Chapter Twenty-Five
May 3
rd
, 2021 - 10:23 am
The last several days had been something of a blur for Andy. Thankfully, Ash seemed to be holding to her expected delivery date, and so the twins hadn't yet arrived, although Aisling and Andy had picked out their names - Kayleigh and Riley - and Andy felt a little bit of relief that his son, his first son, Matt, got to experience being the center of attention for at least a little bit on his own.
It also turned out that whatever else the nanobots rushing through Piper's body were doing, they were at least respecting the fact that she was still taking birth control, and while her body may have wanted her to get pregnant, it hadn't affected the birth control she was on, and her intentions of doing one more Olympics before retiring were still going to be on. For now, at least, Piper remained unimpregnated.
Fiona
had
tested positive for pregnancy, and that had delighted her to
no
end, because she'd been expecting it to be something of an uphill battle. Both her and Andy had been considered semi-infertile when they were younger, and now that she was with child, she couldn't be happier.
They'd brought Matt back from the hospital just a couple of days after he'd been born, and the doctors said that he was just shy of 8 pounds. He'd been born with hair a shade of onyx like his mother, hazel eyes like his father, and a strong opinion about when to eat, like both of his parents.
The family had set up a room in the manor which would be the nursery, a place where the newborns and infants could be until they were old enough to get their own room, although Andy had done the math and was already worried that a handful of rooms might turn into dormitories with several children bunking in. But, as he was fond of saying, they'd burn that bridge when they crossed it.
Niko had been wiped out for a few days after getting back, but since then had sprung into being a new protective mother with all the gusto she attacked everything else with. Matt had been doing the rounds, and the entire family had already taken multiple turns holding him.
Also, as expected, Jade had decided to settle into her role as house nanny, and she sprang into that job like she was born for it. In fact, she'd taken to handling Matt when he woke up in the middle of the night so much that Niko had only gotten up once so far to help. Niko had felt a little bad, but Jade had insisted that she be allowed to do her job and tend to Matt when Niko was resting. It was an adjustment to the house rhythm, but it seemed a welcome one, with the Team coming together to show how group parenting was going to work.
But one person that Andy had had trouble cornering was Nicolette, however, as the almost ninja-like housekeeper had taken to avoiding talking to anyone for more than a few moments over the past week. Andy, however, had a plan. He grabbed his laptop and went to sit in the hallway outside of Nicolette's room, and he started to write.
One of the advantages of being a writer was that location didn't matter, and wherever he wanted to write from, he could. So, pulling up a chair and waiting outside of someone's room was definitely an option. An hour or so later, Hannah wandered by and cocked her head, and asked, "What're you doing, Andy?"
"Waiting for Nicolette," he told her, not looking up from his typing.
"I think she's scared of talking to you," Hannah said with a giggle.
"Well, that's ridiculous, so I'm going to wait here until we have a conversation," Andy told her, typing away on the keyboard. "If you see her, you can tell her that."
"Okay, Andy." And then Hannah continued along her way.
Another hour or so later, he heard the voice he wanted to hear from the end of the hallway near the stairs. "You're not going to let this go, are you?" Nicolette's voice asked.
"Nope," Andy said. "We're gonna talk about it."
Nicolette let out an overly dramatic sigh and then walked over towards him, dressed in one of her least slutty French maid outfits, dropping down onto her knees next to him in the chair. "Please don't make me give it up, Master," Nicolette said, a single tear running down her cheek.
That was the point where Andy turned and looked at her, a single tear running down his own cheek. "Is that the kind of monster you think I am, Nicolette?" he sighed. "That I would ask you to give up the child you so vehemently insisted you wanted? I'm not going to make you give it up, Nicolette; I swear to you on my son's life." She let out a very visible shudder and sigh of relief at that, as if the tension had just left her body. "Why would you think that I would?"
"I... I'm not sure, Master," Nicolette said. "With Piper not getting preg--"
"Piper didn't
want
to be pregnant, Nicolette, not yet." Andy nodded his head, though, as if he could understand how the information out of context might have made her jump to erroneous conclusions. "That was a decision that
she
made, and I'm supporting her in. That doesn't have anything to do with you."
"I was worried you might've just been telling me I could have a baby so you could get out of the hospital or something," she sighed. "Whitney got accidentally pregnant with Bill's baby in 2019, and he forced her to terminate it, which she did without open objection, even though it was fucking killing her. They had a ripped condom, which neither had noticed in the heat of the moment, and when Whitney missed her period, Bill... didn't take it well."
"Oh, shit..."
"He flew off the handle and while he didn't hit her, he was threatening to abandon her, to get rid of her because he didn't want a child that badly. He did the worst thing he could possibly do to a person who gets off on total submission - he refused to tell her to do anything else until she'd had the abortion. It... it was the worst I'd ever seen her, Master. She was crying all the time, almost nonverbal, and despite the fact that she was trying very hard to put on a brave face, that was the break in their relationship from which they never recovered from. Rationally, I know you wouldn't ask me to do that, Andy, but the idea of losing this child... I was scared that maybe you'd agreed to it in a spur-of-the-moment thing, and that when you weren't under the pressure of your first child about to be born, maybe you'd reconsider, because I'm not one of your wives. It sounds really fucking stupid when I say it out loud, I know. But just because it was important to
me
doesn't mean it would have to be important to
you
, sir. I'm staff. I get th--"
"Okay, Nicolette, knock it off," he chuckled. "The
staff
designation around here couldn't mean any less if I
tried
to make it mean less, and Heavens know, I have tried. It's a way for you women to say you don't want to be married to me, you're never
going
to want to be married to me and that I shouldn't even
consider