“Hey, doctor…” Dylan’s features changed to embarrassed confusion as he pointed and then splayed out his palm in a gesture of desperation, trying to retrieve Alex’s name. “Doctor…you were there last night…”
“Alex. Alex Derjian,” he said, extending his hand.
Dylan shook it with great power, which Alex managed to match, the two practically arm-wrestling in front of the desk on the postpartum wing to prove their firm grips were manly enough. Mike, the other father (what a strange phrase, and yet it rolled through Alex’s mind as if it were normal) was a few steps behind, holding a tasteful bouquet of Mylar balloons attached to a small bunch of flowers in a mug.
“Alex,” Mike said, those placid eyes meeting his, filling with a calm that seemed to make all of the nervousness of the morning dissipate.
Dylan nudged Mike in the ribs. “You remember his name?”
“Of course I remember his name. How could I forget the name of the guy who almost delivered our baby?”
Dylan turned a slight shade of pink and looked away. “Yeah…good point.” Then he perked up. “But at least I didn’t almost faint at the birth like some people.”
Dylan’s eyes were focused on a point behind Alex and he turned to the right to see Josie standing there, hands on hips, one leg cocked higher than the other, a sour smirk on her face as she said, “Oh, yeah? Well, at least I didn’t show my ass to—” She froze, turning and realizing that it was Alex standing right there.
I wouldn’t mind seeing your ass, he thought, biting back the offer.
“Alex,” she said, various parts of her tensing and relaxing at the same time, her body language changing.
Something was completely different about her this morning. As he took a good, long look, still drawing on that calm composure that Mike seemed to have infused in him, he almost laughed. It looked like she had gone through the same morning ritual that he had, though in feminine terms: hair done, makeup, and an outfit he imagined she never actually wore. If she had put that much concern into her appearance this morning, could it be that she had hoped that she would run into him as much as he had tried to manipulate running into her?
The only way to know would be to let the next few minutes unfold the way that he had planned them.
Leave it to Dylan to make some kind of dig to make her look bad in front of Dr. Perfect.
“Alex. Hi,” she barked, shocked and consumed with a tingling feeling of realization at just how close she was to him, as if having him in proximity to her like this sent some sort of electric jolt, a current, through her. Which, apparently, it did—and that made the connection between her thinking brain and her mouth shut down entirely at the same time that the floodgates between her heart and her nether regions opened with a giant, roaring tidal wave.
“Hi, Josie,” he said, reaching out and down, touching her shoulder briefly. The slight gesture of welcome may as well have been a flamethrower lighting her entire body on fire. The tingle went from a light, muted sensation to a full, roaring flame.
The awkward silence between the four of them was broken—finally—when Mike pointed to Dylan’s enormous stuffed giraffe and said, “Meet Jillian’s bodyguard.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Dylan asked, shrugging. He looked exhausted but exhilarated all at once, and Josie looked down and realized that he was wearing two different shoes. The night must have been tough—she knew they had taken the last twenty-four hours in shifts.
“That thing definitely won’t fit in a bassinet,” she found herself saying, and Alex laughed, a polite, slightly over-done chuckle that made her realize that he was just as interested in her as she was in him. And just as nervous about that interest as she was.
Dammit.
That meant that her awkwardness and his awkwardness were on display for Mike and Dylan to absorb and to amuse themselves with.
As if he read her mind, Dylan, with a mirthful look in those eyes, turned all of his attention to her and said, “What are you and Alex up to?”
Alex’s eyebrows shot up and he looked down at her, just over his shoulder, and it was his turn to put hands on h*ps and say, “What are we up to?”
A sinkhole needed to open up and swallow her. Instead, Sarcastic Josie kicked it. “We,” she said, fanning the air between the two of them with a hand that ping ponged back and forth, “aren’t up to anything. I am here to visit my best friend who just shat an eight-pound thing out of a hole that is not meant to have eight-pound things come out of it.”
“Yes, it is,” Alex argued. “That’s exactly how nature intended it.”
Fuck. He had her there.
“If that’s how nature intended it, then we all know God was a man because no woman would do that to other women.”
It was the best she could do, and she stormed off to Laura’s room. Fortunately she knew the number and she walked in to find Laura there, sitting up, her legs split—which made Josie cringe at the sight—under a thin hospital blanket. With baby Jillian in front of her, completely undressed and unwrapped from her little burrito blanket, diaper in place, Laura bent gently over with the baby’s entire foot in her mouth.
“Umm…hi?” Josie said, waving slightly. “The hospital food isn’t good here, I guess?”
Laura slipped the baby’s foot out of her mouth and started laughing quietly. Then she clutched her abdomen and winced. Josie wondered why. There had been no C-section, so why would it hurt to laugh?
The baby was asleep and startled at the vibration of the bed and the sound of their voices. Laura quickly swaddled her back into the little wrap and pulled her close, nestling the baby’s cheek against Laura’s bare chest. Laura held a finger up to her lips and Josie nodded silently, creeping carefully over to the chair next to the bed and settling in as Jillian settled down, little even breaths indicating that she’d fallen back asleep.
“Has motherhood turned you into a cannibal?” she asked.
Laura shook her head. She looked almost as tired as Dylan, with her face puffed and swollen a bit, blood vessels all around the ring of her eye socket bright red and popped, a sprinkling of them on her cheeks as well. Her face, though, exuded joy. And it was contagious, for Josie started to feel it too, seeping in and replacing the awkwardness and the desire that she had just felt out in the hallway with Alex.
“I just…she’s so beautiful, Josie,” Laura said. “I had this impulse to see if her foot would fit in my mouth.”