Page 94 of Expecting an Argument
I sobbed as hot tears rolled down my cheeks. The handsome man laughed at me.
“Hush, Olivia,” he said, an amused smile brightening his voice as he dried my tears with the edge of his sleeve. “You’re not a robot.”
He lifted my hand to show me the wire that now looked more like a tube embedded into my skin. “This is just to help the nurses give you medicine.” He glanced up to a screen behind me that I just noticed. “That monitors your heart rate—that’s the noise you’re hearing.”
I leaned forward, studying his strong jaw and the devastating cut of his cheekbones. “And why are you here?”
He looked at me with eyes that were blue enough to quench any thirst. “Because I care about you.”
He smelled so good, like opening presents under the tree at Grandma’s. His face was mere inches from mine, but I wanted him closer.
“Really?” I said, my eyelashes feeling heavy as I moved toward him. “I’m so lucky…”
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
His eyes flicked up to the monitor and his breath ghostedagainst my lips. “If you’re this excited now, I can’t wait to see what happens when you meet the babies.”
I froze, then my brows furrowed as I limply fell back. My pillow caught me and held me upright as I chewed on the handsome man’s words.
I took a deep breath—wait, I could breathe again. Why couldn’t I breathe before? My hand groped around my ribs, then my abdomen. My belly felt smaller and squishier than it should, like it was empty.
“Babies?” I whispered. “Babies…babies! Oh God, where are my babies?”
I turned as my chest started to shake. “Beau, where are the twins?”
Beau held my shoulders, keeping me steady. “There you are, sugar. The twins are in the nursery, snuggly and warm. They were just waiting for Mommy to wake up.”
The tears started again. “What—what happened?”
Beau held my hands as he explained everything. I sat, frozen in shock, as he told me that Annie had a partial placental abruption at Ashley and Tyson’s house that caused me to hemorrhage. I had lost nearly two liters of blood by the time I was wheeled in for the emergency c-section.
“Dr. Ornelas said you were very lucky to not need a transfusion after all that blood loss,” he said. “You were so tough, I told you that you were a badass.”
My lip trembled. “You…you saved my life. If we had gone to Parkland hospital or…or even driven to the city instead of taking your helicopter, I might not have made it.”
He shrugged. “Like I said before—if it’s for you, nothing is too much. I’d do it again any day of the week.”
He said it so casually, like he had merely picked up a coffee for me before work. Beau always had the financial resources to move mountains, but the sincerity of his devotion shook me tomy bedrock.
Hearing that he loved me was nothing more than words, bits of breath lost to the wind. Every touch and every kiss I had dismissed as pure physical voracity. Even him caring for me during the pregnancy was a means to an end, and that end was currently waiting in a nursery somewhere else in the hospital.
And Beau was…here. I had awoken to him clutching my hand almost as if he were in prayer and he had stayed with me, patiently, like he always had.
A calm warmth, like a blanket fresh out of the dryer, wrapped around me. I had always thought that all-encompassing warmth, the kind that made my muscles feel woolen and each breath light as down feathers, was an unaffordable luxury, but the feeling was not completely unfamiliar.
I had felt it, pieces of it, at doctor’s appointments while staring at a flickering ultrasound monitor, in the cab of a truck while ordering at a drive-thru that was just about to close, and in the artificial twilight of the bedroom TV just before falling asleep next to my greatest friend.
Beau’s love was something I never thought I wanted, then nothing I ever thought I deserved, but regardless of how I felt about it, I had it—all of it.
And I never wanted to give it back.
A quick knock rapped on the door before it opened. I held my breath as the nurses wheeled in two bassinets, one with a pink placard and the other with blue, filled with precious swaddled bundles inside.
The nurses’ voices lifted with their smiles, but their words were a happy blur as they handed me first Annie, then Brady.
My head turned back and forth as I scanned each of their faces. I couldn’t match the squishy bundles in my hands to the blurry ultrasound photos that I had studied.
A horrible hollowness grew in the center of my chest.Between the slender cheeks and pointed chins, I couldn’t recognize any part of myself in them. There must have been a mistake.
