Page 72 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Oh, okay, that one hurt,” I said, gripping the edge of the table. “This shit just got real.”

“How bad?” Amai was up again.

“Sit down, Amai Landry,” Mama said, not even looking at him this time, already moving into the kitchen for something.

He sat. Barely.

“It’s fine,” I said, breathing through it. “It’s not—it’s manageable. It just hurt more than the last one. Shit.”

Honor came around the table and crouched next to my chair, rubbing slow circles on my back. “That’s how it go, sis. They gon’ keep getting worse and closer together. That’s the whole point.”

“I know that,” I snapped, more from the pain than at her.

She just laughed, unbothered, because she had three kids of her own and had heard worse than being snapped at by a woman in early labor.

“You want to walk?” Saroya asked. “Walking helps. That’s what they told me with all three of mine.”

“I don’t want to walk. I want this baby to not be trying to come out in Mama’s dining room.”

“She ain’t coming out in my dining room,” Mama said, appearing back at the table with a glass of water and pressing it into my hand like that was going to fix anything. “Drink this. You need to stay hydrated.”

I drank it because arguing with Delphine mid-contraction wasn’t a fight worth having.

“Amai.” I said his name, and he looked at me like I’d fired a gun. “Call your mama. Tell her to meet us at the hospital.”

Something flickered across his face—quick, complicated, and gone almost as fast as it showed up. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll call her right now.”

“And Amai.” I made sure he was looking dead at me before I said the rest. “Winston doesn’t come.”

“Truth—”

“I mean it. He’s not walking into that hospital room. Not today. Not for this.”

“I wasn’t gonna call him,” Amai said. Something in his voice told me he meant it, that the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind, but he still felt the need to say it out loud so I’d hear it clean. “This is Tru’s day. Not his.”

“Good.” Mama’s voice came sharp from the kitchen doorway. “Because if that man shows up on my porch today of all days, I got a cast iron skillet with his name already carved in it.”

That got a laugh out of everybody, even me, even through another contraction rolling in right on the heels of the last one, closer together now. I felt the shift in my body the way you feel weather changing before it actually rains—something building, something coming whether I was ready or not.

“That one felt different,” I said, breathing hard through it.

Amai was up out of his chair so fast the whole table shook.

“Different how? Different bad? Truth, talk to me⁠—”

“Different closer,” I said. “Different like maybe we should actually go now instead of in twenty minutes.”

That did it. Amai went into motion like somebody flipped a switch—grabbing my hospital bag from where it’d been sitting by the door because I wasn’t about to be caught unprepared, grabbing my jacket even though it was warm outside, grabbing his phone to call Priest for the car to be pulled around, even though we’d driven ourselves and the car was sitting right in the driveway. The man had officially stopped making sense and started just grabbing things.

“Amai, baby.” Mama’s voice again, patient this time, like she was talking to somebody’s confused toddler. “The car is in the driveway. You don’t need Priest.”

“Right.” Amai set his phone down. Picked it back up. Set it down again. “Right, yeah, I know that.”

“You want me to drive?” Raven offered, half-teasing, half-serious.

“I got it,” Amai said too fast, too defensive, like his ability to operate a motor vehicle was under attack.

“Baby.” I reached for his hand, and when he took mine, I felt how cold his fingers had gone. How tight he was gripping. “Look at me.”