Our Private Eden: Family

"Oh, and when you do resume, I recommend that you use a condom for a few months for infection prevention and to reduce the odds of a follow-on pregnancy - so-called Irish twins," she said.

A bitter northerly wind cut right through our overcoats as we left Glenda St. John's clinic in an office park a 60-second walk from the hospital where our child would enter the world. An arctic clipper was barreling our way out of Canada, hell-bent on pushing single-digit lows as far south as Little Rock, Jackson and Birmingham. In northwestern Missouri, we were expecting lows around 5 below zero for a night or two, making me damn glad we had a garage for Holly's truck and my Mustang.

It was all we could do to keep the house suitably toasty for us, running both the forced-air gas furnace and the fireplace gas logs full-tilt, but we did it not so much for comfort as to keep water pipes from freezing and bursting in the walls. From a comfort standpoint, it was more of an issue for me than for Holly, who had another tiny human growing in her and serving as a sort of internal heater.

Since our two-person Christmas Eve onesie orgy beneath the Christmas tree, Holly and I had grown fond of sleeping absent the constraints of clothing, but the chill outside - the cold wind howling against the denuded tree branches and the eaves of the house - prompted me to wear pajamas this night while Holly remained defiantly naked.

She eyed me pityingly as I walked to bed and crawled in beside her.

"You guys are such wimps," she said with a playful half-smile. "Here am with your nearly full-term baby in my belly and tits stretched to the size of cantaloupes, and you're afraid your Alpha Tau Omega 'mule dick' is going to catch a chill and shrivel."

"Hell, it's going to be below zero out there tonight," I said, weakly trying to defend myself.

"Yeah, out there. We're in here. I want to see what Sir Hollywood is made of," she said, giggling as she reached her hand through the unbuttoned fly of my pajama bottoms and grasped my flaccid member. "Oh no no no. Oh no no, this will not do. Queen Holly orders a command performance from the mule, Sir Hollywood."

Holly dived under the covers and I felt her lips encircle the head of my cock as she stroked its shaft with her hand. Any concerns I may have harbored about the cold vanished as I lowered the covers off both of us, affording me a view of Holly coaxing my cock to rigidity.

In our perpendicular alignment, there was little I could do to satisfy Holly other than knead her ass cheeks and maybe press a digit or two against anus. So I did just that, and it got Holly's hips undulating and her legs scissoring against each another, a way to stimulate the lips of her pussy without actually touching them.

"OK, honey, your turn," I said as I repositioned us with her legs astride my belly. I pressed my hands against her ass, pushing her farther up my torso as I simultaneously scrunched myself downward until her pouting twat was within reach of my tongue. I pulled a pillow beneath my head and began lapping at the copious, clear slish that had already coated her inner thighs and matted the public hair nearest her cleft. When the point of my tongue began treading from her opening to the underside of her raised clitoral hood, she lost control of her hips as her mound assaulted my mouth and nose, striving toward a climax that was just out of reach.

"Here baby," I said as I inserted two fingers into her vagina and began kneading the G-spot on its anterior wall. She let out an extended wail, at the end of which her orgasm broke over her, and it did so with a vengeance. Her whole body shuddered, and her arousal seeped from her depths, coating my mouth and cheeks and connecting it to her pulsating pussy with viscous strings.

When her quaking ceased, she wasted no time coating her hand with her glistening juices and applying them directly to my straining cock. She turned around on all fours and presented her swollen twat for my invasion.

"Fuck me from behind, baby, dog-style," she growled, already massaging her clit as her hips heaved.

I knelt behind Holly and nudged the flared head of my dick into the sweet spot between her pussy's gaping inner lips. With one thrust, I was fully sheathed inside her, and Holly took it from there, slamming her backside into me as my tempo heightened. The liquid sound of our coupling set to the rhythmic slapping sounds as we built toward a crescendo was powerful auditory eroticism.

"That's it, baby, plow that hungry cunt. Own that pussy," she said as she gasped for breath. "Cum with me."

Her body stiffened. Holly clutched her pillow with her left hand as though it were a lifeline and she cradled her belly with her right. She buried her face onto the surface of the bed and bellowed as her body jerked. Her contractions around my spurting cock had the effect of extruding our love fluids to the rim of her pussy, even as it was filled by the full length of my shaft. For a moment, my head swam and I thought I might lose consciousness.

All of that without ever removing my pajama bottoms.

When we regained our composure and sprawled on the bed to catch our breath, we looked at each other, considered how ridiculous the scene looked and laughed. On a sub-zero night, we were both sweating sufficiently to warrant a quick trip to the shower. Sir Hollywood lay limp, the last of his ejaculate oozing onto my flannel pajama bottoms. Holly's rich, musky arousal coated not only her crotch and her pubic patch but both globes of her ass and her protruding baby belly. Fine beads of breast milk had begun forming on her nipples.

"Hey, you heard Doctor Glenda. She told us to listen to my body," Holly said. "And tonight, it was screaming, 'Fuck me hard, Corey!'"

"If this is a preview of the next two months, I don't know if I'll survive til junior is born," I said. "But compared to what's left, what a great way to go."

●●●

By mid-February, the discomforts of pregnancy began to wear on Holly. Her ankles were swelling, and no brassiere she could find gave her consistent comfort. Sitting and rising from a chair were awkward and balance was a challenge. Lying on her back for more than a few minutes caused her significant discomfort and even pain. She became more self-conscious about her body image and her voracious appetite, and no amount of reassurance that she was nourishing two people eased her anxiety.

So it was that I made our first Valentine's Day our last getaway before our baby arrived. Since the holiday fell on a Tuesday, I begged off for Tuesday afternoon and the following day and booked Holly and me into Kansas City's Raphael Hotel, the city's crown jewel spa and luxury lodging since it opened 50 years earlier. For two days - Tuesday and Wednesday - she would be pampered: massages, wraps, warming mineral baths, manicures, pedicures, gourmet food both in the Raphael's five-star restaurant and in the privacy of our suite.

When I pulled the Mustang to the front entrance, she was greeted by staff with a dozen roses - part of the Valentine's package - while one valet unloaded our scant luggage and another whisked the car into the underground parking deck. Once in the room, a member of the spa staff handed Holly her monogrammed, plush terrycloth bathrobe and soft slippers that would be hers to keep.

For the rest of the afternoon, that was all she need wear, said Kristi, the bright young woman in a white, gold-trimmed spa uniform patterned after surgical scrubs. "If you want to duck into the bathroom and change, I will escort you down to the spa floor where you will be pampered," she told Holly.

"A spa floor? You have a whole floor designated for nothing but spa services?" I asked Kristi as Holly changed.

"The third floor. Well, most of it. We have a couple of administrative offices there and some storage: it takes a lot to keep a spa up and running 16 hours a day," she said. "But there are no guest rooms on that floor. There used to be, but the Raphael converted that floor to spa use several years ago to differentiate us from other luxury hotels in the city. We also redid the top of the building to put in a rooftop swimming pool and bar."

"We have some spa offerings for couples if you'd like to join your wife for her massage later," Kristi helpfully offered.

"What time?" I asked.

"Late afternoon, but let me call you when Mrs. Vaught and I get down to the third floor and I can check her timetable, OK?"

I nodded.

Holly waddled out of the bathroom trying to cinch the bathrobe around her tummy. The hotel had given her a robe specially made for expectant moms, but it wouldn't stay closed over her protrusion.

"Here, let me show you this special feature," Kristi said, her hands deftly locating the Velcro patches on the lapels of the robe specially designed for women in advanced pregnancy. It fit perfectly. Holly did a model turn in front of the floor-length mirror on the inside of our closet door and smiled.

"Lead the way, Kristi," Holly said.

The massage was scheduled for 4:30, the final stop of the afternoon's personal care/spoil-Holly-rotten session, and I confirmed to Kristi that I would join Holly. Asked if I preferred a male or female masseuse, I just told her to give me the best available, I don't discriminate.

The massage tables were quite different. Holly's was specially engineered with an opening to accommodate her pregnancy and allow her to lie face-down while her masseur (she chose a man) to unwind the knotted muscles and decompress her vertebrae. I was assigned to Greta, woman with powerful, sinewy arms and long, strong fingers.

By the time my deep-tissue massage was finished, I felt as pliable and relaxed as a sponge. I looked over at Holly as her masseur, Hector, wrapped up his work with a light effleurage on her back. Her face was fitted downward into an aperture fitted to the width of her cheeks, affording Hector's hands unfettered access to the taut muscles of her neck. I couldn't see whether her eyes were closed but I knew from her slow, deep breathing that she was asleep.

Hector looked to me for guidance. I waved him off, and he understood. I allowed her to slumber a few more minutes until Kristi tapped lightly on the door at 5:30. She saw Holly asleep and tiptoed in to where I now sat in my bathrobe on the table next to Holly and whispered to me.

"We've got another massage scheduled for 6 so the crew will need to come in and clean and change out the tables, so would you like to wake Mrs. Vaught or shall I," Kristi said.

"Let me. I think I can do some things you can't. Give me a minute."

Kristi left and I crept over to Holly's side, pulled down the sheet Hector had draped over her up to her shoulder blades before he left. I ran my finger lightly down her spine and back, then again, allowing it as far as the crease of her buttocks.

"Mrs. Vaught, time to wake up," I whispered in her ear. She made a small groan, still unwilling to wake fully. So I ran my fingertip down her back again, this time delving deeper into her ass crack. "Mrs. Vaught, if you don't wake up, I'm going to have my way with you..."

With that, her head bolted upward, and she looked around, unsure what she would see. When she saw my wicked grin, she groaned and laid her head back down.

"You asshole. Best sleep I've had in weeks and here you are playing with my butt and making me think it's the massage guy," she said, almost in a pleading tone.

"We gotta get dressed baby. Hotel's got to turn this room around for another massage in just a few minutes and we've got 7 o'clock dinner reservations," I said.

I helped Holly extricate herself from the special maternity massage table and back into her robe, copping a gratuitous feel of her tits as I did so.

"Don't start something you can't finish," she said, eyeing me warily.

"Oh, I can finish. Just not here."

As we exited, the cleaning crew rushed in, arms full of sheets and towels and squirt bottles of disinfecting cleaner. Wearing only our bathrobes, we took the elevator back to our floor. At our door, rather than immediately opening it, I turned Holly to me and kissed her. I undid the Velcro snaps that held her robe in place over her tummy, and it fell fully open. There, in the hallway, I tongued one of her exposed nipples while my hand trailed downward to caress her already moist slit.

"Baby, we better get on the other side of this door fast or we're going to be asked to leave and not welcomed back," Holly said.

No sooner were we inside than I backed Holly to the edge of our bed and helped her sit gently on it. She removed her arms from her bathrobe and lay backward, her bottom aligned with the edge of the bed. I shed my robe completely and tossed it on the bed beside her. I knelt on the carpeted floor and pressed my face into her womanhood, focusing my tongue on her emerging clit and the folds near it.

It was difficult for Holly's hips to roll as freely as they once had, given her present condition. And it became clear that her supine position was not the most conducive to her responsiveness. I guided her onto her right side, relieving her lower abdomen of some of its pressure and lifted her left thigh upward, affording my lips and tongue ample access to her slickened furrows of flesh waiting to be stroked. Five minutes of kissing her pussy and lightly fingering her vagina brought her to a respectable orgasm, but clearly Dr. Glenda St. John's admonition that they may lack the shuddering pinnacles they once reached was manifesting itself.

Holly grabbed my erection and swabbed her drooling snatch with it before guiding it to her opening. "Let me feel your cum inside me, baby," she said.

Still on her right side, once I had fully entered her, she closed her thighs and tucked them onto the mattress, intensifying the pressure on my penis and, evidently, the stimulation of her G-spot and her vulva. I had limited expectations that she would experience a trembling orgasm, given the outcome from protracted oral stimulation just completed. But Holly was responding vigorously as we fucked in one of the few alignments still physiologically workable at this stage of pregnancy. Holly kept one hand on her belly until at last her climax crashed over her, more forcefully than her orgasm minutes earlier.

"Oh, Coreeeey...," she moaned as her back bowed and her pussy convulsed. That prompted me to thrust deeply inside her and, with a guttural grunt, unleash my cum.

Still standing with my legs pressed against the bedside, I felt my thigh muscles begin to burn and my knees falter. Reluctantly, I extricated my still-dripping penis from Holly to lie beside her on the king-sized bed.

"How are you, baby," I asked her, threading my fingers past her cheek and through her golden ringlets.

She smiled. "Is that question for me or for... our baby," she said, looking down at our unborn child going through a workout of its own. "Looks like he's doing a gymnastics floor exercise in there."

We stared in silent awe at the movements beneath her uterine muscle and skin, both stretched taut by the full amniotic sac containing our very active prenatal son or daughter. At one point, a series of three quick protrusions seemed to run up the left side of her bulge, and Holly laughed.

"What's he doing, jogging?" she said.

"You keep using the word 'he,'" I said. "Is that because you want a boy?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Maybe? Kinda? I don't know? As long as he or she's healthy, then I'll be happy."

"What would be a good boy's name?" I asked.

Holly shrugged. "Haven't given it much thought, really. I like Corey - I love Corey - if you'd like a namesake junior. Maybe a Corey Paul Vaught Jr.? It would be another C.P. Vaught.

"Maybe. We've got some time, and I think the right name will come to us when the baby comes to us. But what if she's a girl," I asked. "Would Holly fit into her name? Maybe she'll also have her mom's beautiful eyes, her irresistible smile, her sweet nature? This world could use more Hollys. A baby Holly would wrap her daddy around her pinkie, just like her mama has."

"It will be what it's supposed to be. I love you," she said, kissing me quickly on the forehead. "But right now, I could eat the north end of a southbound steer, so we need to wash up, get dressed and get downstairs for our dinner reservation."

●●●

Saint Patrick's Day came and went. So did the next day and the day after that. Holly felt she was about to pop.

Our visits with Dr. Glenda St. John were now on a weekly basis, as was common for pregnancies as advanced as ours. On the doc's recommendation, Holly and I had taken Lamaze classes together and I had gone through the primer for dads who opted to accompany their ladies into the delivery room, something this hospital started in the early 1970s and other hospitals had since copied.

But when March 20th dawned without labor, Holly called Glenda again. I called Holly from work afterward to see what the doctor said.

"She says not to get hung up on the St. Patrick's Day timeline that got fixed in our heads when Dr. Foster offhandedly mentioned it that day in Memphis. She said these aren't precise calculations and that nature sometimes bucks the rules and that's perfectly natural. She said she I could go another week without her being alarmed," Holly said. "Corey, this is getting miserable. Maybe she can wait another week, but I don't think I can."

We had finally gotten to the point where sex in any configuration was uncomfortable for her. And I couldn't stop wondering what would happen if her water broke right in the middle of the act. So Sir Hollywood had been on the sidelines for about a week, but Holly - not Hollywood - was my concern at the moment, and I had no time for him.

"I'll head home a little early today. I've told Mr. Norton that we were right up on the due date and my presence over the next week or two might be a little uncertain. I think maybe you can rest easier if I'm there with you."

Holly's robust appetite had waned - she said she just had no space to put it - and she sustained herself with tiny snacks throughout the day rather than three full meals. Sleep was elusive. She was nervous: you'd swear she was overcaffeinated though it had been weeks since she had consumed coffee, tea, colas or anything with caffein.

We had been in bed less than half an hour, and I was trying in vain to calm her by rubbing my fingers gently through her hair. She got up to pee again - it wasn't uncommon for her to head to the toilet almost hourly because of the way her pregnancy was compressing her bladder. She had just made it into the bathroom when I heard her gasp.

"Oh shit!" she yelped.

I bolted up and ran to her. Clear liquid covered the bathroom's white tile floor at her feet. She faced me with a pleading, desperate look. "My water just broke, Corey."

For a second, I stood dumbstruck as it occurred to me that this was it: go time, not a drill.

"We're ready for this, baby. Let me call the hospital and notify them we're on the way. You put your hospital dress on, I'll grab the go-bag and get the Mustang warmed up and pulled around for you," I said, willing myself to appear calm.

Indeed, we knew the exact drill for delivery day. It was in writing, we had memorized it, and even done a couple of trial runs. We had bought a roomy knee-length cotton shift that Holly could quickly slip on with nothing underneath, the easier to exchange for a hospital gown. We had a bag packed and waiting by the front door, all she would need for a few days in the hospital. I even had my D-day wardrobe set aside: roomy khaki pants, a blue, plaid flannel shirt, Adidas jogging shoes and a heavy canvas overcoat. The hospital birthing ward was ready for Holly's impending arrival in the onset of labor. I had dressed, tossed Holly's go-bag in the back seat and had the car warming and ready.