Oops

He'd spent the wee hours of the night making plans. Taking Pete out of state, maybe out of the country seemed to be the only thing to do. Because men like him, in his situation--. Christ. Whatever they did, wherever they did it, would open him up to the loss of his career, lawsuits, prison terms, maybe worse. He found that he didn't care. He had gotten Pete into this, and he would get him out, and if some rabid Texas DA tried to bring him up on charges, he'd fight it all the way to the fucking Supreme Court. The ACLU or NARAL would love this shit.

Gabe groaned and unfolded himself from the couch. "Leave any for me?"

"Plenty," Pete said, gesturing with his cup. "You buy the good stuff."

"Life is short," Gabe said. "Too short for Folgers."

Pete waited until Gabe had filled the only other cup, doctored it with whole milk and sugar, and then said "So ... yeah. So ... I'm keeping it."

Gabe had turned to stare at him, seen the steely glint in his light eyes and the grim set to his jaw, and understood that there would be no budging this man.

"I'll have to find a summer job, because I can't go home like this." Pete gestured at his bulging front. "They've gotten used to me being a man, I guess, but now they think I'm going to find a nice girl, settle down." His lip curled ironically. "Are there other studios in your building? Can you find out? Because the grad dorms close down after finals."

"Don't do that," Gabe said, surprising himself. It was turning out to be a morning of many surprises. "Move in here with me. Don't worry about the job. I got you into this, I can float you for a while."

Pete nodded. He had evidently spent the night planning, too. "I'm not giving up coffee, though," he informed Gabe. "Booze, yeah. I hardly drink anyhow. Other than last night." He grimaced. "I guess I'll have to stop my T shots. And when I, you know, when it. When I, uh, have it, someone will have to adopt it."

Gabe had taken charge from there.

Coming around Pete's place at the end of the semester with his F150 and an orderly from work (who'd been given a case of beer for the help and a twenty to keep his mouth shut) to move him out of the grad dorms and into Gabe's studio.

Consulting one of his former profs, a severely pretty and tightly wound married lesbian, for OB recommendations who didn't work at his job.

"They need to be, um, LGBTQ-affirming," he'd said, feeling himself blush. "The situation is... pretty complicated. The person is transgender. A trans man."

"A trans man? And he's pregnant? Oh, Lordy. What a predicament. The poor lad." Her brittle veneer melted like summer snow. And just like that, she was on their side, referring them to the midwife, and then, once she had (accurately) intuited the role Gabe played in the whole mess, inviting the both of them to dinner with her spouse and the daughter who had been born to them through a donor. And then it had been her turn to blush, as she proposed the adoption.

"We can keep it in the family, so to speak. You'll be uncles, of course. Godfathers, if you prefer. Unless ... unless you'd rather make a complete separation? Just put it all behind you?"

No, Gabe and Pete decided, uncles would be fine. They talked it over in private. They would buy a drum set, and fireworks, and battery operated toys that emitted terrible noises, and later on, maybe an Xbox. "Can't leave out the girl, though," Pete pointed out. "It sucks, when you're older and everyone makes a fuss about the new arrival."

"So, two drum sets. Check," Gabe replied, and they both laughed.

There were lawyers, one for each pair, both paid for by the lesbians. There was a nursery, painted gender-neutral green by Gabe and the woman he thought of privately as The Husband Lesbian, after an internet story that had gone viral a few years back.

And then there was Pete, sleeping nights while he slept days, letting his books metastasize around the apartment, civil and friendly, doing his best to be a good roommate (other than the book situation), but walled off somewhere Gabe couldn't reach.

Then Gabe had had the night terror. Back in fucking Iraqistan, under heavy fire, behind a bombed out car in a dusty street in some broken city, with a man's lifeblood spurting into his hands. He'd cranked the tourniquet tighter, cinched it, and as enemy fighters advanced, picked up the dying man's rifle and employed it, putting rounds through center body masses with a precision that pleased a dim, savage part of him, watching men fall as dispassionately as if they were NPCs in one of the video games he sometimes played in the USO tent. He wasn't Chris Kyle, thank god, but he was no Desmond Doss, either.

They'd given him a medal for that day, with the V device for Valor. And the dying man had lived, and gone home, and married his girl, and fathered a child. Gabe kept a picture of them in his phone.

But the dream, though. In the dream the shot-down insurgents got back up.

And then Pete was there, holding him in his still-wiry arms, tight against his still-hard chest. "Bro, bro. You're all right. You're here. You're home. Wake up." Pete had rubbed Gabe's chest and stomach, fed him a stiff belt of whiskey, massaged his tense shoulders, lain down next to him while he tried to sleep. When he woke again, just before sundown, just before work, he found Pete cuddled in the cage of his arms, Pete's ass pressed against his groin, and his hand cupping Pete's firm, swollen belly.

After that, things were different.

Better.

Real. A real friendship, if nothing else.

**

"I thought you'd treat me like I'd turned into a girl, or something," Pete had confided not long after.

"Why? You didn't."

"Well, I mean." Pete patted his stretched-tight stomach through his stretched-tight tee shirt. "This isn't how guys are supposed to be."

"Oh, screw that. Screw how guys are supposed to be. You think I'm what a guy is supposed to be?"

"Dude, you were a Marine."

"No, I wasn't. I was a Navy corpsman. It's different."

"But you deployed with them. You fought with them. You ki--. Sorry. Shit, I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

In truth, Gabe hadn't known how it was going to be between them, with Pete off his hormones and his belly a little bigger every day. But it had turned out that his body was keenly, almost painfully aware of Pete, and of Pete's belly, and since Pete had moved in Gabe had spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Working the tension out.

"Pete," Gabe said. "Get over here and let me show you something."

"Yeah?" Pete got up awkwardly from the chair and sat awkwardly down with him on the sofa.

Gabe put a hand to Pete's jaw and turned his face towards his own. He kissed Pete, tasting the PB&J Pete had eaten for a snack. His other hand roamed southward, down his chest, lifting his tee shirt up, stroking the bulge of his belly, feeling its density and its weight. Pete tried to wriggle away from that and Gabe didn't let him, but he brought his hand back up to the chest and its hard, flat pectorals and thatch of tawny hair. It took a heroic effort for him to pull his mouth back.

"Jesus Christ, I've been wanting to do that for weeks." Panting a little, he pressed Pete's hand to his crotch. "Feel that?"

Pete gave him a healthy squeeze through his scrub pants and underwear. "I do believe," Pete said, beginning to smile behind his untrimmed mustache. "That is your big fuckin dick, waking the fuck up."

"That is indeed my big fuckin dick, waking the fuck up. It is also a dick that has never, in its entire existence, wanted anything to do with a woman. Dick doesn't lie, dude. It knows exactly what you are."

And then Pete's hands were on him, pushing him back against the sofa and pressing his mouth to Gabe's. "Oh thank fucking Christ," Pete moaned, in between smooches. "I've been so fucking horny, and I thought--"

They had shoved the coffee table out of the way and done it on the rug, too avid for each other to get to the bed, and on his next shift, every time his scrubs brushed against the carpet burns on his knees Gabe had smiled.

"What are you smiling about?" one of the RNs had asked him. "You look like you had the best lay of your life last night. Who's the lucky man?"

He had winked at her, saying nothing, before he strutted away.

**

Near August, things began to change. Pete woke him up one afternoon, long before he had to start getting ready for work, and told him his belly felt strange, felt different. It was set a lot lower and it fucked up his walk and sometimes it, like, squeezed him.

"'Squeezed you,'" Gabe repeated. "Want to lay down for me real quick?"

"Why?" Pete crossed his arms defensively on his chest.

"So I can have a look at you."

"Are you going to feel my tummy?" He said this in the midwife voice.

Gabe, who was too wound up for games, tried and failed to keep the frustration out of his voice.

"I am going to palpate your abdomen. Now lay down, goddamn it."

"Bro, I love it when you talk dirty."

"Would you STOP?"

He had done this only once before, on the night Pete and his gal pal had shown up half drunk. The line between medic and lover was something he didn't really like to cross. It felt corrupt to him, and not in the sexy way. That night he'd made Pete lay down on the sofa, probed a bit with his fingers, feeling through the CrossFit-tightened muscle layers to the roundness deep inside, then gotten the stethoscope out of his work bag and pressed the business end to Pete's swollen tum.

"Holy fuck." He'd listened for a moment to Pete's panicked heartbeat and beneath it, something else, something much smaller and much faster, then handed the ear pieces to Pete.

"What? What?"

"Listen for yourself."

"Holy fuck is right! Jesus fucking Christ!" Pete had torn the earpieces out and sat up, fast, jerking his tee shirt down over his torso.

Now Pete couldn't do anything fast, and laying down made him gasp a little, from the weight of himself, the weight of the thing inside him, so Gabe made it as brief as he could, then got him sitting up and put an arm around him.

"Look. Your belly feels weird because you're almost done with this. It's, ah, headed for the exit."

"Oh shit, really? Like today?"

"Probably not. First ones can take their time." Gabe wasn't sure how much to tell him. Pete was allergic to clinical detail about the contents and activities of his belly, and words like uterus or cervix made him visibly disconnect.

"But it's coming soon? Oh thank fuck." Pete leaned against Gabe's side, his head on his shoulder, limp with relief. When his belly squeezed again he grabbed Gabe's hand and pressed it to himself.

"It's doing it again. This doesn't mean it's starting now?"

Gabe felt Pete's muscles strain. "Baby, no. When it starts, you'll know it. Do you want me to call in to work so I can stay home with you tonight?"

"No, I think I'm ok. If it isn't starting."

Later, he would tell him the things that would mean he had to call Gabe at work, on his cell or at the front desk, and keep calling until he got through. Later, he would tell him the things that would mean he had to call 911. Later, he would text the midwife with an update, and text the lesbians with an update of their own.

Now, he let Pete turn in his arms and kiss him.

"Hey," Pete said. "You know how they say the line between fear and, like, eros, is thisfine?" He showed Gabe his thumb and trigger finger smushed tight together.

Gabe, in fact, had not known that, but it made a lot of sense.

"So what are you telling me?" He kissed Pete back. "Are you saying that you're scared and horny at the same time?"

"Mm hmm." Pete kissed him.

Gabe realized that he was scared and horny too.

"I'd take care of it myself," Pete told him. "But you've given me this big belly here, and it makes it hard to reach, so I think you'd better take care of it for me."

Gabe put a hand to Pete's belly. "Are you sure? I think this might be too big for, you know, for that. I think it's just too full. Might pop." He kissed him.

Pete arched his back so his belly pushed out even farther. "Who's fault is that, bro?"

"Hmm. Yours? I don't recall having to persuade you much. I seem to remember you begging for it. 'Oh, put it in me, bro. That musty old condom will be fine, bro.'" He stroked Pete along the vast territory from his ribcage to his groin, and kissed him again.

"Shut up." Pete laughed against his lips. "We'll see what your belly's doing, this time next year."

"Can't wait," Gabe said, and slid his hand into Pete's drawers to do his duty.

When they'd finished handling each other, and both had taken showers, he kissed Pete's forehead and his mouth, and hugged him, and rubbed his back, and got him propped in a corner of the sofa with a pile of books and a PB&J while he trimmed his beard and pulled on a fresh set of scrubs.

Work was good. Quiet. The only real drama derived from a college couple who came in, the girl complaining about the worst case of food poisoning she'd ever had. Her boyfriend had tried to cook chicken for her.

Evidently it hadn't gone well.

The girl was plump and front-heavy, all boobs and tummy, and eventually, after she held herself through a belly cramp and wailed "Oh no I PEED," the RN who was keeping an eye on her figured out what was actually wrong and called Gabe over to help catch.

It was her boyfriend's fault, but not because of the chicken.

Less than an hour later, the girl had extruded a healthy six pound daughter, and Gabe had fought the boyfriend, who didn't want another guy anywhere near his girlfriend's junk, and then he had squared off with security when they tried to drag the idiot boy away. There had been a lot of paperwork because of the fight. When he left work the two kids were surrounded by excited, cooing nurses and a doc who'd run down from OB, with their baby in their arms, both of them shell-shocked but plainly thrilled with their accomplishment.

The whole business felt weirdly auspicious to him. The easy birth of the oops baby in the ER, the young father already babbling on about overtime hours and getting his mom to babysit for date nights, the young woman pointing out the baby's (admittedly cute) toenails and eyelashes and assorted bits to anyone who passed by.

Cheekbone bruised and throbbing, a little tired, but not in the bad way, he got in his truck and drove home to Pete. In a week or so, but probably sooner, Pete would be tucked up in bed asleep, his belly deflating at last, while the midwife fussed around him, and Gabe would sit on the sofa with a baby of his own in his arms, waiting for the lesbians to come with their carseat, and their going-home outfit (in gender-neutral green), and their daughter, who had just become a big sister to somebody.

Pete would do his T shots again, and go back to CrossFit, and take a drink when he wanted one, and maybe they would apply for a bigger apartment, one with two rooms or even three, one where they could have friends over because there was somewhere for them to sit. Their semesters would begin. Pete would argue in seminars and grade freshman essays and sit for his comps, and Gabe would be one step closer to being officially qualified to do the things he already knew how to do.

And this strange interlude in their lives would end.