The Scenic Route by Devan Sipher

she is. She just cares too much. About too much. And says
way
too much. Now you’re thinking I take after her.”
    â€œI wasn’t thinking that.” He was thinking how vulnerable she looked and how much he wanted to protect her. “What about your dad?”
    Naomi got quiet. “I don’t know,” she said, examining her thumbnail. “Fathers and daughters are tricky. Don’t you think?”
    â€œMy father pretty much adored my sister,” Austin said, surprising himself by talking about his father, which was something he rarely did. “Mandy could do no wrong.”
    â€œI’m jealous,” Naomi said, then winced. “No, not jealous. Sorry. What I meant was it’s great she was able to have that kind of relationship with her father.”
    â€œIn some ways,” Austin said, wondering if the opposite were more true. He didn’t want to go there. But it was too late. His brain had shifted gears. Synapses were firing in the wrong region. “There are things you can’t control in life,” he said, rolling off her.
    Naomi nodded as if he had said something meaningful, but it wasn’t meaningful. It wasn’t even coherent. And he wanted to be coherent. He wanted her to understand who he was. Which was expecting a lot, since he wasn’t even sure he understood.
    â€œMy point,” he said, “is that there are also things that you
can
control. And I think it behooves you, I mean, it behooves me, to take responsibility for the things I can control.” He had never said that out loud before. He had thought it many times, but he hadn’t shared it with anyone. Naomi nodded again, but she didn’t say anything. So he kept talking.
    â€œEvery endeavor in life has an odds ratio associated with it. So while people say you can’t predict the future, it’s not entirely true. You can predict your probability of success. Which means you can choose to do things with a high probability of success. Or you can gamble, and I’m not a gambler. I don’t even play poker.”
    â€œHuh.” She sat up. He immediately regretted half of what he’d said. But he wasn’t even sure about which half. “I’m trying to figure out if I’ve ever before slept with a guy who didn’t play poker.” She smiled mischievously. “I’m guessing I could whip your ass in a game.”
    Great,
he thought. One more thing they didn’t have in common. But there was no point in pretending to be someone he wasn’t. “I’m never going to be a billionaire, but I’m also never going to lose everything. I could never do what Stu’s doing.”
    â€œYou never know.”
    â€œNot going to happen. In every career, there’s a ladder you have to climb, but Stu not only has to get up the ladder, he also has to build it. The great thing about medicine is that the ladder is already there, and it’s not going anywhere. It may not always be easy rising from step to step, but it’s usually clear what the next step is.”
    â€œDoes that get boring?” she asked.
    Austin stopped and thought about it. “No,” he said. “It’s comforting. I’m a junior partner in an established practice. And I know that when the senior partner retires we’ll buy him out, the same way he bought out the senior partner before him. And the same way someone will buy me out when I’m ready to retire.”
    â€œWow. You have it all worked out.”
    What had he just done? He’d just mapped out the next thirty years of his life without leaving room for including someone else’s plans. Someone like her. “But it’s not like everything’s set in stone,” he assured her. “More like sand,” he said, trying to undo the damage. “In fact, we recently lost our other junior partner, and we’re scrambling to find a new one. So things can get pretty wild and