Erik the Pink

by Matthew J. Metzger

  “The first time she falls over and starts crying, guarantee he’ll want to rush her off to A&E.”

  Lauren started giggling, and Andreas found a smile playing over his lips. It was aggravating as hell sometimes—but it was sort of sweet, too.

  “He was fine when you were pregnant.”

  “Not in the last two months.”

  “No?”

  “Christ no.” Andreas rolled his eyes. “He tried to banish me to just the bedroom and the bathroom. Said I might fall on the stairs.”

  “Uh, you? You’re graceful. He’s the galumphing great elephant.”

  “Not right now. You should see him when he carries Beatriz around. Like he’s handling priceless crystal.”

  Lauren made a cooing noise, and Andreas rolled his eyes.

  “Oh please.”

  “She is!”

  “Sure.”

  “Honestly, you’d think he was the Spaniard and you were the Brit.”

  Andreas snorted. “Thanks—I think.”

  “You’re so grumpy!”

  “She’s just a baby. They don’t get really cute until they’re two or three.”

  “Yeah but you love her.”

  “Of course I love her,” he said flatly. “That doesn’t mean I have to act like she’s a Fabergé egg.”

  “A what?”

  He pulled a face. “Uneducated swine.”

  “Toff.”

  “What?”

  “You, you’re a toff.”

  “What’s a toff?”

  “A posh boy.”

  Andreas cackled with laughter. “Hardly.”

  “You had a castle in Spain!”

  “My parents had a run-down old house in Spain.”

  “I saw the photos, that was a castle. In the mountains! That’s practically a fortress.”

  “It only had half a roof!”

  “Castles don’t have roofs!”

  They argued all the way to the pub, Andreas’ good mood from the spa buoyed even further by just getting to be a dick for a little while. He did love his daughter, every last inch of her, but it was still difficult to hold her and not hear the constant barrage against his ears of the nine months it had taken to make her. Nine months of being a mother, a woman, a girlfriend, she-she-she-she.

  In a way, Beatriz being a girl helped. However dumb it was, he could pretend that all the residual femininity had drained off into his daughter and now he could get back to being a man. It was a ridiculous sort of thought—he’d never stopped being a man, he’d just lost what little ability to pass he’d ever had—but it helped, in a strange way.

  But what helped most was making exaggerated gagging noises as Lauren cooed and made fun of him for his grumpy dad persona.

  “Thanks,” he said as they pulled up in the car park, and Lauren smiled.

  “You’ll get back to being you,” she said simply. “It was worth it, right?”

  “Yeah. Still hard.”

  She squeezed his arm, then plastered a huge smile on her face.

  “Come on. Let’s go see what a mess she’s made of her other dad.”

  To Andreas’ surprise, he didn’t walk in to see one of the barmaids cuddling his daughter. Instead, he found Erik in a booth by the window, watching the football on the telly above the bar, and cradling a sleeping Beatriz against his chest. She was lying along his chubby forearm, head tucked into the crook of his elbow, her little fingers coiled around a soft floppy rattle they’d bought her last weekend. Erik beamed up at them, chest pushed out with pride, and Andreas felt his grumpiness soften.

  “Alright?”

  “Yep.” Erik patted the seat beside him. “She didn’t finish her bottle.”

  “She doesn’t always.” Andreas settled down. “She’ll let us know when she wants the rest of it.”

  “Oh. I had Lizzy throw it away and wash the bottle out. I didn’t think I could just keep the rest like that.”

  “That’s fine, there’s more in the bag.” Andreas exploited his lack of passing to lean over and kiss Erik’s fuzzy cheek. “Enjoying yourself?”

  “Yeah, actually.”

  “No meltdowns?”

  Erik winced. “Don’t think I’m very good at feeding her yet. She’s squirmy.”

  “Yeah, she’s a baby, not a doll. You’ll get used to it.”

  “She’s been asleep for a couple of hours, too,” Erik said.

  “Kind of like cats at this age,” Andreas said. “When we can get her to pack it all into one night, I’ll be grateful.”

  “How was the spa?”

  “Amazing. Greg pretty much dissolved me. I might leave you holding the baby and go start over again with him.”

  Erik snorted with laughter. The rock of his chest created a wriggle of movement and a whimper, and he winced as the whimper turned into a wail.

  “Now what’s all that for, eh?” Andreas said, and decided to hell with his resolution to leave Erik with her. He took her for his own cuddle, leaning into the arm that Erik slid around his waist. Beatriz quieted mournfully, hiccuping a little, then took it up several notches and began to scream. “What the—”

  “Uh.” Erik reddened. “She fell asleep before I could burp her.”

  “Ah. Right. Well. Get me the butterfly chicken. I’ll take this outside.”

  Without the spa, he would have been irritable—how hard was it to burp a baby, for God’s sake—but he felt too serene. His body looked like shit, but it didn’t feel quite so bad, and Greg had voiced surprise at how quickly he was losing the leftover bump, which had been great. So he wandered leisurely outside with Beatriz, and paced with her until she hiccuped the air back out of herself and eventually quieted with a few last grumbles to make sure that her displeasure was well and truly known.

  “You’re going to be a madam,” he told her, pressing his nose into the top of her head as he cuddled her to his chest. She liked it there. He supposed she was used to his heartbeat. “I can see it already. You’re going to be an awful two-year-old.”

  She smacked her lips and began to whimper again. That particular tone, he knew.

  “Alright, alright. Lunch part two, huh?”

  Inside, he gave her back to Erik for the second attempt at feeding, and talked movies with Lauren until their own food arrived. By the time he could tuck into a plate of chicken and salad, Beatriz had been fed again, burped properly this time, and settled down into her pram to play with her rattle and probably fall asleep again. Erik whined about having to go into the women’s toilets to change her, and Andreas rolled his eyes and told him to get used to it.

  “I’ve been using the wrong bathroom for years, at least nobody looks at you funny once they see her.”

  “They do.”

  “Oh yeah, they probably think her mum ought to be changing her.”

  “I’m not changing her,” Lauren said quickly. “I don’t care if I’m the only bird at the table, baby shit is not happening.”

  “Baby shit is happening whether any of us like it or not,” Andreas said dryly.

  “Oh God, that’s gross.”

  “Yep.”

  “Consistency of soup.”

  “Sprays, too.”

  “Oh God, I hate you both,” she whined, putting both hands over her ears.

  They both laughed at her, but when Beatriz eventually stirred, made a face just like Erik’s, and a disturbing smell began to rise like manure off a freshly-ploughed field on a misty winter morning, it was Erik who went to handle it.

  “At least that part he’s alright with,” Lauren said.

  “Well yeah,” Andreas replied. “He knows better than to argue with me about who goes in the ladies’ room.”

  Lauren laughed, then propped her hand on her chin and squinted at him. “So? Only one?”

  “Eh?”

  “Beatriz.”

  “I’m never doing it again.”

  “But what about other children?”

  Andreas shrugged. “In theory. Depends how we handle her
, but…I don’t really believe in only children. It’s cruel.”

  “Cruel?”

  “Lonely. And they turn out mean. Children need siblings, I think.”

  Lauren rolled her eyes, but didn’t argue. “So she’s going to get baby brothers and sisters eventually?”

  “Probably. We’ll wait a few years, though.”

  Lauren hummed, then rapped the table with her knuckles. “My offer stands.”

  Andreas raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Sure. You don’t want to risk some stranger deciding she wants to keep your baby after all. I’ll get to be Auntie Lauren anyway.”

  He reached over to squeeze her wrist. “Thank you.”

  “One caveat.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If Beatriz is old enough to notice a pregnant lady, I’m not explaining how it all works.”

  Andreas cackled, and said that even if Erik didn’t know it yet, that was going to be his job.

  * * * *

  His success in the pub buoyed him.

  He’d almost never actually held her for so long. At home, he either took her for her feed then handed her back to Andreas, or the other way around. The longest he held her for was mid-morning naptime if he’d given her breakfast. He’d only just graduated to bath time. To parade her around, feed her, then cuddle her while she slept…he’d not done that all in one go, uninterrupted, before.

  And the rush of intense love he’d felt while doing so had been overwhelming. He’d been utterly entranced by her, from the tiny grooves of her knuckles to the way she’d wrinkle her nose if he stroked its tip. She was so tiny in his arms, so delicate, and yet so tough at the same time. He’d never appreciated how much of a miracle the human body actually was. As Andreas had put it, he’d just gotten off in a strategic location—and yet here she was. A heavy little miracle of science and nature and life, breathing in his arms, a little brain growing bigger and more complex by the minute, with every sound she heard and every sight she saw.

  His baby development apps and all the books he’d read from the library on early childhood gushed about the importance of positive interaction, even when she was far too young to understand a thing. They jabbered on about how she would soak up all the words, how she could already recognise her parents’ voices and speech patterns, how she’d already be forming the very bases of language and love.

  And that, more than anything, Erik wanted to give her.

  Love.

  If his little girl could already feel loved, when she hadn’t even learned to smile yet—Andreas assured him that her sunny beam the other day was just wind—then Erik wanted to make sure that she did feel it. All of it. That she understood just how important she was, and how long he’d waited just for her. He’d wanted kids ever since he was a kid. He’d left care with the sole intent of finding someone to settle down with, of building a home of his own, of holding his own babies in his arms. For a long time, he’d refused to identify as anything but straight, refused to acknowledge his pansexuality, because he’d been so desperate to make sure that he would one day have children.

  And then along came Andreas.

  “That’s why you’re perfect,” he told Beatriz one evening, when Andreas had gone for a long bath and he had been left holding the baby. He’d settled down on the bed with her, a film playing quietly in the background and Marmalade purring by his hip. “Because he’s perfect, and you came from him.”

  They’d met at a pride parade. Lauren had persuaded Erik to come with her and some of her friends from an asexual gaming group. He’d been feeling low—still no closer to his desperately wanted family, and the horrible feeling that time was running out—and she had insisted he come out and have a good time with them. So he’d found himself a rainbow flag and gotten the bus into the city centre, telling himself to have one good bash, then—in the morning—hit up the dating sites and start seriously trying to find a nice girl to settle down with.

  At the end of the parade, in the crowds outside the pubs, he’d found her.

  Well, at least, he thought he had, until the girl he’d bumped into and whose pint he’d spilled turned around, and he’d seen the trans flags painted under each beautiful brown eye.

  “I thought he was a woman,” he whispered to Beatriz. “I bought him another drink and when I came back with it, I said ‘sorry miss’ and he said ‘mister.’ And I don’t know what came over me then. Just as well your daddy doesn’t care if the chat-up line is smooth, because I just said he was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, man or woman or anything else, and if he had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a personfriend, would he mind dumping them for the evening so I could persuade him I was a catch instead of a big hairy barman?”

  She curled her little fist around his entire finger, and he jiggled it gently.

  “I guess you know the ending, huh?” he whispered.

  Turned out he did have a boyfriend. But they’d had a huge fight the day before, and Andreas was three quarters of the way towards dumping him. Erik had asked why. Andreas had pinked, and pointed to the flags on his face.

  “He said that his boyfriend didn’t want him to have top surgery,” Erik told Beatriz, stroking her knuckles with his thumb when she squeezed tightly. “I said that I sympathised because he looked beautiful, but what was the point of looking beautiful if he didn’t feel it. Then he got out his phone, ignored me for a few minutes, then put it away and said he was single so how about me.”

  It had been one of the best nights of Erik’s life. And then he’d woken up in a hotel room, with Andreas’ phone number and a pair of boxers in his jeans pocket, and knew—even though it had been a drunk one-night stand—that things were different.

  “I wasn’t single after that,” Erik whispered. “And I’ve never once wondered if I made the right decision. He’s amazing, your daddy. He’s everything I ever needed, everything I ever wanted, and then just when things couldn’t get any better, he gave me you. I’ve been waiting more than twenty years to hold you.”

  Nine months had never felt so long. Erik had even kept the unreadable scan results. Beatriz starting to kick had been torture, because while Erik had been catapulted into a whole new level of excited by the movement—the flutter of little feet under his hands, the proof of his baby, their baby, being alive and well and nearly ready to come into the world—it had triggered Andreas’ dysphoria in a huge way. It had been nine months of juggling his excitement with his partner’s horror. It had been nine months of trying desperately to navigate when he could be excited, when he had to pretend it wasn’t happening, and when he had to consider the possibilities of a termination without just outright begging Andreas not to do it.

  And it had been worth every second.

  “I have two perfect days in my whole life,” Erik whispered, shifting her a little higher in his arms to press a kiss to her forehead. “The first was meeting your daddy. And the second was meeting you.”

  “That’s very sweet,” a voice said.

  Erik looked up with a guilty grin. Andreas stood in the bedroom doorway in his dressing gown, curls damp and fluffy from the bath. He was smiling faintly, even if there was a bit of a teasing edge to it.

  “She’ll be a nightmare to settle down for the night if you keep cuddling her for hours,” he chided gently, climbing up onto the bed beside Erik. Despite the scolding, he made no attempt to take her, inside sliding an arm under Erik’s and cosying into his side. He was warm and smelled of the muscle soak bath crème.

  “Can’t help it,” Erik said, stroking her hand again. Beatriz wrinkled her nose and squirmed against his arm. “She’s amazing.”

  “And going to start crying soon if you don’t set her down to sleep,” Andreas said.

  “Alright, alright.”

  “Give her here and I’ll—”

  “No, I got her,” Erik said peaceably, heaving himself off the bed carefully. Beatriz grizzled and began to whine, wriggling and flailing her tiny fists. “I know,
sweetie, I know. One cot coming right up. You going to be a good girl tonight and let me and Daddy get some sleep?”

  He talked to her all the way through settling her down in her cot at the foot of the bed. She began to whimper, screwing up her face in a sharp wail the first time he tried, but after a couple of turns of the room with her yellow blanket, he was permitted to put her down. He hovered there for a long minute, just staring, until Andreas’ laugh disturbed him.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Lights out, or she’ll wake up again.”

  “Okay, okay…”

  “You on duty tonight, or me?”

  “I’ve got it,” Erik said, sliding into bed. The lamp on the bedside table was snuffed out, and in the dark, he sighed and reached out for the warm body on the other side of the bed. He found pyjama bottoms and no shirt, and wrapped both arms firmly around Andreas’ chest and squeezed until he squeaked.

  “Alright, love you, too.”

  “Te amo.”

  A snort. “Te quiero. I keep telling you.”

  “Whatever,” Erik said, drawing his knees up behind Andreas’.

  “Hey.”

  A hand found his own under the duvet and squeezed.

  “Heard every word.”

  Erik smiled. “Yeah, well. Meant it.”

  “Sap.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’ll be fine, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yep. You might not be, when she hits her teens and is slamming doors and screaming she hates us through the walls, but she will.”

  “Nope, pretending that day will never come,” Erik said loftily, then burrowed until he could kiss Andreas’ scalp through the mess of curls. “I know I’m being a bit daft—”

  “It’s not daft, it’s sweet.”

  “—but when you came along, I was starting to get desperate. I was starting to get scared I’d never find this. That I’d never get to have my family. And now she’s here, and you’re here, and I hope you have a master get-out plan if you want to bail because no way am I letting go.”

  Andreas laughed, turning over and dragging Erik’s arm down around him like a blanket. “Too lazy. And too tired. Go to sleep, because you know she’ll be howling for a feed by two in the morning, and you agreed to do it.”

  Erik smiled, hauling Andreas closer in one last hug, nuzzling his shoulder, before sighing and relaxing.