Was that love? It sounded incredibly dull. Not like the explosion that was Zarley in Reid’s life, or the reset that was Cara in Owen’s. But he didn’t want a firebomb and he didn’t need saving. He was the dull one compared to his partners. Stable family, ties to the community, top class education. If he cashed up, he’d never need to work another day in his life. But he’d ridden all the way to success on the back of his friendship with Reid, because genius forgot to eat and specialized at pissing people off. He was also the disposable one. He didn’t have Owen’s wizardry with numbers or ability to charm investors, and although he was a good people manager, he didn’t have Sarina’s insights and keen emotional intelligence. People with his capabilities were a dime a dozen in the Valley. It wasn’t that he lacked ambition or was lazy, but he’d been lucky; right place, right friends, right time.
But another word for dull was happy. He wasn’t an angsty guy. He didn’t have hang-ups like Owen or demons to beat like Reid. He liked software engineering, he had professional pride about his work. He dug old cars, and middle-of-the-road music and blockbuster movies. He liked hacking about in the kitchen and having his family and friends close and he didn’t feel the need to change any of that.
Under the shock, and beyond the family infighting, he was okay about Ana’s baby, because that kid would be family and he’d help take care of it, be around to watch it grow. Boy or girl, he’d fall in love with that kid like he had with Ana.
How did he explain that to Sarina, that a hands-off donor daddy thing was like a horror show to him, that seeing her launch into motherhood on her own tripped the kind of unease in him that made him want to drink till he tamped down the anxiety the very idea caused?
How was that not another double standard? What was happening to Ana deep down freaked him out less than what Sarina wanted to do. It made no sense at all. Sarina was older, financially secure, her career solid and her family behind her. It bothered him he wasn’t dealing well with the situation.
He’d thought it was the belief that a kid needed two parents, old-fashioned, but kids were hard work, that’d put him against Sarina’s plan; that, and wanting something more for her, but here he was agreeing with Ana her baby didn’t need some other kid who hadn’t planned on being a father involved in its life.
Every time he tried out a set of words to explain himself, it looked like he was judging Sarina, like he didn’t have faith and trust in her, and it was so very much not that. Reid had gotten close to how he felt, that hands-off wasn’t good enough. But Sarina had asked for their help. If he fathered her child, he wouldn’t have to stand somewhere else while it grew up. He could teach it to be as good a cook, as bad at cricket as he was.
He’d overreacted big time. Unexpected power failure. Emotional system shutdown. He wasn’t built for this kind of stress. He went to sleep without being any closer to knowing what to say and he was parked outside Sarina’s at an indecently early hour, grateful her car was in the drive.
This time he rang the doorbell. Stupidly worried she wouldn’t open the door to him.
She pulled it wide. “Hi.” She looked down at herself; fluffy gown, barefoot, and her hand went to her hair to tuck it behind her ear. “I’m still on vacation. Owen took my security pass.” She shrugged; as though that would stop her getting in to Plus if she wanted to be there. “You’re on your way in.”
“No, Reid told me to not to show up till I got my shit together.”
“Look, I, ah. Maybe.” She let a blue plume of hair fall over her face, but he could still see he’d upset her. “This meeting awkwardly is getting to be our new thing.”
He reached for her, but dropped his hand. “Ah Sarina, please don’t get upset again.”
She shook her hair back. “I’m not sure how you thought I’d react.”
With his tongue thoroughly glued to the roof of his mouth and his jaw wired shut, it seemed, he had no clear thoughts and his whole body vibrated with tension.
“I’m going to make use of the morning and go swim some laps,” she said.
His swim shorts were in his gym bag in Gita’s boot. “Want company?” Bold move. She could say no. She could probably drown him; she was a much better swimmer.
She took a long time to say, “Why not?” He counted it as a victory. He drove them to Avery Aquatic where they’d all swum as students. It was some kind of miracle they managed to time it so there were no swim groups training and they got a lane each in the rec pool.
Sarina had a clean, precise dive and cut through water like a porpoise with a purpose. He followed her in and couldn’t catch her, content to see her splash half a lap in front. His lungs were burning by the time she stopped and they had the pool to themselves. He hung off his elbows on the side of the pool and watched her plant her hands on the concrete and lift her body, twisting to sit on the edge and dangle her legs in the water.
She wore a navy swimsuit built for speed, but he hadn’t seen her wearing so little for a long time. It did odd things to him. The last time that’d happened was Plus’ tenth anniversary dinner, where she’d worn a red evening dress that’d hugged every not for the office, hidden in sweats, curve he’d forgotten she had. She’d cried in his arms that night over Reid’s stupidity and he’d had a weak moment of wanting to thank Reid for fucking things up and giving him the chance to hold her, comfort her.
That was the night he knew for sure she no longer had a thing for Owen, that wasn’t simply about being the best friend to him she could be.
No, he was deluded. He’d never forgotten how much Sarina could turn him on. Just parked that information in a far lot and caught the shuttle bus to get away from it. She’d been hot in college, but he’d been overwhelmed by Stanford when they first met and his first priority was the work, not letting his family down and graduating with the best degree he could manage.
Once he’d stopped panicking and realized he could cope at school, it’d been the dream of starting a business with Reid that kept him from getting complacent. He dated because that’s what you did and it was fun and he was good at it, and it led to sex and that was great, but it wasn’t the main game.
Reid couldn’t be fussed with the distraction of dating. Owen was engaged to Lacey and Sarina was enough to tongue-tie him. She still was.
And she didn’t need to be nearly naked and dripping wet to do it.
Unflustered where he would worry, unconstrained in her thinking where he preferred to know the rules before he broke them. She was deeply intuitive and easy in her confidence. Strong in a way that made him admire her, want to be with her and yet feel unworthy at the same time.
He was the one who’d brought her into Plus, convincing her she could be the difference between their success and failure; anxious that as just another engineer, he was the weakest link in their chain, and always looking for ways to make himself indispensable.
Once she joined up with them, she was officially off-limits. A colleague he could be friends with. A friend he could cherish but never risk by asking for more. Not that it had ever been discussed, it was simply an official, unchallengeable fact.
Except watching droplets cascade down her body he realized official only existed in his head. Reid scorned relationships until Zarley. Owen mourned Lacey’s death and didn’t connect with anyone seriously until Cara, and he and Sarina had danced around each other for most their adult lives, friends and colleagues who could be more.
She tipped her face up to the sun, a worshipful movement. She was beautiful, but already such a part of him he’d failed to see her clearly. He did love her and it wasn’t a dull thing, not a best friend thing, it was about more than noticing if she wore lipstick or hadn’t slept well, it was so bright it exploded behind his eyes and momentarily blinded him. He dunked himself to clear his thoughts but it wasn’t some fantastic notion he could shrug off, it was the roar of truth in his body. It shook though him like a sonic boom.
He’d loved her too much to risk losing her.
Unconsci
ous of the cataclysm wracking him, Sarina wrung water from her hair and it was pure porn. The practiced movement of her hands pulling a hunk of hair over her shoulder, twisting it into a roll, squeezing along its length and freeing a stream of water. Holy fuck, he’d have to stay in the pool until he could get a handle on himself.
All the brakes were off now. Sarina didn’t pine for Owen and Owen had never wanted her that way. She’d stopped dating and Dev’d pretended not to notice, because he was terrified to act. He’d used Shush as some kind of shield against being rejected, scared to ask for what he wanted in case Sarina said no because no would kill him. Better to be business partners, indispensable as a best friend, than to wreck what they had at work and privately, to know he might lose her forever in either capacity.
And he’d lost her anyway, to loneliness, to practice dating, to the cheese man, and the idea she needed to make a life on her own, as a single mom.
And still she’d been there for him, offering him everything he wanted and had been too afraid to claim.
“You took me by surprise,” he said. Never truer words. He’d tripped and fallen and never recovered. He needed to now.
She looked down at him. “I didn’t manage it well. My fault. I get I put you in an intolerable position. It’s too easy for me to forget the boundaries between us. I needed some distance to think about things. I hope we can get past it.”
She swirled a leg in the water and he caught hold of her foot to stop it, to press his point. “What happened is all on me. Those boundaries, they’re artificial. You have no need to feel bad.”
She looked away and he took the opportunity to haul himself out of the pool and sit beside her. He touched his shin to her calve but she watched clouds forming overhead.
“Sarina, look at me.” Her jaw tensed and she lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“Nothing about what I did was anything you should easily forgive.” He took her other hand, desperate to touch her, to have her touch him, and still she didn’t turn her face. “It’s complicated for me right now, but underneath the shock I’m honored you think I’d make a good donor dad.” Honored and dizzy with the knowledge of what he was going to say next.
“But you can’t do it.”
“I can’t.”
She took her hand out of his. “Because it’s complicated.” Anger and pain in those words. It only made him more certain. “You don’t need to worry about it.”
“The complication is timing.” Now he got her eyes. In terms of important conversations, this one was the summit. It trumped everything else. “Ana is pregnant.”
Sarina’s face showed her surprise.
“It wasn’t planned. She wants to keep the baby. She doesn’t want the father involved. My parents are going to be a problem and she’s in law school for years yet. I don’t want her to give that up.”
“Oh Ana. Twenty-one is young to be a mom. She’s turned to you?”
“Ana’s baby is my family. I can help her, make it easier. She’ll stay with me and we’ll work it out together. My parents will come around eventually, Rani too, but until they do, I’m all she’s got.”
“I see. That explains things.”
“No it doesn’t. I’m ashamed of the way I reacted.”
Sarina looked away. “We were wrong-footed all around.”
“We were. We have been for a long time.” Far, far too long. The reason he was happy with his car and cooking, with his life, was Sarina. She was as inseparable from his work as his downtime. “I have a question for you.” Because he was scared still, it wasn’t the real question, it was the easier plug-in that was less likely to spook her with its intimacy.
She took his hand again, shuffled closer with a wet splosh, so their hips grazed, their thighs aligned. Her capacity for forgiveness made him lose his breath. He hadn’t forgiven himself. He had to breathe through a few beats to get the words out. “Would you consider waiting?”
“You’re saying you’ll be my donor but not now because of Ana. That’s a change of heart.”
“I’ve been doing some work on my heart, it needed a system update. It’s only part of the question.”
She pulled away to look at him. “How long would you want me to wait?” She had time. Four or five years before her fertility declined and might make it harder to conceive naturally. “A year, two. When Ana graduates? When would be enough time for you? When would how my body functions not be an issue for you?” She said that with such weary bitterness, he rushed the next words out.
“Marry me?”
She laughed and the sound choked off in a gasp. “What did you say?”
It didn’t help his confidence any but he got some more words strung together. “Sarina Gallo, would you marry me, please?”
She dropped his hand and pushed away. “What is wrong with you?”
“This is not the most romantic proposal, I can do better, but after what happened I didn’t want to wait. You’re my best friend, you invited me to be the father of your baby, and I don’t want to be hands-off donor sperm. I want to have a baby with you. I love you. If we marry, you don’t have to worry about not having anyone to father a child.”
“Wow, you’re right. That wasn’t very romantic, and I don’t think you can do better, Dev. We’ve never even kissed and now you want to marry me so you can be my on-tap donor and resident cook and babysitter.” She shook her head, spraying him with drops of water. “I’m blown away by the—”
He shut her down with a finger to her wrist. He captured a drip and traced its path, up her forearm, into the angle of her elbow, then over the slight rise of her bicep to her shoulder. He’d borked this, but he would put it right. He put his whole hand to her collarbone, then around to the back of her neck. A shudder of desire, desperate for the time it’d lain dormant, rippled through him and caught in her eyes. She held her breath and he snatched what she’d saved as he took possession of her mouth. Not a tidy kiss, not restrained, or exploratory, he was through with practicing love with her. Sarina was his and no one else was borrowing her heart or her body for the rest of her days.
He took that kiss to open lips and seeking tongues and she fought him for control of its depth, one hand snagging in his wet hair, the other slapping and sliding on his chest as he yanked her closer. Every nagging worry, every stored concern fell away as he tasted her. There was only Sarina and their wet bodies coming together, the trembling heat of the sun in her skin and the helpless sounds she made.
He did that to her, made her nails bite his pec, made her teeth nip his bottom lip, and he needed more, with years of making up to do for being a coward, content to be layer two connectivity, afraid to take the lead and ask for what he wanted.
When she climbed over him, he took them to the water where their bodies could be as weightless as the gravity of never having kissed before. As light as the years of denying himself this sweet, deep ache of lust so strong, he lost the sense of where they were, who they were, and rode the swift tide of pleasure to wrap her legs around his waist and mesh their bodies together.
It was like vandalism, malicious destruction of his heart, when she pushed back and floated apart, tethered only by an outstretched arm and his greedy hand.
She flicked water at him. “You can’t kiss me like that and make it all go away.”
“Go away. No.” Never leaving. Fuck his heart, full-on attack in the making it was thudding so hard.
“The years I waited for you to make up your mind. The agony of deciding you never wanted more and I had to move on, take a lover, find a partner, have a baby by myself or risk never having my own family. You don’t get to martyr yourself for me. You don’t get to cancel all that out with a kiss that, that, burns me up.”
“It’s a start.” It was a loop with no end, eternal. She’d come to see that.
She splashed him again. “You don’t get to go from friend to, what, I don’t know what this is?”
“I have loved you since I fell over you.”
<
br /> Another face full of water. “No, that’s not true. You feel guilty. You made me forget what it was like to want other people, to feel desire and that, that—”
He didn’t have the words to argue with her, or the strength to be apart. He pulled her closer and she dove into him, pushing him back into the side of the pool, his face in her hands, her lips smashing down on his. But she pushed away before he could meld her to his body, sliding out of his grip, wiping her hand across her mouth.
“You made me doubt myself, doubt I could be loved enough, and you were right there, right there like I always hoped, wanting this the whole time and holding back.”
“I didn’t want to ask too much. Didn’t want to risk losing you from my life.”
“So you asked for nothing and when I did, you threw it in my face.”
God, she was going to drown him. “Sarina, please. Let me make it right.”
“You don’t get to make it right. You don’t get to have me now, because I fell for you when you tripped over me. For your good, good heart and your sense of what’s right and the way you care, but it doesn’t matter anymore. We waited too long. I got over you.”
She lunged for the side of the pool and pressed to her feet. She would take him to the bottom of his every fear, hold him under and spike his lungs so he’d never take a thoughtless breath again. “No? No.” It couldn’t be. She didn’t love him.
She stood a thousand miles above him, shining in the sun when she said, “I won’t marry you,” and he was tangled in his false hope and anchored in the gloom of defeat.
FIFTEEN
Sarina touched her lips. It was like Dev had seared them from her face. How had she never guessed he would kiss like it was his only reason to live?
Water rippled around his shoulders and his hair was slicked back, his lashes clumped and spiky. There was nothing soft about Dev without his clothes on, nothing so comfortable as movie night, as lazy breakfasts.
Dev wet wasn’t cute, he was cut your heart out. And given she’d had to harden hers against the disappointment of his casual affection and romantic indifference, it’d taken one hell of a sharp instrument to leave her with a life-threatening wound.
Sold Short (Sidelined Book 3) Page 13
