by Loki Renard
Rex hadn’t realized when they first made their bargain to protect her that they would fall in love with Lacey. He’d known Chase was sweet on her, but he had never anticipated the deeper feelings that had grown between all of them. He hadn’t even realized how much he loved her himself until he was faced first with the consequences of her insubordination and then the unprotected sex she’d been having.
He loved that girl in a way he hadn’t known it was possible to love a woman, and though he’d never wanted any offspring of his own, this was different. Chase was going to be a great dad, and Rex could already see Col and Max taking an interest they hadn’t before. Brian was a little more quiet about things, but even he seemed pleased. As a unit they’d been through several big transitions. Adjusting to fatherhood was the biggest one yet.
He was going to be responsible for five men, one woman, and an infant—and he couldn’t wait.
* * *
Lacey
Pregnancy was the worst thing that could have happened to Lacey.
She was swollen, she was miserable, and there was little any of the men could do about it. Brian had taken to hiding out in the shed most of the time as she went on what they were starting to call her rampages. They weren’t entirely her fault. The hormones were hard to control, and she barely recognized her body these days. Her ankles were swollen, her appetite was out of control, and she occasionally got kicked in the liver. Most of the men were unsympathetic to her plight. They didn’t understand what it was like to have their bodies play host to new life. They seemed perplexed at her mood swings, and preferred to keep out of her way as she patrolled the house like an angry lioness looking for prey.
On a pass of the lounge, she caught Max and Col joking about drawing straws for who would give the other one a DIY home vasectomy first.
“This must never happen again,” Col said, not quite out of earshot. “She could decimate a small nation with that gas.”
“The gas is nothing,” Max replied. “I forgot to put the cap on the toothpaste and she almost put a cap in my ass.”
“Well, maybe you should remember simple things!” Lacey flared at them. “And don’t act like me being pregnant is hard on you. You’re not the one with a human inside you.”
“Whoa, easy, Momma.” Max put his hands up. “Don’t deploy your biological weapons.”
“Oh, fuck…”
“That’s enough, Lacey.” Rex’s voice came from behind her. “You can settle down now. I don’t care what state you’re in, I’ll find a way to discipline you if I need to.”
“Did you hear what they were fucking saying about me?” She scowled at Rex. He was about the only one of the group willing to stand up to her in her current state, and secretly she was glad for it, though she hadn’t admitted it, and likely never would.
“Swear at me again and you’ll have your mouth washed out,” Rex growled.
She hated being pregnant. She felt as though pregnancy had taken her men away from her and left her helpless. She was useless to herself and to everyone else and now that she was showing, the raucous sex that had started to taper off as soon as she told them the news had abated entirely and in its place was nothing but treatment with kid gloves.
Lacey was tired of it. She was tired of being a big blubbery waddling whale who never got laid. She was tired of being kicked from the inside out. She was tired of pretty much everything.
“Wash my mouth out and I’ll get my revenge,” she threatened Rex.
“Oh, yes, little girl?”
“Yeah, so don’t fucking try it.”
It turned out that pregnant women could be taken by the ear and waddle-marched to the bathroom. It also turned out that pregnant women could have bars of soap pushed into their mouths even as they made dire threats of what they’d do if that happened.
Spluttering on bitter soap, Lacey spat the bar out into the sink and gave Rex a foamy glare. “You can’t do that! Soap’s not safe!”
“It’s perfectly safe,” he growled. “What’s not safe is you antagonizing everybody. You’re about to be sent to your room, young lady. Is that what you want?”
She softened a little as Rex glowered sternly at her.
“No,” she said in a small voice. “I want this baby out of me.”
“Soon,” he said.
“But it’s not soon. It’s three months. It’s ninety days of having someone shank me in the bladder.”
“The baby doesn’t have a shank.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s turned part of the umbilical cord into a shiv,” she rumbled, bending down to rinse her mouth of the bitter soap taste.
Rex watched her, his lips curling up into a smile.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re going to look back on these as some of the best days of your life,” he said. “You’re going to remember being tucked up here in a cabin with all of us. This is the part before the happily ever after, little girl. It’s coming. You just have to wait a little longer.”
Lacey felt tears rising to her eyes. Her happily ever after was already here as far as she was concerned. She grabbed Rex and hugged him as best she could, shedding happy hormonal tears on his chest as he held her tight.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lacey
Three months later…
“I am not going into labor without them here.”
Lacey had been in labor for hours already, but she wasn’t ready to have the baby. Rex had insisted on taking her to the hospital just because the contractions were three minutes apart, but Lacey was determined not to have the baby until everyone was with her. Chase and Rex were in the room, but the other three were AWOL, and that was not good enough. She had been very specific that everybody had to be there.
“Lacey, that’s not how this works,” Chase said soothingly. “When your body is ready, it’s ready.”
“Yes, it is. I will bake this baby until it is ready to go to college if I have to,” she growled. “I want them here… ooowwwwww.”
A tightening from the back of her spine all the way around to her belly began again. A contraction. She didn’t want a contraction. She didn’t want to do this. It was going to hurt worse than anything had ever hurt. She’d made the mistake of watching a bunch of birth videos and had come to the conclusion that the scene from Alien was less disturbing.
“Breathe,” Chase soothed.
“I’m fucking breathing,” Lacey snapped back. She was on hands and knees, panting like an animal. “Go and get them.”
“I can’t just go and get them, Lacey.”
“They said they’d be here.”
“They said they would try to,” Chase said. “They didn’t know you’d be going into labor today.”
“Aarrggghhhh…” Lacey screamed as another contraction made everything horribly tight and painful again. “Get them now!”
“Easy, girl,” Rex growled. He was not taking her shit no matter how far she was dilated, which at that point was eight centimeters.
“What? What are you going to do to me? I’m in labor, bitch!”
“You’re not going to be in labor forever,” Rex growled. “And I’ll remember that.”
“I am going to be in labor forever,” she snapped back. “I’ve been in labor forever and I’m going to be in labor forever. This is never, ever going to end.”
“Shhh,” Chase soothed, wiping her forehead with a damp cloth. “Do you want some more ice chips?”
“I want throwing stars,” she grunted. “And you can shove them up your ass and see how this feels… owww goddammmnnitt!”
Another contraction hit her like a freight train.
“You planned this all along, didn’t you,” she growled at Chase when she regained the ability to speak. “You knew if you knocked me up I’d suffer.”
“Did we miss anything?” Max came striding through the door, oblivious as all hell. He was followed by Col and Brian.
“Do you see a baby?” Col interjected.
Ma
x’s reply was cut off by the arrival of the midwife, back to check her cervix. She pushed her hand under the blanket and glanced up at Lacey.
“You want all five of them here?”
“Yes, they’re all the father. They’ve been drawing straws to see who gets to name the baby,” Lacey said, enjoying the look of barely repressed shock on the woman’s face.
“Alright then,” she said with a smile. “You’re ten centimeters. It’s time to push.”
“Hell, yeah,” Max championed. “Time to push! Shoot that sucker out of there! We’ll be home for tea.”
“That’s not how this works,” the midwife said. “It takes time.”
“How much time?”
“She’s a new mother, so it could be a while. Her body needs to work out what it’s doing.”
“Oh,” Max said with a small frown. “It doesn’t know?”
“You’re sure you want him here?” The midwife checked with Lacey again.
“Definitely,” Lacey smiled. Max would be a distraction from everything that was to come. As her labor progressed, all the men settled into watchful vigil. Brian pressed a kiss to her forehead then sat down in the corner of the room and went to work on his laptop. Max stood there looking confused and out of place. Col was hovering near the door, a sort of angry expression on his face, which she now knew didn’t actually mean he was angry. Col was a hammer and every problem that wasn’t a nail bothered him. He was worried for her and he wanted to fight something, but there was nothing to fight. Just his presence made her feel better.
“Okay,” she breathed. “Now I can do this.”
Over the next three hours, she reneged on that point of view. She couldn’t do this. It didn’t make sense. Babies couldn’t come out of people, the math didn’t work out. The baby was too big. She was too small. Everything was stretching, there was tearing and blood and chaos.
Max went to have a look at how things were progressing and promptly fainted. He had to be carried out by Brian and Rex while Col and Chase talked her through it, mostly telling her to breathe, which was stupid as hell because telling someone who had a person coming out of her to breathe was a lot like telling a dude getting his eyes gouged out to remember to breathe. It was the least of her concerns, to say the least.
Finally, somewhere in the midst of the pressure and the pushing and the ongoing reminders to keep metabolizing oxygen, a thin cry heralded the birth of her son. She could hardly believe it when the midwife took him and put him on her chest. He was so tiny, so perfectly formed. She stared at the little face and felt a rush of love like no other. It was so hard to believe that he had been growing inside her all this time and now he was here, with her.
“He’s beautiful,” Chase breathed, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
Rex didn’t say anything, but she saw the look of pride glimmering in his eyes, which he would have sworn up and down were not filled with tears.
Max returned to the room and crowded around. “Cool,” he said enthusiastically. “He looks like Chase… or maybe Col… or Brian… or…”
“He looks like all of us because babies don’t look like anything,” Col said. “He looks like a potato.”
“Col!” Rex snapped sharply.
“It’s true,” Col shrugged, rolling his eyes. “Okay, fine, he’s cute. Whatever.” He extended his finger and the little potato put out his hand and clasped at it. Lacey saw Col take a shuddering breath. His eyes started to shine in the same way Rex’s were. It seemed to be a catching condition. All five of her men gathered around, looking down at the baby they had made. It didn’t matter who the little spud’s biological father was. What mattered was that he had five fathers ready to love him for the rest of his life, and a mother who loved him more than life itself.
The End
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