Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
EMMETT
“Tell me where we fucked up as parents.”
Emmett looked up from his desk, his glasses perched low on his nose because he was now at the age he needed readers.
It was something he was steadfastly ignoring in spite of the fact that he had at least twelve pairs floating around his house.
He dropped his pen and set his elbows on the desk, pressing his chin against his curled fists.
“What has the little queen done now?”
“Well, this is all probably because we started calling her little queen when she was a baby,” Cosimo said.
He shuffled in the room and flopped into his chair.
From the way the tip of his nose and sides of his ears were pink, Emmett realized they were probably going to have to move up their timeline.
Work had been getting to Cosimo for a while now, and Emmett could feel the tension starting to crack. He felt it at night whenever Cosimo was home early enough to climb into bed with him, and he felt it in the mornings with his lack of kisses and touching.
It was affecting him too.
Lately, their relationship had settled into something like roommates who fucked, and when they did more than that, it was heavily weighted in Cosimo’s favor.
Which, Emmett understood why it was that way.
He understood his husband couldn’t give him the sweet tenderness he craved, but it was starting to get to him.
He was ready to revisit bringing in a third once more, and he didn’t think his husband was going to object.
“I’m pretty sure calling our child little queen has nothing to do with her behavior lately. Hell, we could have called her Empress and let her rule the house like a tiny dictator, and I don’t think she’d be any different.” That wasn’t a compliment, unfortunately.
He loved his daughter. He just didn’t like her very much.
No, that was being kind. He didn’t like her at all. The pair of them had plenty of friends with spoiled children who hadn’t turned out to be complete monsters. He wasn’t sure if they’d gone wrong with her, or of she’d just been born this way.
It was something he was fighting like hell to accept, and his husband was fighting like hell to ignore.
Cosimo rubbed at his eyes and sighed tiredly. “She just called me screaming her head off because her driver’s license is suspended. Again.”
Once again, Emmett was unsurprised. “Parking tickets?”
“Parking tickets, speeding tickets, and apparently, she’s gotten a DUI which is the reason for the suspension. She called her boyfriend—what’s that fool’s name?”
“John? Jason?” Emmett struggled to recall. He was a CrossFit trainer and he’d had lunch with them once. Both Emmett and Cosimo had been left distinctly unimpressed.
“Whatever. He bailed her out after her DUI, and then she never showed up to court. There’s a bench warrant for her, and she’s asking us to go down and pay the fines so she doesn’t have to turn herself in.”
Emmett snorted. “Yeah, that’s a big, fat no.”
Cosimo raised a brow, and Emmett knew he deserved it. For far too long, he caved to her demands, and he knew that had contributed to her sense of entitlement. He realized his mistake, but too late, and after years of using every technique in the book to get her to behave, nothing was working.
He desperately wanted to give up again, but he knew that would only make things worse.
Besides, Selene wasn’t living off their money entirely. The apartment was in her name, and her bank account was loaded with a trust fund thanks to his parents dying young and leaving behind a small fortune to the three surviving grandchildren.
She’d run out of cash eventually, but if they cut her off, she wouldn’t be destitute. Unless, of course, she kept up her tropical island vacations. But Selene was always the kid who had to learn the hard way.
“She also invited us to lunch to meet her boyfriend again,” Cosimo said, and his gaze cut to the side.
Well, fuck. It was the start to Cosimo’s vacation, which was also the start to their dynamic shift.
Once a year, Cosimo took ten days off to slip into a twenty-four-seven role where he would be berated, denied, humiliated, fucked into oblivion, made to beg and plead, all by Emmett.
He would be degraded, forced to ask for the bathroom, forced to ask to sleep and eat and scratch his nose.
He would be caged and slapped around. He would have rug burns on his knees by the end, and blisters on the heels of his hands from supporting his weight on them as he crawled through the house for hours on end.
And when it was over, when he was thoroughly shattered into a thousand pieces, Emmett would put him back together and he would be stronger for it. Happier.
It was something Emmett had come to accept about his husband. It was a role he’d grown into over the years.
It wasn’t something he would have chosen for himself, but it was something he gave the man he loved. The only problem was, the thing Emmett needed was the one thing Cosimo couldn’t give him, and he was a little afraid that this vacation would push him past his own breaking point.
It was a conversation they needed to have, but it would have to wait until after the week was over.
Bringing up something like that wouldn’t do them any good until Cosimo’s head was in the right space to receive it.
His job was hard. He was a pediatric heart surgeon who held the lives of tiny patients in his hands.
He was a surgeon who often lost patients from the circumstance of their little bodies giving out from illness and defect, and he had to live with the knowledge that there was nothing he could do. It sat on his chest like a weight he couldn’t get rid of.
He was good at his job. He was more than good at his job. But it was killing him, and all Emmett could do was count down the years until retirement and take Cosimo to his knees every time he needed it.
“What did you tell her?” Emmett asked.
He shrugged. “A few hours won’t throw off the schedule too much.” He bit his lip, then his voice went quiet. “Perhaps, Sir, you could plug me and cage me before we go.”
Emmett nodded and shivered. He might not love slapping his husband’s balls until they turned red, but he did love being called Sir.
He loved the position it put him in. There was only one other honorific he craved to be called, but he would never be Cosimo’s Daddy.
He’d only been gifted that title a few times in his life, but always with temporary partners.
They both knew he needed something like that in his life permanently—to balance the scales and keep him from tumbling over the edge, but so far, it wasn’t meant to be.
It was a someday. A hope. A fantasy.
Still, Emmett couldn’t help but start losing faith that finding his person was possible. There were things about himself he couldn’t change that tended to turn off men who wanted a Daddy. Like the fact that he was married. Like the fact that he had a child.
Like the fact that he was a trans man.
But, as Cosimo always told him, anyone who wanted Emmett to be someone else—to twist himself into shapes that didn’t belong to him—wouldn’t be the kind of person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
They’d never fit in their home.
And Emmett wasn’t willing to risk his marriage or his life to just anyone. He was too happy for that.
“We’ll keep it short. Book the little spot by the water that you like,” Emmett said.
Cosimo nodded, then stood up. He was uncharacteristically soft as he walked around Emmett’s desk and used his powerful hand to push his chair back into a lean. He was taller than Emmett, and broader, but somehow, he seemed smaller when he straddled his legs and wrapped around him.
Emmett didn’t get these moments often. Cosimo loved him, but he loved differently than most people. He loved in words and actions. He would fight the sun if Emmett said he preferred the moon.
But cuddling him like this was rarer than a total eclipse.
Emmett held him tight enough that Cosimo almost lost his breath. Just the way he liked.
“Thank you, amore,” Cosimo whispered.
Emmett eased him back and kissed him gently. “Anything for you, my love.”
Cosimo’s eyes shifted down and he licked his lips.
“I know you’ve been struggling. I know you’ve been trying to hide it because things for me have been a shit show, and Selene isn’t making any of this easier.
” He pressed his hand to Emmett’s sternum, then dragged a touch to his lower belly.
He wasn’t as fit as he used to be, and under his shirt were tiger-striped stretch marks from when he’d carried their daughter.
It had been hell on earth to stop his testosterone. And worse when he’d gone on hormones to make conceiving possible. His dysphoria had gone through the roof through the whole pregnancy, but when it was over and he held his baby for the first time, he knew it was the right choice.
Not one he’d ever make again, but for a while, they had been the perfect little family.
And then it had started to go all wrong.
“I don’t want you to regret me and what I asked from you,” Cosimo whispered.
Emmett pulled his hand back, then cradled his husband’s face. He knew Cosimo wasn’t talking about what they did behind closed doors. Emmett knew he meant the hell Emmett had gone through to conceive and birth the child who now treated them like walking ATMs.
“I wanted her as much as you did. And she’s still our daughter.
I will always have hope that she’ll outgrow whatever the fuck this is.
But there’s only so much we can do. We can meet her boyfriend again, but I’m not paying her fines.
She can go down like every other person who made a foolish mistake and deal with the consequences. ”
Cosimo smiled and took his lips in a chaste but heated kiss. “Ti adoro.”