The Legal Contract between Ohio Regional Carrier Centre and oneBlaine Anderson, signed 21st September 2009

I, the undersigned,Blaine Anderson, consent to give my body to the Ohio Regional Carrier Centre for the determined time often years, producing healthy children until such time as my contract is up or extenuating circumstances such as familial circumstances or medical problems render me incapable of continuing.

In exchange for the continuing production of healthy children, the ORCC will cover all medical costs of the pregnancies and the costs of my care and residence on the centre. My safety will also be ensured, and if at any point a client makes me feel unsafe, then the centre will have the responsibility to ensure my well-being is attended to before the client's.

Signed:Blaine Devon Anderson, 21st September 2009

He can smell the ink drying on the life-changing document as the woman before him smiles reassuringly and reaches for a pen to add her own signature to the paper, as he stares at the lines of laughter around her bright eyes, the grey gathering in feathered waves at her temples. Has he really chosen to do this? To give over his life and body to creating children others would love and cherish, for ten long years? He'll be almost thirty by the time he's legally entitled to leave the centre, long years spent bearing and birthing children he would never even see, never get to hold.

But when he looks around the room, at the pictures of happy couples and people holding their newly-born, healthy, perfect children, he knew he had chosen the right path. How many other doors would his unusual anatomy open for him? Surrogacy will be a life of giving, of bringing smiles to faces and a joyful gleam to eyes, and it's a life he wants.

"Welcome to the family, Mr. Anderson," she says charmingly, laying the pen down and giving him a sweet smile. "You have three weeks to wrap up all your affairs and for us to have a room organised for you here, then you will be able to move in. There will be a month's training programme which we have all of our carriers go through, then you will be ready to start finding clients and getting pregnant."

Blaine grins at her and shook her hand politely, pulling his hood over his head as he leaves the building into a day dreary with light drizzle and darkly swollen clouds scudding across the sky. He can't help the glow swelling within him as he walks the streets, dirty water splashing over his feet with each car that drives past, irritable drivers squinting through rainwashed windscreens.

He's going to change lives. Blaine Anderson, just sixteen, a virgin and the possessor of female anatomy that has gained him nothing but bullying and being shunned by peers throughout his life, is going to give those who desperately desire a child, but are unable to bear one themselves, the opportunity to become a parent.

He is going to give so much love to a world that might otherwise continue in longing.

Blaine loses his virginity around a month after he moves into the centre, to man with dark skin and wide eyes and gentle hands on his trembling body, who reassures him softly and sweetly, whose caresses send heat flickering slowly over his skin, who kisses him to distract him from the inevitable pain when he first pushes into him, who holds him for a while afterwards, kissing his temple and thanking him and leaving him sleepy and warm and sated when he has to leave.

The man's name is Andrew, he's a single man in his thirties who has always longed to be a father. While Blaine's pregnant, Andrew tells him stories about his own father, speaks of a man who was the superhero he always looked up to, and Blaine smiles to himself and curves his hands over the growing bulge of his stomach, feeling the child within growing with each passing day.

He doesn't hold the baby he gives birth to, doesn't even see her. He's informed that she was healthy and beautiful, that Andrew cried with gratitude when he was allowed to hold her, that he named her Rosa and took her away from the centre, away to a place where Blaine will never see her. But he doesn't mind the arrangement. Seeing a baby means meeting their eyes, and meeting their eyes means developing an emotional connection, falling in love with the children he carries, and he can't do that. He has to keep with the terms dictated by his contract, and he can't keep a baby he births, he must give their care over to his clients.

His next pregnancy doesn't go as well, and his client is rougher during conception, his hands too firm on his skin and his eyes dark and holding some wild, something Blaine's afraid of, but he lies still and takes it, as he's expected to do. He's sore for a few days afterwards, but they conceive with the first try and he doesn't have to repeat the experience.

But he loses this child, in a late night incident that's bloody and traumatic. He cries afterwards, feeling empty and desolate and a disappointment to everybody, though Nurse Pilsbury wraps her arms gently around him and assures him it wasn't his fault, and some things are just so beautiful they can't exist in this world. He takes three months to recuperate, to mend his shattered heart and let his confidence return to him.

His next client is a pair of young men, their faces still lingering with traces of baby fat, innocence still in their eyes, and they hold hands and smile into each other's eyes and have long conversations in a moment without words throughout their initial consultation. The smaller one, a blonde with a wide smile and an excitable way of talking, is the biological father, the one who lays Blaine out gently in a warm bed and kisses slowly over his shoulders and neck and collarbones throughout their sex, and Blaine arches up into every wet press of lips to his skin, soft groans bubbling in his chest. The man leaves immediately afterwards, no doubt back to his boyfriend's arms, and Blaine lies there with his mind still a little fuzzy, a smile on his face that doesn't fade for close to two days.

This is the pregnancy that teaches Blaine he loves being pregnant, seeing his changing body in the mirror and caressing lovingly over the swell of his belly, keeping his hands there just to feel the baby nudging their feet and hands and elbows against his touch, singing softly to the child inside him as he walks the corridors of the centre, the nurses smiling fondly on their newest worker, pretty and young and fertile and very much in demand.

This baby is a boy, and the couple, Chandler and Eli, name him Stephen and both send Blaine cards and gifts of maternity clothes and fruit baskets and chocolates for close to a year afterwards, heart-warmingly grateful for the gift he gave them, a baby to love and cherish for eighteen years.

Another pregnancy passes quickly, this from an older couple, who've been married for fifteen years and have tried everything to have children, but are infertile and unable to have their own biologically. Blaine's heart aches for their plight, and he gladly takes several instances of sex with the husband, his fertility winning out and having him pregnant by the fourth time. This couple glows when he falls into an exhausted sleep after giving birth to twin boys, named by their parents as Ryan and Daniel, and taken into a household that sends Blaine Christmas and birthday cards that he accepts with a smile on his face.

His next client is handsome, infallibly arrogant and almost fifty years old, grey scattered through his dark hair and lines around his constantly smirking mouth. When he takes Blaine, it's with a lazy self-assurance that he'll find it amazing without hands on his skin, and Blaine lies still and quiet through it, no provocation to writhe or make a sound laid into his flesh. Blaine gets pregnant after the first time once again, and this pregnancy is awful on him.

He wonders if this child, the fourth baby he'll birth, now twenty-one and one of the centre's most successful clients, has taken some of its father's characteristics. He's constantly sick, starting every morning worshipping the porcelain throne, as another of the workers, Tina, refers to it fondly. His back aches and the baby presses into his bladder and some mornings he doesn't want to get out of bed. There's nothing abnormal about the pregnancy, just a large baby with an obvious streak of its father's arrogance to it.

This is the nine months that changes everything.