“Kiefer,” I said.
“Shh,” he said, still holding me.
“No,” I told him, “it's important.”
“Shh.” His voice was calming. He was the one who had a plane to catch. If he wasn't in a rush, then I could wait. I had nowhere to be.
Except I did have somewhere I needed to be.
At first, I thought I'd peed myself and couldn't make sense of it. Was I that happy to see Kiefer? Like an excited puppy?
But it didn't stop, and in what felt like slow motion, my mind finally realized what was going on.
“My water just broke,” I said. And then I repeated it. “My water just broke.” And as the idea sunk in once again. “Olivia is coming!”
The expression on his face was a smile with a bit of confusion as the words sunk into his brain, much as they must have in mine.
“Right now?”
“Right now,” I said. “I'm going into labor.” And then, because I realized I'd forgotten to tell him. “She's yours.”
“I know,” he said.
He took me by the arm and dragged me outside as he pulled out his phone.
“You know?”
“You're not a good liar,” he said.
I blushed. He kept on pressing buttons on his phone.
"What are you doing?” I asked.
“I'm getting you to the hospital.”
“But your trip?”
He pressed a button on the phone. “Five minutes,” he said. “The Uber will be here in five minutes.” Then he looked up at me and registered the question. “My luggage will have to make it to Tokyo without me.”
“Wait, why not an ambulance?”
He shook his head. “The Uber’ll be here right away. The ambulance will take an hour and charge you $1,000. We could take my car, but I don’t think we’re going to make it all the way back to the garage with you like this.”
He was right. Uber was the fastest way. In L.A., believe it or not, many people took Ubers to the hospital before ambulances all the time.
We must have looked ridiculous, the two of us waddling over to the rideshare area, him with his giant guitar bag on his back and me, as pregnant as I was going to get, leaning against him.
“Do you need to do the breathing thing?” he asked.
“Lamaze?” I laughed. “Not until I'm dilated.”
“Okay, okay.” There was excitement in his voice, along with the nervous energy. He clearly had no idea what to do — why would he? He hadn't attended the classes or read any of the books. He'd only just found out for sure he was going to be a father a few hours ago at most.
“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked. “What do we do now?”
"We get to the hospital,” I told him.
He looked at his phone. “Two minutes!” And there was a big, joyous smile on his face.