Noah

“What’s that?”

“Seriously, Dan, don’t ask me stupid questions!”

He came over five minutes ago, and since then he’s been taking photos and laughing at me, and so have Chad and Martin. It’s as if he got the whole Storm Rocks posse with him.

“No, I meant on your shirt. What’s that?”

Since they came, I can’t even put Richard down. Every time I attempt to do it, he screams at the top of his lungs. Even Aria came back for a while and said that she would help Richard. Not me. She wouldn’t want him having a salad for breakfast. She thinks that I’m stupid. Richard’s a baby, so of course, he drinks nothing but milk. Anyway, I was glad to get out of there, when lo and behold, as soon as I handed Richard to her, he started crying again.

I think that he must be my baby. He seems to know exactly how to wind me up, and now, I’ve got spit-up on me to prove it.

“Ugh!” I put him down. I don’t care if he cries again—which he starts to do the moment I put him down.

“Daddy, I could do with some milk too.” Chad’s sucking on his thumb pretending to be a baby.

“Please remind me, why I’m friends with you guys?”

They look at each other and start to burst into laughter again, the same thing that they've done since they've arrived. I run up and grab a new shirt. They’re quiet, and so is Richard. Martin’s a father of two and I thought that he could help me out, but then he said that since Gia gave birth to the twins, she’s been a right whiny bitch. Shit, if only she knew that he talked about her like that behind her back. Rewind five years and if anyone said anything about Gia being a money hungry gold digger who wanted to get with Martin for his billionaire status, he would have told us that we’ve never been in love. No one could say anything bad about Gia. Now that they were married, she’d started to show him her true colors, but then again, to us guys she was still the same.

Gia wanted to secure the marriage, and she wanted kids to do it. She got two for the price of one after she insisted on having fertility treatment to ensure that they had twins so that she wouldn’t have to conceive again. Martin went along with it. As they say, love is blind. If she requested the fucking Eiffel Tower, he would bankrupt his company just to get it for her. Now, she was a whiny bitch. Shit looks like someone’s going to divorce court soon, which would have made me happy if it wasn’t for the kids.

I walk down, this time with not only a new shirt on my back but a couple of towels too. Richard’s not getting me again. Not if I can help it.

Martin’s sitting on the chair with a bottle-feeding Richard.

“He didn’t want you; he just wanted food. And I figured when Dan said that you had a baby, you had nothing.”

Thank fucking goodness!

“Anyway, seriously man, what are you going to do? One thing’s for sure, you’ll be getting more pussy than you had before!” Chad smiles as he peers at Martin feeding Richard.

Martin sighs. “Do you guys have to be so vulgar?”

Dan stands up as if he’s figured out a Sudoku puzzle, “He’s right. Girls dig single dads. It’s like a fucking chick magnet.”

“Language! He’s only a baby. He doesn’t need to be exposed to such language yet.”

Martin continues to feed Richard and Chad shrugs. “He’s a baby!”

He’s not even Martin’s, but he's admiring him as if he’s his own. They look kind of cute together. I stand, completely lost about what to do next.

“I need to get a DNA test.” That’s as far as my forward thinking concerning Richard has gone. Fouls, calves, and even chicks I can deal with, but a baby is an entirely different subject.

“That’s all you need,” Martin sighs as Richard starts to fall asleep. He lifts him up and starts to gently pat his back. I’m tempted to ask him, beg him even, and then he shakes his head as if he can read my mind and says, “No.”

I thought we were friends, and he's so good at it. Richard could stay with Martin until I figure this thing out.

“You need to get him a crib so that he can sleep through the night, diapers so that you can change him, wipes… A car seat for when you take him out."

"Wait, car seat. He's not staying."

"Where's he going to go, Noah? His mom left him with you."

"I know, but I need to do the test, find out if he's mine, and then I need to find her."

"Why? So, she can leave him on someone else's doorstep?"

He can see that I'm distressed because I haven't got a clue.

"Look, I only brought one bottle and a couple of diapers with wipes. I can write a list, and then you can sort it out.”

“Can you help me?” I bend down on my knees in front of him and he grabs his phone. Ten guesses Gia’s calling him. Even if he’s at work, she calls him just to do whatever she doesn't like doing, which is anything that doesn't involve pedicures, massages, and manicures. Even with two nannies, she still picks up the phone to call him.

“I was going to say yes…”

“Gia,” we all say in unison.

“Yes, Gia wants me home.”

“Damn bro, when you gonna tell her to stop calling you like that? You could be at work or something.” Chad sighs, and he feels it the most. Chad and Martin were the best of the friends. They would hang out and do everything together until Martin hooked up with Gia, and then she put an end to it—just like everything else that Gia didn’t want Martin doing in life.

Martin ignores him, probably avoiding the topic. He argues with Gia about Chad, and the last thing he wants to do is argue about Gia with Chad.

“I need to go. Dan, give me a lift home?"

Dan nods, and then he goes to pat Chad on the back. Martin heads to the kitchen and starts writing on my whiteboard all the things that I need to get for this little tiny human being. Babies need so much. Even adults don’t require that much. Now I know why they say that babies are hard work. They cost too much and are too demanding. I’m waiting for him to stop writing, but the list goes on and on. The more he writes, the more frustrated I become.

“He can’t need all that for one night.”

“One night?”

“His mom will come back tomorrow after realizing what she’s done.”

“No mom leaves their baby unless they’ve got no intention of coming back.”

“What?”

“This Candy or whatever her name is. She left Richard on your doorstep like a bag of groceries. Richard’s what, around two months old?”

I was never that good at math even back at school; I wasn’t going to challenge his theory now.

“My point is,” he says as he puts the marker down and I breathe out a sigh of relief, “she’s not coming back for now. You need to be prepared to have a baby around from now on. That means no more going out all night and getting drunk all the time. In a way, it’s a good thing.”

“For who?” I say, trying to fight back the fucking tears. No partying cannot be a good thing for me at all.

“We’re not in high school anymore. The partying, the late nights… That should have stopped a long time ago.”

“Damn, Martin, we’re only twenty-three, not forty.”

Chad comes into the kitchen, “Well, he’s nearly there, so to him that’s kind of how it feels now. He acts, walks, and talks like a man that’s past his sixties let alone forties.”

That may be the case, but Martin was the most mature out of the four of us back in high school—the one that always had a plan. Too bad he didn’t have one when he fell in love with the wrong woman. I want to say something to him, anything to make him realize that just because he’s married and has kids, doesn’t mean that he has to act as if he’s dead. But the words wouldn’t come out. I was the one that had some growing up to do, not Martin.

“Dan, you ready?”

“Yeah, man. I can come back later and help out if you like, Noah.”

“Nah, no need. I got this one.”

Chad smiles as he gives me a reassuring pat on the back. “We’re sure that you do.”

Then they leave just as fast as they came through the door. Richard’s quiet, and as I peek at him in the living room, I see that Martin has wrapped him up tight. Shit, he looks like a cocoon, and I’m tempted to take him out of it so he can at least move his hands and shit, but then I can see that he’s fast asleep for the first time since he came into the house. I grab him and put him on my chest. He’s not the only one that’s tired. I’m fucking exhausted.