1
Soaked to the bone, pissed right the fuck off, and sweating like she was tap dancing on the surface of sun—even though it was a wet and windy December night— Lauren Green grunted at the same time the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder squealed. She was attempting to wedge herself behind the steering wheel and was doing a shit job accomplishing it.
Her phone started to ring, and she let out a loud “MOTHER FUCKER” at the same time she wrestled with the wind to shut her door.
She finally managed to slam it closed, snatched her phone from her purse, put it on speaker on the cellphone holder attached to her dash and yelled, “What the fuck do you want?” as she attempted to fasten her seatbelt around her enormous baby-filled belly.
“To see if you wanted me to brew you some raspberry leaf tea,” Bianca said quietly. “Get that Booty Call Baby moving on out of that belly.”
“Fuck,” Lauren muttered, immediately feeling like shit for speaking to one of her best friends like she was a telemarketer trying to sell her diet pills. “Sorry.”
“How was your doctor’s appointment?” Celeste asked. They were on a three-way call, as they often were. Her two best friends. Her fellow single moms. Well, Lauren wasn’t a single mom yet, but she would be soon. She needed to be soon. Otherwise, she was going to lose her fucking mind.
Besides hearing that steady heartbeat and being reassured that the baby was healthy and in the right position, she found her doctor’s appointment rather unpleasant.
“Did they do a stretch and sweep?” Bianca asked. “I always hated those. Painful as hell.”
Lauren shifted in her seat. She was told after the invasive, sometimes painful and definitely uncomfortable procedure used by doctors to induce labor she might have cramping, bleeding and be a little sore. She was. More than a little.
Grimacing, she buckled her seatbelt under her belly. “Yep. Not my preferred way to have a man’s fingers inside me, but at this point in the game, the doctor could have stuck his dick in me if it induced labor.”
Both her friends snorted in laughter.
It also sucked that it hadn’t been her doctor. Dr. Finton, her regular OB-GYN was on call at the hospital delivering other lucky women’s babies while Lauren got stuck with a locum, a man old enough to be judging her for her “condition” because it was unseemly for Lauren to be having a child out of wedlock with no father in sight. Clearly, she was a harlot. Not that he said these things to her, of course, but she could feel Dr. Judgy McJudgerson judging the shit out of her as he pushed two fingers into her cooch and scissored them around like her cervix had challenged him to a game of rock, paper, scissors, and kept throwing out rock.
She turned on the ignition, flipped on the defrost and let her vehicle warm up for a moment. The rain was coming in sideways because of the wind and hitting her windshield with a disturbing amount of force.
Starved, because she was always hungry these days, being forty weeks pregnant plus five days, she opened up a bag of dill-pickle-flavored mini rice cakes and started shoving them into her mouth three at a time.
“Did the doctor mention your dilation or anything?” Celeste asked.
The rice cakes had formed a gelatinous glob in the back of her throat, and Lauren struggled to swallow it down. She chugged water from her bottle before answering. “Yeah, still tight as fuck. Like two centimeters maybe. Cervix was hard as a raw carrot too.”
“Damn it,” Celeste said. “I’ll bring over some spicy chicken wings.”
“I’ll bring raspberry leaf tea and dates.”
Lauren wrinkled her nose. “Why dates?”
“Because they help ripen the cervix and decrease the need for Pitocin during labor. I ate dates like a fiend my last week of pregnancy with Charlie, and he came so quickly, with no need for drugs or anything. Barely made it to the hospital.”
“And that wasn’t because you had twins before him and they stretched the door as wide as a combine so he could just slide on out?” Lauren said, flipping on her windshield wipers and pulling out of the clinic parking lot. It was already dark out because, well, duh, it was five o’clock on a Saturday (thank God her doctor’s office was open on the weekends). Add in the storm that had come in off the Pacific earlier that day, and she struggled to see ten feet in front of her headlights.
“Har-har,” Bianca laughed forcibly. “Orgasms also help. You could just stay home and masturbate all night and not bring your crappy attitude over to my house.”
Lauren turned off the side road and onto the ramp for the interstate. “Sorry. You know I’m not usually this big of a bitch. I just want this baby out of me so damn bad.”
“I know, sweetie,” Bianca said. “I’m just teasing you. Bring that crappy attitude over and we’ll pour raspberry leaf down your throat and force-feed you spicy chicken wings. That baby will be out in no time.”
She was just about to accelerate to the cruising interstate speed when a blur of red brake lights in front of her had her slamming on her own brakes hard enough to engage the locking mechanism of her seat belt and make her lurch forward. “What the hell?”
“You okay?” Celeste and Bianca asked at the same time.
“Traffic jam,” she muttered. She tried to see around the vehicle in front of her, but it was a futile endeavor. They were in four lanes of traffic, and it was gridlock. Not to mention the sideways rain.
“I just brought up Google maps on my phone and yeah, major traffic jam on the I-5,” Celeste said. “Any way you can take an off-ramp and do the side roads?”
“We’re at a complete standstill.”
Warm liquid pooled between her legs. What the fuck? She unbuckled her belt and shoved her hand down her pants.
Please don’t let it be blood. Please don’t be blood.
It wasn’t blood.
She brought her fingers to her nose to make sure it wasn’t urine. She’d started peeing herself a little at the slightest sudden movement. A lurch forward like she’d done when she slammed on the brakes easily could have made her empty her bladder.
It wasn’t pee.
“Guys …”
“You okay?” Celeste asked, panic in her voice.
“I think my water just broke.”
“Fuck,” both of her friends said at the same time.
“What do I do?” Lauren asked, craning around awkwardly into the back seat of her Pathfinder to reach for a towel.
“Don’t panic.” Celeste’s voice wobbled. “Sabrina didn’t come for another twelve hours after my water broke. So this may not mean anything more than the start of labor. And that’s what you went to the doctor for, right? To start labor. So at least we know it worked.”
“They had to break my water with the girls,” Bianca added. “First babies usually take a long time to come. Hannah and Hayley were like thirty hours.”
“Jesus fuck,” Lauren muttered.
Attempting to breathe deep and stay calm, she put her vehicle in park and went to push her seat back farther when the mother of all cramps pierced through her abdomen and lower back like she’d just run belly-first into a hot poker.
She sucked in a deep breath. She rode out the pain, gritting her teeth and white-knuckling the steering wheel. “I think that was a contraction.”