Chapter 45 – Anna
FORTY-FIVE
ANNA
There were times she thought that her brain didn’t belong to her. There were times she thought her heart didn’t belong to her, either.
Three Months Later
Officially, I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant and I was huge.
There was no other word for it. My ankles were swollen. My boobs were the size of droopy water balloons. And my belly…it needed its own zip code.
“Can I ask? Are you not attracted to me anymore?” I asked E.G., who was sitting on the couch with me, my feet in his lap as he absently rubbed them while he read some article on his iPad.
It was late, after a long day of shopping for baby stuff. I should be exhausted, but my brain just wouldn’t stop spinning.
“Of course, I’m attracted to you,” he said, without looking up from the article.
“But I’m huuuuuugggggeeee.”
“Being pregnant doesn’t change who you are, Flowers. Stop fishing for compliments.”
“I’m not fishing.”
I was fishing a little. I was just feeling all these things, all the time.
Hormones, am I right?
“You don’t have sex with me anymore,” I noted.
That had him lifting his head and looking over at me.
“You’re not comfortable anymore during sex. Remember the last time we tried? You told me to back the fuck up. I think we can put a pin in our sex life until after the baby comes.”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d been the one to call it on the sex. Being horny faded and total discomfort twenty-four hours a day took its place.
The baby was due in two weeks, and, I’m not going to lie, it was starting to freak me out a bit.
“What if I get eclampsia and die?” I asked him, poking him in the thigh with the foot he wasn’t rubbing. “Are you going to shut down again? What happens to the baby then? Would you give it up for adoption?”
“Stop asking ridiculous questions,” he said with a scowl. “Your blood pressure is good, your ankles are only mildly swollen. You’re young and in excellent shape. The OB/GYN has said so on each visit. You’re going to be fine, Flowers.”
“What if I suck at being a mom? You know, because I didn’t have one.”
“You’ll have my mom. You won’t be able to shake her loose.”
In the end, he’d decided against the Florida move for now, declaring he didn’t want to have to find me a new doctor. His parents were scheduled to come here for an extended stay after the baby was born.
I was going to need the help short term, definitely. But what about long term? I’d heard about maternal instincts, but maybe I was missing them. Like some genetic disorder passed down from my mother, who obviously didn’t have any because she gave me away.
“What’s this all about?” E.G. asked. “You’ve been quiet all day, and now, suddenly it’s twenty questions.”
I lifted a single shoulder. We’d gone to pick up the crib today. E.G. had it custom made. It was a beautiful piece of furniture that was now sitting in a beautiful nursery in the room across from ours.
And it was freaking me the fuck out, because in a few weeks there was going to be a baby lying in it.
“I’m having doubts,” I declared.
“Doubts?”
“Second thoughts.”
“A little late for that, isn’t it?”
Then I blurted out that kernel of darkness that lived inside me. “What if I just have the baby, give it to you, and leave?”
Slowly, he put down his iPad and turned his head toward me. “Is that what you want?”
“Is that what you want?”
“How can you ask me that?”
I didn’t like that he answered my question with a question, but he probably didn’t like that I’d done it, either.
“You don’t love me. You don’t want to get over Allison. Once I have this baby, I’ll be nothing to you other than some convenient sex and a food distributor for the kid.”
He frowned. “There is nothing convenient about you, Flowers.”
He pushed my feet off his lap and stood up, his hands on his hips.
“Tell me what this is about,” he demanded. “You’re pushing buttons and doing it deliberately. You want me to say I love you? I can’t. Let’s move on. What crawled up your ass in the past few hours?”
I was pushing buttons. I was honest enough with myself to admit that.
But there was this huge event that was right around the corner and I was scared.
About all of it. The pain, having the baby, not dropping it on its head.
Being able to breast feed, which apparently wasn’t a given, based on everything I’d read online.
Fucking nipple protectors.
What if I couldn’t do it? Couldn’t do any of it?
It’s not like E.G. and I had this amazing relationship that I could lean into and depend on to support me while I struggled with all of it.
There were days I thought I was battling for his heart and winning. And there were days I was battling for his heart and losing.
Maybe I was just sick of the fight. Like if I was going to be alone to do this thing, I should just be alone now.
All this was in my head at any given moment of the day and sometimes I could shake it and calm down and sometimes I couldn’t.
“I don’t think I want to be here anymore,” I said quietly.
“Where? In this room? Are you saying you want to go to bed? Fine. Let’s do that. This fight is pointless.”
“No, I’m saying I don’t want to be in this house. Not with you. Not anymore.”
“That’s not an option.”
“So I’m a prisoner?” I challenged him.
He huffed out a breath and tilted his neck back like he was stuck in a fight with a crazy person.
Which he was.
“Let’s approach this logically. You can’t be on your own. Not now. You could go into labor any minute. It’s not safe for you to be alone.”
I shook my head. “Single women have babies all the time. I can get an Uber to the hospital the second my water breaks.”
“You’re not taking an Uber to the damn hospital to have my baby! What if something happened?”
“What’s the difference if Ricky takes us?”
“He’s a paid professional!”
“Yeah, and I pay an Uber driver. Same difference,” I shouted back.
His jaw snapped shut and he shook his head. “I’m not fighting with you about this. You’re staying here. We’re going to the hospital together when it’s time.”
He walked toward the archway of the library, which was the only stupid room in his whole house we ever occupied besides his bedroom and the kitchen.
“Fine, but I don’t want you in the delivery room!” I shouted at his back.
That hurt him. I could see it in the way his shoulders jerked. Slowly, he turned back to me.
“Why not?” he asked, in a low voice.
“Because you don’t love me,” I said, looking down at my feet which he’d been rubbing just a few minutes ago. “You’re not my husband. It’s not a place for you to be. And I’m moving back to my old room tonight.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get this. We were perfectly happy, like, twenty minutes ago and now everything is shit! What. Is. Wrong?”
“We weren’t perfectly happy,” I said, basically rolling myself off the couch because it was the only way I could get to my feet.
“You were happy. I’m scared about labor, scared about being a mother, scared about everything.
And I’m massive and everything hurts all the time.
And I’m stuck in this house with a person who doesn’t love me, and right now I’m just sick of it. Sick of all of it!”
His head dropped forward until his chin almost touched his chest. He waited a beat, then looked at me.
“Is that what this is about? You’re scared?”
I nodded and stood my ground.
Cautiously, he approached me. “You could have just told me. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you, Flowers. I promise.”
“You can’t control that. You can’t control any of it.”
“You know I care about you. You’re not in this alone.”
He was speaking to me like I was a child. Moving closer, but slowly, like he was sneaking up on his prey.
“I’m going to be there with you the whole time,” he said, even as he wrapped his arms around me.
I let him because it was the only thing in my world that felt good, even though I didn’t hug him back.
“I’m going to let you squeeze my hand really hard and call me bad names.
I’m going to feed you ice chips and rub your back.
We’re going to do this thing and it’s going to be epic. ”
And that’s when I felt it. A sudden whoosh between my legs. And I was wet. Down there.
Had I peed myself? It didn’t feel like it. It felt like a water ballon had burst between my legs.
“Holy shit,” E.G. snapped. “Your water just broke! Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. What the fuck do we do now?”
I glared at him. “What happened to nothing bad is going to happen? And everything is going to be okay?”
“That was before your water broke!”
Oh my God. “Are you losing your shit right now?”
“Fuck! We need to go. Now. Do you have your bag packed?”
“No! I’m two weeks early. This isn’t supposed to be happening now! I’ll go pack now.”
“No time,” he barked. “We have to get to the hospital.”
“But there was a whole list of things,” I whined. “From that baby book.”
“Forget it.”
“I need my support pillow.”
“You’ve got me.”
“My comfy pajamas.”
“I don’t think you can give birth wearing pajamas,” he told me.
“I needed my calming music.”
“I’ll hum.”
My lips flattened out. “You’re not being as helpful as you think you’re being.”
“We need to go now.”
“Not until I change my leggings first. They’re all wet.”
“We don’t have time!” E.G. insisted.
“I’m not going to the hospital in wet leggings!”
“Fine, I’ll go to our room and get you a pair. I can move faster. In the meantime, call Ricky and tell him he needs to pick us up now!”
E.G. ran out of the library like an Olympic sprinter and I looked around for my phone. It was on the edge of the couch. I picked it up and called Ricky. E.G. had rented him a house just outside our development so he would be close by at all times.
Because, yeah, billionaires could do that.
Except when Ricky picked up the phone, I knew we had a pretty big problem.
As soon as I hung up, E.G. bolted in the living room and tossed a pair of maternity panties and leggings at me.
“We’ve got a problem,” I said. “Also, turn around.”
“Flowers, seriously? I’ve seen you naked. I’ve seen you naked pregnant. I saw you naked last night!”
“Not like this,” I said. “Now turn around.”
He obeyed and I began pulling my wet leggings and panties off. Replacing them with the dry ones.
“What problem?” he asked, correctly reading the expression on my face.
Although what that expression actually conveyed, I had no idea.
“Ricky had an emergency root canal today. He’s totally doped out on painkillers right now. He can’t drive.”
E.G. froze, then shuttered, then seemed to think I was kidding because he started laughing.
“Trust me when I say this,” I told him. “I’m dead serious.”
“No. You’re joking. All this time I have my driver as close as he can be, and the moment I need him, he’s unavailable? This can’t be happening.”
“We’ve got another problem,” I said, wincing as a contraction rippled across my stomach.
“What?”
“I don’t think we can wait for an Uber either,” I told him. “These contractions are starting to happen. Like…fast. Faster than what they said would happen in the book. I think you’re going to need to drive me.”
That’s when all the blood left his face.