Chapter 55
Carla
Magma walks next to me with his hand at the small of my back. I keep expecting someone to ask me why I’m not at my desk, but so far so good.
Magma took a leave-day. He’s in a black T-shirt with his markings running down both arms, and he is drawing looks from every direction. Two nurses from pediatrics stop mid-conversation to stare. I don’t blame them. I stare at him all the time.
Robyn is waiting for us near the elevators; she’s wearing a white lab coat over what looks like a pretty yellow dress. She’s in sandals and obviously came straight from the beach house and is planning to go straight back.
She’d better. I feel bad enough about this as it is.
Her whole face lights up when she spots us. She hugs me first, hard enough to squeeze the air out of me, then she throws her arms around Magma, who looks briefly alarmed and then hugs her back.
“Come with me,” she says, low, glancing down the corridor like a woman in a heist movie. “I’ve got us a room, but we’re going in the back way. If Sandra from imaging sees me, I’ll get asked all sorts of questions I’ll struggle to dodge.”
She leads us down a service corridor, through a door marked Staff Only, and into one of the imaging suites at the quiet end of the second floor.
The moment the door shuts behind us, Robyn spins around and grabs one of my hands and one of Magma’s.
“Okay. Now that we’re alone. Congratulations, you two. I am so, so happy for you. You have no idea.” Her eyes are already shining. “You’re going to be parents.”
“Thank you, Robyn,” Magma says, and his voice comes out lower than usual.
“Thank you for doing this.” I squeeze her fingers. “You should be on a beach right now.”
“The beach isn’t going anywhere.” She waves me off and reaches into a cabinet, pulling out a folded hospital gown, the awful pale blue kind with the ties in the back.
She hands it to me. “Right. Business first. There are a few tests I need to run today. Bloodwork, and I want to check your blood pressure. But we’re doing the ultrasound first, because I know exactly how eager you both are to see this baby, and frankly I can’t wait either. ”
“I’m so eager it’s embarrassing,” I admit. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”
Magma nods. He doesn’t say anything. There’s a muscle working in his jaw, and his eyes keep moving to the machine in the corner, and it occurs to me that the big, indestructible head of Security Central is nervous.
“The changing room is through there,” Robyn says, pointing. “You can leave the tights on, as well as your bra. Take off your top and put on the gown so that I can reach your belly.”
The changing room is the size of a closet, with a bench, a mirror, and a hook on the back of the door. I strip off my top and pull the gown on, and my fingers fumble the ties because they’re shaking a little.
I’m already at the start of my second trimester, and I had no idea I was even pregnant.
I haven’t taken any prenatal vitamins. I drank coffee every single day.
I had more than two cups on occasion. When I got back from Mistveil, I ate my feelings for a solid month, and then I flipped straight into a diet, cutting calories like a maniac, doing those workouts from hell, and the whole time there was a baby in there just trying its best with whatever I gave it.
I press my hand flat against my stomach.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to it. “I didn’t know. I promise to do better and to put you first.” My eyes sting and a lump lodges in my throat.
I take a few deep breaths, and then I fold my clothes into a neat pile, and I walk out before I can spiral any further.
Robyn pats the exam bed, which is covered in a fresh strip of paper. “Hop up and lie back for me.”
I do as she says, and the paper crinkles under me. I lie back and stare at the ceiling tiles, and my heart is going so fast.
What if something’s wrong? What if the coffee did something? What if the diet—
A big, warm hand wraps around mine.
Magma steps up and folds my hand into both of his, and just like that the spiral loses half its power. He’s been like this since the two pink lines. He left for an hour yesterday and came back with three different pregnancy books and a box of apple danishes.
“I’ve got you,” he says quietly.
“I know.”
Robyn wheels the machine closer. It looks like a very serious computer strapped to a cart, a keyboard covered in more buttons than a cockpit, a big monitor tilted toward the bed, and a smaller screen facing her.
There’s a wand attached by a coiled cord, resting in a holder on the side, and a white bottle sitting in what looks like a tiny slow cooker.
“Gel warmer,” Robyn says when she catches me looking. “You’re welcome.”
She hits a switch and the machine hums to life, the monitor glowing gray-blue in the dim room.
She folds the top of my gown up and tucks a paper drape into the waistband of my tights and underwear, pulling them down a little and leaving my belly bare.
Magma’s thumb strokes over my knuckles, over and over, a slow rhythm.
When I glance up at him, he gives me a small nod, calm as anything, but he’s holding my hand a fraction too tight, and his knee is bouncing.
He catches me noticing and stops the knee. Ten seconds later it starts up again.
“Warm gel, coming in,” Robyn says, and squeezes a line of it across my lower belly.
It’s the temperature of bathwater. Then she picks up the wand, presses it into the gel, and starts to move it in slow sweeps, her eyes on the screen, one hand working the keyboard without looking.
The picture on the monitor is a gray wedge of static, shapes blooming and vanishing, and she’s frowning in concentration, tilting her wrist, pressing a little deeper just below my navel.
The static shifts. A dark shape opens up, and then another one right next to it.
There are two babies as clear as day.
They are side by side, each with a rounded head and a body and arms and legs. All of it.
“I’m seeing double,” Magma says. His hands have gone very still around mine.
“It’s twins!” Robyn yells, so loud that anyone in the corridor definitely heard her, secret room or not.
She looks at us with big eyes, moving the wand over my belly, checking one side and then the other, as if the picture might change if she comes at it from a new angle.
“Yep.” She nods like a mad person, grinning so hard her cheeks must hurt. “It’s twins. There are two sacs, two babies.”
“Twins,” I repeat, because apparently that’s all I’ve got.
“Twins,” Magma says.
“Twins!” Robyn says a third time, and then we all lose it.
I’m laughing and crying at the same time, which is becoming my signature since finding out about this pregnancy. Magma leans over the bed and wraps his arms around me, dodging the gel and the drape, and I hug him back with both arms around his neck, and he’s shaking.
Robyn is crying and smiling so hard at the same time that she has to wipe her face on her shoulder because both her hands are busy.
I can’t believe this is my life.
A few days ago, I was miserable. I sat at my best friend’s wedding convinced that the male I loved wanted someone else, planning out my future as the fun spinster aunt who drinks too much at family functions and owns increasingly elaborate cats.
I thought I was alone. I felt alone all the way down to my bones.
Today has a very different outlook.
“It looks like we get to have our messy family sooner than we thought,” I tell Magma, still holding him close, my lips near his ear.
He makes a sound against my shoulder that isn’t quite a word.
Then Robyn adjusts something on the keyboard, and a sound fills the room.
A heartbeat. Fast and galloping and loud and true. It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in my life.
Magma lets me go, slowly, and turns to the screen. The beat is up there too, a small flickering pulse in the chest of the bean on the left, matched to the rhythm pouring out of the speakers.
“That’s Baby A,” Robyn says softly.
I look at Magma, and there are tears rolling down his cheeks.
He isn’t wiping them away. He isn’t fighting them at all this time.
He’s just watching that flickering little pulse with his whole heart on his face, and there is something about seeing a male that big, that hard, that lethal, completely undone by a smudge on a screen.
I will remember him exactly like this for the rest of my life.
He takes my hand again.
“That’s my baby,” he whispers, like he can’t believe the words even as he says them. “Twins,” he adds in a rough voice.
Robyn slides the wand over and to the right. “And this is Baby B.”
A second heartbeat sounds through the speakers. This one is just as loud. Just as strong and true.
“They’re fraternal, so you might get lucky and have a boy and a girl,” Robyn says. She types something, and the machine whirs, then she hands us two small printouts, still warm, one of each baby. Baby A. Baby B. Our children’s first photos, and I will treasure them forever.
“I don’t mind, as long as they’re healthy,” Magma says. He’s still crying. He looks down at the printouts in his big hands.
“They look perfect,” Robyn says. “Right on track for thirteen weeks. Both measuring beautifully.” She sniffs. “I will make an appointment for you with the gynecologist. I’m sure she can fit you in ASAP.”
She wipes the gel off my belly with a cloth, helps me sit up, and then she hugs me, and she’s still crying too, both of us leaking all over each other.
“Congrats, my friend,” she says into my hair. “You deserve it. You deserve all of it.”
“So do you.” I pull back and hold her by the shoulders. “Your time will come. In fact, you should get back to your honeymoon and concentrate on making a baby of your own. That’s an order from admin. I’ll put it in writing.”
She gives me a watery smile. “Ridge is waiting for me in the restaurant downstairs. He’ll be so happy for you guys. He’s been asking me how it’s going every ten minutes since you guys got here. Can I give him the good news?”
“Yes, of course.”
Then Robyn and Magma hug. She disappears against his chest, and he says something to her, too quiet for me to catch, and whatever it is makes her laugh and cry harder at the same time.
Then he’s turning to me, and before I can say a word he’s picking me up, lifting me clean off the exam bed and holding me against him, my feet dangling somewhere around his shins.
“I didn’t think I could get any happier,” he says, “and it turns out I was wrong.”
I pull back enough to look him in the eyes. They’re wet and green and lit up like I have never seen them, and I think about everything waiting for us. The nursery we’ll have to build. The arguments about names. The house full of noise and toys underfoot, the messy family I always dreamed about.
“It’s going to be so good,” I tell him.
“It’s going to be freaking amazing.” He presses his forehead to mine. “I can’t wait to spend forever with you.”
I kiss him, and he kisses me back.
Red Marked is on pre-order now.
Author’s note: It’s Flint’s turn to find his HEA over on Mistveil. Do not worry, because you will hear more from Robyn and Ridge. As well as Carla and Magma.