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.
The afterbirth.
That would be something I would be doing without him. I was pretty sure cutting the cord was something that I could accomplish.
“Can you…” I pointed at the baby. “Can you take my pants and wrap him up?”
He ignored my suggestion about the pants and ripped off his shirt.
Then he wrapped it around my baby.
“Good?” he asked.
I swallowed hard, trying not to look at the man in his bare-chested state.
He wasn’t the most ripped guy in the world.
In fact, for a man that was doing CrossFit five times a week and doing such a physically demanding job, I would’ve expected him not to have a little bit of chunkiness to him at all.
But, when I looked at him, took in his hairy chest and his chiseled jaw, as well as his non-defined abdominal muscles, I realized that I was highly
attracted to him, nonetheless.
“What are you staring at?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
I wasn’t dead. I may have just had a baby, like literally minutes ago, but I wasn’t dead.
“You need to sit here and let me ride into town and call an ambulance,” he muttered darkly.
I sighed and leaned my head into the seat I was leaning against. “Just go get me a spare so we can drive in. I don’t want to leave my car here. And your place is five minutes instead of the ten it would take to drive into town and call someone.”
There’d been a petition going around town for about a year now to get the cell phone signal booster that would help out those that lived outside of town on the north side. Pretty much, if you didn’t have a home phone—which nobody had anymore—then you had to hope that the cell phone tower wasn’t being a total dick and doing its job—which ninety-five percent of the time it wasn’t.
“You think I just carry spares like yours around with me?” He rolled his eyes.
“I think you have a truck five minutes away, and I would rather drive into town in yours, than pay thousands of dollars to the county for their transport to a hospital for something that I don’t need any longer.”
“You want to just go home?” he wondered, looking alarmed.
Now that he said it, I thought—well, why the hell not? The hard part was all done.
“Sure do,” I said.
He opened his mouth, and then closed it.
“We can’t…” he shook his head. “We can’t do that.”
I shrugged. “Nobody is asking you to do anything but take me home, man.”
Murphy looked down at the little boy that was fast asleep in his arms and said, “Your fucking mother is crazy.”
With that he transferred him over, got on his bike, and rode away.
While he was gone, I dealt with the afterbirth, wrapped it up in a trash bag, and then cleaned up my mess as best as I could while my son slept on the seat cocooned in Murphy’s large shirt.
When I was cleaned up, I took the rest of the time to study my son.
He looked nothing like the asshole who’d helped make him.
He looked like me, and nobody else.
Which made me irrationally fucking happy.
When Bayne Green came back to Paris, Texas—which I knew he would—he would never know what he’d signed away.
But I would.
And I would forever be happy in the knowledge that my son was mine, and nobody else’s.
“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world, Vladimir Alessio Pope.” I paused. “And don’t tell that man that you’re named after him, or he’ll find a reason to be mad at me about it.”
Speaking of the grumpy guy.
He rolled up in his truck ten minutes to the dot from when he left, glared daggers at me as he helped me into his truck, and then didn’t say a single word as he drove me home.
He also didn’t leave until my sister arrived twenty minutes after she was done with work.
The next morning I woke up with my car in its spot, a new tire on not one, but four rims, and a note saying, “Don’t do anything stupid like this ever again. Also, you got a cute kid to rely on you now. Don’t be dumb.”
CHAPTER 7
I don’t like running, wallballs, box jumps, thrusters, burpees and definitely not the assault bike. But I love CrossFit.
-Mavis to Murphy
MAVIS
Two weeks later
I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
My sister was currently at home, throwing up her guts, and there was no way in hell that she could watch Vlad. Then again, with her being sick, I most assuredly didn’t want her near my newborn.
But today, not having a babysitter wasn’t an option.
Not with school so close to being done.
I literally had one clinical left to do and one day left to do it in because I’d used up all the rest of my days having my baby.
I stared at the shop that was housing the man that made my heart go pitter patter and wondered if he’d agree.
I hoped he would, because I was literally out of options.
Options that I trusted, anyway.
Getting out of the van, I rushed toward the front doors, hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t get soaked.
There was no hope, though.
This year it’d been exceptionally wet.
There was literally rain coming down every single day.
And every single time I got out in it, it was pouring.
Like today.
Like I needed more shit to worry about.
But whatever.
When I arrived under the cover of his shop, he was already waiting for me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his eyes taking my soaked attire in.
I licked my lips and bit my lip.
“I…” I hesitated. “I need you to watch my son tonight.”
“I’m sorry, but I think that the wind is making me hear things.” He paused. “You need me to do what?”
“You heard me, dammit!” I cried out, waving my hands in the air as if by doing it it would help me not lose my shit. “I’m sorry, okay? I don’t have anyone else. Not anyone that I trust, anyway. I have one more clinical. One! Then I’m done. I need help. I need you.”
He looked like he was about to say no, but then I kept talking.
“You can even take him to the gym with you,” I pleaded. “I won’t complain at all. Just don’t let anyone touch him but you, okay?”
Murphy sighed. “What about my mom?”
“She’s okay,” I promised instantly.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “But leave your phone on. I’ve never watched a baby before.”
I jumped up and down in excitement. “It’ll be okay. I promise. The shift is from six tonight to six tomorrow morning. I might even be back before he wakes up for good.”
“Just how many times does he wake up in the night?” he wondered.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
• • •
MURPHY
“Just you and me tonight, I guess,” I said to the little baby that hadn’t stopped sleeping since his mother had handed him off to me.
That’d been an hour ago, and now I was driving a goddamn minivan back to Mavis’s place, wondering what in the hell I’d just gotten myself in to.
The kid woke up within an hour of me getting him home, so I fed him and got him changed into a new diaper.
Something in which I’d never done before in my life.
“Okay,” I said as I looked at the kid, the diaper, and then the old one that was still around his body.
At least I had something to go by, I supposed.
Pulling my phone out, I did what any man would do, and YouTubed how to change a damn diaper.
“…make sure to always keep something covering the penis if it’s a baby boy. Boys tend to pee when their penis is exposed to cool air. It’s reflexive.”
I looked at the baby that was staring at me with those damn blue jean eyes exactly like his mother.
“Hang with me, my man,” I said as I propped the phone up by his head and proceeded to get the diaper on him. Poorly. But it was done.
When he was done, I picked up the clothes that she’d left out for him to be put in for ‘bed.’
“These are so boring,” I found myself saying of the red pajamas. “Boring.”
The baby kicked his feet.
“I can’t believe she named you Vlad.” I shook my head. “She should be calling you Imp or something. Short for Impaler.”
Vlad blinked.
“You’re pretty boring at this stage, aren’t you?” I wondered.
He didn’t respond, but he didn’t cry, either. So there was that.
“Let’s see if we can find you some different clothes,” I said as I picked him up.
He’d gotten a little bigger than the last
time I’d held him moments after he was born—something I would never forget—but not by much. He still fit securely in the crook of my arm.
Together we walked over to the closet, and I realized that she sure the fuck didn’t have much for him.
As in, he had what amounted to three outfits in each size, and the boring red pajama set was one of the only ones there.
Weren’t baby’s closets supposed to be stuffed full?
Where was all of his stuff?
Mind whirling, I walked back to the changing table, then got him into his clothes.
An hour after that, I got him topped off, then I put him to bed just like she’d told me, making sure to fit the little sock onto his foot exactly as she’d instructed. The sock being some Owlet monitor or something that made sure the baby was breathing.
And since I had my own damn breathing issues—which were getting worse as time moved on—I could see the wisdom in a monitor that would always monitor that.
Laying him down in bed, wide awake, I started to talk to him.
Eventually, he nodded off to sleep, and I got ready for a night on her couch.
Something that I abandoned an hour into it and went in search of her bed.
Then I slept the entire night away until five when it was my normal time to wake up.
After checking my phone and contemplating answering all of the hundreds of messages that she’d sent, I instead did my business, started coffee, and checked on the still sleeping baby.
I’d just gotten into the living room, intent on turning the television on to watch quietly until the baby woke up, but before I could even make it onto the couch the front door burst open and Mavis was there.
“Why haven’t you answered any of my texts?” she bellowed.
I blinked. “Because I was sleeping. I was just about to reply.”
She looked frantic. “Where’s my baby?”
“Still asleep. Why?” I asked.
“I’m sorry…but what?” she asked, looking alarmed.
I stepped back and urged her inside. “He’s still sleeping.”
My repeated words had her staring at me in alarm.
Then she was running down the hallway toward her son’s room.
I followed behind, much more slowly than her.
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