by Aiden Bates
I wrinkled my forehead at Mitch for a second, thinking I’d suddenly stopped getting the joke. “What?”
Mitch rolled his eyes at me and very obviously looked over at Pedro like he was trying to tell a secret in front of him without Pedro noticing. I was trying to mentally playback his words to make sense of what he might have meant, but that look made the lightbulb go off.
Oh. Right. I hadn’t told Pedro about Mitch being pregnant. I mean I’d told Pedro about the plan to get Mitch pregnant and why, but I’d been worried about jinxing it so hadn’t said much beyond that. I hadn’t told Pedro about what Oliver had been through with his own brother, and I especially hadn’t told him anything about what my relationship with Mitch and Oliver looked like these days.
I hadn’t gotten the chance to sit here and talk about the red-yellow color that Mitch’s hair went in the sun, and how he automatically knew how to get along with everyone. I hadn’t told him that Oliver came off as serious until you got to know him, and then you found out he was willing to make himself look like an idiot to make Mitch laugh. I never told Pedro that Mitch had barely finished high school but was the smartest person I knew, and that Oliver had finished all kinds of school but would be the first one to say that Mitch was the smart one.
Well, that was going to change starting right now.
“Pedro,” I said, clearing my throat, weirdly nervous as if I were really introducing them. “Pedro, this is Mitch. You might remember him from high school. He hangs out with Bennet, Garret’s brother, and—”
“Yeah. I’m Mitch,” Mitch said, pretending he was annoyed. “I’m the boyfriend.”
“Yeah? Kind of?” I tilted my head at Mitch. “Yeah? Not the boyfriend, though, right? A boyfriend. One of two boyfriends.”
“The boyfriend having the baby, though. So, you know, the important one,” Mitch said in that teasing way of his.
“Yeah. The baby. Pedro, this is Mitch, one of my boyfriends, who’s having a baby,” I said, introducing Mitch properly.
“And we’ll bring the other boyfriend around some time, too. And the baby, eventually, of course.”
In that moment I realized Mitch was actually having a conversation with Pedro, the way I did. Mitch could make a friend out of any stranger in five seconds flat, and could talk to anyone about anything, but I hadn’t figured he’d be this way with Pedro as well. I glanced at Mitch to see if he understood what he was doing, but Mitch wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Pedro, and had actually slipped one of his hands into Pedro’s left hand, squeezing it lightly.
I started blinking furiously and looked away, trying to hide the fact that I was fighting back tears. I stared hard at one of the tubes coming from my brother’s ventilator, too afraid to look at either Mitch or Pedro for fear I might really lose it.
As I stared at the tube, though, I heard Mitch finish his sentence to Pedro, quietly but once again with that little hint of teasing Mitch’s voice usually carried.
“That means you’ve got, oh, I’d say about…eight months more of laying around before we’re going to need you up, and walking, and taking diaper duty shifts, alright? We weren’t kidding when we told Alverita that this baby is going to need his or her uncle. So, we’ll be seeing you around, Pedro, but I mean it. Eight months.”
I felt weight shifting on the bed, and then Mitch gripped my shoulder as if to give me strength. I still didn’t have the courage to turn around and face him yet, so Mitch began gently rubbing my back.
“Anyway,” I heard Mitch say, his voice now a little strangled like he was trying not to cry, too. “I’m sure he hasn’t told you, so I’ll tell you myself. Back in high school, I don’t think Marcos really noticed me, but to be honest, I definitely noticed Marcos. In fact, do you remember that mean math teacher? Sometimes, I’d see Marcos on his way to…”
And pretty soon, I was sure Mitch had just made another new best friend.
17
Mitch
I’d been summoned, my presence assumed.
It was time for bitch brunch.
In reality, they shouldn’t have worried. I lived for bitch brunch. Granted, the name hadn’t ever really taken off, but I still insisted on calling it that. I figured eventually, it would catch on. Silas, Charlie, and Bennet still seemed less than convinced.
Bitch brunch had started before we’d really, honestly, had a concept of brunch. Bennet and I had been friends since we were teenagers. Our earliest brunches had really been exhausted lunches and dinners complaining about this and that, and splitting value meals between ourselves. When Bennet’s older brother Garret had gone into the army, Bennet had gone a little…wild. And that’s where I came in. No one did wild better that I did in those days. We’d gotten into our share of tight spots back in the day. And then of course, Silas had come along to our brunches when he’d married Garret, and then Bennet had married Silas’s brother’s father-in-law, whose son, Teddy, was brothers with Charlie’s fiancé, Jason, who’d died.
Honestly, it was better than a soap opera. And now, with Marcos, I was actually a part of it. I was involved. “Brothers-in-arms” and whatnot. Ugh.
It was springtime in South Carolina, and that meant, for a few brief months until the heat becomes so unbearable that no one can move, brunch is finally happening outside. We were at Silas’s house out in the suburbs of the town. We settled everyone outside on the porch. Everything was in bloom, including, I suppose, yours truly.
Which reminded me.
Silas had just sat down a platter full of finger food when I sat down my glass of sweet tea and spilled.
“So, I’m pregnant,” I said, apropos of nothing. It was poor timing. Bennet spewed his drink everywhere, Silas looked shocked, and sweet Charlie just smiled widely.
“That’s wonderful!” he said, before his face frowned in confusion. “Wait? Did you use a donor?”
“Well…”
It all fell out of my mouth in a jumbled mess. I told them everything about Marcos and Oliver and the agreement and then the more-than-agreement. “And so now, it’s all of us.”
“Like, all of you, all of you?” Bennet asked.
“Yep. It’s not as complicated as it sounds though. A lot more laundry, so many dishes. But, other than that, it feels…natural?”
“Well, I think it’s all a little cute,” Charlie said, nodding his head definitively.
For all my snark, Charlie was really the one who we centered brunches around these days. After Jason died, Charlie had really struggled to find himself again. He still struggled, really. But every day, I saw more and more of his sense of humor coming back to himself.
“Cute?” Bennet asked. I arched an eyebrow at him.
Charlie nodded again. “Absolutely. Unexpected love blooming? Are you kidding? It’s adorable.”
“Thank you, Charlie,” I said primly. “And, I would remind others at the table that I’m hardly the only one with unexpected love, or did you expect Sergeant O’Rourke to marry you the whole time you were going over to Teddy’s house to play video games? Do you still call him ‘Sir’ and everything?” I asked, teasingly.
Silas roared with laughter, his head tilted back. Baby Jason tilted his head adorably at his papa’s laugh, and blame it on the hormones, but I found myself wondering, not for the first time, what the little one inside me would be like.
Bennet pursed his lips, trying and failing to downplay the flush across his cheeks.
“Oh, you do,” I said, glee blossoming in my heart.
“Shut up, Mitch. I believe we were talking about your ‘unexpected love,’ not mine.”
“Says you,” Silas said. “Tell me more about this. Spill.”
“There are children present,” Bennet pleaded.
“Yeah, yours who is all of six months old and mine who is…currently attempting to eat dirt—Jason! Stop, no!” Silas got up and redirected a rambunctious toddler before returning to the table. Hmm, maybe ours wouldn’t be quite like that.
“Regardless.
A benefit of my ‘unexpected romance’ is that it doesn’t come with a very conservative, very assertive, very religious mother attached.”
He had a point. Silas also looked concerned about this, his brows furrowing. “Yeah, I get that for y’all things have changed, but does she know about Oliver?” he asked.
“Well, no, not yet,” I admitted.
Even Charlie looked a touch concerned now.
“Yeah, better get on that, you know. You’ve got a time bomb now,” Silas said, glancing down at my stomach.
“Is that what we call them now?” I asked.
“Only when they can’t hear,” Bennet said, sweetly. “So, what does Marcos think about telling his mother about the…expanded nature of your relationship.”
This caught me off-guard a little. “I… I don’t know. We haven’t exactly talked about all of it yet.” Which made me start to wonder. Why hadn’t Marcos brought that up? Clearly, we weren’t going to be able to hide all of this forever. Part of me wanted to say we’d just had a lot going on. Oliver and Marcos were still adjusting to the idea of having a pregnant partner, overprotective and hashing out all sorts of new boundaries. And, obviously, Pedro was still in a coma, and that, understandably, still took up a lot of Marcos’s attention. Another part of me wasn’t so sure.
“Well, it’s still early days, we’ll come up with a solution. Besides, I have a date with Alverita after the ultrasound in a few weeks to talk about the wedding and to look at the wedding books. Get this. Apparently? She has a collection.”
“Oh no,” Bennet murmured. “That’s… Oh, that’s not going to be good.”
“Tell me about it. I can’t wait for Southern Omega and Country to come and vomit all over my fictitious wedding.”
“Ooh, do you think there’ll be gingham?” Charlie asked, his eyes sparkling mischievously.
“Oh, honey. Yes. And Mason jars and a barn and everything.”
Brunch went on uneventfully after that, and as I drove away, I couldn’t ignore the slight gnawing in my gut. The boys were only looking out for me, and the things they teased about were real concerns. Alverita was a conservative woman. I had no idea what she thought about omega-omega relationships, or multiple partners… Polyamory? I mean, that was what we were doing now. Would that be too far for her to follow? What would happen? If Pedro really didn’t make it, what would that mean for her remaining relationship with one of her children? What would that mean for Marcos?
I couldn’t take it. The suspense was killing me, and I needed to talk to Marcos about it, to say what was on my mind now before it got consumed by some other issue. I pulled over, intending to call him now, but just as I grabbed my phone, it went off in my hand. I looked down.
Fuck.
Rob Callahan’s name scrolled across the screen. Goddamn it.
This had to stop. I wasn’t going to put up with this forever.
“Hello, Rob.”
“Red!” Rob responded with his sometimes nickname for me.
“What can I do for you?” I asked, in no mood for games.
“Oh, don’t be like that. I only wanted to check in on you. See how things are going for you,” he explained. I could hear the false sincerity from here. Rob had told me himself years ago, “Mitch, there’s one thing you have to learn pretty quick in this business. Never, ever say what you mean. Not once.”
“They’re going fine,” I said shortly.
“Good! That’s good. But you know…”
“What?”
“I’m just saying, some of your regulars are asking about you, you know, trying to set up appointments.” The thought of it made my skin crawl.
“So? Send literally anyone else. I don’t care.”
“Well, I’ve been putting them off, saying you’re busy or on vacation or whatever. Just in case you need a little extra money?”
“Rob, I need you to hear me on this, okay? Because the whole point of that lovely little lunch in Charlotte was to make it clear to you that I was done with it. Alright? Completely. I don’t want back in. I don’t need to be back in. I’m good. I can’t possibly tell you how good I am. It’s over.”
Rob didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Apparently, he wasn’t used to hearing this from the omegas who left him. Suddenly, I realized this was exactly what he did to them. Lay silent for a few months and wait for whoever to get thoroughly tired of trying to eke out an existence on Ramen and minimum wage, and then? In he’d come with the promise of easy money and the same old clients. Wouldn’t that be easier? Wouldn’t that be nicer? You can’t really want to barely make it by when you know what you could have otherwise?
Rob probably didn’t get a lot of “No, thank you’s” on his offer.
Well, too bad. Today he was going to learn.
“You know, there is one client who I haven’t heard from… Just one. You were very popular Mitch. Everyone asks after you. Except Oliver. You remember sweet little Oliver, don’t you? Oliver Munoz? Not a peep. Interesting, don’t you think?”
Oh, fuck him. I saw red. If Rob Callahan had been with me, I would have killed him. I know it in that bone deep way I knew I’d do anything to protect the baby inside me. On cue, my stomach twinged nervously.
“I’m sure he just moved on. It’s not rocket science.”
“No, you’re right. It isn’t.”
“Please don’t call again, Rob,” I said, using every ounce of my energy to keep my voice level and hanging up the phone before Rob could respond.
I took a few deep breaths, and then dialed Oliver.
“Hi, babe. How was bitch brunch?” Oliver asked warmly. I felt some of the tension leave my body.
“I knew it would catch on eventually,” I said.
“Good luck on that one. Did you need something?”
“Yeah, I had a random thought. You know, now we’re in Fort Greene full time, I’m thinking about changing my number. You know, just to something local.”
“You said six months ago that, and I repeat, you’d ‘had that number since you were fifteen and you were keeping it,’” Oliver said suspiciously.
“Yeah, well, I’m just tired of having to give an area code all the time, you know?” I hoped I sounded convincing.
“Well, okay then. Not the kind of craving I expected, but sure of course. I can take care of it.”
I felt immediately better. I didn’t deserve Oliver, would never deserve Oliver. Rob Callahan could go fuck himself. There was no way I was going to let him get to Oliver.
But even as I drove home, home to my warm house and the amazing people inside it, I had a sinking feeling that leaving my past, specifically Rob behind, wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d thought.
18
Oliver
I swear to god, it had been four thirty-two for the past three hours.
Earlier that afternoon, I had finished clearing revisions on a few audits I’d been working on, and I was planning to finish up the day by dutifully updating my client contact sheets before I got to go home.
That was the plan, anyway. Where normally I was pretty efficient about boring, mindless tasks like that, these particular updates were taking forever to finish. Half the reason they were taking so long was because I kept taking mental breaks. I’d get to a good stopping point, and then immediately rewarded myself with “just a few minutes” on some baby furniture website. A few minutes had turned into something closer to a half-hour for some of these breaks, but I was busy putting together a spreadsheet comparing the different safety features of my top ten picks for cribs, so of course I couldn’t be bothered with client contact sheets right now. I had intricate design and wood stain decisions to make.
Still, what I wanted to do more than anything was to be home doing this with Mitch and Marcos, so I forced myself to concentrate on my work in hopes of getting done quickly, and maybe even managing to duck out of the office sooner rather than later.
Right when I was about to turn my attention back to my spreadsheets—the call lis
t, not the spreadsheets I actually cared about—my phone buzzed on the desk next to me. I reached for it and tilted the screen toward myself in order to read the caller’s name. The caller had no name, the number was unsaved, nothing would have really distinguished it from a random wrong-number or a telemarketer.
Nothing, that is, except for the fact that I recognized this number without having any need of saving it. I had memorized this number and would probably know it by heart for the rest of my life.
It was Rob. Rob Callahan. Rob Callahan from the agency. The agency. The one that Mitch had worked for before we’d met. Or, rather, the agency that Mitch had been working for when we met but the one he no longer worked for ever since I’d convinced him to run off and move in with a stick-in-the-mud like me.
Thank you, agency. Thank you, Rob Callahan. I was now much happier than any man had a right to be because of you, Rob Callahan, from the agency.
Now, what in the hell did he want that necessitates calling me at work?
“This is Oliver,” I stated into the phone as I tapped the receiver button to answer the call.
“Mr. Munoz,” the smooth voice at the other end of the receiver said. “Oliver. How are you these days?”
One of the perks of the agency, one of the reasons I’d liked working with them was the fact that Rob, and everyone I dealt with through Rob, always acted like consummate professionals. Everything from the way new clients were on-boarded, appointments were booked and companions were chosen, was done in the glossiest, most polite-but-impersonal way possible. If you weren’t sure what Rob’s business was and you called by accident, you might have thought he was as much a CPA as I was.
He was right, it had been a while since I called, but none of the smooth, coldness I associated with Callahan had faded out of his voice since we’d last spoken.
