“Holy shit,” Damien muttered.
Matthew didn’t scold him for using inappropriate language when Emily was in earshot. If he could have made a sound, he would have said the same.
Their baby was on the screen.
A head, a body, little legs. Dr. Triassi had captured the fetus in profile, and as she adjusted the wand just so, its finer details appeared—a tiny nose, a chin, and a neck.
Matthew craned his neck to see more, but the baby moved. Their perfect picture was gone.
“It moved,” Damien uttered, horrified.
“Daddy?” Emily asked nervously. “Is it bad?”
“No. It’s good.” Matthew took her hand and stroked the back of it with his thumb. “That’s the surprise we’ve been waiting to tell you about. Do you think it looked like something?”
The blank look on Emily’s face told him in no uncertain language that she thought he was crazy. The baby might as well have been a burrito.
Matthew forced a smile. It was tough keeping his composure with a wand stuck up his ass. “That’s okay. It was kind of hard to make out, wasn’t it? I’ll give you a hint. It’s got a cute little nose, and a mouth, and itty-bitty ears.”
Emily gasped. Her eyes were as round as dinner plates. “Daddy!”
Seeing her so excited made up for the awkwardness of addressing his daughter while being anally probed. A grin broke across Matthew’s face, and he opened his mouth to confirm the news when Emily leapt off the chair and cried, “Akitty!”
Damien violently coughed, but he couldn’t fool Matthew—he was laughing.
Dr. Triassi struggled to keep a straight face but said nothing.
So it was that Matthew, nearly nude, still partially hard, and stuffed in the least appealing way possible, taught his daughter a cruel lesson about life.
It was not a kitty.
Emily’s face fell. “Then what is it?”
“It’s a baby.” Matthew smiled, hoping like hell that it would be contagious. “You’re going to be a big sister.”
Emily whipped her head around to gawk at the image on the screen. After a long moment spent in consideration, she whipped it back around to squint skeptically at Matthew. “… How?”
Damien cleared his throat. Several times. “Well—”
Matthew cut him off before he could begin. “We can talk about that after we say goodbye to Dr. Triassi.” Matthew glared daggers through Damien, who returned fire with a smirk so charming that Matthew forgot what he was angry about. “Um, the, uh…”
“The baby,” Damien offered by way of apology.
“Yes, the baby.” Matthew snapped back into the moment. “Right now we’ve got make sure that there’s nothing wrong with the baby.”
Dr. Triassi, bless her, was happy to move things right along. “There’s nothing wrong at all from what I can see. Development appears normal. I’d estimate eleven weeks, which lines up with your last recorded heat. The activity is a good sign—at this stage, it’s very encouraging—and yes,” Dr. Triassi grinned at Damien, “babies do tend to move while in utero. It can be a little jarring if you’re not expecting it.”
The expression on Damien’s face fell somewhere between elation and abject horror.
“Is it a boy baby or a girl baby?” Emily asked.
“We won’t know for a little while still,” Dr. Triassi said. She set about carefully removing the wand from Matthew’s body. “Babies like to keep their secrets. We’ll be able to tell in another few months.”
“It’s a girl baby.” Emily yawned and stretched like she hadn’t just stomped all over the years Dr. Triassi had spent honing her craft in medical school. Floor tiles weren’t the only thing being crushed today. “Daddy, can we go to the zoo in middle park when we get home?”
Damien snickered behind his hand. Matthew, frazzled, looked at his daughter, then sighed and shook his head. “Sure. Why not?”
“Yay!”
