Page 93 of Claimed By the Boss
I don’t tell him I’m scared.
I want to. The words sit right at the edge of my throat the entire drive, but saying them feels like it would make the fear more real than it already is, and some old, stubborn part of me still believes that managing my own terror quietly is safer than admitting it out loud. I grip his hand tighter instead, and hegrips back, and I think, somewhere underneath the fear, that he probably already knows anyway.
The hospital moves fast once we arrive. I’m in a room within minutes, monitors attached, a doctor I’ve never met examining me with calm, careful hands while another nurse asks Zane questions he answers without hesitation, every piece of my medical history apparently memorized somewhere in that mind of his that forgets nothing.
“Three weeks early,” the doctor says, reading the monitor. “Active labor, contractions five minutes apart. We’ll need to watch her closely given the timing, but everything I’m seeing right now looks stable.”
“Stable,” I repeat, needing to hear the word again.
“Stable,” she confirms. “Babies born at thirty-seven weeks generally do very well. We’re not in dangerous territory. We’re simply earlier than planned.”
I exhale, the first full breath I’ve taken since midnight.
Zane doesn’t leave the room. Not for a single moment, not when the doctor steps out to consult with her team, not when a nurse asks if he’d like a coffee from the machine down the hall, not even when I tell him, somewhere around three in the morning, that he should at least sit down instead of standing beside the bed the entire time.
“I’m fine standing,” he says.
“You’ve been standing for two hours.”
“I’m fine.”
I don’t argue further.
I understand, somewhere in the part of my mind that isn’t currently consumed with the rhythm of contractions, that standing here beside me is the only thing he can actually do right now, the only contribution available to a man who has spent his entire life solving problems through action and is suddenly faced with something no amount of strategy or resources can speed along or control.
He holds my hand through every contraction. He doesn’t flinch when my grip tightens hard enough to hurt. He counts the seconds with me when the doctor asks me to breathe through the worst of it, his voice low and steady in my ear, and somewhere around four in the morning, exhausted and frightened and further into this than I’ve ever been in my life, I understand that whatever this man’s failures have been, this isn’t one of them.
“Talk to me,” I say, between contractions, needing something to focus on besides the pain.
“About what?”
“Anything. The names. Tell me the names.”
He smiles, tired but real. “Not yet. You’ll find out properly when she’s here.”
“Zane.”
“Soon,” he says, and presses a kiss to my temple, and the next contraction takes whatever protest I had left.
The hours blur together after that, pain and breath and Zane’s voice the one constant thread running through all of it, thedoctor’s calm updates marking time in a way the clock on the wall no longer seems to.
By five in the morning, the doctor tells me it’s nearly time.
I look at Zane. He looks back at me, something unguarded and entirely undone behind his eyes, every careful control he’s built his whole life around stripped away in this one room, at this one hour, for this one reason.
“Ready,” he says, not a question.
I nod, because I am, because I’ve been building toward this moment since long before I understood I was building toward anything at all, and the room narrows down to nothing but this, the two of us, and our daughter who is finally, after everything, about to arrive.
42
ZANE
I have stoodin rooms where men’s lives were decided by a word I chose or didn’t choose. I have negotiated with people who would have ended me without hesitation if I’d shown the wrong kind of weakness at the wrong moment.
I have never, in my entire adult life, felt as completely without function as I do standing beside this bed at five in the morning, holding Celine’s hand while a doctor tells her to push.
There’s nothing for me to manage here. No variable to control, no asset to deploy, no structure I can build that would move this any faster or make it any safer.
