Page 86 of Omega’s Fold

That is all. That is all that happens. After a minute he reaches up and puts his hand over mine for one beat, and then he takes it off, and I take mine off.

I say, “I’m going to call my mother.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to tell her I’m moving up.”

He turns.

“Are you?”

“You know I am.”

He looks at me across the kitchen. The bump is visible under the flannel from this angle, the small clear curve of her. His hand goes to it without his knowing. It always does now.

“Okay,” he says.

I look at the most gorgeous omega I have ever seen and I think: I live here now. It’s a good thought.

23. Wyatt

My water breaks at three in the morning.

It is not the cinematic gush I have been bracing myself for ever since Donna sat me down on her porch last month and walked me through every stage of what was coming.

It is a small warm release that I feel as a giving way, low and inside, and then a slow trickle down my thighs onto the bathroom mat. I am standing in the dark with one hand on the edge of the sink and the other flat against the small hard curve of my belly, and I do not move for a long count of three.

I got up to pee in the night, the way I seem to do endlessly now, and instead I have gushed all over the bathroom floor.

Julian’s scent is on the bathmat from earlier, that low pine-and-cedar warmth he leaves everywhere he goes, threaded through the quieter scent of our shared soap.

“Julian,” I whisper. “Julian.”

The lamp comes on in the bedroom before I have finished saying his name a second time, and he is at the bathroom door inside ten seconds. He has slept in his t-shirt and his boxers. His eyes find mine in the lamplight. They go from sleep to wide-awake in the time it takes him to register the look on my face.

“It is happening,” I say.

He swallows. He looks at the wet mat and then at my face and then at the wet mat again.

“I’ll call Donna to come look after the boys.”

He goes back into the bedroom to make the call and I sit on the edge of the bath. The porcelain is cold through the thin cotton of my sleep shorts. I time the first contraction. The contraction is short and tight and not yet anything I cannot manage. The next one is shorter. The third is short and longer at the back end of it, with a deep ache that runs all the way around to the small of my back and stays there for a beat after the contraction has eased.

Julian comes back in. He has the phone against his ear still.

“Five minutes out,” he says, to me. Then, to the phone, “Yes. Yes. The bag is by the door. He packed it last week. He is — “ He looks at me. “ — he is fine. He is sitting on the edge of the bath.”

I am not looking at him like he is being slow. I am looking at him because looking at him is the only thing in the room that is making sense.

“All right,” he says, into the phone. “Yes. Thank you, Donna. Yes. We will.”

He hangs up. “She’s on her way. I’ll just go check on the boys then we can go.”

He goes.

I sit on the edge of the bath with my hand flat against the small hard curve of my belly and I breathe.

I stand up. I have to put my hand on the edge of the bath to do it because the contraction has not entirely gone, and when I straighten I feel another one starting at the small of my back, a low slow tightening that builds into the same place the last one was.