Birthquake

by B. L. Berry

  She made Jeff change out of his striped shirt into a solid cobalt pullover because, and I quote, “Stripes will make everyone’s TV screens vibrate. Blue is calming and attractive. People will be more likely to relate with you if you’re in blue.” Apparently, my blush pink blouse would be just fine. I’m still not sure what she meant by the television vibrating, but whatever.

  Before it was officially time for the interview, Jeff massaged my neck and shoulders. It all did little to ease the nerves brewing in my stomach. At least I thought they were nerves. At this rate, it could have been gas from the Mexican I had at lunch. You don't realize just how awkward it is to sit in front of your laptop, fake smiling like a jackass, waiting for a Skype interview to begin. For all I know, they're recording me right now for some weird blooper reel.

  I shouldn't be nervous, but I am.

  Bryan Albertson’s face fills the screen, and he's just as handsome on my computer as he is on my TV with his perfectly coiffed hair and million dollar smile. Someone should really hire him for a toothpaste commercial.

  “Hey guys, thanks for jumping on with me on such short notice. We’ll get going here in just a moment,” he says, making small talk.

  I just sit there staring like a jackass, permagrin etched to my face. Bryan Albertson is in my living room. Kind of. Would it be wildly inappropriate if I whip out my cell phone and take a selfie with his face on the screen?

  Bryan looks off camera, smiling and nodding to someone we can’t see, so I do what any self-respecting woman with a Hollywood crush would do. I turn so my back is to the computer screen, extend my arm and quickly take a series of selfies with Bryan in the background, complete with bright eyes and a pouty smile.

  “Uh, did you get what you were looking for?” a voice from the computer asks.

  “Oh! Sorry, I just …” I trail off without any legitimate excuse.

  “It’s okay. You got my good side,” Bryan jokes.

  A few moments later, Jeff returns to the table and sits down next to me, kissing me quickly on the temple. “You ready?” he whispers into my hair.

  “About as ready as I’ll ever be,” I say with an unconvincing sigh. I’m still not convinced going on late night TV is the right move, but Jeff was excited and adamant about it.

  When we turn our attention back to the computer screen, Bryan Albertson is waiting for us expectantly. He raises his eyebrows at us, and Jeff gives him an awkward wave of his hand.

  “This should be pretty laid back. I’ll give a quick intro, and we’ll dive right into the questions. After we end our segment, we’re going to cut to a commercial, but we’ll use your video as the segue. As my producer mentioned, don’t worry if you screw anything up or drop a few f-bombs as we’ll take care of that in editing before it airs tonight. Sound good?”

  Jeff and I both nod, starstruck by the entire situation. Is this real life?

  “Loosen up, you kids! This is supposed to be fun.” We watch as Bryan stretches his neck to the left and then the right before rolling his shoulders. “Here’s how it’s gonna go. I’ll do a quick intro, ask a few questions, yaddy, yaddy, yadda, and we’ll peace out. Sound good?”

  “Yep! Sounds good,” Jeff affirms with a nod, but I’m caught up on the fact that this grown man just said, “Yaddy, yaddy, yadda.”

  A few minutes later, we hear the voice of a producer off of the screen, and everything begins. “So we’ve got the latest internet sensation, Jeff Carrington and his fiancée, Henley, here with us on The Late Night Buzz. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen the video that everyone has dubbed ‘The Milkman Cometh.’ For those of you who haven’t seen it, Jeff here experiments with some of Henley’s new mom hardware to the point where it sounds like he’s having an orgasm. Be sure to stick around as we’ll be playing it for you at the end of the segment.”

  Jeff grimaces, and I snicker politely. I don’t know who started calling him The Milkman, but it’s damn near genius.

  “Hi, Jeff, hi, Henley, thanks so much for joining us this evening.”

  I have to admit, this guy is good. It’s amazing how he just comes to life when he knows the cameras are filming.

  “Thanks so much for having us, Bryan,” Jeff chirps as we wave in unison.

  “It takes a special kind of man to attach his bare nipples to what looks—and sounds—like an archaic S&M torture device. No offense, Henley. So tell us, Jeff, where did you get such a bizarre idea?”

  Jeff shifts in his chair, and I know it’s the question he’s been anticipating. And one that he likely still has no answer for. “You know? It was one of those things where I can’t even explain where the idea came from. Henley had a baby shower earlier that day and was pulling apart the pieces of the …” Jeff stalls, unsure of what to say, so instead he takes his hands and mimics like he’s cupping a pair of imaginary breasts on his own chest. “pump to get it clean.”

  “Jeff, it’s okay. You can say breasts on national TV,” Bryan reassures him. I can’t help but laugh. My fiance’s face turns red, and he nods. “But based on that gesture, I’d venture to say you’re one of those guys who would stay in bed and play with yourself all day if you woke up one morning as a woman.”

  “And you wouldn’t?” Jeff banters back and Bryan laughs. My cheeks are starting to hurt from smiling, and I have a feeling that my face is contorting into some awkward, forced half smile that would scare away little kids.

  “Fair point. I probably would. But I gotta ask why? What would possess you to hook yourself up to your fiancee’s breast pump? Were you trying to see if you could produce milk?”

  I can see the heat rising in Jeff’s face as his cheeks flush crimson. We both knew this question was coming and I’m not sure he knows how he’s going to answer it.

  Jeff pauses thoughtfully and looks from the screen to me and then back again. He squeezes my hand out of view.

  “No, I wasn’t trying to milk myself or anything weird like that. First and foremost, Henley was having a rough day, and I wanted nothing more than to make her smile and try to get her to laugh.” He nails me with a look of sincerity, and my heart swells inside my chest. I lean over to give him a quick peck on the cheek before he continues.

  “But she had just had her baby shower, and our home was taken over by all these baby items. And, with good reason, none of them are really intended for me as a dad. Everything is for Henley and our son.”

  “Oh! It’s a boy! Congratulations,” Bryan chimes. I simply shake my head, and Jeff beams proudly.

  “Thanks, Bryan. I guess part of me was always a little bit jealous. As a dad-to-be, you feel like you’re standing on the sidelines the entire pregnancy. You’re a part of it, but beyond the initial participation in getting pregnant in the first place, you aren’t a major player. I’m merely playing a supporting role, and I want to be there for Henley in every way imaginable. I guess part of me thinks for me to be able to accomplish this whole heartedly, I need to say that I’ve experienced at least some of what she’s experiencing. And if that means hooking myself up to a breast pump, then so be it!”

  I melt.

  A school girl crush grin covers my face, and I feel him reach for my hand and give it a squeeze. He’s being totally genuine right now. And I love him even more than I did moments ago.

  “I get what you mean. I’m a dad, too. And maybe it’s my morbid curiosity, but I always wanted to know what a contraction felt like. Is this legit pain? Or are you just milking this pregnancy thing for all its worth?” Bryan jokes.

  I snort.

  “Now, I gotta hand it to you, man, that was a bold move allowing Henley to record the whole thing. Whose idea was that?”

  Jeff looks to me, and just as he’s about to place the blame, I intercept the question. “Actually, Bryan, Jeff wanted to prove his manliness to his brothers. So he told me to record it and then promised I could send it to his family. He totally brought it upon himself.”

  “So that’s how the video leaked?” />
  I laugh. “No, my best friend Tara is purely responsible for Jeff’s newfound fame. I made the mistake of showing her the video, and the next thing we know, it’s on the front page of BuzzFeed, Reddit and trending on Facebook.”

  “She means former best friend,” Jeff interjects, and I playfully shove his shoulder. It’s a good thing Jeff knows my sisters before misters and chicks before dicks policy.

  Bryan snickers and shakes his head imperceptibly. “Well, me and the entire crew here at The Late Night Buzz were so enamored with your antics, we shared your video with our friends over at Baby Bungalow, the nation’s leading baby superstore. They loved your humor so much that they wanted to give you ten thousand dollars to go toward all of your baby needs.”

  Bryan steps back further into the frame and flashes an oversized check at his computer screen. Sure enough, our names are on the “to” line, and a one followed by four zeros is written meticulously in the dollar amount.

  “Holy turdburglers!” cries Jeff. “Do you know how much porn you could buy with that much money?”

  Bryan Albertson laughs. “Actually yes, I do, but I’m not sure they sell adult videos at Baby Bungalow since you’re shopping there because of what happens in those movies.”

  I’m stunned speechless as relief washes over me. Ten thousand dollars is a fuck ton of money. We’ll be able to finally buy our nursery furniture and a truckload of diapers and more tiny clothes than we could ever possibly need. Thanks to this, we can actually breathe until Jeff lands a new job.

  My hands fly to my mouth, and the hormones take over. I don’t just lose it. I completely meltdown into a stereotypical inconsolable pregnant woman.

  Jeff rubs my shoulders. “We can’t even begin to thank you enough,” Jeff speaks.

  “Well, it’s truly our pleasure, and congratulations to you both. Now, before we say goodbye, could you do one last thing for me, Jeff?”

  Home boy better comply with the man who is giving us ten grand. I squeeze his hand tightly, telepathically telling him to do whatever Bryan asks of him. I don’t care if it involves shaving his eyebrows, he’s doing it.

  “Sure! What’s that?”

  “Send us out to commercial with your signature milkman moo.”

  And without missing a beat, I become the woman whose fiancé moos on national television.

  TWATSICLES

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of making you a postpartum emergency kit.” She walks past me and sets the brown paper bag down on the counter.

  I smile at my best friend, suddenly feeling inadequate. When she gave birth to triplets all I brought her was a casserole and a jumbo box of diapers. I'm still a handful of weeks away from my due date, and this broad has come bearing gifts every time she's visited. Tara is spoiling me rotten. Or maybe I'm just a shitty friend? I'll just chalk it up to being childless and clueless. Tara’s a pro at this momming stuff, so I'll listen to everything she tells me. Well, almost everything she tells me.

  “That’s really sweet of you, T! You didn’t need to do that.” I don't bother fighting my smile.

  “Stop that. Of course I did. Lord knows your mother is probably worthless with the real stuff. And as your very bestest friend in the whole universe, it is my moral obligation to make sure you are more than prepared for all the shit that’s about to throw down down there.” She waggles her eyebrows and shoots a look down toward my nether regions.

  “Okay, I thought I was prepared after the baby shower. What else could I possibly need, oh wise one? Lay it on me.” I hoist my ass and my belly up onto a bar stool at the island and hold onto the edge of the counter to keep from tipping over. The last thing anyone needs is for Humpty Dumpty to have a great fall right now.

  “For starters this.” She tosses me a bottle of dry shampoo. “You’ll be lucky if you’re able to shower. And for the days that you don’t, dry shampoo will help. But when you do get ninety-four seconds of peace and quiet to jump in super fast, don’t make the water too hot. You’ll start spraying yourself.”

  Spraying myself? What the …?

  She must catch the look of confusion on my face. “Your boobs. You’ll start spraying all over the place like one of those wacky kid’s water toys that look like an octopus and shoots water thirty different directions. And that shit is liquid gold. Don’t make the water too hot because you don't want to waste it down the drain.”

  I nod my head firmly, slightly mortified that this is a thing women have to deal with, but admittedly excited that I might be able to put out a small fire using only my boobs. “No hot water. Got it.”

  “And no matter what Jeff says, him tasting your breast milk isn’t kinky. It’s disgusting. If you’re going to be doing any fifty shades shit, make it the fun kind of kink. Trust me—Cam learned the hard way.”

  I cringe, willing her sage advice to my long-term memory and trying to erase the thought of Cam indulging in a cocktail courtesy of my best friend’s boobs.

  “Okay, next we have seasons one through ten of Friends on DVD. All that baby is going to do is sleep the first six weeks. You’ll be bored out of your gourd because you’re not supposed to wake a sleeping baby and all those other clichés about motherhood. But you will quickly learn that non-baby responsibilities are overrated, and you can milk visiting family into doing all that crap like laundry and dishes for you, at least the first couple of weeks. And selfishly, I need you to have a refresher course in all things Friends because once your ass can drink again, we’re going to dominate the Friends trivia night down at our old watering hole. So these are on loan. I want them back. Don’t even think about keeping them, woman.”

  I smile. She knows me too well. But I really want her to rewind and explain a little bit more on how I can convince family members into becoming my short-term personal maid.

  “And when you don’t feel like watching television, you can always read.”

  She pulls out a stack of books. I recognize a few from our defunct book club where we never actually read the books, but instead drank wine and gossiped. As I scan the titles, I see a couple of light romances by some indie authors, but the vast majority are erotica. And if there’s anything I don’t read, it’s erotica. It’s not that I’m stuck up or anything. I just can’t get through the absurd alpha dirty talk and impossible sex positions without turning cherry red and choking on fits of laughter. Seriously. How many times have you ever had an explosive orgasm at the exact same time as your billionaire boyfriend?

  That's what I thought.

  “I know these aren’t all your cup of tea, but don’t judge. You’re going to be starved and sexless for weeks—maybe even months! And I can promise that while you will have zero interest in riding the train to pound town in the beginning, reading about it will suffice and at least give you sexy thoughts during this inevitable drought.”

  “Fine,” I lie. “I’ll give the books a chance. But I can’t promise I’ll actually enjoy them.” Yeah. Sooooo not reading them.

  “I bet if you asked Jeff to do a dramatic reading of this one, not only would you get all hot and bothered, you might actually enjoy it.” She places a sleek, black paperback in my hands. On the cover is a white flower where the petals are turning to liquid at the tips. It's gorgeous. “Careful, bitch. That one’s signed.”

  I nod, perusing the back cover before placing it down on the coffee table. I think she's right. I just might enjoy this one.

  “And finally, I brought everything you need for twatsicles.”

  I choke on her words. “Excuse me?” I ask once the coughing finally subsides.

  “Twatsicles. Surely I told you about the world’s greatest postpartum secret, didn’t I?”

  “Um, you’ve told me about a lot of things over the past few months, but twatsicles wasn’t one of them. Trust me, with a name like that I would have remembered.”

  She reaches into another shopping bag and pulls out an economy size package of ultra super thick supreme absorbency “these suckers cou
ld stop a flash flood” maxi pads and a bottle of store brand witch hazel. Tara rummages through my kitchen drawer and pulls out a measuring cup. She tears open the package of maxi pads that could probably double as a diaper for this baby in a pinch and opens one up on the counter. Next, she carefully measures out a half cup of witch hazel and pours it over the maxi pad.

  I blink at her wordlessly. “Usually in the commercials, the liquid in these experiments is blue. Just saying.”

  “Yeah, I never understood that.” She shrugs nonchalantly. “Either way, this isn’t an experiment. All you do is pop this puppy in the freezer, and when things start throbbing—because things will start throbbing and not in a good way—you just slip this in your panties and have yourself a twatsicle. It’ll soothe everything and surprisingly bring you a lot of relief.”

  This girl never ceases to amaze me.

  “Sounds cold.” I’m not sure what I was expecting a twatsicle to be, but this surely wasn’t it.

  “It is. Don’t mock it till you try it. Your vagina can thank me later.”

  I take a mental note to hide this magical maxi pad in the back of the freezer to avoid scarring Jeff for life when he goes to grab ice.

  “So, you’re what — two, three weeks from your due date? Is everything all set?”

  “Yes, by some miracle, everything is in order. We were finally able to buy our furniture thanks to The Late Night Buzz. All the tiny clothes have been washed and put away, and the house is as clean as it’s going to get. We’re pre-registered at the hospital, so the only thing missing is this kiddo.” Even though Tara is indirectly the reason we were bestowed with the nursery makeover, I still haven’t forgiven her for that stunt she pulled.

  “And everything down there? It’s primed and ready to go?” She points her finger in the general vicinity of my nether regions and raises an eyebrow.

  “Um, yeah?” I’m almost afraid to ask.

  “Good. Because between the blood and fluids already going on, no doctor also wants to be elbow deep in fur.”