Mehar
I laid on the sand underneath the shade of a palm tree with my hands on my belly and let the thoughts rush over me because I didn’t have the energy to fight them off anymore.
If I had this baby on this island she would be a feral wild child.
No diapers. No clothes. Her first outfit would be a leaf and her first toy would be a coconut shell and she’d learn to crawl on sand before she ever touched carpet.
She wouldn’t have a pediatrician or a birth certificate or a social security number.
She’d just be a baby who existed on an island with two parents who couldn’t even give her a proper bath.
And what if I couldn’t produce enough milk?
My body was running on fish and fruit and whatever bitter greens Quest dragged back from the tree line.
That wasn’t enough to sustain me, let alone feed a newborn.
This wasn’t the life I planned for her. I had started setting up her nursery just before the babymoon.
The walls were painted pink. The shelves were stocked with onesies and blankets and bottles I’d sterilized twice because the internet told me to.
The only thing left was putting together the crib, which Quest was saving for Prime to come help with since he’d helped build the twins’ cribs.
But none of that mattered now. My baby would be sleeping on my sand-covered, mosquito-eaten body rather than the forty-five-hundred-dollar custom crib I’d picked out from a crafter on Etsy.
“Peach!” Quest called out from across the camp.
“Why are you yelling?” I laughed.
“I see your ass over there deep in thought. Stop it. I can hear you thinkin’ from here. Think positive.”
“I’m trying,” I lied. I hated how well he knew me but loved it at the same time.
He could always tell what was running through my head and acted accordingly.
Sometimes if I had a craving for something random he’d bring it home from work without me telling him.
That’s when his psychic powers came in handy.
But right now, when I was catastrophizing about raising a coconut baby on a deserted island, I needed him out of my head.
He sat down next to me under the tree with a cracked coconut in his hand and passed it to me. I drank.
“Think about how good it’s going to be when we get out of here,” he said. “When you give birth to our baby girl in a hospital with doctors and nurses and an epidural and whatever else you need.”
“And a shower. Please say there’s a shower in this fantasy.”
“The longest shower of your life. Hot water. That honey jasmine soap you love from Lush.” He smiled. “Rita, Zainab, Yusef and Serenity will all be there. Then maybe a year later we’ll finally have our wedding. I know how bad you want to drop the baby weight before walking down the aisle.”
“I absolutely do.”
“I don’t care either way. Every version of you is sexy to me.
But we’re going to get there, Peach. You’re going to have your spa.
And we’ll have more kids and they’ll play with Serenity’s and Zainab’s kids.
Girl trips for y’all while us bros watch the babies.
Birthday parties and cookouts. A life. A full, long life surrounded by our family.
” He looked at me and his eyes were steady but I could hear it underneath, the thread pulling tight, the performance holding by a thinner margin than he wanted me to know.
“But you can’t go into these dark places.
I need you to stay optimistic. Cuz I got hope. ”
He didn’t though. Not the way he used to.
When we first crashed here Quest’s hope was loud and certain and unshakable.
Now it was quieter, thinner, held together by discipline instead of belief.
He was trying to convince himself more than he was trying to convince me, and I loved him too much to let him pour from an empty cup without pouring something back.
I sat up and took his hand.
“I have hope too. And we’re getting off this island.
We’re going to find who sabotaged our plane and kill them.
You’re going to see your siblings and I’m going to see mine.
Besides, you promised me a horse and carriage at our wedding and damn it I’m making sure you live up to it.
” He laughed and I squeezed his hand tighter.
“And we still have to finish building Freetown. That’s you and your brothers’ vision.
I’m so proud to watch it come to fruition and I’ll be damned if we miss it because of some island. ”
The words felt good leaving my mouth. They felt real and warm and for a second I believed every single one of them.
Then the cramp hit.
It started low in my back and wrapped around my belly and it was different from the Braxton Hicks.
Sharper. Deeper. It didn’t build slowly, it grabbed me, and my hand tightened around Quest’s so hard that his knuckles pressed together.
Before the first one fully released, another one came right behind it and I doubled forward with a sound caught between a gasp and a groan.
This wasn’t practice. My body knew the difference even if my brain was still catching up. This was real.
“Quest…”
He was already looking at me. And for the first time since we crashed on this island, I saw fear on his face that he didn’t even try to hide.