Page 22 of Fateful Exposure

"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 grewup 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—"

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