My cell phone rang in the pocket of my coat as I headed for the cafeteria in the hospital. I was inducing two women today and rounding on the bedrest of a third. I’d expected to go into the office for appointments first thing this morning, have my coffee, and get things moving before I headed over here, but one of the babies didn’t like my plan.
Sarah Jeffries was in active labor; she’d come in about three hours ago, and I’d just gone in and broken her water to try to keep her dilation progressing. She’d stalled out around five centimeters, and even though she’d had an epidural, she still wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of being in labor for all of eternity.
I checked the screen quickly and saw that it was the number of the office.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Dr. Cummings. Load-y just called in to say she’s running five minutes late. Something about the subway and a banana. I don’t know. She never makes much sense to me.”
I shook my head at Melissa’s theatrics. “Fine. Just send her over to the hospital when she gets in. We’ve got one in active labor and another induction in two hours.”
“Okay. Will do.”
“Great. Thanks.”
This would be Melody’s first day at the hospital with me, but I’d done some searching—cough, research—once I’d met her, about her past experience.
That’s not creepy, right?
I guess it wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t done it for more personal reasons than professional. I couldn’t help it, though. I couldn’t get the picture of her out of my head. But at least half the time, she was clothed. That’s something, right?
Anyway, she’d been working as a night shift labor and delivery nurse for the last five years, so I had no doubts she could handle being thrown right into the hospital fire.
Hell, she was probably dying for a little excitement after being confined to the office with Melissa and Marlene for three weeks.
The cafeteria was already bustling with the breakfast crowd when I stepped inside, but I had only one thing in sight. Coffee shone like a beacon on the far wall, radiating its energizing brilliance as though a Columbian with a donkey stood beside it, so I kept my head down and avoided eye contact to ease my passage.
The last thing I needed was to have some kind of interaction or discussion about me or the show or any-fucking-thing before I guzzled about a gallon.
Victory sounded inside my head as I made it there without incident and yanked a cup from the stack. Glorious heat spread through my palm as my cup filled with the hot liquid, and the smell of full brain function and better decisions made me smile.
I was just reaching for the jug of milk when I made the mistake of looking up and across the room.
Damn. Spotted.
Scott Shepard beamed at the sight of me, and then he wasted no time following it with his distinctive, playful boom. “Will Cummings!”
I smiled in spite of myself. Scott’s brand of fun was contagious. He flirted with life—and everything female within it—with a fervor I could only dream of. If I was a player in the game, he was the whole damn team.
I didn’t yell back, though. I waited for him to make his way across the room and get within a respectable distance before opening my own mouth.
See? Notwithstanding all of the evidence to the contrary, I’m a respectable human being.
“Scott,” I greeted with a handshake.
His mocking smile made me want to punch him in the fucking stomach. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Touchy, touchy. Someone’s in a bad mood.”
“Just you wait,” I grumbled, using a little red straw to stir the milk in my coffee. “You will be too.”
He laughed. Naïve prick. “You’re assuming everyone is as good at looking like an asshole as you are.” He reached out and jostled me by the shoulder patronizingly. “You really are the best.”
“Oh, no, Scott,” I disagreed magnanimously, a hand to my chest. “I assure you, as much as the rest of us try, we’ll never top you in the asshole department. Just ask Mandy. And Sarah. And Monica.”
For the first time during our encounter, he started to look a little less than sure of himself. The smug smile still held, but his level of confidence wavered. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t like hurting women, even if he’d done it so much he could make a living out of it.
“I guess you really are in a bad mood.”
Fuck. Now I feel bad.
“Sorry, Scott. Just…with the show and everything…and I haven’t had my coffee.” I held up my full cup as evidence. “I guess you’re right. I am the biggest asshole.”
His signature smirk came back with a vengeance. “Well, at least you recognize it now.” He patted me on the back and made his exit before I could say anything else.
Fucker. Always tricking me into apologizing when he was the real schmuck.
I swallowed a mouthful of hot coffee as I watched him go, but it didn’t come without consequences.
“Oh, fuck!” I whisper-yelled, grabbing my throat as that shit burned me all the way from the tip of my tongue to my stomach.
Obviously, it was one of those days.
Just as I pushed my way out the door of the cafeteria, a familiar back turned the corner up the hall, and for once, he didn’t look like he was rushing from one surgery to the next.
“Nick,” I called to get his attention. He turned around at the sound of my voice, but he didn’t stop walking. Still, I didn’t need him to be fully immobile to catch the look on his face.
Oh, shit. He did not look happy to see me.
I liked Nick. He was a good guy, if a little serious, and deviously brilliant when it came to neurosurgery. I didn’t want to be on his shit list.
I broke into a jog to catch up to him.
“Nick, hold up.”
“No, Will. I don’t feel like talking. I don’t feel like commiserating over your fallen reputation, and I don’t feel like forgiving you for talking me into this mess.” He shook his head, the ends of his mouth turned down, all while I jogged along next to him. He was still walking.
Jesus. How long are his legs?
He finally turned and came to a stop to look me in the eye after another fifty feet of jogging on my part, and he did it with a heavy sigh. “Winnie already called. She’s worried about my episodes and what they’ll mean for Lexi. She already has enough trouble fitting in as it is.”
Winnie was a badass doctor and a woman I’d worked under for most of my residency. But now she was the team physician for the professional football team, the New York Mavericks, and married to Wes Lancaster, one of my brother-in-law’s best friends. But she was also Nick’s ex from way back and the mother of his daughter, Lexi.
I wouldn’t want her to have my balls in a vise either. Especially not when seeing my kid was the item at stake.
“I didn’t know… I had no idea it would be like this, man. I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath and ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Me too. I know this isn’t your fault, Will. I just…”
Have a remarkable kid that I’ve spent years trying to turn my life around for, I silently thought the words for him.
“I get it. Seriously. Don’t worry about me, dude.”
He very nearly broke into a smile. “Wow. Close call,” I teased. “You’re almost smiling.”
That tipped the scales, and the corners of his mouth actually turned up. “Wouldn’t want that, would we?”
“I gotta run grab some shit and then get back up to four. Catch up later?”
“Sure, man.” He held out his hand, and I shook it. Something was still plaguing him. I could see it in the fatigue around his eyes, but I wasn’t about to delve into it.
I currently had my own problems.
Not knowing when Melody would make it there, I pushed through the door to the stairwell and drank my coffee as I climbed to the fourth floor, also known as the maternity wing.
The last drops left the cup and hit my tongue as I moved through the door and onto the floor. I ducked inside a room and threw away the empty cup in the trash inside the door and then continued down the hall to the supply closet.
I needed a suture kit in case my patient tore during delivery and to find something to give her as a push gift—society’s modern-day reward for having endured the trials of labor. It wasn’t exactly a hospital-approved use of supplies, but I agreed with this new era—these women deserved a little something extra for their trouble—and paying for each gift on my own would make me broke in no time.
The door to the supply closet creaked as I pushed it open, and as if provoked, other sounds exploded around me: several supplies hitting the floor in violent succession, an amusingly creative expletive involving the words “pickax” and “cockpecker,” and finally, the heavy breathing of someone trying their best to go unnoticed and failing spectacularly.
My initial plan was to give them what they wanted, get in and get out with the stuff I needed and do my best to ignore whatever couple I’d found in a starkly nude, professionally compromising position. I’d been in this situation myself a time or two, and like any good boy, I was trying really hard to live by that treat others how you want to be treated credo. Plus, just because my sex life was officially ruined by the show from hell didn’t mean everyone else’s was.
And I would have followed the plan, I really would have, if it hadn’t been Melody I found and she hadn’t been wearing way more clothes than I was expecting. Though, if I was honest, Melody in fewer clothes probably would have decreased the probability of me leaving without incident even further.
“Mel?” I asked, my mouth curving up into a smile as her body jerked unnaturally and rotated woodenly to face me. She seemed disappointed that her back’s powers of invisibility had worn off but not all that surprised.
“Oh, hey, Dr. Cummings,” she tried to remark casually, brushing some loose hair off of her face with one hand and keeping the other behind her body. “What brings you here?”
My smile deepened. “Supplies. And you?”
“Oh, you know. The same.”
I wanted to let her off the hook because she was so fucking cute, but the little tiny voice in the back of my head that actually helped me pass my boards spoke up like an annoying parakeet. Squawk, what if she’s stealing drugs, squawk.
“Oh, okay,” I said with a nod. Her face eased and she moved to go past me, but I stopped her with a gentle hand at her elbow and dropped my voice to a playful whisper. “What, oh what are you hiding, Melody?”
Her shoulders sagged as her eyes rose slowly from the ground to meet mine. She looked embarrassed but resigned, so I steeled myself for whatever horrible deed I was about to uncover and the horrendous circumstances of dealing with it.
“Tongue depressors,” she replied in a rush, the gust of her expelled breath hitting me right along with my surprise—and the box, which she shoved hard—in my chest.
“Tongue depressors?” I asked, but my shock did nothing to slow her painfully embarrassed, highly comical confession. I looked down, and—hot damn, look at that—tongue depressors.
“I know. Stealing them from the hospital is wrong and unethical and completely unacceptable. I’m always telling myself, Mel, why don’t you just order them online or, for fuck’s sake, steal something more interesting if you’re going to put it all on the line, but they’re just so useful.”
“Useful,” I muttered, dumbfounded, and she nodded.
“I make a jar of the week’s tasks and pull one out to keep myself on my toes and prevent my already pathetic life from seeming mundane, and I use them to wax my legs with those at-home kits because the ones they include are so flimsy, and sometimes I use them to write personal affirmations—”
“Tongue depressors?” I asked again, cutting her off with a smile.
“Yeah.”
I cleared my throat and stepped even closer into her space, pulling the box from her hand—we’d both been maintaining our hold on it—as she backed nervously into the shelf behind her and made it rock. “And why is it again that you don’t just order them online?”
She shrugged helplessly. “Easy access?”
Immediately, unbidden and uninvited, my motherfucker of a male mind flashed to an image of sweet Melody, my nurse, bent over in this very supply closet, hands on the shelf and her ass out and inviting, a skirt pulled up around her perfect round hips. Easy access.
Danger, Will Cummings. Motherfucking danger. I’d managed a spotless record of not fucking my actual employees since getting the practice up and running, but that record currently felt like I might run it off of a cliff into a catastrophic explosion scenario. Back away slowly.
“Ha…ha.” I forced a laugh. Jesus, I sound crazy. Wrinkles formed at the corners of Melody’s hazel green eyes and sucked my focus in like little tributary rivers.
What am I supposed to be doing again?
“Will,” she called, her lips so close I could practically taste them. Okay, a good foot away, but still, they were good lips.
“Yeah?” I asked softly, mesmerized completely.
“Are you…um…”
“Yeah?” Two more seconds like this and we were going to kiss.
“Are you gonna—”
“Yeah.”
Are we going to kiss?
“Oh, yeah.”
“You’re going to rat me out?” she peeped, her voice rising a full octave in despair.
Wait…rat her out? What?
“Wait. No. Rat you out?” My mind struggled to pull the blood back from my dick quickly enough to catch up. Not kissing. She’s not thinking about kissing at all, you fucking schmuck. “For the tongue depressors?” I managed around the knot of would-have-been embarrassment clogging my throat.
“Well, yeah.”
Despite the disappointment of circumstances being considerably different than I’d been imagining for the last two minutes, I smiled.
“No, Load-y. I’m not going to rat you out for stealing the tongue depressors.”
She smiled and exhaled a breath of relief.
“Rat you out? No. Tease you mercilessly until the end of time about it? Yes.”
“You tease me? That’s rich.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and settled into a grin. For the first time ever with Mel, I thought I might actually manage something other than acting like a bumbling idiot.
“Right? Seems like it might be refreshing, though. You know, spreading some of the office ridicule around.”
“Uh…Load-y? I think Melissa’s got that covered.”
“She’s just jealous because she’s the lesser Mel.”
Her breath caught a little, and I knew I had to get out of there. If I didn’t, I’d end up doing something I’d regret. Or she would. Because, yeah, I probably wouldn’t regret it.
I forced myself to move away and over to the door. The cardboard in my hand flexed under the overall pressure running through my body and reminded me to turn around.
“Hey,” I called. “Think fast.”
I tossed the box of tongue depressors, and she caught it adeptly.
“Come on,” I told her when she didn’t move. “Haven’t you heard? We’ve got a lady doing her best to become a lady with a baby.”