Santa, Baby

by Blair Babylon

  Over Raji’s head, Andy argued with Georgie, “I’ve wanted to be a doctor my whole life.”

  Georgie said, “You can’t let six-year-olds make career decisions for you. I wanted to be a professional sailor.”

  “Did you?” Xan muttered to his wife. “I have a yacht. We should sail somewhere.”

  Peyton’s chest flinched under Raji’s cheek.

  Cadell said to Andy, “You’d still be a doctor. We need a doctor. Emily could go with us. You could monitor her for rejection. Oh, jeez. We should go to the hospital to check on her.”

  Andy shook her phone at him. “Got a text ten minutes ago. She’s fine. Still sleeping.”

  Raji snorted. Of course, Andy had gotten a text. She had super-momma powers or something. She cared for all her patients with a deep, maternal bond that ripped her heart out every time she lost one.

  You know what? Andy should trash the hepatic transplant fellowship and go be Killer Valentine’s doctor. Raji should tell her that, but she was so sleepy and still drunk.

  In the air above her, Georgie said, “Point is that Xan, here, needs an actual medical doctor to tell him he’s ripping his throat to shreds and shouldn’t be sucking on that electro-stimulation machine three times a day.”

  “I don’t suck on it,” Xan said. “It goes on the outside of my neck.”

  “Whatever. Having a doctor on tour would save us from having to freak out every time someone got sick enough for antibiotics or needed to talk Xan down from doing something stupid to his throat, which is daily.”

  “You should hire a vocologist,” Andy said, “not a gastroenterologist.”

  At least Andy still had her wits about her. Raji was pretty sure that she didn’t. Damn vodka. Vodka always fucked her up, especially when the vodka came after several red plastic cups of white wine.

  “Tryp has ulcers,” Georgie said, pointing with her thumb at the band’s drummer, who was overflowing an armchair and cradling his sleeping, blond wife in his arms.

  “I do not,” the guy mumbled, his black hair falling into his eyes.

  “You threw up blood,” Georgie told him.

  Tryp muttered, “It was a flesh wound.”

  “He needs an H. pylori test,” Andy said. “That’s actually right up my alley. I finished my gastro residency before I started this surgical one.”

  Georgie lifted her hand that was draped over Xan and pointed right at where Raji and Peyton were lying on the floor. “And Peyton breaks out in shingles every few years.”

  “I do not,” Peyton said, his deep voice rumbling in his chest against Raji’s cheek. She giggled a little at it.

  “When was the last time?” Georgie asked.

  “Four years ago,” Peyton said.

  “So you’re overdue,” Georgie said.

  “Or maybe they’ve gone away.”

  Raji peered up at him, and he hadn’t even opened his eyes to answer. Georgie shouldn’t have known that Peyton broke out in shingles every few years and was overdue for the virus to break out again if Peys had just joined the band a few months ago. Right?

  Georgie said to Andy, “We grew up together. His mother was all crunchy and didn’t get him any vaccines, so he got chickenpox.”

  Raji squinted at Peyton. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Peyton said, “Last time, it broke out on my ass.”

  Andy asked Peyton, “Any PHN?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, beside where Raji had lain her cheek, and said, “I don’t know what that is.”

  Andy informed him, “Post-herpetic neuralgia. Did it hurt afterward?”

  “Like the dickens.”

  “We should titer you. The shingles version of the varicella vaccine would be a good option.”

  Peyton opened one eye, revealing his teal iris. Wow, he was pretty. “Yeah?”

  “Should prevent a reoccurrence,” Andy told him.

  Raji didn’t lift her head off his chest, but she mumbled to Peyton, “She’s right. Listen to the woman.”

  Peyton closed his eyes. “Xan, hire this woman, or I will.”

  “Fuck you,” Xan said, still not opening his eyes. The dawn outside the windows brightened the room. “I’m hiring her. She’s my doctor now.”

  That was some weird tension between the two guys, more than your average alpha-male pissing contest. Even though both of them were exhausted, they were arguing over who got to hire the doctor and pay her salary.

  “I didn’t say I was going to quit my fellowship,” Andy said sleepily from where she lay in Cadell’s arms.

  “Merde,” Xan said.

  Raji squirmed on the carpet, turning over to look up at Andy. Maybe it was the vodka talking. Maybe it was Peyton’s little inquiries about her phone number all night long, and she needed to scare him the fuck off. Maybe it was concern for Andy, her too-tender friend.

  Raji said, “You’re too soft-hearted to be a transplant surgeon. Don’t get me wrong. You can cut with the best of them, but you need a specialty with a higher survival rate than seventy-five percent to transplant and then seventy-eight at five years. I know you, pindi. We’ve been over this.”

  Andy frowned at her. “The survival rate for heart transplants is almost exactly the same. You do fine.”

  “I’m a cold-blooded lizard person,” Raji said. “The failures don’t bother me except as a failure and that it brings down my stats. I cut to cure, and sometimes the odds aren’t in your favor.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Andy said, settling herself closer to her husband.

  This might be the only opportunity that Raji would ever have to talk sense into Andy and free her from her parents’ expectations for a career that she really, really wasn’t suited for.

  Raji said, “I don’t cry in the on-call room pretty much every day.”

  “I don’t do that,” Andy said, yawning.

  Press on. Press harder. “I know you, Andal. Don’t lie to me. I can rip a guy’s chest open, cut out his heart, and sew new pieces back in him just fine. You have to be a little bit of a psychopath to do this job. Or a lot of one.”

  Peyton was frowning and watching Raji through slitted eyes.

  Time for the pièce de résistance and to drive the dagger home in both of them at once, to kill two heart-soft wusses with one merciful stone. Peyton had been asking for stuff like going back to his hotel with him, and Raji didn’t roll like that. Stone-cold lizard people did not get involved in cross-species relationships with warm, emotional humans.

  Raji said, “You aren’t a psycho like me. You should get out, now, before this job rips you to shreds.”

  Georgie opened her eyes and said, “So, you can hang around New Jersey and watch a bunch more kids die, or you can come on tour with us, see the world, hang out with royalty and celebrities, boss everybody around, and keep your new husband off of fucking heroin.”

  Nice. Raji approved.

  Under her cheek, Peyton shifted.

  Yes, let him run away from her. Raji was not girlfriend material. She was a warrior who sliced and diced her opponent, cardiac failure, to save people from him.

  And she never, ever wanted to indulge in that most fatal of deviant behaviors: marriage.

  But Peyton settled down and didn’t leave.

  Sleep drifted over Raji’s limbs, pinning her to the floor and Peyton.

  Airport Ride

  RAJI awoke on the cold beige carpeting with her arms and legs wrapped around Peyton. Warmth rolled off his flesh and thick muscles, the only warm thing near her. She huddled closer to him, but her back and legs were so cold that she was shivering. He was still breathing the deep, slow breaths of the sleeping or the heavily anesthetized.

  Considering the vodka shots they had both been doing last night before collapsing on the living room floor, maybe both.

  The other members of Killer Valentine spilled limply over the couches and chairs, snoring.

  The television was silently playing some morning news show, and sunlight beams shot flat f
rom the window and drew long shadows of the furniture on the beige carpet.

  Wait, sunbeams?

  Oh, shit. It was morning.

  And the sun was up.

  Raji grabbed her phone out of her jeans’ hip pocket.

  The screen read 6:19 AM. The battery icon was a thin, red line.

  “Fuck!” She pushed off of Peyton and leaped to her feet.

  The other guys stirred. Xan Valentine rolled to sitting and shoved Georgie down on the couch behind him. From behind Xan, Raji heard Georgie holler, “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”

  Panic shot up Raji’s back and pushed alcoholic sweat out of her skin. “Oh, my God. My plane leaves in an hour and a half, and my stuff is all at my hotel. Shit. I’ll never make it in time. I’m calling a ride right now. I have to go.” She tapped the ride-calling icon on the phone screen, and her phone instantly died. “Fuck!”

  Peyton stumbled to his feet. “My car’s outside. I can drive you. It’s faster.”

  “I’ll never make it. Shit. I have rounds at the hospital tonight.”

  “Let’s go.” Peyton was already walking toward the car.

  “I can’t. My teeth. My breath. I need a toothbrush.”

  Peyton already had the front door open. “Cadell, open the front gate for us. Raji, I have gum in the car. Come on.”

  Raji grabbed her purse that had been lying on the table and sprinted after him.

  He had his key fob out and was thumbing it as they stumbled down the inclined lawn toward the driveway packed with cars. The dark gray sedan parked in the last slot flashed its lights as he reached it. Peyton jerked open the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel.

  Raji noted the car as she ran around the hood: a newish top-of-the-line Mercedes S-Class, a six-figure car.

  If she hadn’t quite believed Peyton when he’d said he was loaded last night, she did now. Not only was the car expensive as all heck, something a cardiothoracic surgeon wouldn’t be able to buy until they’d practiced for at least a decade, but it was also refined and understated, a quietly ostentatious, Old Money car. New money bought BMWs and flashy sports cars. The hospital parking structure was full of them.

  She grabbed the freezing door handle and yanked. As she tumbled into the seat, she told him the name of the hotel where she was staying.

  “I know where that is,” Peyton said, cranking around in the seat to watch out the rear window.

  Raji wrapped her seat belt around herself as the car reversed out of the parking spot, and then Peyton jammed the car into gear and took off down the long and winding driveway. “Gum in the glove compartment. Hand me a slice?”

  She found it, gave him a stick, and crammed one piece into her own mouth, too. Spearmint filled her sinuses, much better than the burp-up of last night’s booze.

  The gate at the end of the long driveway slid aside as they neared it.

  “Cadell came through,” Peyton said. “Even though I grew up with gates like this, they give me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “And why is that?” Raji hung on to the handle on the door and the soft leather of the seat as the car careened around a corner. The wan November sunrise filtered through gauzy clouds, turning them pale salmon and gold.

  Peyton said, “Had some problems last summer.”

  “What, stuck inside your Old Money compound and the foie gras delivery guy couldn’t get in?”

  Peyton laughed. “No, some weird stuff went down.”

  “Like what?” She was in that kind of mood.

  “I shouldn’t say.”

  “You brought it up, buddy.”

  Peyton zipped the car around another tight corner. The turn’s force shoved Raji against the door.

  He said, “That was the time when Xan and I rescued Georgie from the Russian Mafia who had taken her hostage.”

  Raji laughed and held on more tightly as Peyton sped out into the city streets. “Fine, don’t tell me then.”

  Peyton yanked the car steering wheel sideways and sped up the on-ramp to the Garden State Parkway. Even at that time in the early morning, other cars raced around them. “That’s pretty much what happened.”

  “The Russian mafia.”

  “Yep.”

  If the Russian mafia didn’t like Peyton, maybe Raji shouldn’t hang around him anymore.

  She wasn’t planning to hang around him anymore, anyway, but she asked, “Are you somehow involved with the Russian mafia?”

  Peyton said, “Nope. Not at all. Not even a little bit.”

  “So, Georgie seems okay now.”

  “Yep, we saved her.”

  “Is that why you and Xan Valentine have that alpha-male pissing-contest thing going on?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Raji laughed. “Every time you say something, Xan Valentine has to assert his dominant-male, bull-elephant status, like last night, when you said that you would hire Andy to be your doctor. Xan Valentine jumped in and announced that he was hiring Andy, that she was his.”

  “Shingles hurt. If she could stop that from happening to me again, I’d gladly pay her salary.”

  “But then he snagged her, and you didn’t do anything.”

  “Oh, Raji. I come from a wealthy family. We didn’t keep our wealth for centuries by leaping to pay the bill when someone else is perfectly willing to do it. And really, she should be the doctor for the whole band, not my private physician on tour. It sounds like she’s going to give me a shot, slap me on the ass, and that’s it.”

  Raji wasn’t sure how she felt about her friend Andy slapping Peyton’s ass.

  She shook her head. Andy wouldn’t slap his ass, anyway. She was far too reserved.

  And yet, Andy had eloped with a rock star. Raji would have to keep an eye on that little pindi.

  She said to Peyton, “And you swell up but you don’t challenge him, even though I think you could.”

  Peyton shrugged, a quick movement of his burly shoulder while he changed lanes to dodge a slower car. “It’s Xan’s band. He started the band with Cadell when they were at Juilliard, and he hunted down the other founding members and lured them away from college.”

  Raji laughed and hung on for dear life as he rounded another corner. Peyton’s car might look like a sedate Old Money sedan, but some serious horses lurked under that hood. He was racing through traffic. “So why did you join Killer Valentine and become a rock star?”

  “I’m not a rock star.”

  “You keep saying that, but being in a rock band kind of means that you are. I’ve watched videos of you playing the demos in those clubs, you know. You’re hot.”

  “You’ve watched videos of me playing on the demos? When did you do that?”

  “When we met last night, I might have already known who you were. I might have watched that demo of ‘Breaking Out’ that you guys performed at the Travelers Bar a couple dozen times.” Or a couple hundred times. Or thousands. In only three weeks.

  Now that she thought about it, that song was ostensibly about breaking out of fear to find love, but it took on a whole lot of other meanings if Peyton and Xan had rescued Georgie from the Russian mafia. “The way you were prancing around and leering at the front row, it sure looked like you wanted to be in a rock band.”

  “This feels weird. I hadn’t told anyone that before last night.”

  “Yeah, it was probably the vodka talking. Vodka always tells me, ‘People love it when you dance. Dance some more. Dance in the middle. Trust me.’”

  Peyton laughed as he drove.

  She continued, “But the real question is, why do you keep telling me this?”

  “Like I said, I keep liking you better and better.”

  “Oh, bullshit. You’re never going to see me again after today.”

  “You never know.”

  “I think I do.” She hadn’t given him her number on purpose. “So the reason you joined Killer Valentine has something to do with the keyboard player, Georgie Johnson. Ri
ght?”

  Peyton whipped through traffic to take an exit off the freeway. “When did I say that?”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “Oh, God. I wasn’t looking at her with stupid googly eyes or something, was I? Xan accuses me of that all the time, but I swear to God that I’m not. I think I must have naturally googly eyes.”

  Raji laughed. “You do not have googly eyes. You have the most gorgeous eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  “I do?”

  “Um, yeah.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Too much like she was looking at him or something.

  He smirked as he turned the corner toward the hotel where Raji had her stuff.

  Raji said, “And you know you do.”

  Peyton laughed. “I know they’re a weird shade of green.” He turned the car into the hotel parking lot. The Mercedes screeched to a stop under the covered entrance area, and he jammed it into park.

  He turned to her—his eyes darkening to teal in the morning sunlight—and he said, “Go.”

  Raji ran to the stairwell and sprinted upstairs, which was faster than waiting for an elevator.

  In her room, she grabbed the heap of laundry off of her bed—a pile of vibrant emerald silk woven with gold thread and encrusted with rhinestones, her bridesmaid lehenga choli dress—and stuffed it all in her suitcase. She grabbed her toothbrush and make-up bag but abandoned the rest of her toiletries. She would just buy new shampoo when she got back to Los Angeles. No time. No time.

  When she got back to the car, her rollie bag bouncing over the sidewalk behind her, she found that Peyton had bought two large cappuccinos and had a bunch of pastries in a paper bag. The roasted smell of coffee and browned pastry filled his car.

  She grabbed one and stuffed it into her mouth, the pastry turning to buttery flakes on her tongue. “Oh my God, the raspberry ones are my favorite. And coffee. Dear gods. You saved me. Thank you.”

  Peyton chewed and swallowed some sort of doughnut with sliced almonds layered on the top. “There’s some yogurt in there if you want that.”

  “So about the band, Georgie the keyboard player, Xan Valentine, and the Russian mafia—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Peyton crammed the transmission into gear. The tires screeched as the car roared out of the parking lot.