Chapter 29

Back home after everyone had zonked out, I stared at the ceiling and thought back to everything that had happened in just a few months. I was no longer the loner kid without a family. I had three women who loved me and who I loved completely. Instead of a distant mother who blamed me in some small way for the death of her husband, I had lived with a kind, nurturing woman who treated me in every way as her son.

I was still wrapping my brain around all the physical changes I was going through and everything that we had discovered so far. If I said I wasn’t nervous about it, I would be lying. Even normal teenagers go through troubles finding themselves and I was sitting on the mother lode of identity crises. It’s one thing to accept that I am some harbinger of the next stage in humanity. It’s another thing entirely to try and sort out how to take on that responsibility without screwing it up. At least it was guaranteed to keep my life from getting boring.

The one thing I did have some regrets about was Tina. She had pulled away from me and I was worried I would never get her back. Besides Zoe, she was my first connection to anything like a family, and I was loth to give her up now. Zoe seemed to have faith that everything would turn out alright and I sure as hell hoped she was right about that.

In reality there was nothing I could do but accept what was happening and move forward. Rolling over I draped an arm over Zoe’s stomach, pulling her closer to me. Unlike most people, I knew what life had in store for me now, or at least a little bit of it. My destiny in life seemed a little more clear and I knew that as long as I had Zoe and the rest of the girls with me, we had a good chance of making things work.