hardcrowncherryblossom

Or hard crown*ing* cherryblossom. It's very hot.

[hardcrowncherryblossom]

Intro post

I (22, they/them) have been lurking for some time in the preggo and birth space for some time, especially the written parts, and I'm trying my hand at this.

List of stories:

===

First Person

What if you saw yourself like in an FPS?

Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5, Ch 6

===

Here's what I personally like and don't. I write based on this, but don't forbid exceptions.

[fables-of-new-life]

She was not the most titled woman in the room. That much was evident from where she stood — placed neither at the high end of the hall nor among the innermost circle of courtiers who clustered nearest the dais, but in that middle distance where minor nobility and well-connected gentry gathered to be seen without quite presuming to be noticed. And yet Philippe-Auguste noticed her. The ivory gown was off the shoulder, its structured bodice fitted close and laced with fine gold at the front — not excessive, not performative, but precise. It was the gown of a woman who understood that restraint, worn correctly, drew the eye more surely than ornament. The skirt fell in generous folds from the cinched waist, and she held a portion of it loosely in one hand, the gesture unhurried, as though she had been born knowing what to do with her hands in a room full of people watching her. Her figure was full in a way the bodice made no effort to disguise — the ivory fabric doing real structural work across her chest, her waist defined by the lacing before the skirt swept outward and away. Her hair was loose. That was the first thing, really — the thing that snagged his attention before the rest of her resolved into particulars. Deep auburn, almost brown in the lower candlelight, worn in long unbound waves that fell past her shoulders and moved when she moved. It was not the fashion for a formal reception. He found he did not care, and suspected she had known precisely that when she left her chamber. He was still watching when the chamberlain announced him and the room bent into its collective reverence. She curtsied with the rest — but it was her curtsy that held him. She descended with a measured, unhurried grace, the ivory skirts pooling around her, and when she rose there was a half-beat before her eyes lifted. Warm brown. Steady. They found him without searching, and they did not dart away. He said something to the Duc at his elbow — he could not have said what — and moved into the room.

His breath left him. It did every time, and every time the leaving was more complete. Solène at forty weeks was a body that had exceeded every boundary the eye expected of it. The ivory gown — the same ivory gown, or what remained of its dignity — had slipped from her shoulders entirely, the structured bodice no longer equal to the task it had been built for. It had surrendered to her, gathered now at her waist and below, doing nothing to contain the upper half of her and everything to frame the vast, heavy arc of her belly beneath. Her hair was loose around her, deep auburn waves falling across her bare shoulders and her chest, catching the light at their edges, the only soft thing about her in that moment. She had her hands on the belly. Both of them, pressed flat against its lower curve, as though she were holding it — as though without the pressure of her own palms the weight of it might simply pull her forward off her feet. And it was weight. That was the word that came to him, not fullness, not roundness — weight. The belly thrust forward and downward in one enormous, unbroken arc, the skin taut and luminous over its crest, the navel pressed outward by whatever had run out of room within. Her expression was open in the way that exhaustion made people open — the careful composure of the woman he had first watched across a reception hall entirely set aside, replaced by something unguarded and young and very tired. She did not look at him when he entered. She was looking at nothing. Her lips were parted slightly. Her hands moved in a slow, unconscious circle against the underside of the belly, and he stood in the doorway and watched her and did not speak.

Commissioned artworks by mi.ne.ral

[fables-of-new-life]

'Le Magnifique You - A Dancer's Debt'

You came to Dorenval on a caravan of seven, bearing silks and a drum and a name no one at court could pronounce properly, so they gave you a new one — Amarante, because someone thought it sounded like the flowers in the southern gardens, and because French tongues could not love what they could not shape.

You did not mind.

You had been shaping yourself to fit other people's expectations since you were old enough to arch your spine into a bridge and hold it, trembling, while your mother's hands corrected the angle of your hips. A dancer's body is not her own, she told you. It is an offering. Make it generous.

You made it generous.

The king noticed you before you noticed him.

You learned this later — much later, when it mattered, when you were already swollen and stranded and could not undo the noticing. But on the night of your performance, in the great hall of Dorenval with its unreasonable chandeliers and its walls of pale stone that threw sound back at you like a second audience, you simply danced. You danced the way you had always danced: with your whole spine, your whole pelvis, the articulation of each vertebra visible beneath the thin silk because there was nothing beneath the silk but muscle and bone and the particular geometry of a body trained since childhood to speak without words.

Your troupe performed the chain dance, the sword dance, the candle dance. You performed the solo — the one your mother had forbidden you from dancing outside of wedding celebrations, the one that was less a dance and more a slow, vertical unclothing of intent. You circled your hips in figure-eights that made the silk whisper. You dropped into a deep plié and rose again, vertebra by vertebra, belly rolling in a wave that had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the man whose eyes you finally — finally — felt on you from the high table.

He was large. That was your first thought. Not tall — large. Broad across the shoulders in a way that spoke of mass rather than athletics, thick through the chest and arms, a man who occupied his chair the way a boulder occupies a riverbed: immovably, with the quiet certainty that the current would move around him and not the other way. His beard was trimmed close. His eyes were dark and unhurried. He was watching you the way a man watches a fire he has decided to build — not with wonder but with the calm assessment of someone measuring fuel against flame.

You held his gaze through the final sequence. Your spine arched backward until your hair swept the floor, your belly lifted toward the rafters, and in the upside-down theatre of the hall you saw only him, and he was still watching, and his wine was untouched, and that — you understood with the instinct of a woman who had performed for sultans and merchants and one very enthusiastic Venetian doge — was the true compliment.

He sent for you on the third day.

Not the first. Not the second. The third — which your troupe's leader, old Hafez, said meant the king was considering, and that consideration from a man like Philippe-Auguste was more dangerous than impulse, because impulse could be sated and forgotten while consideration meant he had already decided and was merely arranging the architecture of his wanting.

Hafez was not wrong.

The king received you in a private chamber — not a bedchamber, you noted, though the bed was visible through an adjoining door, which meant the distinction was architectural rather than practical. He dismissed your chaperone with a gesture. He poured you wine himself. He asked, in slow but serviceable Arabic, where you had trained.

You told him. Your mother's troupe. Damascus, then Cairo, then Constantinople. The long road west because the eastern courts had grown unstable and the eastern appetites for dancers had grown literal — too many girls disappearing into palaces and not coming back.

He listened. He actually listened, which disoriented you more than his size or his gaze or the slow, unhurried way he held his body, as though he had all the time in the world and intended to spend it on you.

Then he said, in French, which Hafez translated: I would like you to stay.

For how long? you asked, because you were a professional and professionals negotiated.

He smiled. It was a slow, wide smile that did not reach his eyes because his eyes were already elsewhere — already traveling the line of your throat, the column of your spine, the particular way your hips sat in your body when you were at rest, which was not quite at rest at all, because a dancer's body never truly stops performing.

For as long as you please me, he said.

He pleased you first.

That surprised you. You had expected a king to be efficient — to take what he wanted with the dispatch of a man accustomed to being obeyed. Instead Philippe-Auguste undressed you with the same deliberate patience he applied to everything: slowly, with attention, his large hands — so large, you thought, your breath catching as his palms spanned your waist and his thumbs traced the defined ridge of your hip bones — working each fastening as though it were a lock to be picked rather than a barrier to be torn.

He remarked on your flexibility. You were standing before him in nothing but the silk trousers, your arms above your head in an unconscious arch of the spine that made your belly long and your ribcage flare, and he circled you slowly, his hand trailing along the architecture of your body — the sharp edges of your shoulder blades, the deep hollows of your lower back, the extraordinary elasticity of your spine, which curved inward under his palm as though trained to receive a hand there.

You move like water, he said.

Water takes the shape of what holds it, you replied.

Something shifted in his face. A deepening. A darkening. He stepped closer and his hands settled on your hips — covering them entirely, his fingers meeting over the flat plane of your lower belly — and he drew you against him, and you felt the full, startling mass of him, the density of a body built on a scale that yours was not, and something in your hindbrain — old, mammalian, knowing — whispered: careful.

You did not listen.

He laid you on furs that cost more than your entire troupe's annual earnings and he spread you open with the same care a man gives to unwrapping something fragile, and when he entered you the sound that left your mouth was not a performance. You were flexible. You were trained. You had controlled every muscle in your body since you were four years old. But you had never controlled this — the slow, devastating, comprehensive filling of him pressing into you, thick and deep and relentless, his hands gripping your hips to hold you where he wanted you while his body claimed yours with a thoroughness that left no architecture unexplored.

You arched. Your spine did what it was trained to do — curved, bowed, offered — and he gathered the arch of you in his arms and pressed deeper, and you felt something in your pelvis shift to accommodate him, a yielding that was not quite pain and not quite pleasure but something older than both.

Yes, he breathed against your throat. Yes. You were made for this.

You were not. You were made for silk and balance and the precise articulation of a body in space. But his weight was on you and his seed was coming and you were not thinking clearly enough to correct him.

You went home. The troupe moved on. Hafez said the road was hungry and the king had paid generously and there were other courts, other stages. You kissed the ruler's weathered cheek and told him you would follow in a month.

You did not follow in a month.

You followed in nothing, because six weeks after you left Dorenval your courses did not come, and then they did not come again, and the flexible, controlled, precisely calibrated instrument of your body began, with terrifying speed, to be none of those things.

You wrote to the king. You wrote in Arabic and Hafez's nephew translated, and the letter was formal and brief and contained only the facts: I carry your child. I am in the house of my cousin in the port city of Marsa. I await your instruction.

His reply came within the fortnight. It was shorter than yours.

Come home.

He gave you chambers in the east wing. A title — entertainer to the court, which was a fiction so transparent that even the chambermaids saw through it, but it gave you a function, a reason to be at Dorenval that the court could file away without too much whispering. You were to dance at feasts. To perform at salons. To earn your place, he said with that slow smile, as though you had not already earned it with the currency of your body's transformation.

But you were not prepared.

You were not prepared for what his seed — his, specifically, you understood now, his enormous, robust, relentless seed — would do to a frame built for articulation and grace rather than load-bearing. You had seen pregnant women. You had danced at feasts where swollen-bellied wives sat at the high table, and you had thought: that looks uncomfortable but manageable. You had not understood. You had not understood because you had never before been in a body that was being, cell by cell, commandeered.

By the fifth month your belly had swollen beyond anything your dancing muscles could contain. The tight, defined wall of your abdomen — the wall that had rippled and rolled and articulated each vertebra's command — had stretched into a taut, heavy drum that preceded you through every doorway and made a lie of every movement you had ever been trained to make. Your spine, that exquisite instrument, had curved under the forward drag of it, and no amount of trained posture could restore the line that had been your livelihood and your art.

Your hips had widened. Your pelvis, narrow and high-set — built for movement, not for passage, the midwife said with a cheerfulness that made you want to scream — had spread to cradle the descending weight, and the fluid grace of your stride had become a rolling, wide-stanced waddle that bore no resemblance to the dancer who had captivated a king.

And the size. The size of what was inside you. Your hands, which had once traced the precise geometry of movement in the air, now cradled the impossible geography of your own abdomen and felt, beneath the taut skin, a body that was — there was no other word — large. A skull that pressed against your cervix with a weight that stole your breath. Limbs that struck your ribs with a force that distended the skin visibly, a punch from within that the court ladies watched with round eyes when you passed.

The king's children are always large, the midwife said, as though this were a comfort rather than a sentence.

By the eighth month you could not dance. You tried — once, at a small salon, because your pride demanded it and your role required it. You managed the opening sequence: the hip circles, the shoulder shimmies, the articulate snake-arms that rose above your head like twin flames. But when you dropped into the deep plié that began the floorwork, your belly settled between your thighs like an anchor and you could not rise again without two ladies-in-waiting lifting you under the arms, and the court's laughter was kind but the humiliation was not.

You retired to your chambers and did not dance again.

Instead you walked. The corridors of Dorenval, which you had once navigated with the silent, gliding footwork of a performer, now required your full concentration — feet wide, one hand on the small of your aching back, the other cradling the low, heavy undercurve of your belly where the child's weight pooled. You felt enormous. You were enormous. The looking glass in your chamber showed you a body you did not recognise — belly vast and taut, navel protruded to a hard knob, skin stretched so thin the dark line of your linea nigra showed through like a seam in overstretched fabric. Your breasts, always small and neat — a dancer's breasts, lean and high — had swollen to heavy, aching handfuls that darkened daily and leaked a thin yellow fluid onto your chemises.

You pressed your palms to either side of your belly and felt the child shift — a slow, powerful rolling, like a turn of the tide — and you understood with visceral clarity that this body, which had been yours since birth, which you had trained and tuned and commanded like an instrument, was no longer yours. It was his. It was the king's. He had planted something in you that was growing to his specifications — large, robust, relentless — and your flexible, articulate, accommodating frame was simply the scaffolding his legacy was being built upon.

You thought of your mother's words. A dancer's body is not her own. It is an offering.

You had not understood how true they would become.

The ninth month. The fortieth week. The final days.

He came to your chamber — he came often now, his large hands finding your belly with that proprietary tenderness that made the court murmur and you tremble. He would sit behind you on the bed and pull you against his chest, his palms spreading wide over the taut drum of your abdomen, and he would hold you while the child kicked against his hands, and he would murmur French words you now understood well enough: magnificent, beautiful, mine.

On the last night — though you did not know it was the last night — he asked you to dance.

Here? you said. Like this?

Like this, he said.

He sat in the wide chair by the fire. You stood before him in a chemise so thin it hid nothing — the great globe of your belly glowing amber in the firelight, the darkened circles of your nipples visible through the linen, the stretch marks silver on your taut skin. You were enormous. You were unwieldy. You were the furthest thing from a dancer that a dancer could be.

But you were still a dancer.

You began.

Not the full sequence — your body could not perform the full sequence. But the arms, yes. The shoulders. The slow, serpentine articulation of the spine that began not in the hips but in the breath, in the ribcage, in the long muscles of the back that still — still — answered when you called them. You raised your arms above your head and your belly lifted with the stretch, the child shifting inside you, and you swayed, hips rolling in the wide, slow figure-eights that had first caught his eye.

He watched. His wine was forgotten. His eyes were dark and his breath had changed and you could see — you could feel — the effect of you on him, the particular hunger that your pregnant body ignited in him, a hunger you had not expected but had learned, across the months, to wield.

You moved closer. The dance narrowed — became less a performance and more a conversation, intimate, vertical, conducted at the distance of a breath. You stood before his chair and rolled your hips in the slow, grinding figure-eight that was the heart of the solo your mother had forbidden, and your belly swayed with the motion, heavy and low, and he reached for you.

You let him.

You let him draw you down onto his lap, your knees straddling his thighs, your belly pressing between you — vast and hot and undeniable. You continued to move. Smaller now, subtler — the rotation of your pelvis against him, the arch and release of your spine, your hands on his shoulders for balance because your centre of gravity was a thing of the past. He was hard beneath you. You could feel him through the layers of fabric, thick and insistent, and your body — your traitorous, hormone-soaked, commandeered body — responded with a wet heat that made you gasp.

Yes, he said. His hands gripped your hips, spanning them easily, his thumbs tracing the crease where your thighs met your pelvis. He lifted you — lifted you, as though you weighed nothing, though you weighed everything — and freed himself, and then the broad head of him was pressing against you, and you sank down onto him with a slow, shuddering exhale that came from somewhere deeper than your lungs.

You rode him. Slowly at first — the only pace your body could manage — your belly swaying between you, your breasts heavy and aching against his chest. He filled you the way he always filled you: completely, overwhelmingly, to the root. You could feel him pressing against the firm, lowered mass of your womb and the sensation was unbearable and electric and you moved faster, rolling your hips in the ancient rhythm of the dance that was no longer a dance but a coupling so intimate it felt like prayer.

His hands found your belly. He held it while you moved — cradling the weight, feeling the child kick against his palms while his body moved inside yours — and his face was raw with something that was not merely lust but possession, pride, the look of a man watching his legacy grow in real time.

You are magnificent, he said, and you believed him, because in this moment — belly-heavy, sweat-sheened, impaled on the body of a king — you were something you had never been before. Not a dancer. Not a vessel. Something else entirely.

You felt it building. Not the climax — though that was building too, the slow deep tightening that pregnancy had made so devastating. Something else. A pressure. Low. Deep. A giving way.

You were close. Your rhythm faltered, your thighs trembling, your belly clenching — and not just the muscles of pleasure but the muscle of your womb, tightening in a long, hard cramp that gripped you mid-stroke and stole your breath.

Philippe — you gasped, and your hands tightened on his shoulders, and the tightening came again — involuntary, powerful, a great fist clenching in your core — and you felt a pop, subtle and internal, and then warmth — a rush of it — flooding down between your joined bodies, hot and sudden and unmistakable.

His eyes met yours. He felt it too — the sudden wetness, the heat. His hands tightened on your belly.

Now? he said.

You could not answer. The next contraction was already building — a wave gathering behind the first — and your body was clenching around him and the child was pressing down and you were still straddling the king of Valdière with his seed inside you and your waters breaking over both of you and the dance was not over but it had become something else entirely.

You gripped his shoulders. You breathed. You felt the next wave cresting.

The fire crackled. The night was still, very young.

[fables-of-new-life]

'Le Magnifique You: The Knight's Wage'

You were not supposed to be here.

You were supposed to be in the southern reaches, patrolling the border on a bay mare that owed you more loyalty than any man ever had, living on hard bread and harder cheese and the clean, exhausting rhythm of a soldier's life. You were a Knight of the Thorn — a sacred order of maiden warriors whose vows forbade marriage, submission, and the bearing of children. You had sworn these vows at fourteen, kneeling before the altar of Saint Marguerite with your blade laid across your palms, and you had kept them for twelve years with a discipline that bordered on fanaticism.

Your weapon was a greatsword.

This was unusual. Most women of the Thorn fought with rapiers or short swords — weapons that rewarded speed and precision over force, that levelled the natural disparity between female fighters and their larger, heavier male opponents. You had tried the rapier. You had mastered it in a fortnight, found it wanting, and put it down. The rapier was a duellist's weapon, a weapon of finesse and footwork and the particular kind of point-scoring that turned combat into a conversation. You did not want a conversation. You wanted to end things.

The greatsword was nearly as tall as you were. Black-handled, long-bladed, weighted toward the tip in the old style, it was a weapon that most men could not wield effectively and most women could not lift above their shoulder. You carried it the way other women carried children — naturally, without strain, as though it had grown from your hand. You had trained with it for eleven years. Your arms bore the evidence: the defined, corded muscle of a woman who had swung a six-foot blade ten thousand times, the calluses on your palms thick and permanent, the tendons in your forearms standing out like cables beneath sun-darkened skin whenever you gripped the handle.

You were good at what you did. Very good.

Your body was built for the greatsword — which is to say, it was built for controlled power. You were not bulky. You were lean and corded, the dense, functional muscle of a fighter wrapped around a frame that was narrow through the waist and broad through the shoulders, the architecture of a woman whose body had been reshaped by the demands of her weapon. Your arms were your pride — long, defined, the biceps and triceps sharply delineated beneath skin that was tanned and weathered from years of outdoor training. Your shoulders were broad for a woman but not heavy, the deltoids rounded and firm, giving you the V-shaped silhouette of a swimmer or a rower rather than the narrow frame most associated with female fighters. Your abdomen was a cobblestone of muscle — the ridged, sculpted wall of a core that had to stabilise a six-foot blade through every plane of motion — and your legs were long and powerful, the thighs and calves of a woman whose footwork had to carry the momentum of a weapon that weighed half what she did.

You moved like a whip with an anvil at the end of it — all snap and recovery and devastating, controlled force, no wasted motion, no telegraph. Your strength was not the brute, crushing power of the palace guardsmen with their broadswords and plate armour. It was the strength of a woman who understood that power without control was just noise, that a greatsword placed correctly did not need to be driven hard, that the fastest way to end a fight was to be where your opponent did not expect you, swinging a blade they could not parry, before they knew you had moved.

The court called you beautiful. You did not care. You were not at court to be beautiful.

Your hair was long — longer than regulation permitted, longer than practicality advised, a river of dark hair that you braided tightly against your skull for fighting but that fell loose past your waist when you washed it, because you were vain about exactly two things in this world and your hair was one of them. (The other was your sword.) You wore it in the tight braid for combat, the plait coiled and pinned at the nape of your neck, and when you fought — when the greatsword swung and your body moved through its arcs — the braid would work itself loose, tendrils escaping to frame your face with dark, sweat-darkened wisps that made you look, the soldiers said, like a painting of a war goddess come to inconvenient life.

You wore leather, not steel. The Thorn's way was mobility — you fought unarmoured except for bracers on your forearms and a stiff leather cuirass that protected your torso without sacrificing the speed that was your second weapon. The bracers were yours, custom-fitted, dark leather buckled tight from wrist to elbow, and beneath them your forearms were ropy with tendon and vein, the visible evidence of eleven years' grip on a heavy blade. Your trousers were close-cut, your boots flat-soled for grip, and when you stood in the training pit with your greatsword resting against your shoulder and your weight settled on your hips, you cut a figure that was simultaneously feminine and martial and utterly, aggressively dangerous.

You had come to Dorenval because the Order maintained a garrison within the king's demesne — a token force, largely ceremonial, a relic of an ancient compact between the Thorn and the crown. You were the garrison's commander. You had accepted the posting with the same grim resignation you accepted everything: because someone had to do it, because you were the best available, and because the southern border had grown quiet enough to spare you.

You had not expected to stay.

The fighting pit at Dorenval was a sunken circle of packed earth at the edge of the training grounds, open to the sky, ringed by a low stone wall where spectators sat or stood or leaned on their elbows and shouted bets at one another. It was not a gladiatorial arena — nothing so crude. It was a sparring circle, a place where the king's soldiers tested themselves against one another in mock combat under the watchful eyes of their captains.

You had not intended to fight in it.

The first challenger came on your third day at court — a lieutenant of the royal guard, a thick-necked man named Géraud who had seen you running the training pommel with your greatsword and decided, with the particular confidence of a man who had never been hit by a woman, that you needed to be put in your place. He was larger than you, heavier than you, slower than you. He carried a longsword and the expectation of an easy victory.

He swung first — a wide, looping overhand strike that would have split your guard if you had been standing where he expected you to be. You were not. You had already moved — a single lateral step, your weight dropping low, your greatsword coming up not in a parry but in a short, brutal upward arc that caught the flat of his blade and redirected it past your body. The momentum of his own swing carried him forward. Your pommel — the heavy, weighted pommel of a six-foot blade — drove into the gap beneath his breastplate with a precision that came from a decade of targeting exactly that spot on larger opponents.

He dropped. Not because the blow was devastating — you had pulled it — but because the pommel of a greatsword driven into the solar plexus by a woman whose arms could swing the blade full-force was, it turned out, devastating enough. He went to his knees, gasping, and your blade was at his throat before he recovered his breath.

It took five seconds. The spectators went silent.

Géraud's face went the colour of raw beef. He demanded a rematch. You gave him one. It lasted seven seconds the second time because you let him swing twice and then disarmed him with a wrist-binding technique that sent his longsword spinning across the packed earth and left your greatsword's tip resting against the hollow of his throat with a gentleness that was more insulting than a strike.

He did not ask for a third.

The next challenger came the following day. Then another. Then two more in the same afternoon. They came with swords and staves and bare fists, with armour and without, with strategies borrowed from every fighting tradition in Valdière and beyond. They came because you were a woman and because you carried a blade larger than most men could lift and because the garrison commander of the Thorn — a woman! commanding men! at the king's own court! — was an affront to the natural order that needed correcting.

They lost. All of them. Not because you were stronger — most of them were stronger, though not by as much as they expected, and the ones who tried to overpower your guard learned that the muscle in your arms was not decorative. They lost because they fought the way men fight when they are fighting a woman: with the expectation of an easy victory that made them careless, and with a style built around power and reach that left gaps a quicker fighter could exploit. You exploited every gap. Your greatsword gave you reach they did not expect from a woman and force they could not match when your speed brought it to bear. You were precise, economical, and utterly without mercy, and by the end of the second week the fighting pit had become your theatre and Dorenval had run out of soldiers willing to test themselves against you.

After each victory you stood in the centre of the ring — greatsword planted point-down in the earth, one hand resting on the crossguard, your weight settled on one hip, your braid half-undone and dark hair escaping in wisps around your face — and you looked at the crowd the way a wolf looks at sheep. Not with hunger. Not with malice. Just with the calm, absolute certainty of a predator surveying territory it has already won.

You should have stopped there. You knew this. A wise woman would have let the defeats speak for themselves, accepted the grudging respect of the garrison, and settled into her posting with the quiet satisfaction of a battle won without blood.

You were not a wise woman. You were proud.

The challenge — your challenge, the one that changed everything — was born from arrogance and mead and the particular recklessness of a woman who had never lost a fight and therefore could not conceive of losing one.

It was the third week. A feast. You were seated at the lower tables because the Thorn held no formal rank at court, and you were drinking more than you should because the feast was dull and the toasts were long and the mead was better than anything they served in the southern garrisons. Your hair was loose — washed, drying, falling past your waist in a dark cascade that caught the candlelight and drew the eyes of men you did not notice because you were not at court to be noticed. Your leather bracers were still buckled on your forearms — you had come from the training ground and had not removed them, and the combination of formal feast and martial gear drew looks that you registered with the same indifference you registered everything that was not combat.

A knight — a young one, eager, not unintelligent — was seated across from you, and he was discussing your record in the pit with the frankness of a man who had consumed even more mead than you.

"Seven," he said, counting on his fingers. "Seven men you've bested. Géraud twice. That Brabançon sellsword with the twin sabres. Even old Duval, and he fought in the Flemish campaigns."

"Nine," you corrected. "Two more this afternoon. You missed them."

"Nine." He whistled. "Is there anyone at court who could beat you?"

"No," you said. You said it the way you said everything — flatly, without bravado, as a simple statement of observable fact. The sky is blue. Water flows downhill. No one at court can beat you. Your greatsword leans against the table beside you and your hand rests on its handle with the casual intimacy of a woman touching a part of her own body.

"Then the question isn't who," the knight said, grinning. "It's what. What would you stake against a man who could?"

You should have said nothing. You should have smiled and changed the subject and let the mead do its work and woken up the next morning with nothing more than a headache and a story you could laugh about.

Instead you said: "Myself."

The table went quiet. Not the whole hall — just the cluster of knights and soldiers within earshot, who had been half-listening and were now fully attentive. You felt their attention the way you felt an opponent's weight shift: a change in the air, a redistribution of pressure.

"If any man — or woman — can best me in the pit," you said, and the mead was speaking now, and your pride was riding it like a current, "I will bear their children."

The silence spread. A woman at the next table dropped her cup. The young knight across from you had gone very still, his grin frozen on his face like a mask that no longer fit.

"That is… a significant wager, Commander," he said carefully.

"I have never lost," you said. "The wager costs me nothing."

Your greatsword stood beside you, black-handled and patient, and the candlelight ran along its blade like a fuse.

The challengers came in waves.

The first wave was the same men you had already beaten, their pride stoked by the enormity of the stakes into trying again. They lost faster the second time. You were not merciful in the rematch — you made each defeat clean and quick and unambiguous, because you understood that a close fight would only encourage them, and a close fight was a story, and stories drew more challengers. Your greatsword swept their guards aside with the economical authority of a blade that outweighed theirs by three pounds and out-leveraged them by eighteen inches, and your footwork — the quick, precise, weight-perfect footwork of a woman whose body had been built around the demands of her weapon — put you where their guards were not before they could adjust.

The second wave was different. These were men who had not fought you before — knights from the outer provinces, visiting soldiers, a pair of sellswords who had heard about the wager and ridden to Dorenval specifically to claim it. They were better than the first wave. More skilled, more disciplined, less prone to the careless aggression that had undone your earlier opponents. One of them — a tall, angular Gascon with a rapier and a fencer's footwork — was fast enough to get inside your guard, where the greatsword's length became a liability, and for a moment the crowd held its breath because it looked, for the first time, like you might actually be challenged.

You ended it by releasing your back hand from the grip and shortening your hold, converting the greatsword into a close-quarters weapon with a facility that spoke of thousands of hours' practice. The pommel struck the Gascon's wrist. His rapier dropped. Your blade was at his chest in the same motion. Fifteen seconds. Your longest fight. You noted it. You did not show your concern.

The third wave was smaller but more dangerous: two of the king's own household knights, men who had trained under the same masters and fought in the same campaigns. The first you beat in eight seconds — a greatsword sweep that disarmed him before he completed his opening combination. The second — a stocky, powerful man named Bertrand who fought with a longsword and a patience that was almost feminine — gave you twenty seconds and a bruise on your ribs that purpled by morning. He was good enough to parry your greatsword, strong enough to hold his ground when you drove forward, smart enough to wait for you to overextend. You won by moving inside his reach, where his length became a liability, and driving the pommel of your blade into the gap beneath his breastplate with a force that would have cracked a weaker man's sternum. He dropped to one knee, winded, and you stepped back and planted your greatsword in the earth and waited for him to rise, because you were not cruel and the fight was over.

Bertrand looked up at you — at the loose dark hair and the leather bracers and the greatsword standing upright in the packed earth like a monument — with something that was not defeat but recognition. You are extraordinary, his eyes said. And you are going to lose eventually, and you do not know it yet.

You did not know it. You had won nine fights before the wager. You had won fourteen since. Twenty-three victories in the pit, and not a single loss, and your pride had swollen to fill the space where caution should have lived.

You stood in the centre of the ring after Bertrand's defeat, breathing hard, your braid half-undone and dark hair straggling across your face, the defined ridges of your abdomen visible beneath a training shirt soaked with sweat, your greatsword resting against your shoulder with the casual one-handed grip that had become your signature pose. You looked up at the gallery where the court sometimes gathered to watch, and you saw — for the first time — that the king was watching too.

Philippe-Auguste was leaning on the stone balustrade of the gallery, chin on his fist, his dark eyes fixed on you with an expression you could not read at that distance. He had been there for some time, you learned later. Days, perhaps. He had been watching your matches — all of them, or nearly all — with the same patient, assessing attention he gave to matters of state.

You met his gaze. You did not look away. A knight of the Thorn did not lower her eyes for a king.

He smiled. It was a slow, wide, private smile that you would come to know very well in the months ahead, and it made something tighten in your chest that had nothing to do with combat.

Then he descended from the gallery, and the court parted for him, and he stepped to the edge of the pit and looked down at you — at the greatsword on your shoulder, at the leather-and-muscle frame of you, at the loose dark hair and the flushed, sweat-sheened face of a woman who had just won her twenty-third fight — and he said, in a voice that carried to every corner of the training ground:

"I accept your challenge."

You laughed.

You did not mean to — it escaped you, a sharp, involuntary bark of genuine amusement that echoed off the stone walls of the pit and drew stares from every direction. The king of Valdière. The man who sat on a throne and signed treaties and ate from gold plates. The man whose hands, you were certain, had not gripped a weapon in anything more strenuous than a hunting ride in years.

He wants to fight me.

You looked up at him — at his broad, heavy-shouldered frame, at the thickness of his arms beneath the silk of his doublet, at the large hands resting on the balustrade — and you thought: he is built like a bull, but bulls do not fence. You thought: he is large, and largeness is slow, and my blade is longer than his reach. You thought: this will be over in four seconds and I will have embarrassed a king and that will be a problem, but it will be a problem I can solve, because I solve problems with my body and my body has never failed me.

"I am serious," Philippe-Auguste said, and his voice carried the particular weight of a man who was accustomed to not needing to repeat himself.

"Your Majesty," you said, and you kept the laughter out of your voice through an act of will that cost you more than any fight, "with the greatest respect — you sit a throne. I sit a horse and carry a blade that most men cannot lift. There is a difference."

"There is," he agreed. "I have also sat a horse. I have also bled. I have also fought." He paused. "I have also watched you very carefully, Commander, for rather longer than you realise."

Something in the way he said carefully should have warned you. It did not. You were too busy being amused, too busy cataloguing the ways in which a king — even a large, robust, surprisingly solid king — would fall short in the pit against a woman who had been fighting since she could walk and whose greatsword had tasted the defeat of every man who had dared challenge it.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Midday. The pit."

He turned and left. The court dissolved in his wake like silt in a current.

You stood in the centre of the ring, your greatsword in your hand, and you smiled, because you were going to win, and winning was the only thing your body knew how to do.

You did not sleep well that night.

You told yourself it was the excitement of the spectacle — the largest crowd the pit had ever drawn, the court mobilised by the sheer improbability of their king stepping into a sparring ring. You told yourself it was the change in routine, the earlier supper, the unfamiliar quiet of the chambers you had been moved to for the occasion — larger chambers, better furnished, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the king's staff expected the outcome to require different accommodations.

You did not tell yourself the truth, which was that something in the king's eyes — that slow, considering, patient gaze — had lodged beneath your ribs like a splinter and would not come free.

You rose before dawn and went to the training ground alone. You ran through your forms — the Thorn sequences, the greatsword drills that your mother had taught you, the dirty close-quarters tricks you had learned from a Brabançon mercenary in exchange for three weeks of kitchen duty. The blade moved in your hands the way it always moved — like an extension of your body, like a limb you had grown rather than a tool you had learned. Your arms burned with the familiar, welcome fire of exertion. Your core tightened and released with each swing. Your footwork — quick, precise, the footwork of a woman whose body had been shaped by the demands of a weapon as tall as she was — carried you through the forms with the fluid, predatory grace that had become your signature.

Your body was sharp. Your reflexes were clean. You felt the familiar readiness coiled in your muscles like a spring, and you told yourself: he cannot beat you. No one can beat you.

The sun climbed. The pit filled. By midmorning the stone wall was four deep with spectators and the gallery was packed with courtiers in their silks, and the noise of the crowd was a living thing, a rumble of anticipation that you could feel through the soles of your flat-soled boots.

Philippe-Auguste entered the pit and the court gasped.

Not because of the clothes — though those were surprising enough: a plain training shirt and loose trousers, no armour, no insignia of rank — but because of what they revealed. You had seen him in doublets and mantles, in the architectural garments of kingship that concealed as much as they displayed. Now, in a simple shirt that clung to his frame, you saw what the clothes had been hiding, and the splinter beneath your ribs twisted.

He was enormous. Not fat — never fat — but built on a scale that made the word large feel insufficient. His shoulders were broader than yours by half again, slabs of muscle across his upper back that shifted visibly when he rolled his neck. His arms were thick — not with the lean, springy cord of your own fighter's frame but with dense, heavy mass, the kind built by years of sword-work before the throne had claimed him. His chest was deep, his waist solid, his legs planted wide on the packed earth with a stability that spoke of a low centre of gravity and immense foundational strength. He was not fast. You were certain of that. He did not need to be fast. He needed to be once — to catch you, to land a single blow, to close the distance your greatsword kept — and the mass behind it would end the fight regardless of how many times you had touched him first.

He carried a longsword. A fine one — beautifully balanced, with a hilt wrapped in dark leather — but a longsword, not a greatsword. Shorter than yours by a full foot and a half. Lighter by three pounds. On paper, the advantage of reach and leverage was entirely yours.

You adjusted your assessment. This would not be four seconds.

"Commander," he said, and raised his blade.

"Your Majesty," you replied, and raised yours.

The pit went silent.

You moved first. You always moved first — it was your advantage, the opening velocity that put opponents on the defensive before they had settled. Your greatsword cut a flat arc through the air — not at him, not yet, but across his line of advance, a sweeping barrier of steel that established distance and forced him to navigate around your blade rather than through it. Standard opening. You had used it in every fight. It set the terms: your reach, your power, your territory.

He navigated. Not around the sweep — through it. He stepped inside the arc of your blade with a timing so precise it could not have been instinctive. He had timed the swing. He knew its speed, its radius, the fraction of a second during which your blade was committed to the arc and could not be redirected.

He had been counting.

You recovered — fast, faster than any opponent had seen, the greatsword snapping back in a reverse cut that should have caught him across the ribs. His longsword was there. Not fast — placed. It was exactly where your blade was going to be, as though he had drawn a map of your attack before you launched it. Steel met steel with a ring that sang off the pit walls, and the impact traveled up your arms — and you felt, in the shock of it, the raw, immovable mass of the man behind the blade. He had not been pushed. An inch. By a swing that had sent larger men staggering.

Your greatsword was your advantage. His body was his.

You pulled back, redirected, tried a different angle — a low, rising thrust toward his leading knee, using the blade's length to strike from outside his reach. Again his blade intercepted, not with speed but with position, as though he had already seen the path of your attack and simply occupied its terminus.

You disengaged and circled. Your breathing had quickened. Not from exertion — from recognition. You knew what he was doing. You had seen it before, in the rare masters who fought not by reacting but by anticipating — men who won not by being faster but by knowing. He was reading your patterns. The patterns you had honed across twenty-three fights. The patterns he had — you understood now with a cold clarity — been studying. From the gallery. For days. Perhaps weeks. Every match, every combination, every favoured sequence and habitual tell, catalogued and memorised by a mind that treated combat the way it treated statecraft: as a problem to be solved through information.

He had done his homework. You had not.

The realisation made you angry. Anger made you faster. You came in with the full Thorn sequence — the rapid-fire combination of sweeps and redirects and devastating close-quarters pommel strikes that had undone every opponent you had faced, the sequence your mother had called the storm because it was relentless and came from everywhere at once. Greatsword high, greatsword low, pivot, pommel strike, pivot again, the footwork so fast your boots barely touched the earth, the blade a blur of steel around your body.

He weathered it. Not perfectly — you caught him twice, once on the hip and once across the ribs, and the crowd roared at the impacts — but he weathered it. He took your strikes on his body and his blade the way a cliff takes waves: absorbing the force, giving ground grudgingly, and when the storm passed he was still standing and his blade was still moving and his eyes were still fixed on you with that terrible, patient attention.

You were breathing hard now. Really hard. The storm was exhausting — it was designed to end fights in seconds, not to sustain a prolonged exchange — and you had used it and it had not worked and the king was still there and he was not tired and his position was perfect and you were beginning to understand that you were in trouble.

He pressed. For the first time in the fight he moved forward, and the forward motion was not fast but it was inevitable, the grinding advance of a man who knew he had weathered your best and was now coming to collect. His longsword drove your greatsword aside — not with finesse but with the simple, overwhelming authority of mass applied to steel — and suddenly he was inside your guard, where your blade's length became a liability, and his body was right there, vast and hot and smelling of effort, and you felt what every opponent of a larger fighter feels: the mathematics of leverage turning against you.

You tried to pivot. Your footwork — the footwork that had never failed — slipped on sweat-slicked earth. Not much. An inch. Less.

It was enough.

His blade swept your leading ankle and your balance dissolved. You staggered, caught yourself — of course you caught yourself, your core strength was exceptional, your recovery was instant — but in the half-second of instability his free hand closed on your wrist, and his grip was not a fighter's grip but a giant's, fingers closing around the bones of your forearm — around the leather of your bracer, around the muscle and tendon beneath — with a pressure that made your joints sing, and he pulled you off-balance entirely and bore you down.

You hit the earth on your back. Your greatsword fell from your grip and rang against the packed earth. His weight came down behind his blade — not all of it, you were dimly aware, he was not trying to kill you — and the practice edge of his longsword settled across your collarbone and pressed, and the packed earth was warm against your shoulder blades and the sky above was very blue and very far away and the pit was absolutely silent.

You lay beneath him, chest heaving, your braid destroyed and dark hair fanned across the earth, your arms — those corded, greatsword-honed arms — pinned beneath his mass, the defined muscles of your abdomen trembling with the aftermath of exertion, and you stared up at the king of Valdière and understood — with the clarity that only defeat can provide — exactly how thoroughly you had been outmatched. Not by strength. Not by speed. By mind. He had done what no opponent had ever done: he had watched, and waited, and learned, and then he had come to the pit and taken your unbeatable storm and survived it and waited for the single instant when your own momentum betrayed you, and in that instant he had ended it.

You were not angry. You should have been. You had been beaten before in training — every knight had — but never in the pit, never in front of the court, never when the stakes were this. Your body was telling you to be furious. Your pride was screaming. But beneath both, in the quiet, clear place where the best fighter in you lived, you felt something unexpected.

Respect.

He earned this.

"Yield," he said. His voice was calm. He was barely winded.

"I yield," you said.

The crowd erupted. You did not hear it. You were too busy lying on the packed earth trying to understand what had just happened to the architecture of your life.

Philippe-Auguste stepped back and offered you his hand. You looked at it — at the broad palm, the thick fingers, the calluses you had not expected on a king's hand — and you took it, and he pulled you to your feet with a single easy motion that confirmed what the fight had already told you: his strength was not performative. It was real, and deep, and it lived in him the way yours lived in you — as a fundamental fact of his body rather than a skill he had acquired.

He did not release your hand immediately. He held it, and his thumb traced the edge of your leather bracer, and something in his eyes — something warm and proprietary and entirely too knowing — made you pull your hand free with a sharpness that was more reflex than intention.

"You fought well," he said.

"I lost," you said. You did not say it bitterly. You said it the way you said everything — as fact.

"You lost once. In twelve years." He looked at you — at the loose hair and the leather bracers and the greatsword lying in the earth behind you and the lean, corded, combat-trained frame of a woman who had just been brought to the ground for the first time in her adult life. "That is not a record to mourn."

"It is a record that is over." You bent and retrieved your greatsword. The familiar weight of it settled in your hand — six feet of black-handled steel, the weapon that had never failed you — and you planted it in the earth and leaned on it, and the stance was not victory but it was not defeat either. It was the posture of a woman regrouping. "And a wager to honour."

His expression shifted. Not surprise — he had known, you realised, that you would honour it; he had perhaps counted on it — but something warmer, something that looked, in the afternoon light, almost like admiration.

"You do not have to," he said. "A wager made in mead is—"

"A vow," you interrupted. "I said it. I meant it. I have never broken my word and I will not start because the winner was a king rather than a soldier." You met his eyes. "When?"

He studied you for a long moment. You could see him weighing something — not your willingness, which was evident, but your readiness, which you were not certain you possessed.

"Tonight," he said.

You went to his chambers because that was where the king received and the challenger did not dictate terms. You went clean, your hair damp and loose down your back — washed, unbraided, falling past your waist in a dark cascade that you had not let anyone see since you were a girl — wearing the closest thing to a dress you owned. A simple linen shift that you had removed from the bottom of your travelling chest with hands that were not quite steady.

You kept your bracers on. You did not know why. Some things were armour even when they were leather.

You were not nervous. You told yourself you were not nervous. You had faced swords and fists and the blunt, terrifying mathematics of combat your entire adult life, and the prospect of a king's bed was not a battlefield. You were a knight of the Thorn. You had sworn to face every challenge with courage. This was a challenge.

You were nervous.

His chambers were warm, lit by candles that cast the room in amber. He was waiting for you, and he had shed the training clothes, and in their place he wore a loose shirt that hung open at the throat and trousers that sat low on his hips, and you saw the full, unmediated reality of his body for the first time and your stride faltered.

You had spent twelve years among soldiers. You knew what male bodies looked like — had seen them in every state of exertion, injury, and undress. You were not naive. But Philippe-Auguste was not built like the soldiers you knew. He was built the way a warhorse is built — with a mass and a density that spoke not of training but of breeding, of a lineage that had produced men of extraordinary physical substance for generations. His chest was broad and deep, covered in dark hair that thinned to a line down the centre of his abdomen, and the muscles beneath were not the lean, functional cord of a fighter but the thick, layered slabs of a man whose body had been designed — by genetics, by God, by whatever force shaped human bone and sinew — to be substantial.

Your own body was right there, visible through the thin shift — the lean, defined architecture of a fighter, the ridged abdomen, the corded arms still buckled in their leather bracers, the broad shoulders and narrow waist of a woman built for the greatsword. You were not soft. You were not voluptuous. You were a weapon, and beside him you looked like a blade beside a boulder, and the contrast — the sheer, overwhelming difference in scale between your honed, efficient frame and his dense, foundational mass — made something tighten in your throat that was not fear but was not entirely not-fear either.

"Commander," he said, and his voice was low and warm and amused. "You look as though you are preparing to fight me again."

"I am assessing the terrain," you said, and your voice was steadier than you felt.

His eyes dropped to your bracers. "You are still wearing your armour."

"Old habits."

He smiled. That slow, wide smile. "Come here."

He did not take you the way soldiers take women — quick, efficient, practical. He took you the way he fought: with patience, with attention, with the deliberate, unhurried confidence of a man who knew he had already won and intended to savour the aftermath.

He undressed you himself. His large hands — the hands that had gripped your wrist in the pit and ended the fight — worked the ties of your shift with a care that was almost ceremonial. When his fingers found the buckles of your bracers and began to unlace them, you stiffened.

"Leave them," you said. Your voice was hoarse. "Please."

He paused. He looked at you — at the warrior woman in her linen shift with her dark hair loose and her leather bracers buckled tight, the last piece of armour on a body that had never been bared to anyone who had earned the right to see it. Something in his face softened.

He left them. His hands moved elsewhere — tracing the defined ridge of your collarbone, the sharp line of your shoulders, the cobblestone firmness of your abdomen where the muscle was so developed that his palm could feel each individual ridge. You were not soft. You were not yielding. You were a body built for function, and he touched you with the slow, appreciative attention of a man examining a weapon he intended to wield.

When he drew the shift over your head and you stood before him bare, his breath changed. You heard it — a thickening, a deepening — and you looked down at your own body and saw it through his eyes: the lean, taut, combat-trained frame, the defined ridges of muscle across your abdomen, the sculpted lines of your arms and shoulders, the narrow hips and strong thighs of a woman built for the greatsword. Your breasts were small and firm — a fighter's breasts, lean and high, the nipples dark and tight — and your belly was flat and hard, the muscle visible even when you breathed. You were a weapon, and he was looking at you as though you were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"Extraordinary," he murmured, and his hand came to rest on the flat, hard plane of your stomach — a touch so different from a blade's touch that you flinched, then stilled, then let him feel you.

His palm was warm and rough against the defined muscle of your abdomen, and something in the weight of it — the proprietary, possessive weight of a large hand laid on a body it intended to claim — made your breath catch in a way that combat never had. You were not accustomed to being touched with deliberation. You were not accustomed to being held. The men you had bedded had been quick and impersonal, functional exchanges between bodies that understood each other as instruments of release. This was not that. This was a man unmaking you with his hands, and you were not prepared, and your training offered nothing.

He laid you on the bed and the furs were soft against your back and his weight — that immense, unapologetic weight — settled over you, and you felt the full length of him against your body and understood, with the same clarity that had told you the fight was lost, that you were outmatched here too. Not because he was forcing. Because he was good. Because his mouth on your throat was patient and knowing, because his hands on your body learned its geography with the same attention he had given your fighting patterns, and because every touch was calibrated to draw from you a response you had not chosen to give.

You gasped when he entered you. Not because it hurt — though the stretch was extraordinary, his girth demanding an accommodation that made your hips shift and your spine arch — but because of what it felt like. You had been penetrated before and it had been a sensation, something registered and endured and enjoyed in a distant, physical way. This was not distant. This was immediate, and total, and it reached into a place beneath your muscles where nothing had ever reached, and the sound that came from your mouth was not a sound you recognised.

He held your hips and moved, and each thrust was a complete thing — slow, deep, purposeful — and you felt your body yielding around him in ways that had nothing to do with flexibility and everything to do with surrender. Your legs came up — the strong, greatsword-trained legs, the thighs that could hold a horse between them at full gallop — and they gripped his flanks, and you felt the muscles in your abdomen — the muscles that had woven your body into armour — clench and release around him, and he groaned, and you realised that your strength was not useless here, that the body you had built for fighting could be turned to a different purpose, and the realisation undid you.

You broke. Not like a fighter breaking — not with the controlled, teeth-clenched resistance you brought to every battle — but like a woman breaking, open and raw and involuntary, your spine arching, your hands clawing his back, a sound leaving you that was guttural and desperate and utterly unlike the controlled, precise woman who had stood in the pit that afternoon. He drove you through it and past it and into something else, and when he finally spent himself — deep, so deep you felt the heat of him pooling against the innermost architecture of your body — you were shaking, and your eyes were wet, and you did not know if you had won or lost or if the distinction still applied.

He did not withdraw immediately. He held you, his weight a warm, crushing, safe pressure on your body, and his hand came to rest on the flat plane of your belly — low, proprietary, warm — and you felt his seed inside you and you understood what he had done and what it meant and you did not flinch, because you had given your word, and a knight of the Thorn honoured her word even when the honour cost her everything.

"That," he said against your damp skin, "is the beginning."

You did not tell anyone.

For three weeks you continued your duties — training the garrison, running the pit, maintaining the fighting form that was the only identity you had ever known. You ran drills at dawn with your greatsword, the blade moving through its forms with the same fluid authority it had always possessed, your arms and shoulders and core responding as they had always responded. You sparred with the soldiers. You felt the familiar burn of muscle under exertion and told yourself that nothing had changed, that your body was still your body, that a single night — however thorough, however devastating — could not undo twelve years of discipline.

You were wrong.

Your body told you first. The fatigue — deeper than training fatigue, a bone-level exhaustion that sleep did not touch. The nausea that crept in at odd hours, unconnected to exertion or meal. The tenderness in your breasts — small, firm, a knight's breasts — that made the compression of your training shirt suddenly unbearable. You ignored all of it. You were a soldier. Soldiers endured.

Then your courses did not come.

You knew before you confirmed it. You knew the way you knew an opponent's next move before they made it — instinctively, in the body, in the deep place where knowledge lives before it becomes thought. You were carrying his child. The king's child. The wager's price, paid in blood and seed and the quiet, relentless multiplication of cells in a womb you had sworn never to fill.

You did not weep. You did not rage. You sat on the edge of your cot in the garrison quarters, your hands flat on the hard, flat plane of your belly, and you felt — nothing. A great, grey nothing that was not peace but was not despair either. Just the blankness of a woman whose map of the future had been erased and who had not yet drawn a new one.

You trained harder. You trained meaner. If your body was changing — and it was, God, it was, faster than you had imagined possible, the king's robust genes asserting themselves with an urgency that seemed personal — then you would force it back into line through sheer will. You ran further. You sparred longer. You swung the greatsword until your arms screamed and your shoulders burned and the defined ridges of your abdomen ached beneath a new, unwelcome fullness that no amount of drills could flatten.

By the second month your training shirt no longer sat flat across your abdomen. The cobblestone abs — your proudest feature, the visible evidence of a core that could stabilise a six-foot blade through every plane of motion — were softening, the definition blurring as a firm, rounded swell pushed outward from beneath. You bound your belly in tight linen, the way you had seen peasant women do, and it hid the change for another few weeks, and then it didn't.

By the third month you could not hide it. The swell was unmistakable — a firm, rounded prominence that pushed against your training shirt and made your trousers sit differently on your hips. Your body, which had been a weapon honed to perfect function, was becoming something else, and the something else was not a weapon. It was a vessel. And the vessel was growing larger by the week.

Your greatsword felt different in your hands. Not heavier — your arms were as strong as they had ever been, perhaps stronger, the hormones of pregnancy flooding your system with a blood engorgement that made your muscles feel dense and hot and capable. But your centre of gravity had shifted. The swing that had been second nature for eleven years now required adjustment — a fractional correction in the placement of your feet, a degree more lean in your recovery — and you felt it, and it maddened you, because your body had always been perfect in its function and it was becoming imperfect in ways you could not control.

You stopped sparring. Not because you wanted to — the decision tore at you like a wound — but because you were a knight, and a knight did not risk the life of a child in combat, even mock combat, even a child you had not planned and were not certain you wanted. Your body was no longer yours to risk. The wager had seen to that.

The garrison noticed. The court noticed. They saw the greatest fighter Dorenval had seen in a generation — the woman with the greatsword and the leather bracers and the waist-length braid — walking the corridors with a hand resting on the swell of a belly that grew larger each week. They saw the defined muscles of her arms softening, the cobblestone abs disappearing beneath a taut, rounding curve, the narrow waist thickening and then vanishing as the child made its presence known. They saw the way she moved — no longer the fluid, predatory stride of a fighter, but the careful, wide-stanced walk of a woman whose body was being reshaped by something she could not fight.

You felt their eyes. You felt their judgment and their curiosity and their pity. You held your head high because you were a knight of the Thorn and you did not lower your gaze for anyone.

But you were leaving. You had decided. You would discharge yourself from the garrison — quietly, without spectacle — and return to the southern reaches, where no one knew you and no one would watch your body swell with a king's child, and you would have it, and you would raise it, and you would never fight again because the Thorn did not take back mothers and you had known that when you made your wager and you would not ask for exception.

You wrote the letter. You packed your travelling chest. You laid your greatsword beside it — the black-handled blade that had been your identity for eleven years, the weapon that had won twenty-three fights and never lost one — and you looked at it for a long time and tried not to think about what it meant that you were putting it down.

You told your second-in-command that you would be gone by week's end.

The king came to your quarters on the evening before you were to leave.

You did not expect him. You were sitting on the edge of your cot in your linen shift, your greatsword across your knees — you had been holding it, running your thumb along the flat of the blade the way you did when you were thinking, a habit so old you did not remember forming it. Your hand rested on the firm swell of your belly — four months along now, unmistakable, the skin taut over the round mass of it, your navel beginning to flatten, the defined muscle beneath giving way to the firm, unyielding curve of a womb that was larger than it should have been at four months because the child inside it was his child, and his children were always, always large.

He did not knock. Kings did not knock. He simply appeared in your doorway, filling it, his broad shoulders dark against the corridor light, and he looked at you — at your packed chest, at the greatsword across your knees, at your hand on your belly, at the letter on the table — and his face did something complicated that you could not read.

"You are leaving," he said. Not a question.

"I am discharging myself," you said. "The garrison no longer requires—"

"I did not ask about the garrison." He stepped into the room. "I asked why you are leaving."

You looked up at him. Your hand tightened on the greatsword's handle. "I assumed Your Majesty had no interest in—"

"You assumed wrong."

The words landed like a blade strike — precise, unexpected, devastating. You stared at him. He crossed the room in two strides and knelt before you — the King of Valdière, on his knees on the stone floor of a knight's quarters — and his hands came to rest on either side of your belly, his large palms cupping the firm swell of it, and you felt the warmth of him through the thin linen and something in the grey nothing cracked.

"I have been watching you," he said. "Not for weeks. For years. The Order of the Thorn is dying, Commander. There are fewer than forty of you left. You train, you fight, you swear your vows, and you die without issue, and the order shrinks, and the kingdom loses one of its oldest lines of defence." His thumbs traced the taut curve of your belly. "I do not want a knight. I want a legacy."

You did not understand. "A legacy."

"A new order." His eyes were dark and fierce and close. "Built on your blood and mine. Children of the Thorn — raised in the tradition, trained from birth, bred for strength and speed and the particular ferocity that you carry in your body. A dynasty of maiden knights, Commander. Not one generation but generations. An order that does not die because it does not forbid the thing that perpetuates it."

You stared at him. The grey nothing was cracking wider, and beneath it something was rising — something vast and terrifying and warm, something that felt like purpose, like the first time you had held a blade, like the first time you had won a fight, like every moment in your life when your body had told you this is what you were made for.

"You want me to breed," you said flatly, because you were still a soldier and soldiers did not use euphemisms.

"I want you to build." His hands tightened on your belly. "With me. This child —" He pressed gently, and you felt the life within shift, a flutter like a fish turning. "— is the foundation. There will be more. I will give you a house, lands, a garrison of your own. You will train your daughters — and your sons, if they have the temperament — in the Thorn's way. And when you are too old to fight, you will have raised a generation that fights in your place."

You thought of the southern border. The long patrols. The loneliness that you had called discipline and that was, in truth, just loneliness. The constant, exhausting imperative to be the best, to never lose, to never rest, because resting meant someone would come and take your place and your place was all you had.

You thought of what it would mean to stop fighting. Not to stop — never to stop, you would die before you stopped — but to fight for something larger than your own survival. To build something that would outlast your body. To submit — and the word did not taste like defeat in your mouth the way you had always imagined it would. It tasted like architecture. Like foundation. Like the first stone of something that would stand for centuries.

"You planned this," you said. "The challenge. The wager. You planned all of it."

"I watched you," he corrected. "I learned you. And then I gave you the opportunity to choose what I already knew you would choose." He looked up at you. "You chose to honour your word. You chose to carry this child. You chose not to ask for my help. These are not the choices of a woman who lacks purpose, Commander. These are the choices of a woman who has not yet been offered one worthy of her."

You looked down at his hands on your belly. At the king kneeling at your feet. At the child — his child, yours — growing inside a body that had been built for the greatsword and was now being asked to build something else.

At the blade across your knees — the weapon that had been your identity, your purpose, your body's reason for existing — and you understood, with the same clarity that had told you the fight was lost, that you were being asked to choose between the blade and the life it had never allowed you to have.

"I am a fighter," you said. "I do not know how to be anything else."

"Then fight," he said. "Fight for this. For what this can become." His eyes held yours. "And let me fight beside you. You have carried everything alone, Commander. You do not have to carry this."

The grey nothing broke.

It did not break the way you broke in the pit — sudden, involuntary, a collapse of structure. It broke the way ice breaks on a river in spring: slowly, then all at once, and what rushed in beneath it was warm and terrible and alive, and you were crying, and you did not cry, you were a knight of the Thorn and you did not cry, but you were crying, and his arms were around you, and your belly was pressed between you, and the child moved, and you understood — at last, at last — what your mother had meant when she said the words you had dismissed as superstition:

The strongest submission is the one freely given.

You stayed.

He gave you the east wing — not the cramped garrison quarters but the chambers that had once housed the Order's founding commander, spacious and sunlit, with a training yard of your own that adjoined the king's. He gave you a household, a steward, a budget for the new order's foundation. He gave you a place at his table — not at the lower tables but at the high table, beside him, where the court could see you and understand.

Your greatsword hung on the wall of your new chambers. Not retired — never retired, you would sooner cut off your own hand — but waiting. Waiting for the body that had wielded it to return to the form that could wield it again. You touched its handle each morning the way you touched your belly — with the proprietary tenderness of a woman handling the two most important things in her life.

Your body changed, and you let it.

You let it the way you had once let your training reshape you — not passively, but with discipline and intention. You watched in the glass as the lean, corded frame of the fighter softened and swelled. The defined ridges of your abdomen — the cobblestone core that had stabilised your greatsword through eleven years of combat — disappeared beneath the smooth, taut curve of a belly that grew larger each week. Your arms, still corded with muscle beneath the softening overlay, retained their strength even as they lost their sharp definition. Your shoulders stayed broad. Your legs stayed strong. But your centre — your core, your foundation, the place from which all your power originated — was being reshaped by something larger than training.

By the sixth month your belly was a great taut drum that preceded you through every doorway. Your leather bracers still buckled on your forearms — you wore them always, even now, even when every other piece of your fighting gear had been set aside — but they looked different against a body that was no longer a fighter's body. They looked like relics. Like the last outposts of a territory that had been conquered.

You felt the child — his child, robust and large, kicking with a force that distended the skin visibly — and you did not mourn the body you were losing. You had given bodies to the blade. Now you gave this body to something larger.

He came to you at night. Not every night — he had his queen, his mistresses, his kingdom — but often enough that you learned the rhythm of him, the weight and warmth and the particular way his large hands cradled your changing belly while his body moved inside yours. You were not his wife. You were not his mistress. You were something the court did not have a word for: a knight who had been bested and who had chosen, in her defeat, to build.

He would lie behind you in the dark, his arm draped over the great swell of your belly, his hand resting where the child kicked, and he would talk to you about the future. The new order. The training compound he was building on the eastern edge of his demesne, with its sparring pits and its barracks and its hall of arms. The children who would fill it — yours first, then others, recruited and trained and raised in the Thorn's tradition. The legacy that would outlast you both.

And you understood, in those nights, what you had never understood in the pit. That winning was not the only form of strength. That submission — true submission, freely given to someone worthy — was not the absence of power but its redeployment. That you could stop fighting for your life and start fighting for something beyond it, and the fighting was the same, only the stakes had changed, and the stakes were better.

You lay in the dark with his hand on your belly and you felt his child move beneath his palm — strong, robust, already his — and you thought: I am still a knight. I am still a fighter. I have simply found something worth losing for.

On the wall, your greatsword hung in its brackets, black-handled and patient. Your leather bracers buckled on your forearms. Your hair loose on the pillow, dark and long and still the colour of a painting of a war goddess.

The child kicked. The king's hand pressed closer. Somewhere beyond the window, in the training yard that would one day be filled with the children of your body and your purpose, the future was waiting to be built.

You closed your eyes. You breathed. You did not need to win.

For the first time in your life, you did not need to win.

[drpeppertummy]

too lazy to draw this im just thinking about belly shapes

[id in alt]

[dotjpreg]

To my fellow birth prose writers/readers/enjoyers

which do you prefer:

Vocalizations as descriptions, e.g. "They cried out."

Vocalizations as dialogue, e.g. "Ahh!"

A little bit of both.

My preference depends on the circumstances of the birth.

I don't enjoy vocalizations/Results button

Voting ended onAug 4

[labourink]

it's centaur birth thoughts time again y'all

[labourink]

This time I'm more thinking about being a centaur and giving birth,,,,

Centaur pegasi who are oviviparious, laying eggs in their partners that hatch months later; a first labour to pass the shells, then the second labour a few months later to expel the foals

Centaur that breeds with a pegasus centaur without knowing how they reproduce being surprised by a weight in their womb as their partner lays eggs inside them, being surprised later with the hatching and first labour, and surprised months later when they have to deliver foals that just keep stretching them out, around the hooves, the head, the shoulders, the wings- the stretch doesn't seem to end

But also consider the reverse of it.

A pegasus centaur, worried because they can't feel the eggs, how can they be sure that they're pregnant until one day it's just obvious, the swell of their womb under their hide, and they expect the first labour but never get it.

Thinking the second labour is the first labour and expecting to lay the eggshells but being surprised by the weight of a foal in their birth canal

[labourink]

consider being a human and mating with a pegasus centaur....

[thepregkeeper]

heavy eggs clunking into my womb... struggling to pass the eggshells after they hatch compared to the process being not easy, but a lot quicker for the pegasus centaurs...

actually having to give birth to not only a whole FOAL, which is barely possible for a human as-is, but what sounds like MULTIPLE of a very large variant of them... good gods above, that stretch would be divine

[tfpregjourney]

Blog #35: My 8th Birth Story: The Birth Photoshoot

Finally got a nice collaboration with this client, a couple (Charles and Maggie), who worked as photographers. They had wanted to start a family, but a couple miscarriages, including an ectopic pregnancy had stopped their dreams in their tracks. That was until they found me through word of mouth. They reached out to me and we hashed out an idea: They’d provide me with professional photos and videos for my surrogacy services website and in return, I’d be a surrogate for them. Granted there’s a huge cost of carrying a surrogate baby vs. a maternity photoshoot, but we managed to get a good deal for both parties. Finally, when I reached 42 weeks, we, along with the couple and their small crew departed to the private beachfront AirBNB that we had scouted and booked months ago. We arrived in the late afternoon and took the rest of the day to prepare for the couple days long photoshoot. The first day of the photoshoot session was mostly just having me show off my body and huge pregnant belly in various angles within the property, wearing various kinds of outfits, like flowy dresses, a skimpy swimsuit, tank tops and leggings, and even naked photos. The photographer was able to capture my body in great detail and I looked… stunning in the photos, especially considering the sheer size of the belly I have. Even Melody got in on the action and we took photos as a couple. There were also some… NFSW-ish photos that we took, but that’s for our private collection. Seriously, getting a photograph of me riding Melody is wild. The next day, my labor had begun right around the morning. Melody’s letting the labor went as natural as possible, giving me the full brunt of the labor pain so I can show the full emotions. The photoshoot mostly revolved around the close ups of my body, the contractions and also showing off my body posture and mood whenever the contraction hits. I was all over the place, on the toilet, in the shower, on the yoga ball, just hitting off all the checklists of what a laboring mother would be doing to get the best collections of photos. ___ “You ready for this? We only get one shot at this.” Melody said to Charles. “Yeah… almost done.” He said, making the final adjustments to the camera. “Ugh… come on… hurry up!” I groaned. I was in the transition phase, feeling the urge to push, hitting me so badly. I was wearing a tank top that barely covered my belly, cardigan, and pastel blue leggings, swaying my hips and leaning on a nearby table. “Okay we’re ready!” He said, starting the reel. I stood upright and faced the direction Charles instructed me to and then, right on cue, another contraction hits and then… *POP* A splash of fluids burst onto the floor, all caught on camera, both in video, and in continuous shots. “Perfect~” He thumbed up, checking the shots and seeing the fluids midair as well as my reaction to it. “And… we can start with the pushing now.” He said. “Finally… let’s slowly get you into the car.” Charles said as he picked up the camera and took shots of me as I was slowly guided by Melody downstairs, as if I was going to the hospital. I took a deep squat in the middle of the stair, feeling so pushy. I was moaning loudly as I was pushing so bad, feeling the baby’s head coming down super slowly.

Soon enough, I was waddling through the entrance, and right into the front seat of the car. There’s no videos this time around, so I can just sit down in the idle car, with Charles and his crew taking pictures of me from all around the car. “Push hard, Jessie, put all your efforts into it.” Charles said. I went into my headspace, recalling my first birth experience, spreading my legs wide and began pushing. “OH NO IT’S COMING OUT!” I groaned and felt the baby’s head begin to crown right into my soaked leggings. Everyone witnessed the moment and captured it on camera, the baby’s head slowly getting more and more visible with each push. When the baby was fully crowning, the contraction ended and I had to take a breather. “Oughhh… come on focus…” Charles couldn’t help himself. “Pose for me, put your hand on the baby’s head.” He said before taking closeups of the crowning head tenting my leggings. “That’s wonderful… now lean forward a bit.” He said. I followed suit, leaning forward and feeling the baby’s head get pressed into the seat, pushing the baby’s head back a bit. :Ohhh… he’s coming back in…” I moaned in response before leaning back again. I took deep breaths and continued pushing when the next contraction hit and the photographers witnessed the head fully comes out, making a huge bulge between my legs. “OH GOD THE HEAD IS OUT!” I moaned, looking down and watching the bulge, sticking out of me. Charles and the crew took several shots of bulging pants, as well as my body and face right at the moment. The contraction stopped again. “That’s perfect… alright… we… gotta reset for the next pose. Mrs. Melody?” Charles said, looking at the photos before calling my partner. Melody came over and examined the situation. “Alright… Never done this before, but this should work…” She said to me, I took a breather and slowly lowered my pants a bit to expose the head. I pulled open my pussy wide as Melody put her hand unto the head. “Deep breaths, Jess…” Melody said. I braced myself for the contraction and then let my body pulled the baby back in, while she helped by pushing the head back in. It felt like I was being shoved hard by a huge dildo. Took a couple minutes, taking several contractions, with a lot of heavy breathing until the baby was fully back inside me, right at the opening. Melody took me out of the front seat and helped me put the leggings back on before guiding me to the backseat, where I leaned to the side lying, spreading my legs wide in front of the crew. I pushed again and felt the head crowning into my leggings once more. The crew took pictures of me as the baby fully crowned and was bulging out of me. “Hooo… head’s almost out again…” I said before pushing once more and got the head fully out. “Wonderful. Think we can do one more position…” Charles said, looking at the size of the car before nodding. “Yep, one more.” He said before letting Melody into the car and do the same thing again, shoving the head back in.

Once the head’s back in, Charles instructed me to kneel on the backseat,  facing the back of the car. I nodded, understanding his idea. I slowly moved into position and then started pushing again, lowering my body with each grunt, feeling the head slowly coming out into my leggings, the head tenting downwards until the head fully pops out of me. “Fantastic. That’s a wrap for car births.” Charles said. The crew backed away from the car, before Maggie approached after seeing the results of the first of many sessions. “How’d it feel?” Maggie asked me. “Felt like the baby’s gonna fall off me any minute…” I smirked and laughed. Maggie examined the bulging head. “So hot…” She said, cupping and rubbing the head, feeling the contour of the baby’s head that she and Charles will raise together.

Maggie and Melody slowly guided me off the car. “There we go… nice and slow…” She said, “Alright, now for the second session… Maggie, back away, let’s have Jessie walk with Melody supporting her like this.” Charles said. I nodded and took slow steps into the house, while the crew were taking shots of me walking with the head sticking out of me. “Where to?” I asked the crew. “Just… follow us, but also, follow your urges.” Charles said. I nodded and took a couple steps into the living room before another contraction hit. “Mel… support me.’ I said, going into a deep squat, the leggings getting so tight around the bulging head. The baby’s head is not budging, no matter how much I push. The contraction ended before I slowly stood up and waddled again… until we reached the stairs. I had to climb the stairs while the head’s poking out of my leggings, and even stopping midway to push. Finally, when all of us were upstairs, we finally finished the second session. “Alright… that’s a wrap for the second session.” Mel quickly came down and removed the pants and then pushed the head back in once more. “How are you feeling?” Melody asked. “Feels… so… it’s wild that I’m doing this….” I laughed. “How about you? I kinda imagine you’re focusing hard on keeping me like this…” I asked Melody. “I’m okay… just watching you makes it worth it doing.” Mel said to me, massaging her head. . With the pants off, we walked into the bedroom and changed wardrobe, mostly around the pants, putting on a mini flowy skirt and panties and a. “Alright, let’s have you sit down on that chair for a bit.” Charles said, the crew taking a picture of me in my new outfit. Another contraction hits and I push, feeling the baby’s head starting to tent my panties. ”The head’s coming…” I said, the flowy skirt starting to show a bulge forming between my legs. Charles approached and lifted the skirt to see the crowning head. “Beautiful, just like that… and push again now…” I nodded and pressed onwards, the head slowly getting to fully crowning. “Hoooo…. Ohhh…” I moaned as the head reached the widest point, The white panties fully covering the head. 

Charles let go and shot the picture of the skirt covering the baby’s head. “That’s good… Hmmm… Let’s have you stand up.” He said. Mel helped me up and turned around so Charles could take a picture from behind and underneath me. “Alright, Jessie… Now… I need you to push the head back in like this, maybe close your legs a little, as if you’re embarrassed.” Charles described it and I followed. I heaved and closed my legs and heaved before slowly pushing the head back in. “Alright… now… maybe kneeling, just lean on the chair.” He said. “Now we’re gonna take it slow. I’ve been wanting to take photos and videos of this one.” He continued.

I nodded and leaned on the chair before pushing. I can feel the opening’s getting tighter, making the birth a lot more difficult. “Hoooo… this is a hard one…” I groaned and pushed, feeling the head slowly coming out. The head’s starting to bulge my underwear once more, while the cameras are pointing upwards, capturing the skirt, the tented panties, and my underbelly. I kept moaning and pushing, the head slowly coming out, taking several contractions just to get the head to fully crown. “It’s almost out… Hoooo…” I moaned before pushing again. “Ohh… here it comes…” I said, feeling the head’s getting past the widest point and then with a bit more push, the head finally came out once again. “Hooo… you got it?” I asked Charles and the crew. “Fantastic~ Damn… getting late… this was so fun to shoot.” He said, seeing the sunset from outside the window. “I think… there’s room for one more session?” I asked Charles.  “Hmm… yeah I think we can… well… I got what I need for today, so… this one’s gonna be for you and Melody, free of charge.” Charles said, turning the lights on. Melody came over and cupped the bulging head before pushing the head back in once again. “Just one more… okay… come on.” Melody whispered to me and pulled me into standing up. “Wanna do a naked one? Or… jeans?” Melody asked, offering me the choice. “I… think I.. I wanna have a naked birth.” I moaned, taking off my shirt and skirt and panties, and then Mel also stripped herself. “Alright… in that case… come on…” Melody pulled me onto the bed, guiding me to side lying, legs as closed as possible. Melody inserted her fingers into my pussy and pushed the baby’s head a bit more to make sure it’s not around the opening. “I’m gonna tie your legs, okay?” Melody whispered to me before procuring a tight rope and tied my legs around my ankles, then around my knees. “God… I knew you’d make me do this someday… mmmh…. This is gonna be a fun one.” I said, looking at Mel before kissing her. Melody lied behind me, rubbing my belly as I pushed, the baby’s head now at the opening once more and starting to crown. I can feel the head pressing and I can feel my body wanting to spread my legs so badly… but “Shhh… don’t open your legs… deep breaths.” Melody said, reaching down and holding the baby in with her fingers. “Take it slow…” She whispered. I nodded, rubbing my hardened belly before giving slow pushes. The head’s slowly crowning, the head pressing my thighs to make room. I bent my knees upward a bit, so there’s a bit more room for the head. “That’s it. Slowly…” Melody moaned, looking over my pussy, watching the crowning head. “Ohhh… wanna spread my legs so bad…” I moaned, my legs shaking and aching to open. I just kept pushing until the head was fully crowning. “Almost there…” Melody said, cupping the whole head, keeping the head from fully out. I pushed but there’s no movement… “Mel… ngh… the head…”. “I know… not yet… heave and breathe…” Mel said to me. I puffed up and heaved through, feeling the burning ring of fire, before Mel finally let go and then the head came out.

“Ahhhh… head’s out… oughh…. Fuck…” I moaned, feeling the head’s sliding and touching the back of my thighs. “That’s perfect… Alright, day 1’s done!” Charles said. “Got a lot of great photos.” He said. “Now we just need tomorrow and we’re done!” He said. I squirmed, feeling the head resting behind my thighs… as much as I wanted to get this baby out now… we still need one more day… “Alright… ough… Mel… think it’d be better to keep the baby in.” I said. Mel agreed and removed the ropes before pushing the head back in, keeping the baby’s head nested right around the opening, before putting on the tightest belt unto me. “I’m gonna make sure to keep him in, the belt’s just for safety, in case I lose focus.” She said, I nodded and finally got back up. The rest of the night was just reviewing the fabulous photos, admiring the views, and seeing how professional the photos turned out. Even my old raw footage could not compare to the quality of their photos and videos… all the while feeling the baby inside me wanting to get out so bad, as the head kept pressing into the chastity belt. After finishing up… I was back with Melody… She probed my belly to confirm that the baby’s doing fine, with the heartbeat going strong. I continued laboring while Mel took a shower. When she got out, she found me squatting, my body leaning on the bed, and I’m pushing hard, but unable to get the baby out… “Oughh… fuck… I wanna push so bad…” I moaned loudly, reaching down and cupping the belt, my fingers going under the belt and feeling the sliver of the baby’s head. “Deep breaths… breathe… you can get the baby out tomorrow… Let’s get you to the shower now…” Mel said to me, helping me stand up and into the shower. She helped me clean my body while I just focused on conserving my strength. “Definitely not gonna do this kind of shit anytime soon… this hurts so much…” I complained to Melody. “I know… I know… we’ll have you do an easier one next, okay? This is for your surrogacy work, after all…” Melody said, reminding me of the bigger picture. “You’re gonna get so many clients after this.” She told me to lift up the mood.. I put on a modest onesie before getting into the bed, my legs permanently spread apart because of the head resting around my pelvis. I tried to get as much rest as I could as tomorrow’s session’s gonna be a long one. ___ “Alright, I’m going to open the belt okay? Deep breaths…” Melody said as we get prepared for the session. She unlocked the belt and then quickly put on a skimpy bikini, barely able to cover the incoming baby’s head. “Hooo… alright… we’re ready.” I said to the photographer crew. We went outside towards the beach area where the photographer has set up a picnic for us to shoot photos with. In the open, I sat down on the laid towels and spread my legs and began pushing once more, the head slowly pressing against the bikini until the head finally came out. “Alright perfect… time for the main event…” Charles began taking photos of me, while I kept breathing to not push the baby, and Mel keep focusing on maintaining the position. Then I stood up and continued posing for the camera, letting the photographer takes so many more photos. “Perfect… last thing… we gotta get you into the waters.” Charles said, changing to a GoPro for the shot. “Hokay… Mel… help me out?” I waddled into the waters until I’m belly deep and took deep breaths and began swimming as best as I could… all the while the baby’s head dangling between my legs. Charlie recorded myself swimming from behind, focusing on the baby’s head that’s poking out of me… It was only a couple minutes, but they were able to capture the footage they needed.

“Alright that’s it! We can wrap this up…” Charles said. They helped me get out of the waters and guided me back to the shore where the laid towels await… Melody stood behind me while Maggie and Charles sat in front of me as I went into the deep squat and pushed hard. With the sunset as the backdrop, the baby was finally born right into the couple’s awaiting hands. I felt relieved as it’s finally over… “It’s done…” I said in a happy relief.  The couple held the baby for several minutes before they passed it to me so I could calm down and breastfeed the baby. “Thank you…” Maggie said to us. “It’s… I know we asked for a bit too much… but thank you…” She said.

That night was a blissful sleep as I was so tired from everything. The baby’s resting with Maggie, while Charles, Melody and the other crew packed up so we can part ways tomorrow. We finally left and returned home, then we received the pictures from them a couple weeks later. “Hopefully this will revitalize the work…” I said as I scrolled through the final product, picking the best of the best, and praying that these will help get me more clients.

[chepram]

[stucksilly]

I can't stop thinking about situations where the size of someones womb is the only thing preventing them from doing something.

Like reaching for something on the counter, or just out of the reach past their overgrown body. Having to turn to the side to open doors.

Squeezing through the doorway would be fine if it weren't for the septuplets in the way. Widened hips would slide right out if their massive womb weren't jammed between the armrests.

I just love it

[preg-lix]

May I add some things that my belly causes problems about?

Putting on shoes/bending over. Gymnastic bending is required

Closing the fridge door, must turn sideways

Sitting at desk is a new puzzle every time. Alternately, balancing laptop on my belly so I don't have to sit at my desk

Steering wheel vs belly

Getting out of a low riding car is terrible. No leverage, the slide-and-up movement is impossible when I'm heavily pregnant

You are correct that counter tops are terrible

The balance and bending needed to put on pants is frankly cruel

Carrying laundry baskets is a new adventure

[wombbound]

[preggolover-1]

Last date night before baby #9 comes 🤰🏼🥵 What do you think happened that night?

[pleasure-victim]

Concept: scientists invent a drug that makes birth orgasmic in order to reduce the number of c-sections. A side effect is that the more babies you’re pregnant with, the more intense the orgasms. This results in some people secretly taking fertility drugs to get larger litters so they can have mind-bending birth experiences. Eventually so many people are taking these drugs that labor and delivery units become full of people packed full of four, five, even six or more babies, their enormous bellies high in the air, clutching the sides of the bed with their thick legs spread as they moan and writhe in pleasure. The entire labor is orgasmic, each contraction feeling like an orgasm that peaks for multiple minutes, their lower bodies soaked not from their waters breaking, but juice from the constant squirting. Pushing is on another level, and as their pussies begin to bulge with the descending heads they can’t help but talk dirty throughout the incredible stretch. They scream in pleasure as they crown, squirting around the head, some choosing to hold the skull there for a few minutes longer so they can enjoy the stretch and some giving a big, lusty push so it pops out. Their engorged tits spray milk as they cum out baby after baby, fully enjoying the experience of being a birthing machine.

[tbgblr2]

What happens late at night.

He stood there, his mouth agape as his very, very pregnant wife stood at the foot of the bed.

Without ceremony or warning she tugged down her pyjama bottoms, leaving her bottom half naked. He tried to rise, do something, but he couldn’t move he was fixed in place.

“It’s time” she said. Was he imagining it.. was she speaking… sensually?

She leaned forward, one hand on the bed between his legs, opened her own legs to a slight squat and there was a sudden splash as a gush of water was seen falling from between her legs… accompanied by a low moan, as if she was… orgasmic?

“Babe… are you ok?” Seems he can still speak.

“I’m perfect babe.” She purred. “Just lie back and enjoy the show.”

She reached down and grabbed the bottom of her pyjama top, lifting it up over her belly, up to her breasts which she caught in the fabric and lifted up, finally releasing as the top was pulled up, her breasts slapping back down against her belly as the top finally passed over her head and gets dropped to the floor.

“Oh look at that you are enjoying it…” her eyes focusing at the growing tent under the bed sheet covering him. He tried to reach an arm out but couldn’t move any part of his body.

She pulled the tie from her ponytail, her hair spilling down around her shoulders. Like some sort of Hollywood special effect she swings her head and her hair falls perfectly into place.

“What the hell?” He says, to himself, completely bewildered.

“Babe… you aren’t relaxing. I can’t do this without you supporting me… with your eyes.”

She pulls back the bed sheet and he finds himself naked, erect. And still unable to move. He wasn’t tied down or anything, just couldn’t move anything.

“Just let it happen…” she said, crawling on her hands and knees onto the bed. Her breasts and belly hanging down. Her head reached his cock and she lowered her head down onto it, her wet lips slipping slickly down the shaft.

She let out another sensual moan as she pressed her belly down onto his legs and he felt the belly getting tight.

“Contraction?” He asked. She made an affirmative sound which vibrated up and down his cock, sending a shockwave down his spine. Whatever was happening right now amped the sensitivity he usually felt up to maximum. He tried to shiver, but couldn’t.

She pulls her head up, sucking as she goes leading to an audible pop as she lets go of his cock with her lips, only to lift herself up shuffling forward on her knees so she was straddling his hips.

“Are you going to ride me?” He asked… getting into the swing of things.

“No silly… you won’t fit with this big head in here.” As she bucked her hips forward rubbing her slit up and down his shaft accompanied with moans of pleasure.

He finally put two and two together to realise what was going on. “You’re in labour?”

“Got it in one baby…” she continued to slide up and down without actually letting him slip in.

“This can’t be right… isn’t it supposed to be painful?”

“Pain… as well as pleasure… is all in the mind.” She was getting breathy at her movements, rubbing faster and faster. “It’s coming… it’s coming… I’m coming.” She shrieked but there was no sign of pain in the exclamation, only pure pleasure, her smiling face beaming as she came down from whatever high she was on.

She crawled backwards up his body so her knees rested either side of his torso, her belly pressing down against his hard shaft and her breasts resting against his thighs. Her ass – and perhaps more importantly given the current situation – her pussy - was inches away from his face.

He saw a trail of slick juices elongate and drip from her opening as she groaned, putting effort into a push. She didn’t seem to be uncomfortable in any way whilst doing it. She pushed again, her back end lifting closer to his face and her belly pressing down further into his waist as she let out one of the most sensual sounds he ever heard.

“Can you see the head?” She panted as she set into another push. He was bewildered. Unable to act to do anything other than speak so he settled with saying that no, he couldn’t see anything.

“Oh good… I’ll have to push more.” She actually sounded ecstatic for needing to keep going. She got right back into it, her grunting, moaning sounds echoing in the bedroom. She slipped a hand back under her belly and used two fingers to spread her lips. “Does that help, can you see it… please say you can!”

He gulped. He saw it. A dark, hairy mass just visible when her lips were parted. He got excited.

“Yes baby, yes, I see it. I can see our baby. You’re doing so well!” He was desperate to move, to reach out, to touch it but he was frozen in place. Her head turned back and she looked at her husband and smiled, blowing him a kiss as she started to push once more.

He watched as the viscous fluid dripped from between her legs and splashed onto his chest as the room filled with the sound of her moaning.

“I can feel it, it’s right there” she squealed but it wasn’t in pain, she giggled at the end of the exclamation.

“What can I do, how can I help?” He said, eyes open wide and focused between her legs watching the dark shape move and grow as she pushed more and more. She removed her fingers, her lips slipping back in place and covering the head again.

“Just tell me how well I’m doing. I love hearing your encouragement.” She was still actively pushing but was not out of breath, seemed to be actively enjoying things.

He took up the mantle “you’re doing great babe, keep up the good work. Now push for me, let’s see the head. Good girl!” Her response was magical, a low groan that rumbled from her chest as she pressed her body hard against him and pushed. Her efforts were rewarded by the teardrop shape of the head head starting to poke through between her lips.

“I can see it, keep going!” He encouraged, so she pushed hard again, more and more of the head becoming visible as she put in the work.

He watched enraptured as the head grew and grew her lips sliding back to let more and more of it push through. She pushed harder and harder, her body pressing against his as she exclaimed how good she felt and how tight everything was. She shivered in orgasmic bliss as she finally pushed out the head with another good-natured squeal, a splash of the amniotic fluid gushing over his chest.

Suddenly he was rocking left to right. Suddenly he heard a noise he hadn’t heard before this had started. Suddenly he was awake, his wife jostling him from sleep. The tone of her voice and look was very exasperated.

“Joe… Joe. Wake up. My waters have broken, I think I’m in labour. We’ve got to get to hospital!”

[exponenshul]

What if giving birth was as typical as using the bathroom. Like “Excuse me a minute, I’ve really gotta go give birth” or “I hope there’s a delivery room close by, or I’m gonna drop this kid right here!” …That would be silly I think. But also hot

[exponenshul]

What if giving birth was as typical as using the bathroom. Like “Excuse me a minute, I’ve really gotta go give birth” or “I hope there’s a delivery room close by, or I’m gonna drop this kid right here!” …That would be silly I think. But also hot

[tbgblr2]

The Water Park Day

With the summer (and blisteringly hot days even over here in the UK) well and truly apon us, heres a little something that we thought up to titlate your kinky little tastebuds. As usual many thanks to @allkindsofpreg for the co-authorship, and @highlyrelevantnumber for editing and tweaking to get it readable as a coherent story.

----

The record-high summer heat had been brutal for everyone, but especially for you and your large, overdue belly. Our non-airconditioned house was almost as stifling, and in lieu of continuing to run up the water bill with cold showers, I suggested a trip to the amusement park. It was a little ridiculous to take someone so pregnant to a place where most of the attractions were off-limits, but they had a sizeable water park, and that was enough incentive for you.

You pawed through the dresser drawer of rarely used clothing items to find a swimsuit that would fit. A bikini would have been the most likely to accommodate the bump comfortably, but you hadn’t bought any new ones and your old ones would never contain your newly enlarged breasts and hips. After some more digging past old Halloween costumes—including the sexy maid outfit that had gotten you into this predicament in the first place—you found a one-piece that looked like it just might cover everything.

It was easy enough to remove the loose shift dress that had constituted most of your wardrobe over the last couple months, but getting the suit on was a different beast. The material was designed to stretch, but it looked so small compared to your curves, and your body was in a persistent state being of slightly damp at all times.

You laid the swimsuit on the floor and stepped into the leg holes… and that’s as far as you could get. You tried shuffling over to sit on the bed and roll the fabric up your legs, but that turned out to be both unsuccessful and uncomfortable. And that’s how I found you—sitting naked on the edge of the bed, belly spilling over your lap and a wad of bathing suit on the floor.

“Need a little help?” I asked, failing to completely hide the amusement in my tone.

“It is the least you can do, considering this is entirely your doing.” You lifted your leg and I slid the suit on one side, then the other.

“Is it now?” I helped heave you upright so I could pull it up your thighs, pausing at the waist. “I seem to recall you being the one wanting the double thrill of having sex without protection and possibly getting caught at the party.”

My hands lingered at the lower curve of your belly, and you leaned forward to give me a kiss. “That was a good night,” you recalled with a hum of satisfaction.

“You sure this is going to fit?” I asked as I tried to tug the fabric up and out toward the crest of your stomach.

“You promised me a day of cool, weightless water. We will make it fit.”

It took about twenty minutes—including two five-minute rest breaks—but we did finally get the straps over your shoulders. The bold colors and pattern did little to negate the overly stretched balloon look.

“It looks like I’m trying to smuggle in a beach ball,” you giggled, examining yourself in the mirror.

My hands pressed into the firm sides of your stomach. “Pretty solid beach ball.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” you arched your back in a stretch, and something deep in your core twinged. You winced and let out a little ‘oomph’ of surprise.

Of course I noticed and came up to wrap myself behind you. “Everything alright?”

You waved off my concern. “Same old, same old—big baby, small wife.” You grabbed your sun hat from the counter and caught my eye in the mirror. “So, pool?”

"Just a moment" I grinned, as I dropped my jeans to the floor, your 'humph' of frustration at the ease of me dropping my clothes soon replaced by a licking of your lips at the anticipation of me dropping my underwear soon after.

I didn't disappoint. Your swimsuit was practically see-through as it was stretched so much - and it was evidence by the bulge in front of your eyes.

A quick bend at the knees, my fingers tugging down my underwear, and as I stood up, you noticed the pole sticking out at 90 degrees from the rest of me.

"My my…" you were lost at the sight of it. "No… I just spent 20 minutes getting into this thing, no way I'm getting out until I feel 20 degrees cooler at least…"

I could only chuckle as I pulled up my swimming shorts which I had fished out of the drawers. I had to reach in to twist my cock a little to get it to sit down the side of my inner thigh and get caught on the netting, otherwise it could get a bit embarrassing.

Pulling my jeans over the top, and sticking my underwear back in my pocket for later after I was dried, I helped you up off the bed, and we headed for the car.

Thankfully, the water park offered towels as part of the entry price, so that was one less thing to bring with us, but I was polite and carried the bag as you heaved your body down the stairs behind me and squeezed into the passenger seat of the car.

Getting to the amusement park only took thirty minutes, but with you in your gravid state, that was thirty minutes too long to be bent double in a car. To say you were pleased to stretch your legs was an understatement. The idea of getting out of the airconditioned car to go back into the heat outside wasn't exactly your idea of a good time, though.

What shocked me was the fact that you didn't want to go to the toilet soon after we got out of the car. You shook your head. "I can't get this bloody suit off me. Not without help. I'll cross my legs… or make the pool water a little bit warmer if need be."

I gave a tutting noise and giggled, but as we travelled, hand in hand to the front gates of the amusement park, swiped my credit card, and walked through the doors, we caught sight of the crowd.

It was a warm summer day, of course the place was going to be crazy packed. The queue board was saying thirty minutes wait for everything, some as long as two hours. Don't think we would get any opportunity to get onto any rides, but turning right at the entrance and under a covered walkway took us to the water park.

It was as busy as the main park had been, but we found two loungers with access to the main pool, and, after dropping my trousers and pulling off my top, I dashed over (again to grumbles at my agility) to pull a few towels out of the store.

Finally, helping you back up onto your feet, your coverup discarded, we stepped into the cooling waters, now suddenly waist deep as we made our way down the steps.

The baby had been sitting lower and lower in your pelvis for weeks now, making walking or sitting or even sleeping uncomfortable. But once your belly was submerged, you must have made some very inappropriate sounds of pleasure, judging from the sideways glances you were getting as well as the somewhat conspicuous readjusting of my swim trunks.

The water was warmer than you would have liked, overly heated by the burning sun and the number of bodies in it, but it would still be difficult to coax you out at some point.

If your suit had been slightly see-through before, it was practically obscene now that it was wet. Absolutely no curve or crevice or texture was left to the imagination. But you were fine with that—as long as you stayed in the water, no one would notice, and you had no intention of getting out anytime soon.

You still weren’t quite as agile as me in the water; you couldn’t really flip or dive or freestyle swim, but at least you could walk without needing to sit down every few minutes to give your back a break. This all proved a little too tempting for me, though, as I pulled you into a kind of water dance and whispered dirty things into your ear.

“God, you look so sexy right now.”

You would have argued that that was impossible, but you could feel the evidence of it pressed against your skin through my suit. “Yeah? Think you can fuck me into labor later?”

I groaned. “Later is too long from now.” My hands traveled lower, below the curve of your stomach, and I rubbed my knuckles firmly against your clit through the fabric. “Want to risk some more indecent exposure charges?”

“You might have to cut this swimsuit off of me in order to do that,” you warned, gripping onto my shoulders and trying not to make any sounds or facial expressions that might draw attention.

My finger slipped beneath the tight hem between my thighs and stroked once, teasingly, before pulling back out again. “Don’t tempt me with a good time.”

Honestly, all the edges of this tight suit were painfully digging into your skin, and you would have been happy to see the thing torn to shreds… but you also hadn’t brought any other clothes to change into and needed something to wear home.

Another twinge tugged at your insides, and you leaned into my shoulder. “I don’t think the baby is too fond of this thing either,” you grumbled, and I rubbed at a spot where it felt like there might have been a foot jutting out against your skin. “Can’t we get our own pool built?”

I laughed. “Where? On the balcony?”

“A small one would fit.”

“I’m not even sure we could get an inflatable one set up before the baby comes.” Then, when you continued to pout, “We can look into it when we get home.”

Eventually, it was our hunger that drove us out of the pool. Despite the plea of a miserable pregnant woman, they would not allow food to be eaten whilst in the water.

“Ugh, why is this humidity even worse than it was a few hours ago?” you groaned as you heaved yourself from the water, one hand on the handrail and the other in my tight grasp.

“Because now you’re all wet,” I said, wrapping an assistive arm around your waist once you got to the top step. “Not that I think that suit will hold much water, stretched as it is right now.”

We barely made it over to the lounge chairs before you collapsed onto the one that had our towels slung over the back of it. You must have snoozed for a bit while I stood in line to order our lunch, because when you opened your eyes next there was a tray of food and a pair of virgin daiquiris on the table.

It took you another second before you realized what had awakened you—yet another tightening sensation in your stomach. Leave it to Braxton Hicks to ruin a good pool day.

I sat down sideways on the lounger facing you, as you tried to lift up into a sitting position to grab your food.

You failed. Twice. You gave me big puppy dog eyes and finally asked for a hand up as I jumped up and offered to help you sit upright.

“You make that look too easy” I heard you mumble under your breath. I couldn’t help but grin.

As I leaned in to kiss you, I whispered: “And you make growing our baby easy, my dear.”

You coughed and grinned, reaching out for the frozen drink. After taking a long drag on the straw you finally looked up and smiled “don’t you forget it when it comes to changing that little baby. Dad gets a turn at that, too.”

We both giggled as your free hand reached down to your belly again, rubbing at the taught skin (and even tighter swimsuit covering it).

“Little kiddywinks wants to make it clear she knows we are talking about her?” I asked. We didn’t actually know the sex of the baby, but you had your hunch, and I was just rolling with it. Said baby would be dressed in yellow and green for its first set of baby grows either way.

“That, or my body doesn’t like being so constrained. Folding me in half with nowhere for the bump to stretch to isn’t exactly comfy.”

“But… “ I interrupted. “It feels good in the water.”

You nodded, “so good” taking another big mouthful of the drink.

We moved onto our food - burgers - typical theme park fare, but aside from the twenty dollar price tag, they were quite tasty.

Another bite, another sip of drink and you looked a little worried.

“I need to stand up” you groaned. I looked at you with concern in my eyes. “Heartburn. Being folded over REALLY doesn’t agree with me.”

A nod from me and I got up, helping you up in turn. You let out an appreciative groan as you arched your back to stretch it - I got a face full of Lycra fabric stretching and struggling to keep its stitching in the process as you walked back to the pool.

You had taken on the pregnancy waddle - both hands pressed behind your back above your hips, your belly pressed out. Yeah I had to bite my lip and hope it wasn’t apparent to the onlookers what was going through my mind by the shape of my shorts.

As you walked down to the water, submerged waist deep once more, your hands were cupped under your belly and you were pulling up, as if to try and lift the baby off something that was causing you pain.

It wasn’t unusual for you to only be able to take a couple bites of food before the limited space your stomach could occupy was full, but it seemed like the baby was particularly offended by this choice of meal. The dull ache in your back now wrapped around all the way to the front, squeezing and sharpening. The water helped, but not as much as you’d hoped.

You took a couple more trips in and out of the pool—with my assistance—to grab more nibbles of food, but it ended up costing more energy than was gained and eventually you gave up and let me finish off the plates.

Although it didn’t seem possible, the meal left you even bigger and tighter in your swimsuit than before. Everything pinched, pulled and squeezed, and your discomfort must have been apparent because I quickly came up behind you, wrapping my arms around your waist and underneath the belly.

“Little one still causing you trouble?” I asked, thumbs stroking across the dangerously stretched fabric over your stomach.

“Somehow her feet are in my lungs and her head is between my legs.”

“Didn’t think there would be any danger of that in this suit, I figured she would be hugged in tight” I said, hands once again wandering lower.

You turned so that you were facing me, pulling as close as you could with your huge globe of a stomach in the way. Admittedly, we were not very close, so I pivoted you to the side so that you were kind of sitting on my lap—a feat you only attempted because the water made it so I wouldn’t be totally crushed. From this angle, it was easy enough for me to reach your lips, your breasts, between your legs.

If anyone was looking too closely they might have noticed, but most of the naughtier play was happening beneath the surface of the water. We still split apart like teenagers about to get caught making out in a parked car whenever the lifeguard walked by, but that just made us giggle more.

The Braxton Hicks pains still came and went regularly, some intense enough that I began to suggest making our way back to the car, but the thought of getting out and letting the full weight of gravity add to the pain in your back made you pout, and I couldn’t deny you anything. Especially not in this state.

Still, you saw me glancing at the clock every time I noticed your face scrunch up in discomfort, timing the space between the pains.

“Are you sure these are just practice contractions?” I finally asked when they were coming only a few minutes apart.

“I… don’t know,” you admitted.

“Maybe we should try getting out?”

You breathed your way through another tightening sensation and nodded hesitantly. I kissed your temple and guided you over to hang on the edge of the pool while I gathered our things. When I came back for you, I held out my hand, beckoning, but you shook your head.

“I don’t think I can,” you huffed, an arm wrapped around your stomach.

I waded into the water to retrieve you, curling an arm around your waist and taxiing you over to the stairs. As soon as your belly breached the water, you gasped and crumpled forward. You hadn’t realized just how much pressure the water had taken off your aching body, and the full force of it slammed into you and took your breath away.

“It’s okay,” I said, arm tightening around you. “Breathe, I’ve got you.”

“I need to sit,” you said, your ass already rocketing toward the top step. This allowed some partial support by the water, but the internal pressure was like a valve threatening to blow.

“Talk to me,” I pleaded when you finally released my hand from your death grip.

“I don’t think this is false labor. I think- I think maybe I’ve been in labor since this morning. Or maybe even last night. It’s hard to tell when everything hurts all the time,” you explained in response to my stricken expression.

“We need to get you out of here,” I said with renewed urgency, but another contraction hit you out of nowhere and I sat next to you to wait through it with you.

“Feels like—mmph—something’s gonna—“ you clutched at my stomach, almost clawing at the top tight fabric.

There was a small release, an almost imperceptible shift in the tightness of your suit and a spot of warmth blooming between your thighs. You looked down and there were a few light pink tendrils that quickly dissipated in the large body of water.

You looked up at me, your anxiety suddenly matching my own. “I think my water just broke.”

“Shit” I exclaimed, my face blanching white at the realisation.

“Shit indeed” was all you could echo, your eyes wide with something between concern and panic.

Whatever your body had been leading up to right there hit you like a tonne of bricks. You didn’t yell out, at least managed to keep some composure, but both hands pressed tightly into the bump and your eyes scrunched tight like you were trying to change the course of things by sheer will alone.

“Breathe baby. We won’t get anywhere with you collapsing” I gave you a scolding tone, hoping it would get through to you. Truth is you hadn’t even realised you were holding your breath.

“What do we do?” you grimaced. This had thrown you for a loop and you needed some sort of anchor.

“First off… breathe” I said. I watched you intently until I saw you take in a big lungful of air and blow it out slowly though your mouth.

“Good girl.” Your eyes shot up at me. I grinned. I knew your triggers… how much you enjoyed hearing me say that.

“Not appropriate” you grunted. Your eyes closed again. It was happening again. It was quick. You grabbed onto me, hoping your fingers digging into my skin would somehow stop the roiling sensations within you. Of course, that was not going to do anything, but you did admire the bright red welts you left on my skin, shining brightly out from under the water. Another contraction had passed before you realised, and we hadn’t even made an attempt to move.

“I can’t get home with these pains as frequent as they are” you whispered to me. “We might need to call an ambulance.”

I nodded as I scanned for a lifeguard. I couldn’t flag him over so said I’d have to go fetch him. You panicked. Told me I can’t move, you have to hold onto me, you might drown.

I felt your fingers grip me once more. Again… so soon. This was quick. I remembered from the birth classes contractions would be noticeable at ten minutes apart, and would be important to move to where you wanted to give birth at five minutes apart…at two… does that mean we wouldn’t even have a chance to get out of the park?

“I think we need to get you out of that swimsuit” I said. Don’t know if it registered what I had said. “I think the tightness is causing things to be amplified.”

You shook your head. Don’t know if that meant there was no way you were going naked in public, or if you didn’t think it would do anything to help the contractions.

You were in a strange state of calm urgency. Logically you knew that the baby was coming. That we had to get help. That the swimsuit would have to come off. But after the initial shock of realization, it was like your body clicked into focus mode.

You didn’t want to move. The water was just taking enough of the edge off to keep you from being overwhelmed. Now that your waters had gone, it felt like the baby’s head had dropped even lower, which you hadn’t thought possible.

“Feels like she’s right there,” you breathed, reaching a hand around the massive bump to palm between your legs. Of course nothing was there yet—you were sure there would be much burning and stretching before anything started bulging—but you could almost imagine that if you slipped a finger in, that just inside you’d be able to feel it.

You couldn’t quite test that theory, though. It was as if your whole belly had dropped even lower—maybe it had, with the baby locking into the birth canal—but the bottom of your suit was stretched even further, so tight against your skin that you couldn’t even get under the hem.

“Babe, the suit?” I prompted, now worried enough for the both of us.

You nodded but held up a finger to wait a minute, your face tightening into a grimace. I went into focus mode as well whenever you were having a contraction, one hand in yours, the other on the crest of your stomach.

With the tightness of the fabric, I could see every change—how it condensed and hardened and pressed down, down and out, as if trying to forcefully expel the child within.

“That… looked painful,” I finally said when your grip loosened on me.

You nodded, all you could manage as you came down from the contraction.

“Let’s see about that suit now, yeah?”

You nodded again, but getting up and out of the water felt monumental. Your body screamed in protest at the added weight and you groaned, even without the addition of a contraction.

The internal pressure spiked as you got your feet on the concrete; without the cushion of the amniotic sac there was nothing to prevent or soften the baby’s descent. If you were waddling before, it was like you were straddling a horse now, and I had to stifle a laugh as I tried to lead you to the changing rooms. The rooms were near the lockers and towel exchange, and we slipped into the disabled stall. It was bigger, but still only contained a hard wooden bench to sit on. I deposited you there while I went to the desk to see if you could buy an extra large towel, assuming that you would soon need some coverage to get out of the park.

Any movement expended energy that you needed to focus on not making a scene, so you waited until I came back to try and get the suit off. Three more contractions came and went while I was gone, and you were breathing through a fourth when the thin privacy curtain was thrown aside and I knelt in front of you.

“No big towels,” I said apologetically when you finally opened your eyes again. “But I got like five regular towels—maybe we can Frankenstein something together.”

Maybe it wouldn’t matter, though, if we couldn’t get this stupid swimsuit off. The wet fabric clang to your skin like it was glued there, and no manner of tugging could free you from it. The quick pace of contractions certainly didn’t help things.

“We may have to wait until it’s dry,” I concluded, mostly to myself, as you were so focused inwardly that you weren’t really paying attention.

“My ass hurts,” you whined, shifting uncomfortably on the wooden seat.

Happy to have something I could actually do something about, I folded up some of the extra towels and put them on the hard ground, guiding you as you slipped off the bench and onto your knees, kneeling on the towels as you used the bench to rest your elbows on.

I wrapped another towel around you, hoping to get you dry quicker, as you leaned forward, resting your forehead on your clasped hands. The contractions felt like they were on top of each other now, the pain a constant rolling and squeezing and sharpening sensation, and you shivered despite the heat.

You don’t know how long this lasted, maybe ten minutes or maybe an hour, but your suit was almost dry when you looked back up. I smiled encouragingly, but it faded when I saw your look of worry.

“I need to push.”

I didn’t have much time to react before you were doing what can only be described as yoga, on your knees, bending forward, stretching your back… cat pose? This was accompanied with a deep, low moan which should things have been different would have had me rushing to check my trousers in case of protrusions.

But right now, I was worried. You needing to push had come on so fast.

“Are you pushing right now?” I almost stumbled on my words. You didn’t reply, your head was between your arms, slowly rotating right and left as you let out your continued low noises.

“Baby?” I tried again. No response. I got down on my knees and ran a hand up and down your back. That seemed to snap you out of whatever trance you were in as your eyes gained focus on me.

“Sorry… just focusing on the pain.” You looked a little worried… definitely uncertain.

“Don’t worry baby, I’m worried too” I said as I stroked your back. “Are you actually pushing when you do that?”

Your head shook. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. This is all so… alien.” You leaned back into my hand and pushed yourself up with your hands on your thighs.

“It feels so big. So much like a boulder. It feels like one wrong grunt and I’ll split apart. I don’t think I’m doing it involuntarily, but I’m trying to buy us some time… breathe through them. I think that’s what they said in the preparation classes.”

I stepped back a few seconds. “Buying time for what?” You looked confused. I continued with “it’s just you and me baby. You need to think about standing up, getting in the car, we go to the hospital and we have our baby.”

“I’m buying time for you to figure out what the hell I can do about this costume…” that’s when I realised you had tears in your eyes “I’m trapped. How can I push out a baby when my pussy is contained in fabric that I can’t even get a finger between it and my skin?”

You grimaced, and I noticed you hold your breath. A slight look of strain on your features. Whatever you were trying it was a losing battle.

The urge to push was like a papercut—it didn’t bother you until you noticed it, and then it hurt like hell. You had been focusing on breathing, on keeping your body loose and relaxed… but that was damn near impossible with this corset-like suit making everything tighter. At least it didn’t restrict your movement; your hips and shoulders were free enough to bend and open at will, even if it did cause the hemmed edges to bite into your skin.

“Here, let me try,” I said, sure that you must be exaggerating about the tightness.

You shifted your weight again, leaning forward on your elbows and sticking your ass into the air. I was on my knees behind you, and the pause did not go unnoticed. “You’re thinking about the suit getting in the way of more than just the head crowning, aren’t you?” you teased.

The idea of the baby’s head pushing out between your legs caused you to grunt, your own discomfort growing (though of unreleased pleasure rather than pain). I adjusted myself, then probed gently around the fabric hugging the creases above your thighs. My fingers trailed along the cut of your hips, finding no weaknesses in the fabric there. I tugged gently at the flat expanses, but it only had a little give and I ended up pinching your skin more than the fabric.

I laid my palm flat against your blanketed pussy, and you shivered in mild pleasure as I stroked you gently through the fabric.

“Another one,” you warned, but I kept my hand where it was, curling my finger so that my knuckle dragged along the length of your opening and then pressed into your clit.

Any semblance of concentration you had before was gone with that touch, and something in your body released, as if a switch had flipped, and insistence turned to instinct, need.

You groaned, long and low, and pressed back into my touch. The contraction and the suit and your muscles all worked together to push down and out on the large baby making its way toward a currently blocked exit. There was so much pressure, like a balloon slowly expanding in your core from between your hips, deeper and lower as it moved closer toward your opening.

“Hmmm. Hoooo. Ohhh, oh fuck this hurts,” you moaned, shuffling your knees so that they could push even further apart. Your belly now scraped across the ground as you rocked forward and backward.

“That’s it. Breathe, baby. Breathe it down. Breathe down the head.”

It wasn’t like you had a choice. The baby was coming whether either of us were ready for it or not.

“I can feel it moving,” you said, partially in awe and partially in despair. “So big. So full.” It was my turn to groan again and you smiled to yourself. “You know, I’m a little busy here, but if you wanted to fuck as much of me as you can access, we can probably pass it off as amniotic fluid.”

“What?” I sounded bewildered, but also maybe a little excited. “I don’t- I mean, do you really think now is a good time for that?”

You shrugged, another contraction already beginning. “At least one of us should be enjoying ourselves.”

It was your growing moan that finally pushed me over the edge. You pushed your hips back, and I grabbed them, one hand on each side. You must have slipped my trunks just low enough to allow my cock to spring free, because you felt it slide along the taut fabric that might as well have been a chastity belt.

I bent forward over you, my hands furiously cupping the curves of your belly, your breasts, your neck, then back to your ass. I stroked myself against you a couple times and then paused. I waited until the contraction was over and then cupped my hands around your stomach.

“Wanna feel you. You look so sexy like this.”

You were getting uncomfortable like this anyway, so let me pull you up. Space was limited, so you simply stood, legs wide and leaning forward with your palms pressed into the bench. My hands stayed glued to your belly as I pressed up against you, and this time my hips were free to tilt and pump.

My rhythm and pace quickened as you hummed and whined through another contraction. My hand snaked between your legs as it built, and at its peak your knees bent of their own accord, and you sank down, a small cry escaping your lips at the same time I exclaimed, “Holy shit, is that- I can feel you bulging!”

And you were still trapped in this damn suit.

I stood for a few moments in confusion, my pants basically around my legs, my hard cock digging into your ass (and getting stopped from going anywhere by your swimsuit) - and perhaps more importantly considering our current situation - my hand cupping your pussy which was noticeably more rounded than what it had been this morning.

You were whimpering. In fact it was worse, you were shaking.

You reached your hand back to find my cock. It was slick with juices, my body almost ready for release moments earlier. I felt it grab and pull, your hand making slick sounds as it moved up and down.

Finally you spoke. “Have you cum. I want you to cum… fuck… cum. Fuck… Fuck…” You pressed your ass into me as I heard you grunt. You were pushing again. I couldn’t respond. I was bewildered by the moment.

“I… I…” I stammered, confused by the obvious nature of how far your labour had progressed, and your apparent lack of awareness of the same issue.

“Here, I’ll help.” You spoke, it was breathy, like you had been heavily exerting yourself. You reached back with a hand “help me balance”

I held onto your hand as you stood and rotated so you were facing me. You grabbed onto my shoulders and lowered yourself down into a squat, groaning non-stop as you lowered.

I looked down at your wide open legs and yes… it was there in front of my eyes. The area between your legs was bulged out. Almost as if a head was just behind the skin wanting out. The swimsuit clearly showed the edges of your lips… I guess camel toe if we were going to be crude about it… so I breathed a sigh of relief… it’s not that your lips had parted and the head was visible as we had seen so many times in the videos we had watched during our preparation for birth.

But suddenly my entire nervous system felt like it was hit by a bolt of lightning as your hands grabbed my ass cheeks for balance and your mouth enveloped my cock, suction applied to my engorged shaft.

I couldn’t do anything but moan myself as your head moved back and forth, my view downward now your damp hair, and swimming costume clad breasts and belly taking up the rest of my visible life right now.

Thirty seconds, maybe a minute of wet and sloppy noises came from you as I lost awareness of the immediate problem and fell into the wave of pleasure that coursed through me until finally my cock flinched, bounced in your mouth and discharged its warm load.

You let my flow of cum dribble out your mouth and chin as it dropped onto your swimsuit as you felt my cock once more convulse and finally start to recede, slipping out of your mouth.

I breathed a sigh of relief at my release. The feel good hormones coursing through me as a result of the orgasm leaving me momentarily clueless, until that half moment later, as you gripped hard to my ass cheeks, causing pain as your fingers dug in, another contraction rapidly peaking. Your open leg stance and gravity-aided position making you feel the contraction effects so much worse than being on your knees as you were earlier.

So many conflicting feelings roiled within you at once. There was pain, obviously, but also some pleasure. A squeezing pressure, but also an opening, a stretching. And of course a torturous mix of movement and inertia.

Your body was acting of its own accord, the sounds and movements and straining grunts that forced the baby lower and lower. You whined as you rocked back and forth between your heels and the balls of your feet, belly hanging low between your knees as you gripped me tightly.

“Babe. Babe, baby,” I repeated, breath catching every time your fingers dug in and eventually just prying your hands from my hips to prevent any permanent damage. “I know how fond you are of my ass; it would be a pity if you tore it to shreds.”

“Fuck, sorry. Sorry,” you mumbled as I pulled my trunks back up, keeping one hand in mine so you didn’t fall over. “Tight. Hurts.”

I knelt down so I was at eye level with you. “I know, baby. But you’re so close. It’s almost over.”

“W-what?” you asked, finally processing what I’d just said once the contraction was over. “What do you mean?” you looked down at your still very round and full and heavy belly, the impossibly tight fabric still clinging to the most essential parts of you, and then back up at me.

I guided your hand between your legs, and you gasped. You hadn’t been able to spend much time there the last few months—that duty had fallen to me once the belly had gotten too big—but you still knew it well enough to tell how drastically different it felt now. More of your skin had been forced out of the sides of the suit, pushed out wide and slightly outward, the force of the baby’s head already spreading you open.

“Is it- do you think it’s hurting the baby?” you asked in somewhat of a panic as you tugged fruitlessly at the hem of the suit again. “I don’t want there to be a crease down the center of her skull when she’s born.”

I kissed the side of your head. “I don’t think you have to worry about that just yet. You’re not even close to crowning yet.”

You pouted a little at that. “How do you know? We can’t see anything with this stupid suit in the way!”

I didn’t have time to answer before you were pushing again, and oh how you wished I could return the favour and get you off right now. You could feel the press and retreat of the bulge against your hand in time with your efforts, but it never seemed to get any further. Couldn’t get any further.

It went like this for another fifteen minutes or so, and it was getting harder and harder to keep the situation between just the two of us. Your noises, along with our lengthy occupation of the stall, had resulted in several questions about our status. You had been adamant about keeping this between just the two of us, but I had made no more progress on freeing you and you had made no more progress on crowning.

You were sitting on top of several towels on the ground, leaning up against the wall with your knees up, the thin strip of fabric between your legs bowing out and snapping back into place as you huffed and grunted. We locked eyes, and I placed a hand on your heaving belly as we both came to the same conclusion—we needed help.

“I think it’s time we called in some reinforcements,” I said gently, perhaps expecting you to still protest.

You simply nodded, tired of all your efforts being in vain and ready to meet our baby. “Just make sure they have a pair of damn scissors.”

I threw the curtain back and was greeted by two faces peering back.

“Everything OK?” came the voice of a man. He was joined by a lady. Both were wearing swimsuits… neither appeared to be representatives of the water park.

“My wife… she’s in labour. She’s pushing… need to get her suit off. No… scratch that. Need to cut her suit off. Can you get someone to get me a pair of scissors and can you get someone to ring an ambulance?”

The man went off to find a lifeguard, and the woman dashed to the gift shop. I didn’t even have an opportunity to ask their names.

I turned back to you and you stared at me wide-eyed. “They’re going to get help…”

You nodded as you groaned, hands grabbing your inner thighs and pulling apart your legs. You made no attempt to stop it now, you pushed hard, wanting desperately to expel the force that was building but… completely unable to move it.

I stared focusing between your legs. The swimsuit was no better than a second skin and I could now see your lips had opened, the baby’s head would be visible as its teardrop shape signifying you were progressing towards crowning, had there been nothing in the way.

You gulped in a breath of air and screamed at the top of your lungs. Frustration and pain finally got the better of you.

As you let off the push, I saw the receding of your lips. The tight fabric twanging back as tight as a guitar string.

Another push a few moments later and I stuck my head out of the changing room looking for the salvation of the people who had ran for help - no sign of them.

You had a moment to rest as the contraction faded, but it was short-lived… baby wanted out, and your body wanted to play along with that plan…

I finally heard footsteps… several footsteps. Your scream had them barrelling down on us. There was a hand on my shoulder and a pair of scissors pushed in front of my vision.

I didn’t even say thanks. I grabbed them and shoved the icy cold blades against your skin. You shrieked. For half a moment I thought I had cut you, but then the blades came together, there was a sound somewhere close to a ‘thwap’ and your split apart swimsuit simultaneously rolled half way up your belly and over your ass, leaving you exposed to everyone in front of you.

You glanced up. There was the man and woman, someone wearing a suit, and a lifeguard carrying a first aid kit. And right there between your legs was the first sight of our child’s hair.

Your breasts were still partially covered by the tattered remains of the swimsuit, and you lifted your arms and looked at me pleadingly. It was easier to cut away at the straps instead of trying to pull it over your head, and you breathed a sigh of relief once you were finally free. Some part of you considered modesty—we still had a couple clean towels left—but the idea of any fabric touching your body after having been trapped for so long made you squirm.

“Better?” I asked, stroking your exposed skin and feeling it contort and harden as another contraction began. “Push now. Let’s get this baby out of you.”

“Uh, the ambulance should be here in about 20 minutes, but they’ll have to make their way through the park to get back here,” the lifeguard said.

You looked over at him, still standing awkwardly by the stall entrance holding the inadequate first aid kit. He was young, probably a college kid trying to make some extra money over the summer, and trying to look everywhere but between your legs.

“Hate to burst your bubble, kid, but I think we’re a little late for that.” This came from the woman, who was the only other person who had dared to venture into the room. “You’re doing great, mama, just keep listening to your body.”

She was a calm, grounding presence as your stress and emotions were going haywire. “I need to push!” you yelled to no one in particular.

With no barrier holding the baby’s head in place, it surged forward, and you screamed.

“Slow, slow,” I reminded you, using my hand now to keep the head from coming too quickly. “You still need to stretch.”

You wanted to smack my hand away and throw everything into another push, but with the paramedics still so far out and the meagre experience with childbirth in this room, you didn’t want to risk injuring either yourself or the baby.

“I want it out,” you whined between panted breaths, mimicking the pattern I coached for you. “Everything hurts. I’m so uncomfortable.” That was the understatement of the century—the bowling ball between your legs kept them spread open painfully wide, and sitting on the ground, even with the towels, was hell on your spine and tailbone.

“What can I do? How can I help?” I asked, but you couldn’t answer.

You shook your head, your fingers wrapping around my forearms and squeezing at the same time your breathing picked up. The instinct to bear down was overwhelming, and you ended up clenching everything except your core. Your panting breaths were practically obscene, your full breasts and belly heaving with each one.

“Maybe she wants to change positions?” the woman suggested, correctly reading your body language as you shifted and twisted.

You nodded furiously in confirmation, and I turned back toward the crowd. Whatever position you ended up in, someone would need to help you balance while someone else managed the baby. We were going to need a helper.

“Alright,” I said. “Who wants to hold, and who wants to catch?”

No one jumped forward to volunteer, though, after a few moments, the silence must have been too cloying, as the man put his hand up.

“Happy to help… but feel a bit self conscious. You know, nakedness and all that. I mean we have only just met,” he finished with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood.

You reached a hand out, flexing your hand to get my attention. I grabbed it and pullled you up to your feet. You took the opportunity to wrap your arms around my neck, pressing your body into me as you swayed, moaned and gave the occasional yell.

“Could I…” the suited man looked embarrassed but continued after a moment. “Could I get you a hand towel? Something to perhaps bite down on… to muffle some of the more… emotive sounds?”

He was of course worried that word of mouth would get out. They had roped off the changing area we were in with maintenance signs to keep other members of the public out… but the sound carried.

“Seriously…” I growled. “Have a bit of fucking empathy, my guy.”

The suited guy scowled at me, feeling a little put out “if you hadn’t come here trying to give birth on site… trying to get the press’ attention”

I nearly lost it. Grabbed his shirt lapels and was almost ready to give him a punch when you put a hand on my shoulder.

“Please…” your eyes were wide and I could see you needed support. “I need to push!”

You buried your head back into my chest and yelled… my chest muffling the noise which would no doubt appease the suit.

I looked over and the three other people here, even the lifeguard who no doubt worked for the guy in the suit, were all giving death stares.

You stepped your left foot one step to the side and then again with your right to open your legs, and bending at the knees, you pushed again.

The woman got down on her knees and smiled up at her husband and me. “Heads coming along nicely. Nice and slow. No need to do yourself an injury.”

It was harder like this, in some ways—the same gravity that was tugging at the baby and bringing it steadily down was also wreaking havoc on your spine, your knees, your feet—and you were clinging to me with perhaps more force than I was expecting, as I was having a hard time keeping you upright.

“My back, I can’t—!” Your words were cut off with an involuntary moan as you dipped lower into your mini squat. The pressure bordered on painful, both nowhere and everywhere all at once deep in your hips, and you felt like you couldn’t close your legs again now that they had spread. You thought surely the head must be nearly out by now, and you slipped your hand between your legs. But all you felt was your own skin—hot and stretched and distended, yes, but still not crowning. There weren’t many folds left to pull aside and it only took a little prodding to find a sliver of the head.

“Try leaning over, dear,” the woman said, gently guiding you to turn to face the back of the stall and lean down to brace your hands against the bench. “Then you press here,” she said, placing my hands flat against your lower back.

You whimpered, your fingers wrapping tightly around the edge of the seat as your dipped lower again. “Mm. Nghh!” you experimented with smaller grunts and pushes. “Hooo. Oh. Oh god, I can’t- I- nghahh!”

“That’s my girl,” I praised, kneading into your skin as you gasped and trembled.

“Wanna… I wanna see…” you managed between panted breaths.

“See what?” one of the men by the entrance asked, and you felt me tense in barely contained frustration.

“We didn’t bring a mirror, baby,” I said apologetically, ignoring them. But then I had an idea. “We’ve got the tablet, though?”

When you nodded, I pulled away for a moment to rummage through our bags. We had brought the tablet so I could read while you took up permanent residence in the pool; I would have been concerned about the potential of bodily fluids, but we had it in a waterproof case because, well, we were taking it to a water park.

I placed it between your spread legs and turned on the camera, flipping the view so that we could all watch the progress and subtly pressing the record button so that we could rewatch it later—you were too deep into primal instinct to truly appreciate and enjoy it now. After some adjusting for your movements and pushing position, I managed to position it so that everyone could see.

Just in time for another contraction.

You grunted whilst looking down, over your belly as best you could to glimpse the screen below. You saw the petals of your lips spread wide… no… bloom, as you applied downward pressure.

You huffed, moaned and repeatedly gasped for breath between pushes, but there was movement.

“That’s my baby, that’s my baby” you shrieked with joy as you caught a good glimpse of the head as it - finally - didn’t retreat as you let up the pressure.

Your body let you take a moment to rest, deep panting breaths heaving your belly and chest as you realised just how strenuous this really was.

“You’re doing great, baby” I said, my hand rubbing your back. “A few more like that and we might have the baby’s head.”

“Shall we have a race?” You panted. Huffing out a breath you added: “Do I get the head out before the paramedics get here?”

The suited man looked shell shocked. He had visions of you splitting apart, blood and gore splattering the changing room floor as you pushed harder than your body could manage.

“Please…” he stammered. “The professionals are near. I understand if you pant and don’t push, you can slow things down, keep everything calm and relaxed until help arrives.”

“No can do, boss man” you grimaced, the respite between contractions over once more as you grabbed me, squeezing, your grip echoing the downward force you were experiencing. “Baby wants out, and I can’t stop it…”

Your sweaty forehead, the signs of exertion evident in your matted hair, pressed against me and you screamed loudly. You were stretched now, the head keeping your lips parted. So close to a full crown and the birth of the head, and the relief you hoped would follow.

You knew things would get worse before they got better, but holy fuck you were not prepared for just how much worse. Getting the head down this far had been exhausting as the pressure grew and shifted with it, but now that it was finally at your opening it refused to budge.

At least it felt that way. I assured you that there was progress with every push, and you felt the burning sting as your skin stretched with every effort, but every peek at the camera seemed to show the same image.

After several contractions passed with little perceivable progress, you began to whine against me. “Too big. It’s too big.”

I stroked my hair and rubbed your belly—it was still taut, but had shifted and dropped significantly with the mass inside. “We knew it was gonna be big,” I reminded you.

“And I’m uncomfortable.” you shifted and swayed on your feet, bending and stretching your knees and back to the limited extent your current position would allow. “I want our home. I want our bed.”

I looked back at the suit, and he at least had the good sense to be a little contrite about accusing us of intentionally getting into this mess. “I know, baby. But it’s almost over. You’re so close. And then we’ll have our baby, and we can go home. Our whole little family.”

You were only partially listening, but nodded anyway—just hearing my voice was grounding, calming—and redoubled your focus on pushing. Your legs were shaking and even your elbows and wrists protested as you braced against the bench. You wanted to sink lower, to really open up and center all your strength into your core, but you couldn’t. Not like this.

“Need to move,” you gasped as another contraction waned.

“How? Where?”

My hands fluttered about aimlessly until you tugged me over to the bench, then pushed down on my shoulders until I was sat in front of you. You managed to turn around, slowly, and settled yourself between my legs. With my hands supporting you as you lowered down, you hooked your arms over my thighs and was able to go low enough that your ass practically touched the ground.

The woman readjusted the tablet so that you and I could still see—everyone else hovering at the entrance now had a front row view—and you tested out the new position as the pressure began to build yet again.

“Another one. Coming, it’s coming.” Your deep breaths turned into rapid, desperate pants as the head pressed insistently behind your stretched lips. “Burning!” you cried at the same time the camera showed your opening held in a perfectly round ‘o’ shape, the bulge of the head pressing out behind it. You were almost afraid to push, afraid of tearing, but also just afraid of the added pain. “I can’t- can’t take anymore.”

“It’s okay, you’re stretching nicely. Take a minute to breathe here if you need to,” the woman still monitoring your progress said.

I kissed your temple and my hands found their way to your breasts, giving them a light massage and effectively distracting you. You rested your head back against my chest, trying to focus on the sensations I was producing as the raging inferno between your legs threatened to overwhelm you.

The circle widened even as you breathed, the pressure of the contractions and gravity and your wide open stance enough to force the head further and further toward its inevitable exit. Your noises condensed into high-pitched squeals and you tensed against me, your jaw clenching and your body becoming rigid as you attempted to hold back your scream, now at a full, pronounced, obscenely stretched crown.

The contraction ended as you were held open at the widest point, and you let out a noise something like a choked sob.

“Relax, baby. Head’s almost out,” I soothed. “Just let it come.”

“It’s coming quick… it’s coming quick” you squealed, unable to control the sensations coursing between your legs.

“Listen to me… pant… huff huff huff” I regretted not being able to look you in the eyes as I tried to get you to focus on me and not your own body. I knew I needed to stop you actively pushing - I was scared you were going to tear. “Focus on me, baby… on me.”

Your focus drifted towards me and I saw you breathe in, then let out little huffing pants. All the while the head moved tiny bit by tiny bit as more and more of it became visible.

The slightly deformed shape - oval and not round like an adult head - peeked further and further out as you continued to pant over and over again, rapid shallow breaths echoing the ones I was doing in front of you.

Then all of a sudden, as the head slipped past half way… the baby’s nose slipping past your lips, you tensed up, gasping. Your body went rigid, and whilst it lasted just a moment, I knew exactly what was happening. I heard a noise that I could only describe as a ‘slap’ as your lips, stretched tight up until a moment earlier slipped back to the baby’s neck, a gush of fluid splashed out and sloshed on the floor, and the room went suddenly silent except for your heaving, panting breathing… everyone who was observing in front of you shocked into momentary silence as finally our baby’s head had been born.

Your hand reached down almost instinctively and felt around the protruding shape, simultaneously the most natural thing in the world… yet at that time felt so out of place it was surreal.

The woman was the first to move, her hands gently pushing yours out of the way as she tugged at the umbilical cord, slipping it back and over the baby’s head, removing the risk of it getting tied around the baby’s neck.

You blinked. You knew you were only half way done, you knew there were shoulders and a body to be born… but you relished the moment of intimate connection between yourself and our first born child, first instance of mother and baby skin to skin contact as your hand dropped back down to cup the head once more.

“That’s our baby!” you exclaimed, your hand cupping the soft, wet mass that was simultaneously both huge and very tiny. “It felt so much bigger coming out of me,” you giggled breathlessly. You looked at the image in the tablet camera, which gave a different viewing angle. “It’s so pointy.”

The woman between your legs nodded. “That’s what happens with most natural births. Especially with a babe this size in a mum your size.”

Something shifted in your hips, and you winced as the head in your hands twisted and turned to the side, a familiar pressure building as another contraction started. “Guess it’s time for the shoulders.”

Everything was still so sore and though your belly had deflated somewhat with the release of fluids, there was still plenty of pressure and fullness insistently pressing behind your loosened hole.

You pushed, hard, ready to get this over with and finally meet our baby properly, but nothing happened. You shifted on the balls of your feet, circling your hips in an attempt to dislodge whatever was holding up this last bit of effort, but the contraction ended with no additional progress.

“You’ll have it on the next one,” the woman said, though she sounded more unsure.

You looked back at me, and I gave you a worried smile. “Next one.”

You redoubled your efforts when the next contraction came, but the baby was still stuck half in and half out.

“Keep pushing!” the woman encouraged, but you shook your head.

“I don’t want to hurt the baby,” you hiccuped, practically in tears—this was supposed to be the easy part. “The paramedics should be here soon, right?” Surely it had been long enough now that they would have almost made their way back here.

The guy in the suit withdrew from the entrance so he could look around. He didn’t see anyone right away, so took out his phone to call and locate them—apparently, they had gotten waylaid by another emergency on the way to the back of the park, but they would arrive any minute now.

Another contraction was starting up and, god, not pushing felt so much worse. The instinct to bear down was so strong and your panting breaths so fast that you were a little concerned that you might hyperventilate and pass out.

“Slow, deep breaths,” I coached, letting you squeeze my hand as hard as you could.

“I can’t- I have to—“

“Breathe. Let go. Do it for our baby.”

Your face contorted in pain as you whined, long and loud, but you managed to keep pace and mimic my measured breaths. Your body may have been pushing some on its own, and your hands found their way back to the baby’s head as you focused all your efforts on not giving in to the desperate and all-consuming need.

“Just hold on, baby,” you said in a strangled whisper. “Help is coming.”

“Good job, baby,” I praised as you relaxed, slumping against me. “Just like that.”

“I don’t know if I can do that again,” you confessed, looking back at me worriedly.

A new commotion sounded just outside the door as two uniformed medics pushed their way through the small crowd.

“Looks like you won’t have to,” I said, equally relieved.

“Good,” you said, breaths picking back up. “Because another contraction is—ngghh!”

The paramedics arrived at the scene without any real fanfare - the suited man ducking out of the room to guide them towards us.

A man and a woman made up the paramedics team. Slinging their bag to the ground the lady knelt down between your legs and took charge of the situation.

She saw you were pushing, actively in the middle of working through a contraction, straining cords at your neck and your hands gripping into mine, looking desperately for some way to move things on between your legs.

You finally started panting, and took focus of the two new attendees to the room.

"You're doing great, mama" came the voice from the female paramedic. "Call me Sally, and this here is Nick. Looks like you've done most of the hard work already, so we're here to get you through that last little step. You okay with that?"

You nodded your understanding, exhausted breaths getting sucked in and out of your lungs, limiting what you said verbally in response.

"How long has the head been like that?" came the voice of the male paramedic, Nick.

I answered. "Three pushes. She thinks our baby is stuck. Can't get the shoulders out."

Nick nodded. "That's OK, sometimes babies can be stubborn. We'll pop that cork right outta ya!"

Sally rubbed your leg and heaved herself back up. She smiled at you as you'd recovered enough to stop sucking in big gulps of air. "I've been in your situation" she grinned. "My first baby didn't want to come out. Had two more since then. If it at all helps… next one should be easier."

You chuckled. These two certainly helped lighten the mood, give an air of calm to things. But all things come to an end, and yours was signalled by the onset of another contraction. You scrunched your eyes closed and moaned loudly as you started to push again.

"That's it, big strong push!" that was Sally. A gloved finger slipped inside of you around the babys neck and felt around. "Ahh… there we are. I can feel where things are stuck."

Your composure failed. "Get it out! Get it out!" was all you could wail. You finished your push with a wailing, pleading cry.

"Up on your feet, please, mama" came the voice from Sally. You groaned as you had to move once more; I stood with you. "Okay, daddy… I guess you are the daddy, yeah?" she looked at me. I nodded in confirmation. "I want you to hook your hands together under her arm pits, and cross them under her chin." I did as I was asked, and Sally nodded. "Good… now Mama. You squat down low. Deep as you can get. I want those hips to open nice and wide."

You went limp in my hands and sunk to the ground. I was taken aback by the sudden dead weight in my arms and had to react quickly just to hold your weight up. Sally got down on the floor and once more sunk her fingers in behind the baby's neck. She tugged on your skin, which resulted in you giving a howling screech of unexpected pain, but you felt the baby physically move inside of you, and suddenly there was a pop, and the first shoulder, second shoulder and baby's torso all slid out in quick succession, right into Sally’s hands.

A moment later, after a small tug to free the legs, and and our baby - our daughter - was born. The cries of the baby were echoed by the cheers and claps of the small group that had mustered around us. It didn't take the paramedics long to cut the cord and hand the baby up to you. I kissed and embraced you as I settled you on the ground to bond with the baby.

The paramedics carried out their paperwork and helped you deliver the placenta as they started to get us ready to transfer to the hospital for a check up. Nick took a look around at the shredded swimsuit, and seeing no other clothes he looked inquisitively at us. "Do you have anything to get changed into?"

You went red with embarrassment. "Didn't think I'd be needing to get cut out of the suit" you mumbled.

"Not to worry, hang here for 5, do new mummy stuff, and I'll go fetch you a blanket to cover your modesty. The hospital will have the height of fashion available to you, paper gowns, as daddy here goes home to fetch you something more suitable for leaving the hospital with a newborn baby in tow" He chuckled as he left the room and trudged back to the ambulance.