24. Everett
I had assumed, based on television, that labor was maybe twenty minutes of groaning and then a baby.
It is four in the morning and the midwife keeps using the phrase “progressing nicely.”
Brody is hovering, desperate for something to do. The birth class, it turns out, was worth every excruciating minute. Not for the breathing.
For him. He prowls. He fetches. He adjusts. Every time somebody new comes through the door he moves. I think it’s an alpha thing. Protective. Maybe a little possessive, but he looks like he wants to growl every time someone comes in the room.
The night nurse noticed it the first time and looked wary. The midwife noticed it and said, “I’ll introduce myself once, big man. After that you’re furniture.”
He checked it. Then he became furniture. Enormous, hovering furniture that refills my water when the cup is still two-thirds full.
Both our phones are face-down on the windowsill. Mine is on do-not-disturb for everyone including Priya. His has been detonating since midnight. He’s been ignoring it. Mostly.
He checked it once, hours ago, read the screen, and turned it back over without a word.
“Well?” I said.
“JP says the pool’s up to eight hundred dollars and to please aim for a weight ending in a seven.”
“Tell him I don’t fix outcomes.”
“Already did. He says that’s exactly what a man with insider knowledge would say.”
The phone buzzes again now and Brody ignores it.
A contraction rolls in and flattens my thoughts. They’re not subtle anymore. They start in my back like a warning shot and then take the whole middle of me in a fist. The only thing to do is breathe through them.
Brody counts with me silently, lips moving, one hand flat between my shoulder blades.
The whole room reeks of antiseptic and floor polish, and under it, woodsmoke, and every time it gets bad I turn my face toward him without meaning to, like a plant finding sunshine.
Finally, after what feels like a thousand years, my scent changes yet again and the contractions go crazy.
And Brody — Brody comes off the wall like it’s a line change. There’s a growl starting somewhere down in his chest, aimed at nothing, aimed at biology itself, before he chokes it off because the last thing this room needs is an alpha making it about him.
He doesn’t make it about him. He makes it about me.
“I can’t do this,” I hear myself say. My voice comes out wrong, high and frayed, a stranger’s.
Brody’s face arrives an inch from mine. Both my hands are in both of his.
“Hey. Look at me,” he says. “You’re the toughest man I’ve ever met, and I’ve met men whose job is getting punched.”
“That’s not—” The fist closes again. I ride it with my forehead against his and his scent all the way down my throat, and it passes, and I’m still here.
“One at a time,” he says quietly. “That’s the whole game. One at a time, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Then the midwife says the word push, and thinking is over for a while.
Brody braces behind my shoulder, arm like a stanchion, and he’s stopped saying anything at all except my name, low, steady, on the exhale, like a metronome.
Time does something strange in here. I could not tell you if the next part takes twenty minutes or two hours. There is only the work, and the rest between the work, and his arm behind me, and the midwife’s voice saying good, again, good.
Once, in a rest, I look up and catch his face before he can set it. He’s wrecked. Eyes wet, jaw tight, utterly convinced I can’t see him.
“Good,” the midwife says. “Again. Just like that.”
The world reduces. The next push and the next. Someone says something about the head and Brody makes a sound I have never heard from him — high and punched-out, half a laugh, half a prayer — and I take one more breath the size of the room and give it everything left in the account.
There’s a moment of enormous, ringing stillness.
Then a cry. Furious. Small and rasping and absolutely outraged at the management, and the whole room exhales.
“A boy,” the midwife says. “And loud.”
They put him on my chest, warm and slick, ridiculous, a stranger I’ve known my whole life. He’s got a shock of dark hair and a grip, when my finger finds his hand, that closes hard and holds.
I say something. I have no idea what. Brody’s hand comes down and covers the entire span of the baby’s back, and the baby stops crying at the smell of him, and the three of us stay exactly where we are while the room goes about its business around us.
He’s here.