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Tim knows that despite how much he loves to give attention to Lucy’s breasts (and, how much she loves when he gives attention to her breasts) that the few days before her period starts, they’re extremely sensitive.
He knows this. He knows when those days are, and during that time, he avoids them completely.
So he’s surprised when, two weeks after they should’ve been sensitive, she winces when he pulls a nipple into his mouth.
“Sorry,” he hums, knowing her body cues like the back of his hand. Lucy shakes her head as if to say it’s okay, and he kisses his way back up to her neck.
The thought flies into his head suddenly, without preamble:
Is she pregnant?
He doesn’t have time to think about it too much as he focuses his attention on other parts of her body and becomes otherwise occupied.
Later, after - when they’re satisfied and sleepy - he rationalizes that sore breasts don’t automatically mean pregnancy. There would be other symptoms and signs, too.
…Like the box of untouched tampons under the bathroom sink that he’d noticed were still there when he came home from the grocery store with a new box.
Like the fact that Kojo has been strangely protective of her lately, his head constantly resting on her abdomen when they’re in bed or lying on the couch.
Or that she’s been extra exhausted lately, going to bed early and harder to wake up than usual in the mornings.
That one afternoon at work a week ago when he couldn’t find her, and she came out of the locker room looking pale, blaming the food truck she and Celina had stopped at for lunch.
Holy crap. She’s pregnant.
Tim looks over at her, where she’s burrowed under the blankets snoozing softly.
If she’s pregnant, she’s got a whole plan on how to tell him - probably involving baby boots and whatever else she’s dreamed up - so he vows to keep his mouth shut until she can put her plan into action.
Still, he can’t help but look at her and think about a baby – their baby – growing inside her, her growing bigger through the upcoming months, feeling their baby kick, the first time they hold and see their son or daughter.
Is he completely off base here?
No. He knows her. Not once since they moved in together has she ever not even opened a box of tampons before they buy another at the end of the month – whoever is on grocery duty that week.
Her breasts are tender like clockwork.
She’s always tended to be a night owl, making fun of him for falling asleep early.
Still, he resolves to let her tell him in her own time, with whatever Lucy plan she’s concocted, and he’s going to love every second of it.
Now that he’s figured it out, it becomes more and more obvious.
She’s nauseous the next morning. Her complaint about the smell of eggs when Tim cooks Kojo’s breakfast – something she’s never had a problem with before. The cravings: she wants chocolate chip pancakes for dinner three nights that week, she’s suddenly craving slushees, and she asks for no pickles on her veggie burger when they go out to eat after work.
Celina’s giving her a hard time for how many restroom breaks they take on shift, given how difficult it is with only a few select restroom stops that have floor-to-ceiling stalls.
She’s emotional; she cries over a dog food commercial, a singing competition, and a potted succulent at the grocery store that just looks “so lonely.”
Still, a week goes by and she hasn’t said a word.
It’s a busy day at work, and they’re both on a scene. They’d gotten a call for a welfare check – Lucy and Celina had taken it, but when they arrived, no one answered the door. Celina noted smells of ammonia and decay even from outside, and looking in through the window it was clear the homeowner was a hoarder. The front porch was sagging and it was possible there was structural damage. Tim had arrived on scene to assess the situation.
“If you approve us to make entry,” Lucy says, “We can go inside and confirm that the resident is actually deceased.”
“The porch is sagging, there’s an ammonia smell consistent with waste buildup, and we have no visual on the interior piles,” Tim says. “That’s enough for me to limit entry. Sergeant Chen, you coordinate from outside.”
He thinks that Lucy will agree to it without him having to explicitly say why he wants her on the outside, and giving away that he knows. Exposure to even something as simple as ammonia could be a respiratory irritant, and pregnancy can change oxygen tolerance.
“What?” Lucy scoffs. “I’m the supervisor on scene.”
“And you can coordinate the scene from out here.”
“It’s fine, I’ll go,” Celina volunteers easily, eyeing them suspiciously as she picks up on the tension.
“Great. Juarez you-“ Tim begins to direct Celina.
“What?” Lucy gasps in disbelief. “No! I’m her superior officer, I don’t send her into an unknown and possibly dangerous situation and sit it out.”
She doesn’t have to say the words, but he knows what she’s thinking: you never would have sent me inside and coordinated from safety.
“Okay. Then I go,” Tim decides quickly. “By that logic, I’m watch commander, it makes the most sense for me to assess the scene inside.”
“Sergeant Bradford,” Lucy begins and he can tell his wife has checked out and Sergeant Chen is here in full force. “I am perfectly capable of safely entering the structure and assessing the situation. We’ve seen a lot worse. I will put on proper PPE if it’s warranted, and I will go in.”
“You won’t. That’s an order.” He knows his voice is coming across sharp, but he can’t help it.
Lucy raises her eyebrows, and Celina retreats into complete silence.
This is an argument they have never had. He has never ordered her not to do something on shift – at least, not like this, not since she was a rookie probably. He’s always trusted her and he’s always respected the fact they both rank as sergeants, despite the fact he does have authority to make calls as watch commander. In all their time working together before they were married and after, he has never given her an order that’s based on his personal feelings, never forbid her to do something just because he worries about her safety.
“I can handle it,” she scoffs, and it seems like her emotions are about to come to the surface which is something she never allows to happen at work. “What is this? You never do the overprotective bull crap thing when we’re on duty.”
He hears Celina’s sharp intake of breath at Lucy’s tone and the bite behind her words and he forces himself to stay calm.
“This isn’t about you,” he finally snaps, calm but firm, and he’s so close to admitting to her that he knows but he can’t do that here, not in front of everyone. “And that’s final. Watch commander’s orders.”
He’s surprised she’s resisting him so hard; he had thought she would take his out and go with it given the pregnancy. But, she’s still Lucy. Maybe it’s because she assumes he doesn’t know and she thinks he’s just being overprotective or maybe it’s because she’s determined to prove, as many female officers feel the need to, that pregnancy doesn’t have to hold you back.
The risk is not huge, but he would use caution with any pregnant officer, sending them into a scene with unknown health hazards that would be particularly dangerous given pregnancy and a developing baby.
However, if looks could kill, he would probably be dead, and judging by the look of shock and absolute silence on Celina’s part, she knows it too.
After the call is over, he doesn’t see Lucy again until he gets home.
She’s on the couch, and when he comes inside she doesn’t greet him. The whole drive home he thought about what to say, how to handle this – if she wasn’t going to give in and admit she’s pregnant to him, he was going to have to admit he knows – her planned surprise be damned, because otherwise they’re going to end up in a dreadful fight.
“Can we talk?” he asks and Lucy gives him a look from where she’s sitting on the couch, Kojo’s head resting on her stomach – of course.
“Why? What’s the point of talking when your orders are final.”
“Come on, Lucy, that’s not fair,” he returns. “You know… you know why I did what I did.”
She stands, and Kojo looks offended at her abandoning him. “Tim, I have absolutely no idea what got into you today.”
“I think you do,” he retorts.
“I clearly don’t,” she snaps back. “You know I’m perfectly capable of something as simple as that call today.”
“It wasn’t about you!”
“You keep saying that, but it doesn’t add up! Who is it about, then?”
“It’s about the baby!” The words fall from his mouth suddenly without a chance for him to stop them.
Lucy’s face goes through several different expressions – first shock, then surprise, then, absolute…
confusion.
“What the hell are you talking about?” she snaps, frowning at him. “What baby?”
In all this time, Tim hadn’t stopped to consider that she doesn’t know.
“Are you… are you messing with me right now?” he asks her, genuinely. “Because I get it if you wanted to tell me some special way but I think we’re beyond that now.”
“Tell you…”
“That you’re pregnant.”
Lucy continues to look at him like he’s lost his mind and he realizes then that she actually had no idea.
“I’m…” Tim watches as her mind does the calculations in real time. All the clues start adding up for her, dominoes tipping over one by one the way they had for him, and then she gasps, eyes widening.
“Oh my god, I’m pregnant.”
Before he has a chance to say anything, she rushes off to the bathroom. “We need a pregnancy test,” she says, opening the cabinet under the sink. “Okay. We don’t have pregnancy tests. We need to get some.” She spots the unopened boxes (plural, now) of tampons and it seems to only confirm her reality. “Oh my god we have a thousand tampons and no pregnancy tests!” she mutters and sits down on the floor.
“Lucy.”
“I… why didn’t you tell me?!”
He sits down on the floor with her and can’t help but let out a soft chuckle at how absolutely insane this is, but how it’s so completely them.
“I thought you knew,” he returns gently. “I was playing along because I figured you had a way you wanted to tell me and…”
“I did!” she wails, and a real sob falls out of her lips. “I did! I always knew when it happened I wanted to get you boots, you know, like when you became sergeant - and call you a boot because now you’d be a first time dad and… oh, now I can’t ever do that! Not even with the next one, because you won’t be a boot then!”
“Hey,” he says, pulling her in for a hug, kissing her on the head. “It’s okay.”
“Oh my god, I’m going to be a terrible mother.”
“Where are you getting that from?”
“I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I’m supposed to have that mother’s intuition, you know? Instead, you got your father’s intuition and…” she notices Kojo, who’s lying in front of the bathroom doorway, never willing to leave Lucy far from his sight and narrows her eyes as she processes. “Oh god, Kojo knew. Tim, our dog knew I was pregnant before I did.”
Tim shrugs, trying to keep it light. “Well, he’s a dog. They have those primal instincts.”
“And I don’t have any motherly instincts!”
“Lucy.”
“My husband had to tell me I’m pregnant.”
“If it helps,” he says, a smile tugging at his lips. “I figured it out when your boobs were sore. I’m not so sure that’s the fatherly instinct you’re thinking of.”
Lucy stares at him for a moment, and then bursts out laughing. “Oh my god. We’re ridiculous.”
Tim reaches forward and rubs soft circles on her back as she comes down from her spiral “Are you… are you freaking out because of the baby or because this caught you off guard?”
“No. It’s not the baby, I… I am completely taken by surprise here, but it’s not that. I’m happy about that, once I can get my head around this and stop reeling. It’s adjusting to the fact this was completely out of my control.”
Tim raises an eyebrow. “We’re about to be parents. I think we’ve got to get used to things being out of our control.”
Lucy laughs, leans forward and hugs him. “Oh my god. We’re going to be parents,” she realizes. “I really need to take a test. To be sure.”
“I’ll go get one,” he says immediately. “Are you… are you okay here? Do you want to come?”
“I’m okay,” she assures him with a soft smile. “I’ve got Kojo, my protector. I think I need to just… process for a few minutes.”
“Copy that,” he says, giving her a kiss on the head and holding out a hand to help her up from the floor.
“Tim,” she says, reaching for him and he looks back at her. “I’m pretty sure that… this is real. We’re going to have a baby.”
The moment sits with them for a minute while he looks into her eyes, pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yeah. I know. I’m the one who told you.”
Lucy bursts out laughing, shoving at him. “You’re the worst. Go, go.”
Tim is gone longer than Lucy expects, but she takes the time to process.
She replays everything the past few weeks and it all starts to make complete and total sense.
Kojo sticks by her side as she sits on their bed and scrolls through her phone, already looking for an app that tells her what to expect week by week and researching what she can and cannot eat that she might not already know.
“You’re going to be a big brother,” Lucy tells Kojo, and he lifts his head to look at her, unimpressed. “Yeah, yeah, I know. You already knew, too.”
Tim returns with an entire bag of pregnancy tests and Lucy just gives him an amused look to which he shrugs. “Just... to make sure I got the right kind.”
She can only imagine what the cashier had been thinking.
He sits with her in the bathroom – offers to stay while she takes the test and to her complete surprise, she doesn’t usher him out of the room because this entire thing has gotten her so off kilter and she needs his presence to ground her. She never would have ever thought that she would want her husband in the room while she pees on a stick, but she’d told Tim once his calm in the middle of chaos is something she needs and it always has been.
They wait. They talk. They share nervous jokes and laughter.
Then the two pink lines stare up at them on one.
The word pregnant on another.
A big happy face on the last.
They hug for what seems like forever, swaying in each other’s embrace, Tim planting soft kisses on her head and forehead.
“Well. I guess this is not going to be the cute story I wanted to tell our kids,” she jokes, the humor of the whole thing finally making her laugh.
“Well, what about this?” Tim asks, stepping out of the bathroom momentarily to Lucy’s confusion, before stepping back inside with his hands behind his back.
“What’s…”
Tim brings his arms in front of him and lets two pairs of boots hang from each of his index fingers – a pair of tiny Doc Martens and a pair of tiny baby boots.
“Do you know how hard it is to find boots at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night?”
“Oh my god,” Lucy laughs iin delight and then bursts into tears - something she has a feeling she might be doing regularly.
“Congrats, Boot,” he teases, sparkle in his eyes.
“Yeah, well - right back at you,” she laughs, voice cracking with emotion, leaning forward to kiss him softly as they both begin to realize what has happened to them, to their lives.
“I love you,” he tells her, forehead leaning against hers.
“I love you so much,” she returns, taking a pair of boots from him. “I can’t believe you got me boots.”
“I mean, honestly, Lucy – was there really ever any other way this ever should’ve gone down? You were the original boot.”
She shakes her head, tears still rolling down her cheeks. “I know I should get mad at you for calling me that but it’s really very sweet.”
“And anyway,” he adds with a chuckle and a grin, “looks like we’re both boots now.”