“Okay.” Lucas swallowed heavily, then started rocking gently again. “Sorry if this is annoying you.”
“It isn’t. I’m sorry I had to bring him up.”
“No. No, no, no,” Lucas said. It was obvious he was getting stuck on the word because he clamped his mouth shut and breathed heavily through his nose for a few beats. It happened to Fallon sometimes. It used to happen a lot when he was a kid—but it was always noises.
It drove Frankie up the wall, and Fallon could see it pushing his brother to the edge and hated when he couldn’t stop himself.
“Okay,” Lucas said after a long moment. “So. You’re going to have a baby. You’re keeping it. Charlie doesn’t know, but he’s the dad. Anything else?”
“Gage knows,” Fallon said. “He’s known for a while. I made him swear to secrecy.”
Lucas looked mortally offended. “How did he know first?”
“Because I moved in next door to him. I also asked him not to say anything about that,” he added, because he didn’t want Lucas to get angry about that. “I was dealing with a lot, and I didn’t know if I was going to go through with having the baby. I didn’t know if I could handle it.”
“I’m gonna yell at him,” Lucas said plainly. “But I understand why he kept it a secret.”
“Fair enough.” Fallon cleared his throat. “Don’t be too mean though. He loves you a lot, and I think it was killing him to say nothing.”
Lucas sighed. “Fine. That’s reasonable, which is annoying, but I love him too.”
“I know,” Fallon murmured, touching his stomach.
He was doing that a lot now that he was, well, showing. It wasn’t like the movies. It wasn’t like a basketball under his shirt. It wasn’t even very round. It was just…larger. And squishy in parts and harder in others. And every now and again, he felt strange flutters, like gas bubbles, only more deliberate.
He hadn’t told anyone about that either. Not even Gage.
“Do you think Frankie’s going to be upset with me?”
Lucas frowned. “About the…baby thing? Or the Charlie thing? Or both?”
“Either. I don’t know. Mostly the secrets, I think. I don’t usually do that, but I panicked.” He picked at a thread on his shirt.
“Is a baby something you’ve ever wanted?”
“I…” He hesitated. “I’ve always thought about it. I never thought I could, you know, be a dad? Because I’m fussy, and I get overstimulated easily. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be fair to have a baby if…if I couldn’t be more like everyone else.”
“Well, you knowIthink that’s bullshit,” Lucas said. “I mean, I don’t want kids. Or, well, I don’t want more than Elodie. But I’m good with her. And you are too. And you’ll be fucking great with yours.”
Fallon smiled a little—just the tiniest lift of his lips. He’d spent so long not sure if he was even allowed to want the baby because so much of who he was seemed to be diametrically opposed to giving birth to and raising a child.
He was a man, and men weren’t supposed to get pregnant, so it should bother him that it happened to him.
As an autistic person, he didn’t like noises or weird smells or changes in routines, so he wasn’t supposed to be okay with what a baby would bring.
But none of those things were scary.
What terrified him was needing to constantly explain himself. Was the fear that people would stop seeing him as a man because he chose this. Or that they’d say hateful things in front of his child. Or he might do or say something to make himself seem very visibly autistic, and someone might think he couldn’t care for his child and try to take them away.
He was fucking petrified of being told by everyone on the outside that he wasn’t allowed to do this.
“Did I say something wrong?” Lucas asked.
“No. Sorry. Words are hard right now. I’m very stressed.”
Shifting over, Lucas’s fingers trailed a touch along the cushion that separated them. “Can we hold hands? I get paranoid people leave the room without me knowing, and then I’m sitting here talking to myself like a jackass. It’s like…like eye contact for me.”
Fallon touched Lucas’s fingers, then turned his palm up and allowed Lucas to press his own down. The touch wasn’t bad. It was comforting. His palm wasn’t as calloused as Gage’s, but it was close.
