Released

  His eyes were wary as they watched me, and my own nervousness tried to take over.

  “I need to go,” I mumbled. “Tria will be wondering where I am.”

  “Damon called her right before he called me,” Douglass said. “He told her where you were.”

  “Well…um…” My tongue lost its ability to form syllables as my excuses evaporated. I looked back at Mom, who offered me a half smile.

  “Would you stay for dinner?” she asked. “We could call Tria—have her picked up to join us.”

  “I…I don’t know,” I admitted. “This is…a little much.”

  Dad nodded though Mom still looked disappointed.

  “Will you join us at Michael’s on Sunday?” Dad asked. “It would…well, it would really mean a lot to me…to all of us.”

  For a long moment, I just stared at him, not knowing how I should answer.

  “Please?” Mom’s soft voice echoed through my ears.

  My eyes danced from one parent to the other, and my heart started beating faster. I had simply had enough and couldn’t take any more for one day. There was only one way to get myself out of here without further inquiries, discussions, tears, and apologies.

  Okay,” I said quietly, “I’ll be there.”

  *****

  “I don’t have anything to wear,” Tria announced.

  “You have a ton of clothes,” I told her.

  “None of them fit!”

  “They fit last week!”

  “What are you saying?” she snapped back.

  I mumbled something too low for anyone to hear or understand—myself included—and quickly hid in the bathroom.

  Tria was less than a month away from her due date and just sick to death of being pregnant. I mentioned that there were only a few weeks left, thinking she would feel better, and I just about lost a limb. I won’t even mention what happened when I suggested she be a pumpkin for Halloween. For the most part, I was now afraid to say anything, but we were already late to Michael’s Sunday dinner.

  I peed, splashed cold water on my face, and tiptoed back toward the bedroom. Tria was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dress in her hand and tears running down her face.

  My chest hurt just seeing her like that.

  Walking over quietly, I knelt down in front of her and took her hands in mine. I rubbed the edged of her thumbs as she gripped the material of the dress.

  “What’s wrong, babe?”

  “I hate this,” she whispered. “I’m tired of feeling like this, and you’ve got to be sick to death of me.”

  She sniffed, and I reached up to wipe away tears.

  “I’m not,” I said. “You’re pissy, and you have every reason to be. I did this to you, so of course you’re going to take it out on me.”

  Shit—shouldn’t have said it like that.

  Tria glanced at me but then looked down at our hands again. She twisted our fingers around each other and sighed heavily, so I must not have made too big of a verbal blunder. At least, it wasn’t bad enough that she was going to smack me or anything.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t mean to…”

  Her voice trailed off, and a fresh tear rolled down her face.

  “Hey…” I reached up and took her face in my hands. I had to raise myself up on my knees to be able to reach around her stomach, but then I could almost look her in the eye. “I love you. Soon it will be over, and we’ll have a baby to complain about.”

  I smiled, but the smile I got back wasn’t very convincing.

  “Want me to cancel dinner?” I asked.

  “No,” she muttered. “It’s the first time you’ve really been with everybody. I don’t want to ruin that.”

  “You aren’t ruining anything,” I countered. “You know I’ve been having second, third, and fourth thoughts about this. An excuse would be great.”

  “Not going to get out of it that easy,” Tria said. “Besides, I’m the one who can’t eat any of that stuff their cook makes. It’s all so heavy, and I end up with heartburn.”

  “How about we tell them we’ll show up for dessert, and we can just make something here to eat? Maybe just a salad or soup? That way you don’t have to get dressed up or anything.”

  With a promise that I would still go, see the family, and be civil to everyone, I convinced her to at least delay our arrival. I called Chelsea to let her know and then joined Tria in the kitchen to cook a simple meal.

  “Wow! These Braxton Hicks are a lot stronger than they were last week.”

  Tria had been experiencing these false labor pains for the past three days. The first day it happened, I freaked out and called Damon to take us to the hospital, where the doctor smiled patronizingly and told us to go home. Tria still had four weeks before she was due, and what was happening was perfectly normal.

  “Go sit down,” I told her. I sliced through another onion, but when I looked again, she was still just standing there. Her eyes went wide for a moment. She glanced at me and then down.

  “Shit,” Tria muttered, and she ran off to the bathroom.

  I rolled my eyes. I swear the woman had to pee about every half hour. I supposed the whole thing was her body’s way of getting her used to getting up ten times a night to feed the baby, but I was getting woken up every time she had to go to the bathroom.

  Not that I was complaining. Complaining would likely get me killed.

  With the salad done, I flipped through the pages of the tattoo magazine I had grabbed from the gym. I was thinking about actually adding another one—Tria and the baby’s names—but I wasn’t sure where. I wanted them incorporated into the current design somehow, but I wasn’t getting any decent ideas. Maybe I’d just have to go see Emily and ask for some mock-ups or something. I flipped through a few pages, focused on my study.

  As a switch turned on in my brain, my body went ice cold.

  Tria hadn’t returned.

  I screamed her name as I threw the magazine across the room and ran to the hallway. I ripped the door open before I realized she was yelling back, telling me everything was fine.

  “Please, get out,” Tria moaned from the toilet. She was sitting there and trying to kind of bend over and kick her pants off her ankles. “I just…just…”

  “Just what?” I demanded.

  “It’s embarrassing!” she cried out with a sob.

  “What is?” I roared.

  “I think I peed myself!”

  I took a long breath and tried to stay calm.

  “Want me to get you some clean clothes?” I offered.

  “Yes.” Tria sniffed.

  In the bedroom, I yanked open her dresser drawers until I found some underwear and pants. I smiled a bit at the little blue lacy things. I had a feeling it was one from the set Amanda had given her during an impromptu wedding-slash-baby shower Chelsea threw in lieu of an actual wedding reception.

  I handed her the clothing through the door, only to have Tria throw them back at me.

  “Really, Liam? Do you really think I can wear that underwear?”

  “Shit…um…sorry,” I muttered back. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking. She had given up the sexy panties a few months ago. I went back to the bedroom and picked out some others, but before I could even close the top drawer again, I heard my wife moaning.

  “Tria?” I called, but she didn’t answer. I pushed open the door and saw her sitting on the toilet all bent over. She looked at my face, and my heart stopped in my chest.

  “I don’t think these are Braxton Hicks,” she said breathlessly. “And I don’t think I peed. I think my water broke.”

  I was never one to jump to conclusions, but I was pretty sure we were about to have a baby.

  Chapter 20—Be the Man

  “Don’t panic, okay?” Tria pleaded.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I tried not to start Lamaze breathing. Tria was already pissed at me, and that just didn’t seem like a good idea.

  “Just…stay calm, all right?” She
propped herself up on her elbows and tried to breathe the way the nurse-midwife told her to, which was nothing like I was telling her to do before.

  “Okay.” I tried to place my hand on her back, but she immediately pushed it away. “Sorry! Sorry!”

  “It’s all fine…there’s no reason to panic,” she said again.

  I moved a little closer, then a little farther away. She wouldn’t let me touch her, so I ended up just kind of wringing my hands like some old lady listening to an inspiring church sermon. Tria flipped over, cringed, and glared at me.

  “Stop it!” she snapped.

  “I’m not panicking!” I yelled, not sure what else I did wrong by just standing there.

  “How about we get some coffee or something?” Michael placed his hand on my arm, but I shook it off.

  “I’m not going anywhere!”

  “Liam, it’s going to be hours.” My father’s voice was calm, and I wanted to punch him in the mouth.

  “Fuck that,” I spat. “She can’t get away from it, so why should I?”

  “Because you are driving me insane!” Tria suddenly screamed.

  I stopped and stood still as I looked at Tria. With the help of Chelsea and the nurse, she climbed off the bed, and with a little more help, made her way onto a big, red birthing ball. She bounced up and down as she shook her finger at me. Her eyes were blazing, beautiful, and bordering on deadly.

  “Now get out for at least fifteen minutes, or I’m going to tell them you can’t stay for the birth!”

  “Shit…um…”

  “Come on, Liam.” Michael and Douglass each took an arm and hauled me out to the little waiting area just outside the maternity wing. Michael stopped and let my father haul me the rest of the way down the hall to the vending machines as I continued to ask what I had done that was so terrible.

  Time had completely stopped, so I wasn’t sure if we had been at the hospital for one hour or ten. I just knew I was going to lose my mind before this baby was ever born. Tria was in a ridiculous amount of pain. I mean, I knew it was supposed to hurt. I knew Tria would be in pain, and everything everyone ever said promised that as soon as it was over, she’d forget all about that part.

  Maybe, but I didn’t see how. I didn’t think I ever would.

  It was too much. Too much agony. There was no way it was right or normal.

  “I can’t do this,” I muttered to myself. I glanced behind me to see Michael heading off down the hallway in the opposite direction, probably looking for food as Dad was trying to hand me a cup of coffee. I was pretty sure my shaking hands would just spill it all over the floor.

  “You’re fine, Liam,” my father said. “Just keep yourself together, and it will all be fine.”

  “No,” I said with a shake of my head. “It’s not. That can’t be right…can’t be normal.”

  “She’ll be fine, too, Liam.” Dad placed his hand on my shoulder, and I didn’t shake it off. “They both will. But she needs you now—Chelsea and Julianne can offer support, but she really needs you. She’ll be fine if you’re fine.”

  “I know.” If he said the word fine one more time, I was going to lose my mind. I tensed my fingers on my thighs as my chest rose and fell with heavy breaths.

  They were all here—Chelsea and Michael, Douglass and Julianne, even Ryan and Amanda had been here earlier but had to leave to deal with business shit since the rest of the company’s major decision makers were all refusing to leave the hospital until there was another Teague family heir in the world.

  If I didn’t get it together, Tria was going to end up having the baby without me in the room—either because I passed out before it was time or because she’d thrown me out for being an ass.

  “I have to get my shit together.”

  I sat down on one of the waiting room chairs. It was robin’s-egg blue, plastic, and immediately stuck to my ass. I couldn’t even remember why I was wearing shorts in October.

  “Yeah, you do,” Dad said. “Why don’t you sit down, relax, drink this, and then we’ll go back in.”

  I nodded because I figured I was the last person who needed to be making any decisions right now, and Dad was the only other person around to make them for me. Forcing my hands to be still, I took the cup between my palms and sipped the hot liquid.

  “This coffee is shit,” I remarked. One more sip was enough before I set it off on a side table.

  “Did you expect something better form a hospital vending machine?”

  “I guess not.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence while I pretended to calm myself and completely and totally failed. I wasn’t sure what Dad was trying to accomplish. From the look on his face, he was either contemplating or constipated—it was anyone’s guess.

  We went back into the room, and I tried to keep my shit together; I really did. After a while, Michael and Douglass were kicked out so Tria could drop most of her clothes and just kind of hang out. You would think she’d be embarrassed or something, but she didn’t seem to give a shit anymore. Chelsea and Julianne stayed at Tria’s request, and I was glad to have them there. I had no fucking clue what I was doing and mostly fought against any kind of Bill Cosby impersonation, which would definitely have gotten me killed.

  It was still very tempting.

  For a while, I was fine, but when the contractions started coming closer and closer together, and Tria started really screaming, I could barely keep myself from doing the same. Everywhere I touched her made it worse, but when I tried to get a little distance, she got hysterical. Of course, if I didn’t touch her or didn’t say anything to her, she got mad, too, so I tried to speak and touch softly.

  “You’re doing great,” I told her.

  “Fuck you!” she spat back.

  I cringed a little, rubbed her back, and hoped something I said or did made some kind of difference, because I felt useless. She wasn’t pushing me away anymore, but it was probably because she was too weak to do so.

  I didn’t think it would take this long. Tria was a couple of weeks early, but still within the definition of a full-term pregnancy, according to the doctor. As much as I tried to reassure myself, it was getting harder to believe as the minutes and hours ticked on.

  “I want to be up there,” Tria said, and I helped her move on her hands and knees toward the top of the bed.

  Almost immediately, she screamed again.

  “Can you try breathing?” I asked.

  “No,” she moaned as tears flowed down her cheeks. Every one of the tears that left a trail on her skin also left a rip through the center of my chest.

  All I could think was that it was my fault. If I hadn’t shoved my cock in her, none of this would have ever happened, and she wouldn’t be hurting like this.

  “It hurts,” she whisper-cried at me. Her voice was too low for anyone else to hear. For the first time all day, her eyes didn’t show anger or frustration, but terror. “It hurts a lot more than I thought it would…I don’t understand…”’

  “It’s supposed to hurt,” I reminded her. “You can still do the epidural or—”

  “No!” she cried. “It’s not good for the baby…natural is so much better…the magazines…”

  “I know, babe.”

  Tria had gone kind of crazy over the whole natural birth thing. It was entirely possible she read too much about it. Though I had no doubt it was the better route to go, it seemed like an awful lot of shit to go through. Tria was sure, and I just went along with it because it was what she wanted.

  Despite all the time we had to get ready for this, I felt completely unprepared. The baby was early, and we didn’t know what we were doing.

  Tria went back and forth from the birth ball to the bed. Then she went from being up on her hands and knees to lying on her back so someone could check her progress though there really didn’t seem to be any.

  “Stop poking at me,” Tria growled at one of the nurses.

  The shift had just changed, and the nurse who had been
there earlier was now gone. I wasn’t sure who this one was, but Tria obviously didn’t like her much. The nurse moved off to the side for a moment but then reached out and placed her hand on Tria’s stomach as another contraction hit.

  “Don’t touch me!” Tria yelled at her.

  I was about to move around and just get in the nurse’s way when she ignored Tria’s obvious warning and placed her hand right above my wife’s belly button, and Tria backhanded her.

  Yep—right across the face.

  The nurse jumped back, looking astonished, and then just backed out of the room altogether. Tria didn’t even say anything.

  “Did she just hit that nurse?” I heard Julianne ask as she leaned over next to Chelsea.

  “I do believe she did,” Chelsea said.

  “I like her, you know,” Mom replied.

  “I do, too,” Chelsea responded.

  “Tria?” the doctor came over and touched my wife’s forehead. It wasn’t the doctor we had been seeing but some guy dressed in Dockers and a blue button-down.

  Tria looked up at him just as another contraction hit her. My fingers were nearly crushed in the process, but she got through it. I let her squeeze the shit out of my hand, figuring it was the least I could do, and tried not to show in my expression just how much it hurt. I definitely wasn’t going to say anything anymore; it just wasn’t safe.

  “I’d like to take a look at you, all right?”

  The doctor managed to shift Tria to her back so he could check her out, and I hoped she wouldn’t smack him on top of the head. I tried not to think about the whole thing as another guy getting up in my wife’s goods, but it was hard not to. I mean, he had his hand in her, for Christ’s—

  “Mr. Teague?” the doctor said, startling me. “May I speak with you?”

  Chelsea came up beside me and took my place holding Tria’s hand while I moved to the other side of the room with Dr. Whoever-he-was.

  “May I call you Liam?” he asked.

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Liam, your wife has been in some pretty hard labor for over twenty hours now.”

  Had it been that long? My mind whirled around in a little circle, and I conjured up images of all the “frog in a blender” jokes I had heard as a kid.