A/N: A bit shorter but I don't think you will mind:D
Trying to figure out what symptoms correlated with what stage in pregnancy was giving me a headache so I'm purposefully a bit vague. I apologize if that detracts from the writing for anyone but it was necessary for what's left of the author's sanity.
Chapter Seven
Will's POV
He sighed quietly from his unannounced position at their bedroom door when she hurtled another pair of pants to the ground. She was ten weeks along and although he could detect a very discrete thickening of her waist, from what he had read she was probably more than feeling it. When he combined that with how sensitive she had become to that portion of her body from the eating disorder he could only imagine what must be going through her mind.
As he watched her standing in front of the mirror, worrying her bottom lip, hands occasionally sliding across her belly only to fall to her sides in defeat before she tried on another piece of clothing, he realized he didn't have to imagine, that he already knew.
Wordlessly he stepped into the room, heading directly for the closet where he rifled around for a low-waisted skirt he had seen her wear a couple of times. It was a light purple, with a slightly darkened floral pattern littered across the flowing material. She didn't require maternity clothes yet but he knew what she was trying on was never going to work. For some women, for most, they would have accepted the tightness as unavoidable and moved on. She wasn't most women and he needed to do something before they ended up late for their first appointment.
That was probably the reason this was affecting her more today. He knew she was nervous about going. He was antsy about it, and he wasn't the one the appointment was for.
She was regarding him with tired eyes when he turned around, skirt in hand. "Here," he said with a smile, handing her the skirt, "it will sit low."
"I feel huge." Emma grumbled, carefully avoiding the word that had become somewhat taboo in their lives.
"Em, no one can tell when you have clothes on. I can barely tell when you have clothes off." He reassured her, dropping a kiss on her cheek before she started to pull the skirt on.
She was still struggling with accepting the pregnancy. She wasn't adverse to it, it was just so surreal, for both of them, that her feelings about her changing body were overriding everything else. In a rush she stepped away, bending over to grab at a white button-down blouse she had discarded earlier, quickly doing the buttons before she gave up on that as well and her forehead crashed into his chest.
"Even my breasts are huge." She whined, her voice muffled against his shirt.
"That's a conflict of interest," he spoke gently, rotating her by her shoulders so that she was facing her reflection as he began to undo just enough of the buttons that the swell of her breasts was visible, "because I think this, "he motioned to her chest, careful not to touch the part of her that had become so tender, "is one of the best parts."
"One of the best parts?" She rotated to facing him, waiting.
"The other part may or may not have something to do with you wanting to jump me every time I turn around." He smirked as he leaned in for a kiss, remembering how she had effortlessly convinced him that Spanish papers weren't really all that important, again. His students were never going to get their grades back.
Carefully he moved them backwards, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her on his lap, his head resting against her back while she redid what he had just undone. He wrapped his arms her waist, the gesture having grown almost protective in the last couple weeks, and sighed against her.
"When it sinks in this will get easier." He commented, lowering one hand to rest on her thigh, tracing a flower with his index finger and she relaxed against him while the mahogany clock on the opposite wall ticked delicately through their thoughts.
This waiting room was different from the others. It appeared as though a tornado had swept through covering the light grey carpet in toys for varying ages. In reality that tornado probably had a name, and whatever her name was she was adorable. Shoulder-length brown curls that bounced right along with her as she skipped in and out of the couples, earning smiles wherever she went.
She held the room within that smile and Will imagined that she could rip a one hundred dollar bill in half and smother the anger with innocent eyes and a protruding lip.
For the moment the girl was resting, sitting next to her father, curled up in the drab chair, peering over his shoulder, her tiny hand rubbing at her chin as though she was questioning as the man next to her appeared to be doing. Every time the door to the back offices would open her head would whip around, hair twirling about behind her, mouth open slightly while restless energy overtook her features ensuring she had to work to sit still. Her face would fall just as quickly and Will would grin to himself, at her excitement, that unlike an adult's, was unfettered by disappointment, and resurfaced just as strong the next time the door opened.
"Mommy!" She shrieked, and he realized that he wasn't the only one who had been watching when the room erupted into a quiet chuckle as she bounded over to a heavily pregnant woman wearing sweats and a sleepy smile as she ran her fingers through her daughter's hair.
"Brother did you like the doctor?" She questioned loudly, with the insistence only a child can muster, her lips inches away from her mother's rounded stomach.
Will glanced away when the girl's small hands reached out and pushed her mother's shirt up high on her stomach, and it was obvious from the girl's practiced motions that this was something she did often. It was also obvious from the mother's flushed cheeks that it was something that was supposed to be done at home.
His eyes landed on his wife, one hand over her middle that seemed so tiny compared to the one he had just seen. She was riveted on the mother, now nervously straightening her blouse and good-naturedly asking her daughter to wait until she got home to see her brother. Emma wasn't smiling like the rest of the women in the room. Her eyes were wide, her mouth parted and he could tell she was a million and one miles away.
More than anything he wanted to ask what she was thinking but it wouldn't have been appropriate, and he had a few ideas on the matter anyways. He smiled at the family as they headed out the door, the little girl waving enthusiastically, the mother pausing to knit her eyebrows at Emma, still staring.
"My mother's brother is in the hospital. I guess he has been for three months." Will began, cringing at his topic choice but it was something he had just found out through a care worker at the nursing home.
Horrible transition or not he accomplished his goal and Emma snapped out of her reverie, turning to look at him, waiting for more information.
"He had a stroke and there's brain damage." He watched as her face pulled into a frown, probably reciting things she had learned about brain damage and strokes in college. "They say he looks like what you would expect after lying in a bed for three months."
"Weight gain." She said with an almost eerie resolute finality, her lips barely moving around the words.
And there it was. The gap in her logic left by the eating disorder that he wondered if she would ever find a bridge for.
"Weight loss." He corrected softly, noticing her expression change as the error in her thinking dawned on her.
Emma's POV
The gel, cool against her skin, surprised her despite the nurse's cheerful warning and the countless times she had seen a scene such as this play out in movies. Will's hand was resting in hers, an unspoken comfort that she was glad to have at her side.
A grainy image appeared on the monitor and she waited for the woman to point out what was and what was not their child. It was Will's intake of breath and the loving kiss he placed on the back of her hand that he forgot to lower from his mouth that brought tears to her eyes, that made it more real than the grey blob she was staring at.
It was hearing the heartbeat, so rapid compared with her own that gave her that moment, his breath spilling out against her skin and when she turned her head, he was smiling with more emotion than she had ever seen.
"Emma, that's our baby." He whispered through his admiration finally lowering her hand but not letting it go.
Suddenly the frustration that had gripped her this morning, worsening with every piece of clothing she had tried on, was gone. He was right. She wasn't fat. She was pregnant and there was a difference. Even though the sensation of her waist pressing into her pants reminded her of the panic-induced body checks in the mirror that had dominated her days, she wasn't that woman anymore.
She was going to be a mother.
Will was going to be a father.
They were going to be a family.
Will's POV
Her morning sickness gradually lessened and when she started her second trimester and she could finally keep most of her food down. They had talked about that once, about how surreal it was to be throwing up after eating, not by choice, but because her body felt it necessary. Between that and a seemingly never-ending need to pee, she was never very far from a restroom.
Eventually, her body becoming used to the changes it was undergoing, the fatigue melted away. He no longer had to virtually pick her up to get her out of bed and then there had been the time she had fallen asleep at the dinner table, hand resting loosely over the fork. He had a picture of that somewhere.
They had been out with the dog, lazing in the park on a Saturday afternoon when she brought up the subject of names. They had briefly flirted with the topic before they had decided they would just wait to learn the gender. She had given him the choice on that which still surprised him. He would have assumed that someone with Emma's personality would have wanted every detail, including gender, pegged down at the first possible second that it could be. But she hadn't wanted to know, if he hadn't.
The day he found out he was going to have a daughter, when he had finally found the strength to get up out of the chair he had collapsed into, tears of happiness he hadn't been expecting sliding down his cheeks, was officially, the best day of his life.
Later that week they decided on a name. Megan Rose.
They were at a mandatory staff meeting, mindlessly watching Figgins attempt to prattle his way through a pie chart that was clearly beyond his cognitive reach when he heard Emma's sharp inhale and her hand closed tightly around his underneath the table, placing it delicately on her stomach.
He could still remember that, head bowed to hide the grin as he felt a kick. For the rest of the meeting that was where his hand stayed. And he still had absolutely no idea what the point of that pie chart had been.
The first time he found her actually crying over her body was after a trip to the store, mere weeks before she had started wearing maternity clothes, and the cashier had politely inquired if she thought a small would be large enough. That had been a rough night, with Emma ranting about how she felt like a whale and that she had been for a while but had been afraid to say it because, once upon a time, she had talked that way on a regular basis. He had assured her, with tender kisses and caring touches interspersed with carefully chosen words that she had every right to feel how she was and that she should never hesitate to speak her mind to him.
His first trip to the store late at night was for grape jelly. She had turned down everything in the house, her mind set on a salami and jelly sandwich which sounded disgusting to him, but she had loved it. And it was a cherished memory of his, watching her sway her hips in time with the jazz playing across the speakers in the living room as she smeared absurd amounts of jelly onto two slices of bread. There had been a time when he would have gone to the ends of the earth to find her something she would eat. He realized then, when she took the first bite with a contented smile that he still would.
He played music to her stomach, a variety including show tunes, jazz, classical, and of course a standard dose of Singing in the Rain. He had read that infants exposed to music in the womb in the last three months of gestation, when tested a year later, showed a preference for the music they had heard inside their mother. It didn't mean that this dictated what musical style the infant would prefer later in life, but it did help determine what factors in songs might influence them.
Of course, much of what a child learned to like in music came from exposure after birth. He could see it now, Emma and him squabbling over what style of music Megan should listen to, sticking their tongues out at each other when she was old enough to choose one over the other, rolling their eyes when she chose neither.
He hoped she loved music. He hoped she breathed music.
He realized how different things were with Emma as compared to Terri right from the start. Terri had complained about being on her feet four hours a day. He often had to remind Emma that it was perfectly fine to not get everything done and that some evenings, it was just as enjoyable to soak in a warm bath as it was to read baby books and diligently take notes.
Oh, the notes.
They had entire binders labeled by topic and age of development, with high-lighted sections, all of which he found endearing if not exhausting. He had barely made it through one book. She was on her sixth. She was better than Wikipedia.
Terri had taken every opportunity to turn a situation against him, cutting him down as a man or father-figure. Emma was supportive, and she showed it. He didn't realize it would mean so much, her saying over the sounds of his playing a standard blues scale on the piano, that he would be a great father.
It hit him a little bit more every day. That that's what he was going to be.
Sometimes, as they made love or he caught sight of her undressing he simply had to stop and stare. At her. At her stomach. At their future.
She was relaxed, dancing around the coffee table in between dusting pieces of furniture and unlike the zeroed in precision indicative of a compulsion she often paused mid-swipe to sing a few bars of some country song he had never heard of. Every Sunday he had to put up with her listening to the top 30 countdown but it was worth it to catch glimpses of her like this.
Returning his attention to his pile of papers, the Spanish ones that he was attempting to grade for the third time in as many weeks, he sighed and reached for the Spanish Dictionary to his left. After so long of reading their spelling, he began to question his own.
Vaguely he registered the song changing in the background, Emma's surprised laughter floating through the air but he didn't look up, determined to get this done, tonight.
He definitely wasn't complaining that he hadn't gotten them done. To him, a pregnant, hormonal wife should be an acceptable excuse for any homework not getting graded in a timely manner. Someday, he was sure, his students were going to look back on this and realize why their teacher was no longer getting things back the next day. Probably when they were husbands in his position, or wives in Emma's and he was glad he wouldn't be around for that revelation.
The other night while he had been making decent progress she had quietly sat down across from him, staring intently until he had finally glanced up only to find her hand dipping between her legs, underneath an oversized t-shirt that had clearly been the only thing she had been wearing. Two more dismal papers made it to the 'graded' pile before she gasped softly and he decided the students weren't really making that much of an effort therefore, he should be allowed to shirk off teacherly responsibilities, especially when his wife was touching herself not five feet away.
Emma's arms appeared around his neck, her breath hot against his ear as she sang along with the radio. Her hands flattened against his t-shirt, sliding across his chest until they rested on his shoulders.
"Em, I really, really need to get these handed back." He stressed, scooting his chair forward in an attempt to remove himself from her tempting caresses.
She didn't listen, nibbling at his ear lobe and moving her hands so that they were underneath his shirt, her fingertips blazing a trail of fire across his skin. Briefly he closed his eyes, attempting to will away the arousal that was starting to make his pants uncomfortable. "Emma…" He began, cut off by more lyrics that quickly caught his attention.
"The first time, we did it." Emma sang softly under her breath, her tone seductive, breathy, higher than the male lead she was singing over. "I was scared to death. She snuck out in that cotton dress, jumped on in and we drove out to the lake. Put her hand on my knee and said 'I just can't wait.' I had everything I needed in the bed of my truck, turns out my baby loves to," Emma paused for a beat, bringing her lips directly against his ear, and while whoever the guy was who was doing the song sang 'fish' she sang what every person listening to the lyrics was expecting.
And right then and there he knew those papers weren't getting handed back tomorrow.
Without thinking he stood up, turning and capturing her lips in a searing kiss before breaking away, one hand resting lightly on her swollen belly. "Say it again." He whispered against her cheek, his voice thick with arousal because she never talked like that and it was selfish to ask but he didn't care. "Say it again and maybe I will." He spoke low and dangerous and he gave into the urge to nip softly at her ear.
"Fuck me." She whispered so gently he almost didn't catch it while his hands began pushing her sweat pants down while hers found the zipper on his jeans.
"Gotta be louder than that." He taunted, enjoying the moment, gasping when her hand flattened against his crotch.
"Fuck me Will." She repeated, accenting each word and he smiled as images of doing just that formed in his head.
He had never done what he was about to, always too afraid of coming off as disrespectful or vulgar, but he wanted her. Now.
Gently he cupped her cheek before he commanded softly. "Get on your hands and knees." She didn't question him, dropping to the ground almost instantly and he practically fell to his knees behind her, reaching out to pull her underwear down in one quick motion, running his hands across her bare skin.
Swiftly he undid his pants the rest of the way, pushing them down just far enough because he didn't have the patience to take them all the way off, pausing only long enough to make sure she was ready before sliding into her.
"God, you feel so good, so hot." He mumbled as he increased his pace, spurred on by the sounds she was making, contented whimpers and one command that left his mind reeling.
Oh he could definitely fuck her harder.
It was quick, messy, frenzied and they hadn't even taken the time to undress but as he laid beside her on the living room floor, clothes still half off, chest heaving, he knew it was going to be one of his favorite memories.
"Will," Emma drew out his name, "make me come." She whispered against his ear, grabbing one of his hands and sliding it between her legs.
"I just did." He teased, loving how the pregnancy was affecting her sex drive. It was becoming something of a standard, her coming more than once.
"Again." She whined and the desperate tone in her voice was all took to have him trailing kisses down her body, pausing at her stomach, so very definitely pregnant.
He slowed things down, smoothing over the stretch marks he had caught her crying over one day with his tongue before continuing to his destination, hands on her hips, mouth between her legs, and God he loved doing this to her. Softly he alternated patterns with his tongue until her hands found their way into his hair and she pressed his face downwards, demanding more as she moaned his name.
As she came for the second time, her thighs tight against the sides of his face, he mentally thanked hormones. While her body relaxed against him he moved to the side and simply placed his hand over her belly, fascinated by the way it had to curve to encompass the part of her that had previously been flat. He knew she was growing anxious about the weight gain but she was still eating well, better than she had before actually, and he admired her so much for that. More than he knew how to articulate.
"I love you." He murmured, remembering the ungraded papers resting on the table with a groan. "I love you, and I love you like this especially but I really have to grade those papers."
With much effort he forced his body off the ground turning to help Emma up only to find her head turned to the side, a hand where his had been on her stomach, and her mouth parted slightly as she slept. He really wanted to take a picture of that, his pregnant wife in a state of half-dress from hormone-induced lust, asleep on the living room floor, but the fear if it somehow getting out of their hands prevented it.
Instead he shook his head, chuckled and headed to the bathroom for a warm wash cloth, taking his time with her before he resigned himself to dreadful spelling, poorly constructed sentences, and the random note from one of his Glee students about a song they thought of while in class.
Forty-some papers and unknown hours later she was still where he had left her, now rolled over onto her side. Regretfully he woke her up, making sure she didn't stumble on the way to the bedroom and tucked her into bed, sliding in behind her to wrap his arm around her waist.
That was when he remembered it.
The night he had spent with her the way he was now, his arm over her stomach swollen with food after a binge, and the thoughts he had been unable to stop about how her stomach being swollen for an entirely different reason.
He was grateful that she was asleep when he gently lifted her shirt up and kissed her belly because a tear found its way from his cheek to her skin, and he let this new memory, of them right now, replace the old one.
A/N: I hope you enjoyed this as much as I've enjoyed depicting pregnant Emma.
I'm starting a new job on wednesday and then classes the following week. I'm going to be extraordinarily busy and my updates may become more sporadic (I will try not to let this happen) and occasionally shorter but I will not, I will not abandon this story. Please have patience, it's so greatly appreciated.
As always, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continued loyalty and fantastic reviews! They make me want to write!