Epilogue
NOEL
Aster is perfect.
And I swear, she looks just like Luca.
It’s Jack or Josh—okay no, I know his name is Jacob—who calls us in a near state of panic to meet us at the birth center, which gets Luca all fucking wound up while we’re jamming ourselves into clothes and I have to tell him to stop crashing out, babies are born all the time and it’s fine.
Besides, I was born addicted to heroin and look how I turned out. No need to freak.
“You were?” he asks me in frank shock as we stumble down the front steps of our new house and towards my car—another new thing in my life, purchased for practical reasons now that I’m no longer in the heart of the city, though I despise driving.
Both dogs are staring at us from the front window and yes, we adopted a second greyhound too.
She’s the exact opposite of Amelia, her coat a sleek white and her personality hyper. We named her Bunny.
“I could’ve sworn I told you that.”
“You definitely did not. I would remember something like that.”
And it happens quick, too. We barely get to Demi’s room before we’re ushered inside, hurried into our gowns and masks, all the while she’s wailing like she’s being split in two which I guess she technically is, like mitosis almost. I’m surprised she wants us there at all.
Fully expected her to kick us out until it was all said and done but nope, and I don’t know where to even look because this seems too private and I feel like an outsider intruding but it’s okay, supposedly, Demi told us a million times she wanted us all here and it was part of her birth plan or whatever.
And Luca’s holding my hand so tight he’s practically breaking it when Aster finally makes her ceremonial appearance into the world, a small squalling thing with a head full of dark, dark hair and a tiny scrunched up face.
The nurses immediately plop her on Demi’s chest for skin to skin, and she’s glowing despite her exhaustion, and we’re all fucking weepy, me included, like it’s my kid and I did something, had any part or say in this at all.
In some strange way I guess I feel like I did.
And then, after mom and baby are all cleaned up, Luca gets to hold her at last, and I can’t stop smiling because he can’t stop smiling and I’ve never seen him look so proud. I might be crying, a little, just a little, because it’s sweet and I’m a sucker and I know just how bad he wanted this.
“You’re gonna be amazing,” I say to him, very softly, leaning up to kiss the side of his face. Which is when he hands her off to me, and I have to smother a squawk. “Wait, Luca, I don’t—I’ve never—”
“It’s okay.” He shows me how to hold her, this bundle of tiny human who weighs all of seven pounds soaking wet and didn’t even exist an hour ago, arranging my arms and hands just so. She’s stopped crying and is staring up at me with big gray-green eyes, just like her dad’s.
Which turns my heart to total, complete mush and I get it, all at once. Why people like babies so much. They’re little replicas of the people you love the best in the whole world.
Baby’s first this, baby’s first that.
Thanksgiving and Christmas both take place at Demi’s house, and they’re boisterous and noisy affairs.
The house is full of Demi’s relatives, and while they might look askance at Luca and I—he is, after all, officially her ex-husband, I am his boy toy—they’re very, very nice.
No backhanded comments, nothing homophobic and no questioning of my precise gender.
Just treating the two of us like people and I can tell that once upon a time, Luca’s in-laws did like him very much.
And still do, in the capacity that they can.
Luca’s dad wasn’t invited. He’s still around, still hanging in there, but him and Luca don’t talk anymore. Just like I no longer talk to my own mother.
There’s not much to say about that. It happens with little fanfare, almost underwhelmingly so. Shortly after Aster came, I stopped taking her calls. I ignored her texts and then, when they became abusive, I blocked her number.
That was it. She just went away.
Which is sad, I guess, but at the same time better. And I think I don’t need her when I have all of this, now.
Anyway, the whole production is overwhelming compared to the holidays of my own childhood.
Never seen or experienced anything like this.
Never any decorations, never a turkey, never a tree, all lit up and overflowing with presents beneath, all of this an utterly foreign concept to me that exists only in cheesy Hallmark movies.
I can’t believe people actually celebrate this way.
But it’s nice. I like it.
By January we start to get more than just daily visits with Aster, which is a nice surprise.
Demi gives us the occasional weekend overnights, whenever she needs a break, and she sends Aster over with enough pumped breastmilk to feed an army of infants, which is fine too.
I don’t mind getting up with her at night but neither does Luca.
We sorta have to compete for it, who gets to her first. Sometimes I win, but usually we both get up, one of us warming up a bottle while the other holds her.
“Big feelings,” I’ll whisper as she wails, her dark little head squashed against my cheek. “Big big feelings.” I know all about that.
He takes to being a dad like a fish to water, Luca.
He lights up when he sees his daughter in a way I’ve never seen him, or a different way at least. He absolutely adores her.
There’s hardly a moment, whether visiting or having her over, that he doesn’t have her in his arms—he’s even gotten one of those sling things so he can carry her around the house—except at night when we go to bed, and even then it’s very reluctant.
The crying doesn’t bother him, and the occasional sleepless weekends don’t bother him either.
And sometimes—not often, because I am a light sleeper and usually get up the moment he does, if not before, when I hear Aster fuss—I’ll wake to find the bed empty, and when I venture out in search of him I find him lying on the rug in the baby’s room, with her snuggled up on his chest. Rubbing her back, kissing her head, murmuring things that are probably nonsense but soothing to an infant nevertheless.
Of course I get down the floor with him, quietly, laying my head on his shoulder. Both of us knowing that we would be much better off asleep, but these are the stolen moments that we would miss otherwise. We’ll never get them again.
“We should have another one someday,” he whispers to me. “You and me, I mean.”
“What, like we both jizz in a cup and find a surrogate and pretend we both made it?” I whisper back.
“Or just you jizz in a cup.” He smiles. “I want your baby very specifically.”
“We already talked about this. A kid with any part of my genetic material is doomed. I’m not mean enough to do that to them.”
“That’s not even true. Come on, Noel. We both grew up without siblings. You don’t want that for Aster, do you? It’s boring and lonely.” He sounds so wistful.
Wordlessly I slide my fingertip across his chest until it reaches one of her tiny hands. She immediately curls her fingers around mine, gurgling.
It’s a halfway compelling argument. I’ll give her that.
On Valentine’s Day, though, the weekend of my twenty-fourth birthday, we don’t have Aster. Luca has dedicated this Saturday evening solely to me, even though I said he didn’t have to.
He gets a fire going in the living room fireplace when we get back from dinner. We went to the same Italian place I invited him out to a whole year ago. Our first date that wasn’t a date really, wasn’t supposed to be, but a mere testing of boundaries—and fuck, it’s hard to believe it’s been a year.
One year that I’ve known him and loved him and hated him and loved him again, wanted him with a dizzying depth so terrifying it was hard to breathe and still do, and I can’t imagine not ever wanting him with that exact intensity even years from now, decades.
Even when we’re old and ugly and his tattoos turn to amorphous blobs and I die a terrible, terrible twink death.
He occupies such a large part of me. Takes up so much space there because that’s where he belongs. He is home.
I guess, looking back, I wouldn’t change anything.
Not really, not if it meant I didn’t get all of this: us, his love, a house together, a family.
It is more than I’ve ever had, more than I ever thought I’d get, the sort of happiness that seems to happen only in sappy romances and movies. What more could I possibly want?
There’s honestly nothing else. It’s only him.
A smile tugs at my lips as I watch him, the wide cheesy kind that hurts my face and makes me feel like crying, almost, because there’s so much of this raw and unfettered joy in me I can’t contain it.
I can’t win, happy or sad I’m always falling to pieces one way or the other; I’m just the sloppiest person in existence.
But Luca doesn’t mind. He loves me just the way I am, messy and flawed and prone to cling, moved to tears as easily to laughter, capable of experiencing a spectrum of moods with the same sort of rhythm of a swinging pendulum.
He loves me on my bad days just as much as my good ones.
Loves me even when I’ve forgotten to put the dishes away like I’ve promised, or put the cap back on the toothpaste and let it get all dried out around the top of the tube and encrusted on the bathroom counter, or when I’ve spilled nail polish on the coffee table and then neglected to clean it up.
Loves me even when sometimes it’s hard for me to get out of bed, or when an old panic sets in and makes me flighty and moody and lash out. He’s always there, always.
I don’t have to be any sort of way for him. I don’t have to contort myself to fit. I can just be.