The cheap, analogue clock in the living room showed that it was getting close to 5 o’clock. Troy had been sitting in the hallway, cupping Rusty’s head in her lap, for close to 10 hours now. She’d spent most of that time sobbing, completely unable to emotionally cope with her new situation.
Deep down she knew that she couldn’t fight back. She was so emotional that she could barely get two words out of her mouth before choking up and there was no way she could cast a spell in her current state. Part of her wished that the other book owner would just come in and finish her off. Maybe, she thought, she could beg for them to help Rusty. To just take the book and leave the two of them alone in a more normal life. She just wanted things to be over.
But things were quite far from over, a fact that became apparent to her as a dull ache began to spread upwards from her cervix. The ache creeped through her uterus until it felt like her entire abdomen was sore, at which point all of her uterine muscles clamped down at once.
The pain was intense. Not only were the muscles straining against themselves, but they were forcing the baby down into the dense, fibrous wall of her cervix. The more her muscles pushed down, the more she felt like her cervix was about to burst open, and the more she actually wanted it to burst open if just to end the pain.
But she didn’t burst and the contraction didn’t stop, it just got stronger and stronger.
“Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!” Troy moaned. The arm behind Rusty’s head pressed him up into her stomach. Her other arm, meanwhile, squeezed itself between her thighs and belly, providing some support to the baby inside of her and helping to relieve the tension in her muscles, if only slightly.
Sweat and tears matted the fur on her face. She couldn’t focus on anything but the pain, anything but the baby that her body was trying to force out, anything but the feeling of being an overstuffed water balloon that was about to burst.
Then it stopped.
Her muscles instantly relaxed, the pain vanished, and the pressure in her stomach went from an unbearable torrent to its previous unpleasant tightness.
“Are you ok hun?” asked Rusty.
A flash of panic hit Troy’s mind as she briefly considered that she might have gone into labor, but then she remembered visiting her obstetrician a few weeks ago. While she was due any day now, that wasn’t her going into labor – it was a false contraction. Her obstetrician had warned her about them and she’d been having them on and off for the past week or so. As long as she didn’t have another one within the next couple of hours, it didn’t really mean much beyond the fact that she was close to her due date. Given the size of her stomach, that wasn’t something she needed to have a false contraction to know.
“Its fine, just a small contraction, I’m not in labor,” Troy replied.
“Hun you taste a bit… milky, maybe you should take a few minutes to clean yourself up, then we can figure out what to do.”
Troy looked down and realized that two small wet trails were running down her dress, one of which was running right past Rusty’s mouth.
“Sorry,” Troy said as she got up.
Walking into the bathroom, the first thing she did was to take off her dress and bra. She had expected to fumble with it a bit, but her body just did the motions for her as though they were well practiced. Looking into the mirror, she saw a pitiful sight.
Standing there was a petite tiger girl that looked more or less identical to how Troy would have imagined a feminized version of her previous, male tiger self would have looked. Except, of course, for the massive stomach jutting out in front of her. Even with one of her arms under it, just looking at herself, slightly bent over with a look of exhaustion on her face, it was clear how much her body was struggling under the baby’s load.
Then came her fur. It was much silkier than it had been as a man, and as she ran a hand over it, she noticed how much smoother it was as well – especially compared to Rusty’s. She wasn’t sure if that was a side effect of the estrogen or the basket full of hair care products she saw hanging from her shower head.
Turning her attention back to the mirror, Troy noticed that the fur on her face was wet and matted, as was some of the fur around her nipples as well. Taking a piece of toilet paper, she cleaned herself up with expert hands. While she didn’t have time to do a full makeover, she still made herself look presentable for Rusty. And she had fun doing it.
Turning back to her bedroom, Troy heard her cellphone start to ring.