Five #7
“What?” he grunted, scowling at me.
“You’re not going anywhere. Go back to bed.”
“Tell me again who called.”
“My friend Dylan, my partner—she’s in labor, and it sounds like maybe she’s having a bit of a meltdown,” I explained, continuing to rifle through the drawers in his armoire. “I need to get over there and help her poor sweet husband before he has a meltdown too and they’re both scarred for life.”
“Dylan called or her husband?”
“Her husband.”
“Okay.”
I found a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and held it up. “Whose is this?”
“It’s Jen’s or Rachel’s.” He yawned, smiling slowly. “They were here a lot while I was gone.”
I arched a brow at him.
“Not like that,” he snapped at me. “Jen doesn’t bring guys here anymore.”
“As far as you know.”
“Screw you, J,” he said with mock anger before he suddenly gave a snort of laughter. “Did you see the front of that shirt, baby?”
The word Diva was large and airbrushed on in pink metallic ink, but I would have to deal with it; there was nothing else in Sam Kage’s closet that was going to work.
He was six-four, I was five-nine; he was a mountain of hard, heavy muscle, I was lithe and lean, and none of his clothes were going to fit me.
It was this or nothing, because my dress shirt no longer had buttons.
“Maybe next time you won’t ruin my clothes,” I complained.
“Sorry.” He shrugged, but he obviously wasn’t.
I yanked the tag off, turned it inside out, and pulled it on. It clung to me, but it covered me, and under my jacket, no one would notice. “Okay,” I said, raking my fingers through my hair a few times. “I gotta go. I’ll call ya.”
“The fuck you will,” he snapped at me. “Just wait; I’m going with you.”
“No, Sam, you can’t do that. Dylan hates you—you bein’ there won’t help.”
“It’ll help.”
“No, it really won’t.”
“Listen.” He walked over to me and put his hand heavy around the back of my neck. “You’re mine. I go where you go, and anywhere you go at four in the goddamn morning, I go too.”
He had no idea what he was even saying, but it was very cute, so I wrapped my arms around him, squeezed tight, and told him to button his jeans and find a shirt. I slapped his ass hard when he turned away from me.
He muttered to himself all the way back down the hall.
There were hurried introductions made when we arrived at Dylan and Chris’s apartment, and I called Sam my boyfriend because it was easier than the explanation would have been. His smile over the title was huge.
“It’s only for tonight,” I told him.
“Whatever you say.” He grinned back.
We all took turns trying to extricate Dylan from the bathroom.
I tapped on the door and tried to talk my best friend and partner out.
She wouldn’t budge. Her husband was so sweet.
I thought Dylan’s mother, Akiko, was going to cry, and his own mother, Dana, was giving him a look like he was the Second Coming.
The door didn’t even crack. Dylan’s father, Martin, tried, then Chris’s father, James, tried, and then her sister, Roxanne, went with the funny, sarcastic approach.
We all laughed, even Sam smiled, but there was nothing from Dylan except her screams as the contractions ripped through her.
“Can I try?” Sam asked me from where he was leaning next to the china cabinet.
Arms crossed, ankles crossed, he looked very calm.
“Sure.” Chris invited him with a sweeping motion of his hand. “Come one, come all.”
Sam levered himself off the wall and moved across the room to the door. He tapped gently, and we all watched him, riveted.
“Hey, Dylan—it’s me, Sam. You know, Detective Kage. The one you fuckin’ hate.” I could have done without the swearing. “Don’t you have something you wanna say to me?”
The reaction was instant. The door slammed open, and she came roaring out of the room.
“How dare you even speak to him again, you selfish sonofabitch! I hate you for hurting him, for letting him get shot! I hate you even more for leaving, and I hate you most of all for coming back! You! Don’t!
Deserve him! Get the hell out of his life, you poisonous, manipulative asshole! ”
The room was silent except for Sam, who stepped close and took her chin in his hand and lifted it so he could look down into her eyes.
“Oh ho, the lady’s a tiger.”
She breathed deeply, utterly fuming as she stared up at him.
“Feel better?”
She shivered once, and there was the patter of liquid on the floor beneath her. Sam didn’t even flinch.
“I think my water broke,” she said in the tiniest voice I had ever heard.
“Yep.” He nodded, giving her the lopsided grin that I loved. “So let’s go to the hospital.”
“I can’t walk,” she said, looking at her husband, then her dad, Chris’s dad, and finally me.
“It’s okay,” Sam announced, then he turned to me. “Get me a towel.”
I darted into the bathroom, emerged with one, and passed it to him, and he wrapped her in it from the waist down before scooping her up in his arms. He did it like she weighed nothing at all.
“You got a sweater or a shawl you wanna take? I don’t want you to be cold.”
Chris knew the one, and bolted from the bedroom and was back in seconds with her favorite chunky cardigan. He helped her slip it on, and all the while, Sam held her like he could have done it all day and night.
Once she was cozy, Sam was at the door seconds later, holding her cradled against his chest, her arms wrapped around his neck, her face lying on his shoulder.
Even nine months pregnant, she looked tiny and fragile in comparison to the big and strong man he was.
The picture of them together would be forever ingrained in my memory.
“J, get a trash bag for Dyl to sit on in the car, another for the floor board, and grab the bag she packed for the hospital. C’mon, Chris, let’s do this.”
Chris seemed rooted to the spot he was standing in and just stared back at Sam.
“Let’s go, buddy,” Sam coaxed him.
“But I was going to drive her in—”
“I’m a cop. I have a cool blue light and a siren in my car. Who’s gonna get you there faster?”
“Okay, you win,” he agreed, rushing around the house, hurrying everyone out as we all followed Sam down the stairs.
Four flights down—he wasn’t waiting for the elevator—carrying a very heavily pregnant woman, and he wasn’t even winded when he put her gently in the passenger seat after I spread the trash bag over it, and the floor at her feet.
The SUV was huge, but all the parents still had to take a separate car.
Three in the back seat—me, her sister, Roxanne, and Chris—was all there was room for.
“Why do I need the trash bag?” Dylan asked as Sam pulled away from the curb, blue light going off like a strobe. “My water already broke.”
He chuckled, reached out and touched her cheek, petting her. “That’s amniotic fluid, sweetheart, it doesn’t stop coming until the baby’s out.”
“Oh.” She looked over her shoulder at Chris. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
She questioned her sister, Roxanne, and then me. None of us had had any idea. When she turned back to Sam, she explained that she thought there was just one big gush like in the movies.
“Nope,” he assured her. “Not at all.”
“How come you know so much?”
Talking kept her mind occupied, and Sam knew all about diversionary tactics.
I was surprised by the amount of things Sam knew about babies.
He himself had delivered four when he was a uniformed officer: one in a bank right after a robbery, two in cabs, and one in the back of his squad car.
All his sisters had kids and had recounted their birth stories to him and the rest of his family in grisly detail.
He had Dylan laughing as he talked about his sister Jen’s birth video and how it had accidentally turned up at the local video store because one VHS tape got swapped for another.
Luckily, the guy at the counter had checked it before just putting it back out on the shelf.
When Dylan had a contraction, he made her count through it, and told her how well she’d done when it was over.
As we were all climbing out of the SUV in front of the hospital, I felt a hand on my back. I was faced with Roxanne, and she was smiling at me.
“You keep that man, Jory.” She sighed deeply. “Gorgeous and built like that… God! Those arms of his and the way he carried Dyl… Christ. Does he have a straight brother?”
I laughed, because yes, he did.
Chris caught my arm and pulled me in beside him as we walked behind them through the parking lot.
“I wish I could carry her like that.”
Dylan was back in Sam’s arms, talking to him as he walked her through the emergency room doors.
“You have,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but not this far, or for this long.”
“He’s just big, so he can.”
“I wish I was too.”