White Lilies (A Mitchell Sisters Novel) (35 page)

She pushes into my fingers, driving them deeper into her. “Please, Griffin. I want to feel you inside me. I need to feel you inside me.”

I quickly push my jeans the rest of the way down and kick them off my body. I hold myself at her entrance, silently asking for permission before I push into her.

“Yes,” she reaches down between us, guiding me inside her.

She’s so tight. Tighter than I remember. Her walls grip me and it’s everything I can do not to let myself go right now. “Sky,” I breathe out, stilling within her; taking a second to calm myself.

When I start to move, I join her hands with mine, lacing our fingers together. In this position, with her reclining back against the couch, I can’t get past her stomach to kiss her. But it only makes what we’re doing more intimate as we stare at each other through every thrust.

She pushes against my hands, giving herself leverage to take me deeper. She gasps when I hit the end of her. “Oh, God,” she moans. Her eyes darken and our gazes become intoxicating. Our eyes speak the words that our mouths are incapable of producing. The world falls away and nothing exists but us.

This woman has become my reason for living. My light in the darkness. In an unprecedented move on my part, I softly sing a few lines of the song from the party. Lines about this being our fate. Words that tell her once again that I’m hers.

Her eyes glaze over. She’s close. I’m close. I extract one of my hands from hers and find her swollen clit. I rub tiny circles on it, watching her mouth open and her head fall back, thrashing around on the cushion behind her.

“Griffin!” she screams. “Oh, God, yes!”

Watching her fall apart, feeling her walls tightly squeeze me as she does, sends me over the edge right along with her. I still, emptying myself completely within her, my garbled words of ecstasy mixing with hers.

After we catch our breath, Skylar giggles, bringing her hands up to her stomach. “Every time,” she says. She grabs my hand and puts it underneath hers. We lock eyes as our son somersaults beneath our hands even as I’m still inside her.

It’s a moment I’ll remember as long as I live.

I shake my head in wonderment. How could I have fallen in love with two such incredible women in one lifetime? How could I ever see myself living without this beautiful creature beneath me? Both of them. With a hand still on her belly, my other one cups her face. “I love you, Sky.”

Her hand comes up to touch my jaw. Her thumb brushes across my lips. Her eyes soften and sparkle at the same time. “I love you, too.”

I close my eyes and let her words sink in.

They fly open again when she declares, “I lied, you know.”

“Lied?” My heart lodges in my throat for half-a-second before she explains.

“When I told you what I said to John,” she clarifies. “I lied.”

My eyebrows shoot up in question as I finally pull out of her and take a spot on the couch. “You didn’t tell him you owe it to the baby to give us a chance?” I grab some tissues from the coffee table and gently clean her up while I await her answer.

“No.” She shakes her head. “I told him I was in love with you.”

A smile overtakes my face. I want to do a fist pump and high-five someone.

“I’ve loved you for a while, you know,” she says. “Even before Erin died I was in love with you.” She sits herself up, pulling the throw blanket over her middle in an attempt to hide her nakedness. “I’m sorry I made this so hard on you, Griffin. I think I just felt guilty falling in love with my best friend’s husband. I was scared. Scared that we were betraying her. Scared that I would screw this up.”

I touch her locket, working it between my fingers. “I was scared, too.” I spring the locket open and unfold the small slip of paper, letting our eyes trace the words. “I’m not anymore.”

“Me neither,” she says, folding it up carefully and placing it back inside the locket.

I retrieve her clothes from the floor and help her dress before taking her hand and leading her upstairs. “Do you think it’s too soon to ask you to move in with me?”

She giggles, pulling me towards the master bedroom where I fall asleep with her in my arms, spooning her from behind with my hand lying across her flawless belly.

chapter thirty-two

It’s still pitch black when an elbow pokes into my ribs. I rub my eyes, trying to wake up when I hear Skylar say, “I need you.”

Instantly I spring to life. I wrap my arms around her and chuckle into her hair. “Woman, you’re insatiable.”

Seconds later, a pillow lands on my face. Hard. “Not that, you animal.” The light turns on and I shield my eyes while they get used to it. “I thought I was having false labor, but now . . . well, either I wet the bed or my water just broke.”

The oxygen is sucked out of my lungs as anxiety overtakes my entire being. A million things run through my head. We aren’t ready yet. It’s not time. We haven’t packed a bag for the hospital.

I’m gonna be a fucking dad.

“I’m scared, Griffin.” Her hands tremble as she reaches for her cell phone on the nightstand.

Before she can make the call, I grab her hands. I try to put up a calm exterior even though I’m freaking out on the inside. “It’s okay, Sky. We can do this. You can do this.”

“But it’s too soon,” she cries.

I shake my head. “It’s not. You’re almost thirty-six weeks. Millions of babies are born healthy at this point.” I rub her belly. “Aaron is going to be perfect, you’ll see.”

She tries to smile and then she makes the call to her doctor.

They exchange a few words about how long she’s been in labor. Then Sky turns to me. “Look at the bed. Is there any blood on the sheets?”

I pull down the top sheet and hold my breath while I search her side of the bed. No blood. Relief rushes through me like a fucking tsunami. “Looks clear.”

She relays that to the doctor and then, from what I gather, we’re told to meet her obstetrician at the hospital. When Skylar hangs up, she doesn’t look quite so pale. “She said what you did. He’ll probably be perfectly fine.”

I jump out of bed and pull on last night’s jeans and shirt that lay in a pile by the bed. Skylar tells me to fetch a bag in her closet. I frown when I realize she was prepared all along, but that I wasn’t a part of it. I vow not to miss another thing. Ever.

She tries to get dressed when a contraction hits her. She reaches for her phone and shoves it at me. “Time it!” she shouts. By the time I figure out where her stopwatch app is, the contraction is over and she’s glaring at me.

I shrug. “I’d say it lasted about a minute or so.”

“Maybe you should get
your
phone,” she says, dryly, through clenched teeth. “At least write down the time so we know how far apart they are. Do you think you can handle
that?”

I try not to laugh. I’ve heard about this. Women getting bitchy when they go into labor.  I say in my nicest voice, “Sure, Sky. I’ll write it down and then I’ll go call a cab.”

“Do
not
tell them I’m in labor. I’ve heard they won’t come!” she yells from the bedroom.

I quickly throw some stuff in my own duffle, not knowing how long it will be before I can get back here. In record time, I race to the basement to get a camera. No way in hell am I missing out capturing this on film. When I go back up to get her, she’s already coming down the stairs with her bags in hand. I run up, two at a time. “Are you crazy, Sky? What the hell are you doing trying to do this yourself?”

In hindsight, I realize calling a woman in labor crazy is not the appropriate thing to do.

“Well, if you weren’t taking so goddamn long, you could have helped. What were you doing down there anyway? Eating breakfast? Folding laundry?”

I take her bags and walk her to the front door, not bothering to answer her stupid questions. “Who should I call? Baylor? Your mom?”

“No,” she says.

She stops in her tracks and grabs my arm. Hard. I pull out my phone and check the time. I start my stopwatch.

A minute later, when she can talk again, she says, “I don’t think I want a bunch of people coming in and out of the room like when Baylor was in labor. Plus, this could take a while. Why don’t you wait and call them when it’s almost time.”

I nod. “Sounds like a plan.” I see the cab rounding the corner and tell her to stay put while I take the bags down. The cabbie gets out, putting them in the trunk while I go help Skylar down the steps and into the back. “Mount Sinai Hospital.”

He looks at Skylar, his eyes trained on her belly. “Oh, shit, really?” He shakes his head mumbling something about always getting the pregnant ones and how he’s going to kill someone named ‘Bubba’ back at dispatch.

Despite Skylar’s assurances to the cabbie that we have plenty of time, he makes it to the hospital in ten minutes flat. I guess it helps that it’s the middle of the night. The bars have all closed and the only thing illuminating the streets of Midtown are the ‘Open’ signs in the all-night diners.

I swipe my debit card, leaving the poor guy an insanely huge tip before we head into the maternity ward.

Four hours later, Skylar’s contractions are getting harder. We’re waiting on an epidural and she’s told by one of the nurses to use her Lamaze breathing. Skylar nods her head and points to her overnight bag. I put it on the bed next to her and when she’s able, she pulls out a framed picture of her and Erin. The one from her nightstand. “My focus point,” she says. “Can you put it over there on the table?”

Focus point? Lamaze breathing? “How do you know all this stuff?” I say, placing the picture where she directed.

“From Lamaze class.”

“You went to Lamaze class? When?”

“Back in December. Baylor went with me.”

I sigh, berating myself for missing yet another part of this monumental thing.

Thirty minutes later, I’m trying to find something on the television to take her mind off things while the epidural kicks in. However, the only programs on are the morning news shows and they’re downright depressing.

“Turn it off,” she requests. “Tell me a story.” She shifts around to try and get comfortable. “Tell me about the first time you met Erin.”

I sit beside her bed, letting her squeeze my hand through every contraction as I tell her about my first love. I tell her about how we ran in different circles. I was more of a loner, having lost my mom. I didn’t belong to any group. Erin was a popular cheerleader who I’d had a crush on for years, but never had the courage to approach. Then one day I saw her pulled over on the side of the road, in our little rural town in Ohio, flagging me down for help. She’d gotten a flat tire and didn’t have a spare. I offered her a ride home. Then as luck would have it, or as I now know . . .
fate
, my own car failed to start and we sat there on that dirt road for hours, talking, waiting for another car to pass.

Skylar tries to smile, but pain riddles her face instead as she crushes my fingers once again. I’ve decided being in labor is like being bi-polar to the extreme. One minute, I half expect her head to spin around like that girl from ‘
The Exorcist’
—the next, she’s completely back to normal, talking about her sisters or the restaurant.

A large nurse comes in the room. Her scrub top, adorned with storks carrying pink and blue bundles, tightly stretches across her rolls of flesh. Skylar asks her, “Exactly how long does it take for this epidural to work?”

The nurse looks surprised. With a smile plastered across her face, she says, “Sweetie, it should have kicked in by now. I’ll have the doctor come check you out, but there’s a possibility it just didn’t work for you.”

Skylar’s eyes widen in horror. “Didn’t work? Are you kidding?” she yells at the nurse, who’s now checking the baby monitor printout.

“It happens in a small percentage of women.” She flashes Skylar a sympathetic-yet-practiced smile. “Don’t worry, sweetie, women have been doing this since the beginning of time without any epidurals. It’s the way God intended. You’ll be just fine.”

Skylar’s eyes follow Nurse Happy as she exits the room. If looks could kill, that nurse would be flat-lining on the bleach-mopped floor of the maternity ward. “The way God intended?” Skylar yells. “Screw that!” She grabs my arm. “Griffin, get me some drugs. This hurts. Like really, really hurts. Not like stubbing your toe hurt, or like breaking your arm hurt, it really hurts—like body being ripped in half hurt. Like hot lava running through me hurt. Ahhhhhh . . . !” She grips my arm like a vice as another contraction takes control of her.

With my free arm, I rub her back and speak words of encouragement. I look at the door, hoping someone will come through it to provide whatever relief they can. It’s tearing me apart seeing the woman I love in pain like this.

She relaxes back into the bed, sweat dotting her hairline. I wipe it with a cool cloth.

“I feel sick.” She rubs the sides of her belly. “Do you have a piece of gum or hard candy? I know they won’t let me eat, but maybe gum would be okay.” She looks at me with hopeful eyes.

I stick my hands in my pockets, searching for the pack of gum I can usually find there. My hand hits something hard and I realize that in throwing on my jeans from last night, I still have the engagement ring with me. As I retrieve a piece of gum from my other pocket and give it to her, I contemplate my choices. But there really is no choice, because it occurs to me right here, right now, that I don’t want Aaron coming into this world without knowing how committed I am to his mother. Surely this was fate, me having the ring with me at this moment. I grip the box. “Skylar, you believe in fate now—I mean, we both do, right?”

She gives me a hard stare. “You think it’s fate that I have to have this kid without any drugs?”

I bite the inside of my mouth so I don’t laugh. “Just answer the question, Sky. Do you believe in fate or not?”

Her hand comes up to touch her locket. She nods. As another contraction grips her, she looks at her focus point, giving me a chance to pull the ring from the box and lower to a knee. Her contractions are only a few minutes apart, so I don’t have a lot of time and I need to make every second count.