After he’d left me in the office to go get changed so he could take me home and I could leave my car with him, his mom had made it sound like Murphy was sick. But wouldn’t tell me how.
Which was why I asked him if he was sick and needed a rest day when he’d mentioned that he was coming to workout with me anyway and could easily take me home afterward.
He’d shut down after that and hadn’t been the same since.
Which led to now.
Him marching up with his eyes narrowed at my tire.
Whoops.
The closer he got to my window, the more ferocious his scowl became, until I lost sight of him with the contraction coming upon me. When he finally opened my door, he had his mouth open and ready to fire.
Then he likely saw the tears on my face, and every single angry word he was about to say fell from his lips.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“There’s no cell service,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure I’m about to have this baby.”
He looked down at the trash bag that I was sitting on, then back up at me.
“Are you sure?” he asked, hoping for a different answer.
I didn’t have a different one to give him.
“About as sure as one can be when she feels a baby coming out of her vagina,” I admitted.
His eyes went alarmed. “As in, you can feel the head, right now?”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
“We’re an hour away from the hospital.” He groaned. “And this is where you don’t get cell service for ten miles in either direction.”
I nodded, feeling my heart sink just a little bit more.
“And your tire…” he looked at his bike. “There’s no way that I can get you on my bike, either.” He paused. “I can ride back to the area where I can get signal…”
I launched myself at him. “No, don’t leave!”
I knew that I’d be delivering this baby in the next twenty minutes.
If not less.
I just…knew.
“First babies don’t come that fast,” he tried to console me. “And we’re not going to be able to get out of here if something goes wrong.”
I knew that.
Like, I really knew that.
I’d been stewing over it for the last two hours.
There were about a million and one things that could go wrong.
But…women did it all the time back in the times before hospitals.
If a highlander’s wife could do it, I could do it.
At least, I thought I could.
“This first baby does,” I told him. “I’m serious. I don’t know if this means anything to you, but I can really feel the head. By the time that you can feel the head…in there…it means that all you really have to do is start pushing. And that generally is the end stages of labor.”
I was lying.
I wasn’t in end stages.
I was in the end stage.
Like, if I pushed once or twice, I knew that my girl would just slide right out.
My girl…that I didn’t have any clothes for. No car seat. No diaper bag. No goddamn blanket.
Nothing.
“What’s that look for?”
I swallowed hard and pushed the button that would open the back door.
It slid open with a whir.
“I was thinking that I don’t have a damn thing in here that’ll help us,” I told him.
He helped me get into the back seat, then snatched the box of trash bags that I’d been intending to take home today seeing as I’d been piling trash on top of my counter instead of in the trash can because I’d ran out two days ago.
Pulling one out, he yanked a knife out of his pocket, then sliced the bag up the sides before placing it on the ground underneath my feet.
From there he laid one on the chair, then opened the next one up for good measure.
He looked at me then as if he didn’t know what to do next.
I helped him by situating myself on the floorboard. “Turn around so I can pull these shorts off.”
He gave me a look that clearly said I was crazy for trying to preserve my modesty when he was about to see a whole lot more than that, but he turned around anyway.
When I was naked from the waist down, I sat in the back of the van gingerly. “There are going to be things you see today. Things I say and do that I won’t mean. I want you to promise me to never hold this day against me, okay?”
Another contraction hit me, and it would’ve knocked me straight to my knees had I not already been on my ass.
I’d been able to power through the last two…but not this one.
The urge to push was overwhelming, and I now knew that I wouldn’t have been able to put this off much longer no matter how much I tried. The baby would be delivering herself if…
“I won’t hold it against you. I also vow to forget everything that I see today,” he vowed. “Now, hold my hand and tell me what to do.”
I didn’t hold his hand. I latched onto his arm so tight that my fingers dug into his skin.
My eyes went to where he was so graciously allowing me to hurt him.
I let go and moved to his hand, but something about the sight of my handprint on his arm struck me as odd.
“You have edema.” I panted through my next contraction. “You should get that checked out.”
Edema was swelling.
Something that a man as young as Murphy shouldn’t have.
But before I could put much more thought into it, my head was once again in the game, and I was bearing down so hard that I couldn’t breathe.
“You should turn toward me so I can catch her,” Murphy said.
I opened my eyes after the contraction was over to see him staring between my legs.
I looked myself to see that there was a baby head sticking halfway out of it.
That baby head had so much blonde hair that I was amazed.
“I can’t move…” I found myself saying.
He reached over and helped me, turning me until I was pointed to where he was kneeling in the floorboard of my van.
“Thanks,” I said just as another contraction hit me.
I wasn’t sure how much longer after that that the feeling of relief down there hit me. Two, maybe fifteen contractions. I wasn’t sure.
But what I was sure of was that the scream of my baby making its way into the world was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life.
“Umm, honey? You had a boy.”
My eyes snapped open and I stared into Murphy’s eyes for a split second before I did, indeed, see that I had a boy.
“What. The. Fuck?” I gasped.
Murphy started to laugh, then tucked the little gremlin into my arms.
He studiously avoided looking at the carnage between my legs.
Thank God for small favors.
His eyes were, wholly, and completely on the little boy that I now held in my arms.
“I was going to go buy baby clothes today,” I admitted. “That was what I was going into town to do. My maternity leave started today, and I thought, what better way to spend the day than to pick out clothes for my baby? Funny how life works sometimes.”
Murphy’s eyes went from the baby to me then back.
He shook his head. “I’m still mad at you.”
My lips curled into a small smile as my stomach cramped again.
This time, however, it was something I could ignore.