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Akira never expected to find himself pregnant. Yet one day he took a pregnancy test for fun.
The test sat on the edge of the bathroom sink, innocuous and almost shy in its revelation. Akira stood barefoot on the cool tiles, his heart thudding quietly, not in panic but in a kind of awe.
Pregnant. He was happy
He ran a hand over his stomach, flat as ever, as if expecting something to answer back from beneath. There was nothing, not yet, but he stayed like that for a while. Listening.
His husband, Hayami, was still asleep on the couch. He had stayed up late, prepping for a presentation, eventually dozing off mid-sentence with his laptop glowing beside him. He tiptoed into the living room and sat beside him. For a few minutes, he just watched him breathe.
Then he whispered, “Hey.”
He stirred, eyes blinking open slowly. “Morning,” he mumbled, then saw her face. “Everything okay?”
He handed him the test. His confusion dissolved slowly as the realization spread across his features, and then he was sitting up straight, stunned into the same silence she had felt.
“No way,” he breathed.
“You better make me a bunch of banna parfaits”, Akira grinned.
Hayami smiled and nodded.
The weeks passed.Akira began to notice the small shifts—fatigue, hunger, a strange craving for peanut butter on crackers at 2 a.m. But more than the physical changes, it was the emotional ones that took him by surprise. He felt like he was walking through a new version of the world, one where everything pulsed a little differently.
They told their parents. There were tears, congratulations, phone calls from relatives Akira hadn’t spoken to in years. The spare room was cleaned out. Paint samples began to gather on the dining table. Every plan now ended with “...once the baby’s here.”
At the twenty-week ultrasound, Akira and Hayami heard the heartbeat for the first time. That sound—a galloping, watery rhythm—stopped time. They had cried. Not out of fear or worry, but out of sheer, overwhelming awe that something was alive inside him. That he was no longer just himself.
Later that evening, sitting in the nursery with the printout of the ultrasound in his lap, he whispered, “Hi, little one.”
And for the first time, he felt it.
A flutter.
Tiny. Fleeting. Like a breath brushing across his skin from the inside out.
He gasped and laughed all at once, his hands flying to his stomach. It wasn’t just real—it was here.
Hayami walked in and put his hands on Akira’s bump. This child was gonna be raised with lots of love.