Chapter 16: The Last Quiet Morning
Astrid woke because she was wet.
Not the small familiar dampness of the third trimester, not the trickle that had become a nightly nuisance since the baby had settled head down and started using her bladder as a pillow. This was different. She came up out of sleep slowly, the way she had learned to these past weeks, cataloguing her body before she opened her eyes: no contractions, not anymore, the last one having washed through her somewhere around four and faded without returning. Her hips ached dully. Her belly sat low and heavy against the mattress, so low that when she pressed her palm to the underside of it the whole weight of the child seemed to rest directly on her pelvic bone, a dense warm stone.
And beneath her, the sheet was cold and slick.
She lay still for a moment and listened. Shane breathed beside her, deep and even, one arm flung above his head, his face slack in the gray light that seeped in around the curtain edges. Somewhere down the hall a toilet flushed. The house was otherwise quiet.
Astrid pushed herself up onto one elbow, and the movement released a thick slow slide of something down her inner thigh, warm and heavy and nothing at all like water. She went still. Her hand found the sheet and touched the spot and came away tacky.
"Okay," she whispered to no one. "Okay."
She got up. The floor was cool. She waddled the few steps to the bathroom with one hand low on her belly and closed the door before she turned on the light, because she did not want to wake him yet, not until she knew.
Under the white glare of the vanity she looked at the pad she had worn to bed, and then at her fingers, and what she saw was blood-tinged, thick, gelatinous, more than she would have believed her body could produce at once. Something the size of her palm, clear and pink at the edges, with a thread of dark red through the middle.
She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and stared at it for a while.
She knew what it was. She had read the books, all of them, and Cass had gone over it in the kitchen last week with her boots up on the second chair and a cup of black coffee in her hand. Your plug comes out, Cass had said. Could be days before anything happens. Could be hours. Don't panic, don't call anybody at three in the morning because your underwear looks like a science experiment. Call when the contractions are five minutes apart and lasting a minute. That's the deal.
Astrid put both hands flat on her thighs and breathed the way Rosa had taught her, four in through the nose, six out through the mouth, and on the third breath she started to laugh, quietly and a little wildly, because it was absurd, because she had spent three months bracing for an emergency and instead her body had simply, politely, handed her a piece of itself and told her to be patient.
The door opened. Shane stood there in his boxers with his hair half out of its tie, squinting at her without his glasses.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine." She held up her hand, then thought better of it and put it down. "I lost my plug."
He blinked slowly, processing. Then he came in and crouched in front of her, both hands on her knees, and looked up at her face with that flat, steady calm he put on when he thought she needed it, the same face he wore on the bench in the third period.
"How do you feel?"
"Low." She pressed her palm to the underside of her belly again. "Really low. It's not contractions. I'd know if it was contractions. It's just pressure." She looked at him. "There was blood in it."
"Cass said there might be."
"I know what Cass said."
"Okay." He rubbed her knees. "So we wait."
"Yes."
"Come back to bed."
"In a minute." She reached for a washcloth, wet it, cleaned herself with the methodical care of a woman who had spent twenty years being competent at things. "Go start coffee. I'll be out."
He went. She sat another moment on the toilet lid, and in the quiet she felt the baby shift, a long slow roll from her left side to her right, and she put her hand where the small hard back of the child pressed up against her from the inside, and she thought, soon. Not yet. But soon.
Dina's morning began the same way and with the same wordless astonishment.
She woke at ten past five with her hand already between the sheets, and she knew before she got to the bathroom, knew from the heavy drawstring pull at the base of her belly and from the strange slack feeling lower down, like something that had been holding the whole apparatus together had quietly let go.
She had to sit on the edge of the tub to get her underwear off. Leo was awake when she came back, propped against the headboard with his eyes barely open, his broad chest bare, the scars of his old rugby shoulder pale in the dim.
"You're up early," he said.
"Yeah." She climbed back in beside him but did not lie down; she sat with her back against the headboard and her hands on the mound of her belly, which sat so much lower than it had last night that it looked almost like a different body. "I think I lost my plug."
Leo was awake now.
"When?"
"Just now."
"Are you hurting?"
"No." She turned her head and looked at him, and something in her chest, some tight thing that had been wound up since the dry run, loosened a notch. "I feel lighter. Is that insane? I feel lighter."
"You look lighter." He put his hand on her thigh. "How's your back?"
"Terrible. But in the normal way."
"Okay."
"Okay," she said, and laughed, and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and he looked so relieved and so confused about being relieved that she laughed again.
They found each other at the farm table a little after six.
The kitchen smelled of bacon. Shane was at the stove with a spatula and his glasses on, and Leo was at the counter with the good mixing bowl, cracking eggs into flour, and the whole room was warm and gold with the light coming in over the sink. Astrid had put on a soft gray cardigan over a nursing bra that she had not needed for anything yet and had begun to resent on principle, and Dina wore one of Leo's flannels open over a t-shirt that strained across her belly.
Dina sat down across from Astrid. Astrid pushed the butter dish toward her without being asked.
"You look different," Astrid said.
"So do you." Dina buttered a piece of toast, took a bite, chewed, and then said, quite casually, "I lost mine about quarter past five."
Astrid's hand stopped on the way to her coffee cup.
"You're joking."
"Why would I joke about that."
"When?"
"Quarter past five." Dina's eyes narrowed. "When did you?"
"Just after four."
They looked at each other.
"That's an hour," Dina said.
"That's an hour."
Shane turned the bacon. Leo's whisk stopped moving. Neither man said anything, and Astrid watched them both very deliberately not look at each other and not look at the women, which was somehow more telling than if they had shouted.
"Right," Shane said. He slid the bacon onto a plate, turned off the burner, and wiped his hands on a towel with the unhurried precision of a man who had decided something. "So."
"So what?" Astrid said.
"So that means it's soon." He looked at Leo. Leo nodded once, slowly, the way a man agrees to a thing he has already agreed to. "Which means today is the last day you two get to be taken care of by somebody who isn't each other."
"What does that mean?"
"It means go eat breakfast," Shane said, and set the plate down in front of her, and kissed the top of her head, and then he and Leo walked out of the kitchen together and down the hall without another word.
Astrid heard the bedroom door close. She heard it latch. She looked at Dina, who had her toast halfway to her mouth and an expression on her face somewhere between suspicion and delight.
"Did they just"
"I think they just did."
Astrid got up, slowly, one hand under her belly, and walked down the hall to the bedroom.
The door was closed but not locked. She opened it two inches and put her eye to the gap and looked in.
Candles. Rose petals scattered across the fresh white sheets, petals in a trail from the door to the bed, a bottle of oil on the nightstand beside two folded towels and a bowl of oranges. Shane was on one knee at the far side of the bed, blowing out a match. Leo was smoothing petals off the floorboards with his foot. Neither of them was speaking. They looked up together at the sound of the door.
"Go to the spa," Shane said.
"Shane."
"Go to the spa." He stood, and crossed the room, and opened the door the rest of the way and took her face in both hands. "You've been timing every contraction for three days. Go get touched by a stranger for six hours. We'll get the room ready and we'll be here when you come back."
Behind her, Dina said, "Leo?"
"I already called the place," Leo said. "You're booked under my name. Two o'clock."
It was twenty past two when the two of them finally sank side by side into the heated stone loungers in the dim, cedar-smelling room of the spa, robes open to the waist, bellies bare and low under the soft amber light, and let the day take them.
The therapist's hands found the knots at the base of Astrid's spine and began to work them, thumb over thumb, in slow widening circles that pressed the whole weight of the child down into the table and then eased it back up again. Astrid made a sound she had not authorized. It came out of her throat low and long and nothing like words.
"You're carrying low," the therapist said. She was a small woman with short gray hair at the temples and forearms like a farmhand, and she had introduced herself in a voice so flat and calm that Astrid had trusted her within thirty seconds. "When did the baby drop?"
"Two days ago." Astrid's cheek was flat on the padded ring of the face cradle. Warm oil pooled in the hollow of her back and the woman's palms spread it up her flanks in long strokes. "Or three. I've stopped counting."
"Mm."
Beyond the folding screen, two feet away, Dina lay on the second table in the couples suite they had booked, and Astrid could hear her breathing change as her own therapist worked down toward her hips. There was a small sound, a half laugh or half groan, and the rustle of the sheet. Then Dina said, "Sorry. Sorry, that's, yes, right there."
"Your sacrum's twisted," said Dina's therapist, whose voice was lower and younger.
"I know. I've been told."
The gray-haired woman's hands came down onto Astrid's glutes, and Astrid gripped the edge of the table.
She could feel every finger. That was the thing. She had been touched by Shane and by Leo and by Dina across four months of this pregnancy, and every one of those touches had carried something with it, a question, a promise, a history. This carried nothing. The woman was not trying to please her. She was simply, methodically, unpicking her, and Astrid's body, which had spent three months coiled around the fear of what came next, began very slowly to come apart under her hands.
Down the backs of the thighs. Behind the knee. The heel of the palm rolling up the hamstring and then, without ceremony, the inner line, right up into the crease of her hip, and Astrid's whole pelvis clenched and released like a fist opening.
The oil was warm. The room smelled of cedar and the faint sweetness of the other woman's shea butter. Astrid's nipples ached and she felt the unmistakable damp of it against the sheet under her chest, both breasts suddenly heavy and tingly with let-down, and she pressed her forehead into the cradle and thought, not now, not here, but her body had stopped taking instructions from her somewhere around the fifth month.
The therapist's fingers walked inward. Along the tendon that ran from the pubic bone down the inside of the thigh, pressing, holding, and Astrid's hips lifted off the table a bare inch before she caught them and forced them back down.
"Tender?"
"Yes." Astrid's voice came out a rasp. "Yes, tender."
"It's the round ligament. Everything's stretched. I'm going to hold here for a count of thirty, breathe through it."
And she did, one flat palm pressed low on Astrid's belly above the pubic bone, the other cupped under her hip from behind so that Astrid was cradled between her two hands like something being weighed, and Astrid breathed and the pressure became heat and the heat became, embarrassingly, unmistakably, a slow swell of pleasure that had nothing to do with the woman's intention and everything to do with what her body had learned to do when it was held.
Twenty. Twenty-five.
On twenty-eight Astrid came.
It was small and quiet and it rolled through her in one long wave from the base of her spine forward into her cunt, a deep pulsing clench that wet the sheet under her and made her bite down on the padded ring and breathe out through her nose, hard, once. Her belly tightened. Her toes curled against the table. The wave broke and ebbed and left her shaking, and the woman's hands did not move from where they were, did not register a thing, just kept the steady pressure until the count ran out and then lifted away.
"There," she said. "Better?"
"Much better," Astrid said, and her face was wet, and she had no idea when that had happened.
She lay there under the sheet while the therapist worked the rest of her, calves, feet, the knotted arches, and she listened to Dina behind the screen, and she knew. She knew because Dina had gone quiet in that particular way, all held breath and no words, and because a moment later there was a small wet sound and Dina's hand came up and pushed her hair back off her forehead and she let out a breath like a woman setting down something heavy.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
They met in the quiet room afterward in their robes, in the low amber light, on the two heated loungers, and Astrid's hair was still damp at the nape and her body felt wrung out and hollow and good. Dina sat down beside her and tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
"Well," Dina said.
"Yes."
"I'm not going to ask you what happened in there."
"Good." Astrid took a slow sip of the cold cucumber water someone had left in a sweating glass. "Because I would lie."
"I came in about eleven minutes," Dina said. "I want you to know that. I counted."
Astrid snorted into the glass and had to wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, and then she laughed, actually laughed, the first real one in days, an unguarded ugly laugh that bounced off the cedar walls, and Dina laughed too, curled sideways on her lounger with both hands on her belly, and for a minute or so they were just two enormous women in white robes laughing in a dark room like idiots.
Then it died down. Dina's hand found Astrid's hand between the two loungers and held it.
"Now what," Dina said.
"Now we go home."
"And then?"
Astrid looked down at their bellies, both dropped, both low, riding on their laps like sacks of warm sand. She thought about the petals and the candles and the two men who had closed the bedroom door and sent them away. She thought about her plug in the toilet bowl at four in the morning, that strange piece of herself handed over politely. She thought about how few days were left of any of this.
"Then we let them take care of us," she said. "And then it happens."
Dina's hand tightened on hers.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
They dressed slowly in the changing room, and the ordinary indignity of it made them both laugh again: two women the size of houses trying to bend over their own shoes, grunting, holding the lockers for balance, one of them having to sit down on the bench to get a sock on and then being unable to get back up without a hand.
"I want you to know," Dina said, hauling herself upright with one fistful of Astrid's robe, "that I have never in my life been this useless. I was a server for six years. I could carry four plates in one arm."
"You could still carry four plates."
"I could carry four plates and then I would need a wheelchair."
Astrid pulled her phone out of the locker and ordered the car. Nine minutes. They sat on the bench in the lobby under the ferns with their coats open because neither of them could stand to have anything tight across the belly, and Dina's hair was a mess and Astrid's was worse, and they smelled of the same oil, and the woman at the front desk did not look at them twice.
The car came, a gray sedan with a cracked phone mount and a driver who turned the radio down low when they got in, thank God, and who did not try to talk.
Astrid took the back seat because Dina had to sit where she could stretch her left leg, and the two of them rode hip to hip with the belt under Dina's belly and Astrid's hand where it always went now, flat on the top of the mound.
The highway unspooled. Streetlights began to come on though it was barely five.
"How are you actually," Dina said, very quietly, looking out her window.
"Low." Astrid watched the city slide past. "Not sad. Low. Like something's coming down a chute toward me and I can hear it."
"Yeah."
"You?"
"I cried in the shower this morning before you even got up."
"You did?"
"Not about anything. I was washing my feet and I couldn't reach them properly and I started crying about my feet." Dina turned her head. "And then I came about three times this afternoon and now I'm sitting here feeling like I've been scraped out with a spoon."
"That's the drop."
"I know what it is. Doesn't help."
"No."
They were quiet through a red light. Then Astrid said, "My tits are killing me. I've been leaking since the table. I could feel it running down and I just lay there."
"Both?"
"Both. Through the sheet." Astrid shifted her hips, and the motion put her thigh against Dina's thigh. "I'm going to be honest with you because I'm too tired to be careful. I have been turned on since three o'clock and I think it's partly the massage and partly you, and mostly the fact that my body has decided it doesn't care anymore what's appropriate."
Dina didn't answer immediately. Her hand came down and rested on Astrid's knee, and the car went over a seam in the road and neither of them moved apart.
"I want to put my mouth on your belly," Dina said finally, so soft that Astrid barely heard it. "That's the thing I keep thinking about. Not your cunt. Your belly. The underside. Where it's tight."
"You can."
"Not in a Kia."
"No." Astrid's hips moved again, a small unstoppable rock against her own hand. "But when we get home."
"When we get home." Dina's fingers pressed into the inside of Astrid's knee, high, right where the tendon ran up under the coat, and Astrid had to close her eyes. "I want you to sit on my face. I've been thinking about it since Wednesday. You're heavy enough now that it would be a whole different thing, and I want to know what it feels like. I want to choke on you a little."
"Dina."
"What. The driver's not listening."
The driver was listening to talk radio through one earbud. Astrid opened her eyes and looked at the back of his head anyway, and then at Dina, whose cheeks were flushed and whose mouth was slightly open and who looked, in the sodium light going past, about nineteen years old.
"I leak now," Astrid said. "When I come. That's the part nobody tells you. I come and I leak and I make a mess of whoever's underneath me."
"I know you do."
"Have you seen it?"
"I've had my face between your legs in your own bed, Astrid. I've seen it." Dina's hand slid up an inch and stopped, flat and warm on the inside of Astrid's thigh, and Astrid's whole pelvis pulsed around nothing. "I want it in my mouth."
The car turned into their street.
Neither of them said anything else. Dina took her hand back and folded it in her lap like a schoolgirl and Astrid pulled her coat closed over the belly and they rode the last two minutes in a silence that had weight to it, and Astrid could feel her own pulse in her ears and between her legs both at once and thought, with a flicker of the old lawyerly disgust, that she had never in her life been this easy to get going.
The building door. The elevator. The hall.
They knew something was wrong before they got the key in, because there was light coming under the apartment door, low light, moving light, the kind that flickers.
Dina got the door open first.
The hallway of the apartment was dark except for the far end, where the bedroom door stood wide. From the threshold, in the dark, they could see it: the trail of petals down the hall in a straight informal scatter, and beyond that the whole room transformed, a hundred small flames climbing the walls in jars, white petals everywhere across the turned-down sheets, two bottles of oil on the nightstand, the diffuser going, the window open a crack to the November air so that the whole thing smelled of cedar and orange and candle smoke and clean cotton.
The house was otherwise silent.
"Where are they," Dina said.
A note on the kitchen counter, in Leo's block capitals, held down by an orange. We're at the deli. Kitchen's clean. Take your time. Don't call unless it's time.
Astrid read it twice. Then she set it down and stood in the dark kitchen with the low doorway light on one side of her face, and she put both hands on the counter and breathed.
"They did this," she said.
"They did this."
Dina came up beside her and pressed her forehead into Astrid's shoulder, and Astrid felt the other woman's belly against her hip, hard and low and round, and felt Dina's breath come faster against her neck.
"Astrid."
"Yes."
"I need to lie down."
Astrid turned her head and looked at her. Dina's face was wet at the eyes again, and her hands were shaking a little, and it was not sadness.
"Okay," Astrid said, and took her hand, and led her down the hall between the petals.
Dina did not make it to the far side of the bed. She got one knee up onto the mattress and then her strength went out of her all at once, and she pitched forward onto the sheets with a small wet sound, face down, both arms flung out, and the petals lifted and settled around her like snow falling back over a footprint. Her coat was still on. One shoe was off and one was not.
Astrid stood in the doorway for a second and looked at her: the wide V of her back, the flannel rucked up over the hard low shelf of her belly, the pale soles of her feet. The candles moved along the walls. Somewhere out in the dark city a siren went past and faded and the room was very quiet again.
"Is that the whole plan," Astrid said. "Face down in a stranger's rose petals."
"I'm resting." Dina's voice was muffled by the duvet. "I'm a very large woman and I have walked up two flights of stairs."
"Elevator."
"Shut up." Dina turned her head to the side and opened her eyes and looked at Astrid across the whole length of the bed, and the look on her face was not fatigue at all, whatever her voice was doing. "Come here."
Astrid came. She got the other shoe off Dina's foot on the way past, dropped it, and climbed onto the bed on her knees, and the mattress dipped and rolled them both toward the middle where the petals were thickest. She put a hand flat between Dina's shoulder blades.
"Roll over."
"Can't."
"You can."
Dina rolled over. It cost her something; Astrid watched it happen in her face, the small grimace as the belly changed hemispheres, and then Dina lay on her back in the middle of the bed with the petals stuck to her flannel and her tits and one on her cheekbone, breathing hard, and the front of her shirt was straining open two buttons down over the mound of her stomach, which sat up off the mattress like a hill with its own weather.
Astrid took the petal off her cheek and ate it.
"You're an animal," Dina said.
"It's a rose. It's food."
"You've been in litigation too long."
Astrid leaned down over her and kissed her, and Dina got a hand up into Astrid's wet hair and held her there and kissed her back hard enough that Astrid had to brace a hand on the sheets, and under the kiss Dina's other hand was already working at the tie of Astrid's robe, one yank, and the robe came open down the front and Astrid's belly dropped free of it and met Dina's belly, skin to skin, hot, and both of them made the same low noise at the same time.
"God," Dina said into her mouth. "God, you're hot. You're running a fever."
"It's the baby. It's all the blood."
"There's so much of you." Dina's hand went down Astrid's side, over the flank, under the curve, cupped and lifted the whole underside of her belly and let it down again slowly, feeling its weight. "This is what I dreamt about. This exact thing."
"You said you dreamt about my cunt."
"That too." Dina pushed at her shoulder. "Get up. All the way up. I want the belly."
Astrid knelt up over her, knees on either side of Dina's ribs, and let the robe fall off her shoulders behind her, and Dina got both hands on her stomach and pulled her down and put her mouth on it.
She did what she had said she would do in the car. She kissed the underside of the belly, right where it hung, where the skin was thinnest and tightest and pulled shiny over the child, and she licked along that line of pull, the flat of her tongue, long slow strokes from one hip up over the crown and down to the other, and Astrid's hips moved without her permission and she caught herself with a hand on the headboard. Her breasts were aching and heavy and pressed against the tops of her own thighs and she felt the letdown start, the deep internal pull, and then the wet on both nipples at once, running down.
Dina saw it. She reached up between Astrid's legs with her mouth still on the belly and smeared her thumb through the milk on Astrid's left breast and sucked her thumb clean.
"That's sweet," she said, surprised.
"It's milk. It's for a baby."
"You're a fountain." Dina licked her again, up the underside of the belly, into the navel, biting gently at the little knot of it, and Astrid's head dropped back and she said, out loud, a word she would not have used in court.
"Turn around," Dina said.
"What?"
"Turn around." Dina's hands got her by both hips and shoved. "You said in the car. I've been thinking about it since Wednesday. Straddle my face and put it down on me and I'll tap your leg if I need air."
"Dina, I'm enormous, I'll suffocate you."
"Then I die happy. Get up here."
Astrid got up. She swung a leg over, awkward, one hand on the headboard and one on Dina's shoulder, and settled with her knees on either side of Dina's head, and the whole matter of her, the low hanging belly and the swollen red cunt of her, came down over Dina's face and Dina did not wait for her to find a height. She hooked both arms up over Astrid's thighs and pulled her down and put her mouth on her.
Astrid had to grab the headboard with both hands. Dina's tongue went flat and wide up the whole length of her, split her open, and the wet sound of it was obscene in the candlelit room. Astrid's hips bucked down against Dina's mouth and came back up and down again, and she was shaking, her thighs trembling wide, and she looked down her own body past the heaving dome of her belly and could not see Dina's face at all, only her dark hair and her arms wrapping Astrid's legs and the top of her own stomach in the way like a wall she was pressed over. She felt each stroke arrive under the belly like a hand from another room.
"That's it," she said, and her voice was wrecked already. "Right there, don't move, don't move." Her hips rocked into Dina's face in a slow heavy grind, and she felt Dina's nose against her clit and Dina's tongue working lower, into her, drinking her, and she heard herself start to whine and did not care. The candles swelled and shrank on the walls.
She came with her mouth shut and her eyes open. The whole pelvis seized, deep clenching pulses that squeezed down around Dina's tongue, and at the same moment her tits let go again, both of them, hot milk running down over her own belly and dripping off the shelf of it onto Dina's throat. She shook through it, teeth bared, one long shudder from the shoulders down, and then slumped forward onto her hands over the headboard and gasped for air like a woman who had just finished a set of stairs.
Beneath her, Dina was licking her mouth and laughing. Two wet lines of milk ran down her neck into the hollow of her collarbone.
"You did it," she said. "You leaked on me. That's exactly what I wanted."
Astrid climbed down off her and lay on her side and put her face into the petals and tried to get her breath back. Her legs would not close. She could feel everything she had just done running down the inside of her thigh.
Then she got her hand between Dina's legs.
Dina was soaked, the whole crotch of her leggings ruined, and when Astrid got two fingers under the waistband and into her, she was hot and open and clinging and Astrid's knuckles were wet to the wrist in one stroke.
"How long have you been like this," Astrid said.
"Since the massage table." Dina's hips were already moving on her hand. "Since I saw you standing in the door. Since the car. Pick one."
"I'm going to make you come."
"Yes," Dina said. "Do it slow. I want it to be slow. Everything is going to be fast from here on, and I want one thing to be slow."
Astrid went slow. She pulled her fingers back to the first knuckle and slid them in again, and Dina's hips rolled up to meet her, and she did it again, nothing clever, in and out, the heel of her hand grinding down on Dina's clit on every pass, and the wet sound of it was louder in the room than either of them. Dina got one hand into the petals and the other around Astrid's wrist and held on.
"More," she said, and Astrid gave her more. Then she pulled her hand out and went down the bed and peeled the ruined leggings off her, over the hips and the long swell of her, down one leg and then the other, and Dina lifted to help her and then lay back with her knees falling apart, wide and heavy and open to the room.
She put her mouth on her. She licked her, long flat strokes, hole to clit and back, salt and copper and the faint sweetness of the shea butter still on her skin, and Dina got a hand into Astrid's hair and held her down, and her belly was a wall in the way, the top of it pressing at Astrid's forehead, and every time Astrid pushed up into her the child rolled against her cheek. "Slow," Dina said. "Slow. I meant it." So Astrid slowed. She got two fingers in her and curled them up and set her tongue flat on Dina's clit and just held it there, no motion, only steady pressure, and Dina's whole body began to shake in a long slow wave and did not stop, and her cunt clenched around Astrid's knuckles in slow rolling pulses, and she came for what felt like a full minute, mute, her mouth open, tears running into her hair. Then she let go all at once and lay there like a woman who had been set down after a long carry. Astrid wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and lay down beside her in the petals.
The key scraped in the lock.
Both of them heard it. Dina's eyes came open. Then the front door, then footsteps in the hall, two sets, then the low mutter of men's voices and the thud of a jacket going onto a peg.
"They're back," Astrid said.
"They said the deli."
"If they'd gone to the deli the door would not be opening."
Dina started to get up. It was not graceful. She got an elbow under her and rolled, and all of her came up off the mattress, and then the belly pulled her the other way and she grabbed for the headboard and missed, one knee on the bed and one foot on the floor and one hand tangled in the duvet.
The bedroom door opened.
Shane stood there with his glasses on and his jacket half off his shoulders. Behind him, Leo, both of them stopped dead in the doorway.
There was a silence of the kind that tends to happen in doorways.
Then Shane crossed the room. He put his jacket on the chair on the way past, and got both hands under Dina's arms where she was caught half off the bed, and he lifted her like it was nothing, like she was a person and not a pregnant woman the size of a door, and he laid her back down onto the bed, properly, in the middle, on the petals, and put a pillow under her head.
"There," he said.
Dina looked up at him. Her face was still red and her hair was wrecked and there was milk drying on her chest. "Hi."
"Hi."
Astrid sat up on her elbow. "You were supposed to be at the deli."
"We were at the deli." Shane straightened, and his eyes went over the two of them and the state of the sheets. "We came back."
"Why?"
Leo closed the door behind him, still holding his keys. He looked at Dina on the bed, and the look on his face was not anger and not surprise, it was something softer and more ruined than either. "Because we didn't want to miss it," he said.
Shane sat down on the edge of the bed beside Dina and put his palm flat on the top of her belly and rubbed his thumb in a slow circle around her navel. Her eyes closed.
"You look like you've been busy," he said to Astrid.
"We drove home and the room was lit up like a church. What did you expect."
"I expected to come home and find the two of you asleep in the middle of it. That was the plan."
"Plans change."
"Yeah." His thumb kept moving and Dina's hips moved with it, a small lift and settle. "I can see that."
Dina put her hand on top of his and pressed his palm down into the mound of her. "Shane."
"Yeah."
"I want somebody to take care of me tonight." She said it plainly with her eyes still shut, no games in it. "I have been scraped and oiled and used all day and I want to be the one who gets held. So does she."
Astrid watched his face. He did not hesitate. "Okay," he said.
Then Leo put his keys down on the nightstand and came around the far side of the bed, and Astrid turned onto her back and let him come down beside her. He was warm and he smelled of cold air and of the deli, dill and brine and the bread smell that never washed out of his clothes. "You okay," he said into her hair.
"I'm leaking and I've come twice today and I can't feel my feet. I'm better than okay."
He laughed, low, and his hand found the underside of her belly where it was still wet with milk and slid over the slick skin of it.
Across the bed, Shane pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor, and then he went to work on the buttons of Dina's flannel, one at a time from the top down, unhurried, while she lay still and let him. He got it open and pushed it off her shoulders, and then the t-shirt under it, and she lay there in just her leggings and her nursing bra and the low hard dome of her belly, and he looked at her for a while in the moving light.
"You're beautiful," he said.
"I'm a building."
"You're beautiful."
He put his mouth on her collarbone and worked his way down, and Dina got a hand into his hair and held him there, and across the bed Leo's fingers slid down through Astrid's wet and into her, two of them, slow, and Astrid turned her face into the side of his throat and breathed.
Shane sat back up and looked across the bed at Leo, and something passed between the two of them without a word, the way it had been passing all week, a whole conversation conducted in eyebrows and the set of a jaw. Then Shane got both hands under Dina's shoulders and lifted her, easy, up off the petals, and Leo did the same for Astrid on the far side, and the two men pulled their wives up and turned them on the mattress until they were facing each other, close, knee to knee, so close their dropped bellies almost touched.
"What are you doing," Dina said.
"Making it easy," Shane said.
He shifted around behind Dina and sat with his back to the headboard and his legs open, and drew her back against his chest so that she was sitting up between his thighs, her back on his stomach, his knees propping her knees apart on either side of her. Leo did the same behind Astrid, hauling her back against him, one arm coming around her flank, his palm coming down flat underneath the low hard shelf of her belly and taking its whole weight off her, so that she could rest back into him and let him hold it up.
The relief was immediate and enormous. Astrid did not realize how much she had been carrying until Leo took it. Her hips loosened. Her shoulders came down away from her ears. She let out a breath she had been holding since the spa and it came out of her long and slow.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's, yes."
"Good?" Leo said at her ear.
"Do not move your hand. I'm serious. Do not move it."
He didn't. He kept the cradle of his palm under the belly, lifting, and his other arm came around her chest above the breasts and held her there.
Across the small space of mattress between them, Dina had settled back into Shane the same way, and Shane had one arm under her belly and the other across her collarbones, and she was looking at Astrid now, both of them propped up and held open on their husbands like two instruments being cradled, and Dina's face was doing something complicated.
"I feel like I'm on a stand," she said.
"You are on a stand."
"I feel like a telescope."
Astrid laughed, and the laugh moved her belly and Leo's hand moved with it. "Shut up, you're ruining the mood."
"It is a very specific mood and I am holding it right now."
Shane's mouth came down onto the side of Dina's neck and he said, low, "Look at her, Dina."
The laugh stopped.
Dina looked. Astrid was sitting there with her legs wide, held open, and the candlelight moved over the whole front of her, the milk-sticky shine of her belly, the dark wet shine of her thighs, the red swollen fold of her cunt sitting open at the bottom of it. Dina looked at it and did not look away, and her breath changed, a slow pull in through her nose.
"Put your hand on her," Shane said. "She's right there. There's nothing between you."
Astrid watched Dina's hand come across the gap.
It landed flat on the top of Astrid's belly first, on the tight high dome of it, and slid down over the wet skin, over the navel, down the underside where Leo was holding, and then lower, through the hair, and then Astrid felt two of Dina's fingers slide into her.
"Fuck," Astrid said, and her head tipped back against Leo's shoulder.
Dina had been slow on the way in and stopped. "Is that okay?"
"You have no idea how okay."
"Tell me."
"I've been open since the massage table. You know that. You've had your mouth on it."
"I want to hear it again."
Astrid turned her head and looked at her down the length of both their bodies. "Fuck me with your hand," she said. "Slow."
Dina pushed her fingers in the rest of the way, to the deep knuckle, and Astrid felt them bottom out and curl, and her whole pelvis rolled. Leo's arm tightened across her chest. Under her, he shifted, and she felt the hard length of his cock against the base of her spine, and did not do anything about it yet, because she did not want to move, because if she moved the fingers would stop.
Then Dina said, over Astrid's shoulder, "Leo. Give her your hand."
"What."
"Give her your hand. Where mine is. Under mine. She needs more than two fingers from me right now and I want to feel you in her while I do it."
Leo's voice was low and rough at Astrid's ear. "Do you want that?"
"Yes." It came out before she had decided anything. "God, yes, both of you, just do it."
He moved his hand from under her belly, and the weight settled back on her and she grunted, and then his arm came back around and his hand came down past Dina's wrist and slid two thick fingers into her alongside Dina's, and the stretch of it made something behind Astrid's eyes go white.
"Okay," she got out. "Okay. Don't move. Give me a second."
Across from her, Dina was watching with her mouth open.
"How's it feel," Dina said.
"Full. So full I can feel them in my throat."
"You feel so tight. Astrid. You feel so tight around my fingers."
"That's what four fingers does."
Dina began to move. Slow at first, in and out, and Leo moved with her on the same rhythm like they were rowing the same oar, and Astrid's hips started to meet their hands, lifting off the mattress and pushing down and lifting again, and Leo kept the belly and her chest and did the work of holding her up so that all she had to do in the world was take it.
"There," she said. "Slow, that's it."
"Look at me," Dina said.
Astrid looked. Their eyes locked and did not move off each other, and Astrid could see the exact second Dina's own hand started moving on her own body, because her wrist twisted and her face opened and her hips bucked up against her own heel between her thighs.
"Shane," Dina said. "Put your hand on me."
Shane's hand came around and down. Astrid watched it go, the breadth of it on Dina's wet thigh, and then the heel of it settle over the top of Dina's mound and grind down, and Dina's whole back arched into it and she moaned, low and long, and the sound of it went straight through Astrid's cunt and clenched her down around the four fingers inside her.
"Do that again," Astrid said.
"Do what."
"Make that noise again."
Dina pulled in a breath and ground her clit down on Shane's palm and moaned on purpose, loud, loud as she could, and the sound filled the candlelit bedroom and bounced around the jars on the walls, and Astrid felt her whole body answer it, felt the wet run out of her around the four fingers and down over Leo's knuckles to the sheets.
"Both of you," Shane said, and his voice had gone flat. "Both of you talk. I want to hear it."
"Astrid." Dina's fingers twisted inside her, and her eyes stayed locked on Astrid's, and she was not smiling anymore. "You're so wet I can hear it. I can hear your cunt around our fingers. Say my name."
"Dina."
"Again."
"Dina. Fuck. Dina, keep going."
"You're mine tonight, you understand that. I want to watch you come on my fingers with your husband inside you. I've wanted that since the rug. I want to see you come open like a door."
"Then do it. Do it harder."
Dina's wrist snapped, and Leo caught the rhythm and doubled it, and the two of them worked Astrid in a stroke that was deep and fast and merciless, palm grinding on her clit at the top of every thrust, and Astrid's mouth fell open and she stopped being able to say anything at all, only the noise, only the low broken yelp of every stroke. Her tits let down and ran, two dark wet lines down the front of her belly into Leo's hand.
"Look at her," Shane said in Dina's ear. "Look at her leak. She does that every time."
"I know she does." Dina's voice was a wreck. "I've had it in my mouth. She did it on my neck an hour ago."
"Mine's coming for you," Astrid got out. "Look at me, Dina, look, I'm, I'm, oh, fuck, don't stop, don't you dare stop."
Dina did not stop.
Astrid came with her whole body, back bowed into Leo's chest, heels dug into the mattress, cunt clamping down hard around both their hands and releasing and clamping again in a long rolling series of pulses that she could not count, and milk running, and Dina's face right there in front of her the whole time, watching her, greedy for it, and Leo's arm so tight around her chest she could barely breathe and did not want to.
When it eased she slumped back against him, boneless, and Leo pulled his fingers out slow and laid his hand flat and wet on her thigh and left it there. Dina drew hers out and put two of them in her own mouth and sucked them clean, tasting Astrid off her knuckles, and Astrid watched her do it and could not even find the energy to be embarrassed.
"Good," Dina said, around her fingers. "God, you're good."
"Now you."
"No."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are." Dina pulled her fingers out of her mouth, and her voice had a hoarse edge to it. "But I can't be on my back and I can't be on my knees and the only thing left is right here, in Shane's lap, and I want it from you. From your hand. Not his."
Shane's palm stopped. He looked over Dina's shoulder at Astrid, and there was a question in it, and Astrid answered it by crawling forward on her hands and knees across the small gap of mattress until she was right up against Dina, nose to nose, belly to belly, and then reached down between Dina's thighs.
Dina was so wet her whole inner thigh was slick. Astrid's fingers slid in without resistance, all the way, and Dina's head fell back against Shane's shoulder.
"There she is," Shane said quietly.
"Two," Dina said. "Put two."
Astrid put two, and curled them, and found that spot, and pushed on it, and Dina's hips came off the mattress and shoved herself down onto Astrid's hand.
"Fuck."
"Look at me," Astrid said.
Dina looked. Her face was flushed and her eyes were running and her mouth was open, and she was staring at Astrid with an intensity that had nothing playful left in it at all.
"Say it," Astrid said.
"Say what."
"You know what. You said it to me with your fingers inside me. Say it back."
"I'm yours tonight." It came out in a rush, low and dirty, and Astrid's cunt clenched around nothing at the sound of it. "I'm yours, I want you to feel it, I want to come in your hand, I want to come staring at you."
"Then come."
But she did not let her yet. She kept the strokes slow, deep, twisted a little on every pull, and she leaned her forehead against Dina's and breathed with her in the warm shared air between their mouths, and with her other hand she reached down and took Dina's hand and brought it to her own still-wet cunt and pressed it there, so that they were doing it to each other at once, both of them, hand to hand.
Shane's palm came back down over the top of Dina's mound and found her clit and pressed flat, steady, no motion.
"That's it," he said. "Both of you work. I've got her."
And Leo came up the mattress behind Astrid and got a hand under the low hanging shelf of her belly from the side and lifted, took the whole weight of it, took it off her hips so she could stop being a building and just be a body, and Astrid groaned and worked her hand inside Dina harder and Dina's hand answered her, and the two of them fell into a rhythm that was all their own, breath for breath, eye to eye, the men holding the weight of them on either side.
"You close," Astrid said.
"Close. So close. Don't you dare slow down."
"I'm not going to."
"Astrid."
"Yes."
"I love you." Dina's hand curled inside her, hit something deep, and her eyes did not leave Astrid's. "I love you and I'm about to have a baby with you and we're going to die in the same room and I want you to fuck me right through this one."
The words landed somewhere behind Astrid's ribs and she pushed in with everything she had.
Dina came. It was not quiet. She threw her head back and howled, the sound raw and long, and her whole body arched up off Shane's thighs, belly standing straight up, tits pushed out, and the wet cunt around Astrid's fingers clamped and pulsed and pulsed and pulsed in deep rolling waves that Astrid felt all the way to her wrist. Shane held her. Shane held her whole weight with both arms while she came, and milk ran from her too, and she shook and shook and did not stop shaking for a long time, and Astrid watched every second of it from six inches away and came herself, again, silently, just from watching, just from the sight of Dina going to pieces in her husband's arms with Astrid's hand inside her.
They both went limp.
For a while there was only breathing. The candles burned down an inch. Leo let Astrid's belly down gently into her own lap and Astrid let out a small sound of protest and then laid her head on his shoulder. Dina lay slack against Shane's chest with her legs wide and Astrid's hand still inside her, both of them unwilling to move, unwilling to end it.
Shane broke the quiet first.
"Bed," he said. "Proper bed. Not this."
"Too tired to move," Dina mumbled.
"That's what I'm here for."
He got an arm under her and lifted, and Leo got one under Astrid, and the two men carried their wives the last two feet across the ruined sheets into the middle of the bed and laid them down side by side, facing each other, close enough that their bellies pressed. Then they took the wet sheet off, and Leo pulled the dry blanket up over the two of them and tucked it around their shoulders, and Shane set a glass of water on the nightstand and blew out all but two of the candles.
"Sleep," Shane said.
"Stay," Astrid said, without opening her eyes.
"Obviously."
He got in on Dina's side and Leo got in on Astrid's side, and the four of them settled into the warm dark, and the two women's hands found each other in the middle of the bed under the blanket and lay there, laced.
Astrid was almost under when Dina spoke.
"Astrid."
"Mm."
"Yesterday at two in the morning." Dina's voice was barely there. "After the dry run. When we were timing, and you were on the bed, and I was on the ball, and you said the thing about the mucus plug being the body's polite note."
"I remember."
"I didn't think it would be the next day."
"No."
"You have yours out too."
"It's in the toilet at four in the morning and half of it's on the sheets," Astrid said. "So yes."