Thanks for coming along on for the ride and all the delightful feedback. I'm having fun and I hope you are, too :) Next up, second trimester...
Part Three
At four months, he started to sing again – Johnson, Coltrane, T-Bone, Duke, Muddy, Louis. He found the old records with Billie and Ella scratching, headphones against Beth, insisting the CDs were no good. CCR, the Doors, the Beatles, sure, but always back to the basics.
"Is you is or is you ain't my baby," his voice rumbled against her.
MLMLMLMLML
Mick sat on the couch, an overflowing laundry basket at his feet, the fabric folding over his hands, his movements trapping Beth in their simple grace. His shirts, her shirts, socks in tight balls, towels stacked. Her eyes watered as an image of tiny clothes in his hands flashed.
He turned.
"What's wrong?"
"You're doing laundry?"
"Did you think my clothes magically appeared in the dresser before you came along?" he arched a brow and she fell in love all over again.
Beth settled on the couch, lowering herself with just a hint of wobble. She began to help him build the piles. "I think there's a lot of magic involved with you."
MLMLMLMLML
They sat at the small table wedged near the kitchen, one of the many things Mick had realized they needed. A kitchen table, a bedroom, a banister, locks for everything, bits of plastic to shove in outlets, the list was ever-growing.
Her chicken was shoved to the side and Beth busied herself pouring vinegar over her rice.
"My memory might be failing me, but how can that sound good?"
She shrugged and stirred the pile with her fork. Mick took a gulp of his breakfast, pausing when her eyes settled on him.
"Is this bothering you?" he set the glass down, licked his lips clean.
"No," she shook her head, sending a screen of blond hair between them.
"I'm waiting for it to sound good," Beth heaved out of her chair, grabbed the blood and sniffed. Mick let the tickle of fear. At some point, this pregnancy was bound to echo the vampire that had fathered it. Beth tilted the liquid toward her and poked the tip of her tongue in it.
She made a face.
"Where's the vinegar?"
MLMLMLMLML
The fragile happiness built. The Pythian predictions less so.
He rubbed cocoa butter on her skin, his hands on her as much as possible. She fell asleep to his soft voice against her, white noise of story after story – his mother's advice, a boy becoming a soldier, Christmases and birthdays, the feel of a guitar in his hands – chasing her to dreams.
"What will you talk about when he actually gets here?"
"Everything."
Beth's body pressed against Mick, backside following the trail of him. His hands wound around her, following the expanding curves of her. He spread his hands over their child, his hands unable to hold him. He brushed fingertips over her stomach, feeling the tiny movements thrumming beneath the skin.
"It tickles," she didn't stop him.
"I'll tickle your outsides. He'll tickle the in." A butterfly kick in response.
"Already conspiring against me," Beth murmured.
MLMLMLMLML
Mick learned. Kegel exercises and folic acid and episiotomies and toxoplasmosis and serum free T3 test and placental lactogen. He opened Gray's "Anatomy of the Human Body" and Dewhurst's "Textbook of Obstetrics and Gynaecology."
"Maybe you should teach me some of this?" Beth's bump near his face, irresistible. He pressed to her.
"You'll be busy."
"You'll be absent," she pronounced.
He flinched.
"The blood, Beth. It's already... I'll try."
An eruption of tears, nose running, heaving, graceless sobs.
He pulled her to his lap. She didn't fit, belly against the desk, and cried again.
"I'm sorry," she curled against him like a child.
"So am I."
MLMLMLMLML
"I feel like Katie Holmes," Beth shifted on the table. "Are you going to run this thing every week?"
"It's just a rental," Mick tried to adjust his mental picture of Andi as the midwife adjusted cords and knobs. She stirred the warming goo and he caught flashes of pale pricks on her wrist. Josef liked them smart and beautiful.
"Let's get started,"
Beth pulled her shirt up and Mick smiled involuntarily at the sight of her stomach; she wiggled when Andi spread the jelly over her.
Then the wand waved and seconds ticked by, the screen blank as she located the uterus.
"And there's your baby!" she announced. The circle on circle, fuzzy gray against the black.
And Beth was crying again.
"That's – it's really," she couldn't get words out.
Mick wasn't sure who grabbed whose hand first, but suddenly Beth was squeezing him past the point of human comfort. Andi zoomed in and there it was.
Beth's heart jumped as she peered at the screen.
"There, it's flickering," she pointed.
"That's the heartbeat Daddy's been hearing."
An aching breath poured out of Beth, tears streaming now, and Mick brought her hand, still grasped in his, to his lips.
"Lie still," Andi instructed and then turned up the volume.
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
"Oh my God," Beth murmured again and again. She stretched her free hand as if to touch the screen, but fell short. The head, the ghost of the umbilical cord. For all his preternatural vision, this was the best thing Mick had ever seen.
"About 140 beats-per-minute," Andi studied the screen. "Do you want to know the sex?"
"Mick thinks it's a boy," Beth smiled. "But I'd like to know for sure, past the psychic sniffer bit."
"Give Daddy a prize," a finger pointed at the tiny jut from amid the static of the image. "It's a boy."
MLMLMLMLML
"Jack?"
"No."
"Josef?" her smile.
"That's just asking for several centuries of smirking."
"Jude?"
"Do you particularly like the letter 'J'?"
"Patron saint of lost causes. I thought it would be appropriate."
"Matthias then," he shot back. "Patron saint of happiness."
Beth raised her eyebrows, mimicking her husband.
"Patron saint of our son getting his ass kicked on the playground?"