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"Ma'am, can I get you anything? A pillow, some water?"

The flight attendant — young, neat ponytail, name tag that said Cara — was already reaching for the overhead compartment before Reggie could answer, and Reggie kept her face as composed as she could manage, which was getting harder by the minute.

"Water would be great, thank you," she said, and her voice only caught slightly on the last word because the contraction that had been building for the last thirty seconds chose that exact moment to crest, rolling through her lower back and down into her pelvis with a deep, grinding force that made her press her thighs together under the blanket.

Cara set the cup on the tray and moved on down the aisle without a second glance, and Reggie let out the breath she'd been holding in a long, controlled stream. "Hoo... hoo hoo... hhhh."

"How far apart now?" Dax asked from the aisle seat beside her, not looking up from his phone.

"A minute forty," she said through her teeth. "Maybe less."

He set the phone face-down on his thigh and turned to look at her then, and she knew that look. She'd known it for twenty years, had catalogued every version of it, and this particular version had nothing to do with worry. 

His eyes moved from her face down to the enormous, low-hanging globe of her belly, round and gravid and pressing heavily into her lap even with her knees drawn up as far as the seat would allow, and something in his expression settled into that private, focused attention that made her want to hit him and also made her stomach flip despite everything.

"You're fine," he said.

"I know I'm fine," Reggie said. "I'm just telling you how close I am."

Three rows ahead of them, their older three were out cold in a heap of travel pillows, the eldest with her mouth open and her neck at an angle that was going to hurt later. Nobody back here was awake. 

The nearest passengers were a row up on the opposite side, both wearing noise-canceling headphones, completely sealed off from the world. The back of the cabin was dim and close and, for the moment, theirs.

“I knew we shouldn’t have flown to see your mother.” Reggie said bitterly through another tightening. 

Theo stirred against her side and she guided him back to her breast without thinking about it, and he latched and settled immediately, his fat fist curling against her with the total confidence of someone who had never once in his eleven months worried about anything.

"Get the leggings down," Dax said with a wry smile. 

Reggie stared at him. "We are in economy, lest you forget."

"And you are about to have a baby in economy," he said so calmly, it’s getting into her nerves, "so get the leggings down and keep the blanket over your lap, and nobody is going to see anything."

She hated that he was right. 

She hated it with a specific, well-worn bitterness that had been accumulating since the seventh month when he'd first floated this whole scenario as though it were perfectly reasonable, but hating it didn't change the fact that not only their fifth baby currently lodged in her pelvis had a non-negotiable opinion about its arrival but she also deep inside love this whole idea. 

She worked the leggings and her underwear down her thighs in the cramped space, shifting her hips, and got them free of one ankle and bunched around the other before she pulled the blanket back over herself.

She pressed her palm between her thighs and felt the swollen, taut heat of herself, her labia already full, bulging and aching, the baby's head bearing down so far into the birth canal that even the light pressure of her own hand sent a sharp wave of sensation flooding up through her core.

"It's right there," she said, and her voice had gone very low. "Dax. The head is about to come…hoooo–hooo hooo hoooo–” 

He reached over and lifted the edge of the blanket just long enough to look, and she watched his jaw tighten in a way that had nothing to do with alarm.

"Yeah," he said, and let the blanket fall back. "It is." He grabbed his own blanket and set it over his thighs, too, trying to cover is growing bulge there, too. 

The next contraction didn't give her a warning. 

It arrived hard and low, seizing her from the base of her spine and driving straight down with a force that shoved the baby’s fat head forward against her hand, and she crammed her face into Dax's upper arm and bit down on the sound that tore up her throat.

"MMMPHH — nnHH — oh god —hooooooooo–hooo hooo hoooo–" She ground her teeth into his sleeve, her fingers pressing desperately against her vulva, feeling the head surge against them with every pulse of the contraction. Her perineum burned, already stretching, the whole front wall of her vagina pushing outward. "HhhhNNGH — Dax, it's pushing through, I can feel it pushing —"

"Don't fight it," he said, low in her ear.

"I'm trying to slow it down, if I just —" She shifted her hips and immediately regretted it because the movement brought the baby down another fraction and the pressure from her movement and the toddler she was carrying went from enormous to total. "HHMMPHH — okay, okay —hoooo hoooo hooooooo—"

"Stop trying to slow it down, Reggie."

"There are people on this plane," she hissed, lifting her face just long enough to say it.

"Half of them are asleep and the other half have their headphones in," he said, perfectly level. 

She pressed her face back into his arm and bore down because her body had already made that decision, and she felt her labia spread around the advancing head, felt the deep hot stretch of her perineum pulling taut as the baby worked through her cervix and down through the last of the birth canal with the focused, patient insistence of a fifth child who had done this before.

"HhhhNNNGGH — MMPHHH —" The sounds came out in bursts against his sleeve, each one half-swallowed, pressed into the warm bulk of his arm. Her free hand fisted into the blanket. "It's coming through, I feel it coming through —"

"I know you do," he said, and his hand came up to press against the back of her neck, heavy and unhurried. His breathing had changed, she could hear it, the way it had gone slightly uneven, and she knew exactly what that meant.

"You are such an ass," she breathed into his arm.

"Head down," he said.

She put her head down on his arm. 

Her palm cupped against herself felt the shift — the teardrop shape of the head pressing outward between her folds, small and firm and wet, pushing against the stretched ring of her labia with a force that made her clitoris ache from the inside out. The skin of her perineum was pulling to its absolute limit, and amniotic fluid was already leaking steadily over her fingers and soaking into her leggings beneath her.

"HHhhNNGH — MMMPHHHH —" She pushed into the next contraction, long and grinding, and felt the head advance another fraction and hold, lodged at its widest point with her labia stretched in a burning, stinging ring around the crown. "Ohhhh — MMPHHH — it burns, it burns so much —"

"Breathe through it," Dax said.

"Hoo hoo hoo — hhh — hoo hoo —" She panted through the worst of the stretch, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes from the sheer searing heat of it, her fingers spread wide against her perineum to ease what pressure she could. Her vulva was swollen and flushed and stretched fully open around the baby's skull, the shape of the head clearly visible to her own touch, every ridge and curve of it pressing against the taut walls of her vagina as it inched forward.

Through it all, her toddler suckled and slept, milk-drunk, it seems, on her engorged breasts. 

Down the aisle, Cara passed through again with a drinks trolley and Reggie felt her go past without looking up, face pressed into Dax's arm, the blanket pulled high, breathing in hard controlled bursts through her nose.

Cara paused.

"Is she alright?" she asked Dax, keeping her voice low.

"Migraine," Dax said, without missing a beat. "She gets them on long flights. She just needs to stay still and keep her eyes closed."

A brief pause, and then the trolley moved on.

Reggie would have laughed if there had been any breath left in her body to do it with, but another contraction rolled in on the heels of the last one and she pushed, hard, bearing down with everything she had left, and felt the head inch forward into a full crown — fully out, fully free, sitting heavy and wet and slick in her cupped hand with amniotic fluid running in a warm, gushing stream down her inner thighs and pooling in the leggings beneath her, catching on the hem of the blanket.

"HHNNNN — MMMPHHHH —" The sound tore out of her muffled and desperate, her whole body trembling, and she felt Dax's hand press harder against the back of her neck. "Haaaahh — haaaah — okay — okay, the head is out, Dax, the head is —"

"I know," he said. "Keep going." at this point, he looked around and brought a hand under his blanket to reach inside his sweatpants, giving his hard and leaking cock a few pumps. 

She snorted at what he did but bit her lip and stroked her thumb over the wet hair plastered against the skull between her legs, feeling the baby shift and rotate under her fingers, the presenting shoulder turning into position. 

She knew this feeling. She loved this feeling, even now, even here, pressed into the back row of an economy cabin thirty thousand feet over the Pacific with her husband's arm as the only thing keeping her from making a sound that would wake every sleeping passenger from here to the galley.

She genuinely, in her bones, loved this.

“Dax,” she whispered hoarsely, and he looked down on her, eyes glossed over, hand pumping himself as discreetly as he can. 

“Yeah, babe?” 

“Kiss me…” 

He didn’t need to be told twice. He leaned down and kissed his wife as he continued to pump himself, feeling his balls start to tighten a bit as they made out. 

The next contraction built and she pushed into it, and the first shoulder eased through with a long, wet, squelching resistance that pulled a sharp, muffled cry from her throat.

"HHNN — MMPHHH — there — that's it —"

“Let me see, Reg.” He tells her and she sat back and slightly lifted the blanket just enough for him to see it. 

“There you go—Mmmmpphhh—haaaaaah–hooo hooo hooo–” 

One more push, shorter and decisive, and the second shoulder came free with a slick, gushing rush, and then the rest of the baby slid out into her waiting hands in a warm, wet flood of fluid and relief, trailing the last of the amniotic sac, and Reggie pulled her daughter up against her chest under the blanket and held her there, next to the nursing toddler. 

Dax made a grunting sound as he came into the blanket draped over him. 

“F–fuck yeah…” 

Cara came back through with a stack of napkins six minutes later and stopped at their row again, looking at the blanket-covered situation with eyes that had gone rather wide.

"Oh my god," she said, keeping her voice very low. "Is that — did she just —"

"She did," Dax said, entirely unbothered.

Cara stood very still for a moment. Then she said, "I'm going to get the first aid kit and the senior attendant, and I'm going to need you to not move," and she was gone before Dax could answer.

Reggie looked at the babies on her, one toddler now milk-drunk and deeply asleep and the newborn just latching, her hair sticking to her forehead, her new daughter warm and breathing against her chest.

"You know she's going to file a report," Reggie said.

"Probably," Dax agreed.

Reggie looked down at the babies, then back up at her husband, and she laughed — short and exhausted and completely helpless, the sound muffled quickly against the top of her daughter's head.

"You are so lucky I actually love doing this," she said.

Dax's mouth curved, slow and satisfied. "I know," he said. “I can’t wait for us to do it again.” 

-fin

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