A Likely Story: A Wayward Ink Publishing Anthology (12 page)

Jax untangled his hair from Cassidy’s grabby mitt and reared back onto his long haunches. “Well, you’re still at the ‘hilarious banter’ stage, I see,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

“Water,” Cassidy said. “Lots of water, please.”

Jax stood. “Comin’ up.”

“There’s a bottle of Jack on top of the fridge,” Cassidy said.

“Cool,” Jax said. “Thanks.” He turned to go.

Cassidy grabbed at the hem of his jeans. “Not for you.”

Jax lumbered off with a laugh.

Shortly he returned, toting a jug of water, the bottle of Jack, and two glasses. “We’ll share,” he said, lowering himself next to Cassidy.

“Hell no we won’t,” Cassidy said. “I’ve seen what you ‘share’. The last thing you ‘shared’ with me, I’m about to have to put it through college.”

“Yeah, well, not tonight, you won’t.” Jax served up two monster shots of whiskey. They slammed them back. He poured Cassidy a glass of water, and himself another shot.

“Is that okay for the baby?” Jax asked.

Cassidy shrugged. “Can’t be worse than what they give you in the hospital.”

“What do they give you in the hospital?”

“Fuck if I know.” They laughed.

“For real.” Jax leaned in close. Cassidy gulped in great lungfuls of his Pigpen aura, grateful for the stink of his nearness. Would his baby smell like smoke and old jeans too long unwashed? “Are you OK?” Jax wiped Cassidy’s wet, sticky bangs back from his forehead, and rubbed the nape of his neck.

Cassidy looked at him. Jax’s eyes sparkled with a permanent twinkle, but his focus was pulled tight onto the little soon-to-be-trio. Cassidy took his hand. “No. I’m scared.”

“It hurts?”

Cassidy’s eyes went wide. He squeezed Jax’s hand and nodded emphatically. “Like hell. This isn’t going to be any fun. I’m scared of when it comes. I’m scared it isn’t coming.”

“You sure look like it’s coming.”

“But I’m a dude. I can’t be having a baby. I think I’m just going to shit out my insides and die right here.”

“Aw, Pickle.” Jax turned down the corners of his clown mouth. “You’re not gonna die, Mama. This night’s about life, man, I can feel it. We made a life, me and you.”

“We did?”

Jax set a gentle hand on the swell of Cassidy’s belly. “We did.”

Cassidy spared a tired smile. Jax leaned closer and kissed him. On the forehead, on the mouth, on the tight-popped new outie navel. For a spell they rested. Cassidy drifted to and fro, now smiling at Jax, now snoring. Jax watched Cassidy doze, pulling at the bottle of Jack and marveling at the big, bloated dude-mama he’d somehow managed to create. Eventually, inevitably, impossibly, Cassidy cried out.

It was a real, raw cry of fear. A shit chute he never knew he had had somehow wrung itself wide open, and he knew for a terrifying fact he was going to dump his insides onto his bathroom floor.

“I’m here, Mama,” Jax soothed. “Is it time?”

“This is it,” Cassidy wailed.

Jax sat himself up straight, edged over to Cassidy, once again on his knees. “It’s coming?”

“Something’s coming. Oh God, this is it. Oh my God, I think you killed me. Jax, what’s happening?” He smashed Jax’s hand in his own.

“You’re gonna make me a Pa, Pickle, that’s what.”

Cassidy howled again. Whatever he had inside him was coming out, and he didn’t know whether to pray for a baby or a pile of guts and the end—both prospects were terrifying. “What do I do? Holy shit, what do I do?”

Jax scanned the bathroom. He stretched to reach a towel off the rack and hopped up into a catcher’s crouch. “I guess you squirt a baby at me and we raise it up the best we can.”

“Do you mean it?”

“I will if you will.”

Cassidy nodded.

“Then let’s do it,” Jax said, scooching close. “On TV they say ‘breathe’ and ‘push’ a lot. I guess start there.”

THEY WERE still cuddled together, a dazed and sweaty family of three, on Cassidy’s bathroom floor when he and the boy’s Daddy agreed on Howie’s name—”
Howie
got him is kind of a crazy story,” Jax laughed, looking into their future of
Where’d this kid come from?

Shortly before Howie turned one, Jax fulfilled his obligations to the Colorado parole board. A month later, Cassidy was among the nine Republicans to vote with the unanimous Dems to legalize same-sex marriage.

Their actual I-do’s were traded in a small, same-jeans-as-always lakeside ceremony. But the wedding portrait snapped on the Capitol steps—Cassidy squinting into the sunset in a suit, Jax, hair slicked into submission, mugging with the baby in his arms—was campaign website gold, and made the cover of
Mile High Magazine
’s annual June Pride issue.

Cousin Kirk got the boot from the hillside house in Grand Lake after Jax helped Wade convert the garage into a little boy’s bedroom. Cassidy kept his place in Cap Hill as a crash pad, but once they settled in the mountains, he only drove into Denver to handle House business, and then hurried home to his boys. In the summer, Jax had his pick of high-season hotel kitchen gigs. In the wintertime, he unloaded trucks at the Safeway when there was a need, towed Howie through the trees on a sled or finger-painted the day away with him when there wasn’t. Some Tea Party jackass from Winter Park with an axe to grind mounted a campaign against Cassidy, but was handed an embarrassing defeat when Cassidy played his messy public divorce and long history of unpaid child support against him. Kirk was no dummy campaign manager and made it difficult to paint the Uematsu-Jacksons as a threat to family values. They were legally wed and dutifully raising their darling ‘adopted’ son (for all the newspapers needed to know). Cassidy had a well-known record of standing up for Grand County, Jax had paid his debt to society, and by the way have you gotten a load of their adorable baby? His fourth term was a layup.

Little Howie loved his cousins, and Cassidy and Jax spent as much time at Wade and Elvira’s house as they did at home, more in the summertime when the lake was its bluest and the weather its dock-sittingest. Except for like three days at the very end of August, the lake was too cold for Cassidy, but Jax cannonballed off the dock like it was his job, and played shark to the little dudes’ guppies until Elvira had to threaten to fish all four of them out of the lake with a net come dinner time.

Howie was three and a half the afternoon that Cassidy and Jax were lounging in camp chairs on the dock, drinking beer and holding hands, doing nothing more than watch the sky be blue and the cousins traipse up and down the beach doing whatever little kids do with rocks and driftwood when the whole world is a never-ending summer day and a bottomless cooler of juice boxes. It didn’t happen overnight, but Cassidy fought for it, and got his pre-baby body back. Except for the stubborn bubble around his belly button that looked like it was there to stay, but Cassidy figured he wasn’t the only almost-forty married dude that ever popped a beer belly, and half a cantaloupe was better than half a Volkswagen. Hell, even Jax’s washboard had started to bow in the last few weeks—nothing lasts forever.

“I’m about ready to eat,” Jax said.

“We had lunch an hour ago,” Cassidy said.

“I know.” Jax traced his fading abs while he mused. “Ever since I got over that crazy flu I had a couple months ago, I can’t stop eating. Look.” He took Cassidy’s hand and set it on his stomach. “I’m startin’ to get a little pot.”

Cassidy looked at Jax and let a grin creep across his face. Jax was almost always the top, and a spectacular one at that—Cassidy was always pleased to host. But every once in a great while, Jax’s little wiggle-butt wanted in on the action, and Cassidy would saddle up. The last time had probably been a couple months ago.

Howie wandered down the dock, apparently out of gas. When he cuddled into Cassidy’s lap, Cassidy ran fingers through his sun-whitened hair. “Howie-man,” he said, but was looking right at Jax when he asked, “How would you like to have a little brother?”

MICHAEL P. THOMAS is a flight attendant whose writing is continually inspired by his work with the flying public, who flatly refuse to be boring. The author of three novel-length gay romances and a number of romantic and erotic shorts, he writes gay fiction because when he was coming out he sure was glad to have it to read. After misspending his youth in San Francisco, he now lives in his native Colorado with his husband.

Michael P. Thomas can be found at:

Website:
http://misterstewardess.com/

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/GoReadMichaelPThomas

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MrStewardess

IT WAS almost midnight, the witching hour—a time when magic might be real, but never was. Mason paused in his trek down the front stairs, listening to the quiet whir of childhood memories, the sound that preceded the bells of the old grandfather clock in the foyer. It was a portent of the dozen discordant chimes signaling the start of a new day.

Mason ghosted silently down the halls of the once-elegant mansion, now a mausoleum of the barely living. A skeletal apparition, dead yet forced to breathe: hollow, dark-rimmed eyes, sunken cheeks, bloodless lips, disarrayed hair flowing past bowed shoulders. Heavy with the weight of loss, he slowed his footsteps as he silently marked another lonely, sleepless night, fortunate that old money allowed him to retreat from the world and nurse his persistent wound in luxurious emptiness. The absence of humanity comforted his soul. It was, after all, humanity that had torn it from his chest. The godless war in the Middle East had claimed its most important victim last year, and destroyed another future as well. He needed no one, wanted no one. No one heard his sobs; no one interrupted his misery. The touch of another was only a passing dream. The clangor of life was silenced, the only exception the old clock. His purpose was gone, his will forfeit. He was a shadow in the mansion, ghosting with his ancestors, slowly fading from view.

He hadn’t always been this lost, this broken. A mere thirteen months ago he was a vibrant young man, twenty-one years old, living in anticipation of a future with his high-school love. Three more months would have seen Jeremy back at his side, free of their families’ hatred and free to hold and cherish each other.

They had planned to marry in a small private ceremony, travel the world for a year, and then return to start a family. Jeremy would have been released from the army and, with his honorable discharge, released also from the obligation forced upon him by an angry, homophobic father. Their lives had been on hold since that day three years ago… the day their families discovered the love the boys had successfully hidden for years, from both family and friends.

Mason and Jeremy, childhood friends, had fallen into their love naturally. Best friends first, then hesitant explorers when their bodies began to mature, and finally soul mates, one heart in two bodies. They planned their lives as they grew: cowboys riding the range at seven years old, space explorers and astronauts at twelve, and finally they decided to attend and graduate from Yale University after which they would begin their adult lives, Mason as an environmental attorney and Jeremy as a National Parks Service employee. Their academic careers were exemplary, graduating from high school as joint valedictorians with some of the highest grade point averages ever seen at their small school. Their proud parents had purchased a substantial two-bedroom apartment near the Yale campus as their graduation gift. It would allow them their own space during college and grad school.

From old money and older names, the boys were everything their parents expected. It was a given that both would excel at anything they put their minds to, and they always delivered. As eldest sons, they were expected to continue their family lines and contribute to the wealth and prominence of their family names. Charmed lives, wealth, and prestige were their legacy, through no effort of their own. Neither boy, however, took life for granted. They didn’t care how smooth their paths appeared to be; they worked hard to make their lives what they wanted. They had dreams of their own, and were determined to succeed, with or without their parents. They knew choosing each other would almost ensure they would be proceeding on their own, so they planned to keep their love quiet until their trust funds kicked in when they turned nineteen.

Yes, life was good and, like a fine wine, would only improve with age. Until, that is, they were discovered
in flagrante
, bare as babies, wrapped in each other’s arms.

The doorbell jerked Mason upright in alarm, chasing away the memories of a broken past. No one knew he was lurking in his grandparents’ long-abandoned home. Insistent in its need for attention, the doorbell all but drowned the final chime of the clock. He slowly opened the heavy door to reveal the dream of his lover, his waking nightmare. Realizing dimly that his mind had finally relinquished its hold on sanity, he motioned the dark intruder through the ancient portal, speechless in disbelief.

Mason stumbled back as his past life moved to embrace him. Emotion overwhelmed him and he slid to the floor, vision tunneling to blackness.