Eric the Pink

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Beatriz stared up at him as she devoured the bottle, and Andreas couldn’t help but beam tiredly back at her.

It had been nine months of absolute hell, but it was worth it. He couldn’t tell yet if she’d look more like him or more like Erik, but she was so unmistakably theirs that it made his heart ache. She had Erik’s nose and mouth, but her colouring was that of home. He could see his mother and father in her, all of his brothers and sisters, even some of his cousins.

But she was different, too. Andreas was the oldest of six children. He’d fed most of them as babies—cuddled them, changed them, taken them out in the pram. He’d even been mistaken for the mother of his youngest brother more than once, what looked like a fifteen-year-old girl hefting a chunky toddler about on her hip all over the hills of north-west Spain.

Beatriz felt so very different.

Because she was his. And now she was here, he could stop pretending to be her mum. Or anyone’s. Ever again. And her wide-eyed stare, fixed unblinkingly upwards as she decimated the bottle, would never care. She just knew him to be safe. Comfort. Some instinctual family, formed out of blood and blind sound, before she had even been born. And as she got older, they could teach her everything else that she needed to know.

Everything he’d ever wanted from his family.

“Come on, beautiful,” he murmured as he tugged the empty bottle away. “Daddy’s coming to get us today. We get to go home.”

He’d been too exhausted, the birth too difficult, to go home with her at once like he’d originally planned. He’d even been too shattered to feel ashamed of it—women gave birth every day, and all his issues had been dogged by a sense of shame that he couldn’t just take it in his stride like they seemed to. But in the aftermath of the birth itself, he’d stopped caring. They’d spent the night on the ward, and Erik had gone home to bed, and probably told Jo and Lauren about their new arrival. Andreas had meant to grab his last night of sleep for the next two years with both hands, and entrust Beatriz to the nurses, but his instincts were maternal even if he wasn’t a mother. Every whimper had woken him up, and he’d insisted on feeding her even when the nurses had come to do it.

“I’m awake,” he’d said, each time. “I may as well get used to it.”

Not, really, that nine years seemed to have made a difference. He had been fifteen last time he’d taken care of a baby, and a significantly older baby than his day-old daughter. But the memory hadn’t left him, and he found himself humming his mother’s old songs as he rested Beatriz against his shoulder, pressing his nose into the top of her head and inhaling that soft, special scent that newborn babies all seemed to have.

“Bet you’ve got your father’s belly, too,” he murmured, and she proved him right by emitting an enormous belch that couldn’t possibly fit inside a baby. “Yep, there it is.”

She whimpered when he tried to put her back in the cot, so he leaned back and left her there, snuffling on his chest like a sleepy puppy. His hand covered most of her back; her legs still curled up in the position she’d kept ever since she grew legs in the first place. A fist clutched at his gown, and she snored contentedly.

Tears prickled at his eyes, so he closed them. She was beyond anything he’d possibly imagined. Nine months of absolute hell—unimaginable hell, from the horrifically persistent misgendering to the disgusting betrayal his own body had committed every day since the positive pregnancy test—had been worth it. Nine months of wanting to claw his way out of his own skin, nine months of staring at bottles of various noxious liquids and wondering if they wouldn’t stop this pregnancy in its tracks, nine months of hating himself for hating being pregnant when he’d always wanted a baby so bad—

He’d been so scared it wouldn’t be worth it.

But here she was. And despite all of his fears, he already knew he loved her.

Andreas must have dozed, too, for when he opened his eyes again, the sun had poked through the windows, a pillow had been tucked around Beatriz’s other side to keep her safe on his chest, and the empty chair was suddenly occupied by an enormous checked shirt.

“Oh my God,” he groaned.

Erik beamed. “Morning. Er. Afternoon.”

“What are you wearing?”

“My best shirt!”

Andreas dramatically covered his eyes with a hand, and heard the familiar guffaw.

“Have to set a good example.”

“That’s a bad example.”

“Nope.” He heard the chair creak, then hair and teeth met his upper arm and Erik chewed mockingly. Andreas laughed.

That could sum up everything. Erik did something utterly ridiculous, and Andreas laughed. That was why they worked. That was why Erik had caught his attention in the first place.

The fact was, they looked like they didn’t work at all. Jo had once compared them to Roger and Jessica Rabbit. “How does a guy like Erik get a guy like you?” she’d said, and after laughing at Erik whining about being called a badly animated bunny, Andreas had shrugged.

“Same reason, I guess.”

Erik was no more a looker than Roger Rabbit. He was a bear—both tall and wide. He towered well over six feet, and weighed the same as the average rugby player, although in Erik’s case it was fat, not muscle. His shirts were big enough to serve as modest dresses for Andreas, and he sported long red hair and an enormous red beard. Both frizzy. Both prone to beard baubles at Christmas, and plaits or buns in the summer. And the hairiness didn’t stop at his head—Andreas had long refused to blow him, because of the aftermath of picking fur out of his teeth for the next week. He looked not too dissimilar to Brian Blessed, and certainly had the same lungs. In short, he was not—physically—an attractive man.

In every other respect, though, he was like the world’s biggest magnet. Which as Andreas’ last name translated to ironhand in English, made a strange sort of sense. He was so ridiculous that he made Andreas laugh. He was so earnest that he made Andreas melt around the edges. And he was so bright, so completely and utterly sunny, so irrepressibly happy, that it had become infectious and made Andreas happy too.

He felt good with Erik. So when the teeth let go, and a nose and bristly beard nudged the side of his face hopefully, Andreas yielded and puckered up.

“I brought the car seat Lizzy loaned us.”

“Good.”

“So I get to use it?” Erik asked, peering at the baby with a wide smile.

“Yep.” Andreas rolled his shoulder until Beatriz grumbled and blinked sleepily at them. “Little lady here has had her breakfast, second breakfast, and lunch. And I want mine.”

“I went to the supermarket.”

“Oh, God.”

“Hey!”

“Are we going to end up making fourteen rounds of chilli just to use all the meat again?”

“No,” Erik said emphatically, then shifted on his chair like a guilty five-year-old. “Well. Maybe ten rounds.”

Andreas groaned. Beatriz mewled.

“Okay,” he said. “Take Her Majesty. Did you bring me some clothes?”

“Should you be getting up?” Erik fussed.

“They’ve sent most new parents home by this time.”

“Really? But you just had a baby!”

“Yes, I didn’t break a hip.”

Erik hesitated, glancing at Beatriz. “She’s on her front.”

“Yes.”

“So how do I—”

Andreas rolled his eyes, and the baby. She opened a wide maw to squeal, and then Erik reached out and she was transferred into his fat arms. She looked tiny in his enormous paws, dainty and delicate, and Erik paled alarmingly as she squirmed. Beatriz seemed to hold the same opinion as Andreas, though: chunky was comfy. She wriggled, gave one last angry wail to make her feelings perfectly clear, then settled down with a snort.

“Oh my God,” Erik breathed. “She’s—”

Then he sniffed, and Andreas raised his eyebrows.

“Are you crying?”

“No!”

“You are,” he said sceptically, easing his legs out of bed and pressing the call bell. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Erik mumbled hoarsely. “Just—you know. She’s here. Ours. I have—I have a family. One that’s really mine, not—not like before. Just mine.”

Andreas softened. He leaned forward to kiss the bushy red hair exploding from the top of Erik’s head, but said nothing. The nurse came. He was helped to dress, carefully avoiding jarring the dressing over the caesarian wound too much, and he watched Erik watch Beatriz as he got ready.

His family.

His whole new family.

Then he said, “Take us home, then,” and Erik’s face lit up once more.