“I am not giving birth to a bowling ball,” Laura said, her voice trembling. Two people walking past stopped and gawked at the two of them, then looked at Laura’s belly. It was a couple, a man and a woman, and the woman’s face changed to an expression of sympathy.
“Dear, I’ve been there. The bowling ball eventually comes out,” she said, and pointed to the man next to her who looked young enough to be her son, a guy in his early twenties.
Horror dotted his face as he stared at Laura’s crotch and mumbled, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“But,” Laura said, “it doesn’t really feel like a bowling ball?”
The woman and Josie exchanged a glance, and Laura began to wail like a small child. “But that’s not true!” she shouted.
“No, of course not,” said the stranger.
Oh boy, Josie thought, this is going to be a long birth.
Chapter Two
Dr. Alex Derjian watched the scene unfold with a certain level of mischievous pleasure that he hadn’t been able to access in years. He’d done a double-take when the crew walked in through the main emergency doors as he’d been charting, documenting the last hour or so of work on patients. A rotund and deeply pregnant, gorgeous blonde woman was flanked by an incredibly tall Nordic man and a smaller but more muscular Italian guy who looked like he could be on the cover of GQ. And then behind them a slim, tiny, little buzzing dynamo he recognized instantly.
Josie from the research trial his grandfather was part of. Holy shit, he thought. Of all the ways to run into her.
The pregnant woman must be her friend…or her wife (if so, his g*ydar was broken). He saw one of the certified nurse midwives, a serene and businesslike old hand at all things birthing, meeting up with them. Unless there were complications severe enough to warrant calling him in on a consult—he was one of two residents on call in OB/GYN-- he probably wouldn’t have any contact with Josie or her…whoever the laboring woman was. The only time that midwife would call him in would be in a true surgical emergency.
Unlike some other obstetricians, he wasn’t a slicer, preferring a medical approach as much as possible before resorting to surgery. It didn’t earn him any favors and it hadn’t landed him any top internships or residencies anywhere. Without the killer instinct to cut, he’d been told, he should have just been a midwife.
They said that as if it were a bad thing.
A deep smile crossed his face, dimpling either side of his mouth. A mixture of Finnish and Armenian blood coursed through his veins, making him not particularly anything anymore, though his Armenian last name won him some points in Watertown, a western suburb just outside the city lines where a cluster of Armenians all lived. If your name ended with I-A-N you were instantly assumed to be a local Armenian and treated as such, regardless of the truth. Josie’s coloring was similar to his, dark brown hair and eyes, but otherwise there were no similarities. She was petite, and he was a solid foot taller. She would easily fit under his arm, an image that flickered past his mind’s eye, briefly and unasked.
What is she doing here? he wondered. Was she working as a nurse? Or with her friend? Or her wife? And who were the two guys with them? Deeply curious, Alex closed the chart and looked up, startled to find a pair of big, wide green eyes lasered right in on him. It was Lisa, one of the nurses who had a crush on him—one that was absolutely unrequited.
When he’d started here ten months ago she’d asked him out for coffee. It had gone about as well as a root canal performed by a sadist with Parkinson’s. Since then, she’d stalked him as much as was professionally possible without losing her job. He’d struggled to find ways to be kind, finally resorting to completely ignoring her. Cruelty would be the next step, and he really didn’t want to reach that point unless he had to.
Her eyes tracked Josie as the group loaded onto an elevator headed, he knew, for labor and delivery. “Do you know her?” Lisa asked. She was about the same size as Josie, but a good fifty pounds heavier. Like Josie’s lovely pregnant…associate…Lisa had blonde, wavy hair and green eyes, though a completely different profile. Where the woman he’d just seen come in with Josie had a kind, open face, plump, sweet cheeks, and frightened but beautiful eyes, Lisa had a much more closed-off look, a pinched face, and something to her features that spoke of scarcity, of life as a zero-sum game.
That had been the problem on their one and only date. All she wanted to do was complain about the coffee, the pastry, schedules at work, supervisors, her student loans, her cat—pretty much everything. Who the hell complains about their cat – and on a first date? More importantly, who cares? It had seemed to be her main mode of communication and Alex, who was sometimes working hundred-hour weeks, didn’t want his precious free hours spent listening to that.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said, absentmindedly. “I’m going to go and head up to labor and delivery and see if they need some help.”
“But you have charting to do,” Lisa said in a clipped tone, pointing to the seventeen or so charts stacked in front of him.
He waved his hand and broke eye contact, marching toward the elevator, decision made. “I’ll deal with it later.”
“But- but…” she sputtered as he walked away, the sound of her voice receding along with his tension.
For the past six months, he’d taken his grandpa, Ed, to the Alzheimer’s research trial at the nondescript medical building in Boston where Josie was the nurse in charge of clinical data and interviews. Alex would wait for thirty minutes or so before Ed would emerge with a big grin on his face and some sort of a small reward like a gift certificate to a coffee shop or a new set of golf balls, and then they’d go out to lunch. Alex enjoyed the carved-out time away from the craziness of the hospital.
His mom had asked Alex to make that one promise, that once a month he’d take an hour out of his schedule and help out. And with rare exception he’d managed, happy to take some of the burden off his mom, his aunts, and his grandpa’s girlfriend. It seemed like such a small gesture. The first time he’d taken Ed, he had been in the bathroom when Ed’s name was called. The second month he’d missed because of a work commitment. But on month three he had gone and seen Josie for the first time and that had made him resolve to be there every month.
She probably wouldn’t know him from Adam, because every time she came into the waiting room to call Grandpa Ed’s name, she barely looked up from her paperwork. And she absolutely was not his type, had never been his type, would never be his type—and if you had put a gun to his head and told him he had to say she was his type, he probably would have to accept death. He went for luscious, curvy, brown-haired, Slavic-looking women with bright red lipstick and asses that went on forever. That’s who he dated, that’s who he bedded, and that’s who he assumed he would eventually marry and have kids with.