Erik the Pink

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Beatriz 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.

* * * *

The house was Erik’s pride and joy.

It wasn’t some sprawling farm in the Spanish mountains, or a luxurious villa on the picturesque Spanish coast, but Erik had never lived there. He’d grown up in care homes and foster placements, dragged up in place after place after place. He’d always been too stupid, too big, too ugly, too loud, too old. Only one placement in his entire childhood had ever come close to being a real home, with Auntie Ellen, but then she’d had her stroke, and he’d been sent right back into care. And after that, it had been a waiting game until they kicked him out of the home, and into the world, all on his own.

So when other kids at school had been wanting to join the army or learn to weld, Erik had wanted to buy a house, get married, and have a family. Whatever he did, whatever he became, they had been the things he’d needed.

So their little house wasn’t much—but it was everything to Erik.

It was just a little terraced house, squashed into a whole street of them, but it was graced with a long thin garden at the back, and two bedrooms instead of the typical one around here. When Andreas had moved in, the windows had become adorned with glass charms and the vegetable garden bracketed by enormous climbing plants with vibrant red flowers, jutting out of the fence like trumpets.

That had been two years ago. And now Erik was bringing a whole new person home.

Not that the new person seemed to be interested. She’d slept all the way home in the taxi, and stirred with a despairing, hiccuping sort of wail when the taxi had rolled down off the main road and into the potholed terror of their street. Andreas had had her out of the car seat, blanket and all, and was shushing her against his shoulder before Erik even really registered that she was crying.

“First sprog?” the cabbie asked pointedly, and Erik jumped.

“Sorry. Yeah. That obvious?”

“Just a bit, pal.”

Erik flushed as red as his hair, but grinned anyway. So what if he was acting like a fool? He’d managed to snag a brilliant boyfriend, and now he had a gorgeous baby girl to complete the set. Other folks were just jealous.

Andreas stood patiently by the door, cuddling a now quiet Beatriz to his chest like he’d been born to heft babies around. Erik kissed him quickly before unlocking the door and shepherding his new family inside, heart bursting as the rainbows from the glass wind chime hanging in the hall window splayed across Beatriz’s blanket and little hat in ribbons of wild colours.

And then he just sort of…stood there. Empty car seat in one hand, keys in the other. Just stood and stared.

“Er.”

“What?” Andreas asked.

“What now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…what do we do now?”

“Given that Madam seems to think sleeping on me is the best thing ever, I’m going to sit down somewhere and try and align our sleep schedules a bit.”

Erik brightened, setting the car seat down. “Okay. So—put your feet up, both of you, and I can fetch and carry?”

Andreas’ mouth quirked up at one corner. “I suppose.”

“Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate? Real chocolate? Ice cream?”

“Hot chocolate. The real kind,” he added snottily, “not your s**t instant.”

“Andreas!”

“What?”

“You can’t swear now,” Erik said primly.

Andreas snorted. “Oh please. With Jo for an auntie, her first word is going to be f**k anyway.”

He wandered off into the living room, leaving Erik to argue with thin air. Erik snorted, but ducked into the tiny galley-style kitchen to rustle up pans and Andreas’ beloved hot chocolate, Spanish style. He acted like instant powder was an obscenity, and only the finest dark chocolate would do. Erik had to admit the stuff was nice…but Christ, if it wasn’t diabetes in a cup.

By the time Erik made his way into the living room with a stack of biscuits, a mug of tea, and a cup of the beloved hot chocolate, Andreas had settled into the armchair, feet up on the stool and Beatriz held in the crook of his arm, supported by a stack of cushions. Erik tucked her blanket more securely around the wriggly little limbs, and she hiccuped gently.

“Thanks,” Andreas murmured as he took the cup with his free hand. He looked knackered, and Erik said so. “I am. Think I’ll have a nap with Little Miss Loudmouth here.”

“Don’t you listen to your grumpy old man, you’re gorgeous,” Erik told the baby, very seriously. She fixed him with a distinctly unimpressed stare, and he laughed. “Oh my God, she’s got your attitude.”

“Heaven help us,” Andreas drawled.

“So.” Erik dragged up the beanbag to sit by the chair and admire his new baby from a safe distance. “I made fifty percent of that.”

“You got off in a strategic location. I did the rest of it.”

“Yeah, but she’s fifty percent me.”

“I’m sure she’ll manage, despite the disadvantage.”

Erik rolled his eyes. “Will your nap make you nicer?”

“Try me again in a month, when the sensation of trying to shove a beach ball out of my v****a has eased somewhat.”

Erik grimaced.

“She’ll be the only one, Erik.”

The declaration was quiet, gentle, but firm. And Erik nodded.

“I know.”

He reached out to trace a tiny fingernail.

“I’d love for her not to be an only child,” he said, “and maybe when she’s older we can talk about adopting another one or two. Or we can talk about surrogacy again, if we want her to have some blood siblings. But the way you struggled with—with everything, I don’t want to see that again. I don’t want to see you like that again.”

“I can’t do it again. It’s not even that I don’t want to. I can’t.”

He almost hadn’t. Andreas had never much struggled with being effeminate, but being female was something else entirely. And the unmistakable transformation of his tight, carefully controlled body into the lush, full figure of a pregnant woman, had been unbearable for him. As much as Erik adored every speck of the little soul they’d made together, he had to admit it.

“I don’t want to see you like that again.”

He glanced up, and Andreas smiled.

“C’mere.”

Erik leaned up. Beatriz stirred sleepily as Andreas bent forward, and mewled between them as a soft kiss was pressed against the bridge of Erik’s nose.

“Love you.”

Erik smiled. “Te amo.”

“Urgh, not sure why I love you, though. Te quiero. Honestly.”

Erik chuckled, shuffling down the bag to tug Andreas’ socks off by the toes. “How about now?” he asked as he rubbed his thumbs into the tired arch of the left foot, and a breathy sigh was his reply.

Erik had never been very good at massages, but Andreas had haughtily informed him that it was necessary for keeping gorgeous specimens like Andreas around. Erik would never admit it aloud—even though Andreas plainly knew—but that arrogant supremacy turned him on like crazy. He was mad enough to like high-maintenance, even though Andreas’ supposed high maintenance was mostly for show. He liked shiny things, but glass worked just as well as diamonds. He liked a massage, but didn’t see much of a difference between home-grown and spa-bought.

Best kind of high-maintenance, in Erik’s opinion. Made him work for it, but didn’t give him money worries.

He ended up massaging Andreas right to sleep, although that might have been the armchair after a couple of nights in a hospital bed. Once Andreas had joined their daughter in the land of nod, Erik edged out of the room, and snuck upstairs. A blanket came down off their bed, and he draped it carefully over his partner’s legs, tucking it just shy of Beatriz’s cushion nest. He considered trying to move her into her cot, but decided he wasn’t good enough to move her without waking her up and making her cry.

So instead, he found his phone, and took a photo.

Everyone’s home, safe and sound. Say hello to our beautiful little Beatriz!

He sent it round their friends—then sank down onto the sofa to watch his little family, and feel the world click into place around him.