by Viki Storm
I stretch my back before getting up off the stool. It’s getting harder and harder to move lately. I put one hand at the small of my back and the other on my large, swollen belly. I hoist myself up with a grunt and Ayvinx is at my side, helping me. “You don’t need to pretend that you can still do everything on your own.”
“But I can,” I insist. He’s right, though—it’s just a tough habit to break. I’m trying. For the sake of our daughter.
And as if she knows this, I feel her kick. I flinch and he looks at me, concern plain on his face. “Are you okay?” he says. I swear he’s more terrified of me going into labor than I am.
“Fine,” I say. “Just a kick. This little spawn of yours is feisty already. She moves around like a hellion possessed.”
“Any child of mine would,” he says, voice full of pride. He puts his hand to my stomach and I reposition it to the spot where she’s kicking. She gives another wallop and he laughs. “She’s strong.”
“Just so long as she doesn’t kick a hole through me,” I say. I have serious fears that she will kick a hole through the fluid sac that surrounds her in the womb. The healers assure me this is impossible, but they can’t feel how hard she kicks.
She’s going to kick and I’m going to feel the water start to trickle down my leg, I just know it.
The healers that came from Zalaryx have magnificent technology. They have a little device that reads the sound waves from the fluids inside the womb. They can reconstruct an image of the child just from the sound waves. Whoever thought of such a thing? Sound waves through the water? And they can tell that the seven-month-old child inside my belly is a girl. That’s as close to magic as I think exists in the real world.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
“Sure,” he says. He puts his arms around me and when I lean in to return the embrace, he squats down, wrapping his arms low, underneath the swell of my belly. His face is level with my stomach and he presses his ear to my belly. “I’m going to miss this belly,” he says. “You look so beautiful with my child inside you.”
Just then, I feel another one of those full-force kicks right at the spot where he’s pressed his ear. “Ow!” he says and dissolves into a fit of laughter.
“See what I mean?” I say. “A hellion!”
“Of course she is!” he says. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way. You’re going to have a whole house full of little Ayvinxes running around.”
“Maybe I should have stayed on Fenda and been the royal seamstress after all.”
“Not a chance,” he says, lifting me up as easily as if I was a box of feathers. “The Imperator gave you to me—remember? For… What did he call it? For ‘valiant deeds in service to the Fendan race’? You’re mine, by law.”
“Set me down,” I say. “I don’t care who gave me to you!”
“Let me carry you,” he says. “You do so much, you deserve it. It’s not a weakness to accept help.”
So I do. I melt into his arms and close my eyes, thinking that it does feel good to let someone else take the reins once in a while. If he wants to carry me, I should let him. Because that’s what was wrong with my life for so many years. I was trying to do it all alone because I didn’t want to let anyone in. And now I think about how close I came to dying in an Earth jail cell, or being gentled at the hands of a rogue Zalaryn, or being ravished by a horde of Fendan soldiers, or being host to a Kraxxoid egg sac….
And Ayvinx was there to help me every time. He kept me safe even when all odds had my demise as a certain thing. In his arms, the baby kicking lustily inside me, I know he’ll always be there to keep me safe.
Keep us safe.
And I will always let him.
The End
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VIKI STORM lives in a drafty house filled with action figures and board games (some of which actually belong to her children). She's probably watching The Universe or The Twilight Zone right now instead of writing.
