Single (Single Dads Book 1) Read online

  I climbed into bed and rolled onto my left side, my drapes open to the night, and I could see the corner of our neighbor’s house in the dim glow of the street lights.

  We owed the man and his family a huge apology. Turning up at their house had been an honest, and very drunk, mistake from Eric. The three of us had only moved here at the end of last week, and even though we’d introduced ourselves to some of our neighbors, we hadn’t met him or his family at all. Their house had been empty when we’d knocked. So tonight, maybe Eric gave the wrong address to the cab. Maybe he’d confused the houses, which stood next to each other and were mirror images of each other. All I know was that Eric throwing up in the big bushy bush thing wasn’t a good way to meet the neighbors. I bet the poor guy in his pj’s had gotten it in the neck from his partner after the baby woke up. Tomorrow, I’d go over with a bottle of wine or something to explain what had happened, or at least give the glossed-over summary of events.

  This was only day five in our new house, and I’d been determined to make a concerted effort to become more sociable. The last place we lived had been a dive, and we were just as likely to get mugged by people living near us than make friends. This house was different; a nice area, the three of us sharing the costs of it, each owning a portion of it.

  I fired off a quick check-in request to Leo, the other one of us living here, and put the cell back on the side table. We had this thing between us, to touch base, to let each other know we were good. Eric, firefighter, never had his damn phone on him, but he made the effort when he could. Leo, cop, was efficient and the one who’d initiated this circle jerk that was the three of us letting each other know where we were. Then me, an ER doctor, the one who had to defend the fact that he was arms deep in blood and guts as the reason he couldn’t get to his phone. I think Leo despaired of us; actually I know he did. My cell vibrated, and I pulled it out.

  Long night, coffee shit, on my way home.

  I wasn’t going to sleep knowing Leo might want someone to talk to, so I got up and made fresh coffee; the three of us had shifts that were all over the place, and sometimes the only thing that kept us going was caffeine. When Leo arrived home, he cast a worried look toward Eric’s room. I subtly shook my head and handed him a mug of coffee. He fell on it like a starving lion on fresh meat and then scrubbed at his eyes, fussing over Cap, who jumped around him and then leaped up next to him on the sofa and curled into his dad, his nose on Leo’s knee and his tail wagging gently against the leather. Leo buried his hand into Cap’s fur, and his voice broke.

  “A family of five,” he said and closed his eyes. “Mom, dad, three kids—they were trapped on the seventh floor. Smoke had already killed them before the fire got there. No fire doors on the floors below, it was like a chimney.”

  We took a moment to consider the horror of that loss, and Leo made the sign of the cross on his chest. He was a good Catholic boy, from a huge Italian family, most of whom were cops, and even though he’d long since lapsed, I’d seen him pray silently after a bad day. Hell, after any day.

  “Eric got drunk,” I said and poured my own coffee. I was on shift at ten, and it was already three in the morning. I couldn’t see me getting much sleep, not when Eric might need me.

  “I don’t blame him. He was on floor clearance, tried to get through the door. I don’t even want to think about what he heard…”

  “I guessing you were called in as well?”

  “After the fact.”

  That was all he needed to say. He’d probably been part of the team who’d taken witness statements, worked the scene. We sat in silent contemplation for a few minutes, lost in our own thoughts, and then I couldn’t avoid telling him what had happened when Eric came home.

  “He knocked on the wrong door, woke up a baby, pissed off our neighbor.”

  “Ouch.” Leo winced.

  “The guy said he was going to call the cops, but I got Eric away. We owe him an apology, or at least Eric does. We haven’t been in this neighborhood a week, and our shit is already spilling over.”

  “It’s a one-off. They’ll understand when you tell them.”

  “Or not.” The three of us didn’t go around telling people about the crap in our lives. They didn’t want to hear all the gory details that messed with our heads on occasion. I exchanged a pointed look with Leo, who simply nodded because he understood. “I’ll take them over some wine.”

  Leo frowned and glanced around him at the piles of boxes in our front room; not one of us had managed to unpack a single thing. “Do we even have wine?”

  “We will after I buy some.” I wobbled as I stood, exhaustion making me slow. I had managed to get some sleep before I knew Eric was on his way home drunk, but it hadn’t been enough. Then there was the guy on the porch all hissing and spitting, in pajamas, fuzzy duck slippers, bare-chested. He was all kinds of sexy, and I could think that privately, despite him being off-limits to a bunch of idiots like us, given he had a family and we hadn’t even officially met. I checked in on Eric on my way back, and he was on his side, sleeping. He’d be in there processing everything in his dreams, or at least I hoped so. By tomorrow, he would have compartmentalized it all.

  And whether that is a good or bad thing, it was what we did.

  Asher

  Mia woke at five, and I was instantly awake at the slightest sound. Her eyes were open, and she stared at the ceiling, waving her hands and curling her legs. She’d been active in the womb. At least that is what my surrogate had said, and I had no reason to disbelieve her. At one of the scans I’d attended, the pediatrician had shown me Mia’s heart, her tiny fingers, and pointed out she was hiccupping as she moved. She’d been less than real at that moment; just a promise of something that was going to change my life forever.

  Something I could plan for. The best crib, the most ergonomic stroller, a beautifully decorated nursery, formula, emergency numbers, and twenty-four new baby books. Not to mention sleepers in all different colors, hats, tiny coats… the list was endless, but I’d been equipped to the hundredth degree. Not that I knew what half of the things I’d bought were for, and I doubted I’d need most of it.

  I’d like to have said I was prepared, but nothing could have prepared me for the day Mia had been handed to me. Not even the tons of books I’d waded through. Some of them explained that I should sleep when the baby did. But what happened when I was so busy watching to see if my baby was still breathing that I couldn’t sleep at all?

  The books said nothing about the terror that gripped me when I was the only one who could help this precious child who owned my heart.

  “Morning, Mia,” I murmured and managed to use the bathroom and get back before the snuffles and soft movements gave way to something more insistent. I measured everything perfectly, made up a bottle, and ignored the call of coffee. Maybe one day I’d be organized enough to have both, but right now, Mia was the priority. I took her to the garden-room that faced my back yard, and we sat on the small sofa there. She took her whole bottle, her hands opening and closing as she sucked, and then she was done. The spit-up on my navy sleep T-shirt was expected, and yet again I regretted forgetting the cloth by the bottles.

  One day I’d get this right. One day I’d be the perfect dad.

  Right now, I missed my twin Siobhan and her boisterous family. Mia and I had stayed in her garage conversion after collecting Mia from the hospital, and for just short of six weeks, I’d had Siobhan to turn to if I needed help. Now it was time for me to start a life on my own or at least a life where it was me and Mia alone. Rain beat on the glass roof, a soothing, hypnotizing noise, and I cradled my little girl in the garden room, lulled by the sound of it.

  “I wished for you,” I began and slid down in the seat as she cuddled into me. “When the wish came true, it created a perfect tiny miracle.” She moved a little and caught my thumb in her fist, holding it tight. Just six weeks old and she knew that she could hold on to me. Before her, I truly felt my heart had been empty, but now
we were a family. “You and I against the world, Mia.” I love you so much my heart hurts.

  I wanted to sleep, but I couldn’t; too hyped up from being woken. So I opened my laptop one-handed and caught up on a couple of emails as I yawned.

  How many other new parents are out there, unable to sleep and utterly alone? More specifically, how many single dads.

  Did they all feel so totally overwhelmed? I closed down my email and opened a browser, dimming the brightness on the laptop when my eyes began to burn. Then I typed single new daddy help lonely into Google and pressed search.

  There were one hundred and thirty-nine million hits or more. I couldn’t read how many zeroes there were with blurry eyes. There was a lot of daddy porn to wade through, then pages dealing with bereavement and separation, and a useful link to the top ten apps I should have on my iPhone if I was to become a successful parent.

  Talk about pressure. I wonder if the apps give you points for everything you do right.

  I bookmarked the app for later, went back up to the search parameters, and added the word gay, glbtq, and surrogate, in the hope they would bring up a whole new set of more appropriate results. There were a couple of forums, but the one that caught my eyes had a rainbow logo and the letters SDT, which stood for Single Dads Together. I scrolled through some of the open posts, which were few and far between. This was a private forum I needed to sign into to get deeper, but on the surface, I wasn’t sure it was my kind of place. One featured open post was by a dad of three called Nick, who’d lost his husband, another had a man talking about overseas adoption. They appeared to be the two guys who ran the forum, and at first glance, I wasn’t able to see if there was someone on there like me.

  Neither of them had made the decision to start a family on their own, and I felt unaccountably alone. Maybe no other man thought that they could be an effective lone parent to a baby girl? Guilt twisted in my chest, abruptly turning to anger. I wasn’t supposed to be on my own. Darius was meant to be here as well.

  Or at least he’d been present at the concept and ideas stage, and he’d interviewed surrogates. Even if he had sat on his phone for most of them, saying I was the better person to choose. After all, he’d convinced me that it should be my sperm, which helped to create our child, so I should be the one to select the surrogate. I should have known then, but I wasn’t going to wallow in all of this shit now. Determined, I joined the forum, and in the bit where it asked me who I was and why I wanted to be on there, I spoke from the heart.

  My name is Asher Haynes, and I’m gay. I have a daughter, who is six weeks old, through surrogacy. I just left my sister’s house, and I’m home now. I chose to have Mia alone. I am alone.

  I closed my laptop, and when Mia stirred, I changed and fed her. With her dozing on my chest, we sat together in the garden room for a while longer, and somehow I managed to quell the panic fluttering in my chest.

  Siobhan said I would be fine, that I was going to be a wonderful dad, and that I was a great uncle. With the freaky twin connection we had she sometimes knew me better than I knew myself. Only, uncles can hand their nieces and nephews back. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to do that. When it was obvious I wasn’t going to shut my brain down and my stomach growled with hunger, I decided to head to the kitchen for cereal. The first thing I spotted was the ceramic bowl from last night, the one I’d used to defend myself, smashed on the tiled floor. I couldn’t have pushed it far enough back, or maybe I’d broken it last night and not even realized. Unluckily, the bowl had been the victim of my exhausted clumsiness, and tiny pieces of ceramic were scattered everywhere.

  I bent to pick up a shard one-handed, although why I did that, I don’t know, dropping it when it sliced into my hand. I didn’t care because I didn’t have any energy left to care. I picked my way through the fragments and back to the garden room. I’d clean it up later. The wound bled, but I wrapped it in a towel, and it wasn’t as if it hurt. Then I think I maybe slept an hour. A sleep made up of fitful ten-minute naps interspersed with waking up in a cold sweat, a panic gripping me that Mia wasn’t breathing, that somehow I’d lost the only important thing to me in my entire messed-up life.

  Every time I checked her, she was fine, and I ignored the blood from my cut staining the towel there. With a sense of peace, I held my baby girl and changed her, then gave her a bottle when she woke up. She slept in my arms under the glass roof, and it was when I felt myself drift off that I decided I needed to get back to bed. Only, the hall was obviously still littered with pottery, and everything that had happened in the dead of night became real. With Mia in one arm, I refused to think about Sean or Eric or my chaparral broom or the smashed bowl. I’d sweep it all up later, hire a gardener to fix the bush, maybe clean the kitchen, find some coffee, and get a shower.

  A shower sounded so damn good.

  I stroked Mia’s soft hair as I settled her in her crib and was immediately lost in thought. Everything I’d ever had or wanted was wrapped up in my daughter.

  “I hope you’ll love me,” I said and swallowed the emotion in my throat. “I’ll try and be a good man for you. I’ll be the best daddy.”

  The person I became would be wise and focused, and I would learn to love tea parties with teddies and dolls. I would patch up scraped knees, teach Mia all the things I’d learned so far in my life—for what they were worth. I’d show her when it was right to keep secrets and help her recognize when she should share, and most of all, I would help her find out what she wanted to be in this world. She would never make the same mistakes as me. I wouldn’t allow anything to hurt her. She was my world now, and I would protect her and love her with every fiber of my being. She would be safe.

  I would make sure of it.

  Sean

  The wine I bought for Mr. Fuzzy-Slippers in the morning as part of my apology wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t for lack of money, just choice. The small gas station carried the cheaper lines, but they did have flowers for Mrs. Fuzzy-Slippers and a brightly colored magazine with a teddy bear on the front. I didn’t know how old the baby was, but I thought I had all my bases covered unless there were older children in the house as well. I didn’t recall any of the neighbors we met talking about the family next door, although we hadn’t stopped and talked to a lot of them, as moving, then shifts had swallowed our free time.

  “Let’s do this.”

  I tugged my shirt straight, ran a hand through my hair, which needed cutting about as urgently as my closet needed updating. No one saw my street clothes when I wore scrubs, so who cared whether my shirt was ironed or my jeans clean. The last thing I wanted was to come across as something less than the experienced doctor that I was. After last night, we’d have been lucky to see respect from our neighbors, let alone become friends. I took the steps up to the porch and thanked the heavens it had rained and cleaned up whatever dinner Eric had left in the bush.

  Checking the time once more, and assuming there were children here meant the entire family would be up, I knocked on the door and waited. I had three sisters, and all of them had children, and sleeping in was nonexistent to the point they told me they’d forgotten what they were.

  I heard some banging inside, a few curses, and the door opened in a hugely dramatic fashion. Fuzzy-Slippers-guy stared at me, and he was exhausted.

  “What?” he asked.

  I thrust the wine at him, “For you,” I said, then waggled it when he didn’t take it. Then I remembered the flowers and magazine. “For your family.” He stared at me, then the apology gifts I’d brought with me. “We just wanted to say sorry, Eric, Leo, and me. It won’t happen again.”

  Of course I was lying. Who knew if it would happen again? None of us could control the kind of things we dealt with, and sometimes it was all too much. As it had been for Eric.

  Just sometimes.

  Call it a well-trained eye or seeing the way he swayed, but something wasn’t right. Which was when I saw the blood.

  “You’re bleeding,” I s
aid and stepped closer.

  He blinked at me, then looked down at his hand. “Yeah, I cut myself,” he managed, staring at it as if he had X-ray vision that was going to securely fix what appeared to be one hell of a deep cut. He opened and closed his fist, and blood oozed out as he opened the cut.

  “Do you want me to take a look at it?” I asked and watched him think that one through. “I’m a doctor,” I added, trying to be as helpful as I could to his decision-making process.

  “I’m fine.” He wiped his hand down his chest, leaving a smear of scarlet. Quite clearly he wasn’t fine at all. I cracked my neck and stepped up to his doorway, peering behind him and assessing the situation. Shards of pottery littered the floor inside, and there was blood, but I wasn’t sensing murder and mayhem, more misfortune and tiredness. I pressed his arm, guiding him to step back to the right and away from the majority of the shards, and he didn’t stop me as I moved him into the kitchen, which was a mirror layout of ours. I sat him on the nearest stool and then considered the wound. Blood had dried around the cut, which extended from the fleshy part of his hand to the base of his little finger.

  “Wait here,” I said, crossing the field of sharp pottery before opening the door. I couldn’t see a key to lock it, and this was an emergency, so I left it open as I jogged back to our house. I thundered up the stairs to my room and grabbed the house medical kit. I had responsibility for anything medical in the house, Eric was in charge of fire safety, but up to then we hadn’t worked out what Leo was in charge of, even though he said he was on-site security. When I passed through the front room, I caught sight of Leo sprawled half on and half off the sofa, an empty beer bottle clutched to his chest. So much for security; if I’d been in less of a hurry, I’d have found a Sharpie and drawn on his face.