Chapter 9 Perry
PERRY
He calls. He doesn’t text first.
He calls.
At first, I stare at my phone because I don’t recognize the sound it’s making. But then I realize why it’s ringing. Dr. Damian Baylock is calling. No one calls anymore. Not unless someone’s dying or you’re over forty. Which, to be fair…he is. The second one.
I let it ring twice more before answering. “Hello?”
“Perry.” His voice slides through the speaker and into my spine, deep and steady and entirely too comfortable in my space.
I have a ridiculous urge to sit up straighter even though I’m alone in my living room, one twin asleep in a bassinet to my left and the other snuffling softly in the swing to my right.
“Doctor,” I reply automatically.
He exhales something that might be a laugh. “Are we still doing that?”
“Probably not.”
A beat.
“I thought I’d try something outdated,” he says. “A phone call.”
“It’s bold.”
“You’ve used that word twice to describe me. I think I like it.”
I shift carefully on the couch. My body is still…not mine. Everything aches in inconvenient ways. When my brain even flirts with sexy thoughts, my uterus sends up a protest flare. Too soon. Way too soon.
But talking? Talking is safe. Maybe.
“I didn’t realize you were old-fashioned,” I say.
“I’m not. I just prefer hearing your voice.”
That does something to me that I do not appreciate. “Well, congratulations. You’re hearing it. Now what?”
“And now, we talk. Unless you can only flirt via texting…”
I roll my eyes even though he can’t see me. “You flirt like someone who’s been successful at it for a long time.”
“I have been,” he says calmly.
The honesty of that makes me laugh. “Confident.”
“Experienced.”
“So, you’re saying you’ve been around the block?”
He chuckles lightly. “Not for a long time. But yes, back in my day, I did my fair share of dating.”
“I’d say it’s still your day, Damian. The years have been more than generous to you.”
A brief pause. “You’re not so bad at flirting on the phone yourself. Care to continue?”
“Yes.” I settle deeper into the couch, adjusting a blanket around Nicholas with my free hand. “What does one ask on a first…phone call?”
“Basic things. Where did you go to school? What do you like? What don’t you like?”
“That sounds dangerously like dating.”
“It might be.”
My heart kicks a little too hard at that. “You first. Where’d you go to school?”
“Undergrad in Connecticut. Medical school in Boston. Residency in New York.” He speaks about it plainly, not bragging, just stating a fact.
“And your favorite color?” I press.
There’s a pause. “Blue.”
I smile to myself. “Predictable.”
“I thought so. That’s why I hesitated to admit it. But I like what I like. How about you? School? Color? Etcetera.”
Not such a great topic for me. “I tried out a few different schools, trying to find myself, I suppose. But all I found was guys who liked treating me like a pretty hobby. Eventually, I graduated with a degree in literature, as if I could do anything with it. Oh, and I don’t have a favorite color.”
He scoffs. “Everyone has a favorite color.”
“Not me. Can’t choose between platinum, gold, or sage.”
“I notice a theme. Is sage because it’s the color of money?” he teases.
“How very United States-centric of you. And yes.”
He laughs hard. “I like a woman with priorities. What were your grandparents like?”
We talk about nothing and everything for almost twenty minutes. The twins shift and murmur around me, but he doesn’t comment on the background noise. Doesn’t ask.
Good.
His voice is warm. The kind that makes you lean closer without realizing you’re doing it. It is way too soon for me to like this. But I do.
By the thirty-minute mark, I’m pacing. Not because I’m nervous. Because if I sit too long, everything stiffens in protest. Postpartum is a scam. No one explains that your body feels like it got into a bar fight and lost.
“You’re quiet,” Damian says.
“I’m mobile,” I correct.
“Are you walking?”
“Yes.”
“Should you be?”
“I pushed out twins, not a grand piano.”
He laughs, low and unfiltered, and it travels straight through the phone and into my bloodstream. It’s unfair how attractive that sound is.
“So,” I say, steering us back to safe territory before my brain wanders somewhere it physically should not, “what do you do when you’re not saving lives and hosting intimidating brunches?”
“I don’t host brunches.”
“You attended one.”
“Under duress.”
I grin. “Noted.”
There’s a brief pause, and then he answers properly. “I raft.”
“Raft?”
“White-water.”
I stop pacing. “You?”
“Yes.”
“You seem like a museum membership kind of man.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“That’s pretentious.”
“I may have a tad bit of pretension in me. Comes with being a Baylock…”
He tells me about the river—how the water hits you like it’s personal, how there’s a moment in every rapid where you have to commit fully or you capsize. He likes that. The commitment. The calculation. The fact that you can prepare, but you can’t control everything.
“You like risk,” I say.
“I like measured risk.” He continues, “I thought about taking up climbing. But I saw the aftermath of a fall. Open tib-fib fracture. Internal bleeding. It ended badly.”
I wince. “So you like to flirt with danger but not marry it.”
“That’s one way to put it. Amber was certainly the safe choice. Or so I thought.”
I almost want to pry into that, but it seems like second date territory.
“And you?” he asks.
“What about me?”
“What do you do for fun?”
I glance down at Walker, who’s now awake and staring at the ceiling like he’s contemplating philosophy. Or peeing.
“I’m more of a…chaos architect,” I say.
He hums thoughtfully. “That tracks.”
“How so?”
“You strike me as the type of person who figures out what she wants and never stops until she gets it.”
I try to stop my laugh from sounding nervous. I’m not sure I manage it. I change the topic. “What kind of music do you like, Damian?”
Rock, as it turns out.
I admit I like trashy pop when I need to reset my brain. He doesn’t judge.
The twins start fussing at the same time. I freeze. There’s a second where I consider lying. Old party-girl instincts—lie to make sure everything seems fine on the surface.
Instead, I say, “Hold on.”
“You alright?”
“Yeah.” I scoop Nicholas up and balance the phone between my shoulder and ear. The crying softens quickly.
“You sound…busy,” he observes.
“Just life,” I say lightly. “Or at least, my life now. Is that too weird for you?”
“Not even a little.”
And the conversation restarts.
We’re an hour in when he tells me about the dog.
It comes up because I ask what he does when he leaves the hospital and doesn’t feel like going home.
The question hangs there for a second, heavier than the others.
I don’t know if he lives alone. I don’t know if Amber ever really moved out of his shadow.
“I feed a stray,” he says finally.
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“A stray dog,” he clarifies. “He lives in the alley behind the hospital.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Scout.”
I smile into the phone. “You named him.”
“He refused to respond to anything else.”
“That’s not how dogs work. They respond to food.”
“Can’t speak for other dogs. But it’s how it works with him.”
He tells me Scout showed up last winter. Mangy. Suspicious. Thin but not starving. He started leaving scraps. Then soup. Apparently, Scout likes soup.
“Soup,” I repeat.
“Chicken noodle. No onions.”
“You cook for him?”
“I buy it.”
“That’s adorable.”
He ignores that. “He stays in the alley. I’ve tried taking him home.”
“And?”
“He stopped eating.” The softness in his voice when he says that makes something tighten in my chest. “I took him to a vet. No injuries. No illness. The vet said some dogs get used to being outside. Being alone. Territory matters to them. I took him out of his territory and put him into mine, and he didn’t like that. ”
“So you let him stay at the hospital?”
“I feed him. I bring a ball sometimes. We throw it until I get paged or, if it’s after my shift, I throw it until I’m too tired to keep going.”
I lean back against the wall, Nicholas finally asleep against my shoulder. “You’re kind of perfect,” I say before I can stop myself.
He goes quiet for a second. “Not remotely.”
“You feed a stray dog soup.”
He exhales. “That’s a low bar for perfection.”
“It isn’t. I promise you that.”
“You’re charitable, Perry.”
There’s a silence that feels different. Warmer. More personal.
One thought cracks through. I want to tell him. I want to say, You delivered our sons. You named them without knowing it. You’d probably feed them soup too. The words sit right at the back of my throat.
He doesn’t push. We sit in the quiet for a second, just breathing through the line. I like him. I like him a lot. And that might be the worst part.
But then time catches up to me, forcing a yawn. “Crap.”
“Everything okay?”
“You know how the phrase is dog-tired?”
“Yes.”
“It should be mom-tired.”
He laughs lightly. “Need to go?”
“I hate to admit it—God, it’s only nine thirty? I used to wake up at nine thirty.”
“At night?”
I nod as I speak. “Just enough time to shower, get dressed, do my hair and makeup, and pregame before the good clubs get slammed.”
“You really were quite the fun girl in college, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. College.” And right up until last year. “Time for bed, I guess.”
We say our goodnights, and he promises to call again soon. When we finally hang up, it feels like stepping out of a warm room into cold air.
The silence in my living room is loud. Nicholas is asleep on my chest. Walker is dozing in the swing, pacifier bobbing lazily with each breath. The house smells faintly like formula and whatever lavender candle Olivia insisted I light “for good sleep.”
I stare at my phone. He said he’d call again. Not text. Call.
Seriously, who does that?
Apparently, men who white-water raft and feed soup to stray dogs. I shouldn’t like that as much as I do.
I shift carefully, easing Nicholas back into the bassinet.
My body protests the movement in twelve different places.
It’s too soon to be thinking about anything physical with Damian.
Every time my brain wanders toward memories of New Year’s Eve, something in my abdomen reminds me I am, in fact, recently rearranged internally.
But liking someone? That’s allowed. I think.
I text Olivia to see if she can take a call, and she answers on the first ring. “Spill.”
“He called.”
“Well, how did it go?”
“He’s…good.”
“Good how?”
“Feeds-soup-to-stray-dogs good.”
She goes quiet for a second. “Oh no.”
The ugly reality is staring me in the face, so I might as well address it. “He’s too good for me, Liv.”
“Details.”
So I tell her all the details, including our flirtatious brunch interactions, and even she’s mooning over the guy. “He really is perfect.”
“It’s a problem.”
“You like him.”
“Unfortunately.”
She blows out a big sigh. “And he still doesn’t know.”
“No.”
“And he named them.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “I know.”
“After delivering them.”
I gulp audibly. “Yep.”
“That’s insane.”
“I’m aware.”
There’s a pause. “You have to tell him.”
“Not yet.”
“You’ve had nine months.”
“I’ve had nine months to avoid it,” I correct.
“And now?”
“Now I’m tired. I just had twins only a month ago. I’m hormonal. I’m crying because he feeds a dog soup.”
She laughs. “That tracks.”
“I need time. I need to figure out how to say it. How to handle Jason. Faith. Amber. All of it.”
“Perry,” she says carefully, “there’s drama…and then there’s whatever this is.”
“I know.” Because this isn’t just messy. It’s nuclear.
I look over at the bassinets again. Nicholas stretches, mouth opening in a silent yawn. Walker shifts, tiny fist punching at air like he’s already ready to fight something.
My sons. Damian’s sons.
“I can’t drop that on him right now,” I whisper. “Not when I don’t even know what I’m doing.”
Olivia sighs. “So what’s the plan?”
“I date him.”
She chokes. “Excuse me?”
“I date him. Casually. I get to know him. I figure out if this is real or just an attraction leftover from a New Year’s Eve mistake.”
“And then?”
“And then,” I say, staring at my sleeping sons, “I tell him.”
She’s quiet for a long time. “That’s either brave or catastrophic,” she says finally.
“Why not both?”
I tell her good night, then hang up and sink back onto the couch, exhaustion dragging at me in waves. Eyes closed, I listen to the soft, synchronized breathing of my boys.
One thing at a time.
I can handle one thing at a time. Or, well, I’d like the chance to handle one thing at a time for once in my life.