Riley
Thirty-seven weeks.Not quite full term, but close enough that the nurses smile like they already know the ending. Hospitals at night feel like someone turned the volume down on the world and left the heartbeat. Dim lamps pool gold in corners. Wheels whisper past like careful ghosts. Behind the next curtain a TV murmurs an old sitcom laugh track, and somehow it doesn’t feel disrespectful. It feels like the building reminding itself people survive here.
Jason’s hand is an anchor on my forearm, thumb tracing a slow line that matches the monitor’s steady blip. He’s sitting in the world’s least ergonomic chair, legs splayed wrong for his frame, hoodie wrinkled, hair doing that post-helmet rebellion even though he hasn’t worn one in hours. He looks like trouble and safety at the same time. My trouble. My safety.
“You good?” he asks, low, like we’re in a chapel. He already knows the answer; he just wants me to hear myself say it.
“I’m good,” I say, surprise threading the truth. “Weirdly.”
He grins sideways. “Scientifically measured weirdly—like a four out of ten?”
“At least a five point three,” I tell him, which earns me the kind of eye crinkle that makes my ribs feel less like a cage and more like scaffolding.
To keep the nerves from blooming, we build our usual raft of stupid. He hums the world’s worst version of our goal horn as a lullaby. I counter with the chorus from a pop song he pretends not to know while he mouths every word. We trade ridiculous hypotheticals—what if the baby arrives demanding a trade to a warmer climate; what if their first word isoffside; what if they inherit my organization and his ability to sulk attractively. He vows to teach them the art of an elite nap. I promise to train them out of his tragic comma placement.
“Hey,” he says, mock wounded. “My commas are passionate.”
“They’re chaos,” I correct, and the smile that slips out tastes like relief. “But I’ll allow them. In small doses.”
Nurses drift in and out with the grace of people who know how to make a room gentler just by occupying it. Vitals check, IV check, the soft rub of alcohol on skin, the efficient cooing of machines to one another.Dr. Hassan appears twice, both times a steady lighthouse: calm, kind, narrating just enough. Real contractions roll and ease like a tide that’s finally learned manners. My body is not a battlefield. Tonight it’s a sea that’s being listened to.
Jason squeezes my hand with every exhale I steady on four-two-six. When I falter, his breath exaggerates the count like a metronome on purpose. I let my focus slide from numbers to his face, and the room shrinks to fit the two of us and the small third person who kicks at intervals like they’re tapping out a setlist.
He leans forward, forearms on his knees. “Okay,” he says, whispering only because the night asked us to. “Game plan: I am hydration mule, snack procurement, and playlist DJ. Also, comic relief if required. I can juggle tongue depressors. Probably.”
“Please don’t juggle hospital property,” I murmur, laughing under my breath. “But I’ll take the playlist.”
He scrolls and lands on an acoustic cover of a song we slow-danced to in the kitchen last week, more swaying than technique. The guitar is soft enough that even the machines seem to listen. He sings along under his breath; he’s off-key in exactly the way that makes me want to cry.
My body feels stretched thin in that last-month way—every motion slow, deliberate, like the world’s been teaching me patience one vertebra at a time.
“Thanks for staying,” I say, and mean more than the chair.
He looks at me like the question is offensive. “There is nowhere else,” he says simply, and his thumb keeps drawing that line, steady as the monitor.
The night holds. We let it.
The room finds a rhythm that isn’t mine to conduct. Nurses pad in with shoes that turn squeaks into whispers. One tucks the corner of my blanket like she learned how to fold clouds. Another checks the drip, eyes flicking to the monitor, mouth easing when the numbers behave. Dr. Hassan’s voice comes and goes, a steady river through a day that forgot how to be linear. She narrates just enough for me to feel held by the process: “Fluids look good… tightening is spacing… we’ll keep listening.”
Listening is the whole job tonight. The machines do it. The staff does it. I try.
The monitor throws green digits that would have felt like gospel a year ago. I can read vitals in my sleep; I’ve lived in fluorescent rooms with clipboards under my arm and apen behind my ear long enough to speak beeps like a second language. But I’m not the trainer in this room. I’m the body on the bed. If I count too hard, I’ll tip back into work and forget to be a person.
So when the numbers start their little dances, I look at Jason instead.
His eyes are ridiculous. I’ve thought it since the first time he chirped a ref and then glanced at me like he wanted to know if I bought the performance. Sea-blue, stupidly cinematic, currently rimmed a little red because he’s pretending this chair is comfortable and because he cares in a way that costs him. Every time my breath hitches, his does; every time mine steadies, his follows, like we’re learning a duet nobody taught us.
“Check in,” he murmurs, the same way I ask an ankle for feedback. Not a demand. An invitation.
“Better,” I say, and it’s true across enough metrics that I don’t have to lie. “Like the tide is learning its manners.”
He smiles, looks at my belly like he’s making a silent deal with a roommate. “Your landlord requests quiet hours after nine,” he tells the baby. “In exchange, we’ll learn how to swaddle like pros and not subject you to my chili experiments.”
“Please don’t,” I whisper, horrified. “No one deserves that.”
A nurse snorts as she scans my bracelet, the sound soft enough to be permission. She replaces a sensor that wandered. “You two okay?” she asks.
“We’re good,” Jason says, and he’s not performing. He’s reporting. She nods and disappears, leaving us with the guitar picking and the drip and the hallway wheels fishing for their next destination.
