Dressed in a simple T-shirt and sweatpants Mr. Magpie had provided, Gray looked perfectly peaceful. His dark blond hair was scattered over the smooth pillow, creating a halo that Shadow had earlier arranged into a perfectly symmetrical shape. His chest slowly rose and dipped, confirming to Shadow that he was in fact still alive and safely getting back to health at an accelerated rate.
When Gray’s phone rang, Shadow paused the TV and answered. He’d talked to Beast before, and Knight had taught him how to take photos with the phone, so he’d sent them picture updates of Gray’s healing wound.
“This is Gray’s phone,” he said with his mouth full.
The silence on the other end of the line only lasted two seconds. The voice that blasted from the receiver so loudly Shadow had to pull it away from his ear was unmistakably Rev’s. “What? Why are you picking up his phone?”
Shadow took a moment to compose himself. “He’s sleeping. Can I take a message?”
“I know he’s sleeping. Beast told me. Now wake him up.”
“Um, no, I can’t do that. He will only wake up once his healing is complete. At least that’s what the doctor said. Kissing him didn’t work.”
Rev’s raspy groan was like a crackle in Shadow’s ear, but he endured, because he didn’t want to be on bad terms with Gray’s father. But his explanation must have spurred even more anger, because what came next was a chain of words that sounded remarkably ugly.
“You piece of shit. You take your hands away from my son. If you don’t, I swear I’m going to personally cut off your dick and feed it to you!”
Shadow crossed his legs with a frown. He’d grown to understand why a dick was such a private matter to humans, and he liked it where it was. “Err, I… I’m not doing anything bad. I’m taking care of his body while he sleeps.”
Rev took a raspy breath. “Look, you fucking idiot, he is only interested in you because he’s lonely. You know yourself that you’re not a real man.”
All of Shadow’s good mood drizzled to the carpet. If he were talking to Rev face to face, he might have been unable to hold back from lashing out, but he was left squeezing the phone. “We have a connection you cannot understand. I may not have had a childhood, or a family, but I am a real human man.”
Rev laughed. “Sure, sure. You’re five weeks old. A real human. Give me a break. You will never understand how to be human because you didn’t live like one. You are a monster, and if you must know, you give everyone the creeps. You’re just a toy to him. A way to pass the time before he meets a real man, not some pussy who fucking draws butterflies with chalk like a little girl! Or cries when he’s upset.”
Shadow sank in the armchair as he looked back at Gray’s serene face with a growing tightness in his throat. He hadn’t drawn butterflies. They were moths. Was there really something wrong with him?
“I’m human enough!” he growled and hung up, too frustrated to talk anymore since Rev never had anything nice to say to him anyway.
“I’m human enough…” he whispered to himself, even though the longer he thought about this the less he believed his own words. The bikers often laughed at things he did, and even Gray had warned him about talking about his troubles with coming. Would he never really be what Gray needed? If he and Gray were to be together for so much longer than just a month, would Gray see the cracks in Shadow’s facade sooner or later? How would Shadow ever live up to be the ‘real man’ Gray needed if he didn’t know what that entailed?
He pressed a button on the remote the way Magpie had showed him and said, “How to be a real man?”
The screen popped up with dozens of videos to choose from. There. He would learn.
The first video featured two brothers, both of whom had Beast’s physique. Many of the things he learned from the film were unclear and suggested that men have somehow changed for the worse over time. The authors then suggested a video presenting the female perspective on the same topic, and Shadow followed their advice, watching that one next.
The videos were an instructive rabbit hole into which Shadow fell for hours, and the longer he watched, the more he feared that Rev might actually be right about him. He’d been doing things wrong all along. Gray had been kind enough not to point it out most times, but the truth was right there on the screen.
Shadow did not qualify as a modern man.
But with the advice from these strangers, he would learn.
*
Shadow recognized that Gray was waking up from the way his fingers stirred under the blanket. He instantly stopped practicing his new gait and climbed on the bed, leaning over Gray with a sense of anticipation burning inside him. Finally, after five days of constant sleep, his lover was back to meet the new improved Shadow .The heartbeat was no longer sluggish, and when Shadow moved higher up his lover’s body, he could even sense Gray’s breath coming more rapidly.