by Kris Ripper
“I know.” She kissed me. “Let me take care of you a little bit today. I have this shoot, but they don’t usually take that long, and we can work your quilt later.”
“I would rather work on yours.”
“My quilt doesn’t exist.”
“We should change that.”
“Pushy ass.”
I kissed her. “You don’t like my ass?”
“It ain’t the worst ass I’ve had, I guess.”
I pretended to be affronted. “You’re harsh. And my ass likes you so much!”
“Is that right?”
The baby monitor piped up. James’s sleepy gurgles.
“The boy’s up.” I dared kiss her once more before she drew away.
“Yeah, we’ll head downstairs. Emerson is probably up already.” She paused in the doorway and raised her eyebrows. “You coming?”
“I don’t have pants.”
Dred laughed and walked down the hall.
I pulled on my good slacks and followed. If you were going to entertain your friends with a walk of shame, you might as well do it in suit slacks and an old Green Day concert shirt.
Unfortunately, Emerson had on his “we are not amused” face.
“You guys know there are other people in this house, right? I mean, you didn’t have some kind of mutual aneurism that resulted in you forgetting you weren’t actually alone last night?”
I winced. Dred put James in his seat and tugged it in Emerson’s direction. “Tell Emerson me and Zane get to have fun if we want to, baby.”
James obediently turned to Emerson and started talking.
“James, please inform your mother that some of us need our rest.”
I started to apologize, until I saw him wink at James, who laughed.
“No laughing.” Emerson waved his finger in James’s face. “I need you to be firm with her, young man.”
James giggled.
Emerson amped up his scolding in response to rising giggles, and I moved over to Dred’s side.
“That’s kind of amazing,” I whispered.
“They’re good for each other.” She cracked a smile. “Thank god for James, or Emerson would have freaked out and broken up with Obie like seven times by now.”
Emerson threw his hands up, dramatically, making James laugh again. “I’m like five feet away right now. I can hear you talking shit about me, Mildred.”
“You sure about that?” She grabbed a jar of baby food peas and hooked a spoon out of the closest drawer, offering both of them to me. “You want to shove food in the kid’s face? I should eat before I go take pictures of straight people about to set off on their perfect, happy lives.”
“Sure.” I went to sit on James’s other side. He immediately turned away from Emerson and focused on me. Ha. Mental note: James’s affection can be bought with mashed peas.
“How’s the couple?” Emerson asked.
“Oh, fine. They’re not nuts or anything. A little young, but this should only be the two of them, so it should go smoothly. It’s when the parents get involved that everything really goes to hell.”
I offered James a spoonful of mashed peas. He swiped it aside. “Hey!” The second time I slid it into his mouth before he could hit it.
Green oozed from between his lips. He grinned.
“That’s so gross.” I held up the jar in Dred’s direction. “Hey, can I have a few of these? The jars, not the peas.”
“Sure. Why?”
“Sperm.”
Emerson choked on his cereal. “What?”
“Sperm. I need something for Tom to jerk off into.” I shuddered. “I mean, you didn’t think I was having sex with him, did you? That’d be sick. He’s Carlos’s husband. It’d be like banging my brother.”
“Okay, just—” He shook his head. “Let’s not talk about jerking off into baby food jars, okay? I’m so uncomfortable right now.”
I pointed the spoon at him. “Hey. This is procreative jerking off into baby food jars. It’s, like, blessed by baby Jesus or something.”
Dred snickered.
“Let me get this right.” Emerson narrowed his eyes. “Baby Jesus blesses gay men jerking off into baby food jars so lesbians can get pregnant.”
I couldn’t keep a straight face, but I tried. Then Dred repeated, in a choked voice, “Baby Jesus,” and I lost it.
“This household is completely insane,” Emerson muttered, going back to his cereal.
I realized, with an unsettling weight in my gut, that he’d just included me as part of the household. But I’d planned everything out, damn it, and being part of a household wasn’t on my list. It wasn’t what I wanted. Was it?
Emerson, still looking a little green, held out his bowl to Dred. “You want to get me another round of cereal to make up for totally ruining the innocence of baby food jars? To say nothing of keeping me awake with your disgusting lesbian antics last night.”
She brandished a spoon covered in sweet potato mash at him. “Excuse me, I am not a lesbian. Just because I’m fucking a woman doesn’t make me a dyke, you asshole.”
James, picking up on her tone, said something that sounded suspiciously like, “Dyke, asshole.”
I muffled a snort.
Emerson snorted. “Oh, nice, Mildred. The kid can’t even talk yet, and you’re teaching him slurs. What about daycare!”
“No one would know that’s what he said. And anyway, can you imagine them talking to me about it? ‘We think your son may be saying inappropriate things.’ ‘Oh? Like what?’ ‘Well . . .’”
“Actually, it might almost be worth it to teach him things they wouldn’t want to repeat.” Emerson touched James’s arm to get his attention. “Say ‘dyke,’ James.”
James started talking, but this time it was all consonant sounds and the occasional sibilant.
Dred laughed and carried the jar of sweet potatoes to the table. “What about ‘dildo’? Baby, say ‘dildo.’ Can’t imagine the ladies down at St. Pat’s saying that to my face.”
James crooked his head to the side and said something.
Even though it didn’t sound anything like dildo, we cracked up.
Obie’s laughter echoed from the stairwell. “Please tell me you guys aren’t down here teaching James dirty words on a Sunday morning.”
“It’d be better if we were doing it on some other morning?” Emerson lifted his face for a kiss.
“Maybe? Hey, Zane. Heard you spent the night.” He smirked.
“I thought you were at work last night.” I couldn’t even muster embarrassment, really. The sex had been spectacular; feeling embarrassed now would be an insult to it.
“I meant ‘heard’ as in Emerson bitched and moaned about how he couldn’t get any sleep until I, uh, distracted him.”
Emerson got stiffly up from the table. “I did not move in here for the live sex shows.”
“You’re right.” Obie passed him the cereal box and milk. “You know what would make everything better? If we moved downstairs.”
“I’m not having this conversation again.”
Dred laughed. “Oh, yeah, you are. You’re having it until you agree.” She grabbed another jar of food and brought it down to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “And what conversation?”
“The one where Obie tries to convince Emerson it makes sense to remodel the workroom into a master bedroom for them.”
“Huh.” The workroom took up half the ground floor. “It would complicate resale value, but I think it’s a great idea otherwise.”
Emerson and Obie turned to each other at the same moment, as if each of them thought he’d won.
“Complicates resale value!” Emerson repeated triumphantly.
“It’s a great idea!” Obie shot back.
Dred smiled at me. “Ha. That was good. You should tie them in knots all the time.”
“Listen.” Obie poured milk into his bowl, then Emerson’s. “It makes much more sense for us to live downstairs. For one—”
“The crip will eventually suck at stairs.”
“I was going to say, for one, then you won’t have to hear Dred and Zane having sex.”
This time we smiled at each other. Last night had been freaking incredible. This morning had been . . . pretty rough, but Dred made up for it.
“That point is provisionally accepted as a reasonable argument,” Emerson mumbled. “People have no fucking respect.”
“And two, I’ve been needing to remodel the workroom anyway, and there’s more than enough space for us to have our bedroom there. Plus, that’s about the only way I can justify putting in another bathroom, which would be awesome.”
“But would complicate resale value!”
Obie rolled his eyes and leaned forward. “And, point three, there might not be enough room upstairs forever, you know.”
“Huh.”
Both of them looked over at us. I frowned. “Why not? Are you guys going to work on the upstairs? I was thinking, you could combine two of the bedrooms and make a huge master en suite, which would definitely be good for resale. But that’s a big project if there’s no relevant reason why you need to do it.”
“We’re not planning any work upstairs.” Obie raised both eyebrows, looking between Dred and me. “But it seems like the two of you are . . . at least, that you might, at some point in the future, actually need all three bedrooms.”
“Why?”
“Well,” he said, sounding perfectly reasonable. “You are trying to get pregnant. Right?”
It hit me all at once. I was trying to get pregnant. Three bedrooms. One for James, one for Dred (and me), and one for Future Kid. With Obie and Emerson downstairs.
The warmth of the kitchen—the comfort of it—vanished, like a flame doused by a bucket of water.
“Uh, I just remembered— I gotta— I gotta go—” I pushed the jar across the table and half stumbled out of my chair. “Sorry, just, I have an appointment later. And I, you know. I can’t really go like this.” I laughed, only it wasn’t real; it was high-pitched, nervous laughter.
I didn’t mean to look at Dred, but somehow I caught the fleeting, horrible freeze in her expression, pain and surprise intertwined. Then she covered it all up with . . . nothing. Her face went blank.
Shit, shit, shit. I fumbled and patted James’s head. “Uh, bye, James.”
He waved a fist at me and chattered something as I retreated from the kitchen.
“Yeah, right back at you, kiddo.”
Up the stairs, into Dred’s room. Dred’s room. Not our room. It was her room, in her house. I had my own place, damn it. I loved my condo.
I kept repeating that to myself as I gathered my clothes and switched shirts and found my bag.
“Don’t forget your thermometer.”
Shit. I turned toward the doorway. “I really do have to work. I sometimes work on the weekend.”
Dred shrugged. “I sometimes work on the weekend, too. You shouldn’t knock the Green Day shirt. You looked kind of cute as a teenage boy.”
“Oh, I see how it is. That’s your type, right? Teenage boy?” I was trying to tease, but it fell flat in the face of her unblinking gaze.
“Nope. You’re my type.” She gestured to where I was pulling my shoes on. “You. This. Running away. This is my type. You’d think I would learn, but I never do. Anyway, I’ll see you around.”
I listened to her footsteps down the hall, down the stairs, and tried not to start crying again.
I walked straight to my car, got in, and drove.
Halfway to Jaq’s apartment I realized she probably wouldn’t be there. And while it might have been fine to show up on your best friend’s doorstep with a BFN hangover and demand comfort, it was less acceptable to do that at her girlfriend’s place.
Plus, it was Sunday. They’d be on their way to Mass. Damn it.
I drove to Carlos and Tom’s instead.
When we had all settled down after getting out of our various college programs, I’d started shopping for my condo. Jaq had lived in a series of apartments that improved, marginally, over the course of her career; six years into teaching she had an okay place in a relatively safe neighborhood.
Carlos had moved into the in-law unit behind the Moriartys. Jaq and I had been convinced he’d only moved there because, having been given the opportunity to live behind Sherlock Holmes’s popular nemesis (he had a whole lecture on why that was canonically thin), he couldn’t resist.
He and Tom had only been dating at the time, and he kept to himself. By the time Tom moved in, Mrs. Moriarty was calling them “roommates” and Mr. Moriarty was pretending he didn’t have any idea what was going on. At one point he asked four-foot-eight, dark-haired Carlos if six-three, blond Tom was his big brother. Carlos said, “You can’t tell he’s younger than I am? Look at that baby face.” Mr. Moriarty had gone out of his way to avoid them for months.
We’d assumed that after Mrs. Moriarty died that the old man was going to kick them out, until Tom admitted he’d been helping around the house and running errands for them. Without telling Carlos. Since he’d moved in.
I parked out front and walked through the side yard to get to the cottage in back, thinking about Mr. Moriarty alone in his house, surrounded by the life he’d lived with Mrs. Moriarty, but without her. I was crying again by the time I got to the front door of the cottage.
Carlos took one look at me and cursed under his breath. “Oh hell. Get your skinny ass in here.”
I hiccupped. “Not skinny.”
“You’re plenty fucking skinny, Zane. Come on.”
He led me to the sofa and dropped a blanket on my head. “Let me turn on the heat. Jesus. Coffee’s not made, so suck it up.”
“But”—sniffle—“you’re brewing it, right?”
He growled.
Fifteen minutes later we were huddled under blankets with coffee while I sobbed that I’d never get pregnant and I’d die alone, like Mr. Moriarty, and then for some reason I started talking about Fredi, about how all she had was the bar and it couldn’t be enough, I didn’t know if it’d be enough for me if all I could show for my life was my stupid career.
Even as I was saying it, it sounded like a midlife crisis in a Lifetime movie.
Carlos let me run until I got to the part about my shriveled-up eggs, and then he put his coffee down and pasted his hand over my mouth. “If you keep talking, I’m gonna start laughing and then I’d look like a shitty friend.”
He pulled away before I could bite his hand. “Jerk.”
“You couldn’t be a bigger stereotype right now, FYI. I can’t help that it’s funny.”
I kicked him.
“You’ll break my compromised-by-dwarfism bones!”
I kicked him again. And laughed. It was hard to take Carlos seriously when he tried to play the “compromised by dwarfism” card. His folks had a lot of flaws—like thinking he was going to hell for being gay—but they hadn’t let him get away with ever cutting himself slack because he hadn’t inherited their average heights.
“First of all, Mr. Moriarty had fifty-six years with the love of his life. If you’re trying to feel sorry for him, or like he’s unlucky because she bit the dust first, fuck that, Zane. Fifty-six years with her. Can you even imagine?”
I shook my head. “But doesn’t that make it worse? That she died?”
“Yeah, if it wasn’t for Tom being a way better son to them than their kids, we’d have probably found him dead in front of the TV before now. But that doesn’t erase fifty-six years. And Fredi has all the companionship she wants. Do you really think she never takes anyone home from the bar?”
“Wait. No way. Fredi hooks up?” My mind boggled. Fredi, with her leather vests, and her impatience, and her permanent scowl. “Whoa.”
“I can’t divulge secrets of the marital bed, but I don’t think you should feel sorry for Fredi, Zane. But obviously, you aren’t. You’re feeling sorry for yourself. So what’s up?”
I set my coffee
down on the table so I could better burrow into the couch. “I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
Hell. I sighed. “I spent the night with Dred.”
His eyes widened. He was actually surprised, not just pretending to be for reasons of mockery. “You did not.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Oh, honey, it didn’t work out?”
“No, it did. Everything worked out. Everything was fantastic.” I buried my face in my arm and started crying again.
“Honey, here.” Sounds. His mug on wood. Blankets rustling. Then Carlos, pulling me closer, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “Are you in love with her?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard the question, but it brought on a fresh wave of tears. In love with her? I couldn’t be in love with Dred. I couldn’t be in love with anyone! That wasn’t my story. I wasn’t one of those people who fell in love, who saw that in their future. And damn it, it wasn’t on my list.
“Shh. Hush now. All your babbling is gonna wake up Tom, which would be rude, since you’re drinking his portion of the coffee right now.”
“Asshole,” I mumbled.
“You’re drinking his coffee and I’m the asshole?”
“No,” I countered. “You’re drinking his coffee, after generously offering yours to a friend in need.”
“Oh, I think you know me well enough to know that no amount of tears gets between me and my morning caffeine.”
I sat back so I wasn’t leaning on him as much. “Sorry. Just, I got my period, I hate everything, and I don’t understand why I feel this way.”
“Well, shit, why didn’t you lead with that? Of course you feel this way. You always hit bottom on BFN days.” He pushed the coffee back into my hands. “The least you can do is not let it get cold, since you’ve already stolen it.”
“You’ve got a hell of a bedside manner.”
“I’m known throughout the land for my compassion and goodwill toward men.”
“Gross. I don’t want to hear about it.”
Carlos rearranged himself to get more comfortable on the couch, not looking at me. “It’s not a bad thing, you know. If you’re in love with her.”
“But— I can’t— That’s not—” I stared into my coffee, thinking about the way morning light fell on the floor of Dred’s bedroom. “I’m thirty-five years old, Carlos. If I could fall in love, don’t you think I’d know that by now?”