Santa, Baby

by Blair Babylon

“COME on, Peys. Don’t be chicken,” Raji said.

  Peyton grimaced. There was no way he could sprint into the Northeastern wintry night outside the plate glass windows and escape. She would probably follow him and drag him right back. That little minx was quick when she ran.

  Besides, she had convinced the tattoo shop’s owner to take them in after hours and assured Peyton that they were absolutely a vault who wouldn’t tell anyone about Raji and him. Plus, they were in Raji’s old neighborhood in New Jersey, not anywhere near her hospital in California.

  Raji smiled at him. “It’ll be fine. You’ll love it.”

  Her sweet smile belied the fact that she had just convinced Peyton to let her tattoo artist drill ink into his virgin skin. Who was dominating who, here? He didn’t like this at all.

  Peyton frowned at the many pages of sample tattoo pictures clipped into stacks of three-ring binders.

  Neon lights running the length of the ceiling blasted blue-white light over the whole storefront of the small New Jersey tattoo shop, striping the plastic page-protectors with their glare and whiting out his unmarked skin. “It seems so permanent.”

  “You betcha, it’s permanent. Mark yourself up. Live your life on your skin.”

  The smell of bleach stung his nose, but at least the place smelled clean.

  He flipped twenty or thirty pages. “I don’t know where to start.”

  Raji called, “Gordon! We need a consult!”

  A spry, middle-aged person walked out of the back room, wiping their hands on a towel. “Yeah?”

  Peyton glanced over, taking in Gordon’s soft, hairless chin, bulging arms covered with writhing ink, and shaved head to show off the delicate inkwork on their scalp, too.

  How could Gordon ever understand Peyton’s dilemma of choosing his very first tattoo?

  “I’ve been looking at your work,” Peyton said, gesturing to the book. “It’s impressive. Some friends of mine have a lot of tattoos. Your work is great, very subtle, nice artistry.”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Gordon said, still wiping their hands.

  Raji butted in. “He’s having a problem making a decision.”

  Gordon, who only came up to the middle of Peyton’s chest, looked him down and up, frankly evaluating Peyton’s body and his life choices, probably. “Nordic.”

  Peyton admitted, “A lot of Norwegian, some German and English, but what tattoo should I get?”

  “Nordic design,” Gordon sighed. “Nordic runes and Viking knotwork. Armband. Not all the way around because you obviously aren’t pureblooded Native American, blondie. No saturated areas because you’re a first-timer. If you want to add a sleeve or an armor piece later, it’ll be easy to incorporate.”

  Raji nodded wisely, her dark, sultry eyes half-closed.

  Well, he couldn’t chicken out in front of Raji.

  Peyton shrugged. “Let’s do it.”

  Raji smiled at him. “Now you’ll look like a real rock star.” Her smile dropped a little. “Or you will, when you get five or six more of them. Hey, Gordon, could you touch up the raven on my leg? Some parts are a little faded.”

  Gordon rolled their eyes. “You first, Raji, so blondie can see how it’s done.”

  Homeless

  NEW York winter air knifed through Raji’s winter coat and felt like pins inside her nose, but she and Peyton were walking together in Central Park. Pale sunlight glittered on the pristine snow heaped on both sides of the sidewalk.

  The heart surgeon and the rock star could go out in public because, dressed against the cold, they were incognito.

  A harsh January blizzard the previous night had essentially closed New York City. The airports were due to open the next morning before her flight back to L.A., so she wasn’t worried about getting back in time for rounds.

  Raji’s knit hat covered her face from the top of her sunglasses and down over her ears. Her scarf met the bottom rims of her glasses and wound around her face.

  Peyton had a nubbly, beige scarf wound around his face that matched his hat, and sunglasses hid the shocking teal of his eyes. The collar of his black wool coat was turned up against the biting wind.

  They were so desperate to get out of Peyton’s hotel and do something together that they had braved even a brutal New England cold snap to take a walk in the wintry afternoon.

  They were bouncing along the path like puppies, scooping up snow with their leather gloves and tossing it at each other, so involved in being together and silliness that was otherwise absent from both their lives that they almost didn’t hear the baby crying.

  Peyton looked around, his covered head swiveling as he looked over the frozen trees and snow. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” Raji asked, laughing. Her breath fogged her sunglasses as she panted, drifting fog over the sun-sparkling snow.

  A thin whine sang over the snow.

  Peyton pulled his hat off and yanked his scarf down, still scanning the snow banks. His blond hair stuck up on top. “It’s coming from over by the arch.”

  He started running overland through the knee-deep snow.

  Raji followed him as best she could, but the snow came up to her thighs. Even though she ran through the path that Peyton was breaking, he outdistanced her quickly.

  Over by the Greywacke Arch, a Gothic-looking overpass thing, Peyton crouched. Raji could hear him speaking softly.

  When she caught up to him, he was talking to a woman huddled under the bridge.

  The woman’s wild, uncomprehending eyes and open mouth made Raji take a step back, but Peyton was already stripping off his coat in the icy air.

  The baby was still wailing in distress.

  “Nice to meet you,” he told the woman, his deep voice pitched low and soothing as he wrapped his coat around her. “You’re going to be fine. I’m so proud of you for finding this arch to take shelter.” He unwound his scarf from his neck. “I’m just going to wrap your baby up a little more. You’ve done such a good job, keeping them warm. Boy or girl?”

  “Girl,” the woman grunted.

  Peyton wrapped his knit hat around the cap that was already on the baby’s head and then swaddled the infant in his scarf. “My friend here wants to hold the baby for just a minute. She loves babies. Can she?”

  The woman nodded, her greasy hair escaping her hat.

  “Thank you.” Peyton passed the baby to Raji. “Tuck her inside your coat, up against your body. Make sure she can breathe but try to get her warm.”

  Raji took the baby and tucked her inside of her coat. The baby stank of a very dirty diaper, and her soft skin was icy against Raji’s chest. She held the infant as carefully and yet tightly as she could, pulling her arms inside her coat and leaving the empty sleeves to protect the baby as much as possible. She tried to evaluate the baby, to check her vitals, but getting her warm seemed most important. The baby was certainly breathing as she wailed. No respiratory distress, anyway.

  Peyton said, “I’m just going to make a quick phone call.”

  “No police,” the woman said. “No government.”

  “No, not the police,” Peyton said, so gently. “An old friend of mine. Jennifer,” he said into the phone. “Hey, I was out walking in Central Park, and I found a person here with a baby who could definitely use your services. No police, all right? No government.”

  The woman settled back against the arch, satisfied.

  The baby settled down and nuzzled against Raji, hiccupping just enough sad little cries to reassure Raji that she was still breathing in there.

  A few minutes later, very few minutes considering how far into Central Park they were, four people drove up on snowmobiles.

  One woman hopped off and surveyed Peyton standing in the brutal cold in just a sweater. “Jesus Christ, Peyton. Vivica, get him a blanket. Is this our friend?”

  “Yes, Jennifer,” Peyton said. “Raji is holding the baby.”

  “Breathing?” Jennifer asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Than
k you, sweet Saint Jude.” Jennifer crouched down. “Honey, what’s your name?”

  Another woman slapped a folded blanket at Peyton’s midsection and walked over to Raji. “I hear you’ve got the baby?”

  Raji nodded. “She’s inside my coat.”

  The woman nodded. “This is unusual, but I’m going to ask you to accompany me to an—” She looked back at the mentally ill woman huddled under the arch and dropped her voice. “—ambulance who will take the baby to a hospital. We don’t want to expose the baby to the elements any more than we have to.”

  Raji said, “Let’s go.”

  The woman started walking to the snowmobiles. “I’m Vivica. I figure we should be on a first name basis. I’m sorry, but we’re going to get a bit up close and personal. I’m going to ask you to sit on the front of the snowmobile but facing backward, so the wind hits your back. I’m going to wrap more blankets around you. We’re going to go as quickly as is safe to get the baby to medical care but not die in a snowmobile accident. Are you okay with this?”

  “Yes, I’m good,” Raji said.

  After a quick snowmobile ride that froze Raji’s back, they met an ambulance on the street. Raji climbed in, and they closed the doors before they opened her coat to take the baby from her. A blasting heater warmed the back of the ambulance in less than a minute.

  The EMT took the baby carefully from Raji, holding the child with two hands. “Good color. You did a good job keeping her warm,” the woman said, checking the baby’s vitals. Her grape fingernails bulged through her beige gloves. Her voice rose. “It’s okay now, baby girl. We’ll take care of you.”

  Vivica drove Raji back to Peyton. This time, Raji rode behind her on the snowmobile.

  When they got back, one of the other social workers had loaded the woman onto another snowmobile, promising her, “We’ve got a lovely place for you to spend the night. It’s warm, and I promise there will be black bean soup. Good job sitting on the snowmobile. Now, I’m just going to get on behind you, here.”

  They drove off, crawling over the frozen snow toward the road where Raji had seen another ambulance waiting.

  Jennifer turned to Peyton. “You have some weird talent for sniffing out homeless people.”

  Peyton waggled his phone at her from where he clutched the blanket around his shoulders. “It’s a good thing I still have you on speed dial. Usual contribution?”

  “Not everyone gives us ten thousand dollars when they find a homeless person who needs our help.”

  “I’ll transfer the money when I get back to my hotel.”

  “It’s appreciated, Peys. We’ll take care of them.”

  Jennifer and the others drove off on the snowmobiles, leaving Peyton and Raji to trudge the short distance back to the path and then back to their hotel.

  On the way, she asked him, “You just happened to have a social worker on speed dial?”

  He shrugged. “I lived over by Lincoln Center for six years, until last summer. I have a weird knack for finding homeless people in crisis. It’s not so much a talent as an obvious outcome when you’re roaming the streets, going to performances and clubs and parties until all hours of the night. After a couple of my calls were routed through the police, which sometimes caused setbacks, Jennifer and I figured out a more direct connection. She works for Catholic Services.”

  At the hotel, Raji let Peyton warm up in a hot shower before she pounced on him. “You’re giving her ten grand?”

  “That’s my usual contribution when I make their lives harder by insisting that someone needs help immediately.”

  “Every time?”

  He frowned. “It was two or three times a year, not every week, and I don’t even live here now.”

  “Whatever happened to your Old Money policy of not paying the bill when someone else will?”

  “What?” Peyton asked, toweling the water from his hair. The tops of his ears were a little too pink like he might have gotten a mild case of frostbite. His skin, usually golden and tanned, was mottled pink and white.

  She sat behind him on the bed, leaning against his back, trying to warm him up some more. “When you and Xan Valentine were bickering over who was going to hire Andy as the band doctor, you said that the Cabots hadn’t kept their wealth by arguing when others were perfectly willing to pay the bill.”

  “That’s an entirely different situation,” Peyton said, waving away her protestations. “Andy should be the doctor for the whole band, and she’s good at it. She treated Tryp’s ulcers the first months, thank God. This is different. It’s charity, desperately needed charity. I have routes set up for donating to charities. In the other case, well, you know how I told you that the Cabots are Old Money?”

  “Yeah.” Hell, yeah, she remembered.

  “We’re American Old Money, meaning that our wealth goes back to the Revolutionary War when some family members financed piracy against the British, which was a very lucrative investment. Let it suffice to say that Xan Valentine is European Old Money, which means they’ve had centuries, even a millennium, more time with their money at compound interest. The Cabots are rich, but Xan Valentine is wealthy. His family is orders of magnitude wealthier than us newbie Cabots. I mean, If he wants to pay the good doctor’s salary, he’s welcome to.”

  “I did not know that about the rock star. Doesn’t he have a working-class British accent?”

  Peyton snorted. “He used to pretend to have one, but he gave that up and speaks with his French and Monegasque accents most of the time now, at least in private.”

  Raji fought to keep her jaw from dropping. Monegasque. “He’s from Monaco? The tax shelter of the billionaires?”

  Peyton turned and slid his arms around her, holding her against his cool skin. “Maybe someday, if we ever decide that we can tell people that we’re seeing each other instead of keeping all this a secret, you can ride in one of Xan’s several airplanes, maybe the jumbo jet with his family’s noble crest on the tail.”

  SXSW

  IN Austin, Texas, Peyton was lying in a hotel bed with Raji as they sipped stale room service coffee.

  His shoulders ached, and his hands cramped. Brilliant afternoon sun shone through the wide window, heating the air even though it was only March and the air conditioning grated at full blast. The humid air in the room felt too warm, except for in the path of the air conditioner, where the cold, wet air chilled his skin.

  The day and night before, he had performed a bruising three-show schedule that Xan Valentine had booked for the South By Southwest music festival.

  Killer Valentine had started with a full performance at the Moody Theater in the early evening, their standard three-hour set with a short intermission and staggered breaks. The three thousand-seat venue was where they filmed the television show Austin City Limits, and the steep seats rose to the rafters many stories above the stage. It was like performing at the bottom of a hole of screaming fans.

  After that show, the band had been rushed by SUVs to the YouTube at Coppertank venue for an hour-long private show that streamed live on the internet.

  After that, after fucking that, they had played a pop-up concert, an unannounced hour-long set at the Victorian Room at the Driskill Hotel for less than two hundred shocked people.

  A thousand festivalgoers thronged outside the hotel, trying to get into the surprise show.

  Peyton was surprised that there wasn’t a riot or that people weren’t crushed in the melee outside.

  That fucker Xan Valentine was insane.

  After the last set had ended at three in the morning, Xan couldn’t even talk. He had croaked and grabbed his throat. Georgie had hustled him into the bedroom of a hastily rented hotel suite to have him do cool-downs, but he looked like he was having problems breathing.

  The triple play was a stunt that might jolt Killer Valentine to freakish superstardom, sure, but Jesus, that Xan Valentine was in-fucking-sane.

  The band had holed up in the suite for hours after that until the mob drifte
d away and they could go back to their own hotel at dawn. Peyton had thought for a while that they were going to have to call a police helicopter to get them out.

  But when it was finally over, Peyton was left trembling with adrenaline and tossing with wild-eyed insomnia as he stared into the darkened hotel room.

  He had dozed fitfully for a few hours until Raji had arrived, bumping into his hotel room with her weekend bag. She’d tumbled into the bed with him.

  In an instant, her mild floral perfume, her pixie, perky black hair, and her bronze, silken skin decorated with gorgeous tattoos overwhelmed him. The crazed adrenaline of the stage that was making him twitch and clench his fists flowed away, leaving only hunger for her.

  Afterward, Raji was lying on her stomach beside him, her leg thrown over his and nattering on about how she’d saved a woman’s life in the emergency room. The overworked ER resident had called cardiothoracic for a consult because he had just known that the fiftyish, overweight patient presenting with abdominal pain must be having a heart attack.

  When Raji had shown up to evaluate the patient, the woman had insisted that the excruciating pain was not a heart attack. Something else was wrong.

  All the other examining doctors had dismissed the woman’s elevated white blood cell count, which indicated infection, and her squeaky-clean EKG because she was over fifty and overweight, so it had to be a heart attack.

  Raji had listened to the patient, palpated the woman’s abdomen, and sent her for an MRI to rule out appendicitis.

  Yep, it was definitely appendicitis.

  The gastro surgeon had told Raji later that the organ had been on the ragged edge of rupturing. An hour’s delay could have led to peritonitis and possibly the woman’s death.

  “Doctors don’t listen enough,” Raji told Peyton. “The most important thing is to listen to the patient.”

  Peyton had been running his palms and fingers over Raji’s naked ass while he listened to her, palpating the velvety skin on her butt.

  The smoothness of her skin and slim curves of her ass fascinated him.