"You're coming home with me." Lindsey had heard enough of Elise's story by the time she had gotten to the part where Stevie was supposedly rude at lunch, but he still listened until the end, just to be nice.
"Lindsey, I'm sure she didn't mean it." Stevie was sitting in the chair at that point, while Lindsey stood in the middle of the room to try and calm himself down.
"I didn't want to say anything, but then I talked to Kash, and..." Elise felt awful, she really did.
She was the very last person to want to hurt Stevie's feelings, or make Lindsey mad, but she also knew that she couldn't keep it a secret. It wasn't fair for Lucy to talk about someone that she had hardly even given a chance to in the first place.
Holding up her hands, Stevie tried to settle them both down some. "She is just very overwhelmed with my presence, okay?" Her voice was soft, only because she was trying hard to get through to Lindsey and that wasn't always easy.
He scoffed, letting both of his hands hit his side. "Overwhelmed? Overwhelmed with what?" Lindsey wasn't usually a very over protective husband, but that was just ridiculous.
There was nothing for Lucy to feel overwhelmed by. She hardly cooked, never cleaned, slept an insane amount and she wasn't even the one pregnant... Seemed to Lindsey like all she did in her free time, was complain.
"I'm not going home." Stevie didn't answer his question, because in reality, she knew he wouldn't understand.
She wouldn't have traded the experience of carrying her babies for the entire world. It was a bonding experience that went far beyond anything she had ever been witness to... She first fell in love with all of her children while she was pregnant, and Lucy didn't get to have that.
Stevie was certain that she was overwhelmed with the fact that she wasn't the one housing that sweet baby, someone else got the honors of doing that.
And to anyone else, it might not have made sense why Stevie was adamant on staying, but to her, it did. She wanted Lucy to feel the love that a mother is supposed feel when their child looks up at them for the first time, and even though she couldn't carry her own baby, Stevie wanted Lucy to experience it all with her.
"Are you kidding me?" He was starting to get a little fed up with that line of hers- I'm not going home, even after she'd felt so out of place and unwelcome in their lives? That was insane to him.
"No, I'm not." She spun herself around in the chair, almost glaring at him. "I'm not kidding." She restated as she shook head in slight annoyance.
Letting his jaw settle, he wasn't afraid to glare right back at her. "I don't understand why you're doing this to yourself, Stevie." He didn't- if she wasn't happy, nor having a good time, she should have just come back home, where she belonged.
"You don't understand anything, Lindsey." She rolled her eyes as she glanced back over at Elise, who was starting to panic.
Raising a brow, he let out a dry chuckle. "What do you expect from them after you're done with this?" He didn't want to have hurt her feelings, but he also didn't know how else to get through to her. "Do you really think we're ever going to see this baby? Do you think they're suddenly gonna come visit us, and spend time with us?" He knew they wouldn't- he knew that as soon as she had the kid, they wouldn't hear from Crosby until he needed something else.
Sinking down in the chair, she could feel her heart beating fast. "I would like to think that I can fix our relationship, yes." It stung when he said things like that, but only because she knew how honest he was being.
Letting out a sigh, Lindsey softened once he'd caught a glimpse of the tears filling the brims of her eyes. "I know you want to find common ground with him... with them," he lingered, a gentle shrug following his words. "But you know how ruthless those boys can be." He was sugarcoating it, really... they could be fucking jerks and the last thing he wanted was for his wife to feel like she had to put up with it.
She let out a huff as she pushed herself up off the chair. "You're just mad that for once, maybe Crosby likes me a little more." Stevie didn't feel like he was looking out for her- she felt like he was controlling her and that never got him very far, he knew that from first hand experience.
"Oh, please." He creased his eyebrows, a look of confusion written across his face. "I don't give a fuck if those kids don't like me, Stevie. I just don't want them to think they can walk all over you, like they've done their entire lives."
~
Across the city, Lucy and Crosby were having a night quite similar. Crosby had gone out with a couple of friends to have some drinks after the baseball game, and even thought he didn't get totally trashed, he did forget to call Lucy to let her know where he was, or when he was coming back home. So as soon as he walked in the front door, they were bickering back and forth.
Not only was that upsetting to Lucy, but after Elise ditched her, she spent the day with her mother, who wanted to start shopping for the nursery... the room that Stevie was taking up residency in.
"Then I got these cute curtains." She was standing in the center of their living room, blocking the tv to ensure that all of Crosby's attention was on her.
Nodding his head, he stared blankly at the yellow curtains. "Nice." He shrugged his shoulders, trying to work on his x-ray vision to see through her and watch the rest of the game.
"I also picked out some cute little lamps and a rocking chair." She had gone through and pre ordered half the store, but until they could figure out a place for everything, nothing was coming home.
"Cool," he didn't know why a baby needed all that sort of stuff... How was the baby going to turn on a lamp? It just didn't make sense to him.
"We need to talk about the nursery, Crosby." Lucy felt like they were way behind- most people would have had started painting the walls, and building the crib at that point in the pregnancy. They hadn't done any of that. "I think you should ask your mom to sleep on the couch for awhile." Her words caught him off guard, and also got his attention- the first thing she'd said all night that actually interested him.
"What?" He had heard her, but he still couldn't believe she had said it. "You want my pregnant mother to sleep on our couch?" He sounded like Lindsey when he said stuff like that.
"We have to start to getting things together for the baby, Crosby." She held out her hands, voice steadily rising. "We have no where to put the baby." She added, trying to sound more rational.
Scrunching up his nose, he gave her a really unenthused look. "Then we can sleep on the couches, but she isn't."
