Chapter 80

Chapter 80
Cheyenne

Labor feels personal by the time they get me upstairs.
Not in a poetic way either. In a rude, sweaty, deeply specific way where the universe apparently looked at my pelvis and said, let’s test her commitment to motherhood one more time just for fun.
I grip Dallas’s hand hard enough to make his knuckles pop and breathe through another contraction while the nurse helps me onto the bed, gets monitors strapped around my belly, and asks a string of questions I would answer more politely if I weren’t busy feeling like my spine’s trying to climb out through my back.
“Pain scale,” she asks.
“Rude question.”
Dallas makes a sound that’s halfway between a laugh and a cough.
The nurse smiles like she’s heard worse. “That puts you at what, eight.”
“Twelve.”
“We’ll write down ten.”
“That’s cowardly.”
The monitor catches a hard spike across the screen. Baby girl’s heart stays strong through it, which is the only reason I don’t start crying before I’m ready. Dallas leans down and brushes my hair off my forehead while the nurse checks me.
Then she looks up and says, “You’re farther along than I expected.”
Dallas’s focus sharpens. “How far?”
“Nine.”
I blink. “I’m sorry, what?”
She smiles. “You didn’t come in early. You came in just in time.” Well.
That certainly explains the personality change in my uterus.
The next hour stops pretending to be an hour and turns into a body-level war I can only measure by landmarks. One nurse swaps out with another, and my doctor finally gets here. Dallas presses ice chips to my mouth between contractions, and someone else dims a light. I can hear someone telling me I’m doing great, which is a nice thing to say, but feels a little hollow when your entire lower half’s trying to split in two.
Dallas stays steady through it all. He doesn’t do that empty calm people fake when they’re actually spiraling inside. He stays with me. Really with me. Hand on my thigh. Mouth at my temple. Water, ice, pressure on my back, whatever I ask for before I even finish asking. There’s no performance in him tonight, just presence, thick and sure and impossible to miss.
At one point I’m gripping his shirt in both fists while a contraction drags through me so hard my eyes blur.
“I hate this,” I gasp.
“I know.”
“I’m never doing this again.”
He nods solemnly. “Completely fair.”
“And if you remind me later that I said that, I’ll smother you with a pillow.”
His thumb strokes once over my knee. “Good to have the terms clear.”
That actually gets a laugh out of me, which hurts and helps at the same time.
My doctor checks me again not long after that and says it’s time.
Everything in the room changes, not louder, but tighter and more purposeful.
The nurse adjusts the bed. My doctor walks me through what she wants. Dallas comes up farther by my shoulder, his hand braced behind my neck so I can curl into him when the time comes.
“You ready, Baby?” he asks.
“No.”
His mouth brushes my temple. “Me neither.”
That settles something in me more than any perfectly crafted reassurance could have.
The first push feels useless and enormous at the same time. Like trying to move a mountain with your own rib cage. The second one’s better. The third makes me curse loud enough that the nurse at my side has to bite back a smile.
Sweat slides down my spine. My hair sticks to my face. I hate everybody a little. Mostly whoever first described childbirth with soft words and left out the part where your whole body becomes one giant command.
The commands keep coming, again and again and again.
Dallas keeps counting for me because his voice is the one I can still hear clean when everything else goes blurry. Not loud and not panicked, just low and steady like a handrail.
“That’s it. Come on, Baby. I’ve got you.”
I bear down so hard I think my vision whites out at the edges.
Then my doctor says, “There’s the head.”
Something tears loose inside me at the same moment hope does.
I start crying before I mean to. Dallas kisses the side of my face over and over. “One more.”
“Liar,” I tell my doctor.
The room laughs quietly, and then the contraction hits, and I give everything I’ve got left to it.
Pressure and fire, then relief so sudden it almost feels wrong, and then a cry splits the room wide open, sharp and angry and alive.
“It’s a girl,” my doctor says.
Dallas makes a sound I’ve never heard from him before, something wrecked clean through at the center. When I turn my head, his eyes are wet, and he’s not even trying to hide it.
Our daughter’s lifted up just enough for me to see her before they place her on my chest, warm and slick and furious at the whole situation.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
She’s tiny and perfect and louder than seems reasonable for a person who just got here.
Dallas lays a shaking hand over both of us.
“Hi, baby girl,” he says, voice broken all to pieces. “Hi.”
I laugh and cry at the same time because what else am I supposed to do with that?
The nurse helps get a blanket around her while I stare like if I blink too long she might disappear. She doesn’t; she keeps crying, and that’s good, because loud means her lungs are good, and that she has a temper and a future nobody gets to steal from her.
“What’s her name?” the nurse asks gently.
I look up at Dallas. He looks down at me like I hung the moon myself. “You tell them.”
My throat tightens all over again. “Ivy Leigh.”
The nurse smiles. “That fits her.” And it does.
The rest comes in softer pieces. Delivery of the placenta and stitching. The baby is rooting angrily against my chest while someone adjusts the pillows under my arms. Dallas cutting the cord with a hand that’s steadier than his face. Me looking over at him and feeling this whole fierce, impossible thing settle into my bones, the knowledge that there are people who change your life and people who change your blood pressure and then there are people like him, who walk into every hard moment and make it livable by refusing to leave.
Once the room quiets and the essential bustle eases, they give us a minute alone, just us.
Dallas sits on the edge of the bed with Ivy swaddled in his arms, and the sight nearly finishes me off. He’s got tattoos and broad shoulders and that stillness he wears when he’s taking something sacred seriously, and our daughter looks ridiculously small against him, safe though, completely safe.
He glances up. “You’re crying again.”
“So are you.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It is from where I’m sitting.”
He smiles without really meaning to, then looks back down at Ivy like smiling anywhere else feels wasteful. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’s loud.”
“She’s ours.”
That one lands deepest. I shift carefully, body sore and hollowed out and full all at once. “Bring her here.”
He stands and sets her back against my chest, then climbs in close enough that his arm can stay around both of us.
For a while we don’t say anything; we just look.
At her little mouth. Her dark damp hair. The furious wrinkle between her brows like she came out annoyed that we disturbed her peace. At the shape of her fingers curling open and shut against the blanket.
Eventually there’s a knock, then another, then the door opens a crack, and Boston’s head appears.
“You decent?”
“No,” I say.
He comes in anyway, because, of course, he does. He leans down and kisses my forehead before he looks at Ivy for a long second. “She’s perfect.”
“I know,” I tell him.
“Obviously biased.”
“Who asked you anyway?”
That gets the tiny half laugh I wanted. He checks my chart with the kind of automatic scan he probably can’t turn off if he tried, then straightens and says, “The vultures are downstairs.”
I close my eyes. “How many?”
“All of them.”
That makes me smile. When the door opens again, it’s Ashlynn first.
Of course it is. She steps in with tears already in her eyes and one hand pressed to her mouth. Collin’s right behind her, carrying Sawyer in one arm while my son blinks sleep-heavy and confused at the bright room. The rest crowd the doorway, in shifting layers of family, baby gear, and love.
The room gets loud fast. Ashlynn comes to my bedside and kisses my forehead, then Dallas’s cheek, then looks down at Ivy like she might combust from it. “She’s beautiful.”
Collin’s eyes are shiny too. “That she is.”
“Baby,” Sawyer says from Collin’s arms, then points with a tiny sticky finger and looks at me like he’d like an explanation for why I went somewhere without him and came back with a person.
I laugh softly. “Yeah, buddy. That’s your baby sister.” He considers that.
Then he leans toward Dallas until he gets lowered enough to pat Ivy’s blanket with the gentlest hand I’ve ever seen him use. “Hi.”
That does it, and I’m crying again, but everybody can cope.
Behind them the rest of the room swells. Jackson and Brooklyn shoulder in together, one twin boy on each hip because apparently subtle entrances aren’t a thing anymore once you become parents. Lincoln’s got one twin leaning against his leg and the other already asking too many questions. Aspen stands there with that fierce, tired softness motherhood gave her multiplied by three, a baby monitor clipped to her bag even now because she’s learned survival the honest way. Collin tries to tell everybody to stay calm while being the least calm person in the room. Ashlynn tells him to hush, and he actually does.
Dallas looks around once, then at me. There are no words, and he doesn’t need them because the whole room says it for him, chosen again and again and again.
By the time the nurse finally threatens to throw us all out if the volume doesn’t drop, Ivy’s been admired by every set of hands I trust, Sawyer’s decided being a big brother mostly means pointing at things more forcefully, and the room smells like flowers, coffee, baby lotion, and the kind of happiness that takes work to hold onto.
Later, after they’ve all been pushed back out in laughing clusters and promises to return tomorrow, the room quiets again.
Dallas sits beside me with one hand wrapped around mine and the other resting protectively over Ivy’s bassinet. The lights are low. My body aches in twelve different ways. My hair’s a mess. There are still family voices drifting faint from the hallway because nobody in this family leaves quickly once love’s involved.
I smile into the dark. “What?” Dallas asks.
“Nothing.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not.” I squeeze his hand. “I’m just thinking this is loud.”
He glances toward the door, then back at me. “You complaining?”
“Not even a little.”
Because loud means we made it here. Loud means children and brothers and sisters and grandparents and wives and husbands and all the ordinary holy clutter of a life that kept going.
Loud means forever doesn’t look polished. It looks fed, tired, overfull, and loved.
I close my eyes with our daughter breathing softly beside us, and my husband’s hand holding mine.
Outside the room, our family keeps moving, voices filter through the walls, shoes squeak, and somebody laughs too hard.
And inside it, my whole life comes into focus. It’s full, busy, affectionate, and ours.
Forever.