by Tia Siren
But something held me back. This was a business arrangement. I already shouldn't have stayed over there the night before, or the other nights that week. But at least on those other nights, I'd stayed over there because we'd had sex, which was part of our business arrangement. This time, I'd just gone over there for a cuddle. After taking him to meet my parents.
I groaned. None of this was turning out to be very businesslike, and I knew I needed to bring it back to that. I was starting to feel overwhelmed by my feelings, and that was a bad place to be.
Fortunately, Erica was home when I got there. She took one look at my face and instantly knew something was wrong. “I've got some ice cream, but it's not cookie dough flavored,” she warned.
I laughed, but I suddenly surprised both of us when that laughter turned into tears.
“Oh honey,” Erica said, coming over to me and pulling me into her arms. “What's that bastard done to you?”
I shook my head. “He didn't do anything,” I sniffled. “But you were right when you told me to be careful. This is proving to be harder than I expected it would be.”
Erica held me. Then, she guided me over to the couch, sitting us both gingerly down on it. “Do you know if you're pregnant yet?” she asked. I shook my head miserably, and she sighed heavily. “If you are, nine months is going to be a terribly long time to feel like this,” she pointed out.
“I can't go back on the arrangement now,” I told her, feeling a bubble of panic rise in me. She was absolutely right, but how could I get through nine months, knowing that once I popped a kid out of me, Michael probably never wanted to see me again?”
“I doubt Michael is that much of a cold-hearted dick,” Erica said. “If you tell him that you're having second thoughts, that you're this upset about it, I doubt he would make you go through with it. I don't think he's going to sue you to enforce the contract.”
“What if he does, though?” I asked, my voice raw and scared. I should have thought this through before signing that damned thing; I didn't know what I had been thinking. “I can't afford to be sued.” I paused. “Anyway, it's not about the contract. I don't mind carrying his baby for him. I just don't know what to do about the baby. I don't think I want to give it up, but I also know that I could never raise it. And then I'd still have to have another baby and give it up to him.”
Erica was silent for a long moment, just patting my back. “If you're okay with having the baby, maybe you need to cross that bridge when you get to it,” she said. “What I mean is, once the baby is born, then you can worry about who is going to have custody over it. The main thing you need figure out right now is if you're even willing to have that baby. If not, you probably need to steer clear of Mr. Needs-An-Heir.”
“I don't know if I can,” I sobbed. “He's a regular at The Shift.”
Erica cracked a grin. “Now you know my pain every time I break up with one of my boyfriends,” she joked.
I managed a watery smile. Finally, I took a deep breath. “I can't avoid him,” I told her.
“Then maybe make sure you're not alone, in a private place, with him anymore,” Erica suggested. “I can keep an eye on you while you're at the bar.”
“Okay,” I said in a small voice. I paused. “I took him to meet my parents.”
“You did?” Erica asked, sounding shocked. “How did that go?”
“I think Mom's in love with him,” I told her. “Dad was thrilled too.” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “Sorry about the waterworks; I'm probably just over-tired.”
“Do you need to take a night off work?” Erica asked sympathetically.
I snorted. “You know I can't afford to do that,” I told her.
“For the last time, would you worry about your health and sanity more than you worry about the rent payment?” Erica asked, but there was no malice in her voice, just genuine exasperation.
I smiled at her. “Thanks,” I said, giving her another hug.
She sighed and stroked my hair. Clearly, it was on the tip of her tongue to say something else, but she refrained. I was grateful for that, at least.
I thought again about texting Michael, but again, something held me back. I needed to pull back from this situation for a little while. For the sake of my sanity, like Erica had said.
“I'm going to go try to take a nap before work,” I told her.
“All right,” Erica said. I could see that she was still worried about me and that almost set off a fresh wave of tears. Fortunately, I managed to make it back to my private portion of the room before the tears spilled over.
Chapter Nineteen
Michael
When I got back to the apartment with lunch for the two of us, Paige was nowhere to be found. I frowned, setting the takeout containers down on the dining table and walking through the apartment. “Paige?” I called. She wasn't in the shower or in the walk-in closet or anywhere else. “I brought sandwiches and pastries, from the bakery down the road.”
Still nothing. After I had cased the place, when I didn't see her anywhere, I walked through it again, trying to see if she had left a note for me somewhere. But there was nothing, not on the kitchen counter, not on the dining table, not on the night stands.
I frowned and checked my phone. Sometimes, I accidentally clicked on “airplane mode” when I was trying to adjust the screen brightness in the dropdown menu. Normally, I would hear and feel when I received a message, but if it had been in airplane mode this whole time, I would have missed it if she had texted me. I winced, feeling guilty even though I wasn't even sure that was what had happened. But when I checked my phone, I saw that I was receiving signal as usual, and I hadn't received any messages from her.
I started to text her, to ask where she had gone and why she hadn't told me that she was leaving. I wanted to tell her that I had just stepped out for lunch, but that I had hoped she would be there when I got back.
I wanted to tell her about the raging hard-on that I had woken up to, the one that had necessitated me standing for five full minutes in a cold shower before I felt okay going out in public. I had been hoping that once I was back and she was awake, we could take care of that. I had even come up with exactly what I wanted to do with her.
I hardly ever used the tub in my bathroom. It was big enough for four people to sit in, probably, and it had jacuzzi jets to boot. I had thought it would be nice to get in there with her, the water slickening our movements, making our hands glide over one another's skin. I would enter her in one smooth thrust, pushing all the way in, finding that spot which I had previously found with my fingers.
We would both come there, and then I would wrap her up in a soft towel and carry her into the bedroom, laying her gently down on the bed. I would make her come again, using only my mouth this time, getting to listen to all those delicious, sweet noises that she made.
There was one hitch in those plans, though: now, she was gone.
I frowned, thinking back, trying to remember if she had mentioned having anything that she had to do that day. It was a Monday, a normal work day, but then again, she didn't work a normal, 9-to-5 job. Even if she had work at The Shift that day, she probably wouldn't need to be in until later in the day.
And even if she had work, that didn't excuse the fact that she hadn't told me that she was leaving.
I felt surprisingly unhappy, thinking that she had left without letting me know. It was up to her if she wanted to do that. I wasn't holding her prisoner. But I had at least expected her to leave a note, or at the very least to have texted me. She had done it the last time she had woken up in my bed, so what was different about this time?
Of course, if she woke up and found that I was gone, she might have thought that I expected her to leave as soon as she was up. I frowned, giving myself a mental kick for not leaving her a note. But the last time, she had texted me anyway, before she had found the note, so it wasn't so strange that I had expected the same thing to happen this time.
I finally settl
ed on a simple: Hey, where'd you go? I brought lunch.
I waited for a reply, but I was starving. Finally, I had to dig into lunch without her. But I could barely taste the food; I was too busy trying to dissect her behavior and figure out what had happened. A few hours later, I still had received a text or call from her. That was when I started to get worried.
I knew, logically, that she must be okay. I didn't think that she had been kidnapped from my apartment or anything crazy like that. But I wondered if she was feeling okay mentally. Maybe she was having second thoughts about this. Maybe she had realized that she was already pregnant and she wasn't sure how to tell me.
Is everything okay? I asked.
A few hours after that: I'm getting worried, please let me know you're okay.
Finally, I received a response, but when I saw it, my heart plummeted. It was just one simple word: Fine.
That wasn't exactly the response I had been hoping to receive, although I wasn't sure what was the response I was hoping for. Obviously, something was wrong with her, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Things had gone fine with her parents, I thought. And she had seemed to think so too. And then she had come back to my place with me, and we had a good night's sleep.
Maybe she had been expecting me to have sex with her, though? Maybe she was upset that we had just gone straight to sleep? But I had thought that was what she had wanted, given how exhausted she had seemed in the car. Besides, if that was what she was upset about, why not talk to me about it, rather than just disappearing like that.
No, it had to be something else, but I was at a loss as to what it was.
The next couple days she didn’t respond to my texts, as I tried to figure out what the problem was. Finally, on Wednesday night, I decided that the only course of action was to go to the bar and try to talk to her in person. Maybe I could get her to tell me what was bothering her.
The bar was dead when I went in there, which made it easy to make contact with Paige.
But she barely looked at me as she slid me a whiskey-on-the-rocks, without even asking me what I wanted. I thought about joking that I had been planning on a beer that night but that this worked too, but I didn't think she would take it as a joke. I felt like I was walking on eggshells around her, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I had done wrong.
She clearly didn't want to talk to me, either; as soon as she had handed me the drink, she made a beeline for the other end of the counter and started wiping down the bar, taking extra care to get it totally clean, even though The Shift wasn't a clean kind of bar. In fact, I didn't think I had ever been in there on a night when the bar hadn't been sticky with the minor spills of a thousand glasses of alcohol that had been passed over to customers.
I thought about following Paige to the other end of the bar, but I didn't know what to say to her when she was like this. Plus, for all I knew, if I followed her down there, she was going to find some excuse to come back to this end of the bar, and I wasn't going to follow her back and forth all night like it was some demented tennis match.
I just wished she could be reasonable. That she could talk to me if there was something wrong. I couldn't help her out if she refused to tell me what was wrong.
And for some reason, I desperately wanted to fix whatever it was that was wrong.
Finally, Paige came back down toward my end of the bar. I continued to sip at my drink, just watching her. “Paige, what's wrong?” I finally asked her, keeping my voice quiet.
Her eyes flickered towards me, and then she went back to scrubbing away at the bar. “Nothing's wrong,” she said with false cheer in her voice. “I'm just busy working.”
“I know that,” I said. “But come on, I can tell something's wrong. You're not talking to me.”
“Of course, I'm talking to you,” she said.
“No, you're not,” I told her, shaking my head to emphasize my words. “Or at least, you're not talking to me like you were last week.”
Paige was quiet for a moment, acting as though all her focus was on a sticky spot on the counter.
“Paige, what's changed?” I asked softly. “I can't help you work through this if you don't even tell me what's bothering you. If I did something wrong, don't you think I deserve to know what it is?”
Paige stiffened at that, only confirming my belief that I had done something wrong. I frantically wracked my brain for what it could have been, but the only thing I could think of was the thing that I had already come up with: that I had had sex with her, and now she had decided for some reason (out of spite?), she wasn't going to have sex with me ever again.
I had to admire her strength of resistance. It was taking everything I had not to leap over the bar, toss her over my shoulder, and carry her off into one of the back storerooms. I was hard just watching her, and she wasn't even doing anything particularly sexy. She wasn't even dressed particularly sexy that evening either, unless you were interested in the early '90s grunge look of ripped jeans and an oversized flannel shirt.
Suddenly, I found that I was very interested in that look.
I shook my head and pushed my attraction aside, trying to reason through this. “Paige, please can you talk to me?” I pleaded, reaching out to catch her hand.
To my surprise, Paige slapped my hand away. I blinked, stung by the sudden stroke of violence.
Erica materialized out of nowhere, giving Paige a pointed look. “Paige, I know you've got your beef with him, but this is your workplace,” she said in a low voice. “As far as the other guests are concerned, you are just a bartender, and he is just another customer. If you want to have a serious conversation, or if you want to give him another slap, I need you to take it someplace else.”
Paige looked as though Erica had betrayed her, but after the shock wore off, I could see that she understood. She swallowed hard and nodded. “If I'm not back in ten minutes, come get me, though.”
“I promise,” Erica said, giving me a murderous look.
I followed Paige outside, feeling surprisingly guilty, even though I didn't know exactly what it was that I had done wrong. Whatever it was, it had to be bad, though.
“Paige, look, whatever it is that I did,” I began as we got outside.
But there was something about it, the way the moonlight and the streetlights shone on her face, the way her tongue darted out to wet her lips, the way those eyes shone so innocently. Whatever I had been about to say, I broke off saying it, backing her up against the brick wall of the alleyway and kissing her passionately.
“Fuck,” I whispered in between kisses. “I missed you.”
Paige looked up at me with wide eyes. “You missed me?” she asked incredulously.
I felt a blush spread across my features, and I only hoped that in this dim lighting, she wouldn't be able to see it. “I know it's only been a couple days,” I mumbled, but before I could finish that, Paige had her arms around the back of my neck and was pulling me down into another kiss.
She took control of this one, and I liked that, I realized. The kiss was messy, full of fire and passion, our teeth clashing against one another's and our lips pressed almost too tightly together. It was enough that when we finally broke the kiss, both panting for air, my lips felt swollen and abused, and from the way she brought her fingertips up to trace the edge of hers, I could only assume that she felt the same.
I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Then, I gave a short laugh. “We can't just kiss and forget all about it,” I told Paige. “I really do want to know what I did to upset you.”
“You didn't do anything wrong,” Paige said shortly.
“It doesn't seem that way,” I told her.
“Look, just forget about it, okay? Now, do you want to have sex with me or not?”
Chapter Twenty
Paige
I couldn't believe those words had come out of my mouth. In fact, I felt as though there were someone else there, taking over my body. Surely I wasn't there in the alleyway
outside The Shift, making out with Michael. Especially not after my tears the other day. I had vowed that I wasn't going to get close to him again, not when I was so uncertain about this whole situation, this whole agreement that we had signed on to.
I had known that he was going to show up at the bar, sooner or later, and I had tried to prepare myself for that. I had schooled myself in what I was going to say to him. Erica had promised that she would be right there with me the whole way.
I scowled a little, thinking about that. Some help she was right now. She had been the one to say that Michael and I shouldn't be alone together, not if I was trying to resist him. But here, she had practically pushed us out the door.
It wasn't fair to blame her, though, I knew. I understood why she had asked us to leave, because it did look bad for me to have slapped Michael, even on the hand, in front of a bunch of people who didn't know the backstory there. Or who didn't even know there was a backstory. That kind of thing could get a person in trouble, I knew. There was nothing else that Erica could have done. I just shouldn't have slapped him in the first place.
But I knew that touching would lead to trouble. Would lead to this.
I couldn't seem to keep my hands off him; even while we weren't kissing, I was running my fingers along his chest, up underneath his shirt. I slid one of my hands down lower, finding his member hard beneath his jeans. I groped him, feeling him twitch in response.
This was where we always ended up. This was why I had agreed to be his surrogate in the first place, because I wanted him in a way that I could describe. I remembered how lonely he had seemed, last week when we had talked. He seemed lonely again tonight, but possibly even lonelier than he had before. As though he knew exactly what he was missing out on, now.
He bent so that his forehead was pressed against mine, our breath mingling between our mouths. “You don't know how badly I want to have you, right here and right now,” he growled.
