Page 60 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
That’s true. Tammy’s going to be doing a lot of work around here. There’s no way in hell Levi is going to touch a diaper.
Eventually, two sides of the crib come together—it’s bigger than Crane thought it would be, there’s no way that babies are this big, right?—and Levi screws supports for the curtain rods into the ceiling, which would’ve forfeited their security deposit if there wasn’t already blood irreversibly smeared into the bathtub. (Again, who the absolutefuckpaintsabathtub.) Besides that, there’s not much else that got brought home; a quilt that’ll go on the floor to act as a changing table, a set of sheets for the crib mattress. One of the bags, which Levi says he got off Facebook Marketplace, was from a mom cleaning out her closet. Most of it seems promising, even if some of the onesies are stained. Levi is convinced the idea of a baby monitor is stupid.
Crane pauses to inspect a onesie. The crabs printed on it look exactly like Luna’s squishy crab toy. It’s newborn-size. It seems small until he remembers he’s going to have to push this thing out.
It was easier to hate the baby when he thought it was a maggot.
He’s still managing it.
It’s half Levi. No matter what he does, or how much he manages to distract himself, Levi is always inside him. Always feeding off him. Maybe that’s the grit on the back of his teeth. Maybe that’s the dirt.
He hopes that the son of a bitch, currently taking off his shirt because there’s no way to adjust the heat in the apartment—and god, is the HVAC stuck onhigh?—is starting to clock the consequences of his actions, but Crane cannot name a single cis man who’s ever had to deal with theconsequencesof having a baby, so.
Though. There’s that scar again. Not the one on the shoulder that Crane had stitched up months ago, but the other one, the one he’d almost forgotten about: the raised keloid right on the side of the gut.
The curtains go up. They’re gray, and probably could do better at blocking out light, but they’re fine. When Levi closes them, it turns this corner of the apartment into a dim cave, quiet and muffled. Stagger doesn’t like not being able to see them, or maybe he’s intrigued by the new setup. He comes over and fiddles with the fabric.
“It’ll work,” Levi decides.
The crib is almost done, and Levi sits down beside Crane, picks up some of the extra tools, nudges his way in to finish it up. Their legstouch. Crane doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t move because he’s being good.
Of course, the baby thinks it’s a great time to try to roll over. What’s probably a head jams right into the spine and what might be a knee or foot paws at the walls of its fleshy prison cell, wriggling until it finds a good spot and, Jesus, where’s that photo of an eel ripping out of a heron’s stomach, that is exactly what it feels like. Crane glares at his belly and hisses, an odd catliketshhhsound. Fuckingsettle.
Levi snorts. “Is it messing with you?”
No shit.
“If it’s anything like you, it’s going to be one stubborn motherfucker.” He screws on one of the crib walls and shakes it to make sure it’s sturdy, which jingles his dog tags. “Frustrating, too.”
Crane leans back on his hands. Not if Levi breaks it first.
Levi’s gaze narrows in on the belly.
If he’s noticed that Crane is wearing Stagger’s jacket, he hasn’t given any indication, but it’s unbuttoned and drapes around the swollen stomach, showing an oversized Metallica tee from Levi’s time in Fort Knox. Levi’s clothes are the only things he feels comfortable in anymore, with regard to size, even if the smell of him is sickening. Levi looks at Crane’s belly the way Stagger looked at Hannah, or Jess—drawn to it, possibly unsure why.
Levi pushes under the shirt to feel it.
Crane does not wince. He lets it happen. Levi presses in just a little bit, tries to locate where exactly the baby might be, as if there’s a whole lot of space left for it to go anymore.
The baby responds with a nudge.
Levi recoils, visibly disgusted. “Fuck.”
Crane doesn’t react, but he wants to take the screwdriver and put it through his eyeball directly into the brain.
Levi doesnotget to do that. Levi doesn’t get to act like this is gross tohim, like this is freakinghimout or leaving a bad taste inhismouth. Not after fucking Crane on the auction house floor while he cried, not after Jess bled over the bathroom floor after shoving a sharp object up her cunt to kill a fetus.
Is it finally clicking for him? Was he asked to do this by the hive and is only now arriving at the reality of the situation, now that it’s not just getting off? Is that why he’s been sleeping on the couch—because he doesn’t want to get too close to what he’s done? Fun part’s over, huh. Maybe he’s realizing that Crane won’t be able to take care of a baby with a disability that’s currently making it near impossible to bathe, that if anything goes wrong the hive will blamehim, that it’s real and it’s happening and there’s only six weeks left.
And Levi doesn’t even know that Crane’s not gonna be there at all. Sorry. Hope he and Tammy can steal enough money to cover formula.
Crane should probably feel guilty that he’s leaving the baby with the man sitting across from him, but that would require a level of care that he is psychologically incapable of at the moment.
Levi finishes the crib. It’s made of pale oak and seems pretty decent considering that it was probably picked up off the side of the road. The mattress board gets moved up to the highest rung, the green sheets put on the mattress itself, and Levi gets up to push it into place.
That keloid scar is just inches from Crane’s nose.
The strange keloid scar. In such an odd place, healing worse than he’s seen anything heal on Levi before.
