“No.”
“Come on, Mel. You have to realize how cool this would be for me,” I explained, and my wife snorted in laughter as if it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.
Yes, folks, you heard that right, we are officially married.
Mr. and Mrs. Will Cummings, or if you ask Mel, Mr. and Mrs. Melody Marco.
It only took me one year after she took me back to get her to walk down the aisle.
And it’d only taken another another six months after that before she got pregnant.
Believe me, I already know.
I’m the luckiest bastard in the free world.
My beautiful wife and I had been having the same conversation for the past two weeks.
I wanted to deliver our baby and she thought I was out of my mind and needed to deal with the fact that I would only be there as “support at the head of the bed, not face first with her vagina and guiding our baby into the world.” Her words, not mine.
“I do,” she responded with an exasperated smirk. “What I’m not realizing is what gave you the impression you’re at all important in this scenario.”
It sounded bad, but in reality, I was surprised she wasn’t saying worse. After all, she was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and I’d been persistent in telling her that I planned to deliver the baby myself and have someone stand in for me as coach.
“I’d say I played an important role in the making of the baby.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “In implanting the baby with a chromosome. I made this baby. Fed it and housed it for nine fucking months. My feet are swollen, my bladder is destroyed, and I’ll never sneeze without peeing again.”
“Mel…” I said, smiling so big I thought my face might split in two. She was very nearly miserable, but she was still as lovable—and beautiful—as ever. And she was all mine.
She huffed, melting just a little in the sweet heat of my smile. “If you deliver the baby, who’s going to be my coach? And don’t you dare say Marlene.”
I laughed. “It’s going to be kind of hard for Marlene to be your coach when she’s busy being your nurse.”
In a surprising turn of events, once Melody had taken over the position of running the Women’s Clinic, she’d hired Marlene to keep the younger nurses on staff in order.
I’d had my doubts when she’d told me of her plans to hire the world’s grumpiest nurse in America, but somehow, the two of them were just the right amount of sweet and gruff to keep the clinic running like a well-oiled machine.
Their outreach and charitable successes had far exceeded anyone’s expectations, and to Thatch’s delight, had made the men behind the big investment look like the saints of New York City.
“William Morris Cummings!” she exclaimed with an accusing index finger pointed in my direction. “I will murder you. Not to mention, she just put her resignation in the other day. One more month and Marlene will be retired. Finally.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what you said six months ago, and she never actually went through with it. The day that woman retires will be the day they’re putting her in the ground.”
“Oh my God,” she gasped. “That’s an awful thing to say.”
“Oh, don’t act all high and mighty over Marlene. You know she will literally be a nurse until the day she dies. There’s no way she could give up a job that allows her to complain about anything and everything.”
I watched as she bit back her smile and shook her head.
“Anyway, Marlene’s fake retirement aside, I was thinking more along the lines of Georgia to be your labor coach.”
She groaned. “Eh, I don’t know. Sometimes your sister stresses me out.”
“I’ll give her a pep talk beforehand, I promise. Nothing but positivity and light and unicorns and rainbows and shit.”
“Oh my God.” She sank her head into her hands. “It’s gonna be like being coached by someone on LSD.”
“At least she’s been through it before, right?”
“I guess,” Melody grumbled. “And she’s probably the best person on our family roster…except for Kline. Maybe he would want to be my coach,” she said with a calculated raise of her eyebrow.
She wasn’t fooling me, though. There was absolutely no way my Mel would be comfortable having her brother-in-law coach her through labor. She didn’t need to know I knew all of that, though. She just needed to think I was willing to do whatever she needed. “Maybe he would. I’d be happy to ask him.”
Her eyes narrowed as she turned away and whined, “I really hate you.”
I chuckled. “Why? Because I’m accommodating of your every wish?”
“Because you make me feel like a bitch! Why do you have to be so helpful? Why can’t you be an asshole?”
“You want me to be an asshole?” I asked even though I knew my wife was full of baloney. She secretly loved the fact that I treated her like a goddamn queen. The joke was on her, though. She deserved to be nothing less than the center of my universe.
“Ugh. No,” she finally admitted as she moved, well, more like waddled toward the hallway. But she only made it four steps before she stopped, clutched her back, and grimaced.
The way she was rubbing at her lower back made me take notice and get serious. “You okay, baby?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Just…” Her eyes pinched in pain. “Ow.”
I stood up straight in one smooth motion and was at her side between one breath and the next. “Are you in labor?”
“Stop,” she sighed and waved me away with the hand not constantly rubbing at her back. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s probably just something I ate.”
Not even listening, I moved down the hall to my home office, opened the bottom right door of my desk, and pulled out the portable cardiotocography machine, otherwise known as an electronic fetal monitor.
A quick trip back down the hall, and I was pulling up Melody’s shirt to strap the band onto her stomach.
“Oh my God. You’re ridiculous. You don’t think I’d know if I were in labor?”
I paused my work at her stomach to meet her annoyed gaze and raise just one eyebrow. She rolled her eyes. “Okay, so maybe I haven’t done it before, but I have two more weeks to go.”
“And babies sometimes come early. Another thing you already know,” I teased.
She flipped me off as I finished getting her set up and hooked to the monitor. Fifteen seconds later, a contraction read out on the screen.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” I goaded as I palpated her abdomen with both hands. “And an extremely strong contraction, at that. I mean…I’m not a labor expert…or maybe I am?” I questioned, and she huffed out her irritation in one long exhale.
“Fine!” she finally admitted and threw both hands into the air. “So, I’m in labor, but we both know that there’s still plenty of time before we need to go to the hospital.”
I shook my head, unsatisfied with the wait-and-see approach when I’d spent so many years in school to know better. “Come on,” I said as I picked her up and carried her down the hall. “We’re going to check your cervix.”
“No! Will!”
“Sorry, Mel. Just lie back and pretend we’re playing out your favorite doctor fantasy.”
“I don’t have a doctor fantasy!”
“You should,” I advised. “I hear they’re really dreamy.”
She growled at me as I set her down on the bed and pulled her shorts and panties down her legs. “Relax, baby. Just let me check, okay?” I soothed as I ran my hand up the soft skin of her thigh. “I love both of you. Just let me make sure you’re both going to be okay.”
Properly mollified, she relented. “Okay. Fine.”
I helped her scoot up and onto the bed as she clutched her stomach and grimaced with another contraction. Once she was positioned comfortably, I sat beside her hip and she pulled up her legs.
I rubbed her clit in the hopes of making a little natural lubrication, and she moaned, startled.
I smiled. “Maybe there are some benefits to letting me be your doctor?”
She flipped me off again and lay back, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t noticeably wet.
Using the moisture to ease my entrance, I pushed my fingers inside and moved straight to the cervix. As the three fingers I’d inserted slid easily inside, my eyes got a little glassy with anticipation.
“You’re already dilated close to four centimeters, Mel.”
“What?” she all but yelled.
“Time to go to the hospital, baby,” I directed, pulling my hand free and wiping her clean with a washcloth.
“Ah, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she chanted.
But I’d never felt calmer in my life. Everything that mattered to me in this world was going to be in my arms within the day.
And they’d be getting there safely—I’d make sure of that.
“More ice chips, Mel?” Georgia asked, and I shook my head.
I didn’t need ice chips. I needed my epidural to actually start working.
Jesus, Mary, and the Beatles, this pressure is fucking terrible.
Okay, maybe it was working, but holy hell, it wasn’t taking this insane pressure away. I might not have been feeling the contractions in my stomach and lower back, but I sure as hell was feeling them in my vagina. It was like a bowling ball was trying to slowly roll its way out of my body.
Four hours after we’d arrived at the hospital and I’d gotten an epidural and dilated to ten centimeters at a pretty quick pace. But the baby was still a little high up, and since everything looked good on the fetal monitor, I’d chosen to try to let the baby descend farther before I started pushing. The fact that my husband was intent on delivering our baby himself might have also influenced my decision to wait a while before pushing.
Normally, I was madly in love with Will. But today, I was kind of in the middle of having his baby, and he seemed intent on driving me crazy with his resolve to deliver our baby himself.
I mean, he’s crazy, right?
I understand that my husband is an OB/GYN.
But what I don’t understand is why he’d think he should be the one whose face is all up in my crotch while I push out a baby from my lady parts.
Intimacy is one thing, but this is a whole other kettle of insanity.
At that very moment, Will made his entrance back into the room. He’d changed out of his jeans and T-shirt and into a fresh pair of navy scrubs.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“How are you feeling, baby?”
“No,” I retorted and pointed a finger in his direction. “If you’re here for delivery purposes, you need to turn back around and move your ridiculous ass back out that door.”
He completely ignored my demands, and I was too numb to get out of the bed to enforce them.
The bastard. Using this goddamn epidural against me.
Will chuckled and sat on the bed near my hip. “Has the pressure gotten more intense?”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth, another contraction wreaking havoc on my body. If the pressure I was feeling was any indication of where the baby was, I’d say my little bundle of joy was about one minute away from peeking out and saying hello.
He quirked a questioning brow. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes,” I lied. I knew the baby was probably crowning at this point. What I didn’t know was how long I could hold out until Will just gave up on the whole “I’m going to deliver our baby” thing…
Will ignored my response and grabbed a sterile glove from the supply cabinet by the monitors. Two seconds later, he was gloved up and trying to pull the sheet down with this free hand.
“No.” I gripped the sheets and held them close to my chest.
“Melody,” he chastised and flashed me a determined look.
“No, Will.”
“We need to check you,” he said in a tender voice. “You and I both know it’s probably about time that you started pushing.”
I ignored him. I was on the “No push until Will puts his street clothes back on” plan. It wasn’t a traditional birth plan, but it was mine all the same.
“We can check me,” I responded. “We, being any other physician on this floor that is not you.”
“You really want Dr. Elders to come in here and check your cervix?”
Ugh. No.
I didn’t respond, and he took that as a green light, pulling the sheets down and instructing me to relax my legs.
His eyes lit up before he’d even touched me. “It’s time, Mel,” he said and hopped off the bed to push the nurse call button.
“What?” I questioned with wide eyes. “What are you doing?”
He ignored me and pulled the sterile delivery table toward the bed.
“Will, you’re not delivering our baby.”
He came over to me and sat at the edge of the bed. “Melody, I need to be the one to deliver my beautiful daughter or son. I want to make sure that everything goes smoothly and that our baby enters this world healthy and happy.”
The earnest look in his eyes had me folding like a house of cards. “Okay.” I found myself agreeing before I could even think twice about it.
Even though my husband was exasperating and a bit of a weirdo for being so hands-on during my pregnancy, I didn’t want anyone else to guide our baby into the world. Sometimes, deliveries didn’t go smoothly. Sometimes, emergent situations happened when you least expected them. And I knew, without a doubt, that Will would make sure our baby was okay.
A nurse came into the room to assist, putting my legs in stirrups while Will got his instruments ready at the foot of the bed.
But I didn’t have time to watch what was happening around me. Another contraction hit me harder than a Mack truck. “Oh, holy hell and tomato sauce,” I groaned as the pressure had reached the point where the urge to push was unavoidable. “I gotta push, Will,” I exclaimed. “I gotta push right now.” Even though I was most likely already pushing. The body has a way of forcing that shit.
He looked up at me and nodded encouragingly. “Good job, Melody. If you keep pushing like that, our baby will be here any minute.”
“Just breathe,” the nurse reassured. “Take a few deep breaths, give your baby all of that good oxygen, and get rest until the next contraction.”
“Oh God. The next one is already here,” I moaned and started to push through the pressure.
“Good job, Melody,” the nurse encouraged.
“You totally got this,” Georgia whispered into my ear and brushed a lock of sweaty hair out of my eyes.
“Keep going, baby,” Will instructed. “There’s the head,” he said as he guided our baby out of the birth canal. “One more big push like that, and our baby will be here.”
I pushed and I pushed and I pushed.
And I pushed some more. Seriously, they call the miracle of birth “labor” for a reason.
Until the most beautiful cry I’d ever heard rang loud and clear in my ears.
“It’s a girl!” Will said with awe in his voice.
“Aww!” Georgia cheered, keeping her voice low and soothing in such a way that I knew Will had given her instructions.
Tears ran down my cheeks as I watched my husband hold our baby girl in his arms, his eyes wet with emotion. “You did it, Melody.” He placed our squirming baby girl on my chest. “You just made my life. Again.”
“I love you,” I said, staring deep into his eyes.
“I love you, too,” he whispered.
And when I looked down at the dark hair and pink cheeks and big eyes of our beautiful—perfect—baby girl, I whispered against her forehead. “And I love you, sweet girl. Happy birthday, Emma.”
THE END