A Likely Story: A Wayward Ink Publishing Anthology (10 page)

“What does what he weighed have to do with what you weighed?” Cassidy asked. He pulled his arms closer around him against the chill he felt rising in his chest.

Wade took a big breath, held it for a beat, let it out. “Elvira can’t have children, Cass.”

“You mean she can’t have any
more
children? Something happened with Olaf?”

Wade shook his head. “She had polyps on her uterus when she was still a teenager. She had a hysterectomy before we even got married.”

Cassidy felt the littlest bit dizzy. “So, what, you used like a surrogate?”

Wade nodded. “Know who it was?”

Suddenly, impossibly, Cassidy did. But he couldn’t put it into words. A simple
yes
was more than he could push through the tightness in his throat. He raised an eyebrow, and Wade nodded.

“She padded,” he said. “We wanted to keep the freak show factor to a minimum. Her sister gave us some eggs. We did IVF with my swimmers, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Cassidy muttered. Because he apparently lived in a world where there were ‘obvious’ elements of his
brother the construction worker’s
pregnancy. “Umm…?” He hugged himself to ward off the weirdness. What was most obvious, of course, was that his brother had lost his damn mind, and Cassidy hugged this certainty close, too, as he recognized for the first time the tiny life stirring inside him. He thought of Jax—ridiculously young, impossibly cavalier Jax—and groaned.

Wade gulped at his wine and held onto the empty glass. Staring through its bottom, he chuckled. “Whoa. That felt good.” He looked at Cassidy with a grin. “And you thought
you
had some coming out to do.”

Cassidy tried to smile, but failed. “How?” was all he could muster, and he had to repeat himself before Wade could hear him.

Wade relaxed some, although he mostly looked at his empty glass while he was talking. “Mom,” he said, as if that suddenly meaningless word explained anything. He went on. “Apparently it’s a Norwegian thing. Something like eighty percent of the known cases of male extra-gastric endometria are Scandinavian men. There are like nine doctors in the world who deal with pregnant dudes, and five of them are in Scandinavia. Two are in Oslo, which is why we got all into ‘connecting with Mom’s family’ all of a sudden. Twice.” He chuckled. “We never met so much as a cousin, but you go where the docs are. It’s only passed through the mom, my boys won’t have it—we can only have boys. Something like one in twenty-two million male babies are born with this little sac attached to their stomach that can support life. You ovulate, Bro, surprise! But we shit it out, it’s a mutation of the digestive system, most guys never know they have it. Only gay dudes ever get knocked up. Or guys that take it up the ass at least once, anyway. But Mom knew it was in the family and thought I should at least get tested for it, she knew how bad we wanted kids. The chances of me having it were like incalculably remote, but if Mom passes it on to one son, the chances that she’ll pass it on to the rest of ‘em jumps to like one-in-three.”

Cassidy’s head continued to spin, visions of smirking Jax tumbling with visions of squalling babies bouncing off visions of Wade in a straightjacket crashing into the now petrifying memory of the few milky drops Cassidy had pretended not to notice his swelling nipples discharge a couple mornings ago. He put his hand under the mound of belly in his lap and struggled to swallow. There was a baby in there? He feared that if he tried to wrap his mind around the words coming out of Wade’s mouth, it would snap with the effort. Surely he was just a fat fuck with some kind of eating disorder.
Please,
he was shocked to find himself praying,
let me just be a fat fuck with some kind of eating disorder.
Until this moment, Cassidy’s worst nightmare had been gaining out of control into fat fuck-dom, but now he fervently hoped that he would keep blowing up, for at least more than the next three months. Given the choice, he’d sure as hell rather pork himself to three hundred pounds than have a fucking
baby
in three months. Hell, Jax wasn’t even twenty-two years old—he practically already had
one
kid, now he was supposed to have that kid’s baby?

“Sorry to drop this on you, old man,” Wade said. “You’re so far along, I kind of assumed you knew. When I saw you, I was like,
‘that little shit, he didn’t even call to tell me’.”
He chuckled again. “Now I know why.”

“I’ll never have sex without a condom again,” Cassidy managed to croak.

Wade laughed. “It’s a little late for that.”

Cassidy looked at his brother, aghast at the horrifying, obviously fictional prospect. “I’m not having any baby,” he said.

Wade reached out and gave Cassidy’s bump a pat. “By the looks of it, bro, you might be having two.”

“I am definitely not having any
two
babies,” Cassidy affirmed.

Wade laughed again. “It’s not like you can have an abortion,” he teased. “You’re a Republican. Hell, knocked up by accident, carrying the baby to term, you’re a family values wet dream.”

“Fuck that,” Cassidy said. “I’m not having any baby.”

Wade’s smile faded. “Cass, you can’t. You’re six months along. You’ve already got a little boy in there.”

“That’s not my fucking problem.”

“The hell it’s not. Put him up for adoption if you want to, bro, but I hate to break it to you: you’re havin’ a baby.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’m kickin’ your ass, is what. You think you’re gonna abort my little nephew cuz you’re too chicken-shit to pop him out, you can think again.”

“Wade.” Cassidy’s voice caught in his throat. He was sweating, his heart was pounding. He thought he was crying, but in his panic he couldn’t be sure. “I can’t have a baby. I’m a dude. Jax is just a kid, we’re just fucking around. I’m a
dude!
This can’t be happening.”

“I know how you feel, little bro. It’s kind of a mind-fuck, I’ve been there. And I’m here. I’ll give you whatever support you need. I’ll help you however I can. We all will.”

Cassidy knew two things in a flash, deep through into his bones. One, his brother was obviously a madman, spouting the craziest of all crazy talk, in desperate need of psychiatric attention. And the other he understood even as Wade intoned it—as a benediction? A curse?

“But it’s happening.”

“WHAT WOULD you say if I told you I was pregnant?”

It was the dark middle of the night, a week after Thanksgiving. Cassidy lay on his back in his bed, sifting through the black for an anchor that might keep his wandering mind within sight of the shore of sanity. Back in his own life, geographic and emotional miles away from his brother’s back deck, the notion that he was growing a tiny life just wouldn’t take hold, even as Jax sleepily rubbed circles on its round, fat incubator.

“I’d say it had better be mine,” Jax slurred, half asleep.

Cassidy shifted to face Jax, even though he couldn’t see more than Jax’s wild-haired outline. “What would you say if I told you I’m serious?”

Jax levered himself halfway up on an elbow. “I’d say you were crazy, and probably call the cops to fifty-one fifty your ass.”

“Oh.”

“But. …” Roused, Jax shifted his weight. He brought his legs around, turning on the axis of his pelvis until his head was alongside Cassidy’s swollen tummy. “I’m down for the play-along,” Jax said, palming Cassidy like a basketball and kissing his belly button. “Actually, it’s kinda hot,” he went on, cupping Cassidy with both hands. “It’s like, all the cum I been puttin’ in ya
is
what made ya blimp. I
did
make my mark on you, put a little Jax-baby in there.”

“Not a Pickle-baby?”

“I already got a Pickle-baby,” Jax said, giving Cassidy’s belly a playful shake. “And he’s ‘bout to birth me a little Jax-baby.” As Jax massaged Cassidy’s belly, Cassidy stirred.

Jax noticed. “You like that, huh? You kinky perv!”

Cassidy could hear Jax’s smile in his voice as he unfurled himself until he was again alongside Cassidy. Jax kissed Cassidy, tugged lightly at his bottom lip with teeth. “I had no idea,” Jax murmured. Jax reached under Cassidy’s swell and coaxed him stiffer, cupped Cassidy’s balls, and then slid down to finger-tease his hole. “You want me to knock you up, is that it?”

Cassidy nodded. Never mind that Jax had already knocked him up—he’d laid the groundwork, and they had months yet to get around to
that
conversation. He’d take it as a good sign that Jax was at least into the idea as role play, fine. But he’d take it as an even better sign that knowing that it actually
was
Jax’s cum that had blown him up made him want Jax inside him again for the first time in weeks, and he wanted Jax inside him
bad.

“Gonna make me a little Jax-baby,” Jax was saying while knee-crawling between Cassidy’s legs, working a squirt of lube around his pucker. “Think you can still get them legs in the air with that big ol’ gut on ya, Pickle?”

Cassidy hooked his ankles around Jax’s neck in response. “You mean like this?”

Jax slid inside him and got down to baby-making. “Why yes I do.”

Once his gut—and its growth—became a plaything, Cassidy relaxed. And once he unclenched his anxiety around his weight gain, it shifted into high gear.

Now that Jax was in on it, it was like he was feeding Cassidy fatter on purpose. “You’re eating for two now, Mama,” he would joke, and serve up ridiculous piles of food.

“Do you have to call me that?” Cassidy asked one night. Jax hadn’t bothered with a bowl or the scooper, but had just brought the half-gallon of ice cream to bed with a spoon. It was Cassidy’s second half-gallon of the day.

“What? ‘Mama’?”

“Yeah,” Cassidy said. “Can’t I be ‘Daddy’?”

“I’m Daddy,” Jax said, his jack-o-lantern grin lit with pride.

“Then can we go back to ‘Pickle’?”

“Which one of us is cartin’ around a big ol’ pregnant belly?” Jax asked, giving Cassidy’s an illustrative pat.

“Me.”

“Uh huh. And which one of us is gettin’ big fat milk-titties on him?”

Cassidy groaned. He was at least a B cup by now, and he had to have at least six weeks to go. His nipples had tripled in size and half the time they hurt if he even thought about touching them. “Me,” he allowed.

“That’s right,” Jax said. “And which one of us wants Daddy’s big happy dick inside him right…” he took the empty carton from Cassidy and set it on the bedside table, “… about…” he waited for Cassidy to lick it clean, and then took the spoon and set it down, too, “… now?”

Cassidy’s hole thrilled at the prospect. “That would be me,” he confessed.

Jax shrugged as he lubed himself up. “Then let me at it, Mama.”

Cassidy groaned, but he lay back and took it, all the while thinking,
I wonder how many of these little ankle biters we’re gonna end up with.

While the come-to-Jesus was still in Jax’s unsuspecting future, he tackled pretend-father-to-be with some gusto. Jax helped Cassidy sit down, scurried to bring him food or a glass of water, clamored to rub his tired feet, knelt to kiss his belly, and then helped him back up again. Combing the racks of the Colfax thrift stores for novelty maternity tees of the yellow-diamond Baby-on-Board variety quickly became an after-work obsession. As, eventually, did parading Cassidy up to The Road to model them for his laughing barstool buddies, who, it became clear, had never seen anything quite so hilarious as a ball-bellied dude in a “Precious Cargo” t-shirt. He fairly sprinted home from work every day with a new list of “the awesomest baby names ever”, which ran the gamut from Jaxxidy Clay and Pickle McGee to Snapper Stout and Cassidy’s personal front-runner, Ceethreepio James.

“Are you
always
high at that job?” Cassidy asked him more than once.

“Never,” Jax would say. “Til after lunch.”

“You don’t want to name him Buford the Fourth?” Cassidy asked one day.

“Do it and I’ll leave you on the spot.” No trace of a smile. The specter of the baby’s Jax-paternal grandfather would not be raised again.

As it does, denial kept everybody happy. For a couple of weeks. Cassidy kept growing, Jax kept feeding him and calling him Mama. The truth—that they needed to figure out how, and indeed
if,
they would face fatherhood together when it smacked them like a big wet fish in the face come February—was happy to bide its time. Its day would come, and with fireworks.

Flat on his back, well into his eighth month, all Cassidy could see when he looked towards the foot of the bed was the pile of his own distended belly. Jax was down there somewhere—teasing his cock, tickling his taint, tongue gone wild—and Cassidy would occasionally see one blue-stained hand swipe around the swell of him. The kid fairly worshipped Cassidy’s belly, and had lately taken to whispering to the Jax-baby inside it, making promises of his first tattoo and his first skateboard, and teaching him all about the birds and bees so he could grow up and one day land him a big fat man just like his handsome Mama. Cassidy laughed at the ensuing visual of a tattoo-covered toddler with his Daddy’s wild chestnut hair going off to preschool with his wallet on a chain and buddying up to a little scrub-faced Alex P. Keaton kid in short pants and a necktie. Jax was a dipshit, there were no two ways about that—he slept way too late, smoked way too much pot, and was in constant goof-off mode. He wasn’t any kind of obsessive about hygiene, and smelled like smoke, sweat, and overgrown feet, often even from across the room. Most days, in his one worn pair of jeans, his hair tied back half-assed, he looked like the burlap sack he’d been shoved in had fallen off the back of the truck, gone over the side of a cliff and through the branches of a very tall tree before ripping open and spilling him into a ditch. But he smiled all the time and he laughed at everything. He worked hard and took pride in a job he was good at—as the seventy extra pounds of Cassidy would attest. He made no apologies, but he was nobody’s victim. He’d been dealt a low hand early on, but he’d played it with guts, and wasn’t comparing his pile of chips to anyone else’s at the table. He knew he was worthy of love, shared his freely, and if there was a better quality to look for in a co-parent, Cassidy would have been hard-pressed to name it.