It's Complicated (9 page)

“Where is she?”

“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 man before them, 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 pretty 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 deviant that—

As Sherri turned to him and bit her lower lip, covering her mouth with her palm, Alex took charge and said, “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 some sort of 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 slowly 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.

“First 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 tension, and 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 few seconds and minutes she could get between rippling contractions.

Josie knew that popping 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 twenty-four-hour 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?”

“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 fourth 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.” Did she just say that? 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
un
familiar 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. Why she felt the need to hide this, to be discreet, was beyond her. Habit? Fear? Embarrassment? Nothing computed as 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.