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Gerard has been sitting on the bed for the better part of an hour waiting for Frank to come out of the ensuite. He can hear him behind the locked door, moaning and groaning amidst the sound of rustling fabric, and it makes Gerard laugh around his fangs. He won the game of rock-paper-scissors to determine what they dress up as this year, and Asher isn’t complaining. In fact, Asher is so happy with his costume he’s been running around the house FaceTiming all his friends on his iPad while he waits for his dads to get ready.
“Are you almost done in there?” Gerard calls, passing his hands over his slicked-back hair to make sure it’s still laying flat. His fingers come away smudged with black, and he wipes them on the dish towel he’s been carrying around since putting the color in his hair.
There’s another groan, a thump, and the door unlocks noisily but doesn’t open. “Why couldn’t I be Blade?” Frank whines, muffled. “Or David from The Lost Boys.”
Gerard gets up, and the way his velvety cape floats around his legs gives him a kiddish thrill. He’s always wanted an accurate Dracula costume, waistcoat and cape and all, and he knows he’s not going to want to take it off when they get back from trick-or-treating. But take it off he will, he knows he will, because he’s been imagining sinking his plastic fangs into Frank’s neck all evening.
Putting on a Transylvanian accent that he’s been practicing since he was twelve, Gerard says through the bathroom door, “I won. You Lose. I am Dracula.” And in his regular voice: “Come on, honey, I wanted us all to be historically popular vampires.”
“But did it have to be historically accurate?”
“Of course! No one would know who you were if you dressed up as The Lost Boys.”
The door flies open, and there Frank stands in his furs and his pearl-beaded headdress looking thoroughly peeved. He looks amazing, but still Gerard has to stifle a laugh. He’s wearing a wig! “And people are going to recognize me as this?”
Honestly, probably not, but Gerard is not going to tell Frank that. “Only the people that matter.” He presses his lips to Frank’s stubbled cheek, leaving a red stain. “You brought this on yourself by having a Vlad the Impaler tattoo. I wanted to dress you up as Carmilla before I saw that thing.”
Frank looks down at himself and deepens his scowl. “I was trying to hide it from you because it’s ugly.”
Gerard fusses with the costume until Frank bats his hands away. “Too bad I know every inch of you like the back of my hand.”
A blush appears high on Frank’s cheeks, and to make it worse, Gerard steps back so Frank can see him properly. He fluffs out his cape, licks his red, waxy-tasting lips, and bares his fangs. And just like that, all of Frank’s woes drain from his face, leaving him limp-limbed and slack-jawed. It makes Gerard puff out his chest, just a little. He always knows just what buttons to press.
“Holy shit,” Frank says, eyes going up and down and up again. He seems fixated on the big antique brooch laying over Gerard’s stomach.
Gerard flicks out his sleeves and fiddles with the cufflinks he’d borrowed from Ray’s wedding tux. “The only thing is that I don’t think I’m as thin as Dracula probably should be. He is dead, after all.”
Frank comes over, hands greedy and outstretched. “And thank god for that.” He kisses Gerard in a filthy way, and squeezes his ass under the cape. It probably wouldn’t be a terrible thing to call off the trick-or-treating, right? It’s not like the school is doing UNICEF this year or anything …
“Dads, are you guys ready yet! There’s not gonna be any candy left!”
Oh, yeah. They have an eight-year-old. An eight-year-old that will be very upset if he doesn’t get his fill of Smarties and Reese’s Cups tonight.
Frank sighs into Gerard’s mouth. “Do we have time for a quickie?”
Gerard can’t help the laugh that bubbles up his throat. He pushes Frank away and smooths out his waistcoat. “In all this garb? Probably not. Plus we’re supposed to meet Mikey and Ray at the mall for those pictures they wanted to get.”
Frank groans. “I forgot about the photoshoot. Don’t they know it’s my birthday?”
“Yes, and that’s why we’re doing it.”
“No it’s not.”
Gerard lifts an eyebrow. “Are you thirty-one or eleven.”
Frank swallows, and he looks a little starry-eyed again. “Did you put makeup on your eyebrows too?”
Gerard shakes his head and collects their wallets and keys from the nightstand. “Let’s go before it gets too dark. And don’t forget an extra jacket for Ash, his costume is thin.”
Frank whines but follows him down the stairs, and before they reach the bottom he says, “Hold on, doesn’t Ash’s costume come with, like, makeup and stuff? Does he still need that done?”
“He said he wanted to do it himself. He’s been watching tutorials all week.” Gerard looks around when they get downstairs but doesn’t see their son. He does, however, spot a pack of newborn pacifiers sitting on the coffee table that they haven’t put away yet. Most of the baby’s things are locked away in a storage unit across town until they decide to tell Asher and finally turn the office into the nursery, but some of the small things, like pacifiers and the occasional bootie, find their way home with them — and hidden from Asher, when they remember. Luckily for them Asher is a bit non-observant around holidays.
“Ash?” Frank calls, taking the pacifiers and stuffing them in a drawer. “Oh, Ashy Slashy, it’s time to go, bud. You ready?”
Asher is preceded by the cats running for their lives, and then he appears, hands held up and fingers like claws, a four-foot mass of black fabric and gray makeup. Frank bursts into laughter, but Gerard’s chest feels so light he could float away. Asher looks incredible! Those tutorials must’ve really paid off, because even his prosthetic ears look natural. He could have a good career in drag, if he was so inclined.
“Oh my God,” Frank gasps. “G, what did you do to our kid?” Asher growls and he laughs harder.
“I turned him into — ! Wait, Ash, do you remember who you are?”
Asher looks down at himself, then says around his mouthful of large, spiky teeth, “That guy from Spongebob?”
Now Gerard can’t help laughing too. God, he loves this kid.
Frank, who almost laughed his wig off, straightens it. Gerard suddenly remembers how he grew his mustache out specifically for tonight and feels an excited zing go up his spine … and the ghost of a burn between his thighs. He clears his throat and hopes no one notices.
“He’s Nosferatu, right?”
“Actually, his name is Count Orlock,” Gerard says, clearing his throat again because he is a pathetic excuse for a human being. “Nosferatu was just an archaic Romanian word for vampire.”
Frank comes over and kisses him sweetly, hand staying an appropriate distance away from Gerard’s hind quarters by laying flat on his hip. “And the doctor’s name was Frankenstein.”
“And the rat was Remy!” Asher pipes up.
Hopefully neither of them can see how red Gerard’s face is under his makeup.
There’s a knock at the door then, and Asher hurries to answer it, picking up the bowl of candy from the floor as he goes. The group of kids on their front stoop shout “Trick-or-treat!”, but when they get a glimpse of Asher’s costume they shout bloody murder and shoot off down the walkway, scattering when they reach the sidewalk. Asher cackles like a madman and fishes out a Hershey’s kiss for himself.
“I think I’ve raised a serial killer,” Frank says at Gerard’s side, and Gerard pats him on the shoulder.
“That’s alright, honey, I’m here now. I’ll put him on the right track.”
Frank moans into his hands jokingly, and then Asher is at their feet, chocolate smeared on his plastic fangs. “Can we go now?” he asks. “Uncle Mikey told me we could watch Dawn of the Dead when we get back from the mall.”
“Wait,” Gerard says, putting his hands on his hips. “The original or the remake?”
“The original, duh.” Asher runs off shouting the cats’ names in a grating voice, and Frank looks at Gerard with his hands on his hips with his lip between his teeth.
“Your costume really gets me going, you know,” he says, and Gerard drops his hands.
“Yours doesn’t.”
Frank grabs the brooch he’s been eyeing, but just before he can pull Gerard to him his phone is ringing from the depths of his costume. Swearing, he digs through the folds of his robes, and finally answers just before the call goes to voicemail. One hand stays on the brooch, a clear indication for Gerard to stay where he is, that Frank isn’t finished with him yet.
“Ray, I swear I don’t have Della’s bow. You probably left it — ” He straightens suddenly, and something strange swoops through Gerard’s stomach. “Oh. Hi. Is everything … ”
Frank’s wide eyes cut to Gerard, and his fingers tighten on the front of Gerard’s waistcoat. Gerard wants to ask him who’s on the other line, but it’s as if some icy force has rendered him incapable of doing anything other than standing here and staring. He can vaguely hear Asher stomping around in the other room.
“What? Is she — is she okay? Are they both okay? It’s so — ”
This is when Gerard’s hearing fades out, like he’s gone deaf in both ears, and his head is consumed with the awful beating of his own heart. He can see Frank’s lips moving but can’t make any of the words out, and he’s about to mentally flip through every traumatic scenario he can think of to prepare himself for every possible outcome when the call ends and both of Frank’s arms drop.
The words fade in like something out of a movie: “We have a daughter.”
Gerard’s heart seizes in his chest, and though his brain and his mouth fill with a laundry list of unintelligible, overlapping things, the first thing he manages to say is, “It’s only October.”
Frank nods, knocking his long curly wig askew again. Didn’t he remember to put the bobby pins in? Or set the baby monitor up in the office so they get used to checking it? Did they ever bring the formula in from the garage and put it on a top shelf in the pantry where Asher won’t see it? Do they have enough clothes? Or diapers? Will any of them fit a baby so premature?
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
Gerard hurries to the downstairs bathroom but does nothing more than stand there over the open toilet, hand braced against the wall so he doesn’t get sucked down the drain and sent out to the ocean. Frank squeezes in behind him, shutting the door, turning on the sink, the fan.
“She’s seven weeks early,” he croaks, and Gerard presses his face into the crook of his elbow. “Only three pounds, ten ounces. She can’t breathe on her own yet but she’s — she’s here. She’s fucking here, G.”
A single lock of hair flops over Gerard’s clammy forehead. Seven weeks early. Almost two months. At 33 weeks of pregnancy, your baby is the size of a pineapple, and considered, at this stage, to be moderately preterm if delivered. Their daughter is only the size of a pineapple. “When?”
When he looks up, Frank has the heels of his palms pressed into his eyes. “This afternoon.” A single-shoulder shrug. “While we were at lunch.”
“Oh my God,” Gerard breathes, and wraps Frank up in his arms and in his cape and his thrumming anxiety. He’s never felt Frank shake this way before, not when Asher broke his arm or chipped his tooth or even when Gerard got into that accident back in April. “Oh my God, Frankie. Why didn’t they call sooner?”
Frank lets out a distressed noise into his neck and Gerard understands. He gets it. They didn’t call because they wanted to make sure she was out of the woods first, that she was going to make it at all. “The guy on the phone said they had to do an emergency C-section. I don’t think he was supposed to tell me that.” He pounds his fist into Gerard’s arm. “God, I’ll bet it was ‘cause she got into bad shit again. That’s what happened with Asher, you know. He wasn’t that early but he still had trouble walking and talking. What an irresponsible — ”
“Hey.” Gerard holds Frank’s weepy face in his hands, suddenly feeling much stronger about the situation. His heart still feels like it’s about to give out, but they can’t both be falling apart. They have two kids now. “None of that silly stuff. You don’t know her situation, and she gave you a baby.”
Frank lets out a watery laugh. “That’s what Ray said when Ash was born.”
Gerard swipes his thumbs around his eyes. “So what — what do we do? I’m new at this.”
“Well — ” Frank uses Gerard’s cape to wipe at his nose. “We go see her, I guess. We gotta go to the hospital.”
Another rolling wave of nausea overtakes Gerard’s stomach, and he tries to ignore it by kissing Frank hard enough his plastic fangs almost break skin. “We have a daughter. We have a baby together.”
“We have a daughter.” Frank pulls away with a gasp. “She doesn’t have a name yet!”
Gerard wipes at Frank’s face again with his hands, this time a little more clumsily, giddily. Because they have a daughter, one that’s only the size of a pineapple and can’t breathe on her own yet but one that’s real and here and theirs. “And not only that, but we still have to get married.” Gerard whispers the last word. “Weren’t we supposed to get engaged this month? Announce it on Facebook and everything?”
Frank sobs again, his mouth trying to desperately form a smile. “Oh, the list. Mom’s gonna be so mad at us.”
“Can we go?” Asher appears in the doorway, pillowcase slung over his shoulder and shoes on but untied. At the sight of his fathers so closely embraced, and in such tight quarters, he scrunches his gray-painted nose and says, “Stop being gay.”
Catching Frank’s eye, Gerard holds out an arm, coaxing Asher into their little circle. He comes over reluctantly and lets himself be squashed between them. “Honey, our plans have changed a little.”
“A lot, actually,” Frank says, putting his hand on the top of Asher’s bald-cap-clad head like he wants to run his fingers through his hair. “Remember when we used to go trick-or-treating at the mall? Like Uncle Ray and Uncle Mikey are doing with Adeline?”
“Are we gonna do that?” Asher asks excitedly, looking up at them.
“Well, we’re gonna … do it at the hospital.”
Asher frowns. “You can go trick-or-treating at the hospital?”
“Sure,” Frank says with a shrug. “There are kids at the hospital.”
“Why are we doing it there?”
Gerard squeezes Frank’s waist, and Frank audibly swallows. The bathroom suddenly feels about fifteen degrees warmer. “There’s someone we gotta go see, bud. Someone for you to meet. Are you cool with that?”
Asher shrugs in a way reminiscent of his father and weasels his way out of their suffocating hold. “As long as I get candy, I don’t care where we go trick-or-treating.”
Okay, well, it’s settled. They’re going to go meet their daughter.
In the quiet, tightly-strung ride to the hospital, Gerard calls Mikey and Frank calls Ray. They both get an earful of words not suitable for the likes of an eight-year-old, and silently decide Frank’s mother will just have to stay out of the loop for a little while longer. At least until they figure out just what in the world they’re doing.
The sun is fully set by the time they’re pulling into the packed parking lot, and, after laughing at their costumes, a nurse at the front desk gets their names and tells them to follow her, and three vampires follow a petite woman in pumpkin-printed scrubs two floors up to the NICU. Gerard has never been to the maternity ward, or anywhere that babies are in a hospital, and judging by the look on Frank’s face, and how tightly he’s squeezing Gerard’s hand, neither has he. Asher, on the other hand, is wholly preoccupied with filling his PAW Patrol pillowcase at every corner.
“Unfortunately we won’t be able to let you in just yet,” the nurse tells them when they stop short. Gerard looks around. Are they here already? “Not with the costumes. But she’ll be waiting for you.”
Frank grips Gerard’s hand tighter as the nurse goes into the room with a smile. It’s then they both notice the windows, just like in the movies, and press themselves up to the glass. Unlike the movies, though, there’s no neat rows of open bassinets, dozing babies to point and coo over. Instead the nurse wheels over an incubator, and inside is a tiny little thing covered in wires and a knit cap that could fit a chihuahua. Their daughter is small and pink and more real than Gerard could imagine. He stares at the baby he’s been dreaming about for months now with his jaw somewhere unreachable and his fingers trembling against the glass.
“Wow,” is all he can say.
“Wow,” Frank agrees.
Gerard bends down slightly to see her better, and he thinks Frank is doing the same at his side until he keeps going, all the way down to the floor. On one knee. He wrenches his hand from Gerard’s and clumsily pulls his wedding ring from the chain around his neck. The nurse in the NICU has her hands over her mouth. Asher is nowhere to be seen.
“Will you marry me?” Frank breathes. “Again?”
Gerard follows suit, taking off his own ring that he’s kept hidden since the summer, and he and Frank put them on each other’s fingers for the first time since that day at the courthouse.
As Gerard is answering Frank’s question with the messiest kiss of his life, Asher is saying, “Look who I found!”
He comes around the corner with his uncles and baby cousin in tow, and the first thing Gerard notices while his head is spinning somewhere up in the clouds is not the shocked looks on their faces, but the fact that the three of them are dressed as Louis, Lestat, and Claudia from Interview with the Vampire.
“I thought you guys were going to be Thing One and Thing Two,” Gerard says, pulling himself up. He glances again at their baby in her little incubator. She’s so small and so peaceful, and something he hasn’t felt before aches in him to hold her. “And Della was the Cat in the Hat … ”
“We’re all vampires!” Asher cheers, almost flinging his candy all over the place.
Mikey, as if in slow motion, places Adeline in Ray’s arms and shuffles over to Gerard in his Victorian garb. He says nothing, just wraps his arms around him tightly for a few seconds and then promptly smacks Gerard on the side of the head. It knocks his hearing aid loose, and as Gerard is trying to put it back in, Mikey hugs him again, whispering, “Congrats, big brother.”
“Thanks, little brother.”
The sound of a door shutting brings them all back to the present, and there the nurse stands with a shy smile. When the four of them turn back to the window, the incubator is gone, and the look on Frank’s face is close to devastation. Gerard takes Adeline from Ray and hands her to Frank, just so he has something small and warm and sinfully adorable to hold onto. It seems to do the trick.
“Is she gonna be okay?” Ray asks, and Asher says, mouth full of Pop Rocks that sound awfully loud in the quiet corridor, “Who?”
“She’s going to be fine,” the nurse assures. “And you’ll be able to hold her in the morning. I think some skin-to-skin will be good for her.”
“Who?”
“She looks smaller than Asher did, though,” Ray says.
“She’s the size of a pineapple.”
“Huh?”
Asher stamps his little feet loud enough he startles Adeline in Frank’s arms, and when they all look over at him he has his hands on his hips and his candy at his feet. “Who are you guys talking about and why are we at the hospital.”
When no one steps forward, Frank passes Adeline, who’s starting to fuss, into Mikey’s arms and kneels before Asher. Gerard can see the cogs turning, and realizes they never thought about how they would break the news to Asher. It’s not as simple as when they first told him they were dating. Now they need to tell him that they’re getting married and that he has a new baby sister all at once. Hopefully this doesn’t bring up the Where do babies come from? conversation, because although he’s tiptoed his way through that question plenty of times with being a teacher to young kids, he’s definitely not ready for that right now.
“Ash,” Frank begins, hands hovering over Asher’s hunched shoulders. The nurse quietly slips away, followed by Mikey and Ray and baby Adeline’s whining. “How would you feel about having a baby sister?”
Asher looks at his original dad and up to Gerard and back to Frank. “What about a brother?”
“What about a sister?” Gerard butts in.
Asher scrunches his face up in thought, then says, “Okay. I like Della, so a sister would be cool, I guess. Is that why we’re here?”
Frank scoops Asher up in his arms, propping him on his hip, and points through the window at the incubator across the dim NICU. “She’s right over there.”
“Wow,” Asher says, pressing his nose to the glass and smudging it with gray face paint.
Gerard steps back from the scene and pulls out his phone to take a picture. After taking it, and three more in quick succession when Asher and Frank turn to look at each other with twin smiles, Gerard watches them on the screen with a warmth so heavy in his chest his Dracula costume starts to feel a little hot. This time a year ago he was the new guy in town starting a new job that his brother got him. He had a house too big for just him and his two cats, and the fear that he’s getting too old to find someone. He was starting to believe that he and Mikey were going to end up spinsters.
But along came Frank and his spitfire of a kid, barging into Gerard’s life without an ounce of decorum, and since then, and from now on with this new chapter they're starting, the holidays will never be the same.
“Dad,” Asher says, kicking his feet. “Dad, I really gotta pee.”
No, actually, the holidays are going to be just the same, and Gerard thinks that’s his favorite part about it.