2. Ross
ROSS
As I wash up, I look in the mirror, scanning my face and frowning. Dark circles under my eyes make it clear that I haven’t been drinking enough water, and I’ve no doubt spent a few too many nights out with James and Cole on top of it. I need to get my shit together.
But not this evening, of course, since I’m meant to be meeting with the two of them at the small, exclusive bar just up the street from our shared workplace.
Our clinic is in one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city, attracting the kind of clientele who are able to afford the cost of our services; we don’t overcharge, but we have some serious skills and experience to our name, and that means we do not second-guess how much we are worth.
I flick off the light in my office bathroom and make my way to reception, where Isla, the receptionist, is tidying up for the night.
“We have cleaners to do that, Isla,” I remind her, for what has to be the thousandth time since she started working here.
She shrugs. “I like things a certain way,” she replies cheerfully. “Anyway, you have a good night!”
“You too,” I reply, as I grab my bag from behind the counter and toss it over my shoulder.
James and Cole are already at the bar, no doubt a drink deep already, but I had a couple of files I wanted to go over before I joined them, and they know me well enough to understand that I’m not going to skip out on my duties.
And besides, I need a little time to myself.
I know that the two of them can handle pretty much anything that gets thrown their face, taking on new clients like it’s nothing, but I’m more solitary.
I like the science side of this fertility stuff, the conferences about new technology, the constantly evolving state of the field.
The people stuff, I leave to the others.
I step out into the cool evening air, where the streetlights are already streaking the dark sidewalks below.
There aren’t many people out and about, but the few who are out are clearly like me—sticking around late at work to take care of something or other, perhaps looking for a little time to clear their heads the same way I was.
I reach the bar, and the guard at the door steps aside to let me in.
I nod in thanks, and head inside. The lights are low, the band playing jazz music in the far corner of the room, and James lifts his hand to wave me over to our normal booth.
There are already a couple of drinks sitting in front of them, and it’s clear they’ve already made a start.
“Hey,” I greet them, as I slide into one of the brown leather seats opposite. “See you didn’t bother to wait for me.”
“I knew you would be a while,” Cole replies. “You always stay latest out of all of us.”
I grin. They know me too well.
“Yeah, well, some of us don’t like slacking off,” I remark, cocking an eyebrow and glancing around the table.
James laughs. “Slacking off? Ross, I had a half-dozen appointments today. And three of them were new clients—”
“I’m just kidding,” I assure him, as I wave down a waiter and order myself a scotch.
Even if I might have the most obsessive work ethic out of the three of us, I know that they are far from slackers.
The two of them have worked as hard as I have for a long time, at least when we were getting the fertility clinic off the ground.
It was one hell of a big swing, opening up a place like that right after college, and plenty of people said we were going to fail. But the three of us, as stubborn as we were, refused to allow that to happen, and now we run one of the most successful fertility support centers in the city.
“So,” James remarks, as he raises his eyebrows, looking between us. “We’re going to talk about it today, right?”
I stare down into my drink for a moment. Of course, I know that’s what this meeting is about. As close as we are as friends, something else has raised its head recently. Something that, as it turns out, all of us have been considering in our own way.
Having a baby all our own.
It first came up on a night not unlike this one, when the three of us were waiting for a cab and Cole came out and said it—that he had been thinking about starting a family. Not that he, or any of us for that matter, were seeing anyone we might do something like that with.
But it turned out that James and I had been having the same thoughts. Must be something about our ages, now that we’re in our thirties. That feeling of life passing you by and the need to make a legacy and a family for yourself.
“Yeah, not that it’s going to happen as long as I’m single, though,” Cole had snorted, shaking his head, as we waited for the cars to arrive.
“You don’t need a girlfriend or a wife to do that,” James remarked, and Cole looked over at him, surprised.
“What do you mean?”
“Do I really have to spell it out for you?” James laughed. “We run a fertility clinic. I don’t think there are many people in the world who understand more than us how easy it is to have a child without a partner.”
“Yeah, but what about the family side of it?” Cole had pointed out. “It’s not like I have anyone to raise them with…”
“We all want a kid, right?” James replied, looking over at me. “So we would all help out if one of us had one. Doesn’t have to be some wife and two kids and a picket fence to be a family…”
And that had been enough to sew a few questions into my mind. Because James had a point—if anyone is well-suited to raising a kid like in an unconventional family like that, it would be us, given the amount of money we make and the level of stability we could offer a child.
And we’ve been friends for more than a decade now. We’ve been part of each other’s lives as much as any family has. We are as much family to each other as any of our blood relations, along with Matt, and I know that I would trust them with just about anything.
But we haven’t exactly discussed the logistics of the matter, and I don’t know where a conversation like that even really starts.
As I take a sip of my scotch, James is the one to break the silence, finally broaching the matter. “Well, the first port of call is to find a woman we all agree on, to carry our child. A surrogate.”
“We could reach out to the agency,” I suggest, referring to the surrogacy group who have put some of our clients in contact with potential surrogates.
Cole grimaces. “I don’t like the idea of doing it through work like that,” he replies. “I don’t want to share a surrogate with someone that I’m caring for down the line, it just doesn’t sit right with me.”
“Fair point,” I mutter.
That’s the crazy part about all of this, the knowledge that our business will bring us up close and personal with every aspect of this process. Well, and then there’s the fact that we’re going to have a baby…
“So how do we find someone?” James replies with a pointed shrug. “Just start going up to women in the street, finding someone who’s willing to do this for us? See if any of our friends or family would consider it…?” He trails off, leaving us all to ponder the question for a moment.
It’s a fair one. Because it’s not just a matter of finding a woman I would be comfortable going through this process with, but both James and Cole need to be comfortable with her too. And God knows that the three of us have very different opinions on what we value in women.
Cole has had a few casual relationships, but nothing serious.
James goes through women like it’s going out of style.
And as for me, I’m usually so caught up in work that I can’t keep up with any of the demands that might be placed on me if I were to be in a traditional relationship, so I don’t know where I would start in looking for someone who matches up with everything I’m looking for.
“You know,” James remarks, as he picks up his glass, swilling a little of his vodka around at the bottom. “There is a girl we all agreed on. A long time ago.”
It doesn’t take any more than that to throw the memories of Millie Michaels to the front of my mind.
That night is burned into my brain more clearly than almost anything else I experienced during that period of my life, that college party that started out like any other and ended up with us hooking up with our roommate’s sister in the guest room.
If there is a single event I can point to that bonded us as friends for life, it’s what happened in that room six years ago, the way we shared her like something precious we wanted to gift each other.
Of course, we never saw her again after that night.
No, she headed back home to her real life, by the sounds of it, and it’s not like we could even follow up on the matter with Matt, not without alerting him to the fact that we had been getting up to something we well and truly shouldn’t have with his little sister.
Every now and then, Matt would mention her in conversation with the three of us, and we would exchange a glance as though making sure that it was as vivid in the others’ memories too.
“Do you even know where she lives now?” I ask, shaking my head. “It’s not like we can just reach out to her after all this time, expect her to hear us out on it…”
“We could,” James reasons. “The worst she can say is no.”
“The worst she can do is tell Matt, and he’ll flip his shit,” Cole cuts in.
That’s another matter none of us want to address. Matt—he might have chosen a more travel-heavy lifestyle rather than one in a clinic with us, but he is still our friend, and Cole’s right in pointing out that he would hardly be keen on the idea of us getting close to his sister in that way.
“I should look into it,” James says, keeping his voice casual, though we can all tell there’s more to it than he’s letting on.
We don’t talk about how much that night meant, but we don’t need to. That kind of pleasure, that intensity, that reckless abandon…when you share it with someone, it’s not the kind of thing you can ever forget.
“At least we can all agree that we were into her,” James says, and Cole grins slightly.
I think of Millie on top of Cole, the way her body moved when she was taking him inside her—how it looked like there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to feel him in that moment.
I know he remembers it as clearly as I do, and I almost want to broach the subject more directly, but think better of it.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough,” Cole points out. “We need to know what kind of person she is—”
“And if she would even be willing to do something like that,” I add. “It’s a big ask, even if we put every cent we have on the table for it.”
“Agreed,” James mutters, and he takes another sip of his drink.
For a moment, we sit in silence, as the notion begins to take root in our minds.
Is it crazy? Probably.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a part of me tempted by the idea.
“I’m going to track her down,” Cole announces. “Figure out where she is, at least. We can take it from there.”
“That’s as far as we’re taking it,” I warn. “At least until we know if she would be interested.”
Cole taps his finger on the outside of his glass, and I can tell that he’s thinking hard, no doubt crunching the numbers about just how impossible something like this would be to pull off.
It’s one of his best qualities, his willingness to dive headfirst into any problem and do everything in his power to figure it out—but sometimes I wonder if he wouldn’t be better off keeping his eye on the prize.
Instead of attempting to work out how we can convince a woman we haven’t seen for six years to carry our baby.