1. Mack

Chapter 1

I stared at my phone, seeing my mother's name flash with another missed call. It was childish to ignore her, but I just wasn't in the mood to talk. At least not to her. I loved her, but I had so much resentment over the things she did in the past that it was hard for me to make nice all the time.

Especially now that one of her many bad decisions was rearing its ugly head yet again and having a direct impact on my life. A very negative impact.

Part of me wanted to give her grace. She was just a kid herself. I understood that she did what she had to do to survive on her own with a baby. She got pregnant right after starting college and somehow managed to keep me a secret from her parents for years. But after not going home at all during that time, her uninterested parents were suddenly interested in watching their daughter walk across the stage. No one was more surprised than her when they arrived and found her living in family housing with a toddler instead of the standard dorm they thought they had been paying for all that time.

And they were livid.

They completely cut her off. Her and—by extension—me.

But she persevered.

With a degree in early child development, she was able to get a good job as a counselor and managed to secure daycare for me in just about every job she had.

However, her ingenuity wasn't always worth the price.

Once she learned that she could get paid for medical experimentations on herself and her son, she did what she thought was the prudent thing for herself and for science…and she signed us up.

Experimentation with human growth hormones and genetic engineering were lucrative and legal at the time, so I tell myself she didn't mean us any harm. In my heart, I wanted to believe she thought everything was truly safe and important for the advancement of medicine. And the drugs that were pushed on me from the ages of nine to twelve did help me grow to be the tallest in my class with easy muscle-building genetics, but they had one devastating side effect that was getting harder and harder to ignore.

Lactation wasn't completely unheard of, but when it started for me when I was twelve, I was terrified. So was my mom. She knew it was an unexpected side effect, but when the doctors told her it was no big deal, and reminded her that she had absolutely no recourse after all the waivers and disclaimers she'd signed, we just dealt with it.

Well, I dealt with it.

For the most part, my milk leaked out in small amounts, and I could generally pass off any wetness as sweat. I even mastered the art of forcing myself to vomit just to have an excuse if any bigger wet spots appeared on my shirt.

Fortunately, that didn't happen often, and through high school and college, it was hardly a nuisance at all. But as soon as I got into my thirties, things started to change. Every time I worked out, my nipples would leak in much higher quantities than before. Eventually, I had to buy special clothes made for lactating men, and now as I rounded the bend past forty, it was all but impossible to date.

My mother apologized a hundred times and begged for forgiveness when it first started to happen, but once I stopped complaining about it, her sense of culpability seemed to have waned as well. Now, whenever I brought it up, she was quick to blame me, accusing me of eating too many meat products or blaming my interest in weight lifting for the increased lactation.

As I stared down at it, my phone rang again. Fuck, I have to do it. With a deep breath, I hit the answer button. "Hey, Mom. How are you?"

"I'm good, sweetheart. How are you?"

"Fine. Just getting home from work."

"Oh, good. I'm glad you're liking your new job. I was afraid that moving up north would be difficult for you, but it sounds like you're all settled in."

I hadn't actually said any of those things, but it was easier for her to create her own narrative than to risk having to listen to a problem, so I just agreed and moved on. "Yeah, it's fine. What about you?"

"I'm great. Remember that man I told you about? Walter. Well, he wants to take me on a cruise. Isn't that exciting?"

Walter? I was pretty sure she told me about a Charles a few weeks ago, but whatever. "Yeah, that sounds great. Where are you going?"

"Alaska. We'll be gone for three weeks starting in June, and he's paying for everything. It's so romantic."

I rolled my eyes and did my best not to let her hear my sigh over the line. "Nice. I'm happy for you, Mom."

"I'm happy for me too, honey. And don't you worry. You're gonna find your special someone too. Maybe we can go on double dates when you come to visit."

"Yeah, maybe." Never. "I better get going, but it was good talking to you."

"You too, honey. I'll call you next week."

"Okay. Love you."

The line went dead without a response. Not because she didn't love me. I believed that she did, and she said it sometimes. Just not all the time. My mother generally put herself first, and as soon as the conversation drifted away from her, she quickly lost interest. I learned at a very young age not to take it personally.

She fed me and gave me shelter, and I'd had a pretty decent life—unethical medical experimentation for money notwithstanding.

And it was time for me to stop blaming my mother for all my problems and start taking matters into my own hands. Which is what I did when I pulled up my laptop and started searching for ways to stop male lactation.

Permanently.

The Latin Brotherhood came up in just about every search I tried. I looked into them a few times over the years, but what they had to offer wasn't what I was looking for. They provided resources and support to be successful as a lactating man. Their members often profited from it or at least were able to live with their condition well enough to have a successful life.

That wasn't what I needed.

I needed a way out of my situation. An alternative to living with it. I was looking for something extreme, but I couldn't see any other option.

After several false starts and visits to sites that appeared to be legitimate resources, but upon further investigation were just thinly veiled religious organizations trying to push whatever their agenda was, I finally found a glimmer of hope.

A doctor.

A real doctor with a real degree at a real hospital who specialized in endocrinology and had a glowing recommendation from The Lactin Brotherhood.

I read through testimonials and came across one from a man who had surgery to stop his lactation, and it changed his life in every way. That was all I needed to know.

Immediately, I booked an appointment for later in the week and checked my stock portfolio to see which holdings made the most sense to sell if I needed cash to pay for the treatment. I was ready to take the first available slot in the surgery schedule and wasn't going to let a five- or even six-figure price tag stop me.

It was time to move on with my life for good, and if surgery was the only way to do it, sign me the fuck up.