Face Down In The Dirt

Chapter 14 - All Bad Things Must End

“Well, if you love my son the way that you’ve been loving me lately, I’d have to think twice about having you in his life.”

Tommy’s eyes started watering again. “I’m sorry. I never stopped loving you, I was fucked up, angry, and out for revenge. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m not sure how to make it right. I just don’t want to lose you, or the baby…. maybe I already have, and I’m scared,” Tommy sobbed into his hands.

“Now you know how I felt when you wouldn’t even talk to me. Hopeless and dejected,” Nikki replied…... “I have to get ready to go.” He sat up and moved on the edge of the bed to stand, his back turned away.

Tommy got himself to a sitting position on the bed, grabbing a handful of the sheet to wipe his nose and tears, cleaning up below. “OK…. um, I guess I can change the sheets and wash these before I leave, so that you can come home to a clean bed in case you’re tired,” Tommy uttered, trying to abate the awkwardness heavily blanketing the room.

“Fine,” Nikki said, standing up, kicking around for his sweat pants in the early morning light. “That wasn’t make-up sex by the way. I woke up with wood, and you happened to be in my bed, uninvited. I still have a lot on my mind that I need to come to terms with.”

“I understand, kind of…. but you asked me to make love. I thought....” Tommy trailed off.

“I know, I gotta go,” Nikki said, with no emotion. “Lock this place up when you leave.”

“I hope everything is OK with the baby. I mean that…. I--”

Nikki took a deep breath, and without warning punched the wall, which left a fissure in the sheetrock. “Dammit!! You wanna know what the fucking issue is!!?? What I can’t wrap my head around!!?” Nikki roared with flashpan anger.

Tommy cowered putting his head down, as he shrunk back, unable to respond to Nikki’s rhetorical question.

Nikki stood, aborting the search for his pants, faced away from Tommy, bracing himself on the wall with one hand. He pounded it with the heel of his palm three more times, before turning back around.  “If the situation was reversed… you know, like you’re the one who got a phone call saying that you’re going to be a father, and you had to tell me that a baby was suddenly coming into our lives….” Nikki poured out, before taking a seat on the edge of the bed, with one leg propped on it so he can look towards Tommy.

“I can’t say for sure how I would have reacted. Shocked, I’m sure.” Nikki threw out a shrug. “Scared, maybe upset. I don’t know. I mean, we were going to plan parenthood together, right? But whether I was upset for one minute, one hour, or even one day, I would have very quickly come to the realization that I was being gifted the privilege of being a father to the most beautiful baby in the world…. yours…. ours.”

A few tears started to fall from Nikki’s eyes. He wiped them away with his hands as he continued on. “How lucky for me to be able to be a part of that baby’s life. Yet, that’s not how you felt about my announcement. Instead, you rejected him, and then rejected me… for days on end. It just confounds me, and the only conclusion that I can draw is that you don’t love me in the same way that I love you. That’s the only thing that makes sense because none of this bullshit that happened since that day would have transpired if you were the biological father! None of it!!,” Nikki screeched, shattering any remnant of a quiet morning. “We would have been planning for a baby in our future.”

Nikki took hold of the sheet and wiped his face clear, as more tears poured forth. “There’s no way you can feel the same way for me as I do for you…. because you would have been over the moon about being a father to my baby. And I would have never treated you, the way that you treated me. You must have seen the pain in my eyes. You heard me cry, and you heard me beg… and I got nothing but rejections and insults from you. I begged for sex, and you preferred to jerk off alone. I begged to talk, and you punished me with revenge. If you didn’t want me because of what I did, you should have just let me go, instead of prolonging the agony.”