There was a spring in their steps, a jauntiness, a full-on joy. It wasn’t just that they’d had phenomenal, slightly exhibitionistic sex outdoors, with the air perfumed by a nature eager to burst forth in its own explosion of growth and renewal. It was that something drew them to each other and made their hands undress each other, made their bodies press against each other, made this communion a series of touches, and caresses, and reaches, and embraces, and sighs, then moans, then more.
The sidewalk stretched on, their feet pounding the pavement as they walked with purpose back to the hospital entrance, Josie’s entire being in a completely different place than it had been when her feet had stepped out of those same doors. As they entered the hospital and headed to the elevators, they dropped each other’s hands. Alex was now in professional territory, and Josie was perfectly capable of respecting that. Two elevators opened, and the waiting patrons piled into one, Josie following them until Alex grasped her around the waist and pulled her back, holding one index finger up to his lips. He shook his head, then glanced at the open, empty option. She widened her eyes and raised her eyebrows, and marched into the empty elevator. Alex, hot and heavy behind her.
Again? she wondered as the doors snapped shut, and she felt her body slammed against the elevator wall, knowing that the four flights up might damn well be just enough time for him to take her again. His lips weren’t tender now. Probing and claiming with an intensity that somehow managed to match what they’d just done by the river. It was exhilarating and extraordinary, so all-consuming that she felt herself growing, becoming a bigger, more developed version of herself. His hands were everywhere, on her hips, up her leg, on her breast, wrapped behind her. Searing the flesh on the back of her neck as his hardness pressed into her belly.
Ding! The elevator stopped with an abrupt jolt, a fitting kinesthetic trigger to make them pull back, to realize that there was, indeed, a society in orbit around them. Others using the machine for far more banal purposes.
Smoothing her hair, she tried to look as nonchalant as possible, nurses and doctors piling in from the first floor. Whatever lipstick she’d put on this morning had been long worn away, either by her own mouth’s activities with eating and drinking, or mingled with Alex’s skin around his lips, his tongue, and other parts of him that she had kissed.
A young woman about her own age, blonde and dour, and disapproving, looked up at Alex and said,“What are you doing here? You don’t work today.”
He gave her an irritated look. “I’m here to visit someone.”
“Is everything okay?” she asked, concern infusing her words.
“It’s fine.”
His clipped responses told Josie that something was off here. This wasn’t the Alex she expected, and whoever this woman was, there was a past.
“Is it a family member?” the woman probed.
“Lisa”—he shook his head slightly—“it’s none of your business.”
His quiet, final sentence made the woman snap to attention and look forward, eyes unfocused, on the hazy stainless-steel wall where the doors bisected the side of the elevator. Her nostrils flared and her shoulders slumped forward. She was angry, and Josie wondered why. Not enough, though, to take the shine off of how she was feeling right now. Laura would pick up on what had just happened in about three seconds, so Josie needed to steel herself for the inevitable grilling that her best friend was about to give her. Nothing, not even Laura’s interrogation, would topple her from the pedestal that she and Alex had managed to put each other on.
Just as Josie suspected, the second that she and Alex walked back into Laura’s room, some sixth sense inside her best friend made her c**k an eyebrow and give them a look of appraisal that made Josie blush. To her mild shock, it seemed to put a little pink in Alex’s cheeks, as well.
“So, what have you two been up to?” Laura said with a cagey tone. The baby was lying in Laura’s arms, eyes wide, alert, and roaming, searching her mother’s face and taking in the pinpoint of the world that Laura’s features represented to her. As if she had been doing this for decades, Laura shifted the baby from one arm to the other, and then reached under her hospital gown to unclasp her bra. Josie watched, transfixed, as her best friend held the baby’s mouth, pulling it gently open, then squeezed her own breast, shoving it into little Jillian’s perfect, rose-petal lips. And then the unmistakable sound of sucking and breathing through the nose. It was a steady beat that you could almost dance to. Suck suck, inhale, suck suck, inhale, suck suck, inhale, with little gulps in between. Funny little noises and tones coming from the baby’s throat.
“Sweet relief,” Laura groaned, and Josie shot her a look of confusion. “Do you have any idea what it’s like when your boobs are filled with milk, and they’re rock hard, and all you want to do is go down to the nursery and grab two random babies ’cause yours is sound asleep and won’t latch on, and just get the milk out of there?”
“No, I can’t say that I know what that’s like,” Josie answered.
Alex walked over to the bedside table and picked up the mauve plastic pitcher, pouring a glass of water and handing it to Laura. “Here, drink this, you’ll need it.”
“The last thing I need is more fluid in my body.”
He smiled. “No, actually, that’s the first thing you need. The only way you’re going to keep up your production is if you keep hydrating.”
Josie watched the two of them, her head bobbing from one to the other. It was as if they spoke Mandarin Chinese. There was a language of parenting, of procreation, lactation, attachment, that she didn’t speak. Laura was quickly becoming not just fluent in it, but accentless. Soon it would be as if it were her first language. Alex was like an immigrant into that world, living there long enough to understand every single word said to him, but occasionally having moments when his accent, or a slightly misused idiom, tripped him up.
To Josie, what they were saying sounded like gobbledygook, and again it alienated her in a way that pierced her even more than it had a few hours ago, to be on the fringes. Knowing that Alex was closer to Laura, and Mike and Dylan, in some ways, than even she was, took the wind out of her. She couldn’t show that right now, of course. It was unfair to Laura, and to the baby, to keep thinking about herself so much. Pushing aside those thoughts, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Her hand instinctively went to stroke the baby’s head, until she realized it was attached to Laura, and that that was probably a boundary she ought not to cross.