One late morning, he woke up with the sun beaming against his face, with the thought of sex burning his brain. It wasn’t usual for him to want sex so much in the morning — given his age, and the fact that he was in a committed relationship. Every year, he realized that his need for sexual intimacy lessened. All he wanted to do was lay with Kasper in bed, or watch a movie with him, or go to the music shop and buy a recently released album by bands they had never listened to before. Kasper’s head beside his own, his ginger hair fanning across their crisp flower-patterned pillows, his pale freckled skin, was no longer as unfamiliar as it used to be. Every year, he waited for August 19th to arrive.

Finally, fifteen years together.

As the day slowly went by, he kept thinking back to that morning. He had sex not long after they woke up, he got Kasper underneath him, glistening and happy, just like he had wanted. And yet, he walked away from their bedroom still feeling like something was missing. They still used condoms even though their friends who had also been together for over a decade no longer did. It was mostly to keep the cleaning up easy. They weren’t the kind of couple who liked to linger in bed after sex, his penis softening inside. They usually wanted to create pleasure and get the rest done as quickly as possible.

But that morning he had wanted to slip the condom off, but of course he hadn’t, because he had been too focused on making Kasper climax to ask if it would be alright. He just wondered what would have happened if he had taken it off. Nothing. Except cleaning would have been a hassle. He didn’t know how to feel about the fact that nothing would have happened — they were exclusive and most certainly not diseased, and Kasper couldn’t get pregnant.

Kasper would never get pregnant.

Maybe he had wanted to take Kasper without a condom so he could impregnate him — so what? It shouldn’t have felt so wrong to want such a thing with his lover of fifteen years. But it did. It felt incredibly dirty.

It shouldn’t have felt dirty, because they had friends — heterosexuals — who wanted to get their partners pregnant, too. It was a normal thing to want after so many years spent together. And the heteros could achieve their wish, they could hold a tiny thing and look at all of its features, they could say it has your nose or I hope it doesn’t grow up with your habit of leaving its shoes all over the place, they could talk about the future over and over again, knowing that they could get everything they wanted. But he and Kasper couldn’t. Maybe his need felt silly, rather than dirty. Sad and depraved.

He imagined leaving such a large part of himself deep inside of Dante — half of his DNA, compiled into an entire baby — as a newborn, he had been fifty-one centimeters and about four kilograms. Which in comparison to him and Kasper was small. But when he thought about a baby about that size being inside of Kasper, connected via an umbilical cord, he thought of it as an all-consuming thing. Something larger than the both of them.

Two days after their uneventful anniversary — they only went to dinner at a slightly more expensive restaurant than usual, and left disappointed at the taste, and then shared a tub of strawberry ice cream in front of the television — they had sex again. That night, with permission, he went in without a condom.

Once they were done, he watched himself drip out as the other man stood up from the bed — adamant to clean himself up in the bathroom without help, not really used to being dirtied in such a way — and as he watched his semen run down, a pearly glint against a tanned inner thigh, he cursed God. For that was the biggest part of himself that he could leave inside of Kasper, and it would not stay. It would disappear down the shower drain and whatever was leftover would be wiped off with a fuzzy washcloth that they never used, which would later be washed in the washing machine. It would never grow into a little baby, half of him, half of Kasper. It would only remain him, all alone, until it would be cleaned off, like the stain that it truly was. Empty potential.

Throughout their relationship, Kasper gained a healthy — perhaps a bit more — amount of weight. When they first met, he had been a wispy boy with fragile fingernails and a constant weight of fatigue heavy on his shoulders. Later, it would be revealed to him that Kasper’s parents never really fed him properly. His pa was a police agent and his mother a nurse, so he was left home alone from an early age most of the time, with ingredients for easy dinners and barely enough other food for breakfast and lunch. Kasper told him that there was only enough to eat when his parents took time off, since they only brought proper groceries when it was convenient for them.

He loved cooking for Kasper, ever since their relationship began, but he became obsessed with it when they moved in together after dating for two years. When he left home, his own mama gave him a cooking book, filled with recipes she used to cook when he was little, but stopped cooking when they became too much effort. All kinds of quiches, salads, multiple kinds of stamppot, and soups. He was obsessed with making them for Kasper, with trying to make them taste exactly like they had done when he was a kid. So he could share a part of himself, of his childhood, with his partner.

Watching Kasper fill out was just a side effect of his obsession. A very welcomed side effect, of course. He loved seeing ribs and nubs of a spine disappear under a nice layer of fat, and seeing Kasper become healthy and well taken care of. He himself gained weight as well, just like most men their age, and he loved joking about their mutual weight gain. We’re becoming true middle-aged men. And silently we’re growing old together. While they had sex he always found himself grabbing at the soft flesh of the other’s thigh, flesh which had not been there in the beginning, which he had summoned with his cooking and care.

After their anniversary, he began thinking about the extra padding around Kasper’s stomach. It would make a perfect home for their baby, soft and warm and protective.

Soft and warm and protective. Maybe his need to impregnate Kasper also had something to do with trust. He would absolutely love their baby, even while it was out of sight and growing in his lover’s stomach. He would want it to be healthy and safe, but health and safety was not something he could provide before its birth. Kasper would have to eat enough, and he’d have to stop drinking and smoking, he’d have to stop being clumsy too, which was a quality he could both be infatuated with — like when they got drunk, and Kasper stumbled against his chest — and annoyed by — like when Kasper nearly fell down the stairs while they were rushing to get to the movie theatre on time.

In leaving the seed that would later grow into their beloved child in Kasper, he would have to trust him to make the right choices. He would give his partner something utterly precious, and by doing this he was basically telling Kasper I trust you to take care of this for a little while, for us, until it’s developed and out of you, until I can see it and protect it, too.

He was, in a way, a selfish person. He and Kasper would probably never break up, but they did spend time away from each other. It was exhilarating to think of Kasper, full with their baby, going on walks or going to the store or at a restaurant with his friends. At some point, he would be visibly pregnant. He could be away, and yet Kasper would always carry a piece inside of him, and people would know. They would take one look at Kasper and they would know that he was in a serious relationship with another man, they would not assume that he was single just because he didn’t have his arm around a girl.

They couldn’t get married, and maybe that had some part in it. They had friends who knew about them, most of them heterosexuals, friends who had partners for some time, but none of their relationships had lasted as long as his and Kasper’s. And still, it was like they weren’t seen as equals. Their friends did not care that they were homosexuals, but they did not see them as anything serious — as if their lack of marriage was by choice, and not because of people ages ago who, for some reason, had decided that their love was wrong, that it meant less.

A child was a serious commitment, something that would tie them together for the rest of their lives. Even if they did, some day, somehow, part ways.

He tried to imagine what life would be like with Kasper pregnant. After their anniversary, after he began thinking more about the baby, rather than only the pregnancy, he would lay in bed during the mornings and he would think while Kasper slept silently beside him. Sometimes, he also thought about his mam, who had died nearly two years prior from breast cancer. She had figured out that he and Kasper were lovers all by herself. She understood them, in a way, and she had welcomed Kasper into her life without any problems when she found out that he had no contact with his own family. He remembered when she divorced his father, it had been her choice, and nobody in her life had stood by her, leaving him as the only person that she had. It must have been nice for her, to get to know someone as kind as Kasper.

If he had impregnated Kasper, they would lay in bed at night, the moonlight shining into their room, and they would talk about the baby, about what they should name it. If it was a boy, it might have been named after Kasper’s uncle, who had tried to take care of him when nobody else would, who had died when his nephew was young. If it was a girl, it might have been named after his mama. Quietly, he imagined having both. Having a Jonas and an Eva.

After a while he began having dreams as well. About getting into his car and driving to his childhood home, about getting to tell his mama about the thing he had contributed to, the baby she could meet in a few months. She would have loved it, too. She never got to be a grandmother — when he was younger, before the divorce, his mother told his grandmother I can’t imagine not becoming an oma, myself. He would get to tell her that he would have a baby with the kindest person they both knew.

He started praying to a God he didn’t believe in for it to happen. If there had been a church nearby their home, he might have started going there, too. Growing up, he felt as if he had a hole in his heart even his mother hadn’t been able to fill. And then he met Kasper, and he felt complete, like his heart grew twice its size and constantly threatened to jump out of his body with every beat it took.

It wasn’t like Kasper stopped being enough for him, but a new hole formed nonetheless after their anniversary. He began realizing that some day they would both be dead, and then there would be nothing left as evidence of their love. No marriage, no fully grown person with their own family, named Jonas or Eva, who would be loving, just like Kasper, with fiery red hair, and creative, like him, with strong cheekbones.

Though he never managed to talk about it with Kasper. They could never have a baby, so it was unfair to even ask for it in the hypothetical sense. He knew that Kasper would think about the baby as well, that he in some way might start hoping for it, too. The fake baby in his head would then become a shared, loved thing between them, a real concept formed slowly, a person who would be perfect but who they would never get to meet. Half of him, half of Kasper.