Everything with Miles will come crashing down.
It’s inevitable. He’s so adamant about the things he doesn’t want out of life, and I’m starting to understand just how serious he is. So as much as I try to protect my heart from him, it’s pointless. He’s going to break it eventually, yet I continue to allow him to fill it. Every time I’m with him, he fills my heart up more and more, and the more it’s filled with pieces of him, the more painful it’ll be when he rips it out of my chest as though it never belonged there in the first place.
I hear the vibration of his phone and feel him roll over and reach for it on the nightstand next to him. He thinks I’m asleep, so I don’t give him reason to think otherwise.
“Hey,” he whispers. There’s a long pause, and I start to panic internally, wondering who he’s talking to. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I should have called you. I figured you’d be asleep.”
My heart is in my throat now, crawling its way up, trying to escape from Miles and me and this entire situation. My heart knows by my reaction to this phone call that it’s in trouble. My heart has just gone into fight-or-flight mode, and right now, it’s doing everything it can to run.
I don’t blame my heart one bit.
“Love you, too, Dad.”
My heart slides back down my throat and finds its normal home in my chest again. It’s happy for now. I’m happy. Happy that he actually does have someone to call.
In the same moment, I’m also reminded of how little I know about him. How little he shows me. How much he hides himself from me, so that when I finally break, it won’t be his fault.
It won’t be a quick break, either. It’ll be slow and painful, filled with so many moments like these that tear me up from the inside out. Moments when he thinks I’m asleep and he slides out of my bed. Moments when I keep my eyes closed but listen as he puts on his clothes. Moments when I make sure my breathing remains regular in case he’s watching me when he leans over to kiss me on the forehead.
Moments when he leaves.
Because he always leaves.
chapter twenty-eight
MILES
Six years earlier
“What if he turns out to be gay?” Rachel asks me. “Would that bother you?”
She’s holding Clayton, and we’re both sitting on the hospital bed. I’m on the foot of the bed facing her, watching her stare at him.
She keeps asking me random questions. Playing devil’s advocate again.
She says we need to work these things out now so we don’t run into any parenting issues in the future.
“It would only bother me if he felt like he couldn’t talk to us about it. I want him to know he can talk to us about anything.”
Rachel smiles at Clayton, but I know her smile is for me.
Because she loved my answer.
“What if he doesn’t believe in God?” she asks.
“He can believe whatever he wants. I just want his beliefs—or lack thereof—to make him happy.”
She smiles again.
“What if he commits an awful, heinous, heartless crime and gets sent to prison for life?”
“I would question where I went wrong as a father,” I tell her.
She looks up at me. “Well, based on this interrogation, I’m convinced he’ll never commit a crime, because you’re already the best dad I’ve ever known.”
Now she’s making me smile.
We both look at the door when it opens and a nurse walks in. She flashes a regretful smile. “It’s time,” she says.
Rachel groans, but I have no idea what the nurse is referring to. Rachel sees the confusion on my face.
“His circumcision.”
My stomach clenches. I know we discussed this during the pregnancy, but I’m suddenly having second thoughts, knowing what he’s about to go through.
“It’s not so bad,” the nurse says. “We numb him first.”
She walks over to Rachel and begins to lift him from Rachel’s arms, but I lean forward.
“Wait,” I tell her. “Let me hold him first.”
The nurse backs up a step, and Rachel hands Clayton to me. I pull him in front of me and look down on him.
“I’m so sorry, Clayton. I know it’ll hurt, and I know it’s emasculating, but—”
“He’s a day old,” Rachel interjects with a laugh. “There’s hardly anything that can emasculate him yet.”
I tell her to hush. I tell her I’m having a father-son moment, and she needs to pretend she’s not here.
“Don’t worry, your mom left the room,” I say to Clayton, giving Rachel a wink. “I was saying, I know it’s emasculating, but you’ll thank me later for it. Especially when you’re older and you get involved with girls. Hopefully not until after you’re eighteen, but it’ll more than likely be around the age of sixteen. It was for me, anyway.”
Rachel leans forward and holds her arms out for him. “That’s enough bonding,” she says, laughing. “I think we need to review the boundaries of father-son conversation while he’s being emasculated.”
I give him a quick kiss on his forehead and hand him back to Rachel. She does the same and passes him on to the nurse.
We both watch as the nurse leaves the room with him.
I look back at Rachel and crawl toward her until I’m lying next to her on the bed.
“We have the place to ourselves,” I whisper. “Let’s make out.”
She grimaces. “I don’t feel sexy right now,” she says. “My stomach is flabby, and my boobs are engorged, and I need a shower so bad, but it hurts too much to try to take one right now.”
I look down at her chest and pull at the collar on her hospital gown. I peer down her shirt and grin. “How long do they stay like this?”
She laughs and pushes my hand away.
“Well, how does your mouth feel?” I ask her.
She looks at me like she doesn’t understand my question, so I elaborate.
“I’m just wondering if your mouth hurts like the rest of you hurts, because if it doesn’t, I want to kiss you.”
She grins. “My mouth feels great.”
I rise up on my elbow so she doesn’t have to roll toward me. I look down on her, and seeing her beneath me feels different now.
It feels real.
Until yesterday, it really did feel like we had been playing house. Of course, our love is real, and our relationship is real, but until I witnessed her give life to my son yesterday, everything I felt before that moment was like child’s play compared to what I feel for her now.
“I love you, Rachel. More than I loved you yesterday.”
Her eyes are looking up at me like she knows exactly what I’m talking about. “If you love me more today than you loved me yesterday, then I can’t wait for tomorrow,” she says.
My lips fall to hers, and I kiss her. Not because I should but because I need to.
???
I’m standing outside Rachel’s hospital room. She and Clayton are both in the room, napping.
The nurse said he hardly even cried. I’m sure she tells all the parents that, but I believe her anyway.
I take out my phone to text Ian.
Me: He got snipped a few hours ago. Took it like a champ.