Sweet Romance14 min read
He Told Me He Was Pregnant — And He Was a Seahorse
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"I took the test," I said, holding the little plastic stick out like it might spit answers at me.
"You did?" Quinn asked, voice thin with something like hope and fear that made my chest ache.
"It shows two lines." I could barely make the words line up. "Two very strong lines."
He looked as if someone had thrown sunlight at him. "That's—"
"Not possible," I cut in before any tender thing could grow into panic. "You're a man."
"I'm not a man," he said, and his voice went soft the way it does when someone confesses a secret they have worn like a bruise. "I'm not human."
I blinked. "Okay. That's a new thing to plead."
He put the test on my palm like it was evidence and not an accusation. "I followed the instructions," he said. "I checked. It's correct."
"You can't be pregnant," I said, and even as I said it my hands trembled.
"Why would I lie?" Quinn asked. "Would I lie to you?"
He looked smaller than I remembered. He always looked small when he tried too hard to be brave.
"Because people lie," I said. "Because this is impossible."
"But I'm telling the truth." He swallowed. "I am a seahorse."
I laughed before I knew it, a short, ridiculous sound that frightened me.
"You mean—" I started, and then he surprised me worse than his words: Quinn pulled off his shirt.
"Look," he said.
He dove—almost literally—into the aquarium I kept on my living room stand and for a moment the world blurred with water and glass. A tiny, shy seahorse pressed its side against the glass and looked at me with my neighbor's eyes.
I didn't scream then, though I think every bone in me wanted to. Instead I sat down on the sofa and everything that had been steady in my life slid like wet sand.
"This isn't the time to panic," Quinn said through the glass. He tapped twice; the seahorse tapped back.
"You're serious." My voice came out thin. "You're actually serious."
"Very serious," he answered. "And I've been very serious since the night we—since the night that happened."
"Quinn, you know what people will say? The internet will explode. The world will—"
"Will you listen?" He said my name as if it were a promise. "Please. Come look. Please."
I did what any sensible person would do when faced with the surreal: I put on shoes, went into my kitchen, and came back with a heating pad and two mugs of tea. I sat on the floor and watched the little seahorse drift, watched it press its snout to the glass as if it understood every ridiculous, terrified thing in me.
"I took you to a vet," I said because I had to make some small practical piece of the world hold. "A real vet."
"You thought I was faking it?" Quinn asked.
"I thought you could be sick," I corrected. "I thought maybe this was some weird hormonal thing, a prank, a hallucination. I didn't expect—"
"You expected less of me than the truth," he said, flat, and then softer, "I know you. You help first and then believe later."
"That's not wrong." I tried to smile. "That's called caution."
Quinn laughed, watery. "The vet was important."
"He said what?"
"The vet said it's true." He tapped the glass. "He said there's a brood pouch forming. He said seahorses—male seahorses—carry the eggs. He said the cells are developing. He said the test is correct."
"Brood pouch?" I repeated. "You have a brood pouch."
"It's like a bag," Quinn said. "Like a little nursery. It's ours."
He turned, shy. For a breath I saw him like someone else had painted him: not the awkward neighbor who asked to borrow sugar but the person who had slid into my life with soft steps and the smell of sea salt. He wrapped himself in the towel I'd given him when he climbed out of my aquarium, and he looked at me like the whole world kept him safe by my permission.
"How do you expect me to handle this?" I asked. My words were staccato. "We barely know each other."
"That's my fault." He said it without argument. "I shouldn't have—"
"Don't say it." I held up a hand. "Don't you start making me the bad person. There are no rules for this, Quinn."
"I'm not a he if it means nothing," he said. "Call me what you want. Just—stay."
"I'll stay," I said, mostly because my heart had already gone on ahead of my brain.
We moved slowly into a rhythm that made no sense and yet felt like a makeshift kind of faith. Quinn stayed with me. He insisted on calling me "sister" with a ridiculous, old-fashioned tenderness he inherited from some family tradition I never understood, and when he was human he kissed my forehead like someone promising to look after the moon.
"He calls you sister?" my mother, Matilda, asked on the phone, suspicious and delighted, as if the title might be information that explained everything.
"He calls me sister," I repeated, and watched a smile sneak onto my face. "Quinn says he's always liked me. He says he wants this—us—to last."
"Then let him try," said my father, Penn, who had the slow patience of a man who knew how to build things. "People aren't fixed. They become."
"He isn't fully—" I started.
"Doesn't matter." My father barked, cheerfully impatient. "If he comes with good manners and learns to play chess, he's part of the family."
"Chess?" I snorted, then filled the silence with the absurdest detail: Quinn actually learned to play chess. He sat across from my father for an afternoon and let the old man show him how to make a knight gallop.
"Your dad's a war strategist," Quinn told me later, eyes gleaming with pride. "He even taught me about openings."
"You're not a college kid with a life?" I teased.
"I'm a college kid with a life and a brood pouch," Quinn said. "Big difference."
There were moments—no, afternoons—when my chest warmed as if a hand had smoothed it. Quinn would do something tiny and private and the warmth would bloom into a stupid, human tenderness.
"You're the worst cook," he complained one night.
"I'm the worst cook," I corrected.
"No," he said, and then gentle, "You're the best cook for me."
"You say that because you can't move your hands underwater," I teased.
He glared, then smiled in a way that crumpled my defenses. He reached across the counter, touched my wrist lightly, then withdrew like someone embarrassed to have found treasure.
"Don't pretend you didn't like the touch," I said.
"I did." He swallowed. "I liked that you didn't pull away."
"That's called consent," I said, half joking, half not.
He smiled wider. "It's called being mine."
Heart-flutter one: He smiled, and it was a thing I recognized as love. It was not the wide, careless grin of college boys; it was the shy, honest smile of someone who had rehearsed his life into saying the right small things. I felt my own face heat.
"Do seahorses fight?" I asked once, ridiculous and earnest.
"Only sometimes," he answered. "Mostly they dance."
"Then dance with me now."
He did. Or rather, he stood in the aquarium in human form and they brought out an old gramophone at our tiny apartment party. Quinn took my hand and the warmth of it felt like a contract. When he laughed, the laugh reached his eyes. When he kissed my temple, I thought I might explode.
Heart-flutter two: He paused in a crowded room, took off his jacket, and let it fall over my shoulders like armor. "You look cold." He said nothing else. The world grew small enough for the two of us to fit in the seam of his shoulder.
Days folded into one another. Quinn's pregnancy moved fast and uneven; he had morning sickness that sometimes made him curl into my lap and cry. He became touchy about how I interacted with other men, and I understood at once: hormones make jealousies sharp.
"Did you flirt with someone at work?" he asked once, raw and small, as if the entire cosmos would break if I admitted it.
"I glanced," I said. "But I wasn't—"
"You were looking," he interrupted, not accusatory so much as hurt.
"Quinn," I said, and then I surprised myself by stepping close. "You think I'm going to leave you because of a glance?"
"Sometimes I think you think I'm a toy," he said. He jutted his chin toward the aquarium where the little seahorse we called Little Ribbon drifted in lazy circles. "Like, play with me for a night and then toss me aside."
I put my hands on his shoulders, felt the tremor when his breath hitched. "I won't toss you aside."
He looked at me with a gravity that made me want to sit down. "Promise me," he said.
"I won't promise forever," I said, because that would be a lie. "But I promise this—I'll be here now. I don't know the rest."
He cried then, soft and wet and messy, and I felt my own eyes burn. He clung to me like we were two halves of something that had been stolen and returned.
Heart-flutter three: He brushed my hair from my face the morning after a bad dream and kissed me like he'd never been given a chance to say it. "Stay," he whispered.
The pregnancy drew out unexpected tendernesses. Quinn told me about his childhood in the currents, about how his people rarely left the water but loved the world above, about old songs that smelled like brine. He taught me to listen for the softness of glass against skin, for the hush of small fins.
We made plans that were ridiculous and earnest. We talked about names. "If it's a girl," Quinn said, "we should call her Little Ribbon." He said it like he had written the name on his heart.
"You mean Little Ribbon as a nickname," I corrected.
"No," he answered.
I laughed. "You really will insist on everything, won't you?"
"Only on the important things."
We had good days when my parents came over and treated him like a son-in-law in training. We had bad days when Quinn's face would go hollow with pain. We learned the language of each other’s bodies. He learned to take his shoes off before coming into my apartment because he hated leaving sandy footprints where I liked to sleep. I learned to make broth that didn't make him turn away.
"Why did you want me?" I asked him one night, when the city outside our window had gone soft and purple.
He put his palm flat against mine. "You were the first who didn't look at me like a curiosity."
"I was a mess that night," I said. "I had drunk too much."
"But you were still you," he insisted. "And you were afraid and you said my name like it was a lighthouse. I didn't know I'd ever need a lighthouse, but I learned to steer toward it."
"I almost left you." The confession tasted like metal.
"You didn't." He squeezed my hand. "You stayed."
The little aquarium baby grew. The vet, Dr. Fleming Rose, monitored the progress with an amused, steady seriousness that put me at ease. "This is not a common case," he told us, chalk dust on his collar. "But nature finds many ways to keep its balance. Care, food, shelter. Be calm and the brood will follow."
"Is it always a girl?" I asked because Quinn wanted to know.
"Not always," Dr. Fleming said with a smile. "But this one looks like—well, the markers point to girl."
We prepared as if to meet someone we had already loved. We knitted tiny things—ridiculous for a seahorse but still charming. Quinn organized a small nest of sea moss inside a specially designed aquarium chamber. He asked advice about human baby care like someone studying a new grammar. He called me "teacher" once, and I almost died from the sweetness.
The pressure of the world around us kept batting at our window. Rumors, curiosity, a few insensitive stares from people who had come to the aquarium for a spectacle. Once, a group of teenagers waited outside our building, phones poised and curious. I felt the old prickling of shame and that animal self-protection rose in me like a wall.
"Let's move," Quinn said softly. "Please."
"Where would we go?" I asked.
"To my people," he said simply. "They like you. They know how to keep things private."
"You sure your family will—?"
"They will. I promise."
We went. His family welcomed me into a house that smelled like salt and jasmine. They were careful with their words and generous with their tea. Quinn's mother—she was a stern, warm woman named Estrella Garza in their own language, though she insisted I call her Aunt—held my hands and said, "Thank you for staying."
"What if I can't stay?" I whispered one night to Quinn when the nervousness braided into my sleep.
"You can leave," he said. "But I hope you won't."
The birth came like a quick storm. Quinn wanted me in the room. He wanted my hand to squeeze. He told me to be brave because he was braver in the way seahorses are braver—bearing life where others cannot. Dr. Fleming stood steady as a rock.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Always," I lied and then laughed.
"You don't have to be always," Quinn said, grinning through the pain.
"Yes I do," I said. "For now."
The tiny creature arrived in a small, miraculous spray and then clung to the glass like a living symbol. It was perfect and furious and tiny, a sprig of life with a tail that wrapped itself around the green moss. It twitched and then settled.
"It's a girl," Dr. Fleming announced, smiling.
We watched the little thing and felt the world rearrange itself around the small weight of newness.
After the birth, Quinn's small ecstasy dissolved into something like a plan. "When will we tell your parents?" he asked, already counting on acceptance.
"Next week," I said, though in the back of my mind I thought maybe we never needed to tell anyone anything beyond our small family.
But my father and mother already knew, had known in the way my mother knows everything—she called me in the morning and said she had baked something. "Bring her home," my father said, as if the invitation needed no more.
When they met Quinn in the living room with a little seahorse curled against the glass between us, my father's face softened. "He makes you happy," Penn said simply. "That's enough."
There was a moment later, in the quiet, when Quinn took my hand and knelt the way men do in stories with boxes in their hands. He pulled from his pocket the small velvet ring box he'd been hiding since the contest they'd had at the aquarium for the best proposal.
"Will you marry me?" he asked, which was both ridiculous and inevitable.
The ring was nothing like I'd imagined; it was a stone that caught the light like a sea. I laughed, and then I cried, and then I said yes because it felt like answering the title of a story we had already been living.
We celebrated in small, strange ways. My parents and Quinn's family sat at one table, handing chopsticks and seaweed and cake like any family. People asked questions we didn't always want to answer, and sometimes I lied. Once, when a reporter tried to spin our story into spectacle, we shut the door and let the sound pass.
There were jealousies to navigate. There were days when Quinn, in full human shape, would stand outside one of the aquarium's tanks and watch visitors watch, and his face would crumble under the weight of being seen as "other." Sometimes in public someone would hiss a question about "freak" and the shock would press at our skin, but then some other stranger would come by and say, "You look happy." That would anchor us.
"I used to think I'd never be tied down," I told him once in the dark, my fingers trailing along the outline of his jaw. "I liked the idea of being untethered."
"People grow," Quinn said simply. "Sea horses anchor with their tails. Maybe anchors are good."
"Do you think marriage will change us?" I asked.
"It might," he said. "But I hope it changes us toward more us."
He smiled at me then, not coy but certain, and I felt the small steady knot of my life loosen.
The little girl—Little Ribbon, because Quinn had insisted on the nickname—grew. She was not human by measure but she learned the small human things anyway. She bobbed in her own small aquarium chamber and let us watch her. She learned to recognize my voice, to bend toward it like sun to a window.
There came a day when a small problem bent toward spectacle: a colleague from the aquarium had posted a video with shaky hands showing our family story, and comments bloomed like algae: some praising, some cruel. One woman in particular wrote things that stung, thin as paper but sharp.
"People will talk," I told Quinn, fighting something hot in my chest.
He stared at the screen for a long time, then closed the laptop. "Let them talk," he said. "We know what we are."
"But they might—"
"They won't break us." He squeezed my shoulder. "We have each other."
I wanted to believe him like I believed in little practical things—tea, heat pads, knitting patterns. "They could make trouble at work," I said.
"Then we'll deal," he answered. "Together."
Then there was the small, ridiculous moment of triumph that felt like redemption. Quinn's old rival from college—a boy who'd once mocked Quinn for his quiet—showed up at the aquarium and tried to make a public scene, laughing too loud, flinging words like bait. He asked Quinn if he intended to "keep a human" as his trophy, if the family would be a circus act.
"I won't be laughed at," Quinn said, and walked toward him.
I moved to stand in front of him, but Quinn's hand found mine. He turned and looked at the crowd.
"This is our life," he said. "Not an exhibit. Not a headline. We will not be reduced to what you need us to be."
The man faltered. There were witnesses, children with sticky ice-cream fingers, parents with soft faces. People around us stilled.
Then, in the way punishment often unspools, the man who'd been so loud suddenly found his phone recording him doing something he'd rather not have recorded. Someone handed a clip to the aquarium manager. It spread, and the man who'd mocked Quinn had his insults played back to him in a loop; his arrogance became ridicule as his own words were repurposed against him. The crowd's mood shifted from mocking to scorn. People took pity on him, then turned away. He left red-faced, small, and unspectacular.
Quinn watched him go with a satisfied little smile like a person who had seen a justice he approved of. "Some people just forget there are consequences," he said.
"I didn't foresee this," I admitted, surprised at how much satisfaction the moment gave me. It wasn't cruelty; it was a correction. The man's performance had collapsed under its own weight. The crowd's reactions changed like tides.
We lived in small domesticities that felt enormous in their ordinary rituals. I learned the cadence of Quinn's breath. He learned my coffee order down to the foam. We built a life that sometimes felt like scaffolding around a secret and sometimes felt like a true foundation. We had fights—big ones, loud ones—where words sliced and then stitched. We had reconciliations where we folded into each other and found our old languages again.
"Will you promise one thing?" Quinn asked me once, maybe six months after Little Ribbon was born.
"Name it."
"Don't disappear on me," he said.
"I won't." I kissed him. "I won't run."
He smiled like a person who had waited long to be believed. "Good."
The wedding was small. My parents cried; Penn taught a neighbor how to make a seaweed dish that was actually delicious; Quinn's family braided tiny blue ribbons into my hair. Little Ribbon stayed in her tank, tiny and glinting, while the rest of us stood on the deck near the aquarium's big tank and said words we had learned together.
"I promise to try," I said into the small microphone, not "forever" because that felt too large and heavy in the mouth. "I promise to try."
Quinn took the ring and slid it on my finger. It fit as if our lives had been measured for it all along.
Years passed, though they didn't slide so smoothly; they layered. There were ordinary mornings with cereal and homework and aquarium chores. There were nights when Quinn would get up to check Little Ribbon because the baby's fin had a small curl. There were hospital visits for other things, and there were mornings where I would wake to the smell of salt because Quinn had gone to the tanks in the dark and returned wet.
Once, at a family gathering, an old man who'd once mocked Quinn now sat and watched him with the same begrudging warmth my father gave. "He grows into himself," Penn said, satisfied.
"I thought I'd always be alone," I told him that night, looking at our small, loud family around a table.
"People change," he answered. "And some changes are the good kind."
Our story isn't a headline now. It's a life stitched in the seam between sea and city. We keep the aquarium well. We read about sea grasses and urban planning and human parenting. We argue about whether Little Ribbon should be allowed more sunlight. We argue over furniture. We argue about which pictures to post.
And sometimes, late at night when the city is soft, Quinn will sidle up to me, press his forehead against mine, and whisper, "Remember the test?" He says it like a prayer and a joke.
"I remember," I say. "I remember you as a seahorse and as a man. I remember the strange music of that first night."
He smiles, the small, honest smile that began everything, and tucks my hair behind my ear.
We keep the small velvet box in a drawer. The ring sits where it belongs, and sometimes I take it out and finger it when the world is loud.
Little Ribbon bobs in her chamber, older and braver, knowing two kinds of sky. She sometimes swims to the glass and looks at us like a small oracle, like a way the universe says: it made room for you.
"I once thought being untethered was everything," I tell Quinn on nights when stars are brave.
"You found an anchor," he replies.
"And you?" I ask.
"I found someone who will stay," he says. "Even when I become a figure of curiosity. Even when people point."
We laugh. We argue. We love. We keep our little aquarium patched against the world.
On rare nights when the city sleeps, I take the ring out, press it to the glass of the aquarium, and let the water's hush answer the small, stubborn beating of our life.
The End
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