“Oh, baby, we did it, all right.” She wagged her eyebrows.
I laughed. “Yeah, I know we didthat, but did we manage to start your labor?”
Alison smiled. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe? Let’s see if I have another contraction . . . even if this just gets me started, I’ll be so grateful.”
I chuckled. “It was a real hardship, as I think you could tell.” I bent to capture her lips, hoping that in this one kiss, she could feel everything I wasn’t sure she was ready to hear yet.
“You’re just too good to me,” she murmured against my mouth. “Noah . . . if I go to sleep right now, like this, will you stay in here with me tonight?”
I traced a line down her cheek. “Of course. Think you can sleep?”
“Yeah,” she breathed, already drowsing. “Maybe it’s my body getting ready for the big show. I’ll sleep now, so I can be ready to have this baby tomorrow morning.”
“Good thinking,” I whispered into her ear, arranging my body behind her, circling her belly with my arm. “I’ll be right here, baby. I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter 16
Alison
Spoiler alert: having sex with Noah didnotstart my labor.
But it sure was worth the effort.
Two days after that monumental night—and after we’d given it the good old college try several more times—we went to Maggie’s office. I was in a rotten mood—being a million years pregnant can do that to a person—and poor Noah looked a little haggard. He’d been sleeping with me in my bed (we both clung to the excuse that if I went into labor, I’d want him closer than across the hall), which meant that he woke up whenever I had to climb out of that bed to pee. He thought I’d been exaggerating about how often I had to go. He was quickly disabused of that notion.
After a quick exam, Maggie made some notes on her tablet and then turned to the both of us.
“So listen,” she began. “Do you want to have this baby?”
I stared at her as though she’d lost her mind. “What the hell do you think I’ve been trying to do for overthree weeksnow, Maggie?” I bellowed. “Of course, I want to have this baby.”
“Okay, okay, settle down.” She grinned. “It was a rhetorical question. What I meant was, I think the time has come that we need to take some action. Your cervix is not dilated. The baby hasn’t dropped. That means that all the stuff you’re doing—the black cohosh, the sex, the castor oil—it can’t do any good because the baby’s head isn’t pressing against the cervix. It’s still too high.”
“So what do we do?” Noah asked. “What kind of action?”
Maggie glanced from Noah to me. “I think we need to talk about induction.”
My shoulders slumped for a minute. “If we induce, I can’t have the baby at home.”
“No, that’s true,” she agreed. “But you have options. The first is that you can use the birthing center in Mulberry. We can approximate a home environment there. The drawbacks are that I’m not really comfortable with the distance between the center and the nearest hospital in the unlikely case of complications.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously. “Where do you suggest, then?”
“Why not St. Agnes?” Maggie spread her hands. “Their L and D department is top notch, and I catch babies there all the time. I have a great relationship with the docs and nurses on staff. Plus, you know most of the people who work at the hospital—at least by sight if not by name. We’d have back-up and facilities if anything unexpected occurred.”
Noah looked at me. “This is your call, Alison. You’re the one giving birth. I’m with you no matter what.”
I considered it briefly. “If I said yes for St. Agnes, when would we do it?”
Maggie smiled. “I’d send you over there right now, and we’d start Cervidil and then Pitocin within a few hours. I want to do a stress test before we begin, but with any luck, we could have you in active labor by later tonight.”
I turned to Noah. “Are you all right with going to St. Agnes? I know it doesn’t hold a lot of happy memories for you.”
He took my hand in his. “I’m fine with it. It’s a hospital I trust.” He kissed my knuckles. “Let’s go have a baby.”
* * *
Oh, if only it were that easy.
