The Long and Winding Road (The Seafare Chronicles 4)

Both he and Megan laugh. “It’s all right, Bear,” she says. “I get what you’re trying to say. And I do this because I want to give couples something they can’t get themselves, for whatever reason. Maybe the woman can’t conceive. Maybe the couple is gay. Just because they can’t have children on their own doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be a parent.”

“It’s pretty gnarly, right?” Marty says, smiling at her. “Pregnancy and birth. The female body goes through so many changes during the months before birth. And we want to be able to give that joy to others.” He narrows his eyes as he looks at us. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because we wanted a kid,” I say. Because obviously.

“Is that it?”

Otter’s arm tightens around me. “Partially,” he says. “But it’s also—we had a strange family growing up. Things weren’t always easy. For us. For others. Mistakes were made. Bad things happened. But we survived. We made it through everything. And there came a point where I wanted to be able to pass on all we learned. To let Bear see that he deserved more. To maybe have a chance to be happier than we’d ever been.”

“You thought all of that?” I ask him weakly.

“Well, yeah,” he says, looking down at me. “I just want everything with you.”

I kiss him because I couldn’t not after hearing that.

“Oh my god,” Marty breathes from across the table. “You two are glorious.”

“I told you they were great,” Megan says, sounding smug. “They are the best people I’ve—oh.”

Otter and I break apart, startled.

Megan’s frowning, looking down at her stomach. She slowly pulls her feet from Marty’s lap, and her brow furrows a little bit.

“Is everything okay?” I ask, panic starting to rise, because no, no, it’s not fair if something goes wrong now, it’s not fair—

She looks up at him, smiling softly. “Your children are awake. They’re kicking. Want to feel?”

“What?” Otter croaks out, and he’s shaking.

“Ah, perfect timing,” Marty says. “Bear, Otter, come around to this side of the table so we don’t have to make Megan move.”

For a moment, both of us are still frozen. And then we’re scrambling up, almost knocking each other to the floor. We’re around the table and on our knees in front of her before I realize what exactly is happening.

Otter reaches up, but then he hesitates, like he’s unsure he has permission to touch. Megan rolls her eyes and grabs his hand, placing it on the left side of her stomach. “Just wait a minute,” she says. “It’ll happen.”

We’re silent then.

There’s a beat, and two, and three, and—

I know the moment he feels it. The moment he feels one of our kids moving in Megan’s stomach. It starts with his lip, the bottom of which trembles before his mouth drops open. It moves up his face in a flush before it hits his eyes, which widen to the point where they’re almost bulging. A sound comes out of his mouth that sounds almost wounded, and then his gaze finds mine and he says, “Bear.”

My hand is on top of his then, my fingers going between his, and there’s nothing, there is nothing, there’s—

A push, back up against us.

It’s stronger than I thought it would be. It startles me, and I almost fall backward, but Otter’s got his arm around my waist, holding me up, and it’s there again, another push, and I don’t know what it is, if it’s a foot or a hand or what, but it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

There’s blood rushing in my ears, but I can still hear Otter murmuring next to me, saying, “Hi, babies, it’s your daddy and your papa, and you’re here, aren’t you? You’re here, and we can feel you. We can feel you. Oh my god, we can feel you. We can’t wait to meet you. We are so happy you’re almost here.”

No one says a damn word about how choked he sounds.

We stay there for the longest time.

10. Where Bear Gets Advice About His Sex Life

JULY ROLLS in, hot and sticky, a rare heat wave smothering the coast for weeks. It feels like the days are just crawling by, the date scrawled on the calendar (!!!!!SEPTEMBER 18!!!!!) still looking so far away. We keep being told that it’ll be here before we know it, but we’re getting anxious.

But it’s not like we don’t have other shit going on. We’ve managed to convince everyone that we don’t want a baby shower, but we’ve somehow found ourselves registered for shit at Target anyway, with daily deliveries coming of packages of all shapes and sizes filled with diapers and shampoo and toys and something called a Newborn Starter Kit filled with bottles and nipples that have anticolic valves built in. It’s overwhelming after a while, all this shit that I would have never even thought of, like sterilizers and diaper hampers and video monitors that I’m pretty sure are more high-tech than I’m capable of dealing with.