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9. Ashton

nine

Ashton

"Wait a second. Let me get this right." Milo, my best buddy, held up a hand, fighting—and failing woefully—to bite back a laugh. "You had a one-night stand with a woman, who then became your boss, who then became your baby momma?"

I rolled my eyes at his theatrics, downing my glass of whiskey in one go. "It's not funny, Milo. In fact, it's actually a fucking nightmare."

He threw his head back and thundered a laugh so loud people turned around to look at us. The downtown bar in Manhattan we were currently at, Cafe Cabana, was a particular favorite of ours. I found an odd sense of solace behind its dim walls and familiar ambiance; inside these four walls, I'd made some of the best decisions of my life. There was no soft music drifting from a background speaker. Instead, the only sounds that filled the air were the loud conversations from the older men, the clinking of beer glasses, and the uncontrollable laughter from some couple in the corner.

I loved it. It reminded me of a childhood I never had. Nostalgia for a place I'd never known.

With Milo, I stumbled upon the Cafe about four years ago. It quickly became a clandestine retreat where the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders with each step through the door.

Plus, it helped that we were unknown in this bar. It was an acceptable distance from New York. No one from the highly affluent circle we worked in would ever think of coming in here, with its decrepit exterior or chipped painting on the walls. It was for people like me, people familiar with poverty who'd segued into wealth.

I'd never been able to let go of my roots, if one could call them that. As someone who'd grown up in the system and had been tossed around from home to home every few months, finding the one place where I really felt at peace was like striking gold.

"Damn, man." Milo wiped the sides of his eyes, gasping. "You've got yourself in some deep shit."

I sighed. "Don't I know it. And the worst part is, she's so fucking infuriatingly hot. I want to strangle her half of the time and fuck her the other half."

Milo's brows raised. The only annoying thing about being friends with someone for twenty years was that most conversations between us were done using facial expressions.

"Don't give me that look," I muttered. "I know what you're thinking."

His voice was full of teasing. "What am I thinking?"

"That there's something there." I finished the last of my beer just so I could avoid looking him in the eye. Milo could be persuasive sometimes, but I didn't want him to get in my head.

"Well, isn't there? I mean, you had unprotected sex with a woman you didn't know, Ash. That never happens, and I would know because your house is a fucking Durex outlet."

I snorted. He was right, damn it. I never fucked without bagging it. Selma had to have bewitched me for me to damn the risks involved. And to hell they had gone.

Guess who's going to be a father?

"I don't know what to do, man," I said. "I never saw myself with kids, you know that."

Milo nodded, gulping from his bottle of Budweiser. "I understand. Given our childhood."

I nodded. I knew he would get it. Milo always did. He was just like me. We'd met twenty years ago in the orphanage I grew up in. He'd been the new kid, deposited at the boys' home like currency by his aunt when she'd gotten tired of him. Milo had been calm and calculating, and it was what had caught my attention.

He'd known how to blend in and be "one of the boys", a skill I'd admired because I'd had difficulty making friends. Eventually, we'd hit it off, neither of us knowing that our friendship would be the kind that would survive the test of time. We had no family, so we became each other's family. I looked out for him, and he did the same for me. Whenever we got into trouble, the other would find a way to get him out of it. Or get into it with him just to lessen the punishment on the other person.

Our first test came when Milo was adopted at eleven, a year and a half later. For the first time in my life, I'd cried all night until my eyes dried up. When his adoptive parents had first come to visit the orphanage, we'd purposely looked unkept, just to divert any attention away from us.

But our plan had backfired so hard it was like a slap in our faces. They'd taken one look at his dirty nails, unruly sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and fallen in love with him. They'd pointed at him with one finger and said, "This one."

After he left, I'd spent the next six months floating away. There had been no reason to laugh or be happy, and I'd stayed away from the other kids. They stayed away from me, too, because I was always looking for a fight. It was the only way I could let out my anger. Pain.

Six months—that was the time it had taken Milo to return to the orphanage. I'd never known joy like I did that day. In fact, I still remember how it felt. It turned out that Milo had not been the most subservient child. Who'd have thought?

Over the next few years, we both got adopted a few more times, none of which stuck. We always found a way back to each other.

We left the orphanage when we were sixteen to fend for ourselves. The orphanage did its best to take care of us through the years, but after some time, the funding became less and less until it completely stopped. They could only afford to feed the younger children twice a day, and the older children had to survive on less.

It was either we left, or we died of hunger. The choice wasn't a hard one.

Small jobs here and there saw us through the days. I'd fallen in love with photography during one of my shifts as an attendant at a photography studio, and Milo had chosen to be a DJ. If you asked me, all that hard work paid off because we weren't the wealthiest people in the world, but we could afford food to eat and as many roofs over our heads as we wanted.

Milo was more than my best buddy—he was my brother.

"Imagine me with a kid," I muttered, letting my eyes roam round the busy bar in search of a waiter. "What would I do with it?"

"Feed it, cloth it, and let it crawl around the house." Milo shrugged. "That's what my buddy Steven does. He's a new father, too. Oh, and change dirty diapers. Sometimes, it gets in your hair."

"That's disgusting."

He raised both hands. "Hey, man, I'm not the one who was stupid enough to have unprotected sex with a woman I'd never met."

My eyes connected with a waiter, and I signaled for more beers before looking at him. "Would you let that go? I get it. It was stupid."

Four bottles of Bud appeared. I pushed two toward Milo.

"Let's not forget that you like her," he added.

I frowned. "Don't be fucking ridiculous."

"Is it, Ash?" He gave me a knowing glance.

"Bullshit," I argued, lifting a bottle to my lips. As I gulped, I tried not to think about Milo and his stupid analysis.

I liked Selma? Pfft. I'd sooner get a vasectomy without anesthesia. She was the most hard-headed woman I'd ever met. It was no wonder her ex-boyfriend left her for her cousin. Who was to say he didn't get tired of her overbearing nature?

But then I thought about how eagerly she'd responded to my touch this afternoon in her office. My body hardened at the memory, and I gripped the bottle so tightly that I was surprised it didn't break. She hadn't been overbearing then. In fact, she'd been so malleable that I probably could have gotten her under me a second time if that entire tit fiasco hadn't happened and brought us back to reality.

Milo started counting his fingers. "First, you had reckless sex with her, and from the look of things, you want to do it again, then you agreed to work for her—"

"With her," I cut in with a frown.

"Semantics. You agreed to work with or for her without pay, which you never do, by the way, and now she's carrying your baby, oh, and all of a sudden, you want to be in the child's life? How many women can you think of right now that you would be comfortable doing all this shit with?"

I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out. Was Milo right? I shook my head. Of course not. The only things I felt toward Selma were hatred and fierce sexual attraction. Beyond that, she was merely another woman in passing.

And my relationship with women over the years has been fleetingly casual. I didn't do any of that romance bullshit, and I didn't sleep with a woman more than once. That was my rule. Come in, get fucked, get out. No sleepovers, no promises, no expectations.

Every single woman I'd been with knew that—well, not Selma, because that part of the conversation never came up. There was also that little peculiarity of me still wanting her after the first time.

Fuck that. Selma was no different from the other women I'd been with, and my wanting to fuck her a second time meant nothing. There was always a first time for everything. Milo had no idea what he was talking about.

I glared at him. "You need to shut up once in a while, motherfucker. You talk too much."

"And you can't talk at all because you know one of us is right, and it's not you," he responded cheekily, obviously enjoying that he was getting on my nerves.

"Suck a dick."

"I would for the right price," he grinned, extending his bottle toward me in a ‘cheers' gesture. I growled at him, causing him to laugh.

"Aw, don't be sour, sweetie," he cooed. "Think about it like you'll finally have some responsibility in your life."

"You act like a fucking child. That's responsibility enough."

He chuckled, changing the subject to a recent gig he did in London, but I wasn't listening. I was too busy thinking about what he'd said.

While having kids had never been something I wanted because I'd spent a long time being surrounded by them, and all they did was whine and cry and ask for food, I didn't have it in me to walk away from Selma and the child that was growing in her womb.

I'd never gotten parental love, and I would be damned if I let my child come into this harsh world under the same circumstances that I had. Unlike what I'd told Selma earlier, I wouldn't fight with her over the child. But I was going to make sure she never had an opportunity to run or hide from me again.

Whether she liked it or not, I would play an active role in my child's life, and that was final.

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