Chapter Twenty-One
Michael
Chris dragged me to The Shift again that Friday night, despite my protests. I had been avoiding Paige just as much as she'd been avoiding me, and I had no desire to show up on a night when I was sure she was working. How did I know she was probably working? Well, it was a Friday night, after all, and I knew she needed the tips.
I felt guilty about that again, even though I knew I had no reason to. She had been doing fine until I had come along. And I couldn't pay her upwards of a million dollars if she didn't end up conceiving a child. That was the deal, after all; I wasn't just giving her a handout. I understood that her rent was going up and she could probably use the money now, but that wasn't technically my problem.
All that aside, I didn't want to be there at The Shift, but there I found myself.
“Come on, I don't get what the big deal is,” Chris said from where he was sprawled across the couch in my office. “You're fucking the bartender, right? Or have things gone sour already?”
I frowned, wondering how much to tell him. “She's been acting weird lately,” I finally admitted.
“What did you do?” Chris asked immediately, sitting up and putting his feet down on the floor.
I sighed. “I don't know,” I admitted. “She just started acting weird, like she didn't want to see me anymore.”
“So find someone else to fuck,” Chris said, shrugging. He frowned. “I can see why it would be awkward to pick up in front of her, but if you didn't do anything wrong, I don't see what the big deal is. She's made it clear she's not interested in anything more than you. It's not like she has any grounds for bitchiness if you move on to someone else. Unless she's already pregnant.”
“I don't know,” I told him. “That's what I just can't figure out.”
“Huh,” Chris said. “What exactly has she been doing?”
“Nothing, that's just it,” I said. “She's avoiding me. So I'm avoiding her.”
Chris smiled a little. “Right, this sounds like high school,” he said. “Maybe it's that time of the month? I know you'd like to think your little swimmers are the most fertile, but maybe you didn't manage to get her pregnant this round.”
“That's possible,” I said, frowning as I thought about it. Paige had told me that she was ovulating, but she had also mentioned something about having been on birth control and not re-upping her prescription for the month. If I remembered correctly, birth control could mess with a woman's cycle, so maybe coming off it could do the same. How would she know if she was really ovulating?
I groaned, realizing it could be a whole extra month before she conceived. With things already so rocky between us, who knew what the next month could hold.
“Look, I'd try to give you advice, but I'm not really a relationship guy,” Chris said. “So, the only thing I'm going to say is, avoiding women never seems to work out.”
I laughed and shook my head. “You're probably right. But what do I even say to her?”
“Find out what's wrong,” Chris suggested. “Don't chicks love it when you listen to them?”
I grinned over at him but had to admit it was a good plan. That evening at the bar, I spent a few minutes watching Paige before I approached her. “We need to talk,” I said, hating how ominous that sounded.
“I'm working right now,” she said, indicating the beers that she was in the process of pouring.
“Look, I just want to know what's wrong. That's all,” I told her.
“Like I said before, nothing's wrong,” Paige said, her voice falsely cheerful.
“Of course not,” I muttered. “You were just cute and chatty and personable last week, but this week, you'll hardly say two words to me.”
Paige set one of the bar glasses down on the counter with a bit too much force, causing beer to spill out over the rim. “I don't know what you want from me,” she snapped. “I'm doing what you asked me to do.”
I frowned at her. “I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, honestly confused.
“The contract,” Paige said, as though I was acting deliberately obtuse. “This is a business transaction, nothing more. We don't need to be friends. We just need to have sex, get me pregnant, and otherwise follow the contract.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It was true that the contract was there to prevent either of us from starting to think of this as a normal relationship, but she was taking things a little too far. Maybe I had been more right than I'd realized when I'd suspected she could deal with this coldly and efficiently. She seemed almost too cold.
“There's nothing in the contract that says we can't hang out or be friends,” I told her. Unless maybe she was worried about that friendship turning into something else? Was she admitting to already developing feelings for me?
“I'm not interested in being your friend,” Paige said coolly, and I had to nix that idea. No, she legitimately wasn't interested. Huh.
“Have you done any tests yet?” I finally asked her, remembering what Chris had said, about how maybe she was avoiding me because she was already pregnant and starting to have second thoughts about our arrangement.
“I start my period next week if I'm not pregnant,” Paige said. “I'll wait until then to do the test. I'll let you know as soon as I get the results.”
“Okay,” I said. It felt like there should be something more to say, something to convince her we could, in fact, be friends. “Let me take you to dinner tomorrow night,” I finally tried.
“I've got work tomorrow night,” Paige said shortly.
“Just go,” Erica said, having been following the whole conversation from her place nearby at the bar. She gave me an unreadable look and then turned to Paige, who was scowling at her.
“I don't want to go,” she said. “And what's more, you know I need the work. Saturdays may not be as busy as Thursdays, but I still make a lot of my tips on those evenings. Plus, I know the hourly rate isn't that good, but I could use all the help I can get with rent this month. You know that.”
“I'm not asking you to take off the whole night,” Erica said, rolling her eyes. “Although if you do, we can cover you, no problem. But get dinner a little early, and you'll be back in here before things start getting busy. You know our Saturday crowd tends to show up later anyway.”
Paige had her lips pressed together tightly, and I could tell that she resented her friend's involvement in the conversation. I would have to remember to thank Erica later.
For a second, I wondered what Erica was playing at. If I remembered correctly, Paige had said the woman was a romantic, so maybe she thought if the two of us spent more time together, we would manage to put together a relationship beyond the one where I was paying Paige to have my child. But Paige was behaving as if she didn't want anything like that.
She gave her friend a look. “Erica, I made a commitment to be here at work. The other day, leaving early, was bad enough, but I can't keep blowing off parts of my shift. You're my manager, and we live together. Everyone else is going to think you're giving me special treatment.”
Erica rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows that if they had something in their personal life they needed to sort out, I'd let them take time off, too,” she said. Her eyes softened. “Look, you're not going to be able to focus on your work and put on a happy smile until you sort this out. So really, I'm looking out for your best interests as well as my own.”
Paige sighed, but she didn't seem to know what to say to that.
“If you don't go to dinner and talk about whatever's going on between the two of you, I'll fire you,” Erica threatened. “I'm sorry to say it, but that's what it's come to.”
I knew it was a bluff, and I could tell Paige thought so as well, but finally, Paige nodded. “All right,” she said. “We'll go to dinner tomorrow.” She turned toward me, giving me an inscrutable look. “But it needs to be an early dinner so I can get back here and still work most of my shift. You can pick me up at 5.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Is there anywhere in particular you'd like to go? A specific type of cuisine that you'd like?” I didn't know why I asked it. It was just, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't really know anything about her. Things like her favorite food, her favorite type of flower, her favorite color; maybe I should learn those things.
Not that I was trying to date her, I told myself sternly. It was because those preferences might be the same favorites as the child we were trying to make.
“You're the one who asked me to dinner,” Paige snapped, clearly done with the conversation. So done, in fact, that she moved down to the other end of the bar and started serving people over there.
Erica gave me a sympathetic look. “She really loves Thai food,” she told me.
I sighed. “Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for getting her to come out with me.”
“You'd better fix whatever it is that you've done to her,” Erica warned, narrowing her eyes at me. “She's been mopey all week.”
“I'll try,” I promised, even though I wasn't sure how to fix it when I didn't even know what was wrong with her.
I watched Paige move back and forth along the far end of the bar, wondering what her deal was. I wish she would just talk to me about whatever it was. I didn't believe it when she said she didn't want to be friends with me. We had too much fun together for that to be true.
Unless she was faking that she was enjoying her time with me. Two and a half million was a lot of money, after all. Maybe she was just trying to make sure that I stayed happy with the relationship so I'd still want to have a kid with her.
Chris clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey man, you need another drink!” he said. “Quit looking so glum. Now, this is Trish and Molly.”
I didn't feel like chatting with random strangers that night, but I knew Chris needed me as a wingman, so I tried to pull it together. I glanced over at Paige a couple times, but she was intently ignoring me. I sighed and shook my head, standing abruptly.
Trish broke off in the middle of whatever it was that she'd been babbling about. Her work, I thought.
“I have to go,” I said. “Sorry.”
There were disappointed looks all around our circle, but I didn't care. Right then, I just had to get out of there.