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Steve woke from his nap with a jolt of panic that resolved itself when Sam hallooed from the foyer. The door had slammed shut as Sam arrived home, no doubt yanked by one draft or another swirling through the house. It was an older house (at least relative to all the condos and apartment buildings they’d looked into renting or buying before finding this place) and doors slammed, floor boards creaked, and windows refused to close with annoying regularity. Sam was always calling Steve to close the window in the bathroom, which opened easily onto a gorgeous view of their sprawling yard, but got stuck so good Steve actually had to exert some super soldier strength to get it down.
He’d promised Sam he’d get around to oiling or sanding or doing whatever needed to be done to fix it, but he’d had more immediate problems this week in the form of Sam’s niece and nephew, Cagney and James. Sam’s sister Sarah was on a second honeymoon with Ethan, and Sam had heroically offered to take care of the kids for the week. Never mind that Sam worked full-time at the VA and Steve was the one with a technically open schedule.
Not that Steve didn’t love having them. They were sweet kids: Cagney was bright and precocious, while James, at only six years old, had the sensitive gravity of a poet. They were fun to be with, but no one had warned Steve that children had exactly two settings: dead to the word and DEFCON One Excitement. “Dead to the world” could mean they were absorbed in their homework or watching some cartoon with dreadfully high-pitched, anatomically impossible characters, or asleep. DEFCON One could be running out of milk, playing Hellicarriers, or getting soap in their eyes during bath time. And the setting switch was immediate. They were the emotional energy equivalent of being gently massaged one second and then brutally beaten the next.
Sam laughed after the first day when Steve slumped into bed, completely wiped out by Sam’s niece and nephew (well, Steve guessed, his niece and nephew now, too). “You’ve taken down airplanes singlehandedly and you couldn’t handle James and Cagney?” Sam asked, disbelievingly.
“I handled them just fine,” Steve said, “but now I have to recover.”
Sam had kissed his temple and intertwined their fingers. “Thanks for helping with them.”
Steve didn’t say what he was thinking, which was For you, anything. He’d gotten better about knowing when he was coming on cheesy as hell. Especially with Nat or Clint pretending to gag or rolling their eyes extra dramatically if he said something too sentimental or sincere. This new world put a premium on irony and understatement and hiding deep caring behind a mask of indifference. It was confusing sometimes, but Steve tried to roll with it. Lucky for him, Sam wasn’t all that coy, flirted like it was a mission and put his cards on the table with more bravery than Steve could ever have summoned on his own. When Sam had said they should get married, half-joking and half-serious, Steve’s knees had gone weak as a vision of their married bliss rolled out before him like fields of wheat and mountain ranges. It felt like destiny – what it had all been leading to. He didn’t say that either, because even he could hear how “America the Beautiful” that sounded and sometimes Sam got a little reproving when Steve compared their love – whether obliquely or head-on – to patriotism and love of country. Sam had plenty to say about how love of country didn’t mean country loved you back and theirs (he and Steve’s) love was reciprocal and nurturing, goddammit. And so Steve had only said, “We absolutely should get married” and that had been that.
Sam was returning now from dropping Cagney and James back home with their parents. The week had gone by surprisingly fast for how exhausting it was and Steve was already missing James’s quiet, serious demeanor and Cagney’s demanding precocity. He knew he was biased, but he could see both of them in the White House or running the world in some benevolent dictatorship situation a couple decades from now. He half-wanted to call Sarah and ask when he and Sam could have the kids back again.
Although, to be fair, he wouldn’t have had such an excellent nap with them around. But then again, naps didn’t give Steve the happy heart ache he’d felt when James had waved from the top of the school steps on Monday after Steve dropped him off or that smile Cagney flashed when they figured out her math homework on Thursday (math had gotten a lot harder since Steve was in school). Naps were great, but Steve kinda preferred the pleasant exhaustion of spending a day with those kids.
Sam came into the living room, shrugging off his jacket and unbuttoning the first few buttons of his shirt. “Catching up on sleep?” he asked, lifting Steve’s legs so he could sit beside him.
“I was watching a documentary on – I forget – hummingbirds? Bees? Must’ve dozed off. Pretty tired.”
“Imagine if they’d been newborns,” Sam joked. “At least Cagney and James slept through the night.”
Steve didn’t answer right away, suddenly caught in a fantasy of newborns with Sam, both he and Sam holding a beautiful child in their arms, perhaps on a sunny day in a park. A family. And then taking them to their first playdates, to school, having them be embarrassed by their overeager dads, watching them graduate high school, college, going on to be orchestra composers or marine biologists or whatever the hell they wanted to be because he and Sam would love them no matter what. Steve’s heart throbbed, all happy-achey again, and he looked at Sam and Sam looked back at him and probably saw all those dreams in Steve’s head because he smiled a little helplessly and grabbed Steve’s hand and said, “Okay, okay. We’ll get on it.”
And Steve grinned and sat forward to kiss Sam, to tell him how much he loved him, because – okay – he wasn’t allowed to wax on eloquently about his love, but he could sure show it.
Sam laughed when he can come up for air and said, “You realize we can’t actually make a baby doing this, right?”
And Steve couldn’t resist. He slipped his hand in Sam’s pants and said, “Let’s have a baby, Sam.”