Sold Short (Sidelined Book 3)

by Ainslie Paton

  “Yeah, what about Dev?” said Reid. “And for the record, you thought I was asexual and I didn’t know what that meant, had to look it up.”

  Because it was impossible.

  She looked at Dev. “He’s. I couldn’t. It would be. Oh my God.”

  Dev’s voice snapped on his, “No,” and they all flinched. “Reid is a short-fused lunatic and Owen was a drug addict and you’d have a kid with either of them but not with me?”

  She was dimly aware of Reid protesting, but couldn’t take her eyes off Dev. “You’re too. You’re too.”

  “Not tall enough. Not blond. Too ethnic. Foreign. Brown?”

  This was a new level to the anger she could stir in Dev. “Stop it.” She stood so she was eye to eye with him. “You’re perfect. You’re the father I’d choose for my child. You’re the one I want.”

  “I’m the one?” He shouted, hands raised and fisted.

  “You’ve always been the one, but you don’t feel that way about me and you made it clear you don’t agree with what I’m doing.”

  “I promised my support, you know that.” Even angered, Dev never shouted like he was now.

  She struggled to control her breathing. It came in great heaving, embarrassing gulps.

  “She doesn’t want your support, man,” said Reid. “Sarina wants to have your kid.”

  Dev’s mouth dropped open, he looked from Reid to Owen.

  “Dev,” she said on a broken wheeze.

  Her best friend, the man she loved the most, wouldn’t look at her.

  He dropped his head into his hands. “That can’t be.” She waited for him to get over the shock of being pushed like this, of having that most intimate of requests land on him in front of Reid and Owen. When he looked up, it was in his eyes. Incomprehension. Her heart curled in on itself at the pain of it.

  “That’s never going to happen,” Dev said, and left the room with the secret of her dreamed-for future torn open and smashed under his feet.

  TWELVE

  The cop who pulled him over was more interested in Gita than the speed she was traveling. Dev could’ve avoided a ticket if he hadn’t come across as an entitled geek whose precious time was being wasted. But he’d needed to be away from Plus, from Sarina and that insanity of hers.

  Still channeling Reid on a bender, the first words out of his mouth when he walked into his apartment were creatively foul and made Ana, who’d refused to go back to college or her share house, or talk to anyone other than the college counselor and the nurse at the health center, flinch.

  Well fuck. She wasn’t stirring around in the fridge to organize a meal, she wasn’t doing schoolwork, she wasn’t acting like a responsible adult who conceivably could care for a baby; she was holding a hot pink pencil and coloring a flower.

  After she flinched, she cried.

  And he didn’t care.

  “This is not a hotel and I am not your parent. I don’t cook your meals or do your laundry or enable you hiding out. But that’s what I’ve been doing and it stops now. I said you could stay a weekend and it’s been over a week. You don’t have weeks to waste right now. You’ve skipped classes, haven’t left the apartment. Would it have killed you to make your bed or feed yourself, how about take the trash out?”

  She wiped at her face. “Don’t shout at me.”

  “Grow up, Ana.”

  “That’s not fair,” she yelled.

  “Exactly what a twenty-one-year-old who is dumb enough to do drugs and have unprotected sex with three men says.”

  “Why are you being so awful to me?”

  Because life was confusing, choices were hard. Sometimes the fucking universe had it in for you and the timing stank. “Because you’re pregnant and you have to make decisions and you can’t even unstack the dishwasher.”

  “I came to you for support.”

  “And you’ve got it, but that doesn’t mean I’m in charge. You’re in charge, Ana, and if you can’t handle looking after yourself, how are you going to handle being a mother?”

  Her tears had stopped flowing and she was cool in her anger now. He wasn’t quite in the same place. He should’ve gone to the gym before coming home. He needed to hit something.

  “I’m leaving.”

  It would’ve been more convincing if she wasn’t still sitting at the table with the colored pencils spread all around. “Great.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Not stopping you.”

  “Why aren’t you stopping me?”

  “Because you’re fucking in charge of you.”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  His cell rang. The tune was the old 80s hit from Flashdance, “Maniac.” It was Reid. He let it go to message bank. “You what?”

  She was terrified, that’s what. She was a kid and she’d screwed up and she was rightly paralyzed by the choices she faced. And she really only had three: to have the baby and keep it, to have it and adopt it out, or to terminate. There were no other variables, no decisions to be made about sex and height and hair color or worry about whether personality was a birthright or learned. All of those decisions had already been made by artificial stimulants and inhibition.

  He had no business taking things going sideways in his own life out on her. He was a monster for shouting. He’d shouted at Sarina too. He’d walked out on her because she’d offered him something he couldn’t now have, because of Ana who couldn’t do this without him. But he loved Ana more than he could hate her for the way her problem affected him. And he loved Sarina too much to get in her way.

  “Ana, I’m sorry.” She gathered her pencils and his cell rang again. He had no intention of talking to Reid tonight. “I shouldn’t have gone off at you. Don’t go. I’m too tired to cook, we’ll order in, okay?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He clacked his back teeth together to stop another parental snap sounding off.

  “But I need to take care of myself, so I’ll order for us.”

  “Good.” His cell rang again. Maniac. Again.

  “You should get that.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  She waggled a yellow pencil at him. “Now who’s being a baby.”

  He groaned and went for his phone and the doorbell rang. They both froze, Ana with her fingers to her laptop, open on a home delivery site. “No one knows I’m here,” she whispered.

  Would Sarina come after him? Recalling the appalled expression on her face had him palming his eyes. She was entitled to know why he melted down, but he couldn’t tell her without betraying Ana. Whatever food Ana ordered, he’d be unlikely to be able to eat it.

  The bell went again. “Are you going to get that? Or do you want me to adult,” Ana said. Annoying. He deserved it. He went for the door. Reid on the other side.

  “I called,” Reid said.

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  “Didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Figured.”

  “You were out there the whole time. You had to be.”

  “Like I said, figured you wouldn’t want to talk.” Reid looked over Dev’s head. “Is that Ana? Hello, you.”

  Ana’s, “Hey, Reid,” sounded suspiciously flirty, and month of Sunday’s, was that an eyelash flutter? “Are you staying for something to eat?” she said.

  “He’s not.” Dev gave Reid a shove out of the doorway. “Talk outside.”

  “Bye, Ana.”

  Ana’s, “Bye, Reid,” was muffled by the closing door. And then there was no muffling anything. He’d cooked for Reid when they were students and too poor to eat out and Reid was too obsessed with building Plus to bother with food. They’d lived together in a shitty, roach-infested apartment for years before they made any money out of the company. There was no avoiding the fact they knew each other inside out.

  “You’d better have a good excuse for how you handled that.” Reid didn’t say what that was, but they both knew. Dev sat on the top step of the short flight to his apartment. Reid sat
beside him. “Is Ana living with you now?”

  “No, yes, maybe.” He couldn’t let her go back to her share house and she wouldn’t want to be at Mom and Dad’s. Was his place suitable for a baby? He had seven months to work it out.

  “You going to talk to me?”

  “I can’t.”

  “It’ll be a long night sitting here then.”

  If he got up and went inside, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d left Reid sitting on his stairs. But this time it wasn’t Reid who’d screwed up.

  “You love Sarina and she offered you an incredible thing and you spat in her face. You need to talk about why so I can understand it.”

  This was humiliating because he knew it and because it was Reid, of all people, calling him out.

  “You destroyed her. She could barely stand after you left. Owen took her home to stay with him and you have to know how bad she felt, because she let him.”

  Ana had already broken his heart. So it shouldn’t be possible for Dev to feel so ripped up. “It shouldn’t have happened like that. In front of . . . It wasn’t right to make it a public performance.”

  “I’m with you there. But it did happen that way and now we’re here and I know this is not how you want it.”

  “When did you grow up? When, Reid? When did you go from so lacking in self-awareness it was a sackable offense to this, I don’t know, this, super-reasonable bully?”

  “When I found something worth changing for.” He meant Zarley and having a second chance with Plus when he was reinstated. “While I was doing that, you were standing still.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve loved Sarina for years and you never acted on it. I always thought it was because you had someone else in your life you loved more. Am I wrong?”

  Reid and his fucking never wrong. “There’s someone else who’s close, but it’s not love.”

  “Then help me out here. A woman you love tells you she wants to have a baby and asks if you’ll be her sperm donor. No strings. She’s not saying you have to play an active role. She says she chose you above the one-percenters, above Owen and me, who love her too. I get that it’s not an easy decision. I don’t get why you made it so final and threw it in her face so brutally.”

  If his head sunk any lower, his forehead would be on the step below. “I don’t think it’s the right thing for Sarina. She has time. She doesn’t need to do this.”

  “That’s not your decision.”

  “She just made it my decision.”

  “She made it your opportunity. There’s more.”

  “No.”

  “I told Zarley not to wait up. I told her I’d wake her when I got in and make her feel good because my day went south and the only thing that will make me feel better about that is her gorgeous mouth on mine. You’re stopping me from feeling better, Dev, from making my woman happy.”

  “Excellent, Reid, make it about you.”

  “I’m trying to make it about you and Sarina, but you’re being fucking unhelpful. Why is Ana here?”

  “Sisters, they visit. It’s a thing they do. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  “I’d agree except you were shouting at her.”

  “You listened.” Reid had no shame.

  “I heard raised voices. I didn’t listen in. One of those voices was yours. It stopped me in my tracks. It’s this new thing you do, shouting. I gave you a billion gig load of reasons to shout at me over the years and you never did, so this new shouting thing worries me.”

  He shrugged and his neck protested. “People change. We just proved that.”

  “You were more effective when you didn’t shout.”

  That sense that he and Reid had swapped character traits wasn’t going away. “Could you do it? Give Sarina your sperm and step away. Have a kid with her, but not be the dad?”

  “Been thinking about it, on the bike on the way over, while I was out here waiting for you. Owen said he would absolutely do it. Said Cara would be onside. Classic Owen, right, selfless. He’d make it work. But me.” Reid cracked his knuckles. “I think women have us beat at the parent thing. We’re surplus stock, they don’t need us anymore. Sarina will be an awesome mom, I have no doubt about that, but if I’m going to take that step to father a kid, I don’t want to stand back from it as though it’s outside me. Think Mom would take me down for it too. So, buddy, I get why this is hard and then I don’t, because you love Sarina and that should make all the difference.”

  Dev stood. He had to do something because he was close to tearing up. “I can’t be there for her now. If the timing was different. Maybe.”

  “Bullshit about timing.” Reid followed him upright.

  “Ana is pregnant.” It was out of his mouth before he remembered he shouldn’t talk about this.

  “Christ, she’s what, twenty, no, twenty-one.”

  He nodded. “She’s nine weeks. Thinks she wants to keep it.”

  “How are your parents taking it?”

  “The sum total of people who know are you, me, Ana and her nurse and sexual health counselor at Stanford.”

  “She’s not telling the father?”

  “Doesn’t know who he is.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “She’s a kid, Reid. She was high, and had consensual unprotected sex with three men at a party. Took a morning-after pill and is in the low low percentage where it doesn’t work. None of those kids figured diapers were in their future. She can’t get organized to take the trash out and she thinks she wants to have this baby.” That wasn’t altogether fair. Ana’s behavior this last week wasn’t typical, she was no princess, no spoiled brat, but then he didn’t know what was typical for her anymore. “If she has this kid, I’m going to be the only father it has.”

  “You have to tell Sarina. I get this is Ana’s business but you have to give Sarina something after what went down.”

  He cleared his throat, looking for an excuse to stall. Three days ago Ana told him she was hoping she’d miscarry. This morning she told him she wanted to keep the baby. She was on a hormonal roller coaster and he was trying to slow the pace of it so she could think straight. He was making himself sick in the process and hurting other people, hurting Sarina as if she was nothing to him.

  “Dev, Owen will make Sarina take time out. Don’t come back to the office until you and Ana are okay and you’ve made time to talk to square things with Sarina.”

  Absolutely not. There was no way his private life was interfering with his professional one. “There are—”

  “Whatever it is at work, it’s not yours to worry about until you’re on top of this. I’m not asking. Ana and Sarina are two of the most important people in your life, don’t fuck it up with them.”

  Reid had him beat. There was a pizza delivery guy out front. “Want to stay for a piece of pie? Ana would like that.”

  “Pie or Zarley’s legs hitched around my hips?” He took a step down. “I’d rather starve.” Reid smiled. “Give Ana a hug from me,” and he was gone.

  Ana had unstacked the dishwasher, laid the table, which was extravagant given it was pizza, and tidied up the kitchen and living room. There was no sign of any coloring pencils. He’d probably overreacted about that, it was supposed to be a meditation, some new age shit he didn’t understand, and Sarina would, that’d caused a surge in global pencil production.

  Ana set glasses and a jug on the table. “Will you come with me to tell Mom and Dad?”

  He put the pizza down. “What are you going to tell them?”

  “The truth.” She frowned. “That I did a risky, thoughtless thing and I’m pregnant. That I don’t want the father involved and I want to keep the baby.”

  “You want to keep it?”

  She nodded. A hand went to her belly, no sign of baby, but he’d caught her making that gesture often. “I really think I do.”

  “They won’t like it.” That was a mild curry. So mild it’d never heard of chili.

  “I only lik
e it some days.”

  “You don’t have to make all the big calls at once.” So why was Sarina moving so fast on something so important?

  “I know, and I’ll have the blood test so I’ll learn who the dad is. I know I’ll have to talk to, um, them.”

  “I’ll be with you if you want that.”

  She gave him a grim smile. “Whoever it is, I’m hoping they agree to let me make the decisions. I’m not expecting their support, just you know, not to make it harder. Mom and Dad, they’ll be upset and I think it will take a long time before they’re okay with me, and Rani is never going to let me forget, but I’ll have to deal with that, and if I have you then, I’m going to be okay.”

  She opened the box lid and his stomach growled at the aroma. Maybe he could eat after all.

  “I’m sorry about how I’ve been this week, Dev. I didn’t mean to make it harder for you. I just needed to act out, I guess. It won’t happen again.”

  He looked at the ceiling. It so would. “You’ll always have me, Ana. Sometimes I have to act out too.”

  THIRTEEN

  Sarina woke to something wet touching the back of her hand. She was in a strange room and could hear panting. She rolled over and stared into the face of a very happy beagle.

  “What time is it, Sammy?” It was head-tilt, tail-wag time. The room was dark, but Sammy normally went with Owen to the park for a pre-office workout so it was either very early, in which case she could curl up for a little longer, or it was time to get up and at ’em.

  She fumbled around on the bedside table and found her cell. It was later than she’d expected. She’d need to hustle if she wanted a lift to the office with Owen.

  She borrowed the silky robe Cara had lent her and went downstairs with Sammy.

  “Did he wake you?” Owen called Sammy to his side. He was half dressed for work, hair shower wet, barefoot in jeans, but without his shirt. When he bent to pat Sammy’s head, Sarina caught a glimpse of his surgery scar. “Wanted to let you sleep.”

  Cara was silky-robed like Sarina. She made a want coffee gesture and Sarina nodded. “Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be ready to go,” she said to Owen, taking a mug from Cara.