“Okay?”
“If you’re not worried, I’m not worried.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Good.” Then a contraction slammed through me and I grabbed his wrist and squeezed. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“Breathe.”
“Stop telling me to breathe.”
Dr. Okafor came in. Checked me. Calm, efficient, a woman who’d clearly delivered hundreds of babies and didn’t rattle. “You’re at ten centimeters. It’s time to push.”
“Oh God,” I said.
“You’ve got this,” Mary said.
“I absolutely do not have this.”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Took a breath that shook on the way in. I looked at Finneas on one side, red-eyed, jaw set, holding my hand. Mary on the other, mascara smudged, coffee forgotten, solid. The chair by the window was empty.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s fucking do this.”
I pushed and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Harder than quitting my job, harder than leaving Atlanta, harder than standing in a clearing full of wolves telling them I wasn’t goinganywhere. The pain was total, consuming, blinding. I screamed and gripped Finneas’s hand so hard something popped in his fingers.
He didn’t flinch. “You’re incredible,” he said, close to my ear. “Keep going.”
“Shut up,” I panted. “Just shut up and let me...”
Another push. Another scream. Dr. Okafor’s voice, calm, sure, telling me I was close, telling me to push again.
“I can’t,” I gasped. “I can’t, it’s too much.”
“You can,” Finneas said. “Andrea, you can. You’re almost there.”
“I really fucking can’t.”
“One more. Give me one more.”
I pushed. Everything went white. Then sound.
A cry. Small, furious, outraged at the world.
Dr. Okafor lifted the baby and placed him on my chest. Wet, warm, screaming. The room disappeared. Everything disappeared. The hospital, the pain, the hours of labor, all of it gone. The world narrowed to this one tiny body on my skin.
I put my hands on him. He was so small. Red-faced, fists clenched, crying with everything he had. I touched his face, his fingers, the dark hair on his head that was matted and wet and already curling like his father’s.
“Hi, Alex,” I whispered. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
He stopped crying. His eyes were closed, his fist uncurled against my chest, his mouth moved, and he settled against my skin. Warm. Alive. Here. My son.
I was crying again. Happy tears, wrecked tears, every kind of tear at once. I couldn’t stop touching his face, his tiny hand, his fingers that were so small they didn’t look real.
I looked up. Finneas was standing beside the bed. Crying. Open, unashamed, tears running down his face. His jaw wasn’t clenched. His hands weren’t fisted. He wasn’t holding anything back. He was looking at his son on my chest with an expression I couldn’t name at the anatomy scan but could name now.
Awe.
“He’s perfect,” Finneas said, and his voice was wrecked. “He’s a strong Alpha. I can feel it.”
