Chapter 320 I need to push

Chapter 320 I need to push
Cassie's whole face lighted up, and for just a moment she felt the pull of it so strongly, the urge to get up, to get in the car, to go and hold that baby and sit with Lila and be present for it the way she always tried to be for the people she loved.

But she felt the weight of herself when she moved, felt it in her back and her hips and the deep, settled heaviness of a body that was carrying two lives and had been doing so for a very long time now.

The twins could come any day. Before the due date, or after it. There was no reliable way to know, and Franklin had been clear, in that gentle but completely immovable way of his, that he wanted her close to the hospital.

Close enough that there was no scrambling, no last-minute panic, no unnecessary distance between her and the place she needed to be when the time came.

She wouldn't have made it anyway. And even if some stubborn part of her had decided to try, Franklin would have stood in the doorway with his arms folded and that look on his face, and that would have been the end of it.

"Congratulations, Lila," she said, and her voice carried all of it, the love, the genuine happiness, and the soft regret of a woman who wishes she could be in two places at once. "I am so close to my own due date right now, I'm sorry I can't get there to see her."

"I know, I know," Lila said, and she was still smiling, Cassie could hear it. "I just had to tell you. I couldn't wait."

"I'm so glad you did. I'll get gifts out to you, and I want to hear everything once you've had some rest." She paused. "Congratulations again. She's lucky to have you."

❖✺❖

Later that same day, the contractions started.

Cassie recognized them immediately and said nothing. It wasn't her first time navigating this particular kind of discomfort, and she had spent the better part of this pregnancy doing everything right, the prenatal exercises, the breathing work, all the things that her background as a fitness coach had made second nature to her long before she ever needed them for this.

She breathed through the first wave, and the second, and told herself it was early and manageable and that there was no need to make it into anything more than it was yet.

She let the afternoon pass without mentioning it.

By the time evening settled into night and the house went quiet and Franklin drifted into the deep, completely unsuspecting sleep of a man with no idea what was building in the room beside him, the contractions had stopped being something she could simply breathe through and had become something else entirely, a grinding, escalating pressure that moved through her whole body in waves and left her damp at the temples and gripping the edge of the mattress with both hands.

She reached over and tapped him.

Nothing.

She tapped him again, harder this time. "Frank." Her voice came out lower than she intended, strained at the edges, she couldn't fully control it. "Frank, it's time."

Franklin came awake the way people do when their body registers alarm before their mind catches up all at once, sitting up, his eyes going straight to her face.

What he saw there did the rest. The sheen of sweat across her forehead. The particular set of her jaw. The way she was holding herself.

He was already moving. "What's wrong? Do we need to go? Should I call someone?" He was off the bed, reaching for his phone, reaching for his keys, and then he stopped himself mid-motion, something visibly trying to slow him down and not entirely succeeding.

"The midwife said there'd be early contractions first. Is this…could this still be that?"

Cassie looked at him.

The look said several things at once, none of them printable.

"The early contractions started in the afternoon," she said, through her teeth, with the measured patience of a woman who is in significant pain and is choosing, consciously, not to direct all of it at her husband. "I just didn't tell you."

Franklin's face went through approximately four expressions in the span of two seconds. "Oh — shit."

He didn't say another word. He crossed to her side of the bed, slid one arm behind her back and one beneath her knees, and lifted her before she had any real opportunity to object.

Cassie gasped, partly from the sudden movement, partly because a contraction chose that exact moment to crest and then mercifully begin to ease, and partly because she genuinely had not expected him to just pick her up like that.

"Put me down, Frank. I am too heavy for this."

Franklin walked to the door as though she hadn't spoken.

"Frank—"

He carried her all the way to the car, lowering her into the passenger seat with a care that was so deliberate and so gentle it almost canceled out the stubbornness of the gesture entirely. Almost.

He was behind the wheel before she'd finished settling, the engine turning over before the door was fully closed.

By the time they reached the hospital, the intervals between contractions had tightened considerably, minutes apart, arriving with an intensity that left no room for pretending they were anything other than what they were.

Franklin had his hand on her arm and was talking to the attending physician before they'd even fully stopped moving, his voice carrying the compressed urgency of a man working very hard to hold himself together for the sake of someone else.

"She'll go with the epidural," he said, as though it had already been decided.

Cassie turned her head. "No epidural."

Franklin looked at her.

"I can feel the baby," she said, and her voice cracked slightly on the last word, not from weakness but from the sheer overwhelming reality of what her body was telling her.

Water was sliding down her thighs and she knew her water had broken, though it was later than it was when she had Rose.

With her first pregnancy, the labor began after the water broke but this time, it was close to delivery.

"I can already feel…” She gasped. “Frank, I need to push."