Dadbod

"I'll go," I told her. "If you call ahead and if you stay with me the whole time. And if you swear you won't tell my brother."

I didn't sleep that night. The weight of my belly made it hard to breathe, and I couldn't stop thinking about whatever kind of death was growing in there.

I don't think she slept much either, and a little after midnight she asked if I was awake.

"Yes. Are you?"

She giggled reluctantly. "Yes. Are you scared?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Honey, I'm sure it's something harmless. A fibroid, maybe. Or a benign cyst. Those can get pretty big. I read about one where the lady's whole--well, never mind. It was just pretty big. Or... maybe you just need the world's most powerful laxative."

I snorted.

She stroked my flanks and belly, very carefully, as if she was afraid that with too much pressure something might burst.

"Will you try to sleep a little bit?"

"I don't think I can. Can you?"

"I don't think so."

Morning came too soon but also not soon enough. We got up with the alarm, and we both called in to work, and I let her prompt me through coffee, and a shower, and my clothes. I was too scattered and freaked out to function on my own.

She did better in that department. When I commented on it, she said working with twelve-year-olds made people good in a crisis.

She took me to a clinic with an early morning vacancy and got me checked in and all my insurance information entered and explained my embarrassing situation--transgender male, 30 years old, abdominal distention over a period of months, worsening discomfort and shortness of breath--I'd been hiding that from her, but she, like most girls, was pretty perceptive--and then came back to the exam room with me.

The NP who saw me was a guy, which made things so much worse, and obviously queer, which made it better, although not all the way. I saw a flash of real concern when he glanced at my belly and the way it bulged out the front of my XL tee shirt, the way I sat leaning back in my chair to make room for it. We hadn't been paranoid. Something was wrong with me.

She took my hand and held onto it, only letting go long enough for me to fumble my shirt and shoes and jeans off and climb awkwardly onto the exam table in my shorts.

The exam was mortifying. Questions about my cycle (hadn't had one in years), and my sex life (sexually monogamous with a cisgender woman), and the bathroom (yeah, I'd been having problems there, I ate like crap), and my drinking habits (hardly ever, didn't like the taste and alcoholism ran in the family), and all the other things that are too private to talk about. Like the fact that I was "biologically female," at least originally.

He palpated my belly with his large, warm manhands.

He said "Huh." And made me explain again that I didn't have intercourse with cis men.

He brought out a bedside ultrasound, and told me we were just going to have a quick look at what was going on inside that belly there, and I closed my eyes and felt cold gel and weirdly firm pressure from some kind of instrument.

I heard him say "Oh, hello there," and I heard my girl gasp in surprise, and then, amazingly, laugh out loud.

"What? What?"

I opened my eyes and saw my girl, relief spread across her face, and the grinning NP, telling me to hold still so he could capture some images.

And on the screen, tilted so I could see it, a whole entire human child. In my belly. A human child.

I was pregnant.

Fucking Chloe.

The rest was a blur. Something about my uterus being set too far back, and the placenta too far forward, which is why there wasn't any obvious kicking. The expanding pressure on my guts explained everything else.

When I started to hyperventilate and the NP and my girl had to help me lay back on the table (my belly wouldn't let me put my head between my knees), she asked, very timidly, about the possibility of termination.

"Oh, no," said the NP. "Oh, no no no. He's way too far along for that. Even if you took him up north. It would be impossible to find a practitioner--you've got a healthy fetus, healthy... dad--and even if you did the baby would be earthside long before then. My dear, I'm afraid your boyfriend is about to pop."

He had to give me a shot and waft some oxygen under my nose before I could calm myself down.

"How long have you two been seeing each other?" the NP asked in a deliberately casual voice, once I did. The nosy son of a bitch was looking for mess.

We glanced at each other. "Six months," she said.

"And before that?"

"Not your business," I croaked.

Somehow she got me home, as comprehensively not ok as I was, with vitamins and fiber supplements and a list of follow-up appointments to attend.

She tucked me into bed and kissed my forehead and a little while later brought me microwaved soup in a mug.

"I'm not sick. I could have gotten up."

"I know. Just let me spoil you a bit. You've had... kind of a hard day."

I snorted. I drank my soup. I let her massage my neck and shoulders and back while I lay on my side. I let her play with my hair and beard.

She seemed to have a hard time taking her hands off me, I think because I wasn't dying after all, and I didn't mind that. It felt... soothing. And eventually I slept.

**

Once I knew I was pregnant, I realized that I felt pregnant, whatever pregnant feels like. There wasn't any more mistaking my belly for surplus fat, or slow digestion. There was somebody inside it. It even got dramatically bigger, like my body had stopped trying to hide itself from me, and I ran out of shirts I could wear and had to fasten my baggiest, saggiest jeans with one of my girlfriend's hair tie thingies.

I made all of my high risk appointments, as humiliating and dysphoric as they were, and she came with me to most of them.

I let her rub lotion into my belly so, as she said, I wouldn't have too many stretch marks showing when I took my shirt off at the pool next year.

There was a supremely awkward house meeting with my roommate. He apologized, looking mortified and kind of weirded out, for teasing me about my pregnant-looking belly a month or so back. I told him it was fine. I hadn't known either, and nobody expects a dude to actually be knocked up.

"Can I, um, can I feel it? You can say no."

"Of course he can say no," my girl snapped.

I thought it over. "Yeah, whatever." Everyone else had had their hands on my belly over the last few days, why not him too.

And he stood up from his chair and leaned over me and rested his hand on the front of my last tee shirt that fit, pressing down a little.

"Am I pushing on it too hard?"

I shook my head.

"What does it feel like?" There was an odd tone of wistfulness, almost of longing, in his voice.

I shook my head again. "It's fucking weird. I can't describe it."

"Better put one in me next, so I can find out. Since all bets are off in that department, apparently."

He winked at me, and I told him to get in line, I was putting one in my girlfriend next. But if he was a good boy, I'd give him twins. Say goodbye to those abs, bro.

She swatted my arm and told me to quit it.

One night while she was massaging my belly with moisturizer, I felt her hand begin to creep lower, and then lower still.

She stroked the thicket of my untrimmed pubes, and almost against my will I felt my hips rise to meet her. My body was the opposite of sexy, horribly bloated and full of pressure, but it still wanted her. I wanted her, more than I'd ever wanted anything.

As uncomfortable as I was, I was also desperately horny.

She saw that, and now it was her turn to tell me how bad I must have been.

So bad, I agreed. Such a bad man.

"A very bad man," she echoed. "Who did naughty, nasty things with that woman, and now..." She kissed my belly below the navel.

"His tummy."

She kissed me again.

"Is round."

Kiss.

"And full."

Kiss.

"And very, very, very pregnant." She kissed me one more time, then favored me with a wicked glance. "Because you."

One more kiss, as if it was something she had forgotten.

"Are such a stupendous lover."

Kiss.

"That the woman put a baby into YOU. But unfortunately... you're just too pregnant for sex."

"Jesus Christ!"

"You're going to be a daddy any day now. Daddies are supposed to be pure, and chaste, and wholesome. Just like moms are."

I was on the verge of begging for it, and I've never been the begging type.

"Well, good night, then," she said, and pretended to roll over and go to sleep.

"Baby, please!"

"Oh, are you not too pregnant for sex?"

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"Well, let's see what we can do about that."

And she did everything about that.

Her fingers, her mouth, a vibrator, her mouth and fingers again. She even shucked my own strap out of its harness and used it on me, working it slowly up inside me while I wriggled and grunted because I wasn't used to penetration with something that large and then easing it in and out, in and out, in and out, while she stroked my dick.

Nine months pregnant and frigged by my own strap. What a world.

When she was done and I'd come about three times, she cuddled up beside me.

"There," she said. "I wanted you to have something fun and nice to associate with this." She patted my stomach. "To counteract all the rest of it. I know it's pretty miserable."

I rolled heavily onto my side and kissed her forehead. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you actually liked me like this."

"Maybe I do," she said.

"Pervert."

**

And Chloe came back. We called her and she caught the first affordable flight. She didn't stay with me, that would have been inappropriate, but she came over to my place after she'd dropped her bags off at the hotel.

Tensions ran high. My roommate cleared out for the evening to leave us alone, but I kind of wished he would have stayed. It might have helped to have another guy around, to balance out the energy of those two women. Two exceptionally pretty and intelligent women, one short and bouncy and a little plump, and the other tall and slim and elegant in an austere corporate way.

For a moment I marveled at how I'd ever managed this. I've never been a classically handsome man, but I can pull, and I had pulled both of them, at least for a while. Amazing.

They sized each other up. Chloe is a few years older than me, and she knew how to disarm another woman emotionally, and she did that, making it clear that she hadn't come back to stay and that I had never been more than a fun, friendly fling for her.

We ordered pizza, although my girl made me get a salad too. She was marking her territory, making it clear who got to have opinions about my body and what went on inside it. She kept her hands on me too, squeezing my shoulders and rubbing my lower back and tweaking my disheveled beard hairs back into place.

After dinner Chloe asked--addressing the question to me and also to my girl--if she could feel the baby.

I told her she might not feel kicking, and she said that was all right. And I leaned back on the sofa and pulled up my shirt.

She gasped.

I was huge and shockingly round.

And she very gently laid her hands on me. The sight of those long, elegant fingers on my swollen, hairy belly did something to me that I tried not to think about, not right there in front of my girl.

The night Chloe and I had spent together had been a very good one. A romp with a crush, both of us knowing that she would leave the next week and nothing further could happen between us.

She'd been on estrogen and blockers for years, and couldn't have penetrated me even we wanted her to do that, which we didn't, but we did everything else, almost everything it was possible for two people to do, and when we were done we were covered in each other's juices, spunk and sweat and everything else, and our fingers and tongues and my strap and her vibrating toy thingie had been everywhere, and somehow, against all odds... well.

Look at me now.

At the end of our sex, Chloe had cried in my arms. It wasn't about me, she said. Just, she hoped that in her new life, in her new city, with her new job, she'd meet a nice man, maybe someone just a little bit like me, and she could get married, and raise a family, and do all the things she wasn't sure girls like her ever got to do.

**

Giving birth sucked. The less said about that, the better. It wasn't the pain. Pain is just pain, and there were drugs for that anyway. It was the strangers' gloved hands everywhere, on my belly and up in all my personal places.

Rude.

But at the end of it there was a little baby boy, healthy and furious, and my girl kissed my forehead and stroked my beard and told me I was a hero while Chloe cut the cord.

It was after that that things went wrong with me, and again with the not wanting to talk about it much. The tl;dr is I came over all dizzy and cold, and the energy in the room changed from excitement to urgency, and after that I don't remember much.

But that is the story of how insurance had to pay for my hysterectomy after all.

And of how Chloe got to be a mom.