There were a lot of things that Billy just never could see in his future.
For starters, he could hardly fathom one for himself at all, never really being able to see himself anywhere past the age of eighteen like it was some sort of bad omen, like he was destined to die young. He came close, but at the end of the day, there was a future on the other side of catastrophe, and an even better one at that.
He was a new man, reborn in a way that felt unreal. In a way that didn’t really feel like rebirth, like the clutches of his past were still looming overhead, there to remind him of all of the things he thought he could never had.
He never thought he would find love.
Maybe he did at one point, freshly five years old as seeing the way all those tv couples fell in love on the screen, believing that he would find a girl and fall in love with her and live happily ever after. But by the time he was six and he saw his father slap his mother for the first time right in front of him after dinner, he started to doubt that love was real at all, believing that people only got together in couples to cure their loneliness. Then, by the time he was nine years old, the boy who sat next to him in his art class who painted him a picture of a tree wound up further complicating his feelings about love, and what that meant to him.
Realizing he was gay, and realizing what it meant, he never thought he would find love like he saw in the movies, and yet he did, with Steve.
Steve, who had been there before, through, and after one of the worst moments of his life. He tended to bruises and cuts left by one monster, and held his hand while he healed from the effects of an even larger one, and he was the one to free him from the clutches of both, giving him the chance at a future that he could never see for himself.
And that was when he realized that love wasn’t the only thing he thought he could never have.
When he got his first job, not as a lifeguard, but his first real job that he intended to make a career, he remembers shaking hands with the guy at the auto shop who offered him an apprenticeship. He remembers feeling nothing until he came home that day as it all set in, that he was doing something with his life which meant he had one to live. It wasn’t just another side hustle, it was the real deal. It wasn’t just the job that he never thought he would have, but when Steve came rushing down the stairs asking if he got the job, and cheering when Billy nodded his head, he realized he also never thought he would ever be proud of himself, because for the first time, he was.
He did believe that he would have his own place at some point. He knew he would eventually leave from under the roof of Neil Hargrove, he even saved up for years keeping all of his cash stashed in a tin can under his bed. It wasn’t that he never thought he’d ever get out, it what that he never thought he would live somewhere nice. He anticipated moving to California and setting up camp in the cheapest listing he could find on the market. He was prepared to take the studio apartment on the corner with paint chipped walls and mold filled ceilings, right next door to a meth lab, because it’s all he would have been able to afford, and it was all he felt he would deserve anyway.
He moved into Steve’s house, or rather, Steve’s parents house, although they were rarely there, and that felt like home for a while, but they both knew that it was never truly theirs, and that ache for a place of his own just never really disappeared.
And then Steve came into the kitchen one day with a newspaper in hand and pointed to a listing for a two bedroom house in town that, just by looking in Steve’s eyes, he could tell he was excited about. It was going for just under 30k, and Billy didn’t hesitate after just feeling a sliver of Steve’s excitement that was radiating off of him to tell him to go make an offer. Fortunately, Steve’s mom was actually a realtor back before she retired, and was able to help them talk the price down to 25k, as well as ensure that they weren’t turned away for being two men looking to live with one another.
That was another thing. He never, ever, once thought that he could have that. Support. He was used to an abusive father and a mother who abandoned him with said father. As far back as he could remember, there was never anyone there to look after him. He didn’t dare believe in a future where he could be his authentic self, because it had always been too dangerous, and thinking about it would just make him sad.
Steve’s parents were far from perfect parents. He knew of the turmoil they put their son through by never being there, missing games and birthdays and holidays and making him feel truly alone for so many years, but one thing Steve always prided them on was that they would always be there for him when he needed them most. They were absent aside from the moments when it truly mattered, and in those moments, a few missed Thanksgiving’s felt like nothing.
When Steve brought Billy back home to his house from the hospital, he stopped at the front door to tell him that his parents were inside. Billy remembers his gut sinking to the floor until he looked up at Steve and saw the subtle smile on his lips. “I told them about you,” Steve said, “and they’re really excited to meet you.”
Billy never thought he’d have loving parents. But that was only because he didn’t entertain the idea that loving parents didn’t have to involve Neil Hargrove.
Billy watched his future unfold before him, surprises at every corner, but there was one thing, one thing that surprised him to his very core and brought him to tears because the realization was just so sudden.
He and Steve had been together for nearly fifteen years which was a feat in itself. They still lived in that little house they first bought, but they were packing ups the loving boxes already, finally making good on that promise made all those years ago that Billy would show Steve the ocean.
Billy remembers the moment clearly. They were in the kitchen, and Steve was packing up all the dish ware and appliances into neatly marked boxes while Billy held a baby in his arms. She was barely six months old. So much of those past two years felt like a blur in the grand scheme of things and Billy didn’t for a moment stop to think about how crazy it all was they he was going to have a kid. He just remembers the excitement of it all when one drunken night Heather offered to be a surrogate and somehow she still wanted to go through with it sober, and just over a year later after that night, Billy was holding his own child in his arms. He was far too engulfed in her to think about anything else.
Until that moment in the kitchen, while he watched Steve pack boxes while he fed their daughter the bottle of formula when he looked down into those big brown eyes staring back up at him when she said “dada.”
The whole room froze and fell completely silent, waiting a few moments to decide if they heard it right. Steve was paused halfway hunched over with a toaster in his hands, looking over at the two with the biggest smile on his face, and meanwhile, Billy was just staring right back down at his daughter, brushing the skin of her cheek gently with the back of his finger trying to hold back his tears.
Because that was it. Of all of the things he thought he could never have, this was the one that held the most weight. Billy not only never thought he would be a father, but he actively never wanted to be. Because he didn’t want to end up just like his own, he was so afraid that he would, and somehow none of that had crossed his mind up until that moment, because in that moment, he knew that just like all those other times before, he was wrong, he was so completely wrong.
He was older, he was smarter, and he was more himself than he had ever been before. He was happy, something Neil Hargrove could never say about himself. He knew then that anything Neil Hargrove had ever taught him was all forgotten, and the love the Steve taught him took over entirely.
He looked down at her and smiled, a few tears streaming down his face and dripping onto her onesie. Steve walked over and wrapped his hands around him from behind, placing a soft kiss to the top of his head.
Billy was all of the things he never thought he would be. He was successful, he was a lover, he was free, and…
“Yeah baby, I’m your dada.”
