About a Girl

chapter forty nine

September 18, 1993

It had been about two weeks since the VMAs and Kurt and Lily were back home in Seattle. NIRVANA's third studio album, In Utero, was being released in 3 days so Kurt was at a release party with Krist and Dave. Kurt had asked Lily to come with him, she was too tired and too pregnant to do pretty much anything other than lay on the couch and watch romantic comedies.

Although Kurt had been a little disappointed that she couldn't come to the party and celebrate with them, Lily was very much content to be at home curled up in a blanket cuddling Pippin to her chest. She smiled to herself, staring at the scene playing on the TV and watching with rapt attention as Richard Gere and Julia Roberts fell hopelessly in love with each other. She'd seen the movie at least a hundred times, but she still cried every single time she watched it. As the movie ended and the credits rolled, she wiped her tears and laughed a little at herself for her overboard emotions. She felt a strong kick in her stomach and she winced a bit.

"You've been fucking annoying today," she grumbled, rubbing her stomach. A sharp pain throbbed in her lower back and she frowned. "Ok ok, sorry."

Lily groaned as she got up from the couch, turned off the TV, and went to the kitchen in search of a snack. As she sorted through the cabinets, she couldn't ignore the pain that continued to stir in her lower stomach. It came and went, a bit like period cramps, but by the time she was seated back on the couch with a bag of chips pressing play on the next movie, the pain was starting to get much worse and harder to ignore...

And then – in the middle of drooling over Patrick Swayze teaching Jennifer Grey how to dance – Lily felt liquid gush out of her, soaking through her pajama pants and onto the blanket she had wrapped around her body. Her eyes went wide as realization hit her. Her heart started beating faster, pounding against her ribs. She sat frozen for a few minutes before her brain kicked into gear and she got up off the couch. She changed her clothes and put her pajama pants and the blanket in the washing machine in the basement. She switched the TV off on her way back to the kitchen where she made a cup of tea and then wandered through the house, eventually ending up in the nursery. She stood in the doorway, looking around the room as she sipped her tea.

She rummaged through the drawers in the dresser – an antique piece she and Kurt had found and, with Krist's help, painted green with pretty little flowers all over it – pulling out all the baby clothes she'd collected from friends, family, and thrift stores, unfolding and then refolding them before putting them back away, rearranging the entire system of how she sorted the clothes. After that she went to the hall closet and grabbed all the cleaning supplies that they had in the house. She started cleaning everything in the room, flitting around like a honeybee and trying to make every last thing perfect.

When she was satisfied with her work, she moved on to her and Kurt's bedroom down the hall. It was... a fucking disaster. There were clothes everywhere and Lily couldn't even tell which were clean and which were dirty. The bed was unmade and Lily's vanity was cluttered with makeup, books, hair clips and brushes, and a purple glass vase full of dead flowers. She frowned at the vase before turning to the clothes piled around on the floor; she tried sorting out the clean clothes from the dirty clothes but she quickly gave up and decided to just throw all of them in the wash. She collected the clothes, throwing them in a laundry basket and resting it on her hip as she walked down to the basement. She moved her pants and the blanket from the washing machine to the dryer and then sorted the clothes into 4 piles: her clothes, light and dark, and Kurt's clothes, light and dark.

After loading the first pile into the laundry machine she climbed back up the stairs, groaning as her contractions grew increasingly painful and closer together. She made it to the kitchen and sat down at the table, resting her head on the cool wood of the tabletop and whimpering as pain and fear coursed through her body. She debated calling Kurt – she was scared, the pain was getting worse, and she didn't want to be alone – but she didn't want to freak him out and ruin the release party for him. A little voice in the back of her mind was telling her she should go to the hospital, but she ignored it. The pain throbbing in her body and the fear of it getting worse paralyzed her, and going to the hospital would make everything that was happening much too real.