Arrested by the Dragon: Gay Police Paranormal Romance

by Clearwater, Julian

“I think it’s your body and you should do what you want,” Leon said and shrugged. “It’s a little weird for a man to be breastfeeding, but there was a story a few years back of a man nursing his child after his wife lost her breasts to cancer, so I’ll leave it up to you.”

  “Let’s play that by ear, then. We can always come back to the store and get bottles and formula if we change our mind, later down the road.” George had read a lot on babies, and breastfeeding was healthier for them. If he could do that, he’d do it, but if it didn’t work out, he wouldn’t sweat it. They had alternative ways to feed babies so they wouldn’t starve.

  “Are you about done yet?” Leon asked, after there were two carts full of stuff.

  “Almost. I need a dresser and a crib. I’d like to add a rocking chair.” George smiled as Leon tried not to roll his eyes. “Why don’t you pick out the rocking chair?”

  “Fine, just be fast picking out a crib and dresser. We’ve been here for hours and I want to go home,” Leon told him. “You may have no work now, but I still have to get up and commute to the hospital in the morning.”

  George nodded and went to pick out a crib set. He fell in love with a convertible crib that changed into a twin bed as the child outgrew the crib. It was a little more money, but the long-term use of it appealed to him.

  He flagged down a sales associate and arranged for the store to drop the crib off later in the week. Then he saw the bassinet that attached to the bed—a side-car co-sleeper for when babies were tiny. It felt right to him and he added it to his cart, too. He knew the baby had to move into her own room eventually, but he’d sleep better knowing she would be nearby at first.

  Satisfied, he waited until the purchases were all rung up. When he paid the nearly three-thousand-dollar bill, Leon didn’t even blink at him. They both knew babies were expensive, and in this situation, Leon didn’t even seem to care about the money.

  They finalized the bills and got the receipts and packed up the car.

  “You know, you have a while to go, and you could have done your shopping online,” Leon said as they drove back to their house. “The internet exists for a reason.”

  “Yes, but then I wouldn’t have gotten the right shade of white and purple paints for the nursery, or made sure I got the right brand of things because one was too flimsy and I needed to compare it to another,” George pointed out. He had always been tactile, wanting to touch things and make sure they felt right to him. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m just tired, and worried,” Leon admitted. “I worry a lot about this situation. I’m indulging you, and I hope it has a happy ending.”

  “You can’t focus on the negatives, or on things going wrong. You just have to hope it goes right and take it one day at a time.” George leaned over and squeezed Leon’s thigh before kissing his cheek. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I feel like it’s all going to be okay.”

  “I hope you’re right, George, because losing you scares me.” Leon gave him a half smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You deserve this, and you want it, but this is not how I expected us to get here.”

  “I didn’t plan on getting here like this either,” George said. “I wasn’t trying to get pregnant, that’s not something that’s physically even supposed to be possible, yet it happened. I don’t have any regrets in the choices I made since I found out, though.”

  “You’ve done a good job adjusting. I’m proud of you,” Leon said.

  A few minutes later, they pulled into their driveway and pushed the button to open the garage. Leon got out, saying, “I’ll take the bags inside. You should go rest.”

  Something strange was happening in George’s stomach, though—a weird feeling he’d never had before. He doubled over, clutching his stomach.

  Leon froze, his eyes betraying his alarm. “Are you okay?”

  “No. Yes. Actually, I don’t know. I think…” George trailed off and used the car to support his weight, then he felt his face break into a broad smile. “It’s the baby. I can feel her kicking. Come here and put your hand on my belly.”

  Leon hesitated for a moment, but set the bags down by the end of the car and walked over to place his hand on George’s belly. He could feel a ripple, almost as if there was gas moving through George’s gut. He stood there for a few minutes until he felt it again and then jerked his hand off like he was burned.

  “Okay, I’ve felt babies move before,” he said. “Coworkers in the hospital always make you feel their bellies, but it feels so much weirder in your stomach, since I know a baby shouldn’t be in there.”

  “This is so surreal,” George said.

  Finally, for the first time in weeks, Leon smiled for real, a smile that touched his eyes and crinkled his cheeks. “This is amazing.”

  “I know! She’s just going to get bigger from here. I cannot wait.” George grabbed Leon’s shoulders and pressed a firm kiss to his lips. He’d meant to help carry the bags inside, but one kiss led to another, and before George knew it, he and Leon were locked in a half-naked embrace in the garage, having sex with him bent over the car, Leon pumping into him from behind.

  When they were done, George wondered if that would hurt the baby. They’d been so careful not to engage in intercourse with penetration like that, but they’d gotten carried away. His body felt fine, though—there was no pain other than the happy soreness from the sex. He helped carry everything up to the room and got out the painting supplies, wondering if he should call it a night, or start working on the nursery.

  Leon poked his head into the room and asked if George wanted any help, because if not, he had some case files to review before work in the morning.

  George shook his head no. He decided to just listen to his body. It was calm and felt okay, with the occasional flutters of the baby here and there. He painted the room the purple color and had intended to come back for the accent paint and trim after he did another coat. He’d paid extra for fast drying paint, so he only had to wait an hour. He was planning on staying up to do the rest, but he found himself exhausted and headed to bed.

  He dreamed of the aliens that night. They didn’t talk to him, but he talked to them. He told them all about the baby, and how she was growing, and how he wanted to keep her. He didn’t know if they were responsible for her or not, but as they went through their exams on him, their medicines and shots, he kept reiterating to these dream aliens, that he needed his baby girl and he promised to take good care of her.

  This was the clearest he’d been through any of his alien dreams and he could have sworn it was almost real. He reached out to grab one of the aliens and she jumped, startled, looking at him like she couldn’t believe he could move.

  “Please, I don’t want to hurt you, but when this all over, when the dreams stop, please let me wake up to my baby in my arms. I’ve already chosen a name for her. I’m preparing the nursery, and I want this baby,” he told her quietly.

  She looked at him for a moment before tilting her head, and before he knew it, he felt the sting of a needle in his hip. He didn’t dream again, but woke up in his bed in the morning.

  He had a dull ache on his hip and when he got up and looked in the mirror, he saw a small welt that looked like a bug bite.

  It didn’t take long to get the rest of the nursery set up, and now that Charles was coming by the house three times a week to check on him and do labs and ultrasounds, it made it easier for him to just focus on growing the baby. He was constantly exhausted, and the bigger the baby got, the more she beat up his ribs. Before this, he’d thought pregnant women just liked to complain, but now he realized they had legitimate pains throughout the pregnancy. The little jabs in the most sensitive places didn’t help, and the baby had good aim. He swore she kidney-punched him a few times, and the sharpness of the pain took his breath away.

  Charles was staying on top of everything, and he was supportive of George’s feelings and questions. Leon stayed back and observed more than he as
ked questions, but as a doctor himself, he understood medically what was going on. The stuff Leon had to face was more emotional and psychological.

  The nursery had been set up for a while, and they were nearing the end of the pregnancy term. Charles had given George a double dose of steroids a couple weeks prior, just to cover their bases.

  George was getting antsy. The pregnancy was coming to an end and he wanted to hold his daughter, look into her eyes, cuddle her close. He’d grown her for months in his body, and he knew getting her out would be physically the hardest thing he ever did, especially since he’d be recovering from major surgery while taking care of her in the first few weeks.

  Part of him was terrified of how she was going to come into the world. The other part of him was incredibly excited. He was so ready to meet her. They’d decided to name her Megan. He pictured her blond and blue eyed, with a round face that reminded him of a cherub.

  He’d been told she could hear him, so he spent a lot of time humming, singing, and talking to her. Leon wasn’t nearly as interested in doing that as he was, but he made an effort, George appreciated it.

  His belly got bigger, and got in the way with everything. He even ran into a doorframe, belly first. He was grateful the doctor was coming to him every couple of days to check on him and measure his progress, instead of forcing him to leave the house and deal with onlookers and stares.

  He felt like he had to pee every five minutes, and he experienced tightening stomach pains that came and went. He was ready for it to be over, yet at the same time, he was scared of the ending.

  *****

  A few nights before his scheduled C-section with a doctor at a private hospital, where they’d sneak him in during the dead of night to hide him from possible onlookers, he dreamed. He was once again in the spaceship with the aliens. This time, they didn’t have him strapped down to a table.

  The blond alien he’d been talking to the last few weeks during his dreams approached him. She tilted her head and in a halted, robotic speech, she addressed him.

  “The baby is female,” she said directly, looking at him. “You say you want to keep her?”

  George nodded and put his hand protectively over his belly. He gazed at the alien in front of him who seemed to be watching his reactions carefully.

  “We need boys, not girls. This child is a girl. Our race is dying out because we don’t have enough males, and males are who produce our children. We are willing to let you keep her, on the condition that sometime in the future, you do this again for us for a boy, and we get to keep the boy.” The alien looked at him, and George got the impression that she’d never spoken to a human before.

  “I will agree to that, but it would be hard to explain how I got pregnant, then everything goes missing at the end,” George told her. “My partner’s a doctor, and he’ll need an explanation. Something I can tell him.”

  “I will answer a few questions, but be careful what you ask.” The alien shrugged, her dainty shoulders going up and then falling back down.

  “Who is the father?” he asked. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked at all, though—he was worried about the answers he was going to get. He hadn’t allowed his own OB to do any DNA testing on the baby.

  “Your partner and you are,” she said. “Our species requires the DNA of two males to reproduce. It’s complicated, but it’s why we ran out of males. It’s why we choose gay males on your home planet. When they mate, they fertilize the egg we implant.”

  “Does it work like that on your planet?” George asked, curious and confused.

  “No, our reproductive organs are very different. When the females mate with the males, we implant our eggs into them. They have two penises and the egg is fertilized by the separate DNA that resides in both penises.” She tilted her head, showing George those pointy, cat-like ears. “The male offspring your males produce with our DNA have the required penises and genetic compatibility. But as I said, we don’t need the females. We haven’t left our females behind when they’ve been created simply because you’re the only male who’s asked to keep the baby or even woke up under our anesthesia and talked to us. We usually erase their memories and take the babies. You are different and our Queen has given me permission to talk to you and offer you the baby.”

  “I want the baby. How do your males give birth?” George asked, suddenly curious.

  “They have a pouch that comes open when it’s time for the baby to come out. Your human males don’t have it, so we have to make them one when the time comes. We remove the uterus and all signs the baby existed, and there’s barely a scar. Our females and males make the food and share equal responsibility for feeding the offspring. You appear to be making milk. The other human males we’ve used never had the same hormonal or chemical reaction you seem to be having. You’re different. We want to follow you, and see how the offspring does on your home planet and how she’s genetically wired. We’ve had some issues with the female babies coming back from your planet being genetically too human to reproduce the way we do.”

  “Have you considered just finding volunteers who’d go to your home planet, human males who’d have babies for you and possibly mate the old fashioned way with your ‘too-human’ offspring?” George asked her, and then the look on her face had him regretting the question.

  “We’ve found that those with too-human DNA die on our planet too quickly. Our home world has many unique plant forms, and appears toxic to humans, and we haven’t figured out how to inoculate against it yet. The females we keep have all died before reaching adulthood, and the couple of human males we tried to bring back died within weeks. Only the male offspring can survive on our planet so far. We are working on it, but that’s why we’re letting you keep the infant. We don’t want to kill babies if we don’t have to.” She reached out and touched his belly with a look of awe on her face. “A baby is one of the most wonderful things you can ever experience. I gave you my eggs, and that’s why I was following you personally. I would have cared for the baby, had it been male.”

  “Would it be you who’d take the boy child, then?” George asked her and she nodded at him. “I am open to it.”

  George still wondered if he was completely dreaming. A part of him felt hysterical and almost like he was about to have a nervous breakdown, yet he knew it was real. He knew the alien was real, knew that him having a baby was entirely possible because of her, and he didn’t know whether to be in complete awe and thank her, or be horrified by how this occurred and that no one on Earth would ever believe him.

  “It is almost time to deliver you,” the alien said. “I will be back in a couple of nights. I can remove the uterus and the baby with minimal issues. Just be ready, and don’t let the human doctors remove the uterus or the baby in their barbaric surgical procedures. We can do it far more gently, with almost no pain for you.”

  George nodded, and she pushed him on a strange floating contraption into a white room. He felt the prick of a needle in his thigh and she helped him sit down on a table as she went to get her supplies to examine him one final time.

  When he woke up in the morning, everything was hazy. Had he dreamed the whole thing? Something tickled against his bare stomach when he moved. Looking down, he saw a lock of the alien’s blond hair tied to his wrist. She was real. All of it was real. He buried his face in his hands and took a deep breath. He had to have a big conversation with Leon, and he knew it wouldn’t go over very well.

  *****

  Twenty-four hours later, Leon was working an overnight shift, and George still hadn’t talked to him about the aliens. He was feeling restless that night, as if he couldn’t hold still, and he kept feeling like his breath was coming and going in ways that didn’t feel good. He went to bed that night, anxious because the doctor wanted to do the C-section at the hospital the next day, and he was still trying to come up with excuses to avoid it.

  He finally drifted off to sleep, and woke to the feeling of peeing himself. Sitting up fast, he realized h
e wasn’t in his own bed, but instead inside of the alien spaceship, surrounded by three different alien women, including the one he’d talked to the night before. Looking down, he saw liquid seeping all over his lap from his penis. He gasped and tried to cover his accident.

  “Don’t worry, we will knock you out in a second,” the blond alien said in a calming voice. “Your water broke, and we got you here just in time for the delivery. When you wake, the baby and you will be in your own bedroom at home. Try to relax, and I promise we aren’t going to hurt you.” She pushed on his chest, trying to get him to lie down.

  “Can I be awake for this? I want to see the baby be born.” He didn’t want to argue with her or the other aliens, but he desperately wanted to be conscious when Megan took her first breath of air.

  She hesitated. “I’ve never done this on a man while he’s awake. It may hurt.”

  “I can take a little pain,” he told her, shrugging. “If it’s too much, knock me out, but let me try, please?”

  Looking at the other aliens, she waited for their responses. They must have spoken to her from their minds, because George couldn’t detect any kind of conversation happening. Finally sighing, she nodded at him.

  “If you scream, or seem to be struggling, I’m knocking you out. Our males don’t have a lot of pain during their delivery, but humans are different.” She picked up a weird looking tool and brought it near his stomach.

  George broke out in a sweat and felt his heart race. Maybe he shouldn’t be awake for this. When she touched it to his skin, he saw it cut through him like butter. But since it was hot like fire, it didn’t bleed much. She made an incision. It happened quickly, and although it stung, it wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever felt. She quickly spread him open and pulled out the uterus, baby and all inside. She quickly cut and cauterized the vein that was connecting the uterus to his insides, and then handed the uterus and baby off to another alien, who stood there waiting with tools for helping the baby out of the uterus.

  While that alien worked on the baby, his blond alien worked on putting him back together. She poured some powder over his skin that tingled. Then she touched him with another tool which melted his flesh back together. George stared down at himself in amazement. There was barely a mark from where she’d opened him up.