Page 79 of Wait for Him

My throat closes and I have to fight the sob rising up behind it with everything I've got left, which isn't much tonight.

"Thank you," is all I can get out.

***

The hospital room is sterile, too bright, and finally quiet. My own screaming has died down with everything else. Once they induced me, labor came quickly, but quick and painless are two entirely different things, and nobody warned me how loud a body can get when it's doing something it very clearly does not want to do.

James Samson Monroe came into the world with a roar at 7:21 p.m., six pounds fourteen ounces, and nineteen inches long.

I never planned to hold him. That wasn't part of the deal. The plan had been simple because I needed it to be simple: deliver him, recover, sign whatever needed signing, and let Samson and Lauren take their son home when the hospital cleared him. The nurses didn't know any of that, though, so they laid him on my chest wrapped tightly in a hospital blanket, and just like that the neat little plan I'd spent months constructing had a warm, breathing weight on it I hadn't accounted for.

This is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and naturally I'm doing it alone. Lauren offered to be here, more than once, and I told her no every time. I'm used to alone; this was no different.

“Do you want a few minutes with him before we take him?”

I nod because I can't seem to get a word out, and I can't take my eyes off him.

I genuinely didn't expect to feel anything when I looked at him. I'd spent months preparing myself for indifference if I was lucky and hatred if I wasn't, especially if they put him in my arms and something of his father's face stared back at me from inside that blanket. That possibility had lived in the back of my mind through every doctor's appointment, every legal conversation, every night I lay awake feeling him move inside me and tried not to imagine what he'd look like when he finally came out.

Instead, there's just a baby.

A tiny, slightly furious-looking baby with a wrinkled forehead and round cheeks who seems deeply offended by his recent eviction.

I stare at him and wait for something terrible to happen inside me, and I can’t name what I feel instead, but the lack of terrible doesn’t change the decision. Samson and Lauren will give him the life I want him to have, a loud house. Eventually, they will give him siblings and he’ll be surrounded by people who will love him without having to fight their way through everything attached to how he got here.

I'll slide this day into the never happened file with everything else and keep moving. I'll even see him when they bring him around, and I'll be able to watch from a safe distance while he grows up loved and cared for and given every possible chance to become something good.

Something pale catches my eye near his forehead.

“Look at that.”

I trace my finger over the streak hidden among the darker hair at his hairline.

Just like mine.

I have poliosis, though I've dyed the white streak for most of my life.

There was always a fifty-percent chance I could pass it on, and of all the things this child could have inherited from me, the first one he decided to announce is the thing I've spent my entire life covering up.

Somehow, ridiculously, that makes this a fraction easier.

“Hey, kid.”

I press my lips to the little streak of white hair and then to his tiny nose. He turns toward me immediately, rooting against my cheek, blind and searching and brand new, and I have to close my eyes for a second because I wasn’t prepared for so many goddamn emotions.

“I took a big fat chance putting my dad's name on you, so you'd better do him proud, you hear me? That's a very expensive name emotionally. There are expectations.”

His face remains spectacularly unimpressed by the burden I've just placed on him.

I graze one impossibly chubby cheek with the back of my finger.

“I guess you're kind of cute.”

A wet laugh slips out of me because kind of is complete bullshit. The little bastard is beautiful.

His hand moves beneath the blanket until a tiny fist works its way free, and I put my finger against his palm without thinking. His fingers close around it immediately.

Stupid cute baby and his stupid fat fingers.