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Author's Chapter Notes:

This was super cute in my head! Plot twist, it's kind of major depress-o!!!

Anyway. 

Why was he making her laugh so much?


I see the man that I fell in love with across the place where we fell in love. He’s making another woman laugh, and though I know that he is charming and charismatic and an easy person to talk to by nature, though I know that hormones are raging through my body and rewiring my brain into a spider web of mush right now, I start to wonder.


He picked someone else over me before.


What’s to stop him from doing it again?


It’s silly and irrational and I know I know I know that it is, but I really don’t see that until Dwight is sexually harassing him for the cameras and suddenly we’re standing in a Rite-Aid in the middle of a work day because somehow, this blood pressure machine will make a fine lie detector test.


He has high blood pressure.


It isn’t an uncommon diagnosis.


But he’s young.


And he’s my husband.


Beside that, he’s my best friend in the entire world. My whole heart. 


I tense when he cuts himself shaving. 


This? When his father ended up in the hospital because of the very same thing? Could be so much worse.


My entire body is numb; the only functioning nerves are the ones in my fingertips rubbing softly over his back as we walk the aisles, as he chooses a new toothbrush for Cece, as he carefully pulls a five out of his wallet and slips the extra change into the Children’s Hospital donation box next to the register.


I dial his doctor from the parking lot, the furrow in my brows pulling them in toward the middle. I can feel his eyes on me as I do all of the talking, repeating the number on the Rite-Aid blood pressure machine and Gerry’s history with smoking and high blood pressure and reassuring Dr. Marcomb that my husband hasn’t touched an illicit substance since his delinquent days in college when he tried pot once or twice. We set an appointment, and though Jim’s soft smile is supposed to be reassuring, I can’t help the grip that I have on his hand when I reach over to hold it in his lap while he drives. I wonder if he notices that I’m holding on just a little bit tighter.


Mom hands our bubbling toddler over to her daddy--she’s a daddy’s girl through and through, and he carries her into the kitchen, undoubtedly for a cookie she isn’t supposed to have before dinner, while I walk my mom to the door. She must note the concern in my eyes, but before she’s able to ask, I tell her that I’m just tired. 


Really, I just want my family to myself for the night. 


She hugs me tightly and says to call when I need to, as if she knows that I eventually will. 


It’s leftovers night, and as Cece munches on a soft cookie in her high chair, I watch.


I watch my husband, his uncomfortable dress shoes still on and the necktie still tucked beneath his collar, as he plates cold spaghetti. He is careful to make a plate of plain pasta for me because he knows, without asking, that our son does not like red sauce as much as his mother does. 


I watch my husband, with bags under his eyes because Cece hasn’t been sleeping well and I haven’t been sleeping well and he’s been carrying us both on his shoulders, doing this all with a smile on his face.


I watch my husband stop everything when our daughter calls out his name, the center of his world when I’m not around. He boops her on the nose, kisses her forehead, and takes a minute or two to play peek-a-boo before he stealthily exchanges his presence for her dinner. She is distracted from her daddy for the next few moments, but I am not.


I know that I very well might be overreacting. My pregnancy hormones have me making up things in my head. He isn’t gawking over my replacement, and his blood pressure is high. But all the same, I have no appetite tonight. I pick at my food, but watch him instead. 


My husband.


My husband.


Because this man waited for me. All those years. While I sat in an unmoving relationship and the world went on without me. He stayed. And now, the irrational part of my brain is suddenly spiraling that I’m going to lose him.


He lifts our tired babe from her high chair, tilting her upside down in front of me for a goodnight kiss. He tells me in his soft, sweet voice to leave the dishes and put my feet up, cradling my head as he presses a tender kiss to my temple. I watch them disappear together up the stairs, Jim pressing raspberries to Cece’s belly. Her laughter is my favorite sound next to his. We usually give each other the space to do bedtime privately, our own mommy and daddy time, but tonight, I just want to be close.


I ignore his wishes and quietly interrupt the beginning of Goodnight Moon. Cece smells of lavender bedtime lotion and is snuggled into her daddy’s lap, and instead of pulling out my phone to snap a photo of her thumb in her mouth and her other hand twirling aimlessly in her curls while she nuzzles Jim’s shoulder, I let my heart capture the memory instead.


He doesn’t ask questions when he sees me. He doesn’t even miss a word in the book. I’m sure he has it memorized by now. He simply glances up at me with those bright green eyes, winks, and tilts his head subtly at the footrest of the glider chair as he shifts his feet to the floor, knowing I probably wouldn’t make it up off the ground with our son at this point. 


I wonder, as our daughter’s bedtime comes and goes, if he gives in to her request for four more books for her benefit or for mine. He does it all with a smile. With his dress shoes still on, his tie only a little bit loosened due to Cece fidgeting with it as she falls asleep.


We both hover at the edge of her crib as her closed eyes flutter softly against her cheeks. It will only be the three of us for a little while longer now. I don’t think either of us are quite ready for this. Despite the fact that we talked about and planned for (and practiced for) Phillip this time, Cece will always be our first baby.


Eventually, I feel his hands lightly grip my shoulders. He steers me out the door and across the hall to our bedroom, offering me one of his huge T-shirts that are all I fit into now. It's really all I've worn to bed since we started dating anyway. He slips into the bathroom, and when he props the door open, I follow. 


He looks so young in his blue plaid pajama pants and white tee, his work clothes finally discarded in a heap on our bathroom floor where they’d likely stay for a couple of days if he hadn’t gotten into the more recent habit of helping more with the laundry. In the past few months, I’ve noticed him bearing more and more of the weight. As we finish brushing our teeth in silence, it all comes to hit me slowly.


My sweet, slobby husband, the man who gets more toothpaste on the mirror when he spits than on his actual toothbrush, has been wiping down the bathroom each morning before we go to work. Carrying up our daughter’s dirty laundry, and even folding her little socks, because he knows it’s been hard for me to walk up the stairs with the baskets. Running the vacuum over the carpet when Cece spills her snack instead of leaving it for a few days.


All while dealing with our head case of a work environment. Parenting our toddler.


Taking the brunt of my hormones, which today, came out in the form of raging jealousy.


It’s too early to go to bed. We usually head back downstairs in our pajamas and unwind in the living room, but I tug on his wrist, and without much coercing, he follows me to our bed. We’ll walk downstairs tomorrow to hardened spaghetti and dishes that will have to soak but right now, I don’t think either of us care.


It’s a weird fit, but he lets me hold him, like he knows I need this. I’m scared. And though I know he’ll go to the doctor and they’ll tell us both that he’s a working, soon-to-be father of two, and it would be strange if his blood pressure wasn’t a little high, he doesn’t wag his finger at me and tell me to get it together. He rests his head between my breasts and my belly and lets me hold him maybe a little too tightly.


“She told me today that we should name her brother Skunk Head.”


His voice is muffled against my belly, against the aforementioned brother whose sister has been suggesting new names for him all week, but I can feel his giggle from a mile away.


It’s the first we’ve really spoken since we left the store, and it feels so good to let out my own laughter as his tickles my eardrums and leaves new imprints on my heart. 


“I thought she settled on Elmo,” I say, running my fingers through his hair. It’s getting longer. I like it this way.


“I guess Elmo was too good.”


“She’s marking her territory.”


“Yeah.” 


I can’t tell if he’s nuzzling his smile against me or our son or both, but his touch feels so nice that I don’t dare try to overthink anything else today.


“We’re going to have two kids soon,” he whispers. “Two.”


“Who allowed that?” I feel myself giggling but know that my voice is shaking.


“Yeah,” he repeats. I don’t have to look down to know that his brows have fallen, his smile twisting into worry. I know all of his tells by now.


“Two,” he repeats. I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or to himself until he continues. “We’re going to have two babies, Pam. We made two tiny humans. What if I’m not enough for them?”


The last sentence breaks my heart as he turns to hide it in the T-shirt of his that I’m wearing, but I catch it all the same. 


The rustling of the sheets as his legs stretch and wind around mine covers up his single sniffle.


“She’s my world, Pam. And I worry every single day that I’m going to mess up. That she’s going to see me fail and that that’s going to be what sticks. But now? We’re having a son. A little boy who will...who will one day grow into a man. I’ll do anything to protect our daughter, but how do I know I’m going to be enough to show our son how to grow up and do the same?”


His voice is never this small. 


Sure, in the quiet of the night, when we’re sharing our dreams and giggling beneath the sheets and weaving intimate secrets, he is quiet. But my husband isn’t ever this small.


The last time I saw him this way, his hair was much longer and his pants were much baggier and I’d just shattered his heart all over the Dunder Mifflin parking lot. 


“What if I can’t be the best for them? What if...what if I can’t support our family? What if I let you down? I’m scared, Pam.”


“Jim.”


It’s one syllable, but I know that if I can feel it breaking, he can hear it too.


My fingers weave through his hair, my other hand splayed over his back.


“What if I can’t find a way to give all of my love to both of them? And one of them feels left out? What if I…”


I’ve heard about enough of this. Suddenly he is speaking more nonsense than me being worried and overprotective about his high blood pressure.


His somber, crackling expression is cradled in my slightly swollen hands, peering up at me with fear and shame that I want to kiss away immediately.


“Baby, where is this coming from?”


It’s a fruitless question. I know exactly where it’s coming from because those exact thoughts and more have crossed my mind every single day since we found out that we were pregnant again. Only, it makes sense for me to think about them.


Despite the newfound voice and confidence that has been steadily growing since he came into my life and told me that I could, I have always doubted myself. Walked cautiously. Stayed where things were comfortable for too long. I’ve felt confident with him by my side, pushing me when he knows that I’m ready, holding my hand when he knows I’m not. 


This isn’t Jim.


My best friend who has known what to say since his first day at work when he told me that he was certain that his pod mate had listening devices in all of our pens. 


The boy who battled his own shyness and put his own heart on the line to tell me that he was in love with me. Who left a career and a perfectly fine woman, dropping it all to be with me


The man who took the fragmented pieces of my heart and glued them back together with his tender hands, his warm smile, and all of the love in his heart, showing me that this was all it would ever beat for.


The father who has the little girl sleeping across the hall simply tangled around his finger without a wish of her ever letting go.


When we found out that we were having a boy, my heart grew three sizes in my chest. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jim would spend the rest of his life setting an example for our son of how to be a kind, strong, loving man. Just like his daddy. Basketball games and water gun fights and wrestling matches in the living room go hand in hand with my visions of a mini-Jim holding open the door for others and offering up his seat on the bus and holding his sister’s hand when she cries. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that this strong man in my arms would doubt himself, would doubt his own abilities in being the absolute best man to raise our family.


He shrugs, his bottom lip pouted slightly, and I have a crystal clear image of what our son might one day look like in this moment.


“I don’t want to fail, Pam. I don’t want to fail them. I don’t want to fail you.”


“Hey,” I whisper, stroking his cheek with my thumb. A bit of stubble has grown there since he shaved this morning. “I’m scared too.”


He sniffles again, scooting up the bed so that we’re both crowded on my pillow, facing one another on our sides. He grips my forearms and strokes them tenderly.


“You? Supermom? Come on,” he scoffs, his laugh a little snotty. I roll my eyes, but he presses on. “I’ve only been doing laundry for a month and I still have no idea how you manage that, dinner, and handling her tantrums on top of a full time job.”


My smile stretches wide as the answer forms.


“Because I have you.”


It comes out as a whisper, a shared secret between us, like we are the only parents on the face of the planet that have that holy grail of wisdom figured out.


“Cece hated me last week,” I remind him, my smile and the giggle in my words contradicting what just rolled off my tongue. “And I’m sure it won’t be the last time she does.”


He nods slowly, and I keep going.


“I hate to break it to you, but I feel like we’re going to mess this up. A lot.”


His eyes widen, but I can tell that there’s silliness in the dramatic shake of his head now.


“Oh man, Beesly.” My heart still flutters whenever he calls me that. “What are we going to do?”


“I was thinking those leash backpacks might be a good start.”


“Definitely.” 


He quirks a tiny smile, and I can’t help pressing my lips against it softly.


“Hey,” I whisper. “How long?”


He knows exactly what I mean.


“A little bit since we found out you were pregnant. More when we found out it was a boy.” 


I see him shrinking inside himself again and put an end to it right away, stroking his jaw.


“Why didn’t you tell me?”


His hard stare is determined.


“I didn’t want to add to your stress. You’re doing everything and more right now. You have to actually grow the human,” he chuckles before reaching out to tug on a stray lock of my hair, twisting it slowly around his finger to distract himself. “You don’t need my silly problems on top of that.”


I wrap my hand around his, stilling it before he gets us truly tangled.


“Not a silly problem.” I shake my head, reminding him that we just admitted to each other that we’re feeling the same way. “I’m sorry that you didn’t think you could come to me.”


“It’s in my head,” he agrees. “I know that I can. I just...I don’t want to let you down.”


“You won’t. You can’t.”


I cup his face, pressing our foreheads together as I close my eyes and breathe in Jim.


We stay quiet for awhile, missing these moments in what has become our new normal--fourteen hour days that don’t seem to end, don’t seem to care that we barely said good morning to each other.


When I open my eyes, the chaos in his forest green has calmed, the golden flecks stilled for the moment.


“Do you want to talk about it?”


He pauses, searching my eyes for any hint of doubt, and nods slowly when he finds none.


So we do.


Just as we’d lain in bed and shared our dreams of the future when we were young. We share our doubts. Our fears. It surprises me that between the two of us, they range from Hearing that first ‘I hate you’  to What will happen if I’m not there to protect them one day?


And just as we always do, as soon as we’ve exhausted the list of what ifs, our conversation turns down a road that seems to extend into space. He asks me how long we’ll be able to convince them that the Stork is the one who delivers babies. I start a fantasy string of vacations we could take with the kids, starting with Disney World (where Jim will absolutely be wearing Mickey ears the entire time) and somehow morphing into a second honeymoon in Europe where we make love on secluded beaches.


Jim wants to get a dog. I want to move out to the country and have chickens. His pout when I say that I could call him “Farmer Jim” makes my smile stretch.


We stroll down memory lane until our eyes grow heavy, our bodies fighting to stay awake and keep this moment going forever, because inevitably, we know that there might be a period of time where there are simply less of them. 


But even in our shared doubts and our spilling of the souls, I don’t bring up Cathy. There is no reason to when she gets his second-rate Zoolander jokes and I get to make up silly scenarios with my husband about our children putting us into a nursing home one day, already placing bets on who will win the wheelchair races. 


Before we both succumb to our heavy lids, we make a promise to keep talking. That we won’t call our problems silly no matter how much we feel that way. That we’ll bring everything to each other, because we are not only a team and a unit, but we are each other’s best friends.


I know that we won’t always. That communication has and always will be something that we have to work to keep open and honest with one another. But I hope that he will always feel comfortable coming to me, and that I can find the courage to do the same.


This man’s heart is so big because he holds three others inside of it. And I know that the way he is making me laugh right now, echoing beneath our bedroom sheets that smell like his cologne and my perfume and our daughter’s stale Cheerios, quietly so that we don’t wake her, is so much better.


Chapter End Notes:
shoutout (and pleading for more) 2 farmer jim.


agian18 is the author of 25 other stories.
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