Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
A dry palm pushed the damp hair from my head before familiar lips pressed into the skin there. “You can do this, Chef,” Kane murmured against my forehead. “You can do this.”
His voice was firm, confident, full of certainty.
“You are powerful,” he whispered in my ear.
I didn’t feel powerful. Not even a little. I felt exhausted. The most exhausted I’d ever been in my life. My body felt as if it were so fragile it was made of cracked glass, ready to shatter at any moment. My hips burned, the bones grinding against each other, the pressure in my pelvis indescribable. My ass seemed like it was going to explode.
The nurses were moving around the room then, practiced, with a calm kind of urgency. One of them was on the phone with my doctor who was, apparently, stuck in traffic. More nurses came in.
They were getting ready for me to give birth.
Except I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough.
“Chef, look at me,” Kane’s voice filtered through my foggy mind, and I veered my gaze to him. He was right beside me, hands clasped in mine. Firm. Hard. Tethering me to the earth. “You are a warrior. You can do this.”
He said it with such surety. Like it was an indisputable fact. Like he believed in me.
Everything inside me coiled as I felt my body ready for another contraction. It was like the ocean sucking the waves back in preparation for a tsunami. My breath came out of my lips in short bursts. “I am powerful,” I repeated like a mantra.
The contraction crashed over me.
The nurse was between my legs again. “Now we’ve got to push.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice; I would do anything to relieve the pressure. The pain, I’d thought I’d prepared for that—I really fucking hadn’t—but the pressure was completely unexpected. I felt like I was going to burst, like my pelvis was about to shatter.
“This is not natural!” I screamed. “Everyone in the birth classes said it was natural. Magical. This does not feel like nature. This is torture!” My sentences came out broken, fractured.
The nurses laughed. I wanted to punch them. “Nature has a way of torturing women, but you’ve got this.”
A handful more contractions ripped through me, and each time, I pushed. “Practice,” the nurse called it, but I wasn’t practicing, I was trying with all my might to get that baby out.
To no avail.
Luckily, though, the pause between contractions was longer than it had been since active labor started. I got a brief respite, sinking back onto the bed, feeling half normal. Kane would kiss my head, blow cool air in my face with a handheld fan.
Things moved impossibly fast yet excruciatingly slow at the same time. I was in my body, more than I ever had been, people in the room filtering in and out of focus with each contraction.
And then my doctor was there, rushing in, switching places with a nurse, changing out pieces of the bed, squeezing my leg, telling me I was doing great.
At some point, they got me a mirror for me to see what was going on down there, to help with the pushing. I hadn’t thought I’d want to see, but I needed it. I needed to. Kane did not.
“Stay by my head,” I demanded, my breath coming in shallow pants as I rode the blissful wave between contractions.
“No way in hell.” Kane leaned back toward me to kiss my head.
“I’m serious, Kane,” I said through gritted teeth. “You do not need to see all that.”
I was looking at the mirror out of pure necessity; even I did not want to see all of that. But I needed it in order to get this demon out of me.
Even in my throes of exhaustion, agony and general fucking madness, I understood I would never unsee myself fully dilated.
Kane, who was in no agony at all and nowhere near as exhausted—therefore having all of his mental faculties intact—would definitely not be able to unsee it. Though I didn’t have much time to argue with him, I knew my reprieve was short lived and could already feel the swell of another contraction approaching.
“I’m serious,” I gritted out.
Kane’s brow flattened as he fastened his hand tightly on my leg, holding it up and in place for me to push, as though he could feel the crest of my contraction too.
“I’m serious too, Chef,” he replied. “I’ll give you anything you ask for. But not this. I am seeing our daughter come into this world. I’m watching your body perform this fucking miracle, and that is that.”
I wanted to argue. I very much did. Especially about the whole ‘miracle’ part.
But I didn’t have the energy.
I looked from Kane to the small patch of hair that was my daughter’s head.
“Okay, this push, you’re going to get her out,” my doctor told me. “You’re going to push with all your might.”