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The Cowboy & The Brit (Pt.3)

A story of a Texan cowboy and a British woman; featuring blossoming love, pregnancy, and unplanned + inconvenient birth. (Pt3 - 13k words)

Co-written as a roleplay with the amazingly talented @wootenbassett75

Part One: The Ranch // Part Two: The Tour

Read the full story on AO3

Part Three: Home

Sunlight was the first concern. Before Ben helped Emily to stand, he had placed his shirt over the baby. Every few minutes he removed it, not wanting to risk overheating the newborn, but he also wanted to protect her from the sun. A girl… the couple had sat for what felt like an eternity just looking at the girl nestled against Emily’s body. In all his life, with all his accomplishments and the dreams that had come true, nothing compared to what he felt now.

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Story request. Thanks.

During the night, a woman goes into labor. But not wanting to wake her spouse up, she goes to the bathroom, hoping it’s fake labor (which isn’t). Her spouse wake up when he hear noises, and is surprised to find her on the toilet, with the baby’s head crowning. But a bigger surprise comes when a second baby is coming (surprise twin), when they think the afterbirth is coming.

The first pain sneaked up on her in the middle of the night. A quiet burglar that snuck through the barred window and shattered her dreams and stole her breath. Eleanor tensed, body locked in stasis, spine rigid against the mattress, willing the cramp in her lower back to dissipate. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused. This was nothing. This had to be nothing. She was almost 37, this was probably nothing, probably just the spicy curry she had foolishly ordered last night, or the spasmodic clench of an overworked tendon. She had to convince herself.

It was 3:17 a.m. Her watch face confirmed it, with a cruel LED glow. Beside her, Marcus was sleeping. Slumbering innocently with one arm thrown across his face, grunting with heavy, blissful exhalations, deep in the dark of the kind of sleep that could only be described as ignorant. As he breathed, Eleanor felt her heart turn to a terrified rabbit pounding against a ribcage of terror. She held still and silent, terrified.

The second contraction came, unbidden, unrelenting. A circle of thick rope being wound ever tighter, wound around her midsection and down, ever downwards, a perverse, cylindrical constriction meant for only one thing. She felt it. She could not pretend. The point of it all. Her pelvis. The baby. She had been hoping this didn’t mean that, this pain in the middle of the night. That it was a dream, or a false alarm. Please let it be a false alarm.

It was too early. It’s too early. I was only 37 weeks. And the nursery wasn’t ready. The bag wasn’t packed. They were all still sleeping. God, everyone in the world was still sleeping. The windows were dark, the cars were silent, and there was a baby down there somewhere. Clawing and clawing. Clawing it’s way out.

She took a deep breath and rolled her legs free of the comforter with icy slowness. Do not push, she told herself, setting one foot down with weightless care, and then the other. Just go to the bathroom. This is probably false labor. Sit on the toilet and it will ease the pressure. It’s pressure. Everything will stop. Please, she thought, and padded her way silently down the short hallway, each footfall soundless on the dense carpet. Click. The bathroom door closed so soundlessly, so softly, that the motion was almost absorbed by the darkness.

The refuge of the tiny bathroom was a tiled and lit sanctuary, if nothing else. She flipped the light on and winced. Bright and antiseptic. She sank down and collapsed onto the toilet seat, sitting on the cold porcelain with a trembling inhale. The contraction came again and it took with it all of her mantras and logical reasons and breath. This one didn’t rise and fall, it leveled out into something burning, something clawing. A low animalistic groan heaved its way out of her throat, as if she were not the one making the sound. She dug her hands into the toilet seat, white knuckled, as another one came. Not one. Two, three, all in quick succession now, overlapping in a blind panic of sensation. The pressure. The violent intensity of it. She had to breathe. The one mantra that she could repeat, and repeat, was breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Breath in. Breath out.

There was a sound. A low ripping noise. Something being torn, something bloody. And the pelvic pressure, the squeezing everything out pressure, crescendoed to a new, awful, grotesque peak. God, it hurt, and it felt so final. Please don’t be real. Please. It’s too early, god, she kept repeating. Too early.

She looked down.

A dark ring of hair was clutched in the toilet bowl, slick with blood and waxy vernix. A head. Her head, part of her, but not. It was still facing down, but it had rotated slightly, towards one side, as if to guide itself with something more sentient. A crown was visible at the top. Swollen and glistening. Eleanor knew, then, that she was crowning. On the toilet, in the middle of the night, on her own. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there. How long it had been since the first contraction. It was hard to know time in a moment like that.

A scream, this time laced with terror and punctuated by shards of fear ripped from her throat.

It was not a moan, but a razor blade slicing through the midnight stillness that woke Marcus. He sat up in a panic, eyes blinking with confusion. “Ellie?” The bathroom light bled under the door. He was two steps to the door in an instant. He flung it open.

The moment burned into his memory, perfectly, gruesomely. Eleanor on the toilet. Pale, and sweating and trembling, with a look of bloodied shock on her face and her nightgown hiked up around her waist. Her thighs slick with blood and a sticky, mucous-y fluid. And between them, a head, a dark, slick, human head. Their child’s head. Crowning. Their baby was crowning on the toilet in the middle of the night, with no one else around.

“Oh my GOD!” Marcus screamed, his voice a physical shock to the system. He fell to his knees on the tiled floor, bloody and awestruck. 911, he had to dial 911. He fumbled for his phone. It was not there. “Don’t push!” he screamed, absurdly.

“I’m not… it’s pushing me!” Eleanor snarled back, arching back with another ripping contraction. The head bulged further out, the raw circle of a fiery ring stretching obscenely. With a wet, ripping sound that Marcus would hear for the rest of his life, the head was out all at once. It lolled against the bowl, face down, tiny shoulders pinned at the gate.

“The cord! Is there a cord? !” Eleanor gasped, her eyes wide.

Without thinking, Marcus’s hands were in the toilet bowl, plunged into the warm water at the same time he could see the silvery glint of umbilical cord pulsing weakly inside Eleanor. His fingers found the slippery, rubbery face. He hooked them under tiny armpits, and as Eleanor gave another throat-splitting howl, he eased the small body out, in one wet rush of blood and amniotic fluid and spasm. It was a girl. A blue-tinged, perfect, tiny girl. Covered in blood and vernix, but screaming with a fierce, newborn lust for life.

She didn’t cry at first. She didn’t cry in his hands for a long, terrible second and Marcus held her, limp, against his bloodied, sweat-slick chest. He rubbed at her back with a trembling thumb, and then, slowly, the head rotated. She drew in one sharp breath and then began to cry. Not a robust newborn cry, but the high-pitched, wavering scream that all babies seem to make their first. But it was a sound. It was the sound of life.

Marcus wept with joy, blinking away tears. He took one long look at Eleanor, now heaving and sobbing with a strange mix of relief and abject terror. “She’s here,” he said, croaking, still clutching their daughter, this little person in his hands. He was a new father, a parent. A husband to a woman who was suddenly giving birth in their tiny bathroom, in the middle of the night. “Ellie, she’s here.”

Eleanor’s expression, however, had not relaxed. Panic had turned to an incandescently bewildered agony. “Something’s… wrong.” she panted. “The placenta… it’s so early. It feels different. Different…”

The contractions, mercifully absent for what seemed like a small eternity, came again with a vengeance, this time deeper and more guttural. Eleanor let out a fresh groan as a hot spray of clearer liquid stained the toilet bowl. Her abdomen had deflated somewhat with the delivery, but she still looked grotesquely distended and enormous.

“It’s the afterbirth, hon, just the afterbirth,” Marcus reassured her, unsure if he really believed it himself. He wrapped the baby in a clean hand towel, using a baby washcloth to wipe away some of the vernix and blood. He reached for another towel, and turned to try and assess the imminent birth of the placenta.

Eleanor screamed, again. The sound a pure, unconstrained shock. “MARCUS! THERE’S MORE! THERE’S SOMETHING COMING!”

He looked down. It was not a dark, liver-like lump of placenta. Another head. A second bulge was stretching Eleanor’s already-distended opening, a second curve of slick, wet hair. This one was light. Blonde.

Time stopped. Air was vacuumed from the room. Their minds refused to allow it to be true.

“No.” Marcus whispered, incredulous. “No, that’s not…”

“TWINS!” Eleanor screamed. “TWINS! MY GOD WE’RE HAVING TWINS! HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE? !”

Twins. The ultrasound, at 12 weeks, had shown only one. A surprise. This was not a surprise. This was an unholy abomination of a surprise.

But there was another contraction, and it was out, this one coming much faster than the first, like the path had been violently, unceremoniously cleared by the first baby. There was no gradual crowning, no procession. Eleanor’s howls of agony from two powerful, explosive pushes and the second head was free. This baby was face-up, with eyes tightly shut and tiny mouth agape with silent protest.

But something was wrong. It wasn’t sliding out, not in the normal sense. The head had emerged with a terrifying, grinding force, but the shoulders felt stuck. Shoulder dystocia, she heard someone say, faintly. The word came from somewhere, some deep back burner of her brain. That’s what this was.

“It’s stuck!” Eleanor screamed, her strength drained, her head lolling back against the toilet tank. “Oh god, it’s stuck!”

Marcus was in a state of pure transcendent panic. In one swift motion, he set down the first baby, now crying softly, on a pile of towels on the floor. The second one was coming, whether he liked it or not, and she was still screaming with the raw strength of a woman being torn in two. Marcus reached for the second, now thrashing newborn. He couldn’t pull on her, he knew that. He inserted two fingers alongside the baby’s neck, feeling the infant’s tiny body squeeze in on itself from Eleanor’s pelvic bones. He had to rotate her. He had to turn her. He remembered a diagram, and frantically began to put pressure on the front, anterior shoulder, in an attempt to turn the baby and coax the shoulders through.

“Push, Ellie, NOW! Push with me. As hard as you can!”

With a superhuman, reddening effort, Eleanor pushed, her face deep purple with exertion, every tendon in her neck standing out like string. Marcus pulled, not on the baby’s head, but on the shoulder he was working on. A sickening, wet pop came from deep in Eleanor, a sound that sounded like bones or ligaments breaking. The baby’s body emerged in a grotesque, contorted rush, with a fresh gush of blood that was far more than she could be bleeding.

It was a boy. A still, purple baby. The cord was wrapped twice tightly around his neck, no longer pulsing. Marcus’s fingers were slick with blood and he had to fumble, blind with adrenaline, to unravel the noose around the baby’s neck. He tried to clear his tiny mouth, rub at the baby’s tiny chest. Nothing.

“Breathe!” he commanded the lifeless lump in his hands. “Breathe! Please!” He took a tiny breath of air and blew it into the little pink mouth. In. Out. In. Out.

Eleanor was sobbing with some kind of cathartic, blood-spattered relief. “Is he breathing? MARCUS, IS HE BREATHING? !”

The baby gasped, a tiny, choked, gurgling cough, and then a tiny, raspy whimper that harmonized with Eleanor’s older daughter in a discordant duet. The most beautiful, terrible sound.

Marcus wrapped them both to his chest, crying, cradling first one then the other. Kneeling in a spreading pool of Eleanor’s blood, which was now leaking across the tiles in bright, arterial rivulets. The bathroom looked like an abattoir. The toilet bowl was its own crime scene. Eleanor’s hair was soaked and matted to her head, her face ghost-white with blood. She was shivering violently.

A muffled chorus of sirens began to wail in the distance and their two new lives, already lost, already saved, were screaming, still coming to terms with their abrupt introduction to the world. Paramedics would be here in a minute. They would burst through the door of this gore-splattered bathroom in a moment, bleached eyes wide and appalled. They would strip the babies, cut the umbilical cords with sterile clamps, and wrap them in clean blankets. The placenta. The singular, huge placenta that had supported two, would come only with a fresh, tearing, groan from Eleanor, who was now teetering at the edge of consciousness.

As they loaded her onto the gurney, as paramedics with wide eyes and straitlaced expressions burst through the blood-slick door and onto the gore-soaked floor, Marcus watched his wife turn her head in his direction, eyes glassy. She reached for him with one bloodied, skeletal hand, palm open.

“Two.” she whispered, voice a thin filament. “Two all along.”

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