by Julia Kent
“People eat it?” he shrieks. “Isn’t that a form of cannibalism?” His eyes search the perimeter of the room for available exits. “I had no idea how violent childbirth is!”
“Shhhh,” Sunny says, her eyes glazed. “We’ll talk about how to desiccate and eat the placenta later, after I teach perineal massage.”
“What’s a perineal?” Josh asks, suspicious.
“It’s part of the woman’s neck,” I lie.
“Whew,” he says, his shoulders relaxing. But he’s still shaking, and now his arms are covered with a thin sheen of cold sweat.
He is the very definition of all the reasons the word moist is so disgusting.
“Would it kill these women to try a little with their appearance?” he whispers as we watch more of the video presentation.
“What?”
“I mean, look at them. No makeup. No toenail polish on those feet.” He makes a sour face. “Hairy legs. Bushes that look like they spread chia seeds on their—” he waves his hands vaguely around the crotch area “—you know.”
“Mons.”
He shivers. “That word is worse than moist!”
“You expect women who are experiencing the most painful and athletic event of their life to put on makeup?”
He half shrugs. “Just saying. A pedicure or some eye shadow would at least show they tried. The poor baby’s going to be born and mama will be in all the pictures looking like a Jersey Devil with an overdue mani pedi.”
The slide changes to an image of a woman’s legs spread wide, with a baby’s head crowning.
“Oh, my lordy lord it’s got hair teeth!” Josh screams. His eyes roll up the back of his head and bam—he’s in a dead faint, falling on the floor and rolling on his side on the industrial carpet.
“He acts like he’s never seen a vagina before in his life,” one of the dad’s murmurs. His words carry throughout the room, and all eyes are on me. “How could she be pregnant and he’s never—”
“We’re strict Mormons,” I lie, grasping at straws.
All the expressions soften into understanding, as if that explains everything.
“He’s bleeding!” someone gasps. I look at Josh’s head and yes—he is.
The next few minutes are a blur of activity as the class teacher administers First Aid, someone is pulled in from the emergency room, and a nurse assures me that lots of husbands faint during class from nervousness, though “never quite this early in the lesson.”
As Josh comes to, he looks around the room, wild and unfocused.
“Labia is a lovely name if it’s a girl,” he whispers, then faints again.
I like him better unconscious.
The wall of suits appear, because it’s not enough to have my gay, unconscious co-worker who is my fake husband bleeding all over the floor of a conference room where a baby’s head emerges from a woman’s vagina and—ouch!—we see the evidence for why stitches have to happen after birth.
Let’s throw in a few grey-haired CEOs and their bean counters. And one delightfully delicious CEO who has most definitely seen a vag before.
Mine.
“You have quite the track record with fake spouses,” Andrew says quietly in my ear as people in the crowd either fret over Josh’s prone body or murmur about liability issues.
Sunny lights a sage smudge stick and starts muttering something while waving the burning leaves over my “husband”.
Andrew looks at my belly with a mixture of amusement and protectiveness. I want to touch him but I can’t. He has, obviously, figured out the ruse. While I technically can’t tell him that Josh and I are working, he clearly knows.
“Are you stalking me, Mr. McCormick?” I murmur, rubbing my pretend bump. “You appear in the most unusual moments in my life.”
“I’m on the board of directors of the hospital, Ms. Warrick,” he replies with a smile. “We’re doing an annual walk through.”
“I’m preparing for the most precious moment I never expected,” I answer, giving him a wink.
He smothers a grin.
Sunny glides over. She smells like roasted chicken, which makes my tummy growl. I am eating for two after all.
Me and Josh. He’s so green there’s no way he’ll be able to go out with me for dinner after this.
“Your husband is down for the count, I’m afraid,” Sunny says sadly.
A warrior’s cry erupts in the tiny room. We all turn toward the source of the sound.
A bloody baby’s head emerges on screen. Sunny pauses the video right there, the frame frozen in graphic detail.
“The miracle of life,” Sunny calls out. She claps her hands. “Let’s resume class now that Amanda’s husband is feeling better.” I shiver at the words Amanda’s husband.
“I’m not feeling better,” Josh argues as two nurses help him stand.
“We’re going to take him into the ER for a quick eval,” one of them tells me.
“But Amanda needs a partner for the next lesson!” Sunny says with a loud, slow sigh. “Who will help her to make the clay molds of cervixes that we’ll stretch open to welcome the baby?”
Josh retches violently as they lead him out the door.
“I guess I’ll handle my cervix by myself,” I say pleasantly to Sunny, who gives me a funny look.
“I can help you with your cervix,” Andrew replies. He catches the eye of one of the receding suits and gestures that he’s staying in the class.
“Don’t you have evil corporate overlords to entertain?” I ask, trying desperately not to lunge at him and kiss him silly. After more than a week apart, I can feel the pulsing parts of me trying to attach to him like suckers on the ends of tentacles.
“Who are you?” Sunny asks Andrew.
Oh, boy.
“This is my, um...brother,” I mumble.
Andrew’s shoulders begin to shake with repressed laughter.
She gives him a once over, then looks at me. “I see the family resemblance.”
What resemblance?
“Let’s try to resume some semblance of normalcy,” Sunny says, dimming the lights again and pressing Play on the video.
“I think that shark got jumped a while ago,” I mutter. Andrew looks around the room, tugs up lightly on his trouser legs, and bends to sit on the floor.
He looks up at me with an expression of expectation.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Waiting for you to get between my legs.” His hand is extended toward me. I take it and bend down.
My fake pregnant belly goes right up between my breasts again.
“Now there’s a look,” Andrew says, staring at my boobs.
“Pregnancy does strange things to a woman’s body.”
“I heard that breasts get bigger, but this is something else.”
I reach under my skirt—again—to pull the belly back in place.
A warm, helping palm slides up my leg.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m assisting you. Remember? I’m your birthing partner.”
“I’m not birthing anything right now.”
“Just practicing.” He gives me a hotter-than-hot smile.
“Practicing what? The childbirth part or the conception part?”
“I get a choice? Because I pick conception without the conception.”
“Then that’s not conception. It’s just sex.”
“You’re on to something there, Amanda. What a good student you are. Quick study.”
As I nestle in his arms, belly back where it belongs, his hand rests on my outer thigh. When I lean back against his chest, it’s a thick, warm wall of ahhhhhh.
“You have body fat,” I murmur as we watch a gooey baby being placed on a mother’s flaccid belly and crawl up, in search of a nipple. The scene reminds me of that one time I had sex with this really weird guy I met on Craigslist....
“I do.” An appreciative palm gives my thigh a squeeze. “So do you, in all the luscious places.”
“
I thought she said he was her brother,” one of the women behind me hisses. “Why’s his hand up her skirt?”
“Ewww,” her husband grunts.
Andrew reluctantly removes his hand and sighs. Warm breath that smells like coffee and spices tickles my ear.
The video shows a woman latching the baby to her breast, a look of blissful contentment on her face. As the camera pans out, we see a doctor merrily stitching away at her torn bits, using a needle the size of an aluminum baseball bat with a meat hook at the end.
At least, that’s how my panicked brain views it.
All of the women in the room collectively gasp and bring our knees together.
“Don’t worry!” Sunny says cheerfully. “That won’t happen to you! Daily perineal massage for months before birth will make you stretch to fit anything in there.”
“What if she already had to stretch to fit anything in there to make the conception possible?” one of the dads jokes.
“Like a turkey baster,” the lone lesbian partner cracks.
“Perineal massage?” Andrew whispers. “Is that what they call it? I just call it foreplay.”
And I’m moist.
He stays right there, cocooning me from behind, his hands roaming over my pretend belly.
“You ever think about having kids?” he asks.
A joke sticks in my throat. I have to swallow twice before I can speak.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, you’ve thought about it, or yes, you want them?”
“Both. I want them.”
I can feel his smile against my cheek and earlobe.
“How about you?” I ask in a hushed tone.
“Me, too. Not for a little while, but yeah. Some day.” He cups my pregnancy pillow and lovingly pats it.
And just like that, I fall even more in love with my fake brother.
* * *
I’m walking down the sidewalk through Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. Street performers juggle on stilts, crowds surrounding them, errant children clapping and running up to throw dollar bills in open music cases. The sky glows as if it’s daylight and yet it’s not. A dark chill in the air, a smoky mist that billows and blanks out the rest of the city, makes it clear that nighttime prevails.
The scent of freshly-made caramel corn and sour beer fills my nose, and I’m walking, step by step, looking up at the faces of moms and dads, of street people and college students, of people I don’t know.
They all ignore me. I smile harder.
A shriek. A sigh. A raucous laugh. A baby crying. All the sounds pop in and out of the glow and the smoke, as if playing a symphony with the human voice as instruments, following a music score I can’t read.
I stumble slightly on cobblestone, grabbing the corner of a produce cart for support. It is laden with melons and apples, cucumbers and oranges, fresh fruits from the Haymarket stands nearby.
As I look down to catch my footing, I see I’m naked.
Completely nude.
The chill of the night runs up my spine like a mouse escaping a predator, tiny claws making their way from the small of my back to the top of my head. I can’t shout. Can’t move. Can’t bear to do anything that might draw attention to me.
And so I freeze in the center of everything that glows and obscures, my heart receding as if it, too, wants to fade away to nothing so it can’t be seen.
A police siren begins, abrupt and alarming, as if a cruiser hid in the shadows behind the crowd and suddenly flipped a switch.
Instead of turning toward the source of the sound, every single person in the crowd looks at me.
I look down at my chest.
My heart is a red, screaming glow, calling out for a kind of help I don’t have words to ask for.
Andrew’s apartment door buzzes and I sit up, whacking my half-asleep head against a cantaloupe.
“Shit!” shouts the melon.
Oh. That’s not a piece of produce.
The dream lingers, my hand on my chest where the bright red glow of my shrieking heart just was moments ago. I feel my breasts with frantic palms, fingers sliding into the grooves between my ribs, solid and warm but not on fire. The crowd’s eyes are not on me. There are no street performers.
It was, as always, just a dream.
I’m in Andrew’s bed and he’s rubbing his eye socket, squinting at me like a pirate through a white tunnel made of cotton.
I’m under the covers and disoriented. How in the hell do baby kangaroos instinctively find their way out of the birth canal into the mama’s pouch when I can’t disentangle myself from a simple bed sheet?
Andrew’s naked ass walks away, his hand rubbing his head, by the time I extricate myself.
He comes back into the room wearing nothing, but carrying two lattes.
I enjoy the view.
“You answered the door like that?” I accept my morning treat with gratitude.
He leers at my naked chest. “They know to leave it outside the door now.”
“You’ve done this that often?”
“Only with you.” He winks.
“I’m honored.”
“You should be.” He gives me a puzzled look and brushes his fingers against the eyebrow I whacked. “You okay? Bad dream?”
I laugh through my nose, suddenly tongue-tied. “Just my usual. Naked in public nightmare.”
“Ouch.” He gives me a searching look, but one of companionship and acceptance. It’s okay, that look says. Take your time. I’ll be here.
The residue of the discomfort from that other world persists, like an oily sheen on my skin. I want to talk about anything but the dream, especially when I am, indeed, naked right now.
I look outside at the gorgeous spring day. “How about we have coffee outside on the balcony?”
His face goes blank. A pinprick sensation, a tingly sense that there is a misalignment in the room, washes over me.
“Let’s just stay here in bed,” he says in a clipped voice, avoiding my eyes.
I shove my hair out of my face and feel a thick thatch at the back of my head. This is no normal case of bedhead. This is, most firmly, sexhead, which is a physical manifestation of being well-thumped in ways where by thumped, I mean fu—
“I love how you look when I wake up next to you,” he says, his eyes tipping down to look at the top of his coffee. Shyness is endearing on most men, but on Andrew, it damn near makes my heart implode.
I’m going to need more caffeine for this level of emotional engagement and nakedness combined at 7:07 a.m. Whatever weirdness I just felt fades instantly.
“I love waking up next to you, my fake brother.”
His laughter carries across the room and out the open window, toward that family picture on his dresser.
“That felt a little porny if I’m your brother.”
“As if creating a clay mold of my cervix last night in class wasn’t inappropriate enough?”
“It certainly was interesting when that instructor took your cervix and shoved the plastic doll through it.” He shudders as he drinks his coffee, his shoulders round and contoured, corded tendons popping out as he moves. I don’t need Netflix.
I just need Andrewflix. Twenty-four seven. I could watch him all day.
I shudder, too. “She seemed way too enthusiastic about perineal massage.”
His hand goes for my naked hip. “I don’t know. I’m not sure you can ever be too excited about that part of a woman’s anatomy.”
“You have an endless supply of frat boy lines.” I can’t stop giggling. He joins me, his deep chuckles rippling on the air, weaving with my laughter to form a cloud of contentment that fills the room.
“What were you really doing at the hospital last night?” I ask. We didn’t exactly, um, talk much last night after the childbirth class was over. In fact, I think my panties are still in the limo. Now that I have coffee and we’ve thoroughly reacquainted ourselves with every inch of each other’s skin, it’s time to turn to conversation.
<
br /> “Board meeting.”
“Sunny said something about a cancer wing.”
He blinks fast, suddenly, and his neck tenses. “Right. Dad’s donating to the hospital. Wants to help bring new technology to the cancer center.”
“To help him?”
“To help everyone. He’s always had his hand in smaller philanthropic causes, but for this one he wants to pour a ton of his personal fortune into the new wing.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Andrew shrugs. “His money. His choice.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask questions like this,” I say, suddenly feeling like I’ve gone in the wrong direction.
“What?” He holds my hand. “No. Nothing wrong with talking.”
“You seem closed off.”
“I do?” He purses his lips, eyebrows tilting down in an expression that’s not quite a frown. “I guess...I just don’t talk to people like this. It’s new.”
“Like what?”
“Like a human being.”
“You are one, you know.”
His eyes light up with mischief, little flecks of amber shining in the sunlight. “I’ll have to drive that out of me. Such a weakness.”
The heavy moment is over. I take a big gulp of my coffee and stay quiet.
He squeezes my hand. “You can ask me anything, Amanda. No subject is off limits.”
“Really?”
“Really. For instance, you could ask me about that family resemblance the instructor noticed last night—”
“Can we change the subject? You are so not my brother. Not even my fake brother. I’m an only child.”
“Lucky.” He drinks a big sip and looks at me. “You never had to compete for attention.”
“Nope. Just me and my mom.”
A shadow passes over his face. If I weren’t staring at him, I’d have missed it.
“Right. For us, it was just the three sons and our dad and our tutors and his assistant, Grace.”
“You mean Declan’s assistant.”
“She is now. But back then, she worked for Dad.” Andrew’s face goes wistful, the light stubble on his face the only manifestation of adulthood holding him back from looking like a teen as he remembers. “Grace was the one who helped keep us functioning after Mom died.”
I look at the family picture. He looks at me.