baby.

  Baby, baby, baby.

  I hurried through the turnstile and down the tunnel, spotting the train. It was packed so tight, there was no room. But I’d make room.

  “Scuse me.” I pushed my way in, garnering a few looks, some murmuring dissent, and a solid shove in the shoulder. “Listen, my girlfriend’s having a baby. I’ve gotta get on this train.”

  The air immediately changed as they made way, and those angry faces lit with smiles. Congratulations and pats on the back followed, but I found myself hanging on to the bar inside the doors with ten other people in the stifling train, phone in my hand and mind on her.

  Fifteen stops. Is she okay?

  Fourteen. Is the baby all right?

  I counted them down, willing them to come faster.

  I wonder if they made it yet.

  We were just outside the Washington Square stop when the train ground to a halt. A tinny voice came over the speaker, cutting in and out. All I caught were the words delay and shut down and further notice.

  The crowd issued a collective groan, and my panic rose.

  All I needed now was to get off the train.

  It was fifteen minutes before the train actually began to move. Fifteen minutes of no cell service, a hundred ripe summer bodies, and a lack of any air circulation.

  By the time we pulled into the station, the commuters were a mob, pressing and rushing for fresh air and to be moving. And I led the charge, bolting out of the tunnel and up the stairs until the cool air hit my face.

  My phone vibrated in my hand, and when I looked, a stack of messages from Lily piled up on my screen, the topmost setting me running for the curb on Sixth with one hand in the air and the other between my lips.

  The whistle from my lips chirped, and I yelled, “Taxi!”

  Lily: You’d better hurry.

  12

  Anywhere But Here

  Rose

  My lips were a tight circle, the air a concentrated stream as I breathed through another contraction. The cab bounced up Broadway toward Mount Sinai, jostling me through the start and stop of traffic, the folded towel under my ass cushioning me only marginally.

  My belly was hard as stone, the muscles burning as the pain climbed all the way to the point where they connected with the rest of me. For thirty seconds that felt more like ten minutes, I bore down, breathing noisily in an effort to survive the pain.

  Lily watched me with a crease between her brows that concerned me. When the tension finally receded, I panted, slumping into the seat with my head against the back.

  “Why does this hurt so bad so soo
n?” I moaned, on the edge of tears. “What the fuck was in Tricky’s sperm? What did he do to me?”

  The cabbie watched us in the rearview with an even deeper crease between his brows than Lily. “You sure you shouldn’t have called an ambulance?”

  Lily shot him a look. “Her water just broke. There’s time.” She turned to me, her face smooth and reassuring. Her hand rested on mine where it was splayed absently on my stomach. “There’s time,” she insisted. “Don’t worry.”

  “My first baby came on like a thunderstorm,” he said, his eyes soft with the memory. “She was in labor for three hours, pushed four times—the last two were all baby. By the sixth kid, all she had to do was flinch and, wham, there she was.”

  My eyes went wide with terror, widening a millimeter more when another contraction started. The tingling low in my pelvis began to burn, the jumping nerves as the burn seared white-hot in a bath spanning up the broad curve.

  “Oh God. Oh God, here it comes again.”

  The cabbie chuckled. “Yeah, she’s havin’ that baby, like, now.”

  I thought Lily might reach through the tiny window and throttle him. “Then hurry up!”

  “Don’t worry,” he said lightly. “Cab’s largely waterproof. I don’t mind the mess.”

  “Well, I fucking do! Oooooh,” I screeched, then groaned, my face pinched so tight, it hurt.

  The pain was blinding, blocking out everything. The jostling cab. Lily and the cabbie. Her hand on mine. The city outside. Our destination. My universe shrank to the muscles in my abdomen and the pressure—so much pressure.

  It’s her head, I realized.

  Her head was pressing against my cervix as my muscles squeezed to push her down.

  Out.

  The sounds that left me were somewhere between grunting and sobbing. When the pain began to mercifully ebb, I fell back on the seat again and closed my eyes. This time, I couldn’t stop the tears from spilling down my dewy face, slicked with sweat.

  “Hurry. We have to hurry,” I mumbled, miserably shaking my head. “Where’s Patrick?” The question was heavy with desperate hope.

  He was the only person I wanted to see. He’d make everything better.

  He always did.

  The emptiness I felt at his absence was total.

  “Tell me he’s gonna be there, Lily,” I sobbed. “I need him to be there.”

  “He’s coming, Rosie,” she said gently, smoothing my hair and using another towel to mop off my face. “He’s coming as fast as he can.”

  The cabbie zoomed, cutting around traffic, honking his horn. At one point, he hopped up onto an empty curb to cut a corner, hanging half out the window, shouting, “Lady with a baby! I got a lady with a baby!”

  Time became a rubber band, stretching and loosening at intervals marked by contractions. Closer and closer together they came. After one particularly brutal, lung-emptying contraction, the look on Lily’s face made my heart lurch.

  “What’s the matter?” I didn’t recognize my voice, already hoarse and tinged with hysteria.

  “They’re a minute apart and thirty seconds long.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Well, it sucks for you, that’s one thing. And the other is that … I think you’re close.”

  I groaned. “Fuck. Fuck! How long have we been in this fucking cab?”

  “Half an hour.”

  I sobbed openly and without care. The towel under me was soaked, the muscles in my stomach sore and aching, even when they weren’t flexed and on fire.

  “I’m gonna have my baby in a taxi,” I said between hiccuping.

  “No, you aren’t,” Lily said with authority I had no choice but to believe. “Are we?” she asked the driver.

  “Nope!” he chirped, zipping around cars, still laying on his horn. He turned a left so hard, we almost toppled over in the backseat, then a right sent us sliding in the other direction as he zoomed into the emergency driveway.

  Before we had a chance to move, the cabbie was out of the car and at Lily’s side, taking the bags and slinging them over his shoulder. I heard him shouting for help through the haze of another contraction that had me doubled over, legs split to make room for my belly, my face locked up like Fort Knox. By the time I came out of it, I drunkenly looked over to find a couple of male nurses reaching in for me. They clasped my arms and pulled, transferring me somehow into a wheelchair.

  They were talking, asking questions, and Lily answered them, thank God. There was no registration—we’d done that already—and though I was sure we’d have things to sign and address later, we were in too much of a hurry to stop.

  The rush and bustle around me didn’t do a single goddamn thing to calm my nerves. We were brought into a labor and delivery room that was full of nurses moving around, preparing an IV bag and tray of needles, adjusting the bed, setting up a pitcher of ice chips and a little foam cup, wheeling in an incubator thingy I’d seen in our tour of the hospital.

  It was then that it really hit me.

  She was coming. And she was coming now.

  “Where’s Patrick?” I croaked, clutching Lily’s arm as she helped me up, hobbling me to the bed. An assless seafoam-green robe was folded neatly and waiting for me on the bed, an unflattering, unsightly rite of passage that would exist in all the newborn pictures we’d take to document the day.

  “He’s coming,” she soothed, hedging like an asshole.

  “I mean it, Lil. Where is he?”

  She avoided my eyes in favor of watching her hands as she helped me undress. “He got stuck on the train. The line went down. Last I heard, he was in a cab on his way here.”

  My chin quivered. The robe was cold, the draft against my ass icy. Goosebumps broke out across my skin, and I climbed into the rigid bed. “I’m scared,” I whispered, the words trembling.

  “I know,” she whispered back. “But I promise, it’s going to be okay.”

  “You swear?” I whimpered, looking into her eyes, ready to believe.

  “I swear it.” She kissed my temple.

  A nurse blew into the room and thrust a clipboard into Lily’s hand. Another nurse rolled up the tray of needles and tape and little electrical sensors. The room was a wave of action. One nurse tucked me into bed while the other took my wrist. The first lifted my gown to expose my stomach and began applying sensors. A stinging prick, and a cold rush ran up my arm when the IV was in place.

  When a contraction hit, they paused, held my hands, soothed me, encouraged me. And when it passed, they finished with a speed that was astounding.

  I could feel the next contraction building, and I was gripped with a need that shot my eyes wide.

  I locked eyes with Lily. “I need to poop. How do I … what do I do if I have to poop?”

  “No, no, no!” a nurse chimed with a fake-ass smile on her face. “No pooping. Not yet! The doctor will be here any second.”

  I groaned. “But … I mean, I don’t know when I pooped last. I should have pooped before, dammit.”

  “Don’t worry, happens all the time, honey,” the nurse said, patting my arm. “Just hold on for a little bit, okay?”

  “Okay,” I begrudged. “Will the doctor bring drugs? I need drugs. I’m supposed to have an epidural. It was in my birth plan! Lily, get her a copy of my birth plan!”

  The nurse had a look on her face I didn’t like, one that looked placating, but her eyes betrayed something ominous. “The doctor will take a look when he gets here and tell you all about your options.”

  She shared a look with Lily when she handed over my birth plan.

  A second later, my doctor came rushing in, smiling as she pulled on sky-blue rubber gloves. “Hey, Rose. Looks like we’re having a baby today.”

  “Dr. Quan,” I breathed. “Thank God you’re here.”

  “We lucked out. Glad I was doing rounds today.” She grabbed the rolling stool next to the counter and took a seat, wheeling herself over. The nurses had already extended the stirrups and were in t
he process of moving my heels into the cradles. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

  I nibbled my lip as she checked me. Another contraction started, and I moaned.

  “Oh God.” I leaned forward, my face contorting and breath noisy and fast.

  “There’s her head. She’s got a lot of hair,” Dr. Quan said cheerily.

  I resisted the urge to kick her. When her hand reappeared, she smiled up at me and began peeling off her gloves.

  “I need drugs,” I said, exhausted.

  “Good news, bad news,” she started. “Good news is that you’re fully dilated. Bad news is, no drugs.”

  “No … no drugs?” I rasped in disbelief.

  She offered an apologetic smile. “By the time we get the anesthesiologist in here, the baby will already be here.”

  My mouth opened and closed, my throat tight and eyes teeming with tears.

  “Don’t worry. You’ve been through the worst of it. Pushing will feel good by comparison.”

  I blinked, spilling tears in a splash. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I cried. “I was supposed to have an epidural and be in labor for twelve hours and Patrick was supposed to be here, holding my hand and telling me it was gonna be okay. But he’s not here. He’s not here and I need him and our baby is coming, but he’s not here. Where is he, Lily?”

  I broke down into incoherent babbling, his face in my mind. I imagined him running and scared and worried and panicked, just as much as I was, and all I could do was cry. Cry and hang on to Lily and pray to God he got here in time.

  “Hurry,” I whispered out into the universe, hoping against all hope that he’d be delivered to me before our baby.

  13

  Hello, World

  Patrick

  Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry.

  One damp hand held on to the door handle of the cab, the other gripping the base of the seat. We’d been sitting in traffic for too long. So long that Lily had messaged me dozens of times, and every single time my phone lit up with another, my anxiety ratcheted up, tightening the screws. Every muscle in my body was tense.