Maya had already been awake for four days, Carina had been breastfeeding Giulietta for three days.
The captain would be leaving the hospital in three days' time to continue her care at home. This meant that their daughters would only have ten days. Ten days, and they wouldn't be able to leave the hospital yet.
They'd gone to the neonatal unit.
-"Maya, Carina, how are you?" asked one of the nurses.
- "Fine, thank you, and how are you?
- "I'm very well, thank you, and I have some very good news..."
- "yes?"
-"Carina... Would you like to breastfeed Vittoria today?"
- "she... Can she come out?"
- "yes, she's one kilo six hundred exactly. I think she was jealous of her sister..."
- "is she going to be able to nurse?"
- "We'll see, we gave her a pipette of your milk that you pumped yesterday and she managed to swallow it. So we'll try suckling and if she doesn't we can always give her the pipette to get her used to drinking on her own."
The nurse saw that Maya looked a little sad at not being able to do anything.
"Maya, in the meantime, would you like to do some skin-to-skin with Giulietta? I think she misses you a lot, it's been a week since she was taken out of the place that was her home for over seven months."
-"Can I do that?" She asked, smiling.
- "She's tiny, she doesn't move, so she shouldn't put a dent in your wounds. Hold her on the right side and you should be fine."
- "uh... I don't have a... Bras or anything under my shirt."
- "Don't worry, we'll put you in the room at the back. It's a subdued room for people who have children in the neonatal unit and who want to do some skin-to-skin or who want to be a little quiet with their baby. It's often families who don't «sleep» at the hospital."
- "thank you"
They had gone into the room and the nurse had brought in the two incubators. And a sheet for Maya to put over her body. She left the room and Carina helped her wife take off her top. She then fetched the baby and placed her in Maya's arms.
She had felt her wife tremble and when she had looked up into her face, she had seen that the captain had started to cry. It was the first time she'd ever held one of their twins in her arms.
The Italian had knelt down in front of her. She ran her hand over the blonde's jaw and her thumb under the captain's eye.
"I almost never took our daughters in my arms... Even they ... They could have... Not been there... I couldn't have survived knowing that they had grown so many weeks in my belly and would never have seen the world..."
Maya had raised her eyes to her wife's.
"You see... That's why, in my eyes, you're the strongest and most impressive person in the world... Here I am, crying because I almost never held our daughter in my arms... And you... You'll never hold your biggest baby in your arms... And yet you're here, you can breathe... And yet you're here, you can breathe... And I want to cry as soon as Jordan is sick and in pain..."
-"It hasn't been easy every day. But I live... For him... What's the point of telling him life is good, if you're going to let me die?
And it's okay to cry because you're holding our daughter in your arms for the first time... And it's normal to cry because you almost never held her in your arms...
