It's Complicated Page 4

  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.

  Even her friend, the blonde pregnant woman, was more Alex’s type than Josie. Staring at this skinny little pixie of a woman, he’d been dumbfounded to find every sensor in his body going mad. Four months ago he had seen her for the first time, and the sad part was that he had squandered every single opportunity to say something, anything, other than “hi” to her.

  When she walked in the room wearing a lab coat and whatever clothes were on under that, it was as if her mere presence was enough—actually interacting with her was too exquisite. What a great lie he told himself—the bottom line was that he was too much of a pussy to actually come out and introduce himself, get to know her, ask her out and see if whatever triggered this animal instinct in him that made him clam up and be a stupid eighth-grade boy was real.

  Life was hectic. It was easier to go to a bar, pick up some chick, take her home, bed her, date her for a few weeks, and then end it all amicably—or not—than it was to actually understand why Josie triggered that reaction in him. Attraction like this was something he needed to protect, pregnant with possibility and yet not quite ready to be born.

  Maybe tonight was symbolic. Perhaps the pregnant woman’s baby, the new life that would emerge in the next few hours or days, would give him a reason to conceive his own new relationship, let it gestate, and see what kind of life came from it.

  Hot breath on his shoulder surprised him as he waited for the elevator. “You don’t have to do this, you know?”

  He turned, stunned out of his own thoughts to find himself staring down at Lisa, who looked up at him, her nose piggish and bulbous, nostrils flared as if she were pissed off about something. “Don’t need to do what?” he said.

  “Don’t need to go up on labor and delivery. Collins is up there, they don’t need you right now.” Collins was the other OB resident on shift tonight. Known as the barber of Boston, he was ready to slice and dice at will, with a C-section rate that pushed forty percent. If Collins got to that case first, Alex knew the inevitable outcome.

  “So he’s up there,” Alex said as derisively as he could. He turned away and stared at the silver doors, willing them to part so that he could get on the elevator.

  Lisa took a step away. “It’s about that woman, isn’t it?”

  Hardening his body, Alex steeled himself and said, “What I do is absolutely none of your business, Lisa. Go back to whatever work you have.” It was lame. He knew it was lame, but it was what he needed to say because otherwise he was going to say something laced with profanity. And he wasn’t that kind of guy, no matter how much she was making him wish he was.

  Sniffing, she turned away and flounced off, to the extent that someone with a stick up their ass could flounce. The elevator doors opened and as he took a step forward his mind processed, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the fact that there before him, in the flesh and in full, stood Josie.

  She stared at his chest and then looked him dead on and said, “Alex Derjian?”

  “Yes?” he said, taking two steps onto the elevator and turning toward her. How did she know his name? He touched his chest, the spot where she’d just stared, and realized his name tag had it in block letters. His heart began to race and an impulse
to reach out and touch any exposed flesh on her body permeated him, making him take a long, slow, deep breath to hold back. What the hell is this? he wondered, the elevator air starting to swim, the heat transmitting out of his skin and seeking to envelop hers.

  “Sherri Newsome asked for you up on labor and delivery,” she said in a neutral voice, clipped like a nurse coming to a doctor with a request.

  “Oh. Oh,” he said. “Is it about a patient?” he asked, hoping it was about her friend, the blonde.

  “Yes. She needs a quick consult.” Her eyes were full of fear and concern, but also something harder, the chocolate irises framed by the whites of her eyes and almond-shaped sockets that framed everything and gave her a pixie-ish look.

  She really was quite enchanting, almost Icelandic looking, like a softer version of the singer Björk. She had the body of a dancer but no height. If she was five feet tall he’d be surprised, and she made him feel like a giant, like a moose of a man. That was hard to do for someone who barely hit six feet and topped out, at best, at 180, with loads of muscle on him.

  With a practiced turn she pressed the L&D floor button and the pneumatic hiss of the doors caught his attention, making him turn and look out to find Lisa glaring at them both, her face like stone as the doors closed. He turned back to Josie, stunned to be in her presence and relieved to be away from Lisa.

  “Hi, I’m Alex.” Reaching his hand out to shake her hand, he was giddy with the opportunity to have a social convention he could use to access her skin.

  She reached back and shook his hand, eyes widening at the genesis of their touch that connected the two. His palm embraced hers, soft and hard at the same time, commanding and tender as if he had to wring as much as possible out of this gesture. He pumped her hand two times and then slowed.

  “Josie,” she said, quietly. “Hi.” She broke eye contact, looking over his shoulder and then directing her attention back, the skin around her eyes warming and narrowing a bit, face breaking into a smile. “Josie Mendham, nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” he said, maintaining contact for as long as possible. Knowing that he would look like a creeper if he didn’t let go, he reluctantly withdrew his hand, the feeling of losing contact like having the wind knocked out of him.

  Either a fireball entered the elevator and exploded in her head and her clit or she had just met her equivalent of Laura’s two soulmates in a single body. With one touch, Alex—just another resident, just another doctor in a hospital working a twenty-four-hour or forty-eight-hour shift, the kind of guy she’d met hundreds of over the years—had transformed everything. Transformed the air in the elevator, transformed the entire experience of bringing Laura in to L & D into…transformed something about Josie herself.

  His touch had seismically split her in two, tectonic plates altering her emotional landscape. How could one person do that? she wondered as their eyes locked and he shook her hand slowly, the tactile sensation of his palm pressed against hers like some sort of a battery recharging every cell in her body, warming her, making parts of her throb with a frequency that she hoped he could feel with his tongue someday.

  Or now. Now would work.

  Very, very naughty thoughts flashed through her mind as they locked eyes. And then a second series of thoughts berated her, guilted her over thinking about anything but her poor best friend, who was about to have her vagina split open by a speeding eight-pound flesh ball, all the nibbly parts on display for a crew of eight or nine people, not including the dads and Josie. This was a teaching hospital, after all, and the only way the interns and the residents and the nursing students going through clinicals could learn was to watch people like Laura on display, to make notes, to get the queasiness over with and to learn by doing.

  Right now she’d like to learn some really nice hands-on sexual lessons, lessons involving his hands on her naked ass, his mouth on other parts, her body entwined with Mr. Alex Derjian here—Dr. Alex Derjian, she corrected herself. Ever since a very messy failed affair her first year of nursing—an entangled, sweeping disaster that involved two doctors at work—she’d had a pretty firm rule: no dating doctors. But rules were made to be broken, right?

  Introductions complete, he pulled his hand away, leaving her drained and empty and full of self-doubt. Had she been alone in the feeling that had just jolted through her? She wasn’t imagining it, though—he seemed to feel it too. Fidgety and a little ill at ease, Josie pretended to study the silver doors as the elevator hummed its way up to an even bigger, more chaotic mess that they both encountered as the doors wheezed open.

  There stood Mike and Dylan and Sherri outside Laura’s door, engaged in an angry whisper campaign with another nurse who stood there. The pained expression on Dylan’s face was shifting more and more into anger, while Mike coiled with a tension diametrically opposite his normal state. Snippets of their conversation floated into Josie’s awareness as they approached.

  “But there’s a limit…”

  “I don’t care about the limit…”

  “Why can’t we…?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  “Is there a reason why we can’t…?”

  “What’s going on?” Alex said, his voice commanding and clear.

  It made Josie stand up straight and listen intently—not that she had any choice. She could have listened to him read a Windows 7 installation guide and been in a state of bliss for hours on end. A melodic baritone, he didn’t have the standard Boston accent that so many men had, and there was a lilt, something foreign, but not quite. He wasn’t a Midwesterner, not a New Yorker, and nothing from the South came into his voice. The sound of his voice was more his own accent, as if he had honed it carefully himself, born of an internal core that made him something distinct and unique and well worthy of everyone’s immediate attention.

  As he spoke, her eyes combed over his body. Brown, shiny waves in hair that needed a cut, but looked perfect tousled the way it was. Dark brown eyes, similar to hers, but with little specks of orange in them. His face was wide, with high cheekbones but the sprinklings of early five o’clock shadow. She knew, too well, that shadow would end up quite thick by the end of his long shift, the kind of stubble that left a slight, rough, red rug burn on a woman’s face after a perfect, intense kiss…or twenty.

  Broad shoulders and a body that indicated that he worked out. His scrubs lay flat against his skin, not too tight, but not the baggy, shapeless look that so many men acquired as residency added some paunch to their under-exercised, over-carbed forms. This was a man who took care of himself. And as the conversation continued, she recognized that he was a man accustomed to finding solutions and having them carried out.

  Sherri turned to him. “Thank you, Alex. I’m glad you’re here. I need you to consult on Laura’s polyhydramnios case,” she said, pulling him aside. “But we also have another issue here that has nothing to do with you.”

  The nurse who stood next to them was arguing with Dylan and Mike, and Josie heard, “But there can’t be two fathers in the room.”

  “But there are two fathers.”

  “No, there can’t be two fathers. Our rooms are small and we can only allow one support person and one father.”

  “Well, I’m the support person,” Josie said. “I’m also an RN. What’s going on?”

  The nurse gave her a grateful look, as if Josie were an instant ally in whatever argument she was having with the men. Josie didn’t like the assumption because she had a feeling that this was going to be one of those moments where she got rip-shit pissed and lost her cool. Doing that in front of Alex was a hell of a first impression she didn’t want to make.

  “Did Lisa call you, too?” the nurse asked.

  “Lisa?” Josie shook her head, confused. The sly look on the woman’s face pinched off instantly, shifting from a conspirator’s countenance to one of officiousness.

  “Both of these men say that they’re the father.” The nurse was in her mid-sixties, no non
sense, about as wide as she was tall. She had extremely short gray hair, thick bifocals, and the body language of someone who didn’t take crap, ever. And Josie could respect that. If she worked here for forty years she’d be an impenetrable fortress of rules too.

  “Haven’t you heard of a kid having two dads?” They were quite a crowd in the hallway now— Mike, Dylan, Josie, and the nurse clustered together, Alex and Sherri just behind them. The OB and midwife, whispering, backed up a few paces.

  “Is this a surrogacy case?” the nurse asked, arms crossing over her chest tighter. A loud scream poured into the hallway from a nearby room, followed by the muted sound of a man’s soothing voice.

  Dylan and Mike exchanged a glance, and Dylan said, “If it was, could we both be in there?”

  “Well, that depends. Is it?” The nurse was so cynical and challenging that Josie wondered if there was something personal going on here. Maybe she was homophobic and assumed Dylan and Mike were gay? Overt discrimination was very rare in the Boston area, but it did happen.

  Honesty prevailed, Dylan’s instinct to lie not strong enough, Josie noticed. Ironic considering he had no problem lying when it came to other things. Maybe he really has reformed, she thought. “No, it’s not,” he admitted reluctantly, shoulders slumping in defeat.

  The nurse pointed to Josie. “So, you’re the support person.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is the dad?”

  “I am,” both men said in unison.

  Out of the corner of her eye Josie saw Alex do a double-take and then whisper something to Sherri, who whispered something back. Alex’s jaw dropped. Oh, boy, she thought, this is getting interesting. Who was she kidding? This had been interesting about ten minutes ago—no, make that nine and a half months ago.

  “Don’t make me do eenie-meenie-minie-moe on you,” the nurse said, pointing her finger at Dylan, and then at Mike.