Page 4 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

CHAPTER 2

KAI

For the rest of the afternoon, as time ticked away until his meeting at the end of the day, Kai tried very, very hard to not feel guilty about saying no to Amy. He wasn’t in the least bit successful, though, the feeling biting at his heels every single second. He hadn’t heard her voice in what felt like months. God, it might actually be months since they’d spoken, and he couldn’t even pinpoint the last time he’d seen her in the flesh.

The more Kai thought about it, the more he was certain that this was the first time that she’d called him in need of help. And he’d said no. His rational, business brain had done the talking on the phone, but now it just made him feel sick. How had they gotten to the point that he was saying no to Amy when he could feel how close she’d been to begging?

He gave up the pretense of trying to prepare for his meeting — which really was one of the most important conversations he was ever scheduled to have — and scooted his chair back from his desk to stare out the window of his office. Even looking out over San Diego, the sun starting its slow descent to the horizon, the cars and people zipping about like intoxicated ants, Kai couldn’t focus on any of it. All he saw was Amy, alone in her kitchen, getting ready for the evening ahead. He would have been less worried about her if she had planned to go swimming with sharks. Without a cage. Or an oxygen tank. Heck, he would have been less worried if she’d said she was going skydiving with a tattered parachute. Instead, she was going back to Chateman High, where they’d both spent some of the worst years of their lives.

It had been easier to stay in each other’s orbits when Amy had been working in the corporate world like him. At the very least, they’d both worked the typical nine-to-five. Their lives had followed the same routine, both of them on the same set schedule. The same daily tasks; sending emails, planning meetings, attending meetings, sending more emails about the meetings, and rinse and repeat. Kai knew they would both be free on weekends, and they would be free most evenings as well. It made it easy to see each other, to talk and stay in touch once the forced proximity of school had been taken away. The forced routine of the corporate lifestyle had taken its place in the structure of their lives.

It had been easier for him, anyway; Amy had been utterly miserable. Even that was an understatement, really. Towards the end of her time in the corporate world, she’d called him more than once in tears, getting so worked up about having to deal with the toxic office culture that she’d found herself in that she wasn’t far away from some sort of breakdown.

In the end, Kai had turned up at Amy’s apartment with burgers and wine, sat her down on the couch and helped her write a resignation letter. When that was done, he helped her write out a business plan for a catering company. The next day she had quit and never looked back, throwing herself into it with everything she had, managing to slowly build up a fledgling business that she was actually proud of, one that didn’t leave her in tears at the end of the day, even if she still got stressed out of her mind sometimes.

Shortly after she’d changed direction, Kai had sold his first tech company and used the capital to launch himself into an entirely different stratosphere, where he was the boss and there was no more climbing the ladder for him. Because the top of the ladder had been reached. Even then, things just seemed to keep growing exponentially as technology morphed and grew before his eyes, as domestic contracts and sales became international ones, and as more and more people knew not only his company’s name but his own as well. He didn’t know how it had happened or what the first domino to fall had been, but these days Kai’s face appeared in gossip magazines and internet headlines on a weekly basis. Apparently, people cared if he dated an up-and-coming actress for a month or two. He had no idea why, but they did. Amy had insisted he’d had a “glow up” since entering his late twenties, his lanky body filling out with muscle despite the pitiful efforts he put in at the gym. His skin got more tan now that he could set his own hours and go walking around the city whenever he needed a break during the day. A more cynical part of him figured that all of this public attention was to do with the seven figures in his bank account, though… Amy hadn’t disagreed.

That definitely counted as a downside, having his picture taken by strangers more and more often, his sporadic and frankly shallow dating life scrutinized like it was the Rosetta Stone or something. But there were downsides to his rapidly changing life that cut a little closer to the bone. The most important one being that he barely saw Amy. This phone call was the first time he’d heard her voice in… he still couldn’t pin down how long. God, that was depressing. And the catering business, even though it made her ten times happier than working in a corporate setting ever had, was stressful in different ways. After paying her bills, she never had a spare penny to her name, so she never went out anymore. There had been fewer and fewer opportunities to meet up.

Kai had wanted to help; he was in the opposite position, having more money than he could possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes, but Amy adamantly refused any sort of financial help from him. Kai admired her determination to do it all from the sweat of her own brow, but if he was honest, he didn’t really understand her complete refusal to accept any help at all. Between the money he could give her, not loan but give, and the connections he could set up, Amy wouldn’t have to scrounge for pennies at the end of the month anymore. Unfortunately, she was the most stubborn person he’d ever met, and she’d refused any sort of handout, as she’d crudely put it, with no room for argument. Kai had considered hiding cash in her apartment at one point when she was eating nothing but ramen to save money for the business, but he knew Amy would have lit it on fire rather than use it.

So their friendship, once stronger than steel and as immovable as a mountain, had become, well, fitful and frustrating. Kai had never really imagined a world where he and his best friend’s lives would take such different routes, where they’d drifted apart so far that he didn’t know what she was up to any day of the week.

But she had called him. Amy had called him because she needed him. The difference was that this time he’d said no. He rubbed his eyes until he saw stars dancing in the dark of his eyelids. He’d been preparing for this meeting all day, staring at numbers and contracts until his eyes were about to fall out of his head, and now it was getting dark. Suddenly, he felt like he couldn’t remember a single thing he’d read that afternoon. The meeting with Jason Torres was going to be over dinner, someplace with Michelin stars next to the name and a reservation list six months long. Kai knew without a shadow of a doubt that no matter how great the restaurant was, any food he ate tonight would taste like ash because he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about Amy catering that horrible high school reunion.

Guilt was not a fun emotion. It was stuck in between his ribs like a blunt knife, and no matter how much he reasoned with himself about the facts of the matter, the guilt refused to budge. He had to go through with this meeting. It was the biggest pivot his professional life had taken since he’d sold that first fledgling company. If he could join forces with Jason Torres, uniting their expertise in software engineering, they’d be able to take on the international market like it was nothing more than a kids’ playground. Kai had his toes in the door at the moment, but together they could kick that door down like it was nothing. They’d been scoping each other out for literal years at this point, looking on from a distance, but now they were ready to sit down and actually look at putting things in writing.

It was a huge risk for both of them to trust someone who was technically a rival, but the rewards would be out of this world for them and all the people who worked below them, too.

So Kai had to say no to Amy. He’d had to. There was no way he could have ditched this meeting, even thought about canceling at the last minute to go to a high school reunion where ninety-nine percent of the attendees had made his life a living hell, and that included the teachers. Absolutely not. No, no, no.

But Kai sighed, knowing full well that he was about to do something really, very bad for his career. Matilda had returned his phone when she’d left the office for the evening, and it had been turned off in a drawer ever since. Now he pulled it out, ignored the missed messages that filled up his screen (none of them from Amy) and called Jason.

“Hey, man!” came Jason’s rather loud and enthusiastic voice from the other end. “Couldn’t wait to talk to me at dinner, huh?”

Kai laughed along awkwardly before clearing his throat.

“Well, actually, about dinner…”

There was a pause, a beat of silence, and Kai knew this was already going to go so badly that he’d be cringing over it for the rest of his life.

“Is everything okay?” Jason asked, sounding suspicious.

“Something urgent has come up, actually,” Kai said, squeezing his eyes shut, feeling like he’d jumped from a plane and was now praying that the parachute would work because there was no going back. “I’m not going to be able to make it tonight.”

The feeling of falling only got more dizzying when Jason said nothing in return for what felt like a very long time. There was dead silence on the other end of the phone, and Kai pulled it from his ear to make sure he hadn’t accidentally hung up or that Jason hadn’t hung up on purpose.

Then there was a very deep sigh from Jason’s end.

“All right, man, I’m going to level with you.” Jason always spoke in a typical salesman-like cadence, giving him a slightly goofy air about him, but right now that air was stone-cold and deadly serious. “Calling me up less than two hours before a meeting that we’ve had planned for months and saying ‘sorry, but something else has come up,’ not a great impression, Kai. Frankly, it’s one of the most unprofessional things I’ve seen.”

Kai bristled at that and the feeling of falling stopped. Now he was standing on his own two feet, feeling stable and sure.

“I’m sorry it’s so short notice,” he said, determined to keep his voice professional. “An urgent matter came up last minute, out of my control. Can we reschedule to a time that best suits you?”

Jason huffed in disbelief.

“Unfortunately,” he said. “The time that best suits me is the one we had scheduled for tonight. So either we meet up now, Kai, or we call this deal off altogether.”

Kai only hesitated half a second before giving his answer. “Then I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” he said with all of the calm he could muster.

“Yeah,” scoffed Jason. “A waste of time is exactly what it was.”

With that he hung up on Kai, leaving him standing alone in his office, night fully fallen outside and the sort of hollow feeling of mild shock reverberating through him. But at least he could breathe better now; that dull dagger of guilt that had been stuck between his ribs had vanished without a trace, and that was how Kai knew that he’d done the right thing. Even if it was one of the dumber things Kai had ever done in his life, and that included most of his teenage exploits, which meant that it was really, really dumb. Disastrous might be a better word for it, considering he’d have to completely redesign the plans for his business going forward without Jason Torres and his assets involved. So, yeah, pretty damn stupid. He didn’t blame Jason for being annoyed either. He would’ve reacted pretty much the same if the shoe was on the other foot.

But facing the fallout could wait until tomorrow. Right now, he rolled up the sleeves of his business shirt, no longer caring if it got crumpled, and headed for his car sitting in the parking garage far below. He had a high school reunion to go to, and a friend to back up.

---