The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(118)

“I know. I’m sorry. I just don’t want to wait too long.”

He held her away, thumbed away the tear tracks on her face. “We won’t wait too long.”

They barely waited at all.

Male plumbing is less complex than female, so Erik got tested first.

Locked in a small room at the urologist’s office, a room loaded with every kind of porn in every medium imaginable, he ought to have felt like…

“A man in a room loaded with porn,” he mumbled. “Candy store, my ass.”

He felt ridiculous.

Trying to get comfortable in one of the recliners (he felt stupid), and staring at his cup (he felt even more stupid) he spent a few minutes laughing. Then he sighed a lot. Then he picked up one of the magazines and tried.

He tried another magazine.

“Whoa,” he said, peering at a page. A naked woman with long dark hair was turned partly away from the camera, looking over her shoulder at him. She was top-heavy: giant, augmented breasts on a too-slender body. But Erik wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was looking at her legs. With keen interest his eyes trailed the length of thigh and calf, down to her feet.

Her feet were in pointe shoes.

Erik’s eyes narrowed. Her feet in pointe shoes, the ribbons tied neatly around her ankles. Her legs were bare, the muscles shaped and defined. Bare feet in pointe shoes. One long curving line of leg, from her toes on the floor, up her calf and thigh to…

With one hand, he covered the woman from the waist up, so all he had were a perfect little ass, long legs and bare feet in…

Five minutes later, he put his specimen cup through the little revolving door at the nurse’s station and left the office. His pace was a little guilty. He had ripped the page out of the magazine and folded it up in his back pocket.

Two days later, the urologist called. “By chance did you ever have the mumps?”

“Excuse me?” Erik said.

“Your counts are extremely low, but what concerns me more is the motility.”

“The what?”

“Your sperm aren’t swimming,” the doctor said with patient enunciation. “For lack of a better phrase. Is there a history of male infertility in your family?”

“I’m estranged from my father, I wouldn’t know,” Erik said. “If it helps, he was an only child, but I don’t know the reason why. My paternal grandparents are deceased. I have a brother. My brother has two children, and to my knowledge, they were conceived the old-fashioned way.”

“All right, for the moment we can rule out genetic causes. Back to my original question—did you have the mumps when you were a child?”

“No,” Erik said.

“Are you sure?” Melanie said from the other extension.

“Of course I’m sure,” he said. And the next day at work, he closed his office door and called his mother down in Key West.

“Of course,” she said, as if Erik were witless. “It’s why Peter went deaf. You knew this.”

“Pete had meningitis,” Erik said, as if she were the demented one.

“That was years later. It was the mumps when he was a baby. He got it first and you hadn’t been vaccinated yet, so we whisked you out of the house to your grandfather’s. But then you came down with it too. It’s highly contagious.”

“I see,” he said, disturbed he’d gotten this wrong all these years.

“Why are you asking, what’s the matter?”

“Melanie and I can’t get pregnant, and it seems I’m the problem. Doctor asked if I’d had the mumps. I guess one of the side effects is sterility.”

“Well, yes, they told me that. But you were three years old. They said sterility was only a risk if you were past puberty. Mumps can’t be the reason.”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

“It’s not. It can’t be. Tell him you were just three.”

He reported back. The doctor agreed, given Erik’s age at the mumps onset, it was unlikely the disease had caused such testicular failure.

“Would you mind not putting ‘testicular’ and ‘failure’ into the same sentence?” Erik said.

He would need all the jokes he could muster in the next year. Erik, this man who hated to be the center of attention, was about to be scrutinized in a way that made every atom in his body howl in protest.

“I can’t tell you how many people have been touching my junk,” he said to Miles as they ran along the canal. “I think if I made a list of people who haven’t had their hand down my pants, it would be shorter.”

“Put me on the list, please,” Miles said, panting.

“It’s not enough they have to handle your balls. No. They have to measure them. Did you know this? They have a little thing of rings to measure your boys. It’s enchanting.”

“Huh. I may register a complaint at my next physical. All I get is a finger up the ass.”

Before jumping into in-vitro fertilization, the doctors were trying to boost Erik’s counts through chemistry—injections of chorionic gonadotropin three times a week. Fortunately they were small-needle subcutaneous shots and he quickly got the knack of self-administration. Melanie, wanting to participate, tried once to inject him, botched it badly and left him with an ugly bruise. Ever after, she lost her nerve as soon as the needle hovered over his skin.