Take Me In (Jack Johnson)

04.

After a long, emotionally draining day at work, I made my way back home in the heat of late May.

Jack was sitting on the couch in our living room, shirtless, and staring at the laptop screen that was sitting on his lap. As I walked through the door he looked up with a frustrated expression. I knew what he was doing, he had been talking about this moment weeks before now: summer job hunting.

The week before the end of college the students had to apply for jobs anywhere they could before all of the high school kids started to take all of the jobs available. Jack didn't have problems finding jobs, usually, unless he waited until later to apply. I'm assuming he did, judging by his hair that he had probably ran his fingers through millions of times already as well as the redness of his face.

"Bad day?" He questioned, taking in my appearance and plastering a smile on his face.

"Frustrating." I sighed, dropping my stuff by the door. I took the five steps across the room and collapsed on the couch next to him.

"Same, baby." He placed the computer on the arm of the couch and leaned back, turning his head so he could look at me. "And, to add onto the stress of not being able to find a good job that interests me, I got this peculiar phone call today."

I grinned widely and sat up straighter so I could ask, "what kind of peculiar phone call?"

This had happened many times before. He had gotten plenty of phone calls from our friends explaining what kind of trouble they were in and why they needed him to help them get out of their situation. And, being the good guy that Jack is, he would help them.

My boyfriend had gotten a lot of other strange calls. One time a girl called him, asking if he was Justin Bieber. Another time a guy had called him and then got mad at Jack for picking up the phone due to a young woman giving him a fake number. The guy thought Jack was the reason the girl gave him the number. This story would probably just end up on this long list of phone calls that Jack has gotten. We'd laugh about it for a while and then tell our friends and laugh more before forgetting all about it until another situation like this came up.

"Well," he started, "this time the call was coming from an orphanage."

He paused long enough for me to stifle out a laugh. As I let the sound drift out of my mouth, I made eye contact with him and realized he was giving me an accusatory look.

"What? They weren't looking for you, right?" I asked, my tone growing somber.

"No, they were looking for me. The lady said that my name and number was on her paper to set up an appointment to find our perfect dream child." He was still looking at me as if I had something to do with this.

I raised an eyebrow at him, "okay, so when did you sign up to find our perfect dream child and why didn't you tell me? I'm pretty sure I can have a child myself without any problems. You know my family, we're extremely fertile. I just didn't know we were at that point in our relationship where that was even a thought in our minds."

As I blabbered on, Jack held out his hand to stop me from talking, "Liyah, I didn't sign up; you did."

Slightly offended and extremely surprised, I let out a gasp and put a hand to my chest, "I did not. I would at least have the decency to tell you and talk to you about it if I were going to sign up for something like that."

"Well, somehow she got my number."

"It was probably Nate or Cassie. They always do stupid shit like that." I rolled my eyes, "did you ask her who it was that wrote the information down?"

He nodded, "and she said that she'd only be able to tell if it was me or not if I went in."

His voice trailed off at the end of the sentence and he bit the inside of his cheek. That was what he did when he wasn't telling the whole story.