“I was hoping to persuade you to come round for dinner,” Lauren said. “The workmen finished my new kitchen and I want to ruin it now. Home-made chilli?”
“Sold,” Erik said immediately. “Andreas?”
“Dunno, I don’t really feel like getting gassed to death in my sleep tonight…”
Erik carefully extended a foot and kicked him.
“Ow! Knob.”
“It’s chilli. This is divorce-level betrayal.”
“It’s chilli. This is a matter of life and death.”
Lauren began to giggle between them, rocking back with her mug and grinning gleefully over it at their mock-argument.
“Fine,” Andreas said, only when Erik finished feeding Beatriz and refused to hand her over to be burped and cuddled. “Chilli at Lauren’s tonight.”
In truth, Erik really wasn’t bothered about whether they had chilli at Lauren’s or not. He just wanted Andreas to eat a full meal. It was hard to keep track of what he ate at home, what with work and a demanding baby, and the exercise DVD had been an unpleasant surprise. If he was going to start up with his fitness regime this soon, then he certainly wasn’t going on any stupid diet.
“There, engaged again,” Erik said, and handed over the freshly-burped baby. She gurgled sleepily, and settled down into Andreas’ arms with a happy sigh and her butterfly toy.
“Thank God,” Andreas drawled sardonically, kicking his feet up and slinging his legs right across Lauren’s lap and into Erik’s. “We’re having a nap first, though. You children entertain yourselves.”
Erik rolled his eyes, and Lauren smirked.
“Hot dirty sex on the kitchen table?”
“Yeah, alright then.”
Chapter 10
When Beatriz turned four months old, they started to split up the childcare. It was later than they’d planned, but eventually the endless routine took its toll, and Andreas called the girls before even talking to Erik about it.
He wanted at least a slice of his life back, damn it
And so every Friday morning, they put her into a nursery so she’d get used to other children. And every Tuesday, Lauren came round to collect her in her pram, and had her for the whole day. Which meant that Andreas had not one but two opportunities to go back to the gym.
Time to get himself sorted.
He hated his mental reliance on the way his body looked and felt, but it was inescapable. The fact his top surgery hadn’t given way and let him grow breasts again had been the only positive side of the horrendous way his body had ballooned during pregnancy. It wasn’t even so much the weight gain as where he’d gained it—his bum, his thighs, his hips, even his face. Where men didn’t. Where women did. He’d been softer. Curvier. Feminine. Female.
And he’d had enough.
The gym was only a few streets away from where they lived. Ideally, he would begin a training regime after a long time away by swimming, but not only did the gym not actually have a pool, Andreas wasn’t in a fit state to try it psychologically. He looked and felt bad enough without squeezing himself into a swimming costume and pretending to be a woman, or donning trunks and praying everyone else in the building wouldn’t notice.
The gym did have a reasonable amount of equipment though, and wasn’t stuffed with the usual posers that seemed to perpetually populate British gyms. Even the sting of using the female changing room was eased by it having a row of privacy cubicles that were free during weekdays. He avoided looking at the sight he must have made in his shorts and tank top, and beat a hasty retreat for the door.
During the day, the gym was reasonably quiet, and he found a lonely treadmill with a view of a TV, put his headphones in and selected his high-intensity playlist from his phone. He had to beat this body back into shape. He’d take up the boxing class again on Friday mornings, the one he’d had to quit after getting pregnant. And maybe he could go to the Body Pump class on Thursday mornings before Erik went to work. That had been amazing for his figure.
Legs stretched, back cracked, he hopped up onto the treadmill, dialled up the volume, and hit the speed.
Screw jogging. He was going to run.
And. It. Hurt.
His hips exploded in protest. His stomach clenched up and screamed. His lungs burst and his ribs creaked. The only muscles that didn’t protest were his legs, still used to carrying a lot of extra weight, pacing the landing with Beatriz in the night, and pushing the pram around the park. He gritted his teeth as he felt every spare bit of skin wobble and shake, as he felt every extra centimetre bounce and judder.
God, why couldn’t it rest on his gut, where it did for men? Where it did for Erik? He didn’t care if he was fat. He cared where he was fat. Fat, thin, built like a bodybuilder, what-the-fuck-ever, but it needed to be a fat man. It had to be a skinny man. He could outrun an Olympic athlete and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if the cashier said, “Have a nice day, miss,” at the supermarket every single time.
The worst of it was that he felt oddly guilty about it. The GP had given him a disapproving look when he’d remarked that he was struggling with his baby body. Jo had immediately said it wasn’t Beatriz’s fault. Even Lauren—who usually got these things—had said, “But you got a gorgeous little lady out of it!”
He felt oddly guilty about all of that.
He didn’t have to hate her to hate what had happened to him. He wasn’t exactly going to be loving his future babies any less because Lauren gave birth to them—or conversely, any more, because they hadn’t left him with excess skin and stretch marks. He could adore her, did adore her, and yet he felt like he wasn’t allowed to hate the pregnancy itself, or the ruin that it had left behind. Even Erik was frowning at him now, and pestering him about his meals.
Thing was, what was Andreas supposed to do? He had to force himself to leave the house. Nine months of being a mother, a miss, a wife, she-she-she-she, had torn at his skin like misgendering never had before. He used to be pragmatic about it, exploit what he could about being perceived to be a woman and ignore the rest, but nine months of that constant barrage had worn him down. Now he could barely even hear the word mother without flinching.
And if he couldn’t even leave the house without psyching himself up, his armour was so shredded, what else was he supposed to do but rebuild it? Get back to that place where there’d at least been the pause before strangers decided he was a woman. He’d never got further than that—never would, not without testosterone to bring his voice down out of the rafters and hide his feminine jawline behind a coat of distinctly masculine stubble—but at least he could return to that ambiguous zone.
Even if it did hurt.
Even if his T-shirt was stuck to his back with sweat. Even if his side was exploding in a stitch. Even if there were black dots dancing at the edges of his vision, and he could feel the air in his lungs like knives.
“Christ, look at that lass go. That’s motivation for you.”
He gritted his teeth, reached out, and bumped the speed just a little higher.
That lass.
Not anymore.
* * * *
Things went to hell in a handbasket just before Beatriz reached five months old.
Their happy, bubbly baby was transformed into a demon from the ninth circle of hell. The nights—which had been slowly quietening down as she began to sleep in heftier clumps—exploded into mayhem, with screaming on the hour, every hour, enough to bring the house down. Even the neighbours started complaining.
She was teething.
“Isn’t this a bit early?” Erik asked when—on only the fourth day of the screaming—Andreas called Lauren and she appeared within an hour with a box of various teething rings.
“Trust me,” Andreas said tiredly. “This is the problem.”
The rings worked after a fashion, and entirely replaced her dummies for nearly three weeks. But even as they stopped her howling, she was miserable. Suddenly, Auntie Jo and Auntie Lauren were pathetic substitutes, and she wa
s completely inconsolable if the daddy she wanted wasn’t the one who was available. Work became a refuge from the noise, as even the loudest and meanest of drunks was better than Beatriz at full volume.
The days were bad—she was grumpy, grizzly, dribbling everywhere, and thoroughly miserable—but the nights were worse. At least daytime cuddles and constant, patient attention could keep her from crying. But being put down in her cot away from her servants and any distractions suddenly turned into the most offensive monstrosity of her young life.
“I take it back,” Erik moaned at three in the morning, on his second week of getting little to no sleep. “I can’t handle this. No more babies.”
Andreas smirked at him from his station at the cot, bouncing Beatriz on his shoulder as she wailed.
“It could be worse,” he said.
“How the hell could it be worse?”
“I told you, my parents had twins. There could be two of her.”
Erik groaned, and tried to smother himself in a pillow.
His baby development app insisted she ought to be six months old before this happened, and he felt ridiculously unready. Andreas just laughed at him, pointed out that tiny human beings weren’t any more prone to following the rules than grown up ones, and said that his youngest sister had teethed at only three months when all the others had been eight months old or even more.
“And we don’t know what you did,” he added. “It could be you teethed at five months and she’s taking after you.”
“Then why didn’t my mother abandon me at five months, not eighteen?”
“Good question.”
He’d never abandon Beatriz, of course, but…who could blame him for lingering at the end of a shift to polish all the pumps? And those hanging baskets did need watering at half past eleven at night. And maybe he had to go in a little early to make sure the deliveries had been recorded properly by the assistant manager, even if Tom had been doing it perfectly fine for a year and a half on his own.
And all that noise was being created by a tiny little being that was outweighed by a crate of beer, for God’s sake. He’d lifted heavier pub dinners than his daughter. Outgrown Moses basket or no outgrown Moses basket, there was no way that volume should be able to come out of something so small.
Strangely though, it stopped him worrying about Andreas. It was as if when Beatriz was unhappy, all of Andreas’ problems were shoved out of his boyfriend’s mind. The strange eating habits disappeared overnight. The exercise DVDs that Erik was sure Andreas shouldn’t be doing yet were shelved again. The punishing gym sessions vanished like they’d never been. He even went out with her one morning in jeans that distinctly showed curvy hips and the still-swollen belly.
Erik…kind of hated the trade-off.
He kept up his little campaign of feel-good things, though. When Andreas was home and on comfort duty, Erik would sit at the other end of the sofa and massage his feet. If it was the other way around, he’d banish Andreas to bed or the bath to rest and recuperate. He was doubly affectionate now that Beatriz wasn’t anymore—and he hoped it might pay off once the teeth came through, and they could get some sleep again.
“We need to start thinking about moving her into her own room,” he said on the third week of thinking fairies had replaced their gorgeous little girl with a changeling. “Once this is over, she should be sleeping through again, right? We can turn the spare room into a nursery and move her cot in there. Set up a night light and a mobile.”
“Fix the window first, I’m not having an insecure window in my baby’s room.”
“I can do that tomo—”
“You can do it after a decent night’s sleep,” Andreas corrected. “You nearly poured boiling water in your lap this morning. Neither of us can be trusted with a hammer right now.”
Things slowly started to improve in the fourth week. The first glimmers of white began to appear in her reddened gums. Honey-dipped rusks began to work better at placating her. Erik discovered that a bit of banana mashed into her formula to make a cold milkshake brightened her up a little bit in the morning. Very slowly, she started to reach up for morning cuddles without howling first.
“Please tell me this is it,” he groaned, the first night that he was woken not by screaming but by a hiccuping, muted sort of whining.
“Nearly over,” Andreas said, and kissed his ear. “You sleep, and then in the morning you can fix the window and we can start on that nursery. I’ll take her downstairs for the night. Come on, cariño. Vamos abajo.”
Erik sighed as the bedroom door closed on the whimpering and whining, and turned over into the warm spot that Andreas had left behind. He should have paid attention during those ante-natal classes, when the instructor had talked about the most challenging parts coming long after the birth. Nobody had mentioned that teething was a million times worse than the actual having a baby part. For him, anyway.
Then he opened his eyes, and stared up at the darkness of the ceiling.
Oh, hell.
If she was teething already, how long before she started to talk?
Chapter 11
“I’m going to join the Park Run,” Andreas said over breakfast.
Once her teeth had come through, he’d managed to wean Beatriz off the bottle in a matter of days. Admittedly, her taste in food was definitely a bit strange—salmon paste and peanut butter spread onto a rusk was her favourite breakfast in the entire world and could keep her happy for an hour, sucking away on it like a giant lollipop—but it was a relief to be able to prop her up in a highchair and have both hands free for everything else.
Including throwing them up in a placating gesture when Erik threw him a filthy look.
“You need to ease off on that exercise regime.”
“It’s only 5k.”
“Yeah, and you had a baby six months ago.”
“Six months,” Andreas said pointedly. “I can even do sit-ups again. I’m fine. And I’m sick of looking like this and feeling disgusting. I’m done with dizzy days.”
Erik grunted. “If I didn’t think you’d cut my balls off, I’d be trying for sex every damn night and you know it. How is that disgusting?”
“With your sexual tastes?”
Erik threw a piece of banana at him. Andreas caught it, and put it on Beatriz’s plastic table.
“I’ll just jog the first few,” he said. “I’ve been walking that far on the treadmill in the gym for a while now. It’ll be fine.”
Erik pursed his lips. “I just don’t get why you need to—”
“Because every time I see my own reflection, I want to break the mirror,” Andreas said sharply.
There was a long pause. He sighed, rolling his head back to stare at the ceiling.
“Erik—”
“I’m sorry.”
He paused.
A hand squeezed his on the table.
“Sorry,” Erik repeated. “I—forget, sometimes.”
“You forget?”
“You don’t see you from the outside,” Erik said with a wry chuckle. “You don’t know what you look like when there’s no access to what’s going on in your head.”
“And how’s that?”
“Like—” Erik waved vaguely around the kitchen. “Like you’re a natural. Like there’s nothing wrong. You swan around the place like you own it, completely capable and brilliant, like having a baby is about as complicated as having an orange. When I’m out of my depth with her, you’re just completely blasé and calm like she’s your fifteenth baby, not your first. So—yeah. I forget. I forget sometimes that you have your own problems with this. Problems I’ve never understood.”
Andreas hummed, squeezing the fingers wrapped around his own.
“You do what you need to do to make yourself okay,” Erik said, “but you can’t blame me for worrying you’ll push yourself too far, too fast.”
“I know. But you can’t just tell me I look good in your eyes and expect that to solve things. It’s never been about that
and you know it.”
“Yeah,” Erik said. He squeezed, and jiggled their joined fists on the table. “Hey, isn’t the Park Run a Saturday thing?”
“Yeah.”
“So maybe we could make a little family day out of it, now it’s finally warming up enough. Walk up there with Beatriz in the pram, I’ll take her to feed the ducks while you do your run, and then we’ll meet you at the finish line and walk back in time for lunch.”
Beatriz either heard her name, or tired of being ignored, and threw the abandoned piece of banana at their hands. It splattered on the table into a mushy, baby-chewed pile.
“Lovely,” Andreas said. “Thank you, darling. Such a sweet gift. And that, I believe, is your problem.”
“My problem?” Erik squawked.
“Yep. I need a shower before I take her to nursery and go to my yoga class.”
“Fitness freak,” Erik groused, but stood up and went for the paper towels. “Go on, then.”
Andreas headed up the stairs with no small amount of relief. There were certain challenges, being with a pansexual man. Erik did not get, on any level whatsoever, what Andreas had to deal with. Not only had Erik never once questioned his gender, but the gender of his partners had never mattered either. He seemed to be genuinely incapable of seeing whether someone was male, female, or anything in-between. And it sounded nice in theory, but the reality was that he tended to accidentally push back against Andreas’ transition. He thought Andreas beautiful all the time, thought him perfect as he was, and sometimes—it seemed—forgot that Andreas wasn’t doing it to be beautiful.
He was doing it because of how he ducked his head when he walked into the bathroom, and opened the cabinet to make the mirrored front face the wall. Because of the way he stared at the ceiling in the shower, to avoid looking down at his fat thighs and swollen bum. Because of the way he patted himself dry afterwards, rather than rubbing, to avoid shaking the bottom half of the hourglass that remained after the top half had been removed.
Because of the wash of relief when he could pull a pair of jogging bottoms up over his hips and hide them. Because of the sense of everything snapping into place when he wriggled a tight top over his head, and his upper half finally looked alright.
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