by Amelia Wilde
“It’s Dayton Nash, Mom.” I look into her eyes. I will not feel ashamed about this. There’s no reason to feel ashamed about this. “He’s back in the city. We’ve been seeing each other.” This is true. We have been. We might not have a title, but…
“That’s good,” Mom says warily. “That’s good.” She turns back toward my dad, then looks back at me. “Listen,” she says softly. “Honey, are you sure that he’s the right man to—”
“He’s the perfect man,” I tell her, my voice rising. “And if you’re going to act like that, then there’s no need for me to—”
“Sunny.” She cuts me off, stepping back in for another hug. “I only want you to be happy.”
“I’m so happy, Mom.” My throat goes tight saying the words. “I’m so happy.”
20
Dayton
Come over.
The text comes in early, just past nine in the morning on Sunday. Summer didn’t have much to say when she called yesterday. She was vague, distant.
I run a hand through my hair. I was dreaming when the phone buzzed. Something about a hospital. I couldn’t find her. It was fucking terrible.
Right now?
Right now.
I throw myself out of bed and feel around for the prosthetic. My leg still burns from yesterday. I worked a couple overtime hours at Killion. It’s my last week at the place, but I need all the money I can get. My skin paid the price.
I shove my leg into it and take a flannel shirt from the end of the bed. If Summer wants me over there, I’ll go. My gut twists into a cold, heavy knot.
This can’t be good news.
It’s frigid, freezing, and Summer is bundled up in a hoodie and thick sweatpants when I get to her apartment. It’s silent and gray inside, reflecting the cloudy day. She doesn’t say anything as I step inside.
“Whitney’s coming back for brunch,” she says finally, once the door’s locked behind us.
“Okay.” Whitney’s one of those people who is so fucking enthusiastic, it’s exhausting to be around her. Summer loves her.
“I’m going to tell her what’s happening.”
“That’s good,” I say carefully. “I think you should.”
She looks up at me, defiance written on her face. “I also think we should decide what we’re going to do.”
“About the baby?”
“About us.”
“Sunny—”
“Don’t say my name like that,” she says sharply. “I got up at the asscrack of dawn to get back here and talk to you about this in person. It was snowy.”
I stifle a laugh. She looks so pissed about the snow, but it’s not really about the snow. It can’t be.
“I know you hate driving in the snow, so I appreciate it.”
“Well, I appreciate knowing what’s going to happen.”
I put a hand on the line of her jaw and tilt her face up toward mine. “Summer.”
“Yeah?”
“What is it you want to talk about? I’ll talk about anything you want.”
Her mouth presses into a thin line. “I told my parents we were seeing each other.”
“We are.” I grin in spite of myself. “We’ve seen a lot of each other.”
That’s when I see it—the fear in her eyes, and the hope. “What are—” She clears her throat. “What are your plans, then?”
She’s not asking about the baby. I’ve promised her we’re in it together when it comes to the baby. She’s asking about something else entirely.
It’s a rush of emotion, a storm cloud breaking apart over me so powerfully that the pain in my leg pulses to match it.
I can’t really be with her…but I want to.
I want her to be mine so much that I’m willing to put her in harm’s way. I shouldn’t fucking do that.
No. The thought is loud and clear. You’re protecting her. This is the best way to protect her, and you.
“I hope you know how—” I’m lost for words, and Summer’s eyes fill with tears. She starts to turn away and I catch her by the elbow. “Sunny, that’s not it.”
“What is it, then?”
“I was hopeless without you.”
Her eyes widen.
“I was fucking hopeless. I’m—” I gesture at my leg. “I’m…fucking broken.”
“You’re not,” she protests.
“I didn’t see any way out of a shitty existence. But when I saw you at that office—” I shake my head. This is getting sappy as fuck, and I don’t care. “I felt hopeful for the first time in a long time.”
She raises one eyebrow. “Is that why you tried to avoid me?”
There it is—that dread. “I tried to avoid you because I’m a risk.”
She scoffs.
“No. My life is a risk. I have things from my past that—that aren’t resolved.”
“Another woman?” Her voice cracks on the word.
“No. Nothing like that.” A solution is dawning in my mind. Why the hell didn’t I think of it before? Oh, because I was wallowing in the pain. Always the pain. Every day, every night. “I’m just warning you, Sunny, that I’ve been around some rough people.”
“I don’t care,” she says, defiance lighting up her face.
“They might not be done with me yet.”
“I’ll protect you,” she says, and laughs.
“But I want to be with you.”
Her shoulders slump with relief. “And not because I’m pregnant?”
“Oh, Jesus, Sunny, I wanted to be with you years ago.”
She pouts. “Why didn’t you?”
“There were mitigating circumstances.”
“Wes,” she says instantly. “That asshole.”
“He might have had a point.”
“He’s never had a point in his life.” Summer’s face goes red. “He’s always been wrong about you.”
I take her in my arms and wait. She looks up into my eyes and her body goes still and calm. Trusting. “I want you to make the best choice for you.”
“I want you to realize I’m an adult woman.”
I laugh. “Trust me. I know you’re an adult woman.” My cock jumps at the thought of her naked body stretched out on the sheets beneath me. “But if it’s too dangerous—”
“I want to be with you, Day.” She swallows hard. “Please. If you don’t want the same thing, tell me now.”
“Hey, Summer,” I say casually, like we’re walking down the hall in our old high school.
“What?”
“Will you be my girlfriend?”
“I don’t know,” she says, and then giggles. It’s the fucking cutest thing I’ve ever seen. “I might be too dangerous for you to—”
I silence her with a kiss. Her lips are warm and soft and willing, and I flick my tongue between them, testing. She opens her mouth and lets me in. By the time I release her, she’s panting. “Are we together now, then?”
“Fuck yes,” I say.
Summer gives me a wicked look. “Then make me yours.”
21
Summer
“I have news.”
Whitney clears her throat, then wraps her slender fingers around her martini glass.
I give her a look. “What are you doing?”
“Preparing to toast you.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes, I do,” she says smugly. “You’re going to tell me that you have a new boyfriend. A hot boyfriend. Named Dayton Nash.”
“That’s part of it,” I admit.
She raises the glass in the air. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says loudly, interrupting everybody at the nearby tables. “My best friend Summer has at last, at last—”
“Stop,” I hiss at her.
She lowers the glass. “What? This is cause for celebration, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say, blushing furiously. “But there’s—there’s more.”
“Oh, my God.” She puts the glass down on the table with a hard clink
. “You’re leaving me.”
“Maybe eventually, but that’s—”
“I can’t believe you would leave me for a man. Summer, we have a perfect arrangement. Our apartment is lovely. Our friendship has never been stronger. I pull you out of your goody two-shoes shell and make sure to feed the part of your soul that needs a good party, and—”
“Whit—”
“—you would throw all that away for Dayton Nash? He’s hot, but he’s not that great. He lives in Queens, for one thing, and that’s—”
“Whitney.”
“—that’s too far to commute, which means that if you move to Queens, we’ll never see each other again. How am I supposed to live my life if you’re—?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?!” Her shriek is so loud, it stops all the traffic at the restaurant.
“I’m pregnant.” I’ll admit—saying it out loud brings me a ridiculous pleasure.
Whitney’s eyes might as well be saucers. “Is it his?”
“Jesus, Whit, yes, it’s his.”
She leans back in her chair, closes her eyes, and fans herself with her hand. “How did it happen? Tell me every detail.”
“I got pregnant. From having sex.”
She keeps fanning. “It wasn’t just sex, was it? It was hot. It was furious. I bet those big hands of his—”
“We are not talking about this in a restaurant.” Not that I’ll ever describe to her the perfect length of Day’s cock, or the way his thickness is exactly right for me, or the way the head hits my g-spot when he— “We’re not.”
“Was it on the floor?”
“No.”
“Was it in—?”
“Whitney. Celebrate with me. I’m pregnant.”
She raises her glass again, but I can see a sheen of tears in her eyes. “A toast to you and your future baby,” she says, her voice shaking a bit. “I’m happy for you, Sunny.”
I sigh a little and raise my water glass. “But you’re sad, too.”
“Well, yeah. You’re the best roommate ever. You even do the dishes.”
“I do the dishes because it’s the right—”
“—thing to do,” she finishes for me. Then she takes a deep, cleansing breath and digs into her purse for her phone. “Give me your mother’s number.”
“Why? What for?”
Whit looks at me like I was born on another planet. “We have to start planning your baby shower.” She waggles her eyebrows. “It’s going to be epic.”
22
Dayton
The receptionist at Global Connect, Inc. smiles up at me from behind her desk. “Good morning, Mr. Nash. It’s finally starting to warm up out there, don’t you think?”
I scan my access card through the reader next to her desk. An access card. Through the reader. It’s a far cry from walking in past the foreman at Killion, who would stand there with his arms crossed, looking at everybody like we were late for a prison shift, even if we were ten minutes early.
Christine’s right. “It could be a little warmer. It’s almost April.”
She laughs as if this is the funniest thing anyone has ever said and waves me in.
I play it cool, like working in an office is a normal thing for me to do.
It should be normal, after almost a month on the job, but it still seems fucking crazy to me that I’m here at all. GC, even with the most ridiculously generic name I’ve ever heard for a company, isn’t the kind of place I ever dreamed I’d work at. It’s boring as hell to explain to another person, but basically, we’re a go-between for charities and nonprofits and the places they serve. Somebody has to arrange for shipping massive amounts of lifesaving crap all over the world. That’s us. It takes so much planning, it makes mission development look like target practice—too easy.
The hero’s welcome isn’t my favorite thing, but other than that—
“Good morning, Dayton.” Susan stands up from her desk to greet me. “How are you?” She’s in her sixties, silver-haired and poised, and she looks at me every morning like I’ve just shipped home from the front lines with a shiny medal pinned to my chest.
“I’m all right. How are you, Susan?”
“Very well. Very well, thank you.” She nods to herself—a job well done—and sits back down in her seat.
“Liar.” Simon. Good old Simon. He’s the only one in this place who doesn’t worship me so much that he’s afraid to joke. Conveniently, he has the cubicle across the way from mine, so he has plenty of opportunities.
I hang my coat up on the hook by my chair and swivel to face him. “Who says?”
“Your face says.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Rough night?”
I rub my hands over my face. Yes, there’s grit in my eyes and a heaviness at the corner that only coffee will dispel—hopefully—but as far as rough nights go, I’ve had worse. “No.”
“Shut up. You’re totally hungover.”
I wish. “I’m not.”
“You can admit it to your old buddy Simon.” He stands up, his own mug of coffee still steaming, and leans against the doorway of my cubicle. “Come on. Your girlfriend’s gorgeous. It’s okay to say you were up all night pleasing her, and—”
“If by pleasing her you mean holding her hair back from her face when she throws up. She’s pregnant and sick as hell.”
The expression on his face changes from teasing to serious and fatherly, even though we’re the same age. “Shit, dude. Yeah. My wife was sick all nine months.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness when it lasts all day.”
“Yeah.”
Simon perks up. “It’s the most incredible thing, though, when you see that baby for the first time. All your feelings change in an instant, and—”
I want him to go away. I want to go into the break room and make an inappropriate amount of coffee, then come back to my desk in silence, get the weight off my prosthetic. It’ll be easier to be excited about holding the baby when Summer isn’t so obscenely sick all the time.
Simon goes on and on about the miracle of holding your child, the words nothing more than a faint buzzing sound in my ears. Her face was pale this morning when I left—she called sick into work. She can’t sit in a chair in the office all day, feeling like that, but I know she hates to take time off. Sunny wants to be there.
So do something about it.
“—and when they laugh…God, it’s—” Simon looks rapturous.
I clear my throat. It’s not that I want to ask him these things, but if he knows something that’ll help Summer, I’ll admit defeat. “What’d you do to help her? Your wife?”
His eyes light up at the chance to share more insight. “Those Club crackers? I always kept a box by her bed. She’d eat a few of those before she got up in the morning—I mean, literally, before she even sat up, and that would help. Plus, they make these suckers out of herbs or some magic shit. Should have bought stock in those. Ginger ale, too. She carried around a tumbler with a straw in it for months. I got so sick of washing that thing.”
I’d wash a tumbler every five minutes if it would help her feel better.
Simon raises his coffee mug in a salute. “Good luck, man. Try some of that stuff out.”
“I will. Thanks.” This is the part where, at Killion, the other guy would give me endless shit about getting a girl knocked up, where he’d bring some other people into it, where it would become an all-day shitfest, until somebody threatened a fight. Simon only goes back to his cubicle and sits down in his chair.
It feels like cheating, working in a place like this.
“Hey, Nash?” He sticks his head out from behind the wall of his cube.
“Yeah?”
“Congratulations.”
Pride loops its way through my chest. “Thanks.”
I write down his list of recommendations on my notepad.
It’s nothing but meetings and phone calls and shuffling paper until after lunch, until that three o’clock lul
l that doesn’t exist at factories like Killion. You work until the bell rings at the end of your shift. You don’t fuck around at three in the afternoon, recovering from an afternoon slump.
Not that I’m fucking around.
I go on Amazon and search out everything that Simon was talking about, except the ginger ale and crackers—I’ll get that at the bodega on the way home. The lollipops look weird, but I don’t care. I find a tumbler shaped like a Starbucks cup, only with a straw, a delicate snowflake pattern on the edge. Perfect. I add a misting spray meant to help with morning sickness and a relaxing candle to the order. I’ll draw a bath for Sunny, if that’s what she wants.
Everything’s loaded up. I pick the fastest shipping method and dig my wallet out of my pocket. I have a credit card for the first time in my life. It’s a small miracle. Summer has no idea how good it feels to pay for these things for her. I guess she’s been doing it on her own all along.
The phone on my desk rings before I can punch in the credit card numbers and I answer it without looking at the caller ID. “Dayton Nash.”
“It’s so sexy when you say your name like that.”
Summer.
“Like I’m answering the phone at an office building?”
“Like a workin’ man who’s wearing a button-down shirt…” Her voice trails off at the end of the sentence, almost wistfully. “That I could unbutton…”
“You are a sucker for business casual.”
“I can’t help that you wear it so well.” She’s teasing, but I know she’s half-serious. Summer loves taking my shirt off at the end of the day. She loves doing more than that.
I press the big yellow order button on the screen and watch the browser load the confirmation screen. “How are you feeling?”
Summer sighs, a little sound that could be relief or frustration—it’s different, day to day. “Better.”
“Are you sure?”
She groans. “Now it’s the opposite. I could eat for days. I’m so hungry, Day. I’m starving. And work keeps forwarding messages from my desk phone. The last one was just some guy who said my name and then breathed through his mouth. It was disgusting. And still, I’m so hungry, I could die.” The last bit is so dramatic, I can picture her swooning onto a fainting couch.