“What do you mean, you won’t accept it?”
Grayson stood because sitting next to Nolan was making him nervous. “You can’t say all those things about how awesome I am and how I helped you wake up from the stupor you’ve been in the last year and then tell me I have to leave because your home situation is changing. If we care about each other and are still compatible, we shouldn’t break up.”
“Come on, Gray, think about this logically. I’m about to become a father. Do you understand how much my life will change? And you’re… you’re young. You have so much ahead of you. I’m at the point in my life where if I don’t do this now, I’ll soon be too old. And I don’t want my life to pass me by like that. So I’m doing this. But you, you should be young and have fun and do stupid things and, God, just be twenty-five. You don’t want to be saddled with an old man and a kid.”
Well, now Nolan was just pissing him off. “Okay, first of all, forty is not old.”
Nolan sighed.
“Second, it is not up to you what I choose to do with my life. It’s up to me. And right now, I am on my way to becoming an interior designer with his own TV show. And I’ve been slowly falling in love with the most amazing man. I will not have you tell me that we can’t be together just because you’re forty and about to be a dad and I’m twenty-five. That’s not fair to me at all.”
“You’re falling—”
“I don’t know.” Grayson would die on the spot if Nolan made fun of him for saying that, so he plowed right over it. “Maybe. I do care about you a lot. I think that working together, we’re creating some really great homes for people, and spending time together off camera is creating something really special between us as well. Is it going to last forever? Who knows? Maybe it won’t last until the end of filming. But I will not let you just cut me out of your life. Not when I know that deep down, you care about me as much as I care about you.”
Nolan stared at him for a long moment, not saying anything. Grayson had paced as he talked, but now he stood right in front of Nolan.
“Are you done?” Nolan asked.
Grayson wanted to run screaming from this apartment, actually, but he held his ground. “Yes.”
Nolan stood. “It’s not that I want to break up, because I don’t. But I think you’ll see, when the baby arrives, that our relationship will change. And that baby is going to have to be my first priority. I just thought that maybe if we parted ways romantically now, we could survive the pain and disappointment and continue to do the show together. But in two months, when we’re in deeper? It’ll suck a lot more.”
“Maybe. Or maybe everything will work out.”
Nolan raised an eyebrow. “How? Are you saying you want to co-parent this baby with me?”
Well, there was a terrifying thought. Grayson had been compartmentalizing this as “my boyfriend will have a baby,” not “we will parent this child together.” He wasn’t actually eager to be a father; he hadn’t thought about kids, not really. He supposed he’d have to give some thought to what it would mean to stay with Nolan, if there was some future for them. But this information was too new, and Grayson couldn’t process it.
“Not necessarily,” said Grayson. “But rather than having you tell me how I feel or what I want to do, I want to be able to make those decisions for myself. And right now, I say I don’t want to break up.”
“You’re delusional if you think this will work.”
“So are you breaking up with me anyway?”
Nolan sighed again. He seemed tired. But he put his hands on Grayson’s shoulders and said, “I guess not.”
“’Cause we could be one of those cutesy Restoration Channel couples that live in, like, Arkansas and have two cute little babies that run around the construction site in tiny hard hats while their parents renovate homes. Except we’re gay and live in New York City.”
Nolan laughed at that. “Gray, my life is about to change so much.”
That was starting to sink in. Grayson nodded. “I don’t know about this whole fatherhood thing, but you have come to mean a lot to me, and I want to help you in any way that I can. If that means listening or if that means just fucking your brains out, I am here for either option. Or anything else in between.”
“All right. I hear you.”
Grayson put his hands on Nolan’s waist. “Where are you gonna put the crib and all that?”
“I was thinking between my bed and the kitchen. I could buy another privacy screen. But she won’t really care about privacy until some years in the future, and maybe I’ll decide living in a loft is not conducive to…. What?”
“I love listening to you talk about this. It’s clear you’re very excited about it.”
“Yeah, well. Two years. It took them two years to call me.”
Grayson nodded. “Maybe I’m not thinking straight because you just gave me a lot of information, but I think this could all work out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Grayson kissed Nolan.
