Serena Williams may have married Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian , but their love story didn't get off to the smoothest of starts.

The tennis champ met Alexis after he sat at a table reserved for her entourage at the Cavalieri hotel, in Rome, and she told him to move.

Alexis was hungover and refused to move despite Serena's camp saying there was a rat under the table.

Serena's very first words to her fiance were: “We just don’t want you sitting there. We’re going to use that table.” Her pals even joked there was a rat under the table - to which Alexis replied: "I'm from Brooklyn, I'm used to rats."

His pithy reply excited her and Serena asked him to join her table - when Alexis later proposed in Rome he put a plastic rat on the table.

When Serena posed naked for Vanity Fair , the stunning tennis champ showed off her blooming baby bump with just a simple chain covering her modesty.

Serena recalled first learning she was pregnant after feeling physically different roughly a week before the beginning of the Australian Open in January - she said after taking the test she simply forgot it was there until an hour later.

(Image: serenawilliams/Instagram) (Image: Annie Leibovitz exclusively for Vanity Fair)

Becoming pregnant was a shock to Serena and it was only at the suggestion of her friend Jessica Steindorff, who suspected it was not merely her hormones acting up that Serena relented and let Jessica buy her a pregnancy kit.

“I’ll take it just because (a) to prove you wrong and (b) because it’s fun, whatever. It’s like a joke. Why not?” Williams says.

After taking the test, she forgot about it, thinking it impossible that it could be positive.

When she finally checked the results, she says she “did a double take and my heart dropped. Like literally it dropped.” Her first thought: ‘Oh my God, this can’t be—I’ve got to play a tournament. How am I going to play the Australian Open?’ I had planned on winning Wimbledon (her third straight) this year.”

(Image: AFP) (Image: Instagram)

After discovering she was pregnant, Serena called her fiance and told him to fly to Melbourne earlier than previously planned. When she saw him, she wordlessly handed him a paper bag containing the six positive pregnant tests.

Now, a little more than six months pregnant, she is facing the reality that she is indeed having a baby with her soon-to-be husband. “It just doesn’t seem real. I don’t know why. Am I having a baby?” she says.