Page 29 of Tender
“Well, this whole thing was—oh.Oh. No.” He shook his head. “You mean like…” he mimed slapping himself.
Emmett winced, then nodded.
“No. It was all, you know, emotional.”
Emmett looked a little bit angry. “You know that’s just as bad, right? There’s not one type of abuse that’s worse than the other?”
In spite of the heavy conversation, Miles chuckled a little. Emmett was so sweet. He was so…fuck. He was like the big, burly Daddies Miles liked to watch when he was indulging in his porn fantasies. The rough, demanding caregiver who heaped praise.
Miles never talked about that with anyone. Ever. But he also hadn’t expected to see the epitome of his fantasy sitting across from him feeding him good food and expensive beer.
“I do know,” he finally said. “But I wasn’t living with, like, the abuse trifecta. Mostly she ignored me unless she wanted something. I did get a lot of work done.” He laughed bitterly.
Emmett sighed, then glanced at his phone for a quick second.
“Has she been calling?” Miles froze, then cleared his throat. “Sorry, god. Don’t answer that, please.”
Emmett studied him for a second, then laid his phone on the table and rested his arms down on the glass top. “Okay, we can’t keep being weird. Let’s get all the Selene things out there so you can let them go.”
“Oh, I don’t?—”
“Miles,” Emmett said again in that rough rumble. “You’re in her fathers’ house. You have questions.”
The soft command in Emmett’s voice was damn-near impossible to resist. Miles took a breath, then said, “Was she like this as a kid?”
Emmett sat back and let out a heavy sigh. “Not…as bad. But she was spoiled, and she became entitled pretty quickly. She was our miracle baby, you know.”
“Right because you’re…I mean.” Miles’s tongue felt like it was fumbling on all his words. “You were probably on testosterone for a long time, right?”
Emmett smiled softly, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I was, yeah. I came out years before HRT was widely available to trans people. I was told I probably would never be fertile enough to carry a child if I decided to, but Mo and I wanted to try. We were one and done.”
“Was it hard?”
Emmett tipped his head to the side. “Are you asking if there were signs when I was having her that she was going to turn out like this?”
Miles burst into laughter, covering the sound with his hand. “No! I just…I mean. It must have been hard to do that. The…baby thing. God, am I being so offensive right now? I don’t know how to ask this.”
Emmett leaned closer to him and reached out, brushing a lock of his unruly hair off his forehead. “You’re sweet.”
Miles felt something zinging up his spine and he shoved that down because goddamn it, no. No! He would not start having even bigger feelings about his ex’s dad.
After a beat, Emmett shrugged and rested his elbow on the table, chin in his hand. “It was strange at first and got worse as I got bigger. I’d been out for so long, you know? I was a man, and men typically don’t have babies.”
“Right,” Miles said with a tiny grin.
Emmett winked, making that zinging sensation in his spine worse. “The dysphoria got to be a lot. I still have it some days, but it was overwhelming back then. Cosimo helped, of course. I also grew a beard and hid my stomach as best as I could so I didn’t have to think about it most days. The pregnancy wasn’t the point. The baby was.”
“So this really sucks for you,” Miles blurted, then slapped his hand over his mouth again. “Sorry,” he murmured against his fingers.
Emmett stared, then threw his head back and laughed. “Fuck, you’re so sweet. I like that you say whatever comes to your mind.”
“I don’t,” Miles muttered crossly. “It’s probably one of the reasons I was never adopted.”
Emmett’s face fell. “I wish I could speak to that, but I can’t. But I can say, knowing you now, you didn’t deserve that.”
“I don’t think anyone did,” Miles answered him. He tried not to think about all the kids he’d known, and the ones he’d left behind. Even the ones who lived harder and more painful lives—the ones full of anger and resentment they couldn’t contain in their small bodies—didn’t deserve it.
“You’re right,” Emmett said. “Life is shit. And it’s rarely fair. The universe doesn’t make sense, even when it does.”
