Jerk It by Lani Lynn Vale

CHAPTER 6

The world would be a nicer place if everyone took a chill pill. It’d be a great place if a few of those people choked on it.

-Mavis to Murphy

MAVIS

2 months later

The last person that I wanted to see was him.

Especially when I was going into labor and there was a high likelihood that he’d be seeing my coochie here in a second.

I watched him walk toward my car, then a contraction hit me hard, and I forgot all about who was around me, because the pain overtook every single aspect of my brain.

Holy shit, having babies hurt!

I’d always assumed that I would be in a hospital with the good drugs when my time came. Not in the middle of the road, with no one around but the damn town mechanic that hated me.

I was hunched over my steering wheel when the tap on the door came.

I was in the middle of the road.

Honestly, I was lucky that someone hadn’t hit me yet.

I had a flat tire.

I also had no spare.

Why did I have no spare?

Because last week, when I’d taken my car to get it inspected, the tires rotated, and everything ‘ready’ for a baby to be here any day, I’d had a slow-leaking flat.

Since Murphy didn’t do slow-leaking flats, or tires at all, he’d switched out my tire with the spare and told me to go get it fixed.

Only…I hadn’t.

And now I was on the side of the road, with a flat on the donut tire he told me not to ride around on for long, and in labor.

How did I know I was in labor?

When I bent down to inspect my tire, a massive whoosh of water had left from between my legs, soaking my shorts, my socks, and my tennis shoes.

Luckily, I had a plastic trash bag that I could lay on my seat.

Unluckily, when my phone had gone to call out—Jesus Christ, why did I live so far out of town?—I’d been in a dead zone.

I’d been hoping for the last thirty minutes that someone would stop—someone that wasn’t a complete creepo—but I’d had to send the one and only car that’d stopped along because he’d looked a little too serial killer to me.

Out of everyone I’d been hoping to come by, Alessio Murphy Romano would’ve been last on my list.

Because, he’d gotten worse since the time I’d seen him at the hospital, and I didn’t know why.

When I’d arrived last week to get my car checked out, he’d been in the middle of a heated conversation with his mother about something—him not trying hard enough about something—and he hadn’t heard me come inside until I cleared my throat.

After he’d left me in the office to go get changed so he could take me home and I could leave my car with him, his mom had made it sound like Murphy was sick. But wouldn’t tell me how.

Which was why I asked him if he was sick and needed a rest day when he’d mentioned that he was coming to workout with me anyway and could easily take me home afterward.

He’d shut down after that and hadn’t been the same since.

Which led to now.

Him marching up with his eyes narrowed at my tire.

Whoops.

The closer he got to my window, the more ferocious his scowl became, until I lost sight of him with the contraction coming upon me. When he finally opened my door, he had his mouth open and ready to fire.

Then he likely saw the tears on my face, and every single angry word he was about to say fell from his lips.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“There’s no cell service,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure I’m about to have this baby.”

He looked down at the trash bag that I was sitting on, then back up at me.

“Are you sure?” he asked, hoping for a different answer.

I didn’t have a different one to give him.

“About as sure as one can be when she feels a baby coming out of her vagina,” I admitted.

His eyes went alarmed. “As in, you can feel the head, right now?”

I swallowed hard and nodded.

“We’re an hour away from the hospital.” He groaned. “And this is where you don’t get cell service for ten miles in either direction.”

I nodded, feeling my heart sink just a little bit more.

“And your tire…” he looked at his bike. “There’s no way that I can get you on my bike, either.” He paused. “I can ride back to the area where I can get signal…”

I launched myself at him. “No, don’t leave!”

I knew that I’d be delivering this baby in the next twenty minutes.

If not less.

I just…knew.

“First babies don’t come that fast,” he tried to console me. “And we’re not going to be able to get out of here if something goes wrong.”

I knew that.

Like, I really knew that.

I’d been stewing over it for the last two hours.

There were about a million and one things that could go wrong.

But…women did it all the time back in the times before hospitals.

If a highlander’s wife could do it, I could do it.

At least, I thought I could.

“This first baby does,” I told him. “I’m serious. I don’t know if this means anything to you, but I can really feel the head. By the time that you can feel the head…in there…it means that all you really have to do is start pushing. And that generally is the end stages of labor.”

I was lying.

I wasn’t in end stages.

I was in the end stage.

Like, if I pushed once or twice, I knew that my girl would just slide right out.

My girl…that I didn’t have any clothes for. No car seat. No diaper bag. No goddamn blanket.

Nothing.

“What’s that look for?”

I swallowed hard and pushed the button that would open the back door.

It slid open with a whir.

“I was thinking that I don’t have a damn thing in here that’ll help us,” I told him.

He helped me get into the back seat, then snatched the box of trash bags that I’d been intending to take home today seeing as I’d been piling trash on top of my counter instead of in the trash can because I’d ran out two days ago.

Pulling one out, he yanked a knife out of his pocket, then sliced the bag up the sides before placing it on the ground underneath my feet.

From there he laid one on the chair, then opened the next one up for good measure.

He looked at me then as if he didn’t know what to do next.

I helped him by situating myself on the floorboard. “Turn around so I can pull these shorts off.”

He gave me a look that clearly said I was crazy for trying to preserve my modesty when he was about to see a whole lot more than that, but he turned around anyway.

When I was naked from the waist down, I sat in the back of the van gingerly. “There are going to be things you see today. Things I say and do that I won’t mean. I want you to promise me to never hold this day against me, okay?”

Another contraction hit me, and it would’ve knocked me straight to my knees had I not already been on my ass.

I’d been able to power through the last two…but not this one.

The urge to push was overwhelming, and I now knew that I wouldn’t have been able to put this off much longer no matter how much I tried. The baby would be delivering herself if…

“I won’t hold it against you. I also vow to forget everything that I see today,” he vowed. “Now, hold my hand and tell me what to do.”

I didn’t hold his hand. I latched onto his arm so tight that my fingers dug into his skin.

My eyes went to where he was so graciously allowing me to hurt him.

I let go and moved to his hand, but something about the sight of my handprint on his arm struck me as odd.

“You have edema.” I panted through my next contraction. “You should get that checked out.”

Edema was swelling.

Something that a man as young as Murphy shouldn’t have.

But before I could put much more thought into it, my head was once again in the game, and I was bearing down so hard that I couldn’t breathe.

“You should turn toward me so I can catch her,” Murphy said.

I opened my eyes after the contraction was over to see him staring between my legs.

I looked myself to see that there was a baby head sticking halfway out of it.

That baby head had so much blonde hair that I was amazed.

“I can’t move…” I found myself saying.

He reached over and helped me, turning me until I was pointed to where he was kneeling in the floorboard of my van.

“Thanks,” I said just as another contraction hit me.

I wasn’t sure how much longer after that that the feeling of relief down there hit me. Two, maybe fifteen contractions. I wasn’t sure.

But what I was sure of was that the scream of my baby making its way into the world was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life.

“Umm, honey? You had a boy.”

My eyes snapped open and I stared into Murphy’s eyes for a split second before I did, indeed, see that I had a boy.

“What. The. Fuck?” I gasped.

Murphy started to laugh, then tucked the little gremlin into my arms.

He studiously avoided looking at the carnage between my legs.

Thank God for small favors.

His eyes were, wholly, and completely on the little boy that I now held in my arms.

“I was going to go buy baby clothes today,” I admitted. “That was what I was going into town to do. My maternity leave started today, and I thought, what better way to spend the day than to pick out clothes for my baby? Funny how life works sometimes.”

Murphy’s eyes went from the baby to me then back.

He shook his head. “I’m still mad at you.”

My lips curled into a small smile as my stomach cramped again.

This time, however, it was something I could ignore.

The afterbirth.

That would be something I would be doing without him. I was pretty sure cutting the cord was something that I could accomplish.

“Can you…” I pointed at the baby. “Can you take my pants and wrap him up?”

He ignored my suggestion about the pants and ripped off his shirt.

Then he wrapped it around my baby.

“Good?” he asked.

I swallowed hard, trying not to look at the man in his bare-chested state.

He wasn’t the most ripped guy in the world.

In fact, for a man that was doing CrossFit five times a week and doing such a physically demanding job, I would’ve expected him not to have a little bit of chunkiness to him at all.

But, when I looked at him, took in his hairy chest and his chiseled jaw, as well as his non-defined abdominal muscles, I realized that I was highly attracted to him, nonetheless.

“What are you staring at?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

I shrugged. “Nothing.”

I wasn’t dead. I may have just had a baby, like literally minutes ago, but I wasn’t dead.

“You need to sit here and let me ride into town and call an ambulance,” he muttered darkly.

I sighed and leaned my head into the seat I was leaning against. “Just go get me a spare so we can drive in. I don’t want to leave my car here. And your place is five minutes instead of the ten it would take to drive into town and call someone.”

There’d been a petition going around town for about a year now to get the cell phone signal booster that would help out those that lived outside of town on the north side. Pretty much, if you didn’t have a home phone—which nobody had anymore—then you had to hope that the cell phone tower wasn’t being a total dick and doing its job—which ninety-five percent of the time it wasn’t.

“You think I just carry spares like yours around with me?” He rolled his eyes.

“I think you have a truck five minutes away, and I would rather drive into town in yours, than pay thousands of dollars to the county for their transport to a hospital for something that I don’t need any longer.”

“You want to just go home?” he wondered, looking alarmed.

Now that he said it, I thought—well, why the hell not? The hard part was all done.

“Sure do,” I said.

He opened his mouth, and then closed it.

“We can’t…” he shook his head. “We can’t do that.”

I shrugged. “Nobody is asking you to do anything but take me home, man.”

Murphy looked down at the little boy that was fast asleep in his arms and said, “Your fucking mother is crazy.”

With that he transferred him over, got on his bike, and rode away.

While he was gone, I dealt with the afterbirth, wrapped it up in a trash bag, and then cleaned up my mess as best as I could while my son slept on the seat cocooned in Murphy’s large shirt.

When I was cleaned up, I took the rest of the time to study my son.

He looked nothing like the asshole who’d helped make him.

He looked like me, and nobody else.

Which made me irrationally fucking happy.

When Bayne Green came back to Paris, Texas—which I knew he would—he would never know what he’d signed away.

But I would.

And I would forever be happy in the knowledge that my son was mine, and nobody else’s.

“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world, Vladimir Alessio Pope.” I paused. “And don’t tell that man that you’re named after him, or he’ll find a reason to be mad at me about it.”

Speaking of the grumpy guy.

He rolled up in his truck ten minutes to the dot from when he left, glared daggers at me as he helped me into his truck, and then didn’t say a single word as he drove me home.

He also didn’t leave until my sister arrived twenty minutes after she was done with work.

The next morning I woke up with my car in its spot, a new tire on not one, but four rims, and a note saying, “Don’t do anything stupid like this ever again. Also, you got a cute kid to rely on you now. Don’t be dumb.”