Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FALLON
The day they got the paternity results was the same day Fallon had scheduled his upcoming surgery.
Gage didn’t say anything, of course, but Fallon could see the tension in his body, and he knew Gage hadn’t read them yet.
They arrived in a nondescript envelope and were sitting on the kitchen table before they left for Fallon’s pre-op testing.
He wasn’t brave enough to ask Gage about them.
Gage said he’d be happy either way, and Fallon believed him.
The problem wasn’t him. It was the disappointment, rage, and ache Fallon would feel to learn that the tiny bit of hope that Charlie didn’t have a single tie to him or his family ever again would be destroyed.
His stomach was feeling wrecked, and while he knew he needed to eat to keep himself and Mango healthy, he couldn’t stomach anything besides dry toast and some chamomile tea.
The blood test went well enough—nothing abnormal. He’d been through more than one surgery in his life, so the prospect of going to sleep and waking up with no uterus and his baby was a welcome one. And he knew he wouldn’t have to struggle with recovery after.
Gage would be with him.
He wouldn’t have to fight for bare-bones help that might have come if he’d lost his mind and tried to do all of this with his ex.
“Do you want some lunch, baby?”
Fallon glanced over as they headed home. He was holding the paperwork with his surgery date—two and a half weeks left before they got to meet Mango. It felt surreal.
“No. I’m not feeling well. You can get something if you want.”
Gage bit his lip, then said, “I promised my dad I’d try and keep us occupied for a bit while they finish the house.”
Fallon’s eyes widened. He hadn’t realized their families had already done the shopping. “Is it bad that we didn’t pick out anything?”
Gage snorted. “I had no idea what to even tell them we needed. My dad tried to ask about a color scheme, and I just went blank.”
Fallon grimaced. “Yeah. I don’t…I don’t know. I don’t care. By the time it matters, Mango is going to outgrow all of it anyway.”
“Exactly.” He let out a puff of air. “Do you…I mean. Should we talk other stuff too? Like baby names?”
Fallon snorted. “Yeah. I guess we can’t really name them Mango, can we?”
Gage grinned. “No.” He squeezed the steering wheel. “Wanna do the zoo? We can sit by the cheetahs and think about it.”
And that, Fallon decided, sounded like heaven.
Gage got himself a snack while they found a comfortable bench, and Fallon leaned against Gage’s side as they watched the cheetahs napping on their wooden platforms hanging from the cage trees.
Fallon always felt sorry for the animals at the zoo, though theirs was to rehabilitate injured animals before they were released back into open-sanctuary zoos on other continents.
But he hated the idea of being caged.
Pressing his hand to his stomach, he felt a flurry of kicks. Mango had been quieter these days, but his doctor assured him that was normal as the baby ran out of room to grow.
“Are there any names you love?” he asked after a bit. This was one more thing he’d been avoiding.
Gage blinked at him. “Oh. Uh…I don’t know. I’d never really given it any thought. Are you, ah…” He bit the inside of his cheek. “Do you want to raise the baby with their assigned gender?”
Fallon shrugged. “I think so, yeah. I don’t think it would have been any easier for me if I’d been raised without one.
I think it just sucks when parents put a lot of pressure on their kids to be a certain way, you know?
Like, if Frankie had tried to make me wear dresses and play with Barbies and yelled at me for not being girly enough, it might have been harder.
But he never stopped me from being myself.
It just took a while for me to put a name to what I was. ”
Gage took his hand and kissed his wrist. His lips were sun-warmed and a little chapped. “So why don’t we pick a few names, and we can see which one Mango looks like the most.”
“Don’t they all just look, like, bald and squish-faced?”
Gage burst into laughter. “I wasn’t bald. I had a full head of hair. I actually had really fine black hair all over my shoulders and back too.”
If the test results came back positive for Gage, Fallon wondered if Mango would look like him or Gage. Or a mixture. Or neither.
“I’ve always liked nature names,” Fallon said. “I don’t want to continue with the Fs. I’m glad my mom ditched that tradition with Elodie.”
Gage chuckled softly as he played with Fallon’s hand. “There are some great F names, but I think doing something just for Mango would be nice.”
Fallon’s brow dipped in thought. He’d never in his life thought he’d have to come up with baby names. He’d never bothered to try.
“My very first D&D character was called Zoa,” Gage said after a few moments of silence. “She was a tiefling bard.”
Fallon tried to remember what a tiefling looked like. Horns, he was pretty sure. And claws.
“She had really long braids and wore a flower crown and played the lute,” Gage said quietly. “I stopped playing her when people made fun of me for picking a girl.”
“People are terrible.”
“Yeah,” Gage murmured. “They are. It took me a long time to realize that the people who were my friends were kind of shitty. I retired Zoa. I had a figurine of her made, and I painted her, and then I put her on my shelf.”
Fallon bit his lip. “What was your favorite character?”
Gage laughed and flushed. “Um. His name was Asher. I got made fun of for that, too, because it wasn’t enough of a fantasy name. But yeah, I was obsessed with him.”
“Tell me about him.”
Gage looked over at him. “You seriously want to know?”
“I want to know everything about you,” Fallon said with a frown.
He huffed a laugh and shook his head. “Okay. Uh. Well, he’s a druid and a half-elf.
He was an orphan—adopted by the Emerald Enclave and raised by them.
And they loved him a lot, but he never felt like he belonged until one day, an elf walked in, looking for sanctuary, and they had the same birthmark. ”
Fallon was quiet for a moment. “That was a campaign you wrote?”
Gage snorted. “No. That was pages and pages of backstory I wrote and was never brave enough to write into a campaign.”
“And he was you.”
Gage was quiet for a beat, and then he nodded. “He was me.”
Fallon picked up his hand and kissed his palm. “But you never did get the brother, did you?”
“No.” Gage tilted Fallon’s head up and kissed him. “In the end, I didn’t need him. I had my family, and it was enough.”
Gage was napping when Fallon found himself staring at the envelope on the table.
It still wasn’t open, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to resist. For now, he set it aside.
He grabbed a pen and paper and began to scribble down a list of names, over and over, until he found the ones that made sense.
The ones he could see himself calling his little one.
He gathered that with the envelope, then went into the kitchen and threw together a couple of sandwiches before making his way to the bedroom. He paused on the way, peering into the second bedroom to stare around at the nursery.
Everyone was gone by the time he and Gage got back, but there was a little note left on the baby’s changing table saying to let them know when they could come back over. Fallon hadn’t texted them yet, but he was going to.
He needed to see his family. All of his family. The ones by blood and the ones Gage had brought into his life.
The room itself was soft earth tones, a wood crib in the corner, matching dresser, changing table, and a rocking chair for sleepless nights. It was simple and careful and easy. It wasn’t overwhelming and wouldn’t make it worse when the baby was triggering every one of his senses to overload.
It meant something that they understood him. It meant something that they cared enough to try this much.
Fallon shut the door behind him, then went into the bedroom, where Gage was just starting to stir. He yawned as Fallon walked over, sitting up on his elbows with a smile.
“Did you make food?”
“Fluffernutter sandwiches.”
Gage groaned. “God, I love you.” He sat up and made grabby hands as Fallon passed the plate over. “I was craving this.”
Fallon wasn’t sure he believed him. He didn’t think most people craved peanut butter and marshmallow, but Gage attacked the first half of his sandwich like it owed him money, so maybe they really were just meant to be.
As Fallon settled, he stared down at the papers in his hands.
“What’s that?” Gage asked, words sticky with the food.
Fallon touched the notepaper he’d been writing on. “I like Zoa. I like Zoa Rune.”
Gage stared at him.
“I also liked Asher, but he seemed…like he belonged to just you. Like that was a part of your story you needed to keep. But I like the idea of Mango being our little hero.”
Gage swallowed heavily. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why Rune?”
Fallon took a moment to answer. “Because that was the name I’d chosen for the character I was going to play the night you took me to the game shop.
” He twisted his fingers together over the paper.
“Rune was a drow rogue who was raised by elves. He never felt like he belonged, no matter how much his family tried to show him he did. I thought—if the campaign went well—he’d find his family there too. ”
“Only it was ruined.”
Fallon laughed, tilting his head up to look at Gage. “Nothing was ruined. That was the night you kissed me. The night I asked you for what I wanted.”
Gage shifted closer to him. “The night I fell for you.”
Fallon reached down and picked up the envelope. “The night this happened.”
Sucking in a breath, Gage stared at it. “I wasn’t going to open it until after Mango—Zoa—was here.”
“I know. But…” Fallon bit his lip. “I think I need to know. If you don’t want to look, I won’t tell you. But I want to prepare for how it’ll make me feel before Zoa’s here.” It was strange to have a name for the baby. It felt heavier. More real. More…intense.
But he liked it.
Gage nodded, then turned his head away. “If I feel disappointed that the results are not my DNA, please don’t take it personally, okay? I love Zoa. Zoa is mine. But I don’t know. I got my hopes up.”
“Me too,” Fallon whispered. He closed his eyes as he tore at the seal, then pulled the paper out. He didn’t bother reading all the bullshit breakdowns of everything. His eyes immediately went to the blue box at the bottom of the page, and his heart leapt into his throat.
He blinked to make sure it was real.
Probability 99.9%, with a whole lot of other nines after it.
“It’s you,” he whispered.
Gage’s head whipped to the side, and then he took the paper with shaking hands and read it, then looked up at Fallon, then read it again. It fluttered down into his lap, and he scrubbed his hands over his face.
Fallon waited for something. Anything. Some sign that Gage was feeling any emotion.
“I thought I’d cry,” Gage said very quietly.
Fallon licked his lips as he peered over just to make sure one more time. To ensure the universe wasn’t playing some cosmic joke on them. “Maybe we should give Zoa ‘Kismet’ for a middle name. Because this isn’t luck. This can’t be luck. It has to be fate. This shouldn’t have happened.”
“But it did,” Gage said, his voice barely a whisper. “Do you regret—”
“Please don’t ask me that. It hurts my feelings,” Fallon said. “You know I would choose you a thousand times. A billion times. I will always choose you.”
Gage nodded. “Sorry. I think I’m feeling insecure, and I wasn’t expecting it. I…” He trailed off, tracing his finger around the number. “I want to wait before we tell everyone. I want to wait until Zoa is here. I want them all to love our baby before they know the truth.”
“They already do, I think,” Fallon murmured. Emotions were rising in him now. He always felt them a bit more delayed than other people, but that wasn’t a bad thing. He always felt them so fucking strongly. “Gage.” He took a breath. “I need you to hold me right now.”
Gage didn’t hesitate. He shoved the papers and plate to the side, then pulled Fallon into his lap and wrapped around him with arms and legs. Fallon felt safe. He felt brave.
He felt happy.
“It still doesn’t matter, right?” he asked.
Gage kissed him warm and easy on the side of his neck. “The only thing that matters is that you both are here. And that I love you.”
“And that we love you too.”