Chapter Three
This was a new low, even for Alex. Coming on to a patient’s support person during the woman’s labor? Alex had seen unscrupulous doctors hit on doulas before. Twice in his short career, he’d even seen the expectant fathers hitting on nurses or other women in the room while the poor, laboring mom writhed in pain and agony. At least he wasn’t the baby daddy here. Although, he thought as he peered around the room, he still wasn’t sure who the baby daddy was. Sherri had briefly explained that this was an unusual romantic entanglement between the laboring mom and the two men in the room.
Alex watched how tender they were with her, how the tall blonde seemed to focus her in meditation and to calm her down, bringing her out of the anger and into a more neutral, calm energy that allowed her to handle the waves of contractions far better than she had while upset and bitter. He admired what they were doing, capable of so much more than he saw in most traditional unions. Flashing back on some of the two hundred births he’d been part of or observed, he couldn’t think of another situation where two men had been so eagerly devoted to one woman.
Not wanting to interrupt them, he took a quick look in the chart and saw nothing noted under “father’s name.” He was curious. How do you do this? How do three people act as one? And which one was the father? Sherri had said that they didn’t want to know, and that seemed even more astonishing to him. If he helped to create a baby, damn right he’d want to know that he was the father.
This was different, he sensed, as he watched the two men help Laura stand and begin to take some slow steps. There was an interplay between them, an easiness between the men that spoke of a kind of connection he respected but couldn’t fathom. Under their eager assistance, she blossomed a bit, even laughing as the tall blonde made a joke, and somehow she chuckled through a contraction, the motion making her belly tighten. Alex watched carefully, his practiced eye noting that she still hadn’t dropped.
Between polyhydramnios and the fact that she was a first-time mother, he guessed it was going to be a long night. That fact he celebrated in his head, a great contradiction to most cases. In nearly every laboring case, he wanted it over quickly. Not to rush nature, but simply to bring closure to the family and to greet the new life that came into the world in his trained hands.
With Laura, he hoped, too, that she would find as little suffering as possible, and that he could help Sherri in whatever way to make sure that the birth was smooth, managing the risks as much as possible. More than anything, he hoped that it was a long, slow, steady birth that gave him plenty of time to talk to Josie.
Touching her like that had been a gamble. Her blushing response emboldened him, made his body react so swiftly he cursed the scrubs, which showed all too publicly what regular pants could hide. That simple touch ignited him and made him want her more. Pretending to read the chart, he mulled over the handful of seconds he’d touched her inner arm, how her breath had hitched, the way the pulse at her throat had been visible, picking up.
She stood behind Laura now, rubbing a lacrosse ball up and down the chain of muscles from her mid-back to her coccyx. Laura bent over slightly, supported by the brown-haired guy, groaning with ecstasy—and then her knees buckled as another contraction hit, and both men shifted to hold her up.
The contractions were coming closer together than he’d predicted, and he and Sherri exchanged a glance. She tapped her watch and shrugged. He nodded, put the chart back, and backed out of the room. If they needed an OB, Sherri would call him. And if the birth went on past 7 a.m., whichever CNM took over for Sherri would call whichever resident took over for him, short of an imminent birth at shift change.
Mentally settling in for a long night and a long labor, he began to plot in his mind how he could use these hours to the fullest, assuming no more big cases came in tonight. Could he get Josie to join him for coffee? Could he come in to offer to help? Could he make it plausible that he wanted to read a fetal monitor strip or assess surgical possibilities?
All of that took up the rational part of his brain. Meanwhile, the irrational part drummed a steady beat as he looked at Josie and studied her more carefully. Her attention was focused solely on Laura’s back, giving him a moment to stand in the threshold and just take her in.
The fire in her eyes, the sarcastic retort she threw out to the brown-haired guy, the way she seemed to be able to touch Laura and whisper something in her ear that instantly made the laboring woman seem a little more at ease—it was all part of the allure of Josie. Beyond that, though, he just didn’t know. How could he pinpoint it when he’d exchanged more words with her in the past fifteen minutes than he had in his life prior?
If he could explain it, he would. But he couldn’t. Some primal attraction that went deeper than the surface, deeper than language, made him want her, made him want to possess her, to be the center of everything for her. He knew it was crazy. Alex had built an entire career on the known, on facts, on medicine and science and that which could be measured and tested, and then applied to the human condition to provide relief, remedies, and comfort.
He had decided to specialize in obstetrics after going to his first birth in medical school. All the mother’s kinetic energy had focused, even through the epidural, and Alex was transfixed. The head had emerged, and then one shoulder, and then the slide and slipperiness of the baby had poured out of the mother’s body, a new life in the deft hands of the doctor. That transition from the safety of the mother’s body into the light of the world was a bridge that Alex wanted to walk for the rest of his life. Obstetrics it was for him.
The surgical side had come easily; he had rock-steady hands, no matter what. It had become a joke in med school that you could feed him fourteen cups of coffee, a considerable amount of sugar, and probably throw in a Red Bull or two, and his hands would be as calm and neutral as Switzerland. Yet, handed that gift by some outside force, he largely rejected it, choosing to find as many medical methods as possible to preserve vaginal births for his patients. He didn’t care that he was largely ignored, or worse, belittled, for his old-fashioned views. Medicine, for Alex, wasn’t about reputation, or climbing a ladder, or any of the other petty things that his classmates considered important.
Helping patients was the focus, and the rest—money, prestige, competition—didn’t appeal to him. Those issues weren’t part of his ethical calculus. So why, if he could so easily reject conventional ideas about his career, did he find it surprising that he would fall for a woman in such an unconventional way?
He turned around and walked back to the elevators, riding them down to the main desk where his other patients’ charts waited for him like baby birds begging to be fed. His handwriting looked like regurgitated worm as he scrawled his way through note after note after note of earlier patients. He found himself on autopilot, thinking solely about Josie, scheming to find a way to get back up to the labor and delivery wing without being too obvious.
*
Josie tried to imagine what the four of them looked like, wandering down the halls of the maternity wing. Laura straddled an invisible bowling ball and stepped as if she were walking on burning coals. Dylan looked like a deer caught in the headlights, eyes wide and frantic, his entire being trying to keep it together whenever Laura looked at him. Mike was Mike, calm and steady, but holding on to a bracelet filled with beads and mouthing words as they walked along. Every so often Josie could hear little bits and pieces of whatever prayer he was saying—Om, Tara, Pad me—and she guessed it was something Buddhist.
If Josie were about to have her daughter enter into the world she’d be praying too, but it wouldn’t be quite as calm and peaceful. It would be more like, Oh, dear God, make the fucking pain stop!
Laura was pretty close to that, but the walk had made a huge difference. She sipped on a cup of cranberry juice as they strolled at a pace about as slow as a bill making its way through Congress. On their second lap around the nurses’ desk, a slightly pudgy, brown-haired shift nurse with piggish eyes joked, “There goes Mario Andretti.” The guys had laughed and Laura faked a polite smile, but Josie’s heart sank. That was the last thing that any woman in this condition needed, the joke failing miserably for the one person who needed it to succeed.
Time and space had condensed into this hallway, and the next hallway, as they made a left turn, the one after that, past the bank of born babies that they could “ooh” and “ahh” at and that could hearten Laura, to give her more spirit. Any rift in that and Laura’s support network wouldn’t be enough. Ultimately, they all knew, this rested on Laura’s ability to dig deep and find a core of love and strength within herself that would allow her to ride this out, to bring a new life into this world. No chant, no prayer, from anyone else could accomplish that. And when all of this was over and Laura held her brand-new daughter in her arms, Laura alone would be the bridge this little soul had traversed into being.
The rest of them? They were there to remove obstacles from Laura and the baby’s path. But not to complete the journey.
Mike seemed to sense that the nurse’s tossed-off joke had had a deeper layer to it, and pulled Josie aside. “Should we avoid the nurses’ station?” he asked, intense eyes steady and stable. Josie could look into them for hours and find peace. Note to self, she thought, when—uh, if—I do have a baby, ask Mike to be there.
“Yeah,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t think that was helpful.”
He nodded. Laura was wearing earbuds, her attention focused on the music as she shuffled along. She burst out into braying laughter suddenly, punching Dylan playfully in the shoulder.
“What?” he said, his face lighting up as if a heavy burden were suddenly lifted and he were joyful.
“You made the playlist.”
“I did,” he said, grinning ear to ear, the charming smile that made women want to take their pants off and burn them now teasing Laura as she was about to give birth to their child. Josie kept reminding herself. Their. Their, their, their. Not his—theirs.
“Really? ‘I’m Too Sexy’ by Right Said Fred?”
“I thought it was a good one.” He started to sing the song and they all laughed.
“He also thought ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ by Queen was a good one, but I talked him out of it,” Mike whispered in Josie’s ear.
“Dead. He’d be a dead man if he did that,” she whispered back.
“Twice dead. Laura would kill him and find a way to kill him again,” he said, chuckling low. “His karma would be ruined for multiple lifetimes.”
“He really thought that was a good song for an overdue pregnant woman in labor?”
“He said he loves fat-bottomed girls and never considered it an insult.” Mike shrugged. Dylan started shooting them the hairy eyeball and Josie ignored him.
“That’s because he has the social graces of a nine-year-old boy with a box of fireworks and three espressos in him.”
“All this dance music on the playlist is fabulous, and the beats help me to get out of my head. Thank you, honey,” she said, reaching out to touch Dylan’s arm. “But I’m not doing that kind of dance.” Her face crumpled, voice shaking. “I’m barely holding it together, because when I do dance, it’s going to be the dance of being split in two so that a new life can emerge,” Laura said seriously. Mike and Dylan wrapped her in a cocoon of their arms, and Josie felt marginal, like a moon orbiting them.
Laura’s face was tired, and Josie knew that her reserves were running low already. This was like mile ten of a marathon, though. It was one thing to be this tired at mile twenty, but this early? It didn’t bode well for what was coming. Love could be enough for a hell of a lot of things, and if love were the measure of how Laura would fare tonight, she’d be fine. Biology, though, could overpower love when it came to birth.
*
Alex happened to be at the nurse’s desk, charting away, documenting the case where he’d sniped The Claw, taking away his ability to perform a C-section simply by reading the fetal monitor strip with the consultation of a nurse with thirty years of experience under her belt. With a little help from some augmentation drugs, the mom had crowned, and the baby had come out nice and slick, like a little seal pouring forth into the world, big, wide eyes open. The baby was safe in the NICU now, being monitored; if Alex had any sense of predicting the future, he’d say that the baby would be fine in about two days. Probably just some junk in its lungs causing minor respiratory issues.
So many of his med school colleagues had gone into obstetrics with a giant burden of fear yoked around their necks. Fear that a baby would be harmed, fear that a mother would crash, fear that a baby would be injured or die. Fear seemed to drive them and from the outside looking in, and they allowed themselves to make so many consequential decisions based on something that hadn’t happened yet.
Alex made his decisions on data and, he admitted, on hunches—but when he listened to his gut there wasn’t a third partner there screaming like a giant fire alarm that went on and on forever, and no flame ever appeared. He ruled over his psyche with a steady, reasonable mind that applied a calculus of optimism. For him, the baseline was of course everything will be fine and it was only data that shook that deep core of faith that would make him act.
When the alarm in Laura’s room went off, he leapt and shot down the hall, barely hearing the clattering of the chart that he’d just been writing in as it slipped off the counter and banged against a chair. His feet pounded into the linoleum floor as he pushed his body as hard as possible—because that code meant that something was wrong and with a patient with her profile he could walk into damn near anything.
The flames of fear licked at his ankles right now; he had the briefest of appreciations for what his med school comrades had gone through. Fighting it back as his heart pounded in his chest, as his arms pumped him forward, climbing up four flights of stairs as fast as possible with no time for the elevator, all he could think was get to the baby, get to the baby, get to the baby, get to the baby. It became a chant, in his head as his brow began to pound, as his hamstrings began to scream and he burst through the doors just as Sherri came down the hall, wide-eyed and pointing.
Sherri, Alex, a nurse, and two hospital staff he couldn’t identify slammed through the door to Laura’s room. Sherri plowed through the suite to the bathroom door, finding it locked. His head swinging wildly, eyes darting around the room, Alex saw Josie resting in a chair, her head snapping up as the group crashed into the room.
“Where is she?” he shouted.
“What? What? What?” Josie said, sitting up, her eyes alarmed. “What are you talking about?”
And then, slam! The bathroom door unlocked. Alex charged in right behind Sherri, who was standing at a dead halt, staring at the scene that unfolded before them all.
A man’s hairy asshole pointed squarely at the door, nearly at waist level to them all. To the left Alex saw Laura, completely naked now, sitting on the toilet bearing down, her face tipped up in flushed horror.
The owner of the brown starfish winking at them as he bent down to finish turning the jacuzzi water off appeared to be Dylan—who froze with his hand on the faucet.
What fresh hell was this?
Alex had seen plenty of strange things in his years on hospital rotations, and had walked in on some exceptionally sexual situations that ranged from the commonplace to the perverted, but going at it while a woman was dilated to six centimeters or so, in a hospital room bathroom, was a new kind of low.
As Sherri turned to him and bit her lower lip, covering her mouth with her palm, Alex took charge and asked, “Laura, are you okay?”
Her face was slack and frozen as Dylan turned around and stood, his naked form laid out in tight, muscled detail for Alex and the four women—No, make that five, he thought as he caught Josie out of the corner of his eye—standing behind the two nurses in the back on tiptoes, her head bouncing as she tried to see what was going on.
If she needs to see any man naked, it should be me.
Dylan said, “She’s fine. What the hell is this?”
Alex raised his eyebrows and shot Dylan a look of marvel. “You tell us what this is,” he said. “Someone in this room pulled the emergency cord.”
Laura looked down at her right hand, which was pressed into the handicapped bar next to the toilet seat, her pinky finger wrapped in the small, thin white string attached to the wall. “Oh my God,” she choked out. “I must have…I was trying to go and I was pushing up to stand and, oh…” She looked at Dylan with abject horror. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you naked?” Josie screeched.
“Because I feel better that way,” Laura answered.
Alex felt the rising bubble of laughter in him, barely held back until Dylan, his toned firefighter body on full display, planted his hands righteously on his hips and asked Josie in incredulous tones, “Are you talking to me?”
Josie looked straight at his penis, and then back at his eyes and said, “You’re the only one who really shouldn’t be naked, Dylan.”
“I was helping her get into the jacuzzi,” he explained.
“And you needed to be naked to do that?” she asked.
Alex was struck by the sarcastic tone she used. There was clearly a relationship between the two that relied on poking each other for amusement. He didn’t have time, though, to think about their banter.
His eyes focused back on Laura. Sherri had moved and was checking her pulse, repositioning the baby monitor to catch the fetal tones which—aha, there they were, nice and strong. Good. Laura’s face tightened and Alex watched her belly move down like an elevator slowly descending, the baby being pushed down to her pelvic floor. She breathed perfectly through the contraction, her body tense at first and then her shoulders slowly lowering to relax, her breath focused in what little bit of diaphragm control remained for someone so enormously pregnant. The belly breathing would help to keep the blood going to the womb muscles and would calm her—he hoped. Without her water popped, this was going to continue to be difficult for her but he wasn’t in charge here—this was Sherri’s gig.
“I think we need to leave them alone,” Alex said quietly, stepping back, the gap between him and Josie now considerably smaller with Sherri in the bathroom ministering to Laura. He reached for Josie’s forearm and she snatched it away.
“I want to know why Dylan was trying to fuck Laura in the middle of having a baby.”
“I want to know why you think I was trying to fuck Laura in the middle of having a baby,” Dylan said.
A low voice a few inches above and behind Alex said, “I’d like to know, what you’re doing, too.”
This was the other dad, what was his name? Mike? Mike—who stared at the display before him and he, too, looked at Dylan’s naked form and shook his head. “There is a time and place for this and this is neither the time nor the place,” Mike told Dylan.
“She wanted me to get in the jacuzzi tub with her!” Dylan protested. “We didn’t pack a bathing suit. We didn’t figure it would be a big deal.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Josie said. “I’m sure people here have heard that a million times.”
“Actually, no,” Alex and Sherri said in unison.
Laura’s contraction was over and she stood, completely naked and utterly oblivious to her nude form, which Alex found charming. So many mothers added to the difficulty and the pain of the labor by being self-conscious. Of all the times in your life when you should be able to do whatever you want, isn’t labor and delivery one of them?
“Out,” she said calmly, pointing to Alex and the two nurses. She pointed to Josie, Dylan, Mike, and Sherri. “You can stay. Everybody else, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think about what’s going on here. I am having a baby!” she shouted. “I want my fucking birthing tub!” And with that she waddled over to the tub and slowly lifted one leg to get in, Dylan supporting her as Mike scrambled into the room to help out.
Alex backed away, admiring her fortitude and wondering if she was always like this. He and Sherri exchanged a look and she just shrugged, waving him out. Crisis averted—back to charting.
*
Now that Dylan’s brown starfish crisis was over, Josie found herself flagging, needing coffee. It was 4 a.m. And while Laura’s body was blossoming nicely, now at about six centimeters, without broken waters this could take quite a bit longer. Dylan snoozed in a very uncomfortable-looking pose in a chair in the room while Mike curled around Laura, spooning her while pressing his hands deeply into the aching muscles of her back. Laura, desperate for sleep, was grabbing whatever Zzzzzs she could get between rippling contractions.
Josie knew that breaking the waters would be the next suggestion Sherri would make, and that Laura would probably comply, but do so with hesitation. Exhaustion had set in, and that meant her mind wasn’t as sharp as it normally would be. Add in raging hormones, abject terror, and the whispers of a new uptight nurse and you had one big mess.
Coffee. She needed coffee. She shook Dylan, who jumped up and shouted, “What? Push?” He was as dog tired as Josie.
She leaned down. “I’m getting coffee. Want some?”
He just shook his head and closed his eyes, curling himself into a barefooted ball on the wooden legs of the visitor’s chair, head shoved against a pillow. The chair folded out into a little bed, but he’d rejected that option for reasons known only to him. She wasn’t about to pry.
The elevator ride down was eerie, the sounds of groaning women in labor and beeping machines cut short as soon as the elevator doors shut. Downstairs, she found a 24/7 coffee shop and grabbed a horrible cup of java that would at least buy her a little alert time. On impulse she bought two. She’d find Alex and offer him one as a prize. Anyone who came face to face with Dylan’s naked ass—no matter how strong and hot it was—needed a little something else strong and hot to get over it.
Finding Alex proved remarkably simple, for as she waited for the elevator doors she heard that steady baritone behind her. “Josie?”
She turned to find him standing there, holding two cups of coffee. Uncertainty clouded his features, and then his eyes twinkled with mirth. “You just got coffee,” he said, pretending to toast her with the cup in his right hand. “I was coming up with this to give you.”
Could he be even more perfect? Apparently. “And,” she answered, gently knocking her own cup against his, “this is for you.” Eyes locked, they smiled at each other, the coffee burning her hand as they just stared. Maybe that burning sensation wasn’t only from the hot liquid in the cup in her hand. Hot fluids were pooling in other places, too.
“Great minds think alike and all that,” he said, not breaking the look.
She knew he had a handful of hours left of his shift, and he looked tired, but there was an energy in him that she admired. Competence and decency emanated from him, even in the blue scrubs. His name tag was askew, hanging from his shirt pocket like an afterthought, and his messy hair made her want to see it in bed, sunlight streaming behind him, naked and sleepy next to her, covered in their scent.
If he could read minds she was in trouble.
She had a feeling she was in trouble no matter what, though, because as their look deepened she felt herself falling, unsure where or how far, but definitely falling into a state she’d never been in before, her body and mind ready to leap right into something that should be carefully thought out.
And the last thing she needed to do right now was tear any of her attention away from her best friend. Laura, trying to sleep, and about to experience the worst pain of her entire life. In the middle of all that, what was Josie doing?
Flirting.
Bad friend. Bad, bad friend.
“We have a coffee surplus. Want to go sit down and get wired and jittery together?” Alex asked.
“Get some Mountain Dew and NoDoz and we could cure cancer in two days.”
“We could do great things with two uninterrupted days together,” he said, nodding solemnly.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Alex gestured for her to get on first, and she fumbled to push the button for the right floor, hands full of coffee cups, but she made it.
“You can tell you’re a nurse.”
She snickered. “A real nurse would make out with you between floors.” Her mouth wasn’t supposed to blurt that out. It was a thought! A thought! The line between thinking and speaking eroded after 1 a.m.
“Is that an offer?”
“Do you want it to be?” Stall. Buy time. Stop inhaling his scent. Stop watching his arms flex with those coffees.
What was he doing? Alex bent down and set the coffees on the floor, then approached her, two steps into her personal space, making her breath so hard to manage she worried she’d faint from lack of oxygen. Autonomous body functions continued, to her surprise, including a decidedly distressing flood of blood to her nether regions, which engorged and flowed, making her wet for him. How could she get out of this with her dignity intact, without throwing herself all over him?
“I don’t play games, Josie.” His eyes bored into her and she gasped, confirming that her respiratory system really was functioning right now, thank goodness. His hands reached for the cups she held and he placed them on the floor, too. Alex touched her shoulders as the elevator crept up, slowly, the seconds feeling like minutes. “Games are for people who don’t know what they want.”
Alex showed her exactly what he wanted next, arms wrapping around her shoulders, one hand sliding against the throbbing skin of her neck, his soft palm caressing her pulse at the jawline, mouth bending to her, upper body curling down to take her with impossibly lush lips that met hers with a sense of welcoming that was almost unbearable in its simplicity and grace.
He didn’t push. This wasn’t a kiss of overriding passion, which she expected, but instead one of invitation, of orientation, even. Rather than saying “take your pants off”—a sentiment with which she was all too familiar—his kiss said “hello.” Which was so unfamiliar it confused her. The former she knew all too well. And then it shifted, moving decidedly into pants territory.
As his lips explored her, her hands splayed against his shoulders, feet standing on tiptoes to embrace him better, the distant ding! of the elevator’s ascent registered and interrupted their embrace as the doors began to open.
Feeling like an errant schoolgirl, Josie pressed her fingers to her lips as he pulled back, a smile creasing his face and making those damn eyes even more appealing. The look he gave her pierced her heart, as if he really cared for her and this wasn’t just some strange attraction that came at the worst possible time—ever—in her life.
No one entered the elevator, thank God, and she nearly kicked over two of the coffees in her haste to pull away and make sure no one caught them. She watched him, effortlessly, dip to one knee on the floor like a man about to propose, except his hand held java instead of a diamond ring.
Likewise, she bent down to retrieve her coffees and looked to him for reassurance, for direction, to know what to do next. His fixed stare made her smile, the grin a reflex that came from a deeper look at the relaxed calm, the knowing joy in him that he somehow transmitted to her.
That look she knew, but not personally. A touch of it was in the way Mike smiled when he talked about Laura.
What next? She followed him off the elevator and stood there dumbly, the quiet hush of sleep at 4 a.m. and the occasional groans from women not on traditional timelines (babies in utero have a remarkable disdain for modern American temporal convention) were the only major sounds.
Even Laura seemed to still be asleep, the room’s door closed, no sounds coming from behind it. What next?
Alex’s hand, holding a cup of coffee, made a flailing, circular gesture toward her. Huh? Then she realized he wanted her to follow him. As she ambled behind, she got a good look at him. How could scrubs fit so well? Seriously? Muscled and full, his ass was like some kind of trophy for Best Ass Ever contests. Seeing it naked would be heavenly. Her mind flashed to the most recent naked ass she’d seen, and she wished for brain bleach. Who wanted to think about naked Dylan right now?
Not her.
A small door with a tiny nameplate next to it and a covered window was Alex’s destination. Ah. Now she understood.
The dreaded On-Call Room.
Meant to be a place for overworked interns, residents, attendings, and nurses to catch up on sleep, on-call rooms were really little more than free-sex rooms. The amount of amorous, ugly bumping that went on in those tiny bunk beds ought to have triggered a Board of Health alert. If Alex was bringing her there, it meant only one thing.
And God, did she want that one, big thing she imagined was waiting for her under those scrub pants.
“Hold on,” he said, setting both his cups on the floor and grabbing the two she held. Marching past her to a nurse’s station, he set down the two spares. “Free for the first person who grabs them!” he announced quietly. “Just milk.” Two nurses snatched them up and murmured their thanks to Alex’s back as he strode with great, sensual purpose toward Josie, making her wish she’d worn something more sexually attractive than a hoodie and yoga pants. Who knew she’d meet a hot doctor at Laura’s birth?
And who would have thought that she’d be standing in the threshold of an on-call room as her friend labored nearby? All moral ambiguity went out the window as he playfully wrapped his arms around her waist and dragged her into the room, kicking the door shut.
“It sounds so crazy,” he said, his mouth against her neck, hands riding up her back and sinking into her hair, the scent of him making her want to lick his skin just to have it in her forever, “but I don’t think you mind my being this forward.” He pulled back, eyes suddenly serious. “And this isn’t your average on-call romp.”
“I’m not average anything in an on-call room.”
That made him pause, making Josie regret the words instantly. Instead of disapproval, mirth shone in those deep brown eyes. “I’m not your first?”
Snort. “You’re my first today.” Ugh! Why did she do that? Say the most heinous thing possible that would make him walk away, turn from her, and not want to be with her? Here she was, stupid, sarcastic crap pouring forth in a highly intimate setting. An extremely attractive, sensual man wanted to get naked with her and—
She said what?
Ferocious with need, he moved like a panther to her, taking her with a kiss that spoke of want and desire and heady sexuality. His mouth was on her and his hands everywhere. Dr. Octopus might not be her first on-call room jaunt, but he damn well could be her last.
Wherever that thought came from, it seemed matched by him. Breathless, he pulled back, leaving her mouth cold with air and abandonment, and said, “This isn’t just sex.”
Of course it was just sex. Men didn’t meet Josie and do this. Not even the casual sex part. She wasn’t the pick-up girl type. Sure, she had her share of one-night stands and on-call room quickies, but she wasn’t That Kind of Woman. Guys didn’t fall for her at first sight; neither lust nor love drove men to her. She was an afterthought, or a friend with benefits. Not the hot chick you felt a connection to and just had to have.
Why, then, was Dr. Coffee doing this?
And telling her it was more than sex?
“Can it at least be sex?” With that, she pulled her hoodie up over her head in one fluid motion, then eagerly reached for his shirt, helping him to wiggle out, his broad, muscled chest on display, a nicely distributed smattering of dark hair covering his well-defined pecs. Her fingertips caressed the six-pack she’d hoped was under those scrubs, trailing down to the navel, where the hair thickened, and his sharp intake of breath told her that a few more inches and she’d pass the point of no return.
Who was she kidding? They’d passed that the second she made that comment about nurses and elevators.
And she was right.
Hot palms made their slow way up her back, practiced hands unclasping her thin wisp of a bra, freeing small, pert breasts from their nylon encasing. Endowment had never been a problem for her—if anything, her figure was boyish, though gaining twenty pounds along with Laura’s sixty or so had given her new curves no man had yet explored. In his hands, her hips felt womanly. The bottoms of his palms cupped her flesh, thumbs brushing with intent to make her nipples stand at attention. Oh, he had her attention, all right. No need for more.
More, though, was what she wanted, her hands riding from his waist up to his shoulders, until she looked up into smoky eyes, darkened with need, his face serious and mature.
“I mean it,” he said in a raspy voice infused with desire. “I don’t understand why or how, but this isn’t just about what we’re doing right now, Josie. Not for me.”
The world’s best come-on line.
“You make me want to do naughty things,” he said, and bent down, his body over hers, his lips next to her ear, the lines of his arms and legs pressed against hers. There was an animal instinct to him, something calm that assumed that what he wanted was what she wanted, too. Yes, yes, yes, she thought.
Then a different animal instinct pierced the air. A sound that only a mother in the final stages of labor could produce came around the corner from Laura’s room. They each jerked their heads up at the sound, eyes popped wide, comically frozen for a heartbeat. Adrenaline, like a bucket of cold water, splashed over them, snapped them back to reality.
Instantly, she shoved her body into her clothes. Unencumbered by the twisty aggravation of putting on a bra, Alex finished dressing ahead of her, and sprinted out the door.
Josie bolted after him seconds later, running as fast as possible back to Laura’s room, her view of Alex’s strong body in motion driving her forward. He had reacted like her, moving into action and dropping their amorous involvement in a split second to attend to Laura. It made her feel more connected to him, even as her heart raced and she entered the room disheveled and in chaos on the inside.
And outside.
“So soon?” she asked Mike, whose eyes were the first she could catch. He had his hands up in a helpless gesture as Laura crouched in an impossible twisting of her limbs over the bed, pulling on Dylan’s shoulders for support. The grunt that came from her tore Josie in two, just as she imagined Laura was being torn in two right now.
“The waters broke,” Alex said. “When did—”
“They just popped them,” Dylan explained, standing next to Laura now as Mike tried to catch her eyes and help her to breathe through the pain. She checked the machines, the heart rate, pulse oxygen, all of it from Josie’s quick glance looking fine. “Sherri used that long hook thing, put a bunch of towels down, and a ton of fluid poured out.”
Sherri calmly, steadily strode into the room, hands tucked neatly in her scrubs as if Laura were the only person in the tiny hospital setting. “It looks like we’re ready to meet your daughter.”
She and Alex exchanged a look and he backed away, hovering in the doorway, whispering, “Mind if I stay?”
Sherri shook her head imperceptibly and then winked at him and he winked back. He just loves births, Josie thought, even when he isn’t the one in charge.