Chapter Five
Josie got ready to go back to the hospital to see Mike, Dylan, Laura, and baby Jillian as if it were prom night. Five different outfit changes, two different re-dos on her hair, and make-up for the first time in ages. Add in the fact that the second Dylan would take one look at her she’d get teased for the next six months about her appearance, and all this fuss proved one simple thing: she was a complete idiot.
Alex had just finished a twenty-four-hour shift and there was no way that she would run into him. What she had was one big crush on a doctor she’d almost given it up for in the on-call room while her best friend was writhing in pain in another room—pain that was the result of doing exactly what Josie and Alex had almost done.
Almost exactly. Josie—unlike Laura—would use a condom. Plus she was on the pill.
That was one certainty in Josie’s very uncertain life. No babies—not now.
Not ever.
She’d decided that a long time ago, even though her mind flip-flopped along with her heart, especially yesterday when she’d held that tiny, mewling infant in her arms, cradled close, warm, and new, and innocent, and just wanting to be loved. Love she could give. It was the whole idea of stability and emotional caretaking and being a good role model that scared the ever-loving hell out of her.
Her fear that she could never rise to the occasion, could never be a good parent because she had not been parented well herself, was what made her freeze in place at the thought of being handed an infant and told, “Love this! Mother this! You’re it!” One hundred percent in charge of this entire human being.
No way.
She was one hundred percent in charge of herself and she couldn’t even manage to figure out what to wear to go see her best friend and her new baby. For that matter, most days she could barely make her socks match and remember to pay her bills on time. Being the sole caretaker of a new life was something so far out of her grasp that Laura was suddenly catapulted into a whole new category of person that made Josie feel smaller. It wasn’t that Laura did that—it was Josie who did it to herself.
When her friends started having babies—not her friends back home, who spat them out at nineteen and twenty by accident and were little more than babies raising babies—no, it was when her best friend had an accidental pregnancy but turned it into a loving family, that was when Josie’s world view was shaken to the core.
Josie was one of a handful of people from her graduating class who had actually gotten out of her little town in Ohio, and not a single one of the women she’d known who had babies young had ever left. That was one reason she was so extraordinarily paranoid about birth control. In her world, the fathers faded away and weren’t part of the equation, and so it was with great incongruity that she watched the saga of Jillian’s two dads unfold.
Why was Jillian’s birth triggering so many of her past issues at the same time that she was grappling with some very right-now issues, all wrapped up in the tall, dark, and handsome Dr. Alex Derjian? Every inhale, every exhale made her think of him, how his hands were on her, his lips exploring her in the elevator, how hot just being with him in the on-call room felt, how far she would have gone if baby Jillian’s emergence into the world hadn’t interrupted them.
Thanks, kid.
She wasn’t sure whether to think that in her usual sarcastic tone, or whether it was genuinely heartfelt. Giving herself to Alex so soon might have been an enormous mistake, and now she was relieved that they’d been interrupted by nature, the visceral reality of what happens when two (or three…) people have sex and biology marches in its unyielding path toward fulfilling its pre-programmed destiny. No birth control? Then you roll the dice and take your chances.
Time to go see Laura and her little chance.
*
Alex walked into the hospital feeling more uncomfortable than he’d felt the first day of his residency. He never set foot on hospital grounds unless it was his shift. He was not the type to hang out, trying to curry favor or get in extra face time so that it looked like he was more serious about his work. When he was on shift, he was one hundred percent there—in mind, body, and spirit—and when he wasn’t on shift he stayed the hell away, because otherwise this job could completely consume his soul.
Walking into the hospital wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and sunglasses made him feel like a civilian. He headed in and, on autopilot, found his body directing him to the changing area where he would put on scrubs and turn into a doctor, morphing from a human being to someone who was supposed to be both humble and god-like; know everything but be flexible when a patient had an idea that he had never heard of; be proficient at paperwork and yet drop everything the second a medical emergency came up; have outstanding social skills and yet know when to keep his mouth shut; be gloriously ecstatic for a family when the birth of a healthy little baby came to fruition after a long labor—and be respectfully mournful when it didn’t.
Doctors—and especially OBs—were expected to be omnipresent, omniscient in some ways, and to be everything for everyone. And for some cases, to stay as far away as possible so that nature could do its work.
Entering the elevator after backtracking a bit from the changing area, he pushed the button for the maternity ward and then realized that he was going to the postpartum wing, furiously pressing a different number as he shook his head. A bundle of nerves this morning, he found himself worried about what he was wearing, which was insanely stupid because he never worried about what he was wearing. He just put on clean clothes and went about his day.
He knew exactly why he was here on his day off and why he was so nervous. It was a little bundle of joy—but it wasn’t Laura’s baby. It was Josie and the taste of something far outside his expectations that he’d gotten yesterday with her—and not just the raunchy taste that he had thoroughly enjoyed, too—that made him want more. His life was so circumscribed—work, the occasional trip with his grandfather, and more work—that when a flash of something deeper, of a connection so intense that he overrode all professional instinct and nearly took her in the on-call room—when that came along and was handed to him in the form of fate, he needed to seize it.
As the elevator doors opened onto the postpartum wing, he walked up to the main desk, took his sunglasses off, and asked for Laura’s room. Just as the nurse started to tell him, “I’m so sorry, sir, are you a member of the family?” and he realized that he wasn’t even recognized up here without his scrubs on, Dylan walked past with a stuffed giraffe taller than either of them.
“Hey, doctor…” Dylan’s features changed to embarrassed confusion as he pointed and then splayed out his palm in a gesture of desperation, trying to retrieve Alex’s name. “Doctor…you were there last night…”
“Alex. Alex Derjian,” he said, extending his hand.
Dylan shook it with great power, which Alex managed to match, the two practically arm-wrestling in front of the desk on the postpartum wing to prove their firm grips were manly enough. Mike, the other father (what a strange phrase, and yet it rolled through Alex’s mind as if it were normal) was a few steps behind, holding a tasteful bouquet of Mylar balloons attached to a small bunch of flowers in a mug.
“Alex,” Mike said, those placid eyes meeting his, filling with a calm that seemed to make all of the nervousness of the morning dissipate.
Dylan nudged Mike in the ribs. “You remember his name?”
“Of course I remember his name. How could I forget the name of the guy who almost delivered our baby?”
Dylan turned a slight shade of pink and looked away. “Yeah…good point.” Then he perked up. “But at least I didn’t almost faint at the birth like some people.”
Dylan’s eyes were focused on a point behind Alex and he turned to the right to see Josie standing there, hands on hips, one leg cocked higher than the other, a sour smirk on her face as she said, “Oh, yeah? Well, at least I didn’t show my ass to—” She froze, turning and realizing that it was Alex standing right there.
I wouldn’t mind seeing your ass, he thought, biting back the offer.
“Alex,” she said, various parts of her tensing and relaxing at the same time, her body language changing.
Something was completely different about her this morning. As he took a good, long look, still drawing on that calm composure that Mike seemed to have infused in him, he almost laughed. It looked like she had gone through the same morning ritual that he had, though in feminine terms: hair done, makeup, and an outfit he imagined she never actually wore. If she had put that much concern into her appearance this morning, could it be that she had hoped that she would run into him as much as he had tried to manipulate running into her?
The only way to know would be to let the next few minutes unfold the way that he had planned them.
*
Leave it to Dylan to make some kind of dig to make her look bad in front of Dr. Perfect.
“Alex. Hi,” she barked, shocked and consumed with a tingling feeling of realization at just how close she was to him, as if having him in proximity to her like this sent an electric jolt through her. Which, apparently, it did—and that made the connection between her thinking brain and her mouth shut down entirely at the same time that the floodgates between her heart and her nether regions opened with a giant, roaring tidal wave.
“Hi, Josie,” he said, reaching out and down, touching her shoulder briefly. The slight gesture of welcome may as well have been a flamethrower lighting her entire body on fire.
The awkward silence between the four of them was broken—finally—when Mike pointed to Dylan’s enormous stuffed giraffe and said, “Meet Jillian’s bodyguard.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Dylan asked, shrugging. He looked exhausted but exhilarated all at once, and Josie looked down and realized that he was wearing two different shoes. The night must have been tough—she knew they had taken the last twenty-four hours in shifts.
“That thing definitely won’t fit in a bassinet,” she found herself saying, and Alex laughed, a polite, slightly overdone chuckle that made her realize that he was just as interested in her as she was in him. And just as nervous about that interest as she was.
Dammit.
That meant that her awkwardness and his awkwardness were on display for Mike and Dylan to absorb and to amuse themselves with.
As if he read her mind, Dylan, with a mirthful look in those eyes, turned all of his attention to her and said, “What are you and Alex up to?”
Alex’s eyebrows shot up and he looked down at her, just over his shoulder, and it was his turn to put hands on hips and say, “What are we up to?”
A sinkhole needed to open up and swallow her. Instead, Sarcastic Josie kicked it. “We,” she said, fanning the air between the two of them with a hand that ping ponged back and forth, “aren’t up to anything. I am here to visit my best friend who just shat an eight-pound thing out of a hole that is not meant to have eight-pound things come out of it.”
“Yes, it is,” Alex argued. “That’s exactly how nature intended it.”
Fuck. He had her there.
“If that’s how nature intended it, then we all know God was a man because no woman would do that to other women.”
It was the best she could do, and she stormed off to Laura’s room. Fortunately she knew the number and she walked in to find Laura there, sitting up, her legs under a thin hospital blanket. With baby Jillian in front of her, completely undressed and unwrapped from her little burrito blanket, diaper in place, Laura bent gently over with the baby’s entire foot in her mouth.
“Umm…hi?” Josie said, waving slightly. “The hospital food isn’t good here, I guess?”
Laura slipped the baby’s foot out of her mouth and started laughing quietly. Then she clutched her abdomen and winced. Josie wondered why. There had been no C-section, so why would it hurt to laugh?
The baby was asleep and startled at the vibration of the bed and the sound of their voices. Laura quickly swaddled her back into the little wrap and pulled her close, nestling the baby’s cheek against Laura’s bare chest. Laura held a finger up to her lips and Josie nodded silently, creeping carefully over to the chair next to the bed and settling in as Jillian settled down, little even breaths indicating that she’d fallen back asleep.
“Has motherhood turned you into a cannibal?” she asked.
Laura shook her head. She looked almost as tired as Dylan, with her face puffed and swollen a bit, blood vessels all around the ring of her eye socket bright red and popped, a sprinkling of them on her cheeks as well. Her face, though, exuded joy. And it was contagious, for Josie started to feel it too, seeping in and replacing the awkwardness and the desire that she had just felt out in the hallway with Alex.
“I just…she’s so beautiful, Josie,” Laura said. “I had this impulse to see if her foot would fit in my mouth.”
“That must be a motherhood thing.”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I’m only on day one of this and there’s really no manual.”
Josie made it a point to crane her body around Laura and Jillian to look at the stack of parenting books and infant care novels on her bedside, all provided by Dylan, Mike, and Dylan’s parents. “I beg to differ—there are plenty of manuals.”
Laura rolled her eyes and sniffed with a derisive look. “Those will tell me the basics but no one tells you that minute by minute, hour by hour, you have to make this up on your own. You have to wing it.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and leaned in. “It’s like…the breastfeeding…nobody really explains what it feels like when that baby latches on or how, no matter how many consultants come in and try to help you with lactation, it’s on you.”
This was not the conversation Josie had expected to have with her best friend today. What was she supposed to say back? She had nothing in common on this one, and so she defied her own natural state of talkativeness and just nodded. This was her future with Laura, wasn’t it? Lots of nodding, lots of absolutely not understanding what Laura would be going through, and a growing divide as she watched her best friend focus her entire life on this child and on the family that she was building with Dylan and Mike.
She’d spent years—decades, really, almost two decades—since her father had died doing nothing but escaping instability and seeking a quiet, peaceful existence. A safe existence that gave her the time to think. And all that escaping and seeking had ended—disappeared, really—the moment the baby was born. Josie had reevaluated everything that she’d been doing as an adult, through the lens of watching other people, like her best friend, grow up.
It made her want to do anything but. It made her want to grab Alex and fuck him in the on-call room, made her want to go spend outrageous amounts of money that she didn’t have. It made her want to go on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Paris because she could—and Laura couldn’t. Josie could do all of those things, and now she couldn’t do them the same way.
It felt as if her friend’s choices had stripped her of assumptions and deep, deep down in an abyss inside her that had a bottom she hadn’t touched yet, she knew that this was good.
But on the surface? It was chaotic and overwhelming and too much for her to handle right now.
“How are you feeling?” Her eyes were riveted to the baby, a pinkish-purple creature with swollen eyelids and little dots of baby acne all over her face. She didn’t look like anyone until Laura pulled the tiny, thin cotton cap off her head and smoothed the little strands of wavy blonde hair.
Was Mike the father? This was going to drive Josie a little crazy until she knew. Though it really wasn’t her business to know, Laura and the guys had made it her business, so now she was eager to learn the truth.
“The testing,” Laura said quietly, “is already in progress. Her blood type’s not conclusive, so we had to send it for DNA matching after all.”
Josie nodded, flustered by how quickly this had all happened. “Oh…..” Her voice trailed off. Nowadays, the lab didn’t have to give up if the mathematics of Mom’s blood type plus Possible-Dads’ blood types turned up an inconclusive result. A simple prick of the guys’ fingers, and the baby’s, plus a bunch of paperwork, was all they needed. For a few hundred dollars out of pocket and about a week or three of waiting, Jillian’s idyllic life of three parents, all showering her with adoration, could still be shattered.
Because it was one thing to imagine happily-ever-afters…once they really knew, for certain, that it was Mike or Dylan, what would that mean? How compassionate and understanding can one man be when he imagines himself to be a biological parent and then science brings all that to a screeching halt with DNA analysis? Does the science override the love?
And only Josie would know the true identity of the bio dad, anyway—unless the three changed their hive mind at a future time. Josie had been analyzing the baby’s features to get clues to her paternity. Thick blonde hair? Must be Mike’s. Blue-black eyes that darkened by the hour? Dylan’s. Long, slim surgeon’s fingers? Mike’s. A little chin that jutted out like a fighter’s? Dylan’s. It was maddening. Deep in her thoughts as she stared at the baby in Laura’s lap, a greater, meta-awareness that maybe no one else was doing this struck Josie between the eyes.
Maybe no one else was trying to figure this out.
Maybe it was just her.
A baby’s beginning should be about the baby and not about the wondering. None of the three really seemed to care—it was a formality that Laura wanted out of the way. Respecting that was part and parcel of respecting Laura and the three of them.
Josie put her hand on Laura’s and smiled, catching her tired green eyes. “It’s okay, Laura. We will do whatever we need to do and make sure that all the paperwork is taken care of. You don’t need to worry about that right now.”
“The only problem,” Laura said, “is that the nurses here told me I need to sign the birth certificate within ten days of Jillian’s birth. So I don’t know if the tests will be back in time for that.”
Josie frowned. “You can amend a birth certificate later, right?”
“I think so,” Laura whispered.
“Why don’t you just pick one guy and then amend it later if it’s wrong?”
Tears filled Laura’s eyes and Josie felt guilty for upsetting her. Then Laura inhaled deeply and her face shifted to a more practical look. “You’re right. You pick.” She pulled a piece of paper from a sheath on the nightstand.
“What?”
“I’ll sign this. I already filled most of it out.” It was a birth certificate form. “And you just add the name of the father. I don’t want to know who you pick. And then when the DNA tests come back, if it’s wrong, we amend. If it’s right, we leave it alone.”
“Geez, you don’t ask much from your best friend, do you?”
Laura nudged her. “C’mon. Do it for me?”
Josie bit her lower lip, grabbed the form, and just picked the first guy who came into her mind—other than Dr. Alex. Scribbling quickly, she folded the form and handed it to Laura, who put it in an envelope.
“Done,” Laura said, a huge sigh escaping from her.
Not quite, thought Josie.
The grateful, tired smile that greeted her words was all Josie needed. Well, maybe not all. “May I?” she asked, reaching for the baby.
Laura smiled and leaned forward to hand Jillian to her. As she shifted, though, she winced, flinching with a wretched look on her face. The calm but tired look was replaced with a tight, pained expression, then a deep breath. Two deep breaths. Three. Ouch. Josie imagined that her nether regions must look like hamburger right now—really nasty hamburger—and knew that the ice packs and the Lidocaine spray were probably the only thing keeping Laura sane. That and baby Jillian.
Josie very carefully, tentatively, took the baby, gingerly wrapping herself around so that her whole tiny body was supported with the length of Josie’s arms and both of Josie’s hands. She felt so lightweight, like a kickball, one of those big ones at Toys 'R Us that you grab and expect to be heavier than they are. Not even eight pounds, little Jillian was a heavy soul, one born into an incredibly unique situation with a family structure that made Josie see it in a different light for the first time.
How would society view the child of two men and one woman? Getting people to understand that some kids had two mommies and some kids had two daddies was hard enough. How was little Jillian supposed to walk into preschool and announce that she had two daddies and a mommy? This kid was going to have to be tough, to know herself deeply, to stand up to the taunts, to neutralize ignorance. Jillian was up to the task—but was Josie?
A deep, steely protectiveness poured into Josie as the baby snurgled and then sighed, nestling against Josie’s arm. Josie smiled and kissed her little head, breathing the baby smell deeply and smiling harder at its sweetness. All worries for the future could wait. Huffing this newborn reminded her that life was good, and this was already shaping up to be a fabulous day.
Seeing Alex had sent her body into overdrive, senses alight and primed for something. Would he really be interested in her today, or was yesterday just a fluke? Dressed in casual clothes, he seemed to be here not as part of a shift, but for a personal reason.
Was she the personal reason? The kiss in the elevator, the near-sex in the on-call room, his steady support as she nearly fainted—did it really add up to more? Maybe she hadn’t misread a damn thing. Maybe he was as attracted to her as she was to him and made a special trip on his day off not to check in on Jillian and Laura, but to check her out.
“Is that Dr. Alex’s voice I heard out in the hallway?” Laura asked. As they both looked, the giant stuffed head of a giraffe walked into the room as if it were animated and stalking all newborn babies on the wing. After the head, the neck entered the room, then the body, and finally Dylan, as if the giraffe were in control, pulling him in. His grinning face was stretched from ear to ear with a level of excitement and love that was contagious.
Josie matched his grin and looked down at Jillian and said, “That’s one of your crazy dads. He’s the craziest one.” As Mike came in, she went on. “The other daddy is calm and peaceful and placid on the outside, but he’s kind of weird, too. You’ll just have to deal with it. Your mama is unconventional, but in a different way, so…Jillian, the deck is really stacked against you. Good thing you have your Aunt Josie to keep you normal.”
Jillian’s three parents all snorted in unison, and Alex walked into the room just in time to overhear Dylan tease back, “If teabagging the set of balls from Jeddy’s in front of an audience is normal, then—”
“Shh,” Laura said, noticing Alex. “Hi, Doctor…I forgot your last name,” she said, reaching for a glass of water and chugging it, a sheepish look on her face.
“Alex. Alex Derjian,” he said, reintroducing himself, shaking Laura’s hand. “You had quite a bit on your plate last night, Laura. It’s no wonder you don’t remember my name.”
“Thanks,” she replied, tipping her head at the baby, who now rested in Josie’s arms, her little pink cheeks slack with sleep.
“Teabagging?” He cocked one eyebrow and looked at Josie. “It sounds like I interrupted a very interesting conversation.”
Shooting daggers at Dylan, who just smirked, she said, “Not as interesting as Dylan’s butt—”
“Hey!” Dylan snapped. “Man Code says we don’t talk about that.”
“Man Code says you don’t show somebody your brown starfish, either,” she retorted.
Alex and Mike managed to stay neutral, their faces impassive, but from the flare of their nostrils she could tell they were trying not to laugh.
“Show what?” Alex finally asked, playing dumb.
Dylan reached out to shake his hand once again. “That’s my man.”
Changing topics, Alex stared at the baby pointedly and reached toward Josie. “May I?”
Josie caught his eyes. He looked just as good this morning as he did yesterday. Clean shaven now, the same spicy but dark scent she’d noticed yesterday coming off of him again. His face was open and he really did just want to hold the baby—she knew that.
She also knew that he wanted a lot of other things, including her.
Hands outstretched, she saw in his face the expression of a man meant to have children one day, a man capable of the deep love Laura, Mike, and Dylan had for the baby in Josie’s arms.
The tiny, helpless baby whose entire existence rested in Josie’s arms. Arms that could drop her. Or– not that she ever would—harm her. There was an element of unreality to it. How newborns were so utterly dependent on the kindness of larger human beings for their simple survival. Paralysis set in as the idea infused her, making her muscles freeze, her mind lock up, her body seize.
“Josie?” he asked. His arms were outstretched in a different way now, a bit more alarmed, the muscles taut, his knees bent slightly as if bracing himself to act swiftly. “Your face is pale the way it was yesterday at the birth. Hand the baby back to Laura,” he said quietly, a soothing tone that cut through her ever-increasing panic.
Instinct kicked in and Laura responded immediately to Alex’s words, lowering her voice as Mike and Dylan slowly stepped closer to the bed. Nodding, Josie kept her eyes on Alex and, without breaking the gaze, turned her body to rotate the baby toward Laura, who took her. The relief of not having those not-quite-eight pounds in her arms, of not being the only person in the world who could control Jillian’s destiny, made Josie sag with a sigh.
“Excuse me,” she said quietly. “I’ll be right back.”
Patting Laura’s knee, she made her way out of the room without another word, deeply humiliated and embarrassed for reasons she didn’t understand.
Out in the hallway, the shakes came, violent tremors in her fingers, her wrists, and her arms. She tried to walk it off, her eyes surveying the layout, looking for the water fountain that she knew should be wedged between two bathrooms. There it was. Homing in on it, she walked robotically toward it, her body stiff with purpose and sorrow and embarrassment.
As she drank greedily from the fountain, her mind turned into a splintered fog. What was it about this baby that was making her lose her mind? It wasn’t just jealousy. That played a small part, certainly—not jealousy of the baby itself, but of the shift in her friendship with Laura. Something more must be at play, though, to trigger this kind of response in her.
A deep, thin thread of resentment and resignation shot through her. The answer was there; it was buried, though, so deeply that she had no desire to dig that crap up again. It’ll come when it comes, a voice said in her mind, that damn voice that came out when she least expected.
Her own childhood smacked up against what was supposed to be a joyful day for her best friend. Friends. She needed to start including Mike and Dylan in that circle. They welcomed her—albeit with limits—and it was time that she welcomed them, too.
“Josie?” The voice behind her felt like an embrace, though he stood far enough away from her to give her some privacy and space. She wanted to turn around, throw her arms around him, and have his hand press against her back, the other buried in her hair as he soothed the confusion out of her. Arousal should have come next, from that image, but it didn’t. A deeper, more intense desire to talk to him, to confide in someone what was going on inside her, came bursting forth instead. Social acceptability trumped all as she swallowed her emotions, everything that pressed at the base of her throat in a giant lump. She pretended she didn’t hear him, taking an extra gulp of water to help her swallow ever so much.
“Josie?” he said a little louder, not backing off. Firmness in his words nearly made her jump. Alex wasn’t going to let this go.
Good. Don’t back off, she thought. Keep trying. You’re going to need the persistence.
She opened her eyes, swallowed hard, and turned around, not even bothering to pretend.
“Alex,” she said haltingly. “I just…I don’t even know what that was.” Tears pooled along the lower rims of her eyes and she breathed slowly through her nose, cursing her outfit, her eye makeup, her not-so-comfortable shoes, all the preening of womanhood she normally shunned.
“I do.” The look in his eyes was one of evaluation and empathy and something else—a camaraderie that wasn’t supposed to be there.
“You do?” she asked. “Then tell me, because I have no idea.”
“You look like every new mom who realizes the responsibility they’ve just taken on.”
“I’m not the new mom,” she scoffed.
“You may not be the mother here, but you have a deep connection to Laura and…” He shrugged, one hand on his hip, the gesture casual. There was none of the stiltedness of new attraction to him. “Every new mom goes through it, and that sickly feeling when you realize that you are God to that infant is your humanity coming out.”
“Then I have an awful lot of humanity,” she whispered.
Saying that was an accident. The words had been in her mind, but poured out of her mouth only as a reflection of the exhaustion of the past couple of days.
“You do,” he said, stepping forward, bridging the gap between them. One more step and her breath halted. Finally, four feet from her, he paused, waiting three beats. He took another step and then reached out, touching a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her face, brushing it aside.
“I can see that,” he said. “Your deep humanity. I think that’s why this seems so…” He pressed his lips together in a smile and shook his head slowly.
“Impossible?” she offered.
“Serendipitous,” he ventured.
“You win.” She gave him a half-smile. “I like your word better.”
His hands started to stroke her shoulder and she could feel the sickly sense inside her drain out, as if his fingertips just smoothed it away.
“I think…” Alex said, taking one more step closer until he was hovering over her. Her body absorbed his heat, and she was aware of every pore of skin on his neck, every bit of stubble that had grown in the past couple hours. Her fingers itched to touch, but held back, for reasons she began to hate.
“I think,” he repeated, “that your answer may be more accurate.”
“I can admit when I’m wrong.” Where the hell did that come from?
He broke the space between them, bending down and planting a soft kiss on her cheekbone. He whispered in her ear, “I enjoy an impossible challenge..”
“Josie?” Laura’s voice caught her off guard. At the end of the hall, silhouetted by the light behind her, her best friend stood in the threshold of her postpartum room, the gown diaphanous, wearing those little paper slippers that no one liked. “What happened?” Laura called. “Are you sick?”
“She’s fine,” Alex answered for her, his arm sliding around her shoulders, the comfort both overriding the sexual tension from the day past and tapping into it in a very different way. He guided her back toward Laura’s room. “A big case of nerves.”
“Nerves?” said Laura. “Josie? About what?” Long blonde hair poured over Laura’s shoulders, covering one bare breast, the nipple tucked inside a flap of cloth. Modest Laura, who wouldn’t go to the dining halls in college in her pajamas or without freshly done hair, was standing in a hospital hallway with her boob hanging out. Josie laughed inside at the incongruity.
“About holding your baby,” Alex answered.
“I wasn’t nervous about holding the baby.” Josie broke away from him. “That is ridiculous. I’ve held hundreds of babies.”
He shook his head as they reached Laura. “Not the same—it’s never the same when you hold one that means so much to you.”
Tears filled Laura’s eyes. “That’s how I feel too—like I’ve just been handed this tiny thing and its very breath relies on me.”
“That’s because it does,” said Mike, who joined the conversation in the hallway. “And on me,” he added.
“And me,” said a voice from behind as a giant giraffe head poked through the door.
A loud, lusty cry came from the bassinet in the room and Laura took off in a near-sprint, stopping after two steps and then gingerly finishing the trek to Jillian. Mike yawned, covering his mouth and apologizing in muffled tones through the sound. At 8:30 in the morning the yawn would have seemed out of place to anyone who didn’t know just how sleep-deprived they all were.
“We’re going to go home and get some real sleep as soon as the baby settles down,” Mike said. “Laura can manage for a few hours, plus they’ll take Jillian—” He stopped short as the name came out of him, brow furrowed in a pensive expression.
“It’ll take some getting used to, won’t it?” Dylan commented. His face mirrored Mike’s.
“It’s okay, though.” Laura’s voice was strong and focused. “Her name suits her.”
Dylan took the crying baby from Laura and began singing softly, a song Josie didn’t know. The baby quieted immediately and focused her cloudy, bluish-brown eyes right on him. Mugging for her, he made cooing sounds, keeping Jillian transfixed. Josie hoped her dad had been like that with her when she was a little bundle of new flesh and love like Jillian. The unexpected thought made it suddenly hard to breathe, and she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.
“I think I’ll go soon, too,” Josie said, giving Dylan a short salute. “You guys are carrying on totally fine.” Nothing’s fine, she thought, edging toward the door.
Dylan handed the baby off to Laura and turned to the stuffed animal he’d brought, animating the eight-foot giraffe. “Hear that? It’s fine, Daddy Mike.” The giraffe was the only thing in the room taller than Mike, forcing him to look up to it. Standing on tiptoes, Mike gave it a big smooch on the mouth.
“Daddy Mike? That’s what you’re calling each other? Daddy Mike and Daddy Dylan?” Josie asked.
“What else are we supposed to call ourselves?”
“How about Billionaire One and Billionaire Two?” Josie smirked. Laura gave her a warning look, but clearly was amused. Alex stared at all four faces, bemused.
“There’s an inside joke here that I’m not getting.”
“There are a lot of inside jokes here that you’re not getting, dude,” Dylan replied.
“Yeah,” Josie said, looking hard at Dylan. “It’s—”
Laura, Dylan, and Mike, from behind, all shouted, “Complicated!”
Frowning, Alex looked around the room again, then zeroed in on Josie. “Since they’re so complicated, how about you and I go do something simple?”
“That’s awfully forward of you,” she said, pulling her shoulders back, pretending to be coy.
“I meant let’s go for a walk. That simple enough for you?”
“Oh.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Getting out of the hospital would go a long way toward helping her to figure out how the hell she could get back to some semblance of stable. “Okay.” She and Alex waved and left the new family to settle the baby and say their own goodbyes.