Who's Your Daddy?

by Gallagher, Lauren

  I hope.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Donovan

  “You really think we can do this in a day?” Isaac asked.

  “Just need to get it finished before we show it to Carmen.” I shrugged. “What we don’t finish today, we’ll do another day.”

  “Good point. Let’s get started, then.”

  “Got that ibuprofen handy?”

  He shot me a glare. “Fuck you, I can handle it.”

  “Whatever, old man.” I clapped his shoulder. “I give it until noon before you’re dipping into the drugs.”

  “Keep it up,” he said, “and you’ll be needing them long before noon.”

  We laughed and headed upstairs.

  Isaac and I had a four-bedroom house with a living room and family room, so there had to be a way to shift things around to accommodate both Carmen and the baby. Two bedrooms were already occupied. Isaac and I had the master bedroom upstairs, Ryan had the downstairs. Across the hall from our room, we’d each commandeered an office. It had taken a little planning and discussion, but we’d figured out a workable solution.

  The sofa and loveseat in the family room went into the garage for the time being, and the smaller furniture went into the attic. We’d decide later if they’d be sold, donated, or put aside for Ryan when he moved out in a couple of years. With everything cleared out of the family room, we moved our desks and bookcases in. My desk weighed about as much as a battleship, so it was the most difficult piece, but with a lot of sweating and swearing, we got it down the stairs and into the family room.

  My desk went in one corner. His went in the other. The room was cramped with all this furniture, and it wouldn’t be as quiet or private as our offices had been, particularly with a baby in the house, but it would have to do.

  Once one of the bedrooms was empty, I started painting it while Isaac took all the small and extraneous stuff up to the attic. I laid plastic and taped the windows and molding. As I poured the paint into the tray, I eyed it for a moment. Hopefully this was really the color Carmen had wanted. It said “pale yellow” on the can, and I could have sworn that was what she’d said she liked. In the tray, though, it didn’t look like anything a civilized person would put on their walls. It looked more like “urine sample yellow”, as far as I was concerned.

  “Oh well, it can always be repainted.” I dipped the roller into the tray and started on the walls.

  Surprisingly, the more I painted, the better it looked. It wasn’t my first choice for a color, but it would do. And hopefully Carmen would like it.

  I had three of the four walls painted when Isaac came in.

  “Looking good,” he said.

  “Thanks, I’ve been working out.”

  “The room, jackass.”

  I turned around and shot him a scowl. “Are you saying I don’t look good?”

  “Of course you look good.” He kissed me lightly. “So does the room, though. You and Julia have a room like this for Ryan when he was a baby?”

  I shook my head. “He slept in our room.”

  That seemed like a lifetime ago. Julia’s parents had kicked her out, so we’d spent the last few months of our senior year and the first six months of Ryan’s life living in a cramped bedroom in my dad’s basement. We’d worn a track in the carpet of the downstairs hallway, walking up and down for hours on end until our arms and legs ached, and, unlike the baby we carried, we were ready to collapse.

  During the time we lived in that room, Julia and I were closer than we ever were before or after. Some parents fought like cats and dogs in those exhausting early months. Out of the two years we were together, the four or five months after Ryan was born were the most peaceful for us. It was like we’d agreed to an unspoken ceasefire until we got our feet under us and figured out what the hell we were doing. We were scared, overwhelmed and completely unprepared to have this kid on our hands, so we stopped fighting and leaned on each other. Once we hit our stride, got the hang of things, and caught up on a little sleep, we remembered how much we irritated each other. Julia moved out when Ryan was six months old.

  “Don?”

  I looked up. “Hmm?”

  He furrowed his brow. “You kind of spaced out there for a second. What’s up?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Just…thinking.” I cleared my throat and dipped the roller in paint again. “Paint should be dry enough in a couple of hours to start putting up the wallpaper border.”

  “You think she’ll like it?” he asked.

  “She should.” I started applying paint to the remaining bare wall. “It’s all stuff she picked out.”

  “Yeah, for a place of her own.” He looked around. “Do you think she’ll like having a room here?”

  The roller stopped mid-stroke. “I hope she does.” I glanced over my shoulder at him. “I mean, we’ve all agreed the baby will stay here at least part of the time.”

  “True.”

  “What about the other room?” I asked. “Do you think she’ll be…you know…”

  “Game for moving in?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “She’s independent as all hell, so as long as we don’t make it out to be some sort of charity thing or pity, I would think she’ll at least consider it.”

  “I think she knows us better than that,” I said.

  “What are you saying? We’re a couple of uncharitable bastards?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I know what you meant,” he said. “I guess we’ll see what she says.”

  “I guess we will.” I started painting again. “If nothing else, it’ll give her a place to stay if she wants to be here when the baby is.” Deep down, I hoped she would like the room. I hoped she’d like both rooms. We’d leave the other for her to set up how she wanted, but it was cleared out so she could move in if she wanted to.

  I hoped she did. I hoped she stayed. As much as my conscience nagged at me for feeling the way I did about her, feelings are what they are, and I wanted Carmen to stay here. With us. As long as—

  Don, stop. Don’t go there.

  While I continued painting, Isaac dragged out the box containing the crib Carmen wanted. Or, rather, the pieces of the crib. He opened the box and eyed both the pieces and instructions.

  “Why do I get the feeling this is going to be a lot more complicated than it looks?”

  “Because it’s related to parenting,” I said. “And therefore it’s complicated.”

  “Is that how that works?”

  “Yep. Get used to it.” I clapped his shoulder. “Come on, it’s not that hard.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  I paused. “No, I can’t say she did. Not to me anyway.”

  He snorted. “Hasn’t said it to me, either.”

  We both laughed.

  “If this thing had a carburetor or a V8, I could put it together in my sleep.” Isaac held up the instructions. “This is some bullshit.”

  I laughed. “Get used to it. We’re going to be assembling complicated shit every Christmas and birthday for the next decade or so.”

  “This is why we get Legos,” he said. “Gets us off the hook of having to put it together.”

  “Oh, we’ll be getting Legos, all right.” I grinned. “That’s half the fun of having a kid. We get to play with things like that again.”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked at me over the instructions and raised an eyebrow. “And you need a kid as an excuse to buy Legos.”

  “Shut up.”

  With the room painted and crib assembled, we took a break for food. Isaac found no shortage of amusement in the fact that I went looking for the ibuprofen first, but he didn’t exactly turn it away either.

  “Think we’re getting too old for this shit?” he asked.

  “Speak for yourself,” I said.

  “We ever move out of this place, though,” he said. “You’re getting a smaller desk.”

  “By the time we move out of th
is place, we’ll have more sets of hands to move it.”

  “Hmm, good point.”

  After we’d eaten lunch, it was sorely tempting to lounge on the couch awhile longer. Literally, sorely. The ibuprofen only did so much, and we both groaned when we got up to take our plates and glasses into the kitchen.

  Twisting a crick out of my back, I said, “Well, paint’s probably dry. Back to work?”

  “Back to work.”

  Back to work it was. Fortunately, most of the heavy work was done. Carmen had hinted about some various accents and decorations, probably not realizing we’d both made note of every last detail she’d pointed out.

  One of those accents was a set of thin curtains that were a paler yellow than the walls. I looked at the curtain rod in my hand and shook my head. “I can’t believe pastel curtains are going up in our house.”

  Isaac shrugged. “Eh, considering we’re more or less gay, I suppose it was inevitable.”

  “Look, if we’re going to jump on the stereotype bandwagon, we might as well go all the way and put sequins on it.”

  “Aren’t those a choking hazard for babies?”

  “Oh. Right.” I looked at the curtains again. “Okay, fine. Up it goes.”

  While I put up the offending curtains, Isaac pulled out the wallpaper border and unrolled some of it.

  “Ugh.” He wrinkled his nose. “Must it always be ducks and teddy bears?”

  “Well, what should it be?” I asked. “Snakes and bats?”

  “I don’t know, cars?”

  “Baby might be a girl.”

  “Girls like cars too.”

  “Oh, yeah, good point.” I glanced at him. “Think Carmen would go for that?”

  He shrugged. “She likes cars. And really, I don’t want this kid growing up thinking it’s okay to own a Chevrolet. The Ford indoctrination must start early.”

  “Yes, God forbid an infant develop an affinity for a Corvette.”

  “See? Exactly. So, I’m thinking Mustangs. Maybe a—”

  “Just hang the damned ducks,” I said, laughing.

  “Oh, come on, a Mustang would look great right over there.”

  “Hang the ducks, or I’ll put up a picture of a Chrysler.”

  He sucked in a breath. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  I gestured at the wallpaper in his hand. “Ducks. Now.” I pointed at a blank spot on the wall. “Or I swear to God, I’ll put a Prowler poster right over there.”

  Isaac stiffened. “You wouldn’t.”

  I threw him my most menacing look. “Wouldn’t I?”

  He narrowed his eyes, but after a moment, we both laughed. “You’re an evil son of a bitch, you know that?”

  “Just hang the ducks.”

  He hung the ducks. I finished putting up the curtains, and started putting together the shelves in the closet. Shelves went together, wallpaper went around the room, and about the time he’d finished putting the border around the base molding, I tossed a screwdriver into my toolbox.

  “I think that’s enough for one day,” I said.

  “Couldn’t agree more.” He started to get up, wincing on the way.

  “You okay?” I offered my hand. He clasped my forearm and I helped him to his feet.

  Rubbing his lower back, he grimaced. “I really am getting too old for this shit.”

  “Just wait,” I said. “You haven’t spent all night carrying a ten-pound kid who won’t stop crying.”

  “I think I need another ibuprofen just thinking about that.”

  “Oh, you’ll live.”

  We exchanged playfully dirty looks, then stopped to survey our handiwork.

  Something tightened in my gut as I looked around the room, taking in the work we’d done. This definitely didn’t look like the place where I’d spent hours crunching numbers and playing video games.

  A baby’s bedroom. In our house.

  So this was real. A few more months and there would really be a baby in our lives. My stomach turned and my mouth went dry.

  I couldn’t look at Isaac for fear he’d hear my unspoken thoughts. For as much as my feelings for Carmen had been keeping me awake at night, now I had a new worry to add to the insomnia cocktail. What if all of this had further ramifications than just some lost sleep and requisite parental responsibilities?

  For the last several years, Isaac had been a saint when it came to my son. He’d taken to the role of stepfather as if Ryan was his own kid, and there were times when he’d been my saving grace, stepping in with words of wisdom or calm suggestions when I was at my wit’s end. I probably wouldn’t have made it through the last few years with Ryan on my own. I loved my son, I’d have stepped in front of a freight train for him, but I couldn’t pretend the last three or four years had been easy, and I’d leaned heavily on Isaac. Probably more than I had any right to. Yet, without batting an eye, when he’d bought his Mustang, he’d deliberately gone the bargain route so he could still put money into my son’s college fund. At times, I’d had to put our relationship second, put plans on hold, invest money, and Isaac never complained.

  He never complained, but I knew it took its toll. Though we’d discussed adopting a child of our own, I noticed he hadn’t brought up the subject much in the last year as things with Ryan had escalated. I hadn’t asked, he hadn’t said, but I wondered if he’d thought twice about becoming a parent after all.

  So what if this baby was mine? Could I really ask Isaac to deal with the sleep deprivation and stress of an infant, with the promise of going through all the teenage years once again?

  One of us would be legally bound to this baby. One of us would be free to walk away if he so chose. I had no intention of leaving regardless of the DNA results, but could I begrudge him if he chose to? If he needed to? We both intended to stay together, for better or worse, but the reality was that we were both human. What if he couldn’t handle being a stepparent all over again, just like I wasn’t sure I could ask him to do so?

  Carmen and I could manage if it was just the two of us. I’d been a single parent; I could raise this baby with her. It was the thought of losing Isaac—as a co-parent, as a lover, as the only one who’d ever made me think seriously about marriage—that scared me.

  I cleared my throat. “You know, I could go for a drink.”

  “Me too.”

  We both turned and damn near sprinted out of the baby’s room.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Isaac

  Donovan didn’t speak as he poured us each a glass of wine. I didn’t say anything either, just surreptitiously watched him whenever he wasn’t looking my way.

  I’d been on edge ever since the day Carmen and I had sex in my office. That afternoon had revealed some uncomfortable truths, and those truths wouldn’t be ignored. Nor would my conscience.

  And now this.

  We’d just spent a few hours etching reality into our home. With every square inch covered in pale yellow paint, with every fastener I’d convinced to go into place on that damned crib, this was more real. And the less I could ignore the implications of that room, the less I could ignore the knot that had twisted quietly behind my ribs since the night Carmen had told us she was pregnant.

  What if the baby was mine? Donovan had already spent the last decade and a half raising a kid. Though we’d talked about adopting or something, we hadn’t settled on it either way. He’d been extra stressed over Ryan for the last year or so, so I’d let the subject drop for the time being. It wasn’t that I wanted to wait, per se. I was forty, for God’s sake; I could only put this off for so long before I ended up with a kindergartener at age sixty. But I didn’t want to push it with him, not when he already lost sleep over Ryan.

  What if he decided he didn’t want to stick around and raise someone else’s kid? He was already stretched thin and exhausted from the difficulties of a teenager. Whether the baby was biologically mine or not, I didn’t care. And I didn’t doubt Donovan’s devotion to our relationship or to his child, but he w
as human. Human and run ragged from butting heads with his son.

  He’d been looking forward to enjoying some of the adult freedom he’d missed in his twenties, and now this? Whether because of my feelings for Carmen, or the pressure on him of raising someone else’s baby, this worried me. If there was anything about this situation that truly scared me, that terrified me right to the core, it was the thought of losing Donovan.

  I stole a few more discreet glances.

  His eyes flicked up and met mine, but we both looked away again. What are you thinking about, Don? His eyes wouldn’t maintain contact with mine, mine wouldn’t with his. Not long enough to read him, anyway. His body language betrayed nothing except that he had something on his mind. The tension in his shoulders was palpable from here. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he always did when he was nervous. That glass of wine didn’t last long, either.

  What’s going through your head right now?

  Damn it. We had this nonverbal communication thing down. Always one step ahead of the other, always in synch, always on the same page. Always.

  Except now. When I needed, more than ever, to read his mind, I couldn’t.

  Talk, talk, talk, I told all my clients time and again, but I didn’t now because I was afraid of the answers.

  Donovan set his glass down. He looked at the bottle, probably considering a refill, but then his eyes darted toward me. By the time my nerves reminded me I couldn’t quite look him in the eye, we’d already locked eyes for several long seconds.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  You. “Just…thinking.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. “About?”

  My mouth went dry. Fuck, where were the words? I don’t want to lose you, Don.

  “Isaac?” He came around the kitchen island and reached for my face. “Something wrong?”

  His touch made me shiver, and I drew in a long breath. “I’m worried about the…” I moistened my lips. “About the paternity test.”

  Donovan swallowed. “Are you worried the baby’s yours, or mine?”

  “Either way, to be honest with you,” I said. “Obvious worries and all of that, but…” There was no way to beat around the bush. No point in it. Might as well just out and say it. Avoiding his eyes, I went on. “If the baby’s mine, there’s nothing to keep you here.”