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 ass**le pointed squarely at the door, nearly at waist level to them all. To the left Alex saw Laura, completely na**d 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 na**d 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 h*ps 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 na**d 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 f**k Laura in the middle of having a baby.”
“I want to know why you think I was trying to f**k 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 na**d 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 na**d 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 f**king 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.