Daddies 2 (M×B×M)

Leo POV

I wake up before I’m ready to.

Not in a dramatic way, I mean I'm not gasping or panicking or anything like that. Just eyes open, my brain's not quite there yet, and for a second I genuinely don’t know where I am.

Then I feel the mattress shift slightly and hear breathing that isn’t mine and my body figures it out before my brain does.

Jason’s place. Their place.

I stay still and stare at the ceiling. There’s a crack in the corner of the plaster, it's small, barely worth noticing but I notice it anyway.

Last night comes back slowly. Not all at once. More like pieces landing one at a time, each one slightly heavier than the one before it.

The restaurant. Cory’s cologne hitting me before I even registered his face. Sam’s voice saying come here like I still owed him something. The way my hands moved before I told them to. Xavier’s arm solid at my back when we walked out. Jason’s voice, clear and steady, telling me to breathe. The drive home where nobody said much because nobody needed to.

I chose this.

I keep turning that over in my head like I’m waiting to find the part that doesn’t add up. Some crack in the logic. Some angle where it stops making sense. It’s something I learned a long time ago, if something feels good, examine it until you find the flaw, because the flaw is always there. It’s just a matter of looking hard enough.

I can’t find one this time.

And somehow that’s almost weirder than if I could.

Xavier’s side of the bed is empty but still warm. I can hear water running somewhere down the hall. Jason is behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him without us actually touching. He does that a lot now gets close without crowding. I noticed it early on and didn’t know what to do with it. I’m still not entirely sure I do.

I turn over onto my back.

The ceiling is plain. Nothing interesting about it. I stare at it anyway because I don’t quite know what to do with myself yet and it gives my eyes somewhere to be.

The thing I keep coming back to is how quiet it is in here. Not the apartment, the apartment has all the usual sounds. The hum of the fridge, the distant traffic, Jason breathing beside me. I mean quiet in the way where nobody is angry yet. Nobody is calculating something I don’t know about. There’s no temperature to the room that I have to read before I know how to act. No mood I need to match before anyone will speak to me.

I’ve gotten really good at reading rooms.

I have no idea what to do when there’s nothing to read.

Jason shifts behind me. “You’ve been awake for a while,” he says. His voice is rough with sleep. He doesn’t open his eyes yet.

“How do you know?”

“Your breathing changes when you’re awake. You hold it differently.”

I don’t have anything to say to that so I don’t say anything.

He finally opens his eyes. Just looks at me for a second the way he does like he’s not trying to figure out anything specific, just actually looking, like my face is somewhere he’s glad to be. I used to flinch away from that. I’m getting better at holding still through it.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

“I don’t know yet.”

He nods like that’s a completely acceptable answer. “Okay.”

That’s it. Just okay.

I almost laugh.

The shower shuts off. A few minutes pass, and then Xavier appears in the doorway, his hair damp, with that expression he gets in the mornings, half-asleep but his eyes still tracking everything. He sees me awake and something in him settles slightly, just slightly, like a small thing he was carrying got put down.

“Morning,” he says.

“Morning.”

He moves to the dresser without making anything out of it. The room stays quiet. Not the kind of quiet that’s holding its breath or waiting for something to go wrong. Just actual quiet.

I sit up.

I’m still in yesterday’s clothes because at some point last night I just went under and nobody made me get up and change, and nobody made a thing out of it this morning either ane even though its such a small thing, it’s the kind of small thing that sits with me.

“Coffee?” Jason asks from the doorway when did he get up?

“Yeah.”

“Yes or you don’t actually care?”

“Yes.”

“Great, because I was making it either way.”

Xavier, pulling a shirt over his head: “He does that. Asks and then makes it regardless.”

“I ask because I’m polite,” Jason says.

“You ask because you like the feeling of offering people a choice.”

“That’s a very dramatic read of coffee.”

I watch them go back and forth and something in me loosens without me telling it to. The easy rhythm of them, the back-and-forth with no heat behind it, just habit. I’ve been around it enough now to know when it’s real and when it’s just noise. This is noise but the comfortable kind. The kind that doesn’t need you to do anything with it.

I get up and follow Jason to the kitchen.

There are three mugs already out on the counter.

Not two and then a third added when they heard me coming. Three. Set up like it was assumed. Like it wasn’t even a question that I’d be here for coffee this morning.

I stop in the doorway.

It’s mugs. I’m aware that it’s just mugs. But my chest does a whole thing about it anyway and I have to stare at the window for a second before I can make myself move again. I grab the middle one and sit at the counter and I don’t say anything about it because how do you explain to two people that three mugs almost broke you?

The kitchen smells like coffee and whatever Jason has going in the pan. Xavier is across from me with his phone, his hair is still slightly damp at the collar, and he’s not really reading whatever’s on the screen. He keeps glancing up. Not in a checking-on-me way. Just like he’s making sure I’m still there.

I wrap both hands around the mug.

We eat at the counter. Scrambled eggs, toast, the first coffee and then a second. Nobody brings up last night. Nobody asks what I’m planning or how long I’m staying or what any of it means going forward. Jason steals a piece of toast off my plate when he thinks I’m not paying attention and when I look at him he gives me absolutely nothing there’s no guilt, or apology, just blank-faced theft. Xavier tells us both to grow up without looking up from his phone.

It’s so dumb. It’s so easy. I almost can’t handle it.

The thing I keep waiting for is the price.

That’s not cynical, it’s just…… It’s my experience because I’m so used to everything costing something. Warmth costs something. Being let in costs something. Staying costs something and I learned that so young and so well that my whole system is built around tracking it. Around knowing what I owe and when it’s going to come due. I got good at calculating. Got good at making sure I was always slightly ahead of the debt so I couldn’t be caught off guard by it.

But here it just doesn’t come.

There's no tension sitting under the surface. No careful watching to see if I’m grateful enough. Nobody’s calculating. Jason is being annoying about the toast. Xavier is reading something and I’m sitting in the middle of it and nobody is waiting for a performance.

After we eat, Jason washes the pan and Xavier disappears to the other room and I end up on the couch. Just sitting there with my coffee going lukewarm because I keep forgetting to actually drink it. The apartment gets quiet again and it's still not uncomfortable it’s just still.

I look around.

The cracked mug on the third shelf that nobody’s thrown out yet. A Post-It on the fridge in Jason’s handwriting that I’ve never been close enough to read. The way the morning light comes through the window and cuts across the floor in long strips. I’ve been here enough times now that I’m starting to notice the small things. That’s new. I only start noticing the small things once I stop constantly scanning for the exits.

When did I stop doing that?

I used to do that everywhere. Walk into a room and before I clocked anything else I’d already found the door, counted the steps to it, figured out the fastest way out. I didn’t even realize I was doing it for a long time. It was just a habit, just how I moved through spaces that weren’t mine.

I’m not doing it right now. I sit with it for a second because it feels bigger than it has any right to.

Xavier comes in and sits in the armchair across from me. He doesn’t say anything for a minute. Just has his coffee and looks at nothing in particular.

Then: “You’re thinking too hard.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“Same thing, with you.”

I look at him. He’s watching me now with that measured thing he does, where you get the sense he’s already a few steps ahead of the conversation and he’s just waiting for you to catch up.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing,” I say.

“Supposed to?”

“Here. In this. I don’t know what the shape of it is. The rules.”

He thinks about that for a second. “There aren’t rules.”

“Everything has rules.”

“Structure, maybe but not rules. Rules imply consequences.”

“Doesn’t everything have consequences?”

“For messing up, sure,” he says. “Not for existing.” He takes a drink of his coffee before setting it down. “You keep waiting for something to cost you something and I can see it every time one of us does something ordinary, like handing you a mug, or sitting next to you, you brace a little. Like you’re accounting for it.”

I open my mouth to try to defend myself.

“I’m not criticizing it,” he says before I can. “I’m just telling you that we can see it. And that you don’t have to keep doing it. Not here.”

Jason appears in the doorway. He must have been listening because he doesn’t look surprised by any of it. He comes in and drops down on the other end of the couch he’s close, and I can tell he’s trying not to crowd me, he pulls one knee up.

“We’re not keeping score,” he says.

“Everyone keeps score.”

“We don’t.” He says it like it’s simple. Like it’s the most obvious thing he’s ever had to explain to anyone. “You can be here and it doesn’t mean you owe us something. That’s how this works.”

“I don’t know how that's supposed to work.”

“Neither do we, really,” Xavier says. “But we’re figuring it out as we go. Same as most things.”

I look between them.

Jason is serious in a way he doesn’t usually let himself be; usually, he’s the one lightening things and making things easier, but right now he’s just sitting with it. And Xavier is watching me the way he always does, steady, and not pushing, waiting to see what I do next.

“I want to stay,” I say.

It comes out smaller than I meant it to. But it comes out.

“Not just for tonight,” I continue. “Not just until I figure things out or until it gets hard or whatever. I want to actually be here. That’s....... that’s what I want.”

Nobody rushes to respond and nobody turns it into a moment or says something rehearsed. Jason nods once, and it’s slow. Xavier’s expression doesn’t change much but something in it settles, like he’d been holding the tiniest bit of tension somewhere and just let it go.

“Okay,” Jason says.

“Okay? That’s all?”

He shrugs. “What else do you need us to say?”

“I don’t know. Something bigger than okay.”

He looks at me straight. “Leo. You just told us you want to stay. What’s bigger than that?”

I don’t have an answer to that.

Xavier leans forward slightly, elbows on his knees. “We made space for you here, and since that’s already done and nothing you said just now changes it and nothing you could say would undo it. You just…… you can stop waiting for the moment where it gets taken away. It’s not going to.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he agrees, in this very calm way. “But I know us. And I know what we want. And what we want is you here. All the complicated, inconvenient parts of you included.”

I look at my mug.

My chest hurts a little. Not in a bad way. In the way of something that’s been braced for a long time very slowly starting to unclench. It’s uncomfortable but it’s not bad. It’s just a lot.

I think about the drive home last night. Xavier kept one hand on the wheel, the other was resting near my knee but not on it it was close enough for me to feel it without it being a whole thing that I had to respond to. Jason talking about something small in the back seat, some story about work, something that didn’t need me to do anything except listen if I wanted to. I noticed what they were doing even while they were doing it. I noticed they were being careful with me without making it obvious they were being careful with me.

That kind of attention takes practice. Or it comes from being the kind of person who thinks about other people like that naturally and even though I’m still figuring out which one they are. I think that maybe they might just be both.

I’ve been in places where I stayed because leaving was more dangerous than not leaving.

I’ve been in places where I stayed because I had nowhere else to go and I told myself that was the same as choosing.

This doesn’t feel like either of those.

This feels like something I walked toward on purpose. Eyes open. Knowing what I was doing.

I don’t have everything figured out. I don’t know what the logistics look like or how I explain any of this to anyone outside of this apartment and I don’t know what the next month is supposed to look like or whether I’m supposed to have some kind of plan. There are probably twenty things I haven’t thought of yet.

But I know I want to be here.

And right now, for the first time in a long time, that feels like enough to start with.

Jason reaches over and takes my lukewarm coffee directly out of my hands.

“Hey!!”

“You weren’t drinking it.”

“I was about to.”

“You’ve been holding it for twenty minutes. It’s cold.”

Xavier, not looking up: “He has a point.”

“You’re supposed to be on my side,” I tell him.

“I’m on the side of hot coffee being consumed while it’s still hot. That’s not a side, it’s a position.”

Jason makes a sound like that was extremely funny. I look at the both of them, Xavier with this small almost-smile like he’s very pleased with himself, Jason completely unrepentant about the stolen coffee situation and something in my chest shifts.

It’s not dramatic and it doesn't happen all at once. But something settles in me.

Like something finding the place it was supposed to be.

It’s warm and easy. And I think I like the feeling.