I have the perfect life.
It wasn't always that way. As recently as a year ago I was facing a seemingly insurmountable problem. But perhaps I should start at the beginning. My name is Tyler. I'm a 32 year old professional man. I'm happily married for five glorious years to the woman of my dreams, Kayla, a potter who works out of a studio in the back of our house and sells her sculptures for an obscene amount of money in frou-frou galleries across the country. It's amazing to me what ordinarily sane people will pay for a lump of hardened clay, but, hey, whatever floats your boat.
Everything seemed to be going better than a dream for Kayla and me. Then, about two years ago, Kayla started feeling her biological clock ticking. Suddenly, she wanted a baby, and that's when things went to hell in a really big way. Kayla and I has always had a very, very healthy sex life. Practically every night would see us fucking like a pair of rabbits, and whenever she'd ask about protection, I'd tell her I had it covered. And that was true...sort of.
When I was a teenager, my identical twin brother, Daniel, and I went to a summer camp. We were maybe sixteen years old at the time. And we were miserable. Daniel met up with this girl at the camp, and asked me to cover for him after lights out one night so they could meet up. So, after bed check in my cabin, I scrambled out the window, took a shortcut across the yard and into Daniel's cabin, where I climbed into his bed just as the counselor came in an did a head count. We were safe!
As I was scrambling out of his bed to head back to mine, I felt a bug or something bite me on the ankle. The next day I was sick as a dog--nasty liquids coming out of every orifice, high fever. It was hell. I was hospitalized for two full weeks. Never did find out what bit me, thought.
I recovered, and was informed of one small complication: the high fever had left me sterile. I would probably never be able to father a child. But, hell, I was sixteen years old at the time. As long as I could still get it up, who gave a damn if I was shooting blanks?
Kayla, it seems, would have cared. All during our courtship and three years of marriage, I'd never told her that I was infertile. What was the point? Neither one of us had ever expressed any interest in having children. So there was my quandary. Do I tell her that I can't give her the child she wants? I considered it. Hell, I even started to tell her, one night when she'd brought up the baby subject again. But then she startled me by stating how much she wanted MY baby. Flattering, yes, but not a good segue into "hey, baby, did I ever tell you I can't have children?" Yep, that would have gone over really big.
So, we continued to get it on every night; two, sometimes three times a night. It rapidly went from being a joy and pleasure to a chore. I began to dread each evening. And each time Kayla's period came, she became more and more depressed. I tried to pull her out of it with all the usual lines; "These things take time, baby," and "you know, there are other options." But she didn't want other options.
And then she started with "we need to go to the doctor." I know, this would have been the perfect opening to break the news to her, but it turns out that I'm a bit of a coward. I couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth, but I couldn't let a well meaning doctor spill the beans either. What could I do?
And then one night, it came to me. Actually, the idea started brewing after an afternoon of watching talk shows. You know the type: "Give my teen daughter a paternity test to see which horny boy knocked her up!" and other stupid titles like that. I watched in frustration, wishing my condition on every one of these careless kids--why should they be popping out babies left and right, and those of us who want them, can't? As a furious seventeen year old punk with bleached hair and his jeans around his kneecaps yelled "I don't care what your *bleep* test says, that ain't my kid!", I reached for the remote to put myself out of my misery. But before I could switch channels, a well dressed lady in the audience stood up and patiently explained to the pissed off teen-aged boy that the test was something like 99.9878% accurate, and since no two people have the same genetic material, there was no way the baby couldn't be his.
The thought flashed through my mind--what about identical twins? Two halves of the same egg and sperm, identical twins have the same genetic material...
It didn't actually come to me until about 2 o'clock that morning. If I couldn't father Kayla's baby, could Daniel? Better question, would Daniel? And how do you go about bringing something like this up? Especially to someone like Daniel.
The opportunity presented itself the following weekend. Kayla was invited out with some girlfriends, so I decided to pay a visit to my brother. He was alone, too. His "roommate" (that's what he calls Tom, anyway. But I know better. Daniel had come out to me when we were in college.) was at work, so it was just the two of us lounging around the pool, sipping beers. I was preoccupied, trying to figure out how to broach the subject I'd been wanting to talk over with him. I guess I was too preoccupied, because Daniel seemed to notice. "What's up, Bro? You are totally out of it today."
I sighed and rested my half empty beer bottle on the arm of the lounge chair. "Kayla and I have been having some...problems."
Daniel looked shocked. He really liked Kayla...as a sister. "Oh, no! What's wrong?"
I looked at Daniel. Really looked at him. You couldn't tell us apart. Same dark hair, dark eyes, cut physique. Hell, we could still, at 32 years of age, pull it over on our parents if we were to try.
"She wants a baby," I said flatly, and could see the moment it hit Daniel.
"Oh, man, you never told her you can't have kids?"
"Hell, no! I mean, she never told me she wanted kids, so how was I to know she'd get this bug up her ass five years later? It didn't seem to matter at the time, and now..." I shrugged. "I don't want to lose her, man. I love her too much."
We were silent for a long time, each lost in his own thoughts. I gazed into the sparkling blue water of the pool, working up the courage to propose my idea to Daniel. Finally, I just took the plunge. "I have an idea, though…" He looked at me, eyebrow quirked. "This is going to sound really strange, but hear me out, okay?"
"Sure."
"I can't father the baby, but you could."
"What?" Daniel looked truly flabbergasted.
"We're twins. Identical twins. The baby would genetically be as much mine as yours."
He snatched my beer bottle away from me. "You're insane, man. You've pickled your brains. I'm GAY, for God's sake!"
"So? You're clean, aren't you?"
