My eyes went to where he was so graciously allowing me to hurt him.
I let go and moved to his hand, but something about the sight of my handprint on his arm struck me as odd.
“You have edema.” I panted through my next contraction. “You should get that checked out.”
Edema was swelling.
Something that a man as young as Murphy shouldn’t have.
But before I could put much more thought into it, my head was once again in the game, and I was bearing down so hard that I couldn’t breathe.
“You should turn toward me so I can catch her,” Murphy said.
I opened my eyes after the contraction was over to see him staring between my legs.
I looked myself to see that there was a baby head sticking halfway out of it.
That baby head had so much blonde hair that I was amazed.
“I can’t move…” I found myself saying.
He reached over and helped me, turning me until I was pointed to where he was kneeling in the floorboard of my van.
“Thanks,” I said just as another contraction hit me.
I wasn’t sure how much longer after that that the feeling of relief down there hit me. Two, maybe fifteen contractions. I wasn’t sure.
But what I was sure of was that the scream of my baby making its way into the world was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life.
“Umm, honey? You had a boy.”
My eyes snapped open and I stared into Murphy’s eyes for a split second before I did, indeed, see that I had a boy.
“What. The. Fuck?” I gasped.
Murphy started to laugh, then tucked the little gremlin into my arms.
He studiously avoided looking at the carnage between my legs.
Thank God for small favors.
His eyes were, wholly, and completely on the little boy that I now held in my arms.
“I was going to go buy baby clothes today,” I admitted. “That was what I was going into town to do. My maternity leave started today, and I thought, what better way to spend the day than to pick out clothes for my baby? Funny how life works sometimes.”
Murphy’s eyes went from the baby to me then back.
He shook his head. “I’m still mad at you.”
My lips curled into a small smile as my stomach cramped again.
This time, however, it was something I could ignore.
The afterbirth.
That would be something I would be doing without him. I was pretty sure cutting the cord was something that I could accomplish.
“Can you…” I pointed at the baby. “Can you take my pants and wrap him up?”
He ignored my suggestion about the pants and ripped off his shirt.
Then he wrapped it around my baby.
“Good?” he asked.
I swallowed hard, trying not to look at the man in his bare-chested state.
He wasn’t the most ripped guy in the world.
In fact, for a man that was doing CrossFit five times a week and doing such a physically demanding job, I would’ve expected him not to have a little bit of chunkiness to him at all.
But, when I looked at him, took in his hairy chest and his chiseled jaw, as well as his non-defined abdominal muscles, I realized that I was highly attracted to him, nonetheless.
“What are you staring at?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
I wasn’t dead. I may have just had a baby, like literally minutes ago, but I wasn’t dead.
“You need to sit here and let me ride into town and call an ambulance,” he muttered darkly.
I sighed and leaned my head into the seat I was leaning against. “Just go get me a spare so we can drive in. I don’t want to leave my car here. And your place is five minutes instead of the ten it would take to drive into town and call someone.”
There’d been a petition going around town for about a year now to get the cell phone signal booster that would help out those that lived outside of town on the north side. Pretty much, if you didn’t have a home phone—which nobody had anymore—then you had to hope that the cell phone tower wasn’t being a total dick and doing its job—which ninety-five percent of the time it wasn’t.
“You think I just carry spares like yours around with me?” He rolled his eyes.
“I think you have a truck five minutes away, and I would rather drive into town in yours, than pay thousands of dollars to the county for their transport to a hospital for something that I don’t need any longer.”
“You want to just go home?” he wondered, looking alarmed.
Now that he said it, I thought—well, why the hell not? The hard part was all done.
“Sure do,” I said.
He opened his mouth, and then closed it.
“We can’t…” he shook his head. “We can’t do that.”
I shrugged. “Nobody is asking you to do anything but take me home, man.”