"But you do. I thought I should try it and see what's the fuss all about. Maybe acquire a taste for them."
He was so sweet Lynne couldn't help but smile. "I can't wait for tomorrow to give the caterer hell. He promised me the oysters would be fresh and cooked properly. I only hope no one else got sick."
"Good thing you didn't touch it."
"I've reason." Lynne licked suddenly dry lips. It was time, and with the hospital settling down for the night, no one was likely to disturb them.
"Oh? Lost your taste for them? Should've told me earlier, then I didn't have to suffer needlessly," he teased.
She managed a smile, reached out with a trembling hand for one of his and pressed it against her stomach. "This."
He blinked, then blinked again. A huge smile suffused his face. "You're pregnant?"
"We are." Her eyes blurred as she absorbed his joy. Would he still be as happy when he knew the truth? She could stop now, keep the rest secret. After all, he and Ash were brothers, twins. The DNA of the baby should be the same regardless of which man fathered him, right?
"Are you okay? Both of you? Why didn't you tell me sooner? Have you gone to see the doctor?" Questions tumbled out as he drew her into a tight hug. "I can go with you. Just tell me when."
"Yes, yes, we're fine. Cara went with me for my first appointment--"
He reared back, fear on his face. "Hey, we've been having sex all this while, sometimes rough. The baby--"
"Is fine." She squeezed his hand. "The doctor said sex is okay."
Mark breathed out a sigh of relief. "All right, but no more rough sex." He smiled, the tender look in his eyes causing riot to her heart. "It's turning out to be an awesome night, hon."
She couldn't not tell him. "There's more," she pushed out through a tight throat.
"More?" he echoed. "Twins?"
"I don't know who the father is," she blurted out.
Color drained from his face, his blue eyes shocked and hurt. "What?"
Her words hovered in the air between them, and then she realized how he could've taken them. "Oh no, no. I've never been unfaithful to you." Hand on his arm, she shook him urgently. "I just meant I don't know if you or Ash is the father."
She held her breath, waiting.
He closed his eyes--in relief? pain?--but when he opened them, he didn't look as pale as he was a few seconds ago. "Explain."
Haltingly, she repeated what she'd told Cara weeks before.
"You've been carrying this burden all this while? You couldn't tell me?"
The pain in his voice hurt her more than she thought possible. She'd thought the possibility of Ash being the father would hurt him, hence her hesitance and delay in bringing up the topic, but she hadn't thought through to what her actions could signify.
"You don't trust me?" Mark ran a hand through his hair and turned his face away, but not before she saw that this realization gutted him. With a groan, he sat up, as though he couldn't bear to be in close proximity to her.
"No, you've got it wrong!" She followed into a sitting position and turned his face back toward her. "I'm trusting you with the truth. I could've kept this from you, but I didn't. I'm only sorry I took so long before I could tell you. I was afraid," she admitted, "because it was my responsibility to not get pregnant, to take the pill. We agreed on that. I didn't want you to think I deliberately got pregnant so I could trap you into marriage.
"Then, the night you proposed, you told me you're booting Ash out of our bed. While I was okay with that, it got me thinking, what if this baby is Ash's? What would happen to him? I'm sorry, I wanted to tell you so many times…" She sniffed, tears blurring her vision and rolling down her cheeks.
After a--long, endless--moment, Mark's arm came around her and he hauled her close to him. He held her and murmured endearments while she wept.
"Sh, it's all right. It's all right, hon. There was a slight detour"--she could feel the smile in his voice--"but it's still an awesome night."
She knew then they'd passed the first major hurdle in their relationship. Her sobs came harder, joy and relief crashing within her. She didn't think she could love him more than this moment.
When her tears were reduced to sniffles, his thumbs helping to wipe them away, her vision cleared to see him looking at her with grave eyes. Her heart lurched, and she wondered if she'd been mistaken in thinking that the problem was solved.
"One more thing." He placed a possessive hand over her abdomen. "This baby is mine."
She was wrong. His unequivocal, unconditional acceptance deepened the level of her love for him another notch. Tears started blurring her vision again as she nodded.
"Is it weird that I love him so much already?" he whispered.
She didn't need to see to know the awe on his face. It humbled her and made her wish she hadn't been so afraid, so selfish.
"And you." His fingers brushed against her cheek as he teased, "When have you become such a watering pot? Should I expect this throughout your pregnancy?"
She tried to speak, but couldn't. She was still too overwhelmed--by the tenderness in his voice, his love for their child, everything. All right, maybe the baby was making her emotional, too.
"I have just the thing to make you stop."
His mouth feathered hers in a sweet and slow kiss. She framed his face and held him as she responded, and this kiss was a portend of vows yet to be voiced--to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She wasn't afraid any longer of the trials and challenges that may come, because Mark would be beside her to face them. Together.
Soon, the kiss turned passionate, Mark pulling down the zip of her dress at her back. The cold draft chased away the fog of lust clouding her mind.
"Mark! Hospital!" Scandalized, she fell back on the bed to trap the gaping dress beneath her.
"Kinky." Mark's eyes gleamed and with a swift movement, he'd pushed her skirt to her waist and he was on top of her.
"Think of all the germs…virus…" But her protests were weak. This was Mark after all, the love of her life, in her arms. Right where he belonged.
Chapter Eleven
CARA, KYLE AND MAX
Saturdays were usually relaxing days at Max's household. They'd wake late after spending a considerable time in bed not sleeping, then get up for brunch and run errands or do household chores. However, on this particular Saturday, Cara had woken early--well, earlier than usual--for a meeting with her doctoral advisor, and Kyle…Kyle was behaving out of turn. For one, he was wearing a shirt and board shorts, when usually, he'd only wore boxers at home, distracting him and Cara out of their minds with his magnificent chest and the prominent bulge between his thighs. For another, his lighthearted mien was nowhere in evidence, and he was…restless. Seriously so. The whole morning and early afternoon, he paced, when he'd never paced before. A nervous tension hung around him, and whenever Kyle would see Max catching Kyle staring at him, Kyle would look away. (Max's head spun with the complexity of that statement.) Surprisingly--and this was the most worrying--Kyle wasn't interested in sex, no matter how many times Max dropped hints as a way of gauging his lover's mood. Finally, Max couldn't take it anymore.
"Is anything wrong?"
They were in the kitchen, Max trying his hand at making no-bake brownies; he'd mistakenly thought Kyle would be occupied enough in teaching Max that he'd shake off his odd mood. Instead, Kyle had added "staring into space" to his list of strange actions.
Kyle startled. "What?"
Channeling patience, Max wiped his floury hands on a damp cloth and placed them on Kyle's shoulders, pinning him in place. "Something's off; you're acting strangely today. I thought you'd tell me when you're ready, but I can't stand seeing you upset. Spit it out. Maybe I can help."
There was a long silence as Kyle seemed to weigh his options. Finally, he squared his shoulders and looked Max in the eye. "You know, the thing last week," he began, "when we rushed you and Mark to the hospital for food poisoning? It was the worst night of my life. Yo
u looked like you were about to die, so crumpled up and miserable on the bed, and I thought, What if--what if this were our last night together?" He swallowed hard. "What if I never got the chance to tell you how much I want to spend the rest of my life with you, how much I love you--" He fumbled in his pocket and then dropped to his knees. Holding out a box toward Max, he asked, "Will you marry me?"
* * * * *
Her advisor had wanted to discuss the presentation of her dissertation in the upcoming mathematics conference that would include well-known names in the academe, and Cara knew her subject matter so well the discussion ended earlier than she thought. The conference was a great venue for her work to be recognized by her peers and might even open up new avenues of opportunities for her. In fact, she was feeling excited at the possibilities that stretched out before her that as she drove up to the house, she decided it was a cause for celebration. There was that new steak house they hadn't yet tried…
She pulled up in front of the house, thinking that if they were going out in a matter of hours, she might as well save the effort of parking in the garage, which was a tight fit for three cars. Locking the door, she entered the house through the front door and heard Kyle speaking from the kitchen. From this angle, she couldn't see them, and she was just about to call out when he said, "What if I never got the chance to tell you how much I want to spend the rest of my life with you, how much I love you--Will you marry me?"
At first, joy rushed through her, that the men she loved would finally be together in every sense of the word, but when the import of the question reached her brain, her world shattered, her heart broken into pieces at her feet.
What about me? was the miserable thought that reverberated in her head.
Of course Max would say yes; there had never been any doubt. It had always been the two of them--the two of them against Kyle's dad, the two of them against the world, the two of them together before they even met her. That Kyle would pop the question while she was away told her a lot about what the state of affairs were.
She loved them, and maybe they wanted her, but apparently not enough to envision a future with her.
She contained her sob, hand against her mouth to prevent a sound from escaping, and held out her other hand to steady herself. Which landed on something on the hall table. Through teary eyes, she saw that it was The Memory Book. She remembered Kyle's wish--his dream to be reconciled with his father--and in the midst of her heartbreak, a resolution firmed. This, she could do. This, she could help them with. This would be her wedding gift to the men she loved.
She grabbed the book and left the house as silently as she came in.
* * * * *
Kyle had written letters to his dad that he never got around to sending. He kept them at the back of The Memory Book, inside an attached plastic envelope. It was the address on those envelopes that Cara drove to, after she had spent a few minutes crying while parked in front of a 7-Eleven convenience store.
Cara reached Kyle's father's house around eight in the evening. It was a medium-sized two-storey house in a nice, suburban neighborhood. She could totally envision Kyle growing up in this place, running and shrieking with childhood abandon. Yet, even as she smiled, her chest and stomach were full of nervous fluttering. She'd had a simple dinner at a diner about half an hour ago, so it couldn't be hunger she was feeling. No, she was definitely jittery. Maybe because she knew how important this meeting was to Kyle. If she succeeded. God, please, let her succeed.
Holding the book tightly to her chest, she walked up the steps to the house and rang the bell.
Stay calm, you can do this. Just speak from your heart and--
The door opened and a tall, bespectacled man appeared. Aside from the glasses and the silver at his temples, he looked so much like Kyle her knees almost buckled.
"Yes?"
"I'm Cara Wilson, a friend of your son Kyle--"
"He doesn't live here any longer," Robert Lockwood said curtly, moving behind the door and pushing to close it.
"Wait!" She wedged a foot in the gap at the same time that she placed a hand on the heavy wood to stop its forward movement. "I know. I met him after…after he left town--"
He swung the door open again so quickly she almost fell into the house. His green eyes, so like Kyle's, gleamed with hope. "You're his girlfriend?"
She knew better than to answer that question. "May I come in, please? We can talk better inside."
As soon as Kyle's father sat down on the sofa, with Cara opposite him, he repeated his question with an eager lilt to his tone.
Her heart sank. She'd come here with some hope that time and distance would've made Robert Lockwood rethink his bigoted stance, but she seemed to have an uphill battle ahead of her with little to no chance of winning.
Still, she had to try. She couldn't think of a better wedding gift than to reunite Kyle with his beloved father.
"Mr. Lockwood, I'm sure you must know that your son loves you a lot and this time apart has been hard on him," she began.
Mr. Lockwood stiffened. "He knows what he needs to do if he wants to come back home."
Patience. "He misses you a lot."
He harrumphed.
"He keeps talking about you, about what a kind and loving father you are, how you always had time for him. He said when his mom died, you must've missed her a lot, but you didn't fall apart. Instead, you did the best you could to be both dad and mom to him." Confidences made during post-coital snuggles.
His gaze on her sharpened. "I was right; you're his girlfriend."
"Kyle also said he learned a lot from you, that you preferred for him to learn life lessons through example and experience rather than ramming it down his throat, unlike some of his friends. He's very grateful to you for that."
Mr. Lockwood didn't say anything, but his expression softened.
"You were there at every baseball game, at his graduation, all the milestones in his life. You're the best father a boy could have."
"I tried my best for him. When Selina died…" His breath caught and Cara looked away to give him time to master his emotions. She was moved to see the love he still bore for his wife, so many years after her death. It gave her hope. If he could still love his wife, how much more his son?
"When she died, I tried to raise him the best I could," Mr. Lockwood continued. "When she was still alive, she would always smile whenever she looked at Kyle and said that he was her little man, Mommy's man, a man like his Daddy. What would she say if she could see him now?" he ended, his voice anguished.
"That he is still her little man, Mommy's man and a man like his Daddy--kind and loving and brave," she answered, voice teary, eyes stinging a little. "So very brave." She began to have a little glimmer of what could've driven father and son apart. "Kyle's sexuality didn't change who he is," she said urgently. "His intrinsic essence remains the same--the man you have raised him to be. Please, Mr. Lockwood, talk to your son, call him--"
"Not until he leaves that fag--"
"Mr. Lockwood," she interrupted, laying the scrapbook on the table, "this is The Memory Book. It contains all the important highlights in Kyle's life since the day he left you. He did this--oh, we posed for pictures, but other than that, he did it all by himself--so that one day," her voice hitched, "one day, you could flip through them and be caught up on all the events and it's as if you'd always been there. Even apart, you were never far from Kyle's thoughts. That's the kind of son you have, Mr. Lockwood, and if he were my son, I would've been very proud of him. And I think"--did she dare?--"I think Selina would've been, too."
Time to split.
She stood up, hesitated, then said very softly, "Please, Mr. Lockwood. Continue to be a part in the future milestones of Kyle's life. He needs you, just as you need him."
When she let herself out of the house, Mr. Lockwood was still seated on the sofa staring at the closed scrapbook.
* * * * *
Outside, she crashed from the adrenaline and sat trembling in
the car, her breath coming in unsteady pants. She'd done her best; the rest was up to God and the love Mr. Lockwood bore for his son. She wished she could say she'd scored a victory, but she had a sinking feeling she'd just given up The Memory Book for nothing. Perhaps Kyle could ostensibly come for it one day, and maybe father and son would talk and it would be the first step to repairing their relationship.
She could hope.
She sat in the car for about ten minutes before she felt composed and steady enough to drive to a small hotel she'd passed by earlier. Fortunately, they had vacancy, and after securing a room for herself, she fell on the bed, exhausted and drained.
And depressed.
What was she going to do now? How was she supposed to continue going to work, teaching, when she'd see Max everyday? It would be pure torture, seeing him and yet no longer having the right to touch him, kiss him…missing him and Kyle everyday…
Obviously, she would have to transfer to another university.
In the middle of the semester?
Okay, maybe she could have a mini-vacation in the meantime.
How could she leave her students like this? What about her duty to them?
And why was her conscience rearing up at a time like this? What about her responsibility to herself?
Fine, she wasn't going to make any rash decisions. She needed time to think, time apart from them, and she knew just the person to call. Retrieving her cell phone from inside her handbag, she turned it on and frowned at the number of texts and missed calls she'd received. Most of them were from Lynne, Max and Kyle. Three from Mark. Two from an unknown number.
She knew her lovers--ex?--would be worried when she didn't go home for dinner as she had said she would. She was heartbroken, not sadistic. Which was why, after her tears had dried up, when she was still parked in front of the 7-Eleven, she'd send them a message that she'd had an emergency that would take her away overnight before she'd switched off the phone, not wanting any distractions. So, she didn't understand the numerous calls--Unless, something had happened?
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