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Ari removed the listening stone from my stomach and put it against his chest. I heard the rapid thud of his heartbeat.
“It’s been elevated since the moment I pulled you in here,” he said. “All I could think about all day is fucking you.”
My cock had no chance. It was hard as a rock, pushing up the front of my robe bottom.
“Does that door lock?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
Ari stood, and as he was about to pull down the wooden latch above the handle, a loud heavy fist banged on the door from the other side.
“Yo! Ari, you in there?” Makoa shouted.
I straightened up in the chair, closed the front of my robe and hurriedly looked for something to cover my obvious bulge. I grabbed a cup of quills off Ari’s desk and held it over my crotch.
“Uh, yes,” Ari said. “But…”
“I’m comin’ in!” Makoa was cradling a basket of coconuts like it was his baby. “Check these out, guys. I— What are those? Quills?”
I nodded.
“Huh. You feeling okay, brotha? I heard you were sick.”
“Nothing serious,” I said. “Ari gave me some medicine. Just a normal part of carrying this baby.”
“Thank you for covering for us earlier, Makoa,” Ari said.
“Sure, no problem. Ehh…”
“You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
Makoa shook his head. “Not a clue. I was just climbing for coconuts.”
“Well, thank you anyway,” Ari said, patting Makoa’s shoulder. “If you hadn’t grabbed Grandma’s attention, I’m sure she would’ve noticed Istil’s bump.”
“Bump? No way. Can I see?”
I stood up and parted the top of my robe, proudly showing off the swell. “You wanna hear their heartbeat?”
“Hell yeah!”
Makoa set the basket of coconuts down on the floor, and Ari positioned the stone against my stomach. Makoa’s eyes widened when he pushed the cone to his ear.
“Whoa. I can hear it! It’s loud!” Then he fell silent for a while, just listening intently. “That’s your baby in there, you guys. Fucking crazy. Oops. Can it hear me?”
“Not yet,” Ari said with a smile.
“Kinda makes it all feel real, doesn’t it?” Makoa said. “Anyway, I’m gonna crack open some of these coconuts. I can’t eat them all myself.”
Makoa departed with his basket. The heat that’d blanked out my head earlier had fallen away to a mild simmer. Ari packed away his instruments, and I straightened my robes.
Ari hadn’t just given me my first meeting with our baby, he’d revealed how much we already loved this child. I saw it in Ari’s face when he had his ear pushed against my belly, a tenderness I didn’t expect from him. It answered so many questions I’d had about how Ari felt about the baby I was certain he would never be able to tell me in words.
We found Makoa and Kai in the kitchen, prying open the coconuts with their shifted claws. They speared through the husks and tossed the fibers in a pile on the floor before jabbing a hole in the shell and draining the water into a jug. They tore the bare shells apart and tossed the halves into a basket on the floor next to Visir, who was scooping out the meat onto a platter with a spoon.
“Anything we can do to help?” I asked.
“You get the best part of the work line,” Kai said. “The eating part! Go ahead, chow down.”
