Page 46

Lux

I toss my hair over my shoulder, smiling a little at the recently-dyed purple ends.

Rafael had taken me back into the city yesterday to get the last items we would need for the baby, and because I had been feeling down about how vastly pregnant I was, he had found a salon that would dye my hair a new, fun color.

“I have the best husband slash fiancé ever,” I sing-song to myself as I drag out the box for the large, inflatable pool that we purchased.

I knew that Rafael didn’t want me to give birth here at home, but I was determined to do so. I had been telepathically ordering the Bean to make her appearance rapidly enough that Wolfie couldn’t drag me to the city and the special doctor he had all picked out for her birth.

“I bought you a really nice swimming pool to be born in, Eve,” I say out loud to the empty house and the child in my belly. “I really hope you remember our pact to have the birth here at home, because I so, so much don’t want to have you in a stinky hospital full of bossy nurses and doctors.”

We had decided to call her Eve because Rafael’s mother had been born on Christmas Eve. Originally, we had planned to use her real name, but then we realized that keeping a low profile in this sleepy little town wouldn’t last for long if we kept dropping clues that could easily be tracked by anyone with the most basic of research skills.

I manage to free the wadded-up plastic pool from its box and I grab the automatic pump that we had bought at the same time. I consider taking the pool downstairs to blow it up, but figure I can carry it down once I have it all inflated. It’s not like it’s heavy.

I hook up the pump and giggle with silly delight as the future birthing location for my baby expands before my eyes. In keeping with the trend of humoring the uncomfortable, pregnant lady, Rafael had let me pick out a truly obnoxiously colorful kiddie pool. I grin at the swooping cartoon dolphins and the cute little cartoon palm trees all over it.

Now that it’s all blown up, it’s bigger than I thought it would be. Oh well, nothing for it but to get it downstairs and make sure it will fit into the space where we are planning to have the birth.

Holding the pool in front of me awkwardly, I start to shimmy down the stairs carefully. A couple of times I get stuck and have to rotate the pool a little to give my belly and the pool the room necessary to pass by the support posts for the banister.

“Maybe people were skinnier when they were pregnant back when this house was built,” I say under my breath as I wiggle past another part of the railing. I heave a happy sigh now that I’m at the bottom of the stairs and go to put my foot on the floor in the foyer.

Except I don’t put my foot on the floor, I put my foot in the pool as I squeeze it past the last support post for the banister.

I don’t even have time to scream before I’m tumbling toward the ground. I instinctively pull myself into a ball, desperate to protect the Bean. I hit the ground on my back with a startling jolt that sends all the air out of my lungs at the same time as I hear a loud, menacing cracking sound from the region of my feet.

The pain is immediate and shocking, and I almost throw up. My head spins dizzily as I lie on the wood floor with the swimming pool over my head, my hands pressed to my belly. I gasp for air, trying to control the dizzy swooping inside of me and assess if I have hurt the baby or not.

When I can finally think a little more clearly, I push the pool off of my head with a grunt and look down in dismay at my ankle. “I don’t think it’s supposed to bend that way,” I say weakly, almost throwing up again.

I bite my lip, pondering what to do next. Rafael is away dealing with business, but he left me with Enzo, who was supposed to call him if I suddenly went into labor. While it doesn’t seem like I’m about to do that, I’m pretty sure that my foot is going to need someone professional to look at it.

“Enzo!” I call weakly, surprised at how hard it is to draw a full breath. “Enzo!” I try again, a little louder.

The effort of shouting is making me dizzy, so I collapse back on the floor, glaring accusingly at the cheery little Dolphins looking at me from the edge of the swimming pool. “It was super rude to trip me like that,” I say, feeling a little delirious.

“Oh my God, Lux, what the fuck is going on?” Enzo cries as he comes my way from the kitchen area. He comes to a halt, looming over me, and catches sight of my ankle. His face gets a little pale.

“That bad, eh?” I joke with a weak laugh.

“Worse,” he says affirmatively.

“Thanks,” I grumble, closing my eyes.

“Oh, I’m sure legs bend like that…if you’re another species,” he says to me.

“Don’t tell Wolfie,” I say to him abruptly, seeing him digging in his pocket for his phone.

“Lux…” he says to me with a warning note in his voice.

“Humor me,” I plead. “He doesn’t need to be distracted while he’s working on a job. With my shitty luck, calling him would distract him and cause him to get killed. Bad enough the dolphins maimed me. I don’t want my husband dead too.”

“The dolphins…oh,” Enzo says, realizing I mean the kiddie pool dolphins. “I’m getting the car,” he says, stepping over me. “We need to go to the city.”

“The city!” I say, feeling dizzy all over again. “Surely we can just go to the local hospital. It’s just a little broken ankle…”

“That is not a little broken ankle,” Enzo argues and then he vanishes out the front door to get his SUV.

I lie on the floor, alone with the dolphins again. “You looked so cute at the store,” I say to them. “I didn’t know you were evil.”

I think of Rafael working on one of the only in-person business deals he’s handled since we moved out here to the suburbs and cringe. Hopefully he doesn’t have to hear about this at all until we are back home and he’s done with the job.

***

“Why didn’t you ask Enzo for help, Lux?” Rafael says to me, a note of scolding in his voice as he stands by my hospital bed.

I look at him over the temporary cast on my lower leg with a baleful glare. “It’s just a kiddie pool! It doesn’t weigh anything! I just wanted to see what it would look like in the living room.”

Rafael sighs and comes over to hold my hand. “I can’t pretend that I’m sad that you are going to have this baby here, in a hospital, like a proper person, now that you’ve done this.”

“I promised not to do anything else clumsy until the baby came,” I grumbled petulantly.

When we got to the ER in the city, they took one look at my leg and rushed me to a room. The baby was fine, but the doctor on call told me that they were going to induce labor in a few hours so that they could get me right into surgery for my ankle. They didn’t want my ankle to wait to be repaired, and they didn’t want to put the baby through a surgery.

“Lux, you can promise all you want, but you just have the worst…”

“Luck,” I say grouchily.

“Oh, don’t be down,” Enzo says cheerfully, coming into the room with a grin. “You guys had the good luck to find one another and the baby’s okay. Could be worse.”

“Yeah, she could have stepped on another pigeon,” Rafael says back. The men have a good laugh at this while I shoot death glares at them.

“That pigeon got in my way,” I assert with annoyance.

“I know,” Rafael says, coming over to press a kiss to my brow.

“But I am glad that we met one another and that Bean is okay,” I amend, looking down at my stomach and rubbing a hand over my belly.

“Hello!” a female voice says from the door. I look to the right and see a slim, imposing-looking nurse coming into the room. She has a syringe and some other supplies with her and my stomach swoops uncomfortably with nerves.

“I’m here to get you started on having this baby,” she says with pleasant efficiency, “so that we can fix your ankle.”

“I’d rather wait to have the baby at home,” I try for the umpteenth time.

“No can do,” the nurse says to me in a firm tone of voice. “If you want to be able to use that ankle ever again, we need to make sure that the baby is safe and then take care of that break. You want to be able to run around with your child, don’t you?”

“With my luck, I’d probably fall on her,” I mutter and Rafael laughs.

“Pardon?” the nurse asks.

“Nothing,” I say more loudly, giving Rafael a gimlet glare.

“This will take a couple of hours to do its work,” the nurse tells me as she depresses the plunger of the syringe. She puts a plastic basin on the side of the bed with me. “You might throw up,” she says apologetically before leaving the room.

“Wait, what?” I ask, looking between Enzo and Rafael.

“I mean, you’ve done a lot of that already during the pregnancy,” Enzo says helpfully. “What’s a few more times?”

“Dammit,” I say under my breath, letting my head fall back against the stiff pillow behind me.

***

“I can’t do this anymore,” I wheeze, flopping back onto the hospital bed in between contractions.

“You can and you will,” Rafael says to me firmly.

I look at his beautiful face and see the tinge of worry in his eyes. He’s been allowing me to crush his fingers in my grip for hours now, and I know that he’s as tired as I am at this point.

The nurse gave me the shot yesterday evening, but my labor didn’t come on as quickly as they had hoped. By the time I finally started having strong contractions, complications with the position of the baby led to them missing the window for me to have an epidural.

The past twelve hours have felt like a blur of pain, sweat, vomit, and fear for me, and I’m not sure how much more I can take. My body feels like it’s breaking down, but Rafael’s steady gaze is something to lean on.

“Imagine the sun in the orange grove, Luxy,” he says to me, squeezing my fingers. “Imagine the smell of oranges and the peace of being outdoors. Just step aside and let the rest of this happen.”

I smile softly at him, so tired that he blurs before my eyes. But I let his suggestion wash me into a meditative state. I can almost smell the sweet, delicious scent of the orange grove near our home and I feel like the sun is shining on my face.

The next contraction doesn’t affect me as much, and I listen to the nurses and bear down through it.

“A couple more pushes,” the doctor tells me encouragingly.

I look at my stiff foot that’s propped up in the stirrups. I stopped feeling the pain from my broken ankle ages ago. The labor pains were far worse. I wonder in an idle way if I’ll have a limp. Maybe I can be a pirate when I’m playing with Eve.

“Luxy, focus!’ Rafael says to me, and I blink away visions of wearing a plastic hook on my hand and chasing Eve while shouting, “Arr me mateys!”

“Push, Lux,” he says.

“This is all your fault,” I whisper, moaning as a wave of pain washes over me.

“I know, and you can punch me for it later. Right now, I need you to push.”

“Fine,” I say a little bit tartly, positioning myself better on the bed and doing as I’m told. There’s a shockingly intense wave of pain, but then suddenly, relief.

My eyes pop open wide, and I stare at Rafael, who is transfixed by the sight he is seeing. He looks stunned, like he’s in shock, and I start to panic.

“What is it? Is she okay?” I demand, shifting anxiously to try and see my baby.

Before I can get too worried, however, I hear a sharp wail pierce the air. The team who delivered Eve cheer and take her to get cleaned up a little and examined.

“You did it!” Rafael congratulates me, pressing a sloppy kiss to my lips.

“I did, didn’t I?” I say dreamily, letting my eyes drift shut. “Broken leg and all,” I mumble.

“Here she is!” the nurse says happily, jolting me awake again. She places the tiny bundle that is my daughter on my chest, right against my skin.

I look down in a bleary way, blinking to correct my focus, and see a shock of dark hair that looks just like Rafael’s. I reach up with trembling hands and hold my baby, a grin breaking out across my face. I feel the first tears slipping down my cheeks.

I have tried and failed at so many things throughout my life. I have had bad luck, been in terrible spots and the wrong place all the time, but right now, I have done the most perfect, beautiful, spectacular thing in the right way.

“She’s beautiful, baby,” Rafael says to me, his voice sounding thick with tears as he places a hand on our child’s sticky, dark hair.

“She looks like her handsome daddy,” I say softly, cuddling her closer to me.

“She can look like me, but she has to have your good heart,” he says back, his voice firm.

I look up at the man who I unwittingly fell in love with, who I met under false pretenses, and who has exposed me to significant amounts of danger throughout our short relationship. I realize that I wouldn’t trade any of the bad moments or rough patches in our history though, because they brought us here, to this perfect moment, to creating this perfect little life.

“I tried to let you be born in a purple swimming pool covered in dolphins,” I tell little Eve, “but daddy is absolutely no fun and you had to meet the world in this smelly hospital room. Sorry your mommy is so clumsy.”

“Thank you for listening to me for once,” Rafael says to me. I glance up and see that he’s smiling at me and that tears are slipping down his cheeks.

“You’re welcome,” I reply. “But I am definitely having the next one in that damn kiddie pool.”