It's Complicated (7 page)

And all Josie could think about was grabbing Alex and finding a quiet room and riding him like a bull. A good friend would have anything but sex on her mind right now.

Apparently, Josie was not a good friend.

She happened to be standing at the end of the bed, and Alex came over to her left and reached across her to grab the chart. Her eyes were drawn to the smattering of dark hair that peppered the skin of his outstretched arm, the taut muscles of his wrist, the way the bones all moved so fluidly. Of course, he had surgeon’s hands, with long, slim fingers that grasped the metal chart as if he were a catcher in a baseball game receiving a ball. Flipping open the chart, his forearms flexed with movement, the sinew and bulging veins speaking to some sort of outside activity that made him athletic and active. Her mind wandered once more to the bedroom. Was he athletic and active there?

She closed her eyes and squinted, trying to drive the thought away as he was mere inches from her. The scent of something citrusy, spicy, and a bit musky all mingled to make her hum even more vibrantly like a magnet drawn to iron shavings— except the magnet was her nether regions, a familiar warmth pooling in her belly above her pubic bone, threatening to make her breathing as labored as Laura’s. The muscles that were clamping inside Josie may have been in the same area as Laura’s, but they were producing a noticeably different sensorial effect.

“Excuse me,” Alex said, looking over with a flirtatious tone to his voice.

“By all means,” she said. “You are the doctor.”

His eyes narrowed slightly at that and he shot her a puzzled look. “But I’m not in charge here,” he reminded her. “Sherri is.”

Could you be any more perfect?
she thought. A humble OB? Impossible. There was no such thing. She wanted to say that, to test him, to push him, see where his limits were, but this wasn’t the time. At that exact moment Dylan walked over to Laura and began rubbing her back while Mike poured a glass of water.

“Laura, you okay?” Dylan asked, bending over her shoulder.

“Am I okay?” said a demon voice from deep inside Laura’s core. “Am I okay? Do I
look
okay?” she asked.

Josie winced. Dylan was about to get it. “No, I just mean…”

For the first time since they’d arrived, Josie got a good look at Dylan. He was wearing a navy polo shirt, some torn jeans, flip-flops, and a baseball cap. Red Sox. Must be a game day.

“It’s okay, Laura. It’s all right, babe,” Mike said, coming over with a glass of water, trying to soothe her and glaring at Dylan. Dylan looked back, shrugging, his palms up in the air in a
what did I do?
 kind of motion.

“It’s not okay!” Laura shouted. “Quit telling me it’s okay! You!” She pointed at Dylan. “And you!”—now at Mike—“aren’t the ones who are about to have this baby come out the hole where you put her in. If one more person in this room,” she shouted, looking around, her eyes wild and angry, “tells me it’s going to be okay, I’m going to order you out of here. I’m going to strap you down and I’m gonna load a bunch of Pitocin in your veins and I’m gonna make you feel how it feels to have your asshole clamp down for forty-five to sixty seconds every two to three minutes and then I’m gonna make you shit an eight- pound brick.
Are we clear
?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the men said in unison. Josie almost said it too, and then bit her lower lip, afraid to piss off Laura any more.

Alex leaned down and Josie could feel his breath before he said a word, the heat tickling her earlobe, making her lose about ninety-nine percent of the thin thread of resolve that was left. “I’m going to assume,” he said, his voice like a soft touch, “that she’s not always like this.”

“No,” Josie answered, whispering, her mouth so close to his earlobe she wanted to stand on tiptoes and bite it. “Only when she’s shitting an eight-pound brick.”

He nodded somberly. “Most of my patients find the brick is worth it.” His smile lit up his eyes as he studied her face. “You have kids?”

The question shocked her. It shouldn’t have—she was getting to that age where it was becoming more common—but it still did. “Um, no. I kill house plants and the only reason my cat is still alive is because he’s smarter than I am.”

He chuckled. “Not everyone’s ready at the same time, right?”

What was that supposed to mean?
“And some of us aren’t ready even when reality is staring us down the birth canal,” she said, nodding at Laura.

“Her level of denial must be pretty extreme,” he said.

“You don’t know the least of it.”

Dylan was attaching some sort of MP3 player to Laura’s shirt as she batted away the earbuds. “I don’t want to listen to that crap,” she said, bursting into tears. “I just want someone to hold me.” A loud, winding-down cry like a toddler’s poured out of her as she melted into a puddle of tears, sniffling against Dylan’s chest, his body twisted in an awkward pose. He looked at Mike and shook his head, eyes begging for help.

What do I do?
he mouthed. Josie started laughing.

She turned back to find Alex going over Laura’s chart, his frown deepening as he read further. She stood up on tiptoes, raised her eyebrows, and tried to get a look, but he was too tall and the chart was too far away. “Anything to be worried about?” she asked in a low hiss.

“Nothing so bad that we can’t continue with the midwife,” he said. “But this is one I’m going to have to watch very, very carefully.” Inscrutable, this one was. Snapping the chart shut, he kept a very neutral—almost too neutral—look on his face, his voice professional and moderate.

His hand brushed against hers as he lowered the chart, and she felt a zing of  every form of energy in the universe coalesce into that point of contact. “Unfortunately, it looks like you’re stuck with me for most of the night on this case.” Avoiding eye contact, he looked at a spot above Laura’s head. “If Sherri agrees,” he added in a slightly deferential tone. Unreal. Doctors didn’t
do
that—defer. To anyone.

“Unfortunately?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

He seemed to consider that, breathing in through his nose, taking his time to answer. When he did, one hundred percent of his attention was focused on her. She liked that very much. “The unfortunate part is that her case is high risk enough that she needs an OB consult for most of the night,” he explained, a practical tone in his voice that made her think she had completely misread what she thought was a flirtatious signal, her stomach clenching and her heart hardening to save herself the social embarrassment of thinking that someone this hot and this interesting would have any interest in her.

“But,” he said, his finger touching the inside of her elbow, making a slow, steady trail into the soft inner flesh and then writing tiny circles in the middle, a pretty obvious symbolic move on his part, “the fortunate part is that, given the amount of time I’m going to need to focus on the case, and the nineteen hours left on my shift, I think you and I are going to become very well acquainted.”

“Me?” she squeaked. His fingers stopped and she nearly sobbed with the exit of his touch, her solar plexus, her abs, her
everything
all tight with anticipation and with some sort of paradigm shift in the universe that made everything about
him, him, him.

“Yeah, Josie. You.”

“I need to pee!” Laura shouted. Josie deflated on the spot.
Way to kill the mood,
 she thought, and then clamped down on her brain, on her thought process, which was far better than clamping down with some of the other muscles in her body that were pulsating right now.

What in the ever-loving hell was she doing?

All her attention needed to be focused on Laura, not on Dr. Alex Derjian. Flashing him a smile, she got herself out of the situation, extracting her ego, her attention, and her clit from this diversion. Two out of three of those should be focused on Laura and the third—well, she had a box of electronic toys to handle that one. She didn’t need another crazy romantic entanglement right now, and certainly not in the middle of Laura’s birth.

She should be focused on her friend’s vagina—not her own.

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 it happen before, unscrupulous doctors hitting on doulas. 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. He wondered why he hadn’t seen this before. 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 wondered who they were, how they felt about this whole arrangement—but more than anything, 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.

But 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. Each directed his attention fully on Laura when she needed the engagement. 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 really 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.

On the surface, his friends would think he was crazy for being attracted to her, because she was the kind of woman he normally just wouldn’t look twice at. And that was precisely why she intrigued him so. From the first day he’d seen her at the research trial, he’d been drawn to her. Now, even with this brief bit of interaction, he was drawn all the more, once again feeling a familiar tightening below the waist that made him think maybe he needed to start wearing a fucking cup to hide his intermittent arousal.