The Twins: Chapter Six - The Days They Worried
Hey, loves! Welcome back to the final chapter of The Twins blog series. I do hope you’ve enjoyed this. I can’t say when the next blog series will start publishing - probably not for a month or more as I would like to get a portion of it written out. I’m not even going to say who it will be about because while I thought I knew, I often change my mind. I hate to get people excited for something and then my muse goes, “Haha, fuck you, do this instead.” You know what I mean?
Anyway.
If you’ve enjoyed this blog series and you want to buy me a coffee to say thanks, here is my Ko-Fi. Don't feel like you have to but for each person who has, thank you so much. For reference, my ko-fi link is always posted to the left side of this blog in the sidebar. I just don’t add it to every post because that’s not why I started it in the first place.
Do you need to catch up with The Twins?
Enjoy the last chapter, loves.
*
The Days They Worried
Chapter 6 - Cara POV
Every night, Cara took her time to remove the stress of the day away. It started in her closet where she shed the clothes of the day for something more comfortable in bed. Then, she moved to her vanity where she wiped away her makeup and prepped her skin for the evening. Eventually, she made her way to her library.
Her favorite space.
The one room in the entire mansion that had been designed entirely for her. Yes, her husband and boys used it. When she had a patient that came to the house for a session, they often found themselves sitting in the leather couches that faced each other in front of the bay windows. Sometimes, after dinner parties, she brought a few friends up to her library to continue drinking because Gian kept the wet bar well-stocked.
Nonetheless, party or not … patient or none, night after night, Cara found herself back in her library where she ended her evenings with two fingers of her favorite cognac and just one more chapter of whatever book she had picked to read for that week. She didn’t get to do that as much as she wanted to anymore, either.
Read, that was.
Yet, she made time for it.
Even if it was only a chapter at a time.
“The house is quiet, hmm?” came a familiar drawl from the doorway.
Gian rarely interrupted Cara when she was reading seeing as how he knew it wasn’t often she could sit down for longer than thirty minutes at a time to read. When he did, however, she never got annoyed about it. She found him leaning in the doorway—both oak doors to the library stayed wide open unless she had a patient in the library with her. Otherwise, she wanted the space to seem open and inviting to others.
Wasn’t that the point of a library?
Even if it was a personal one.
“It is quiet,” she said.
Despite the very busy day they’d had at the Guzzi mansion with the photographer, his team, and photoshoot that lasted well over four hours. Somehow, though, it went off without a hitch. Their newborn grandson, Marcus, even went along with everyone else’s plans. Truly a miracle in and of itself.
Cara was going to have beautiful photos to show for it. And that was really what she wanted, which she got. She usually did get what she wanted, anyway.
His sexy smile had her own growing. “And imagine, we have two of the loudest ones under our roof and their wives.”
Cara laughed. “Plus a newborn.”
“I told you, didn’t I?”
Well, her husband told her a lot of things. Most times, Cara tried to listen even when she thought Gian was just blowing smoke out of his ass to appease her. It wasn’t like it would be the first time he did it.
Shaking her head, Cara went back to her book, asking, “What did you tell me?”
“That you were worrying for nothing about those two—Bene and Beni, I mean.”
Her gaze focused on the words at the top of the page in the book. She read the same sentence over and over again, deciding how to respond to her husband. He wasn’t wrong, but sometimes in her heart, she still felt heavy about what had transpired between their youngest twins over the past year and a half.
“They’d never been apart and then all of the sudden, they were in two entirely different countries,” she said quietly. Sure, over the years the twins had given her many reasons to worry about the two of them. Their wild ways and constant partying when she wished they would focus more followed them for most of their teenage years and even into their adulthood until they both settled down. Still, they were her youngest, too. Her babies. It wouldn’t feel right to not worry about them when they had always seemed to need her a little more for different things than the rest of her kids did. “How could I not worry?”
“Because it needed to happen. At least this time, they separated themselves. They couldn’t live like that, could they?”
It wasn’t the first time they had needed to ask that question.
*
The day the twins cried …
One couldn’t properly describe how it felt to be awake and aware of your surroundings, but unable to move or do anything more than talk. Having been through a c-section before, Cara knew what to expect and that made going into it easier. She didn’t tremble in the paper gown while they inserted the needle into her spine for the spinal, and she didn’t shake or chatter her teeth nearly as bad when the anesthesia started to flood her body.
Beside her, Gian sat on a stool holding her hand. In his own hospital gown, booties, and a cap and mask, his gaze continued to drift between her and the curtain ahead of them. The one keeping their doctor and his team hidden from view.
They’d told her when they began.
Explained what would happen next.
It was strange to feel your body being moved … the pressure that she couldn’t explain and how heavy it felt in her throat when the whispers behind the curtain started to get a little more excitable and loud.
“Almost,” they heard the doctor call over. “Twin A—”
“Benito,” Gian spoke up.
“Beni,” Cara said softly.
Gian spoke a little louder, agreeing. “Beni.”
“Beni will be here in less than ten seconds.”
Those ten seconds passed quickly. Beni’s cry was as immediate as the doctor’s sharp, “Wait, wait a second!”
Maybe it was the panic in the person’s voice. Or even the confusion. Either way, it had Gian moving from his stool despite the warnings from the nurse on Cara’s other side that was tasked with monitoring the machines alongside the anesthesiologist.
“Gian,” Cara called.
He’d already moved beyond the curtain. His hand didn’t let go of hers, though. She counted the seconds. The hushed murmurs between her husband and the doctor followed the same pulling and pressure and then … more perfect, beautiful cries. There was seven seconds between the first cry and the second that sounded distinctly different. They hadn’t even announced Benedetto—little Bene—the same way they had his brother.
Everything moved faster, then. The nurse said nothing as she came to separate Cara’s hand from her husband, the woman’s face clouding Cara’s vision as she promised everything was fine and she would meet her babies soon. She also explained that the other nurses were taking the twins to the warming bassinets on the other side of the room.
Gian would follow.
She didn’t know how long she waited.
Occasionally, the doctor explained what he was doing at that point.
Cara just didn’t care to hear.
Soon enough, though, while the surgeon continued his work behind the curtain, Gian retook his position on the stool next to Cara’s prone form. Only now, he had the twins wrapped in white cotton towels with matching blue caps pulled over their tufts of dark hair.
“Say hello really quick,” he said, “but then they have to take them again.”
Her gaze darted to his.
He stayed happy and smiling the whole time.
“Why?” she asked.
Gian’s gaze darted to somewhere behind her—she didn’t bother to try and turn her head. She really couldn’t, anyway.
Instead of answering her, he pulled the towel away from the twins where they laid side by side in his left arm. Still messy from their birth, with gel swiped across their eyes and little arms twitching, they were wrinkly and pink and hers. That was all she noticed at first. And then she understood what must have made everyone pause when Beni was pulled from her womb. Finally, Cara understood exactly why her boys were always holding hands in every single ultrasound.
The sides of their hands were attached with a thin strip of flesh.
Conjoined.
“It just looks like some skin,” Gian was quick to explain. “No bone or veins or … it’d make sense why they wouldn’t have noticed it if there was nothing to see there, Cara.”
She understood why he wanted to explain.
She just … it didn’t matter.
“They’re perfect,” she whispered.
Gian smiled again, covering the boys with the towel. His palm found the side of her face, and his thumb stroked her cheek, making her realize how much colder she felt because of the anesthesia and IV. But his touch was just enough to make it all better for a second. “They’re more than perfect. I’ll let the nurses clean them up and we’ll get them with you.”
Right.
Skin to skin.
It’s what all her babies had after birth.
“Hurry,” was all she said.
The rest, they could deal with later.
*
*** There are some interesting statistics about how many identical twin births are born conjoined in some way. Sometimes, it is not always picked up on ultrasounds because, like in Bene and Beni’s case, there is nothing “wrong” to be noticeable with what you’re given to see. This was also the case with my youngest son, who was born with Polydactyly. But because the extra additions were so small, had no bones or major veins, we couldn’t see it until he was out in the world and said hello to us. And all he will have to remember that by is one video of me and him when he was a few days old and laying on my couch - I showed him his little steri-strips on both sides of his hands were his extra pinkies had been removed shortly after his birth. Why weren’t the twins told?
I came up with this idea later as a fun way to play around with some of the twin-things they did, and where would it have fit in for their books? This was mostly me writing an idea in fun and seeing what came of it for the blog. Also, it wouldn’t have really mattered. I hope you enjoyed this little tale about The Twins.
XO,
BK.
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