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Amy arrives home a little later than usual that night, overwhelmed with the events of the last few days. There are so many things to process, though the only thing she can focus on at the moment, is her husband’s suspension. She knows Jake very well, and most likely he’ll try to hide his sadness and pretend he’s fine, not because he thinks he’s weak but because he doesn’t want Amy to worry about him. Yet, she can’t help to wonder how he’s taking it.
Not knowing what to expect as she enters their apartment, Amy tosses her keys onto the couch sadly, too distracted to place them on the key hook. Jake is nowhere to be seen, so she figures he must be putting Mac to sleep, since it’s past ten already, and there are no toys scattered around the floor.
Indeed, she finds Jake whispering to his son, who lies in his crib, babbling and very, very awake, even though the lights are dimmed and it’s quiet in there.
“Hey,” Amy says softly.
Despite her tone, Jake startles, turning around, but immediately relaxes when he sees it’s just her. “Ames,” he breathes, looking down at Mac and then back at his wife, guilt taking over his features. “I kind of let him take a nap earlier and now he can’t sleep…”
“It’s okay,” Amy says, shrugging. She wants to add something else to reassure him, but her mind’s entirely blank, so she settles for a casual question. “What did you two have for dinner?”
Jake smiles. “He tried scrambled eggs for the first time. I know it’s technically breakfast food, but I read he can eat them now, plus it’s what I cook best.”
“And?”
“He loved them, duh.”
Amy chuckles. “Of course. Did you have some too?”
“I… wasn’t really hungry.”
“Oh. Well, I haven’t eaten either. We can heat some leftovers if you want.”
Jake nods with a weak smile, which widens as he turns to check on Mac. “Hey, he’s asleep! Maybe he just needed to make sure mama arrived home safe.”
Amy leans over to look at her sleeping son. Mac looks so much like his dad, when he laughs or smiles—which he’s been doing recently a lot—but especially when he’s asleep and completely peaceful.
She turns to see Jake staring at their baby with a proud smile and it warms her heart. Perhaps he’s forgotten about the suspension.
“Leftovers, then?” she whispers after a while, grabbing him by the wrist to pull him a little closer to her.
“Sure,” he says, throwing a last glance at Mac before following Amy out of their room and closing the door behind him. They’ve learned to make as little noise as possible in the last ten months, so their voices are barely above a whisper by default whenever Mac is asleep.
As it’s routine, Jake turns on the TV, not choosing a channel, and mutes it before joining Amy in the kitchen, while she gets the food from the fridge and puts it in the microwave.
From the corner of her eye, she can see Jake leaning against the counter in an awkward pose, staring at her almost anxiously.
Amy has no idea how to ask the question she’s been wanting to ask him since she got there, so she takes a deep breath and turns to him. “Babe, are you… okay with it?”
His expression tells her he’s been dreading her to ask. Yet, he plays dumb. “With what?”
“With everything that happened. Your suspension…”
“Oh,” Jake spats after what seems like hours, as if every emotion he was supposed to be feeling before was just settling in. Amy’s stomach drops. These subjects might not be her thing. “It’s fine. I suppose I can talk about it, but is it necessary?”
She shrugs. “Just tell me.” Her voice is as soft as it can be. “How do you feel about it?”
Jake puts on a poker face now. She’s usually good at reading him, but she can’t tell what he’s thinking. Amy knows how much he enjoys his job. Everything had happened so fast, though, at some point she’d lost track of it all. One second he was very excited about his ‘Speed’ situation and then, suddenly, he was in too deep.
To sum it up, it hadn’t gone well.
“I feel weird,” Jake finally admits, looking down. “It feels weird to know I won’t be going back tomorrow. But I’ll… adapt, I guess.”
“I’m sure you will,” she automatically replies, hesitating a little before placing a hand on his chest.
He seems to attempt a smile, but it vanishes right away. “I feel stupid too. Why can’t I listen? Holt told me to stay out of it and I screwed up. I screw up a lot.”
Amy frowns. “Of course you don’t. Sometimes you can be silly, yes, but there’s nothing wrong with it. This time it just… it got out of my hands too. I was really drunk.”
Jake chuckles. “Yeah,” he says shortly, and then swallows. “So five months, huh? It isn’t that much, is it? There are like thirty days in a month so it would be like a hundred days which have twenty-four hours each, so it would be like twenty-four thousand hours.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head with a smile. Math is decidedly not Jake’s strength. “It’s only like… three thousand and seven hundred hours.”
“Oh. That’s… still a lot.”
Amy sighs. His eyes are red, probably with exhaustion, and she can’t recognize the emotion behind them. It might be just deep, deep sadness.
“Ames,” he says huskily before she can talk. “What am I gonna do?”
Her eyebrows shot up, but before she can even think of an answer, Jake cuts her off again. “Things were so well yesterday. It makes me think… I can mess everything up so quickly. And it’s always my fault. What am I gonna mess up next?”
“Don’t say that,” she says, her throat knotting. “It’s okay to make mistakes, babe. And you are great at dealing with the consequences. You learn from your mistakes, you’ve always done.”
“Yeah, I keep pushing things until something goes wrong,” he argues in a trembling voice, “and until then I stop, I—” and suddenly that trembling voice breaks.
Amy’s stomach drops again as his eyes tear up, becoming redder. He immediately looks away when he realizes himself.
“Hey,” she says soothingly, cupping his face to make him look at her. “Don’t beat yourself up over this.”
“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “I know it’s a dumb thing to cry over, I just—” once more he’s unable to finish his sentence, pinching his lips shut before his voice can get any louder or high-pitched.
A single tear streams down his cheek.
“It’s not dumb,” Amy says. “If it makes you feel like this, it’s not dumb.”
“Well, I got myself into it—”
“And as I said, you will learn from it. That’s what matters.”
“I’ve been suspended like a thousand times already,” he counters, his tone bitter. "What makes you think it won’t happen again? What makes you think I couldn’t get fired?”
She shrugs, trying to stay calm even though she wants to cry as well. “I wouldn’t be less proud of you than I am today,” she says. “You’ve grown up so much and whatever you have to deal with, I have to deal with too, because I love you and I’m willing to. So please, don’t beat yourself up over this because it’s going to be fine.”
He sniffs. “How can you know that?”
“Because I’ll make sure everything’s fine. You’re not alone, babe. You have me.”
Jake stays in silence for a few seconds, and she thinks he’s going to start sobbing, but his lips curl instead. “I love you so much,” is all he says.
“I love you too,” she mouths back, afraid she’ll begin crying if she talks, and then pulls him into a hug.
They stay like that for a while, maybe five seconds or ten minutes, sinking in a silence that they don’t really mind. She pulls away from his embrace only to wipe his tears away. Jake looks so tired. Exhausted, even. She feels the same way, when minutes ago they were going to watch some TV and have dinner, though now she’s not sure she’s up for it.
Jake must have been thinking the same thing because a small laugh comes from his lips all of a sudden.
“What?” Amy asks, amused.
“I just realized we never even heated the food.”
Amy chuckles, and it only causes him to laugh a little harder. She wonders if it’s the exhaustion making such a simple detail seem so funny, and rests her head on his chest, feeling his heartbeat. It’s calmer now, it could be matching hers.
“Babe,” she says softly.
“Yes?” Jake hums.
“It’s going to be fine. I promise.”
He doesn’t answer right away, and Amy separates, afraid she said the wrong thing, but Jake’s only bowing his head like she said the cheesiest thing in the world.
“I know. Thanks, Ames,” he says, and then adds, “I love you.” Even though she hears those words coming from him at least ten times a day, he manages to make them sound like it’s the first every time.
“I love you too,” Amy whispers, leaning in to kiss his cheek.
Jake is about to return a much longer kiss on the lips when Mac interrupts the moment. Amy squeezes her eyes shut with a knowing smile—this has happened many times before. However, Jake immediately becomes alert and rushes to attend to his son.
Amy chuckles to herself, finally heating the food which is still inside the microwave and turns off the TV, because they are definitely not watching anything before they fall asleep, worn off with the events.
Like Jake would say, they’re sort of an old couple now, but she couldn’t care less. To her, so far, it’s meant that things can be so easy now.
Her husband doesn’t join her back in the kitchen so she goes and checks on him and Mac. The room feels so warm and quiet still, as Jake rocks his son softly, lulling him, again not realizing Amy’s watching. It always seems like he drifts away from reality when he’s trying to make Mac stop crying—and he’s good at it. She doesn’t know what it is, but Jake is great at it.
“I have to admit,” Amy says, startling him of course, “I’m a little jealous of you. You get to spend five months with him, all by yourself.”
Jake gives her what looks like an automatic smile, and then realization hits him. “I hadn’t thought about that before,” he huffs, stroking Mac’s soft curls and looking down at him. “Did you hear that, bud? Five months for only the two of us.”
Mac babbles, and Amy tries to ignore how awake he still sounds. “Careful, Ames,” Jake tells her. “That sounded a lot like ‘dada’, and with these five months? It’s definitely going to be his first word.”
Amy rolls her eyes with a playful smile. “Not if I train him every night.”
“Challenge accepted.”
An hour later they’re both in bed after eating dinner and Amy has already changed into her pajamas. Jake hasn’t stopped rocking Mac, who woke up once more, but his father doesn’t seem to mind, and Amy has the feeling that his suspension doesn’t sound so bad to him anymore.