by Dex Bass
“Ok. You shouldn’t be standing too much when you’re pregnant. Let’s sit on your bed for a bit and discuss.”
“Is that your scheme to get me in bed, Professor?” Os sat down on his bed.
“I already got you into bed, remember?” Alan sat next to Os and lightly embraced Os’s back with his right arm. He patted Os’s pregnant belly with his left hand.
“You got me into bed several times,” Os said, correcting his professor. His head was pounding, actually, after a night’s poor sleep and an only halfway decent late-morning nap. But he could still make a friendly quip at his favorite alpha.
“And maybe you even remember it several times,” Alan said.
“I remember our interludes whenever I jack off, which is pretty often with how horny my pregnancy makes me at the weirdest times.” Os made a jacking-off hand gesture for emphasis.
“I’m glad you put our encounters into the wank bank.”
“As a shy, lonely omega, I’m an expert masturbator. I’m a VIP customer at the wank bank.”
“Anyway.” Alan cleared his throat, like a professor about to deliver a lecture. “I just realized that you should move in with me.”
“Move in with you?” Os was saying it for his own benefit. Hearing himself say it, he imagined an idyllic life together with Alan, even if the idea of living with Alan seemed too good to be real.
“Then we could spend time together without me having to sneak here. And I could take care of you while you’re pregnant.”
“Really?” It seemed like Alan was offering too much. Yes, he and Alan were boyfriends and mates and co-fathers-to-be. Yes, it wasn’t unusual for boyfriends, especially ones expecting a baby together, to move in together. But Alan actually inviting Os to live with him sounded like an extravagant gesture.
“Really. My house isn’t big, but it’s plenty of room for the two of us. And for the baby.”
“Seriously?” Os couldn’t help but smile — with joy, not any kind of ironic snark.
“Seriously. Were you ever doubting that? I’m sorry I didn’t make it clear that was always my plan.”
“Well, after your turnarounds, you know.” Os didn’t want to rehash or relitigate. Alan already had to know full well what he was referring to. “I appreciate that you’re telling me explicitly.”
“I always tell you explicitly.” Alan grinned like a teenage lecher.
“How old are you again, Professor Archer?” The joke about explicitly sounded like something Os would’ve said when he was sixteen. But he was now nineteen, a whole three years more mature.
“Um, thirty-nine, officially. Sometimes feel more like nineteen though.” Alan appeared either genuinely bashful or trying to play bashful.
“Right. I thought so. On both counts. Anyway, I really appreciate you telling me these things. Because I was actually wondering where I’d live once I had the baby. I don’t think I can raise a secret baby in the dorm.”
“Os. I love you.” Alan slipped off his shoes. He swung both his legs up onto the bed, then folded his legs. Alan embraced Os with both arms. His hug was tight and safe. Alan’s body was warm; even his arms were warm. Alan lay his head in the crook of Os’s neck. Alan’s scholarly midday stubble felt like a scratchy sweater on Os’s neck.
“Just love our baby. That’s the most important for me.” Os wanted Alan’s love, but ultimately, he could live without it. He wouldn’t be happy but he’d survive. But he didn’t want his child to be without love.
“Os. I love you. I love our baby. I’m going to offer my resignation to the university this summer if they interfere with my focus on you and the baby.”
“And until summer? While I’m pregnant? And while I’m still your student? And I’m supposed to be living with you?”
“Well, I’m sorry if this is kind of direct, Os, but, here in the dorm, you’re not exactly Mister Popular, are you?”
“Only if your definition of Mister Popular is not knowing anybody and not having any friends and always keeping to myself in my room, watching birth videos on OmegaTube.”
“Yeah, I thought so. So if you’re spending nights at my house, nobody’s really going to notice, will they?”
“I guess not.”
“And you won’t have to keep it a secret that you’re throwing up every morning and you have swollen ankles and so on. Even in your classes — I don’t think your classmates really care or know, do they?”
“I’m not exactly the hot topic of gossip, no.”
“So if you live with me, you don’t even hide your baby belly that much. That’s going to get more difficult, as you probably already know.”
“Yeah, I’m getting tired of wearing XL-size hoodies every day, and I’m only starting my third month of pregnancy.”
“I’m sorry for all this. I’m sorry you can’t be proudly pregnant, like all the other pregnant omegas I see on campus. I’m sorry.”
“I understand, I think.” Os did understand. He didn’t find it pleasant, but he understood. “We all have to make sacrifices. I can keep the pregnancy under wraps. And then I can be a proud father after the birth.”
“Fatherhood is the important part anyway.” Alan squeezed Os’s shoulders gently. It actually felt amazing. Os moaned slightly.
“Can I help you pack your stuff? I can drive you over to my house right now. And you can sleep in a big bed and not have to deal with this tiny dorm room.”
“I feel so pampered. And I love it.”
“Well, you’re the pregnant omega here.” Alan picked up the big empty duffel bag on the floor and started putting Os’s clothes into it.
“I actually don’t have that much stuff. But I really appreciate it.”
“Anyway, you’ll still have this room. You can always come back and get stuff from it.”
“As a waddling pregnant man.” Os pantomimed the motion of an overburdened pregnant man duck-waddling. “But yeah. I can always come back to get anything we forget today.”
“I think what I got so far is good enough, isn’t it?” Alan took a cloth shopping bag and put a stack of Os’s textbooks into it. “Just grab your laptop and iPad into your backpack and we’re good.”
“Done! My backpack is already packed. For the class I couldn’t manage to get to today.”
Alan took the duffel bag in his right hand and put Os’s heavy backpack on his right. They stepped out of the room together, maybe for the last time. Os locked the door behind him, and it felt like locking the door to a previous life.
They took the elevator down. Os had been remembering to give up his preference for stairs while he was pregnant.
He and Alan stepped out of the elevator into the dorm lobby. Alan’s silver Camry was parked in front of the dorm, a few steps away. Os could visualize Alan’s prior path: from the Camry to the fire escape, back down the fire escape, slinking around the edge of the building, and into the lobby and up to Os’s room. Alan Archer, cat burglar extraordinaire.
In the lobby, the dorm janitor pointed at Alan. A campus security guard emerged. Some kind of student journalist emerged along with the guard, clicking away at Alan and Os with her all-seeing DSLR.
“Sir, was that you trying to go up the dorm fire escape today?” the campus security officer asked Alan.
Alan’s immediate response: “No.” That was pretty impressive, that his immediate, visceral reaction to such a question would be to firmly, blatantly lie. Maybe os would be the same when he was thirty-nine.
“That was definitely him,” the janitor said, pointing his whole hand at Alan, like a fist. The poodle-haired student journalist was still standing nearby. She hadn’t had the good sense to run away and cover something less personal than Alan and Os’s dorm trysts.
“I’m sorry.” Os took the initiative. He was the only person there with the presence of mind to pull Alan out of the sticky situation. “I was feeling really unwell this morning. I called Professor Archer for a medical extension on my midterm. And I felt so sick that Professor Arch
er thought it was an emergency and he should check on me. He through the fire escape would be the fastest way up. I’m sorry. Professor Archer already apologized to me for the mistake. And he’s about to drive me to the hospital.”
“Which hospital?” the student journalist asked with a knowing half-grin. Her dark curly locks made her resemble Howard Stern. She was waiting for the answer MPreg Hospital. Os wouldn’t give that to her.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, asking personal questions like that.” Os knew to rush in in when there was an opening. “Do your readers really need to know which hospital I’m going to when I’m sick?”
The journalist only looked into her camera screen and tried to look busy. Maybe she was embarrassed. Or at least scared away.
“We’re not looking to put anybody in jail,” the campus security officer said. “I was just trying to figure out what happened, why the fire escape alarm was triggered, and why it wasn’t the usual drunk freshman but a grown man. And now I find out it’s a professor.”
“Wacky professor,” Os said. “Takes all kinds, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Os made the first move to walk for the exit. He did the best not to look like a pregnant man. He held himself upright and walked casually without the slightest hint of a waddle or wobble. His ankles were swollen and hurt but he acted like they were the world’s strongest, freshest ankles, ankles whose owner had never, ever been pregnant.
Alan followed him out the door. Nobody tried to stop them. Alan-remote unlocked his Camry. They were safe inside the car.
Alan breathed and sighed deeply. “You saved me out there.” It was true. Os knew it even without Alan needing to say it. But Os still loved hearing it. He cared for Alan, and he loved hearing it confirmed that he, the nineteen-year-old pipsqueak, was capable of contributing something to the relationship, and protecting his man in some capacity. That and it helped him tell himself that being an omega wasn’t just being a useless pipsqueak or breeding receptacle as some omega-detractors would put it.
Os was his own man. He was Alan’s man too. But most importantly, Os was his own man.
“We’re still gonna be in the campus newspaper,” Os said to Alan to remind him that the fire escape wouldn’t be entirely erased.
“What do you think they’ll say?” Alan asked as he shifted his car into gear and pulled out of the dorm parking lot.
“They have no reason to say I’m pregnant,” Os said.
“But they do have some reason to suspect a relationship between me and my student, don’t they?” Alan sighed and pulled onto a heavily wooded two-lane road adjacent to campus. Without a car at his disposal, Os hadn’t even explored the area around campus. He had no idea where he was.
“Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to say. They might start talking to people, find someone who’s seen you visiting me in the dorm before. Depending on how much effort they put into this thing.”
“And how much effort do you think that will be?” Alan asked.
“The good thing and the bad thing about student reporters is they have a lot of time,” Os said. He didn’t even know where he’d come up with that observation. Just being around Alan was making Os sound like a wise adult.
“Seriously, Os, I can’t imagine any of my other freshman students talking the way you talk. Wise beyond your years and all that.” Alan clicked the car’s sunroof to open wide. Fiery-colored autumn trees passed above them.
“Especially when I tell my professor to suck my dick, right?” Os held his hands high up in the air through the open sunroof. The fall air was brisk without being cold. Os felt like he was celebrating the dick-sucking. More realistically, he was celebrating newfound love, newfound fatherhood, newfound stability.
Alan slowed the car and made a sharp right turn. Ahead was a long, leafy driveway. The gate at the front said Archer and, appropriately enough, a metal engraving of an archer stood out from the brickwork.
“Is that, like, an Archer family crest?” Os asked. He’d seen stuff like that in books about British aristocrats and maybe in movies about the Kennedys or Rockefellers or something. He’d never seen anything like it in person.
“Ah. Something like that. Yeah. You don’t get a house like this in Springville on a professor salary. I was my parents’ only child and they moved into an apartment last year, so here I am, or here I was, living here all alone.”
“I’m sorry.” It was all Os knew to say.
“Sorry about me living here all alone?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t sound fun.” Os cringed at how childish that sounded. But it was true. Living in a big house all alone really didn’t sound fun.
“I don’t live alone anymore. Starting right now, I don’t,” Alan said matter-of-factly. He smiled at Os in a way that told Os just how special Os was to him. Alan extended his arm out to the passenger seat and gently lay his hand on Os’s pregnant belly. He clicked the garage-door button in the visor and drove into the house’s garage.
“The only thing maybe you can feel sorry about is that carrying the Archer name means a lot of, you know, expectations, old society stuff. My parents aren’t the most free-spirited people.”
“Lots of pressure?”
“Sure.” Alan chuckled. He must’ve been running through his mental catalog of all his parental pressure.
“But you’re a professor. You have a perfect life. How can they complain?” Os couldn’t imagine anyone with a life as perfect as Alan. He had it all.
“Ah, they’d want me to be a professor at Harvard, not at Springville State. And some other stuff. Just some other stuff. Anyway, don’t worry about it.” Alan waved away the concern and opened his door, to go help Os out of the car.
Os could have well gotten out of the car under his own power, but he wanted to feel Alan supporting him and leading him. He waited for Alan to come around to the passenger side. Os only unbuckled his seat belt and waited. Alan was the perfect alpha Os had always hoped for: this perfect alpha opened the passenger-side door, extended his arm, and led Os arm-in-arm the five steps from the car to the door into the house.
Inside, the house was professorial. It was exactly how Os would’ve imagined a professor’s house, if professors made more money. It was the sort of house that wore a tweed jacket, shopped at Trader Joe’s, and drove a Volvo, if houses drove cars. It wasn’t ostentatious, but it was nice. And with all the leaf cover around the house, Os had a childish instinctive belief that Alan’s house would be a good place to hide his pregnancy for the world.
“So I can be a relaxed pregnant man in this huge house, which you earlier said isn’t all that big?” Os circled around the living room under his own power, admiring the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the wooded front and back yards.
“No, not quite.” Alan suddenly reached with left arm under Os’s legs and his right arm under Os’s back, and lifted Os up completely off the ground. Alan cradled him as he’d cradle a nearly-six-foot-tall baby. Os had never had that feeling before, maybe not since he was an actual baby. Even if Os wasn’t that small, Alan was big enough to comfortably carry him. “Not quite, because the bedroom is where my beloved pregnant man should rest.”
Now Alan was the one duck-walking, under Os’s weight. Floor boards slightly squeaked under Alan’s professorial feet. He carried Os down the hallway, through an old wooden doorway. Alan brought him into a huge, airy bedroom, and lay him back on a bed. It was the biggest bed Os had ever been in, but his only comparison points were his kid-sized bed back at his parents’ house, and his cramped dorm-room bed, so maybe he was no expert on big beds. But this bed was definitely big.
“Check this out,” Alan said, and disappeared into the bathroom. “I’ve got a towel steamer.” Alan re-emerged from the bathroom with a small plastic laundry basket.
“Are those hot towels?” Os asked.
“Yeah. Never had the chance before—” Alan put the towel basket down on the floor at Os’s feet.
“Smell
s like wood and herbs or something?” The towels were steaming. Os still wasn’t getting exactly the purpose.
“Supposed to be fresh pine and rosemary. These scent cartridges I put in the thing, and my steamed towels come out whatever scent I want.”
“Got anchovy and peanut butter? Kind of what I feel like right now.”
“No, Mister Pregnant Man Food Cravings. But I can bring you an anchovy and peanut butter pizza for dinner today.”
“That’s an actual possibility?” Os couldn’t control how immature he sounded when he said that. But he really wanted to know whether that was a possibility.
“Remember, Omega Pizza near MPreg Hospital? The place where I got you bacon-and-mango pizza?”
“Oh yeah. Right. Omega Pizza. I’m almost embarrassed that the place exists. But then I’m glad. Really glad.”
“So, back to the steamed towels,” Alan said.
“I bet you say that to all the guys.”
“Can I offer you a hot towel wrap for your tired feet?” Standing at the base of the bed, Alan grabbed Os’s two feet with his two hands. “And no, I’ve never said that to anybody else. I do hot towel wraps for my feet after standing up all day. And I’m not even pregnant.” Alan squeezed and massaged Os’s feet. Os was slipping off into half-asleep bliss.
“Yeah. You can put hot towels on my feet. And you’ll massage them after that, right?” Os was half-smiling, half-joking, half-serious. Having this gorgeous man massaging his feet seemed like a fairytale dream, but Os knew that here with Alan, it was very much possible.
“Of course I’ll massage your feet after that.” Alan took one steaming hot towel and wrapped it around Os’s left foot, then the other steaming hot towel on the right foot. It felt like hot compresses and all the tension in Os’s feet melted away. Even though he was pregnant, even though his feet normally hurt every day, his feet had never felt that good before. And this was only the beginning — only the beginning of Alan’s foot treatment for Os that day, and only the beginning of Os’s life with Alan.
