Married Ones
Page 14
“Urgh.”
“Not a chance I’m missing them, suck it up.”
“Alright, alright…”
“And I’m telling Mam. Today.”
“Tel—”
“What are you telling me, love?”
Stephen rolled his eyes. Mike beamed. “Mam!”
It came out too loud.
She snapped, “Indoor voice!”
He crowed, “Not indoors!” and bounced up from the table to step into the little dining room and lift his mother off her feet in a bear hug. She squeaked, thumping his back. Leonard’s gentlemanly peace stuttered for a moment, his eyebrows rising in visible surprise.
“Oh! You’re in a good mood, darling.”
“Brilliant,” Mike said, beaming.
“You were in a bit of a good one last night, too…”
“Same reason.”
His mam glanced suspiciously at Stephen. At the food. Back to Mike’s grin.
“What’s going on…”
“Stephen said I couldn’t say owt on Vikki’s big day,” Mike said, giving her a huge, shit-eating grin.
She stared back blankly.
“About what?”
“We did it.”
Still nothing. “Did what?”
“It.”
“Oh, give over, Mike,” Stephen said. “The clinic called, Stella. I’m—”
He didn’t get the word out around her shrill scream.
And then he couldn’t get any out at all, because she near-strangled him in a hug. When she let go, the excited babble—and aimed entirely at Stephen’s perfectly flat stomach—was so fast and broad, even Mike struggled to understand her.
“Terribly sorry,” Leonard said in his slow, deep voice. “But what’s happened?”
Mike’s future had happened. Their future had happened. Their family had happened, even if, right now, it consisted of him, his husband, and a clutch of cells too small to even be seen, dividing and dividing and dividing…
“Stephen’s pregnant,” Mike said, and felt his entire face ache under the impossibly wide grin.
It was the end.
And it was just the beginning, too.
Epilogue
Mike was speaking before they even walked through the door.
“Quiet! I said quiet, you noisy lot of ingrates!”
First day of the new school year, and of course the pupils were high as cocaine-snorting kites. The heatwave of a summer hadn’t helped matters any, and a fresh September was still blazing outside, even as the leaves were starting to turn brown. His pristine lab, freshly redecorated with a whole new set of jars showing off a variety of preserved species of bat, was about to be torn asunder by a great steaming herd of teenagers.
But Mike could finally sympathise with their toxic mix of dread and euphoria. After all, back to work. But he’d also not have to be here all year. Unlike this lot.
“Pick a seat, children, and sit in it! You’re picking a stool, not a university placement. Hands to yourself, please, Mr Price! This is a laboratory, not an exhibit at a second-class zoo, even if that is where most of you belong.”
Sixth formers. Mike liked sixth formers. Nobody took science A-Levels for fun, so it was a classroom of people who actually wanted to be there. So they settled—albeit with a lot of sniggering, and some unkind elbows in each other’s ribs—and soon twenty-six pairs of eyes were staring at him as Mike hefted his briefcase onto his desk, and snapped it open to find his very first lesson plan of the year.
“Better,” he said, raking the group with his eyes. Bright lot. A handful of potential degree candidates. A smattering more of would-be university students in general. Good brains in here. Good promise. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that you’ve been looking over your textbooks during the summer?”
Laughter rose in a soft wave.
“What a surprise,” he said dryly. “I suppose all you did was drink, smoke, and be offensively young?”
They objected loudly. He maintained his position even more loudly. There was a brief rebellion before they settled down again and got out their textbooks and pens.
“Right,” he said, switching the smartboard on. “Human Biology. Most useful if you’re thinking of going into any aspect of medicine or sports science, or if you just don’t give a damn about plants.”
A snigger went up. Notebooks were flipped open expectantly.
“The first thing you need to know is that studying human beings is hard,” Mike said. “They’re clever enough to be dumb. They have big brains, and they’re bad at communicating. And it’s unethical to perform whatever experiments you like on them, more’s the pity sometimes. We know a lot, but we don’t know everything, and what we like to think we know is often clouded by our own prejudices. Keep that in mind throughout this course.”
A few pens began to scratch.
“Every rule has an exception. Sometimes we have to think outside the box when it comes to human beings, because there is a fine line between biology, psychology, and sociology. That we have a four-chambered heart is biology. But chest pains when we are grieving may be biological, or psychological. And if it is psychological, do we actually feel them because society says we will under these circumstances, or is it something that every human brain imagines when in that situation?”
The pens hesitated, and Mike rolled his eyes.
“Slow today, aren’t you?” he drawled. “Alright. Let’s get those lazy brains woken up. A bit of thinking outside the box.”
They stared back at him dubiously.
“Everyone pair up. In your pairs, pick someone to be A, and someone to be B.”
This, inevitably, involved some squabbling. Picking A and B, to teenagers in a classroom, had always seemed to Mike to be like asking a devoted mother to choose a favourite child.
“You’re not going to be marrying each other here, chaps, hurry it up!” he boomed.
A grumbling silence fell.
“Let’s start with something supposedly basic. A’s, you are going to tell your partner something that makes you male or female. B’s, you are going to refute that argument with biological fact.”
Silence.
“Er. Could you give us an example, sir?”
Mike huffed. “Good Lord, did the summer melt your brains out of your ears? Alright. Mr Johnson here may say he is male because he has a johnson of his own.”
The class erupted into laughter. Mike simply raised his voice.
“Miss Nicholls may refute that by saying that if it were removed—as I’m sure some of the ladies in the room have threatened to do to Mr Johnson—then he would not suddenly be rendered female. Therefore, his maleness is not reliant on the penis, as he’s claimed. Do we understand?”
A faint murmuring.
“You can use your books and your brains, but not your phones. If I see a single phone, it’ll end up in the fish tank. Understood?”
A chorus of agreement. Chairs scraped. They began to talk amongst themselves.
“Remember your arguments, or write them down, because we will open the floor and discuss them as a class in ten minutes,” Mike instructed, then sank down onto his stool. No doubt he would hear a lot of knob jokes and giggling over those ten minutes, but let them have their fun. It was the first day back. And they were a good bunch of kids, even if he would have to fish tank Elliott Walker’s phone within half an hour.
He could set up a disgusting dissection next week, and get them back into the swing of things properly then.
As the chatter filled the room and the first mention of knobs reached Mike’s ears, he opened his briefcase. The glittery front of Emma Mayhew’s card stared back from the webbed pocket inside the lid. Mike stared at it for a moment.
Maybe he’d have to give that LGBT student group another thought.
Shaking his head, as if to shake out the distraction, he retrieved his ledger, complete with the term diary and the register. He had an appointment with the head that afternoon to talk over his le
ave next term. Preparation was going to be key—somebody, after all, was going to have to teach the rest of the syllabus to this swarm of imbeciles. He flicked through the diary to check when he would have to hand his classes over to Mrs Campbell, already picking out which lesson plans he’d have to move around, and which she could do instead of him.
And there, in the midst of the diary, he paused.
The tenth of April was circled in bright red. Amongst Mike’s black ballpoint markings, the colour was jarring, one he never used but for most stupid of stupid exam answers. And in Stephen’s tiny, tidy print, were two crimson words.
Babies’ birthday.
Mike smiled.
THE END
ABOUT MATTHEW J. METZGER
Matthew J. Metzger is an asexual, transgender author from the wet and windy British Isles. Matthew is a writer of both adult and young adult LGBT fiction, with a love of larger-than-life characters, injecting humour into serious issues, and the uglier, grittier edges of British romance. Matthew currently lives in Bristol, and—when not writing—can usually be found sleeping, working out at the gym, and being owned by his cat.
Find out more online at matthewjmetzger.com.
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