Excerpt: Enemies With Benefits

"Dr. Zip didn't say you could get up yet," he said.

Slightly annoyed, she laid back down. "When and where did Dr. Zip get his medical degree, exactly?"

"Online, ten minutes ago, looking up head injuries."

"I'd like a second opinion on this whole 'getting up' issue."

~~~
"We would have made some damn nice-looking kids, you know. Half black, half white, half British, half American..."

She sighed and tossed a gun to him. "Please don't make me kill you. Good help is so hard to find these days."
~~~
She pulled the name card out of the slot, gaining a quizzical look from the NICU nurse, and took a pen from the nearby desk, then crossed out "Baby Girl" out of "Baby Girl Evert" and wrote the first halfway decent first name that came to mind: "Madison". It was a fine name, and she could change it later if she ended up hating it. Amanda put the name tag back into the slot and observed the too-small infant inside the plastic crib.

"She's stable," the supervising nurse assured her. "Do you want to touch her?"

Amanda shook her head violently. For starters, "Madison" hardly looked like a cuddly, touchable baby. Her skin was so thin you could see every vein under her scalp, her limbs were shriveled and underdeveloped, and she was just much, much too small. In addition, Amanda just wasn't a very maternal person. She had never been one to babysit or even find kids all that cute.

But deep down, her main reason for not wanting to touch Madison was fear. She didn't want to dislodge the tubes and needles and wires, she didn't want to break her tiny little bones, and she didn't want to spread germs to someone so vulnerable and small. So she simply stood there, watching the newborn sleep, eyes occasionally flickering up to the various monitors and screens when they beeped or flashed, until the neonatologist arrived to perform more tests.