by Anna Martin
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Sorry.”
Chris coughed a little bit and sat back on his heels, rubbing his arm, then sighed.
It seemed like every move I’d made in terms of our relationship had backfired spectacularly tonight, so I didn’t know why I was surprised that an attempt at fucking had gone wrong too. I wasn’t good at relationships. I never had been.
“So what’s the deal with you not wanting me to touch you there?”
I was an honest man, though. I had a little pride in that.
I knew this was going to be a difficult conversation, but I had to give Chris credit for his honesty. My wrist caught his, and I drew him down to lie next to me. I decided to give him the same honesty back.
“When I was twenty-three,” I started, “I had testicular cancer.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay, they caught it in time and removed it. I had to have chemotherapy, but I’ve had the all-clear at five years, and I have to go back next year again for another ten-year check.”
“But you’re okay.”
“Yes,” I said. “There were a couple of complications…. Usually they put a prosthetic one in to replace the one they take out. But my body reacted badly to it so I had to go for another operation to remove that as well. So I only have one.”
He played with my fingers for a moment, silently thinking to himself. “Did it hurt?” he asked eventually.
“Yeah. At the time it was pretty uncomfortable. And I was still working towards my graduate degree as well. I graduated on time despite all of the operations and everything.”
“That’s pretty amazing. I barely graduated high school.” Chris chewed the inside of his cheek as he looked at me again. “Does it still hurt?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes. Not very often, though. Because they went in through the same scar on my abdomen twice, and sometimes that itches. But it’s mostly okay.”
“Are you messed up about it?”
I laughed and pulled him closer to me. “Probably,” I said. “There was one guy, oh, years ago now who was quite cruel. Refused to touch me there in case he caught the cancer too. Which is ridiculous, but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.”
“Tool is about right,” Chris muttered. His response pleased and lifted me to keep explaining.
“I was so young when I had to deal with it that I was lucky my parents had such good health insurance. People talk all the time about, you know, ‘having balls’, and I don’t. I have ball. Singular.”
“This was after Chloe was born, right?”
“Yes. And just after I’d moved out from the apartment that Lu and I were sharing, trying to raise her together. But I’m still fertile. It still works.”
“It’s okay, you know,” he said suddenly, interrupting my flow of thoughts. “I don’t mind. I just don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t,” I said gently. “I suppose I’m just self-conscious about it.”
“I think you can be as self-conscious as you like if you survive cancer before you even hit twenty-five.”
“I don’t think of myself like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“A… cancer survivor. It was just there, you know, so they took it out, and then it was okay. I only had to have radiotherapy, you know.” I shrugged.
“You’re talking shit, Rob,” Chris said dismissively, shaking his head.
Maybe I was. I hardly ever thought about the cancer or my absent testicle anymore, except when I met a new partner or had to go for a check-up with my doctor. Being so young when I contracted the disease was something of a blessing as well as a curse; I was one of the most generally fit and healthy men my surgeon had ever treated, and I recovered very quickly. In so many ways, I was lucky to have noticed it so quickly and to have a doctor that took me seriously, especially since testicular cancer in younger men is much rarer.
It had been a difficult couple of months when I first noticed that I was getting tired and rundown a lot easier than before, but I’d chalked it up to stress from the decision to leave Lu and Chloe and move into my own place. I still had plenty of contact with them both after I moved out. It wasn’t like I never got to see my little girl, and Lu never tried to restrict my access to her. From a situation that could have turned out to be a complete and utter nightmare, we found a way to stay such close friends even as our lives were turned upside down.
To be told I had cancer when my daughter wasn’t even in school yet was fairly terrifying. Lu had just met Mike so I knew she’d be taken care of, but those few months taught me that I didn’t want my daughter to only know and have a relationship with her stepfather. It was a wakeup call, for sure.
I didn’t even tell Luisa that before the operation I went and banked my sperm so that just in case the worst happened, I’d maybe be able to father another child, a brother or sister for Chloe one day. Well, she already had those from Lu, but I never wanted that opportunity to be taken away from me.
As it was, they only had to remove the one testicle in the end, and the other one seemed to pick up the slack without any obvious trouble. I wanted, more than anything else, to be able to put the entire episode behind me and move on. Just… fucking move on from it all and the pain and the tiredness and the stress of it all, to graduate from my degree with honours and to start my career and leave all of that in my past.
And now there was Chris, a man who was the epitome of youthful excess—beautiful and fun and creative and such a free spirit. It didn’t seem fair to drag him down with my history, full as it was of dark tales about unwanted pregnancy and the awkward discovery of my own sexuality and the one illness that makes mice out of men and doesn’t discriminate against any of us. Gay or straight, black, white, rich or poor… there’s no way of avoiding the paralysing fear of the grip of cancer.
I wanted to keep him away from all of that and at the same time was desperate for him to know every part of me so that he might better understand where I came from. In my occasional odd, dark moments, I went back to that place where I was sure I wasn’t going to make it through, to see my daughter grow up or ever really, truly be in love.
“Well, I definitely killed any last hope of some romantic time with you tonight,” I said with a touch of weariness.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m glad you told me.”
There wasn’t any energy left in me to return his affections so he turned out the light and let me hold him as we inched toward sleep.
He, at least, found peace quickly while I lay awake for a long, long time. Too many memories that I’d worked hard to keep locked away had been stirred back up to the surface by our conversation.
In the darkness his face was so calm and peaceful, a stark difference from the stress of the day we’d had. I knew I should probably let him sleep, but I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out and gently stroking his short hair.
“Sorry,” I murmured as he stirred and woke.
He moaned a little and rubbed his face. “’S okay. You all right?”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted of him until it was staring me in the face. Or rather, straining to escape from my boxers. “Can I have you?”
His dry lips stretched into a smile. “Course.”
“Are you sure?” I had to check. “I didn’t mean to wake you up, but you just look so beautiful sometimes and I couldn’t sleep—”
“Rob,” he said, pressing a finger to my lips to shut me up. “Come be inside me.”
Of course, it was the most perfect thing he could possibly have said. Even though I was completely incapable of expressing what I wanted from him, he seemed to understand. I wanted—no, I needed to be as close to him as physically possible.
Claiming him was easy; I could do that with kisses. Still, I felt somewhat awkward as I pushed my boxers down off my thighs and played with the waistband of his, partly to tease the soft hairs that made a line from his belly button down, and partly because I was still nervous about pushing m
y fingers underneath the slightly worn elastic.
Sighs and smiles against my lips were encouragement to search out his cock; warm, not fully hard yet, the skin silky-smooth against my enquiring fingertips. There was something almost heart-breaking about his whispered pleas for more, the way his fingers wrapped around my arm as I smoothed my hand over his hair.
It was Chris who pushed his underwear off his hips, lifting his bum from the bed and managing to get them down as far as his thighs before my mouth was on his cock and he stopped trying to move.
I knew from the moment my mouth wrapped around him that I’d left him in a state of frustration earlier in the evening. He tasted of salt and desperation, and with my cheek on his stomach, I could feel the rush of blood through his body.
When my body separated from his, I chanced a look up at him. My gaze was met with wide, blown pupils so large that there was only the tiniest rim of bluey-grey left. This clearly wasn’t the time for a slow build-up. Already we were both on the edge of something, and I didn’t want to wait, I just wanted him.
With slick fingers I twisted and pushed inside him, the careful movement still drawing some inhuman sound from his throat as he arched his back from the bed and leaked steadily against his own stomach. A moment, just a moment of wishing I didn’t have to suit up for the occasion and be closer to him than we ever had before.
But that kind of attitude had not borne good results for me in the past, and I slipped the condom on with practiced ease as he rid himself of his boxers and spread his feet wide, offering himself to me. In some ways, in these moments he seemed so innocent to me. Or maybe innocent was the wrong word. Vulnerable. He offered me everything: his body, his heart. And he trusted me to take care of them.
As I pushed into him, I kissed him hard, distracting him with two points of pleasure at opposite ends of his body. I wasn’t really prepared for him to cross both his legs behind my lower back and link his arms around my shoulders, clinging to me while he pressed his face to my chest.
Again. So vulnerable.
So it was easy to treat him as precious cargo, moving with him like a delicate thing that I had the power to break. My own desire bubbled below the surface, only being set free in the noises I made in response to his.
“Tell me,” he demanded.
“I love you,” I said, forcing my voice to be strong. It wasn’t just the words; it was the act of it, too. I wanted him to feel it right down to his bones.
I slowed down the movement of our bodies even further, now just a deep grind rather than the powerful thrusts that usually sent him over the edge. The soft sound he made could have been a sob or his voice catching as I found his prostate and stayed there, rocking against it over and over.
“Tell me again.”
“I love you. Love you, Chris.”
The second time it was definitely a sob, then a cry set free from a throat thick with emotion. I hadn’t known that I had the power to do that to him, to strip him bare and, with just my words, make him orgasm.
I buried my face in the stretch where his neck met his shoulder and let go. There was no use in hiding anymore, not now that I’d given him pretty much everything that I was capable of giving to another person. There was no way I could let him go anymore.
“Love you too, Rob,” he whispered as the last of the shudders wracked through my body, and even though I knew it, hearing it set something different off inside me.
It didn’t feel right to pull away after what had just happened, and even though we’d both want nothing more than to fall asleep with me still inside him, neither physics nor biology were on our side.
Still, clothes were out of the question as we realigned our still-sticky bodies and I pulled his head to my chest. This wasn’t the time to talk about it but to try and cling to the last wispy moments of what had passed between us as they disappeared through our fingers like smoke.
I slept then.
I received a text from Chloe with the news.
It’s a boy. Carter Michael Draco Robinson-Doyle xoxo Chlo
“Draco?” Chris asked from across the breakfast table, his mouth still full of toast. “As in Harry Potter’s Draco?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” I muttered darkly. I took a careful sip of tea. “Then again, her other daughter is Cassiopeia, so maybe she’s going with the astrological bent.”
“At least it’s not Columbus,” he said soothingly, patting my hand. “Cassiopeia?”
“Cassie, for short,” I corrected. “She’s three. And a little terror.”
“What’s her middle name?”
“I can’t remember,” I said honestly. “I’ll ask Chloe, she’ll know.”
I sent off a text message, offering congratulations from us both and making the necessary enquiries.
“Cassiopeia Ariana,” I said after a few minutes.
Chris shrugged. “I don’t get it.”
“Me either. Chloe was just Chloe Ellen. I have no idea what happened to Lu since Chlo was born, but something has clearly messed with her head.”
“Did Lu not fight you on Chloe’s name?” he asked.
“No,” I said, thinking back. “We discussed it, and we both liked Chloe, but I think she understood that I wouldn’t have any other kids, so she let me go with what I liked best.”
“That was nice of her.”
“Yeah. She’s a good person.”
We arranged to go and visit the new mother and baby a few days later, once they were home from the hospital. Chris said he hated hospitals, even if it was only a maternity ward. I had a suspicion it was precisely because it was a maternity ward.
“Do you want to come and meet Luisa?” I asked Chris.
“Why would I want to meet your ex?”
“Because she’s one of my best friends,” I said reasonably. “And she’s Chloe’s mother. And I need to go and see her new baby and I’m scared.”
He laughed. “Really? But you’ve got a kid!”
“Newborns terrify me. They’re so… breakable.”
“Was it different with Chloe?”
“Mm. A little bit. I was terrified but in a completely different way. She forced me to be there when she gave birth, you know.”
“What a bitch.”
He was joking, and it made me laugh.
“Yeah. If I didn’t know I was gay, I did after that experience.” The memory still haunted me.
“So when will you be going to visit?” he asked, playing with a rip across the knee of his jeans.
“Hopefully on the weekend. She’ll be out of hospital by then.”
He was silent for a few more minutes, during which the cat stopped prowling and decided he was going to settle on Chris’s lap. Flea had turned into my first line of defence for when Chris decided it was time to leave. Despite all his powers of resistance, a grey ball of fluff on his lap seemed to be all it took to get him to stay.
“Okay,” he said eventually, once Flea had stopped pawing and turning circles and settled down. “I’ll come with you.”
Clearly I had an ulterior motive inasmuch as getting him to visit Lu would stop her from nagging me that she wanted to meet him. Apart from that, I really did need him as backup when it came to the baby.
I’d called ahead so she knew to expect me, and Mike had taken their now middle child out for the afternoon, leaving my daughter as the responsible adult in the house. She answered the door, scowled at me, smiled brightly at Chris, and skipped back up to her room.
“Lu!” I called out.
“In here!”
She was sitting in some kind of rocking and reclining chair with a bundle of blankets on her lap.
“Hi,” I said, and she beamed at me. “Lu, this is Chris. Chris, this is… my once ex-girlfriend, current good friend, and mother of my daughter. Luisa.”
“Hi, Chris,” Lu gushed. “I’ve heard so much about you. Not from Robert, of course, but Chloe has plenty to say about you. Have a seat.”
“I’m sure she
does,” I said darkly, taking the sofa next to Chris and hopefully providing a buffer between him and Luisa.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, turning on the Southern charm and making my tummy flutter in response. “How’s the baby?”
“Oh, he’s good,” she said, bouncing the bundle in her lap. “All seven pounds, ten ounces of him.”
“That sounds like a lot,” he said.
“Oh, Chloe was nearly nine pounds,” she said breezily. “He was fine. Want to hold him?”
“Nope,” I said quickly.
