Ezra shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t real.”
Titan hummed a little doubtfully. “Perhaps it was not real, but the emotions it evoked were. Are you all right?”
Ezra sighed. That was quite the question, wasn’t it?
“I dunno,” he said after a beat. “A lot has happened—like, a lot—and I don’t really know how to feel about any of it. I mean, I was still working through the idea that you got me pregnant, but now on top of that I have to deal with the fact that I’m half alien? That’s… it… it might be too much for me to handle.”
“You have been dealt a significant number of life changes,” Titan agreed. “However, they are not too much for you to handle.”
Ezra looked at him over his shoulder with a frown. “How do you know?”
“Because you are an incredible human being,” he said simply. “One of enviable strength and resilience.”
“Enviable, huh? The great Titan is envious of me? A silly little human whose only professional reference is his cat?”
He had said it as a joke, but Titan seemed to take it seriously. He kissed Ezra’s cheek and said in earnest, “Yes, Ezra. I am envious of you.”
This gave Ezra pause.
Quietly, after a moment of reflection, he admitted what was on his mind. “I spent my whole life thinking my dad didn’t love me, and that’s why he left. And that colored everything I did, you know? When my boyfriend left me, when I had a string of rebounds who wanted nothing to do with me after we hooked up, I thought, well, yeah, obviously. That’s just how these things go. I’m not the type of person people want to stay around.
“But now what the hell am I supposed to think? Not even taking into account the whole alien thing, it turns out that my dad didn’t leave because he didn’t love me. He was arrested by the literal space policebecausehe wanted to stay. My entire belief system is built on a lie, and now he’s back saying he wants to be in my life, and you’re here telling me you want to stay with me, and I’ve got goddamn kids on the way who will need me to be committed to them, and I just… what is there to envy about a guy who is too broken to know how to have an adult relationship?”
“I am beginning to learn,” Titan said softly after a few moments of silence, “that there is value in recognizing one’s own shortcomings. You know where your barriers lie, and because of this you will know how to overcome them. I am still learning how to admit fault, and it is an arduous process. But what you have taught me, Ezra, is that greatness is not something that is granted at birth. Greatness is about what you do. You are a very wise, intelligent, endlessly kind being, and that makes you great. And I am greater for having known you. That is what makes you enviable.”
Ezra’s eyes burned. For someone who wasn’t much of a crier, he certainly seemed to be doing it a lot lately. He decided to chalk it up to hormones, and discreetly wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
It was late, he was exhausted, and he didn’t have enough left in him to keep dwelling on heavy topics. So instead of attempting a reply, he took a deep breath and asked, “Is my dad really an intergalactic slut?”
Titan laughed, his breath blowing the hairs on the back of Ezra’s neck.
“He has… a reputation,” he said, stroking Ezra’s arm.
“I guess that means I have a bunch of half-siblings out there in the universe somewhere, huh? Good to know the dad I always wished I knew is actually a space whore.”
“Perhaps,” Titan whispered. “But also it may be worth it to, what’s the phrase? ‘Give him a chance’?” He nuzzled his nose against Ezra. “Sometimes beings are not always what they seem upon first glance.”
Ezra took Titan’s hand in his and laced their fingers together. He smiled softly to himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. Sometimes they aren’t.”
26
Ezra
Alien pregnancies had to be different, because Ezra sure as hell wasn’t feeling that “pregnancy glow” he’d heard people talking about. It had been almost three months since Titan had knocked him up and he was closing in on the end of his pregnancy—thank god—but he was being a self-proclaimed whiny sack of shit about every ache and pain and pair of pants he could no longer button up. His ability to “go with the flow” had flown right out the goddamn window. How the hell, he wondered, did people go through nine months of this? In comparison, his pregnancy should have been a cakewalk, yet he was still miserable and grumpy almost all the time.
“I would have killed for a typical Darvrokian pregnancy when I was pregnant with you,” his mother had told him when they’d met up for lunch a month prior to try and clear the air. “I asked Joe about how it works with the… you know,eggsand everything, and Joe told me that Darvrokian…genetic materialis quite opportunistic. As long as there is an established, fertile environment for a little one to grow, conception is quite likely between species, but the baby will gestate and develop according to what’s normal for the mother’s species—unless a bond is put in place between a Darvrokian and their non-Darvrokian partner. Since Joe and I haven’t gone through the bonding ceremony, there was no chance I could have conceived a clutch. Instead I went through nine months of hell, except longer, because you’ve always taken your sweet time with everything, and I was nearly a week and a half past my due date by the time you finally decided to arrive.”
“At least there was only one of me,” Ezra had grumbled in response. “I might not be showing much, but with who knows how many eggs in there, I feel bloated all the time.”
“I wonder if there’s something you can do about that. Darvrokians can change their shape at will, after all, and you have Darvrokian genes. In the same way they activated to, um…” She’d blushed. “Change you enough to create the right conditions for conception, maybe you could use them to give yourself a little more space in there. I’ll ask Joe about it. He might have an idea.”
Joe hadn’t had an idea—and frankly, Ezra was mortified that he’d been asked in the first place—so his suffering had continued.
The one thing that was keeping him sane—somewhat to his chagrin—was Titan.
The alien had made it his life’s mission to be there every step of the way through Ezra’s pregnancy.
