Of Being Yours[another way 2] (27 page)

“Any particular reason why?”

“Not yet.”

I wasn’t about to wait for Maddie’s perfect moment to call Laura; the most important thing was getting her to the hospital, so I pushed my way through traffic in a desperate attempt to get there as quickly as possible. It was only when I got there that I found out Maddie hadn’t called ahead and no one was expecting us.

“Fuck,” I cursed under my breath.

“My name is Madeline Wells,” she told the receptionist on the labor and delivery ward. Her fingers gripped the edge of the counter, slowly turning white with pressure.

Feeling helpless made sickness curl in my belly, the whole situation only worse for feeling like I was betraying Laura by not calling her. She needed to be here for this. With my hand on Maddie’s back, I rubbed slow circles over the blue-and-white striped shirt she was wearing, hoping the motion would soothe her.

“Here,” an orderly said and pushed a wheelchair over to us. “Take a seat, ma’am.”

The receptionist passed a clipboard across the counter and looked at me. “You the daddy?”

“No,” I said quickly.

Maddie grabbed my hand with her now iron-tight grip.

“I’m her… brother.”

She didn’t believe me, I could tell by her expression. But for some reason I was allowed through.

When Maddie was taken into a room, I waited outside on hard orange plastic seats, turning my phone and my car keys over and over in my hands, waiting for a message from Will that didn’t seem to be coming.

There was something about the smell of the place, the harsh antiseptic and the squeak of shoes on the polished floor, the low wails of pain coming from the delivery rooms, that took me back those few months to when it was me and Will in hospital. I didn’t realize how much it was getting to me until a warm hand squeezed my knee.

“Are you okay, sir?”

I jerked out of my daydream to look in the direction of the friendly voice.

“Yeah, I’m—”

I managed to stop the word “fine” before it came out, because I wasn’t fine at all. The nurse was young, round faced, and wearing blue scrubs that clung to her generous chest. She reminded me of another nurse in a hospital just beyond the US border—a thought that sat uncomfortably in my stomach.

“Would you like some tea? It’s a stressful situation for new dads too. People forget that.”

“I’m not the dad,” I said, a smile finally making its way across my face. “I’m here with Maddie.” I gestured to her room. “I haven’t got a clue what’s going on in there.”

“Well, they’re probably just giving her a quick exam and getting her settled. It won’t take long, then you can go in.”

She left me then, off to do more important things than console a not-father. But her reassurance was welcomed anyway.

The door opened.

“You can come in now.”

She didn’t look any better. But she didn’t look any worse, either.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you doing?”

Maddie managed a wry sort of smile. “Not bad. They’ve given me some pain medication. It could be a little while yet.”

I nodded and looked at the single chair in the room. The daddy chair. I couldn’t sit in it; it was all wrong. This whole situation was wrong.

In the back of my head, I knew that she had brought me here for a reason. Not knowing exactly what her reason was wasn’t helping.

“Listen, Maddie—”

“It’s okay, Jesse,” she said.

They had hooked her up to all sorts of monitors and an IV drip that led into the back of her hand. To one side a monitor showed a heartbeat; I wasn’t sure if it was hers or the baby’s. She looked paler in the standard white-and-gray hospital gown, her blonde hair looking dull and her skin sallow.

Maddie hadn’t bloomed into her pregnancy in the same way Laura had. It was years ago, but I distinctly remembered the fact that she got huge. Part of that was the twins, of course, but she seemed to just
grow
with it.

Not Maddie. She was petite anyway, but her body hadn’t moved in proportion to her belly. Now, in the final stages of her pregnancy, her bump was huge compared to her tiny frame.

“Will and I,” I started, “we’re doing better, you know? Things are starting to get better. But I still don’t know if we’ll ever be back to the way we were before. I think we’re making a new relationship, not resurrecting the old one. And that’s good. I want that.”

“However much my mother wants us to have a family, we’re just not there yet. We can’t.”

She nodded. “I thought that might be the case.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”

“I know. Me too.”

I walked around to take her hand—the one without the drip in it. “Do you know what you’re going to do?”

“I think… I think I’m going to leave Laura.”

Somehow I managed to disguise my shock. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said.

I waited while she wriggled on the bed; then I fluffed up a pillow to try and help her get comfortable.

“There’s a lot of things I want for this baby,” she continued. “A lot of those things I already can’t give him. I’ve had a lot of time to try and work out what I think is best for him. I won’t lie to you, Jesse, my first preference would still be for him to grow up with a couple who love each other and will love him too. I thought for a while that might be you.

“I know now that it’s not, and that’s okay. So I thought about it, and I suppose I could give him straight to Laura and Steven. I mean, I already know that they’re fantastic parents, and I don’t want to leave the family entirely. But I think it would be too hard for me to just hand my baby over to them and stay in the house as his nanny.

“I never expected to get pregnant, you know.”

“Sure,” I said. “I think it was a shock for everyone.”

“Laura won’t ever resent me for it either, and that makes me feel even worse. Steven is her husband, and I never entered into a relationship with her expecting her to share him with me. She did it because it was what we both wanted, for all of us.”

“This is what happens when your relationship with your Dom changes,” I said with a smile. “I never would have thought that I would end up falling in love with a man. Sometimes I sit back and look at my life, and it’s a million miles away from where I thought I’d be at this age.”

Maddie gestured for me to sit down. I subtly shook my head and resumed a thoughtful pacing of the room instead.

“In what way?” she prompted, grimacing as another wave of pain hit her.

“I suppose if you’d asked me in high school, I would have said I’d be married by now. I thought I’d be married before I was thirty, anyway. Not this career, either. I considered teaching for a while, but I don’t have the patience or the energy for it.”

“And not this partner,” she said for me.

“And not this partner,” I echoed. “Yeah. If I deconstruct all the things I love about him, then yes, of course, he’s exactly the sort of person I would have wanted to spend my life with. He’s funny and loyal and kind, and he’s got so much love in him.”

“Then why all the drama over the past few months?” Maddie asked. “You two are crazy in love with each other, anyone can see that. I don’t understand why it all came so close to disaster.”

“Neither do I,” I said vaguely. “Neither do I.”

A
FTER
I’d spent an hour alone with Maddie in the hospital, she finally caved and let me call Laura. As I suspected, they’d gone out of the city for the day and couldn’t get to the hospital immediately. It took several phone calls back and forth, but finally we managed to arrange for Will to drop Carrigan and Sawyer at their grandparents’ house so he could come down to the hospital and keep me company.

“Was she mad?” Maddie asked as I was finally allowed to go back to her room with my cell phone on silent.

“No,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Concerned. I told her you weren’t sure if you really were in labor, which was why you called me and not them.”

“She believed you?”

“No, of course not. But she’s not mad.”

I filled her in on the arrangements we’d made for the twins and that Will would be along shortly. I wasn’t sure if he would be allowed in the room as well; things seemed to be moving incredibly slowly now that Maddie had been given the pain medication.

When I went down the hall to get a coffee or something, I ran into the same nurse who had comforted me before.

“It’s perfectly normal,” she said reassuringly. “It always seems like a big rush to get here, but labor is a long process. She’s doing fine.”

“My… my partner will be here in a bit,” I said, deciding on the spur of the moment that she could be trusted. “His name is Will Anderson. Could you make sure they let him up here, please?”

“Sure,” she said.

I resumed my pacing—outside the room instead of inside.

When he arrived I all but flew into his arms. “Never leave me again,” I ordered. “This is fucking terrifying.”

He laughed and kissed my hair. “Good boy,” he murmured. “Where is she?”

The room was dim and Maddie had moved onto her side, facing away from the door. My nurse friend had just finished checking her chart and smiled at Will as we entered holding hands—a united front.

“She’s doing well, guys,” the nurse said. “We’re up to three centimeters dilated, and the baby’s head isn’t presented all the way yet. They’re giving her an epidural for the pain and her contractions are stabilizing.”

I looked at Will. “Did you understand any of that?”

“Not a word. She said three centimeters. Do you know how big that is?”

I shrugged. The nurse laughed. “A little more than an inch.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “What’s three centimeters big?”

“Her cervix.”

I nodded and turned to Will. “What the hell is a cervix?”

Two hours and one extensive biology lesson later and things seemed to be at somewhat of a standstill. Since Maddie’s water had already broken, the doctors were saying that they couldn’t let things go on too long, so they were trying to stimulate her labor with more drugs. To be completely honest, I was bored. The excitement of arriving and things getting started had more than worn off, and now we were just waiting for Laura to turn up and take over.

She had called when they got back to the city, and since everything seemed to be going okay, we were left in charge at the hospital while she and Steven checked in on their daughters before coming over.

“Jesse filled me in on a few things,” Will said to Maddie gently. He clearly had no problem taking the daddy chair and was smoothing Maddie’s hair back from her face as he spoke to her. I wasn’t sure if it was the dominant personality he embodied so well, or our friendship with Laura, or the fact that he was simply such a loving person, but Maddie seemed to be responding to him being there quite well.

“Okay,” she said.

“My parents own a few apartments on the outskirts of the city. I called my mom earlier, and she has one that might be free for you to rent if you want that. Her rates are very reasonable.”

Maddie nodded. “That would be good.”

“That is if you want to move out of Steven and Laura’s, of course. There won’t be any pressure on you to do so.”

“I want to,” she said. “I love Laura very much, but if I’m going to keep this baby, then I want to do it on my own.”

“Have you two discussed this at all?” he pressed gently. “I know she won’t be upset. Of course, the ideal would be for you to remain living with them, but all anyone wants is for you to be happy.”

“I will talk to her,” she said. “I will. I just need to get this whole day over and my baby out, then we can make plans.”

“Okay,” he agreed and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Concentrate on that now. Good girl.”

It was, of course, exactly the right way for him to approach things with her. She needed options, and focus, and control over her own future. I didn’t make any assumptions that I knew exactly what the dynamic between her and Laura and Steven was, and as much as I wanted the best for Maddie, my loyalties couldn’t help but lie with my former Domme.

I wondered exactly how much Maddie leaving would break her heart.

Laura turned up just as things started to pick up speed with Maddie’s labor. I stayed in the room with Maddie while Will took Laura outside and explained as much as he could. Then with a simple “Right, boys—out!” we were dismissed.

An hour later, he was born.

I’m not sure what compelled us to stay once Laura arrived and clearly took charge of the situation. No matter what happened between her, Maddie, and Steven, she clearly cared deeply what happened to the girl who had been her sub.

Then, when she stumbled from the room, pale-faced and sweating, and collapsed back against the wall with her palms flat against it, it came to me. We were here for her. Of course we were.

“Hey,” I said, rushing over to pull her into a hug. “Is she okay? Is the baby okay?”