It's Complicated (10 page)

That
look she knew, but not personally. A touch of it was in the way Mike smiled when he talked about Laura.

It was becoming increasingly clear that the coffee had been some sort of cosmic sign. Not that the kiss wasn’t also, but why were they so comfortable with each other so quickly? Eager to reach out and be so kind and thoughtful? Knowing that her entire life was about to change, and how important such a seemingly insignificant thing—coffee—was in her relationship with Laura, it made sense that Josie would offer him a cup as a gesture. But to have Alex think of her that way, too, was a kind of kismet that warmed her heart.

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.

On-call rooms were notorious among medical professionals in hospitals. Meant to be a place for overworked interns, residents, attendings, and nurses to catch up on sleep, they 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. “So 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? If the tables had been turned and Alex had made that joke right now, she’d have been deeply grossed out. And yet 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.”

How incongruous. 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. Plenty of nurses and female medical professionals were that kind of woman, but she wasn’t. 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 decidedly not-protectively and not-tender. There was an animal instinct to him, something calm that assumed that what he wanted was what she wanted, too. Her head fell back a bit on her neck as she yielded to him.
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 instinctive 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. Dylan 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
.

Chapter Four

Josie noticed that Sherri had dispensed with formalities, not even bothering to cover Laura’s lower half with a sheet as she palpated her belly. A nurse’s assistant tried to cover Laura to give her some privacy, but Josie just shook her head slightly and then Laura shouted in the middle of the exam.

“Don’t bother,” she said, her voice labored, and then she arched her back to the extent that a pregnant woman in labor can arch anything and tipped her neck back in a strange, unnatural curve.

She watched as the midwife seemed to do mental measurements—and that’s exactly what she was doing, Josie realized—to determine how far along everything was, and then a big grin spread across her face and she said the word that everyone in the room had been waiting for. “You are probably complete. The baby definitely dropped.”

“Probably?” Dylan asked, eyes bulging. “Can’t you do an exam?”

“I’d prefer not to now that the waters are broken. I can if we need to, but—”

A primal sound emerged from Laura. No amount of mellow meditation and breathing techniques under Mike’s tutelage could stop the baby that was barreling out of her birth canal now. A sound like an opera singer being stabbed to death in the middle of an aria poured out of Laura’s mouth as she stood, legs wide like a sumo wrestler’s. Her face turned a pinkish-purple Josie thought wasn’t quite found in nature anywhere but childbirth.

“You are likely complete. Laura,” she said, quietly, “you can start pushing now.”

“She beat you to it,” Dylan muttered, holding Laura’s upper arm to give her support.

“I want an epidural!” Laura said, panting after the contraction had subsided. Sherri casually crawled on the floor, under Laura, placing Chux pads beneath her to mop up the fluids, mixed with a tinge of blood, that were coming out in waves as the contraction bore down, then subsided. Josie would have thought the midwife was watering a plant, not monitoring a patient, given her neutral, calm countenance.

“It’s a little late for that, honey,” Mike explained, standing behind Laura now, arms ready to slide under hers and catch her.

“But I don’t—oh, not more!” She moaned, her head dipping down, breathing slowing as the contraction made her belly tighten, and Josie swore she could see the baby descend, Laura’s naked belly on display for everyone now, her navel roiling as the womb tightened so fast and so hard it made Josie wince. The strangled soprano sound came forth again, Mike now holding Laura up, arms under her armpits as she let him support her.

“That’s it. That’s it,” he soothed.

“I can’t do this!”

“You
are
doing it,” Josie interjected. “You are doing it, Laura.” Laura shot her a look of exhausted resignation, a contradictory look. Nothing could save her from what was coming in these next few minutes, and she knew it, Josie knew it—everyone in the room knew it. Paralyzed and horrified, Josie realized her entire role right now distilled down to one, simple job: to usher Laura through the most barbaric pain ever, a pre-condition for meeting her baby daughter. That was it. She couldn’t soothe her, or take any of the pain away, or crack jokes to help Laura relax. This was real life, stretching back to the dawn of man, this baby entering the world the same way countless humans had before them, and no amount of intervention right this second could give Josie any power to alleviate Laura’s suffering.

The room began to spin and Josie reached out, grabbing onto the arm of a chair. She had never been queasy in her life in a medical situation, but right now was different. This wasn’t just some random medical situation, some kid who’d cut his head open, or some Alzheimer’s patient who needed ambulatory care or a diaper change. This wasn’t an emergency appendectomy or a gunshot wound; it was her best friend having a baby. And right now, as Laura bore down, her body folding in half, Dylan and Mike supporting her, a nurse and Sherri pulling on her knees, so that the baby’s head could emerge, Josie began a slow descent into a faint.

Strong hands wrapped around her ribcage and guided her to a chair.

“It’s okay,” Alex murmured in her ear, his voice comforting and solid. “You’re fine.”

He settled her in place and gently pushed her head down between her knees. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

Footsteps—she heard them walking away and then quickly coming back. A tiny little cup of water shoved in front of her eyes. “Here, drink this. Sip it.”

“She okay?” Sherri shouted from across the room, though Josie realized it wasn’t a shout, it was a whisper, all of her senses distorted right now.

She couldn’t be doing this, falling apart in the one moment Laura needed her most. It was like some sort of cosmic joke, especially a
nurse
losing it in the most stereotypically obvious way possible. A delivery room faint? Come on. This wasn’t
A Baby Story
or some stupid trope in a television show.

“You did a great job helping Mike and Dylan take care of themselves,” Alex whispered, his hands on her shoulders, her head still dipped down, “but what about you? Have you eaten or had anything to drink other than coffee this entire time?”