#and Santiago is. just so far the opposite he’s a soft edged freak

[jockpoetry]

Tender can turn to Tinder is an insane line.

[amyscascadingtabs]

everything looks different now that i see you

If there is a world outside of their tiny bathroom with its green walls and white floor tiles upon which a developing pregnancy test has been placed, Amy's forgotten about it.

Then the timer rings.

/

A completely regular Saturday morning in the Santiago-Peralta household turns out to be not quite as regular as Amy'd thought.

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What irritates Amy most about the way she wakes up is that it’s a Saturday morning.

Saturday mornings when they’re both free are supposed to be for sleeping in late, waking up when the sun eventually forces its way through the thick curtains in the late morning. Saturday mornings are supposed to be for sneaking an arm around her husband’s torso, pressing kisses down his chest until he stirs awake, laying there talking in low voices until one of them reluctantly gets up to make coffee. If she's lucky, Saturday mornings can be for lazy, completely unhurried sex, or for shared showers and brunch out at the hipster café which does both pancakes with bacon as well as a smoothie bowl she’s not allergic to.

What they are not for, Amy decides when she presses her phone’s home button to see the screen light up with the numbers 5.22  a.m., is waking up before sunrise with a throbbing head and the gnawing nausea, which has irked her throughout the week, at the back of her throat.

She groans into her pillow out of sheer frustration. Paracetamol is in the bathroom cabinet, left side top shelf next to the ibuprofen and antihistamine. It might as well be on the other side of the planet.

Slowly, with more effort than it should take, she pushes herself up on her elbows and reaches for her glass of water. It's dark and she's visually impaired as is, so she fumbles, so right when she thinks she's got it she's hit with a dizziness spell and the glass falls to the bedroom floor, hitting the carpet with a distinct thud and spilling water everywhere.

It’s too much - the last drop of water to make another, already teeming and metaphorical glass, spill over. She’s already feeling under the weather, has been throughout the week for some perplexing reason, and now she's probably ruined their carpet. Before there's time to react in a more emotionally stable way, she’s quietly sobbing, drawing uneven, heaving breaths that coincidentally happen to worsen the headache.

It really isn’t her best Saturday morning.

“Ames?” Jake’s voice is groggy, mumbling her name when she feels his body shift at the other side of the bed, shuffling towards her. “Is something up?”

“Headache”, she manages to get out, moving close enough for him to put an arm around her when she buries her head in his t-shirt, trying to ignore how overpowering the smell of laundry soap feels, how much it worsens the nausea.“Just - weird migraine, I think.”

“Okay.” He presses a careful kiss to her temple. “Is that why you’re crying?”

The nausea keeps getting worse. She forces air in and out through gritted teeth, hoping to keep it at bay. “I spilled water on the carpet.”

“And started crying?” There’s a worried tone to his voice. She’s keeping her eyes closed, but suspects if she’d open them, she’d find the crease on his forehead he gets whenever she tells him she’s not feeling good. “Babe, don’t be offended when I say this, but you really must be stressed out.”

“Am not.”

“Don’t try”, he warns, rubbing comforting circles on her shoulders. “Stay here. I’ll get you painkillers. Pretty sure we have something for migraines somewhere - hey, what are you -”

She’s pretty much thrown herself out of bed. Pressing the back of her hand to her mouth, she thanks whatever higher power in charge of her shitty morning that at the very least, the distance between their bedroom and bathroom is short and she put her hair in a ponytail before going to bed yesterday. Small wins, she attempts to think, crouching over the white porcelain bowl, but the positive thinking is drowned out by the revolting feeling of emptying her stomach of yesterday’s dinner.

She can hear Jake’s footsteps behind her, noting the worried sigh he lets out upon seeing her hunched-over frame. She figures she must look about as disgusting as she feels, but if he thinks so, he doesn't let her know - just sits down next to her, stroking her back with more tenderness than she's probably worthy of after having woken him up with this about four hours after they went to bed.

“Sorry”, she mumbles when the worst seems to be over and she dares retreat into his arms. He wraps them around her, shaking his head, and it's the sweetest gesture she could imagine in this moment but it doesn't take away from the fact that his shirt still stinks.

“Not your fault, don’t apologize. We’ve been through this.”

“Jake, can you please take your shirt off?”

“Uhm - babe, I hate to kill the mood, but I don't think that's the solution we should -”

“It stinks”, she groans. “Please. You used too much laundry soap, or something. It’s all I can smell.”

“Well, your nose is weird.” He frowns, but dutifully pulls the gray t-shirt over his head, rolling the item to a ball and throwing it out the door towards their bedroom. “There. How are you feeling now?”

The headache is the same, but the acute sickness has sunk back to the lurking, but stable, nausea she’s sensed for days now. Irritating, but more manageable.

“Better.”

“Not like you’re going to throw up again?”

“I don’t think so.”

Her husband hums, playing with a sling of hair that’s escaped her tight ponytail while she rests her head on his shoulder. “You want to try drinking some water? Carefully? I can make you some ginger tea, if you want.”

“Yeah.” She manages a smile, temporarily distracted by his thoughtfulness. Whether it’s the aftermath of a panic attack, a bad hangover or some odd kind of stress reaction like this must be - she’s a Santiago, she never gets sick - Jake remains the unchallenged master of making her feel better, always seeming to know the perfect cure. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”

He kisses the top of her head and tells her he’ll be three minutes, tops. With the nausea under control, she’s confident now would be a great time for those painkillers, so she puts in contact lenses and starts looking through the cabinet.

She finds ibuprofen and antihistamine, but no paracetamol. Huffing in frustration, she decides to search in the cabinet below the faucet instead. Jake might have taken some for a bad hangover and thrown the package there without thinking. There are plenty of cleaning products, a box of tampons and pads, a bunch of band-aids and equipment for easier wound dressing, but no blessed little boxes of painkillers as far as she can see.  

Just as Amy’s about to close the cabinet doors and go for the ibuprofen even though she finds paracetamol better for headaches, she spots another pink and white package hiding close to the wall.

Early Result Pregnancy Test, the white text teases her, and she weighs the carton in her hand for a moment before ripping it open.

Truly, she’s not expecting anything. It’s a harmless safety check. She's not sure how punctual her period has been, but it’s been acting up at times of stress before and always shows up eventually, and sure, they agreed a couple months ago if it happens, it happens but there's been no active trying and they've both been swamped with work lately. Surely it’s nothing.

Nevertheless, she reads the instructions with thorough concentration.

“Okay, so it took me forever to find that tea, but I did it and I'm very proud - what are you doing?”

She's dug out an old toothbrush cup, downed some water and is twisting the unused plastic stick between her fingers when Jake returns, teacup in hand.

“I'm going to take a pregnancy test.”

“You're going to take a what exactly did you say there now?”

“Pregnancy test”, Amy repeats matter-of-factly. “I really don't think it's going to say anything”, she assures him when his eyes seem to pop out of his skull and his mouth is opening, closing and opening again in lieu of an answer. “We’ve barely tried. I'm checking so I can rule it out.”

“Right, right. That's cool.” He sits down, leaning his back against the edge of the bathtub. “Cool. Cool, cool cool cool cool…”

“Can you please not freak out on me right now?”

“Sorry”, he mumbles, dragging his hands through his mussed up curls, making an adorable mess out of them. “It’s, uh. Very out of nowhere.”

She nods, biting her lip. “I just want to make sure. Honestly, I’m sure it’s nothing.”

She isn’t, not really, but when part of her wishes for the opposite to be true, the anxious part of her brain opts for pessimism.

She's read about this. Her and Jake are a bit on the older side of first-time parents, and she may be a Santiago, but she's also been on birth control for a substantial part of her adult years. It's normal for it to take time. She doesn't want to get her hopes up.

The first pink line appears in front of them, confirming the test has worked, and Jake sneaks a hand into one of hers to gently squeeze it. She drags her index and middle finger over his knuckles, looking up from the potentially universe-changing display to meet his eyes. The corners of his mouth shift into a smile.

“I know it might not have seemed like it from my initial reaction”, he says, slowly like he's weighing each word before speaking it. “But I’d be really happy about it. If it was positive.”

Amy smiles, too, albeit more timid - the nausea is worsening again, and she forces some of the tea down in a fruitless attempt to stall it. “I’d be really happy, too.”

“But you don't want to get your hopes up.”

She shakes her head. “It can take a long time. I want to be prepared for that.”

“I get it”, he tells her, watching her with the same soft gaze that always makes her feel like home. “Although.. if it's negative, we can always try again, right?”

“Definitely.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

If there is a world outside of their tiny bathroom with its green walls and white floor tiles upon which a developing pregnancy test has been placed, Amy's forgotten about it.

Then the timer rings.

Loud, stressful beeps interrupt their existence in the liminal space between not knowing and knowing. She turns it off, takes a few deep breaths which does little for her stress levels, and picks up the cheap plastic stick with a shaking hand.

One line.

One line negative, one line no measurable halts of hcG in her body, one line no apple seed-size embryo growing inside of her.

One line.

“It's negative”, she whispers, and a stubborn tear makes its way down her cheek. “I figured.”

“It's okay.” Jake’s hand squeezes her shoulder. “We’ll try again, Ames. It's not a big deal.”

“I know. I just - I was hoping. A little.” With a shrug, she hands him the test. “You can throw it away.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t want to see it.”

He narrows his eyes, angling the plastic stick in between his thumb and index finger. “There is a line, though.”

“That's just to confirm the test has worked.”

“No, I mean another one.” He squints. “It’s weak, but it’s there.”

“Give me it.” She snatches the test out of his hands, standing up in a movement so hasty it gives her another dizziness spell and she has to support herself against the sink. Jake gives her a look of worry, then stands up, too, pointing at the display window.

It is near imperceptible. It reminds her of the old pens she used to draw with at her maternal grandmother’s house, where all which would be visible on paper afterwards was the faint stroke of dried-out marker.

But in good enough lightning, there's a line.

She can't help but stare at it. It looks so faint she's frightened it's an illusion, but there's the shadow of a line, and even a faint shadow is supposed to mean -

“Ames!” Jake connects the dots before she does. “That’s gotta be a positive!”

The smile on his lips is so wide, so exalted, Amy swears it could cure some incurable disease all on its own. She aches to reciprocate it, but fear prevents her.

“What if it's false?” She whispers. “It’s just one test. Maybe it's a false positive.”

Jake shakes his head. “Am I really talking to the person who will defend tests with everything she has and insists on not blaming them for anything?”

“I know, okay?” She leans the plastic stick back and forth, watching the weak line remain there. “But this is potentially life-changing. I can't just trust one test.”

“What are you saying?”

“You need to go buy more. Lots more. Go to CVS and buy like, ten. I don't care about how expensive they are. Just do it.”

“Ames -”

“Jake.”

“Fine, fine, I’m on my way”, he mumbles, stumbling out of the bathroom and towards their front door without as much as glancing at the discarded t-shirt. She snorts at his sudden duracell-level energy, breaking out into wholehearted laughter at how he seems to have forgotten about his half-nudity in the midst of nerves and excitement.

“You're not going to CVS in just your boxers, are you?”

Wallet and keys already in hand, he gives his bare legs a sheepish look. “Oh. Right.”

He leaves wearing actual decent clothing, and she sits down again, hugging her legs to her chest and chugging some of the water without thinking - it worsens the nausea, and she ends up dry-heaving over the toilet for a rough minute. If it does turn out that she's not pregnant, Amy's having a categorically shitty Saturday morning.

On her phone, a notification pops up from the Santiago family chat. Luis is complaining about how his youngest daughter and subsequently Amy's youngest niece, three-month-old Mari, is keeping her parents up at painstakingly early hours. She writes a short message to send him his sympathy.

Thanks, she gets back. Why are you up this early?

Couldn’t sleep. Technically not a lie.

Just wait until you and Jake have kids. Then you’ll really know what sleeplessness is.

There’s a brief second’s temptation to send a picture of the faint, faint line back to shut him up, but she resists and chooses an innocent laughing emoji instead.

Worth it though, the reply comes, a picture of a widely grinning baby girl with blue eyes and a head full of dark hair a la Santiago Baby™ attached. Amy smiles at the picture, trying not to let her thoughts run to the question of whether that's what awaits her in eight, nine months time.

I'm sure, she writes back, adding a single red heart at the end.

The next iMessage notification pops up just as she closes WhatsApp, announcing a message from the contact of Jake Santiago. He named his own contact in her phone while tipsy one night at their honeymoon; to this day, she's not had the heart or felt the need to change it.

I love u, but even I can tell this isn't a financially wise decision

Meaning it's ACTUALLY bad

U sure about this???

YES, she texts back, using Caps Lock for once. Caps means shouting, after all, and the frustration she feels over not knowing is enough to make her want to scream.

Caps lock!?! From Amy Santiago!?!

‘kay I'm buying them

How many u want?

Ten? Get the digital ones.

...we’re spending like a 100$ on this

It's fine. Babe, please just buy them and come back home.

If u say so, he writes back.

By the time her husband returns, her overflow of nervous energy has her walking back and forth in their modest-sized bathroom - slowly, as to not make her stomach turn or world start spinning rapidly again. Her head is still pounding, but she can't remember if there are regulations for whether pregnant women should take painkillers. It shouldn't matter, considering how she's most certainly not pregnant, but she leaves the package be - in case.

“They asked me what I was doing, y’know”, Jake remarks as he gives her the white and red plastic bag. “Repeated that I only needed to buy one unless I had, quote unquote, knocked up a whole sorority party.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Just that I have a very thorough wife.”

She does, in the end, limit herself to five of the tests.

Amy’s survived long minutes before - each second she spent in the courtroom while Jake and Rosa were on trial falsely accused of robbery and the countless sleepless nights when he was first in Florida, then imprisoned in South Carolina, come to mind - yet these are something else. Every second stretches on for longer than it should, the numbers on the screen counting down too slowly, while she aches for the white and blue little plastic sticks to tell her whether or not her life is about to change forever.

It’s not that she doesn’t want it. If anything, she’s been enamored with the thought for quite some time now, finding excuses to look an extra time at colorful onesies and blankets in immaculately soft material in clothing stores, unable to stop herself from smiling at parents with their toddlers and babies on the subway or grocery store. Just the other day, she spent the majority of a bus ride to the library making funny faces at a giggling toddler in green overalls. The thought is ever present in the back of her head, an unswerving wish for it all to someday be her own reality.

No, the fear is in whether she’s ready for her life to change this drastically and for nothing to be the same again; not her body, not her priorities, not her relationship, not her heart.

After seeing him with Terry’s daughters and her nieces and nephews, with Nikolaj and with Iggy, she couldn’t have more faith in Jake’s capability of being a good parent one day, but neither of them has ever had sole responsibility of a miniature human for longer than a couple hours at most. Even then, there’s always been someone else to call and an actual parent to give the child back to after babysitting. She wants to blindly trust in them being able to handle it, but in the end, she’s all too aware they’ve never done anything like it before.

“You just don’t know love until you have a child”, Charles had mused to her over a coffee in the break room not long after him and Genevieve adopted Nikolaj. “There’s nothing like it. You’re going to understand it the day you let Jake put a baby in you.”

She’d grimaced at it then, distinctly uncomfortable by her friend’s fiery passion for persuading her to procreate with her boyfriend of then barely a year, but she’d been curious of what he’d been referring to and she’s curious still. She didn’t know it was possible for her to love someone like she loves the man who just got her a blanket from the living room because he thought she looked cold (she was), but if having a kid is anything like it, her heart is going to have to do some serious metaphorical expansion.

“It’s ironic”, she says to break the nervous silence. “I always plan everything. Then the biggest things never happen the way I imagine them to.”

A crease - the worry-crease - appears between his brows. “What do you mean?”

“Well, us getting together, for example. We broke a rule on our first date and then killed our captain.” She laughs, shaking her head at the memory, and he grins at it, too. “The proposal took me by surprise. Our wedding day literally involved a bomb threat. It makes sense - if this is real - that I didn’t get to plan it as much as I wanted to.”

“I know”, he mumbles, taking her hand in his. “But if it’s for real, then we’re ready.”

“How can you know?”

“Because I love you”, he states, gaze unwavering as it meets hers. “And there’s no one else I’d rather do this with.”

Amy’s thankful she brushed her teeth post throwing up, because she all but crashes her lips into his, not dissimilar to the way she did the first time she initiated a kiss between them. He’s somewhat taken aback, his hands going up in the air before settling on her upper back, but then he smiles into the kiss and it’s safe and it’s blissful and it’s a moment’s pause before they know.

They break apart when the timer rings.

Jake offers, but she reminds him it's her body this either is or isn't happening in, so it's her shaking hand which reaches for one of the tests placed on the edge of the sink. It's her eyes that first look at the result, and it's her heart which almost stops when the first display shows a positive, bold Pregnant, 2-3 Weeks.

As does the next one, and the one after, with the two last ones showing confident plus signs.

“Oh”, is the only thing she can stutter as she holds it up to him, a single-voweled expression nowhere near representative of everything she's feeling. “Wow.”

“Holy shit, Ames.”

“That's - this is crazy.”

“Yeah, but it's real.”

She snivels, wipes away a tear of happiness with the back of her hand. “Seems that way, huh?”

“It does”, he grins, looking at the for-sure positive test. “Looks like we're doing this.”

“Technically I’m the one doing the most right now”, she teases. “But yeah. It looks like we are.”

“We're having a baby.” He takes a deep breath, pulling her close again.“Wow, that’s officially the craziest sentence I’ve said in my entire life.”

“We’re having a baby”, she repeats tentatively, trying the words out. “That’s just - that’s insane.”

“You’re pregnant.”

“Clearly.”

“That’s freaky.”

“Don’t call it freaky”, she mutters, lightly punching his shoulder. “You’re fifty percent behind this.”

“Guilty as charged.” He presses an apologetic kiss to her neck. “I don’t mean freaky in a bad way. I just realized there’s another person inside you, which is dope, but also kinda sounds like a really bad sci-fi movie with parasites.”

She glares at him. “Please don’t compare it to a parasite. Also, it’s more a cluster of cells than a person right now, so calm down.”

“Sounds cute.”

“They will be, eventually.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

They stay in the bathroom for a while. Jake's arms remain wrapped around her, the two of them trying their very best to let the craziness of what’s happening sink in. He offers to get them coffee, but the thought of it nearly makes her stomach turn again, so they settle for more tea. Amy downloads a pregnancy app onto her phone, figuring it’s good to start somewhere, and reads the surreal information out loud before making a note in her phone calendar to call her doctor this Monday and not a day later.

“I’m going to have to make so many binders”, she pretends to sigh after scrolling through the app’s recommendations on ways to ease the morning sickness and fatigue she figures won’t go away anytime soon.

“Oohh, is this going to involve more binders than our wedding did?”

“Pregnancy and parenthood? No kidding. When can we go to Staples?”

He chuckles. “When you’ve slept more than four hours and had breakfast and preferably kept it down. Sound reasonable?”

“Fine, fine.”

Despite the overwhelming shock and jittery excitement, sleep is as tempting a companion the second she lays down in bed as it’s been for the full week; she supposes she knows why, now. The headache which woke her up only an hour earlier is easing, reduced to a minor background detail, and the nausea feels under control for now.

Sleep waits a little longer, though, even as Jake crawls under the covers with her so she's being spooned by him - a privilege given to her mostly when she's sick, anxious, or apparently, pregnant.

It remains a surreal thought. She suspects it will be for a while, likely at least until the first ultrasound or the first movements she can feel.

And yet, when Jake plays with her hair and presses kisses to her neck as she closes her eyes, she has no struggle picturing the two of them in the same bed another Saturday morning toward the end of this year. The two of them, but with a third, much smaller, person - one as unbelievably tiny as she finds all newborns to be, though one she's sure she’ll find cuter than all her nephews, nieces and friends children added together - who will likely have kept them up all night, but will be smugly pretending it never happened. Amy already knows she’ll fall for it.

It’s terrifying and by definition life-altering and they have a long way to go, but at the very least she’s in good company.

She doesn’t hate her Saturday morning as much anymore.