“What if she already had to stretch to fit anything in there to make the conception possible?” one of the dads jokes.
“Like a turkey baster,” the lone lesbian partner cracks.
“Perineal massage?” Andrew whispers. “Is that what they call it? I just call it foreplay.”
And I’m moist.
He stays right there, cocooning me from behind, his hands roaming over my pretend belly.
“You ever think about having kids?” he asks.
A joke sticks in my throat. I have to swallow twice before I can speak.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, you’ve thought about it, or yes, you want them?”
“Both. I want them.”
I can feel his smile against my cheek and earlobe.
“How about you?” I ask in a hushed tone.
“Me, too. Not for a little while, but yeah. Some day.” He cups my pregnancy pillow and lovingly pats it.
And just like that, I fall even more in love with my fake brother.
* * *
I’m walking down the sidewalk through Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. Street performers juggle on stilts, crowds surrounding them, errant children clapping and running up to throw dollar bills in open music cases. The sky glows as if it’s daylight and yet it’s not. A dark chill in the air, a smoky mist that billows and blanks out the rest of the city, makes it clear that nighttime prevails.
The scent of freshly-made caramel corn and sour beer fills my nose, and I’m walking, step by step, looking up at the faces of moms and dads, of street people and college students, of people I don’t know.
They all ignore me. I smile harder.
A shriek. A sigh. A raucous laugh. A baby crying. All the sounds pop in and out of the glow and the smoke, as if playing a symphony with the human voice as instruments, following a music score I can’t read.
I stumble slightly on cobblestone, grabbing the corner of a produce cart for support. It is laden with melons and apples, cucumbers and oranges, fresh fruits from the Haymarket stands nearby.
As I look down to catch my footing, I see I’m naked.
Completely nude.
The chill of the night runs up my spine like a mouse escaping a predator, tiny claws making their way from the small of my back to the top of my head. I can’t shout. Can’t move. Can’t bear to do anything that might draw attention to me.
And so I freeze in the center of everything that glows and obscures, my heart receding as if it, too, wants to fade away to nothing so it can’t be seen.
A police siren begins, abrupt and alarming, as if a cruiser hid in the shadows behind the crowd and suddenly flipped a switch.
Instead of turning toward the source of the sound, every single person in the crowd looks at me.
I look down at my chest.
My heart is a red, screaming glow, calling out for a kind of help I don’t have words to ask for.
Andrew’s apartment door buzzes and I sit up, whacking my half-asleep head against a cantaloupe.
“Shit!” shouts the melon.
Oh. That’s not a piece of produce.
The dream lingers, my hand on my chest where the bright red glow of my shrieking heart just was moments ago. I feel my breasts with frantic palms, fingers sliding into the grooves between my ribs, solid and warm but not on fire. The crowd’s eyes are not on me. There are no street performers.
It was, as always, just a dream.
I’m in Andrew’s bed and he’s rubbing his eye socket, squinting at me like a pirate through a white tunnel made of cotton.
I’m under the covers and disoriented. How in the hell do baby kangaroos instinctively find their way out of the birth canal into the mama’s pouch when I can’t disentangle myself from a simple bed sheet?
Andrew’s naked ass walks away, his hand rubbing his head, by the time I extricate myself.
He comes back into the room wearing nothing, but carrying two lattes.
I enjoy the view.
“You answered the door like that?” I accept my morning treat with gratitude.
He leers at my naked chest. “They know to leave it outside the door now.”
“You’ve done this that often?”
“Only with you.” He winks.
“I’m honored.”
“You should be.” He gives me a puzzled look and brushes his fingers against the eyebrow I whacked. “You okay? Bad dream?”
I laugh through my nose, suddenly tongue-tied. “Just my usual. Naked in public nightmare.”
“Ouch.” He gives me a searching look, but one of companionship and acceptance. It’s okay, that look says. Take your time. I’ll be here.
The residue of the discomfort from that other world persists, like an oily sheen on my skin. I want to talk about anything but the dream, especially when I am, indeed, naked right now.
I look outside at the gorgeous spring day. “How about we have coffee outside on the balcony?”
His face goes blank. A pinprick sensation, a tingly sense that there is a misalignment in the room, washes over me.
“Let’s just stay here in bed,” he says in a clipped voice, avoiding my eyes.
I shove my hair out of my face and feel a thick thatch at the back of my head. This is no normal case of bedhead. This is, most firmly, sexhead, which is a physical manifestation of being well-thumped in ways where by thumped, I mean fu—
“I love how you look when I wake up next to you,” he says, his eyes tipping down to look at the top of his coffee. Shyness is endearing on most men, but on Andrew, it damn near makes my heart implode.
I’m going to need more caffeine for this level of emotional engagement and nakedness combined at 7:07 a.m. Whatever weirdness I just felt fades instantly.