Free It's Complicated by Julia Kent Page B

to them all. To the left Alex saw Laura, completely naked 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 naked 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 hips 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 naked 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 fuck Laura in the middle of having a baby.”
    “I want to know why you think I was trying to fuck 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?