Just What the Truth Is (25 page)

He jogged over to the bed and threw himself down on it, making it squeak loudly. “Oh, Ben, yeah!” he shouted.

My eyes widened in horror, and I hissed at him, “Micah! What in the hell are you doing?”

He winked and kept bouncing as he yelled. “Harder, Ben, harder. Pound that big, hard,
circumcised
dick into me. Oh, yeah!”

Life doesn’t do much to prepare you for watching your boyfriend put on a sex show for his parents, even if it is just auditory. But this was actually happening. Like for real. Swear to God. The Jason meets Freddy movie was less horrifying.

There was a knock on the door right before it swung open. I jerked my head over, ready to see angry parents, and instead there was a pretty brunette standing there with a sardonic grin on her face.

“Wow, Micah. If he can work you up that much without taking his pants off, I can’t wait to see what his big, hard, circumcised dick can do when he actually sets it loose.” And the parade of horrors continued. “In fact, I’m sure my children are wondering the same thing. I believe I’ll help Ben unpack and get to know him a little better while you go out there and explain to Isaiah what exactly it means to pound your dick. Thanks for saving me the uncomfortable sex talk, Uncle Micah.”

My face must have shown my mortification, because Micah’s sister took my hand and smiled at me. “I’m just playing around. The kids are in the kitchen with their grandmother. They didn’t hear a thing. I’m Sarah, by the way.” She looked me up and down before continuing. “You know, you’re even more gorgeous in person than you are in the pictures Micah e-mailed. What on earth are you doing with a troll like my brother?”

Micah jumped off the bed, marched over, and flipped Sarah onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Buzz off, squirt. If Ben hasn’t figured out that he’s out of my league yet, then I don’t need you pointing out the obvious.”

“Micah, put me down! I’m not a kid anymore, Micah, I’m thirty-two years old. Seriously, put me down!”

He ignored his sister and looked at me. “Want to meet the greatest almost-six-year-old on the planet and his adorable baby sister?”

It turned out that Micah’s nephew was able to broker a release of his mother. It wasn’t so much because the boy was concerned about her well-being. More like he wanted to take her spot. So Micah dumped Sarah on the geometrically-patterned sectional couch and then lifted Isaiah onto his shoulders and started running around the house, making the kid giggle madly.

We heard a baby crying, so Sarah leapt off the couch and ran into the kitchen. She came back a few moments later with a sniffling baby. “Adina needs her binky.” Her eyes darted around the room and landed on the diaper bag. She put the baby, who’d begun crying again, on one hip and bent over the bag, shuffling through it.

“You want me to take her while you do that? Seems like you have your hands full there.”

She looked up at me gratefully and handed over the baby. “Would you? Thanks.”

I held Adina against my chest and walked around the room, bouncing a little as I went and patting her back. She must have liked it, because she stopped crying and even rested her little head against my shoulder. I melted just a tiny bit. Okay, maybe more like a lot.

“Darn it! I think I forgot to pack a binky. I might have an extra one in the car.” Sarah looked up from her diaper bag search, and her eyes warmed when she saw me. “You’re great with her. Adina normally doesn’t let anybody except for me and occasionally my mom hold her. Even Gabe, my husband, can’t get her to settle when she’s already in one of her moods.”

I blushed at the compliment and dipped my face, inhaling Adina’s sweet baby scent. “Thanks. She’s adorable.”

Sarah smiled and set the diaper bag back down on the floor. “I’ll be right back. She seems fine now, but she could fall apart in a heartbeat. I better track down a binky or ask Gabe to stop by the house after work instead of coming straight here.”

The baby was asleep in my arms by the time Sarah came back with two pacifiers in her hand. I couldn’t tell whether she was happy or sad, because she was smiling, but her eyes looked decidedly wet when she looked at me holding her daughter. “Be right back.” She cleared her throat. “I just need to clean these off; they were buried underneath the seat.”

Forty minutes later, I was sitting on the couch, holding a still-sleeping Adina and getting to know Micah’s sister and his parents while he played any number of games with his nephew. I think they were on hide-and-seek when Micah’s mother got back to her earlier interrogation.

“So when Micah says your family is Christian, what does that mean exactly?”

I’m not sure how he heard her over his own voice, but Micah stopped counting in the middle of the word “six” and sped over. “Mom, we already talked about this. What’s your obsession with Ben’s religion? Seriously!”

“It’s not an obsession, Micah. I’m just curious. It’s important for us to carry on our traditions, and I worry that in an inter-faith household, the children will end up falling away from Judaism because Christianity is so much more prevalent in our society. It’s easy to become enamored by Christmas trees and Easter eggs. I’m sorry if your heritage means so little to you.”

Micah’s shoulders hunched and his hands flew up. “What children are we talking about here, Mom?”

She answered him in a very slow cadence, like he was having trouble understanding her words rather than her meaning. “We’re talking about your children, Micah. Yours and Ben’s. You did call me and say you were bringing home the young man you’d be spending your life with, right?” She nudged her head toward me. “I gather this is him, seeing as how you’ve told me that you’re living together.”

I was momentarily distracted from the odd conversation by that little anecdote. I loved that he told his parents about me, loved that he said we would be spending our lives together, loved him.

“Yeah, I said that. But Mom, you do realize we didn’t move in together because either of us is knocked up, right? You get that it’s not biologically possible, no matter how hard we try?”

His mother scowled at him. “Don’t get fresh with me, Micah Trains. You can adopt or get a surrogate. Erma Stein’s neighbor and his husband just did that very thing.”

Micah looked at his father imploringly. “Dad? A little help here, please.”

The man barely concealed a smirk. “Oh, I assure you, son, it’s perfectly legal.”

Honestly, I had never seen Micah so frazzled. It was even better than when his mother had asked about my dick. He collapsed onto the couch next to me, causing my body to shift in a way that jostled the baby. I immediately pressed my face to her ear and made a soft “shhhh” sound. She settled back down easily.

The same couldn’t be said for Micah. “I know it’s legal, that’s not the issue,” he responded to his father in an agitated tone.

“If you’re worried about where to get an egg, I’m happy to donate mine,” Sarah said. “You’ll definitely want to make sure Ben’s looks get handed down, so he should contribute the sperm. Otherwise, the kids might get teased at school.”

It seemed as if Micah just gave up on his family at that point. He turned to me and kissed my cheek before smiling apologetically and whispering, “I’m sorry about this. For some reason, they’ve all chosen today to lose their ever-loving minds. Do you think we can get all three of them involuntarily committed at the same time, or would a judge frown on that?”

I winked at Sarah before shrugging and looking into Micah’s eyes. “No reason to apologize to me. I agree with them completely. Surrogacy sounds like a great idea.”

And with that, I rendered my always eloquent boyfriend completely speechless.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I
THINK
the only thing I heard Micah say over the next three hours was, “Can you please pass the salt?”

By the time we got back into the guest room for the night, I was a little worried that we had all pushed him too far. He was leaning down, untying his laces, when I stepped up behind him and rubbed his back. “You okay?”

He straightened up, toed off his shoes, and then turned around. I stepped closer, and he embraced me, dropping his forehead against mine. “Yeah, I’m okay. I’ve just been thinking.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, Ben, did you mean what you said out there, or were you just joining in with my family to take the piss?”

“I meant it.”

He pulled his head back and searched my eyes. “You really want kids?”

Why was that so strange? Didn’t everyone want to have a family? “Sure I do. I like kids. Don’t you? You seem to get along great with your nephew.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I like kids. I guess I just never thought of having any of my own. It never seemed, I don’t know, possible or something.”

I cupped Micah’s face in my hands and stroked his beard with my thumbs. “It is possible. I like the idea of hiring a surrogate. The question is, do you want it? Not right away, I mean. We should enjoy some time with just each other first. But eventually, do you want to have kids?”

He was quiet for a long time, but his eyes never left my face. Eventually, he turned his lips into my hand and kissed my palm, before gazing back at me. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse whisper.

“With you? Yeah, I think I do.”

T
HE
rest of our time with Micah’s family was just as chaotic, loud, and intrusive as that first night. And I loved every single minute of it.

Both of his parents, but especially his mother, were exceptionally warm. Unlike my family, which rarely displayed physical affection, Micah’s family was all about hugs and touches. And although Deborah, Micah’s mom, meddled at an Olympic level, it was clear to me that she did it out of love for him. I’m pretty sure Micah knew that too, despite his resolute refusal to acknowledge it. I even think the emotional chess game they played with each other was secretly fun for him. I sure knew that I enjoyed watching it, once the surgical history of my dick was no longer one of the pawns.

And celebrating their holidays with them was a wonderful experience too. I enjoyed learning about their traditions and was surprised by the deep sense of community they had with other members of their synagogue. It was like an extended family in a lot of ways. And not one person blinked an eye when I was introduced as Micah’s partner, which was completely different from my experience with religion. I enjoyed it immensely.

One night, we were up late with Micah’s parents. They were reminiscing about his growing up years and sharing childhood stories about Micah. I was soaking it all in, enjoying learning new things about a man I already felt I knew better than anyone.

They’d just finished telling me about a trip to Yosemite they took when Micah was in middle school. They’d lined the back of their station wagon with blankets and pillows, and the kids slept and played cards most of the way there. Deborah drank so much water that they turned their restroom stops into a game, collecting magnets from the different convenience stores lining the highway. And to that day, she had those magnets on her refrigerator and thought of her children at the ages they were back then whenever she looked at them.

When we got into bed that night, Micah was particularly loving. He snuggled up to me, wiggling his knee between my thighs, circling his arm around my waist, and nuzzling and kissing my neck and face.

“When you said we should wait to have kids, you didn’t mean like a really long time, right? Because it’ll probably take a while to find a surrogate and work out the contracts and stuff. Plus, they don’t always get pregnant the first time. And then the pregnancy itself is nine months.”

I traced his brow and jawline, ran my fingers over his prominent nose and soft beard, and gazed into intelligent blue eyes tinged with anticipation. Micah was so sexy. I felt my dick fill and lengthen, causing an almost instantaneous reciprocal reaction in Micah’s cock, which was pressed against my belly. “Umm, I hadn’t thought about timing, but no, we don’t have to wait a long time. What do you have in mind?”

He shrugged and found some way to burrow even closer to me. “Don’t know. I’m just really excited about it. Talking about all those stories from growing up made me think about what it would be like for us to do the same stuff, you know? Car trips, Disneyland, birthday parties….”

I found Micah’s mouth and kissed him, taking it deep from the start. Knowing he was thinking about those things, about us sharing our life that way, cranked me right up. “You’d be really good at teaching our kids how to blow that shofar thing from Rosh Hashana,” I whispered when we finally broke for air. “Nobody can blow like you.”

He laughed. “I can’t believe straitlaced Benjamin Forman just turned a solemn religious tradition into a sexual reference.”

I blushed. “I can’t help it. When you had your lips around that horn, I was instantly hard. I had to strategically place the prayer book on my lap so your parents wouldn’t notice.”

He cracked up. “Oh, now you’re bringing the siddur into it! I’m pretty sure you’re mocking my culture and religion. Should I get my mom in here? I think she’s ready to disown me and adopt you instead, but if she hears about this, I may still have a chance.”