Wish Come True (The Blogger Diaries Trilogy Book 3) (27 page)

“I have to potty,” I tell Jason as they let go of me, and head toward the bathroom.
 

“Are you having an epidural?” the nurse asks quickly before I have a chance to close the door.

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply, my hand gripping the handle.

“Okay, I’ll call the anesthesiologist for you then.”

“Well, you can hold off for a bit. I’m really not in that much pain,” I tell her, crossing my legs so I don’t pee on myself as Avary wiggles against my bladder.

“Dr. Chavez will be here any minute to break your water, and that’s when the real pain starts as their little head pushes right up against your cervix. If you’re going to get an epidural, I would definitely go ahead and get it before he does that,” she suggests adamantly.
 

“Oh. All right then.” I nod, and with a squeak as a contraction takes hold, I push the door farther open so Jason can get to me. He’s there in a flash, letting me hold onto him tightly as I breathe through it once again. It’s an awkward feeling, having to pee so badly plus trying to make it through a contraction, and when it’s over, I plop down on the toilet without even waiting for him to exit and shut the door.
 

I groan with relief and look up to find Jason still standing there, my face heating with embarrassment.
 

“I don’t want to leave you in here by your— What’s with the blushing?” He gives me a small smile.

“I just realized you’ll be seeing all sorts of crazy shit today, the least of which is me peeing in front of you for the first time.” My voice is tinged with a bit of panic.

“Don’t you think we’re past that, babe?” he asks, his eyebrow lifting.

“Hell no, we ain’t past that,” I squawk. “Close your eyes. I have to wipe.”

He chuckles but closes his eyes, seeing the seriousness in mine.

“You’re the mother of my child, the love of my life. What do you think is going to happen?”

I can’t help but smile at his profession as he stands there with his eyes closed in the middle of the small bathroom, my big pregnant ass on the toilet, reaching behind myself to flush the toilet so he doesn’t see my pee when I stand up. “There should be boundaries, ya know? Some things left a mystery, so you still see me as this, like, sexy woman instead of too… human, I guess. I don’t know…”
 

“Baby, I think you’ve done fell off your rocker. Can I open my eyes now?” he asks, his accent thick as he grins.

“No, I haven’t! Not to bring him up at such an intimate time for us, but Aiden used to come into the bathroom, where I was happily relaxing in the bathtub reading, and would plop his dumb ass down on the toilet and poop! Right there in front of me! At first, it was like, okay, cool. We’re that comfortable with each other. But
very
soon after, it was like… what has been seen cannot be unseen. There’s shit that should stay a mystery, quite literally. Keep a little mystique. Just like I don’t want you to watch when she comes hurtling out of my hooha. Yes, you can open your eyes.” He does, and then I reach my hands up for him to haul me off the pot.

“What? I’m watching my kid be born, babe. There ain’t no stopping me from—”

“You can watch her be born, but I don’t want you to actually see her come out of my va-jay-jay, Jason. Do you not remember that video we saw? It does something to a man. It’s one thing to watch someone else on film doing it, but if you were to see
me
do it, stretched like that, seeing a whole baby coming out of
me,
you won’t be able to look at me down there and see anything but that. And sorry, but I like you looking at my ladybits and seeing it as a sacred love shrine, not the functional body part that pee and babies come out of, not to mention other stuff. Let me keep a little bit of my sexuality and dignity. Please.”

Something I said, or maybe the panic in my voice, causes him to pull me to him in a comforting hug. “Okay, babe. If it’s that important to you, I won’t look.”

I breathe out a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank you.” A moment later, I feel his body shaking with silent laughter and pull back to look up at his face. “What?”

“Sacred love shrine?” He grins ear-to-ear, and then it’s like saying it out loud breaks the dam and he throws his head back and laughs.

“Shut up, Robi-ho,” I growl, and he continues to chuckle as he leads me out of the bathroom. “We need to call Buffy and Nay.” I told them I wanted them to be in the delivery room with me and Jason a few weeks ago, and they were thrilled. Plus, Josalyn will be going home with Buffy for the couple days I’ll be in the hospital.

“And my parents,” he adds as the nurse comes back into the room, a tall man in blue scrubs following behind her.

“I’m Dr. Reynolds, and I’ll be your anesthesiologist.” He reaches out to shake our hands. “Rebecca here said your contractions aren’t that bad, but she explained about what happens after the doctor breaks your water, correct?”

“Yes, sir. So I’ll be taking that epidural,” I say with a frantic nod.
 

“Okay. No one is allowed in the room while we do it, so, Dad, this’ll only take a few minutes, if you’ll just step out—”

“Hold up,” I interrupt. “Not even he can be in here with me?” My heart starts to pound inside my chest. I did not sign up for doing
any
of this on my own.

“No, ma’am. It’s against policy. Just the doctor and a nurse can be in the room when placing the epidural,” he explains.

“Don’t worry, honey. It only takes a minute and then he can come right back in,” the nurse, apparently named Rebecca, tries to calm me.
 

Unlike me, Jason keeps a cool head. Knowing they won’t budge on the matter, he takes my face in his hands and tilts my head back to gain my attention. “Babe, it’ll only a minute. I gotta run down to the car and get our bags anyways. And I’ll call Buffy, tell her to call Nay, and then I’ll call my parents. Then it’ll be a party up in this place. Okay?” He looks at me with those perfect chocolaty eyes, and everything seems to come into focus. I can do this. Just one pinch and it’ll be over.

 
“All right,” I breathe with a nod, and he kisses me gently before heading out the door, which closes on its own.

“Now, honey. You aren’t going to hurt me. You squeeze all you want. I can take it. We’re going to sit you on the edge of the bed here, and you’re gonna drape yourself over my shoulders and hunch over. Did you get an epidural with your other baby?” she asks as I move to sit where she told me.

“Yes, but I was in so much pain from being in labor for so long that I really don’t remember feeling it when they did it,” I explain.
 

“Well, since you’re not in that much pain this time, you may feel it, but it’ll go numb so fast you won’t even have time to say ‘Ouch.’”

A few minutes later, I’m resting in bed, watching my contractions on the monitor, and Jason comes into the room carrying our bags.
 

“I called everybody. Buffy and Renee are on their way, and Dad and Mom will be up here with Josalyn in about an hour,” he tells me, and the doctor walks into the room after knocking softly on the door. He’s followed in by Rebecca, who comes to stand beside my upper body, while he stays at the foot of the bed.
 

“How you feeling, dear?” Dr. Chavez asks, putting on gloves he pulled from his pocket.
 

“Great,” I reply, feeling Jason push my hair out of my face.

“If I recall what you said before, your doctor broke your water last time too, didn’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. So you know it’s a piece of cake. I just use the amnihook to nick a little hole in the sac and the fluid comes right out. You don’t feel a thing.” He gets on a stool and the nurse picks up my dead-weight legs, bending them at the knees and letting them fall all the way open. In PE class, we would’ve called this ‘butterfly position’ only my feet are farther apart so the doc can insert the amnihook. Several absorbent sheets, which look like puppy house-training pads, are placed under me, and before I even know it’s happening, I’m already cleaned up and being tucked back under the blanket.

“That’s it?” Jason asks, a look almost like disappointment on his face.

“Most of the time, it’s not like it happens in movies. No big explosion of water,” Rebecca explains with a smile. “Now y’all just sit back and relax, and let’s see how the little one reacts to her waterbed being gone.”

I lie back and use the remote on the bed to tilt myself farther into a lying down position to get some rest. I’m suddenly very tired after getting up so early, and I figure I can get in a little nap before our families get here.
 

I come to in a panic, grabbing at my chest, feeling like I’m suffocating. I can’t get in any air. I’m drowning, but I’m not underwater. My lungs refuse to work, and my arms flail in my terror. When I get my eyes open, I see Jason lunge toward me from where he was standing with my sisters-in-law and my niece Brooke. I can’t even speak. My nails tear at my gown, trying to pull it away from my throat. I try to sit up, but I can’t move anything but my head and arms.
 

Before Jason can even fully get the word, “Help,” out, Rebecca is there on my other side and takes hold of my right hand, wrapping her other arm around my back, and pulls me up into a sitting position. She tells Jason to hold me there, and with his arms around me, I watch as she uses the remote to sit the bed up, each second ticking by feeling like an hour without being able to breathe. My eyes are watering, and my lungs burn for oxygen.

Rebecca takes my face in her palms and forces me to meet her stern gaze. “You can breathe. You may not be able to feel it right now, but you are inhaling and exhaling perfectly fine.” She lets go with one hand to point to something on the monitor. “You see that? That is your oxygen level. You are okay. The epidural just went too high up your spine with you lying down, and any minute, it’s going to shimmy back on down, and you’ll feel right as rain. Okay? You’re breathing, hun.”

I close my eyes and try to feel my lungs unfreeze as I consciously pull in air through my nose. I can feel the coolness enter through my nostrils and down my throat, but not fill my chest. But I know the air couldn’t have gone anywhere else but into my lungs, so it calms the panic enough for the minute it takes the numbness to go away, and I relax back against the bed.

“Well, that was exciting. You okay, kid?” Buffy asks, coming over to hug my neck as Rebecca leaves the room.

I swallow thickly and nod. “Yeah. That was fucking scary as hell.”

“I think I gotta go clean out my drawers,” Jason says quietly, and Buffy lets out her loud, boisterous laugh.

“Did you shit yourself there, Jason?” she asks, cackling, which makes me smile.

“Holy fuck.” He presses one of his hands to his heart and bends over, bracing himself with his other hand against his knee, locking out his tattooed arm. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared before.” He stands up and reaches across the bed to fold me into his arms, kissing my neck where he buries his face, and I feel him inhale me.
 

“You?” I scoff. “I woke up feeling like someone was trying to off me with a pillow over my face!” Renee and Brooke come over to the bed and give me kisses on my cheek. “When did y’all get here?”

“Just before you started flopping around like a fish out of water,” Renee says, and I turn to look at Jason. “Are your parents here with Josalyn yet?”

“Not yet, but they should be here any minute,” he replies, still not letting go of me.

“Well I guess that’s all the nap I’m gonna get. Baby, can you hand me my makeup bag out of there?” I ask, pointing to the big black Playboy bunny duffle bag I had packed all my stuff in.
 

He finally releases his death grip on me to walk over to the couch to retrieve the small pink bag that holds my makeup, bringing it back over to the bed, where I unzip it and pull out my compact.
 

“Are we serious right now?” Buffy asks, giving me a crazy look. “Are you really putting on makeup in your hospital bed while you’re in labor, Kayla?”

“Yes. I want pictures, and in all the ones I got while I was having Josalyn, I seriously look like I could’ve walked onto the set of a zombie movie without stopping at the makeup trailer first and fit in just fine with the rest of the undead,” I explain, adding a little blush to my pale cheeks before brushing on a light coat of mascara.
 

“I think I’ve seen it all now,” she replies, and goes to plop into one of the chairs.
 

Just then, I notice there’s someone else in the room with us, and as I catch sight of where he is and what he’s about to reach for, the monitor starts beeping like crazy. “Bret! No!” I shout, right before my nephew’s curious and destructive fingers have the chance to grab a hold of the IV attached to the machine behind Jason.
 

Rebecca comes bursting through the door, apparently alerted by the racket the monitor attached to me is making. She comes over and punches a button on the screen, then asks me if I’m okay before adding, “You’re blood pressure just skyrocketed.” That’s when she spots my rambunctious little nephew making laps around the stand holding the IV bag.
 

“Can I ask for one of y’all to take him out of here? We can’t have anything or anyone in here that can make her blood pressure rise like this,” she asks the room.

“Brooke, why don’t you go out to the waiting room and sit with your brother?” Renee prompts, and my niece sighs but takes Bret by his hand and leads him out the door.
 

Rebecca notices the makeup brush in my hand and looks at me with laughter in her eyes. Before she even has a chance to ask, I explain to her what I told my sisters about my awful pictures from my last labor and delivery. “Fair enough,” she replies, and I barely have my bag zipped when in walks Jason’s mom and dad, Josalyn holding her papa’s hand. I nudge Jason with the bag, silently asking him to put it away before they see it. One, his mom would scold me and tell me how silly I’m being for worrying about the way I look at a time like this, and two, his dad would tease me relentlessly.