Week 1
Sam
When he makes his way into the bathroom Monday morning, the half of his mind that has churned into wakefulness centered on inventory at the comic book store, he finds that his wife is already standing by the sink, and she is crying.
"Quinn?" he says, brain now fully engaged and offering up horrible scenarios—she's been vomiting blood, she discovered a lump, she's in pain somehow. "What's wrong?"
It takes Sam a moment to comprehend the fact that even though there are tears sluicing down her cheeks, Quinn is smiling. "Baby," she begins, but then doesn't say anything else.
"What?"
She gives a wet, hiccupping laugh. "No," she says, and offers him the slim white stick. "Baby."
He stares at it, at the little pink cross, he understand that she wasn't using a term of endearment, but instead a description of a person. Their person. A person that he has thought about, dreamed about, since before they even got married.
"Oh," Sam breathes, and it seems like his voice is floating high above him, like he's at the bottom of a well and he isn't even the one speaking at all. "Oh."
After a few minutes, he focuses, blinks, and notices that Quinn is looking at him with her eyebrows knitted together and her mouth is trembling, molding into an uncertain expression. "Are you—you're happy, right?" she presses, and Sam just stares at her, because he honestly can't believe she even needs to ask that question.
He reaches past her to set the test down carefully on the sink, like it's some precious relic, and then takes hold of Quinn with equal caution, winding one arm around her waist and bringing his free hand up to delicately cup her cheek.
"You keep making me eat my words," he says, and she looks at him as if he's just told her that The Dark Knight was the worst superhero movie ever made—with a mixture of concern for his sanity as well as a dose of plain confusion.
"When you said you'd marry me, I thought that was the happiest day of my life," Sam continues, dipping his head to brush his lips gently along the curve of Quinn's jaw. "And then when we actually got married, I thought that was the happiest day of my life."
Quinn is giggling now.
"And now, I'm going to have to say it again, even though I know there's going to be another day—oh, about nine months from now—that's going to trump this one," he murmurs. "This is the happiest day of my life, Quinn."
He's working on that spot just above her collarbone that he knows she loves when she says, "Boy or girl?"
Sam shakes his head, partly in response and partly to nuzzle her neck. "I don't care."
"Of course you do."
"Don't."
"Do."
"Sam."
"Quinn."
"Samuel."
"That's not fair. I don't have an equivalent for that."
"So tell me what you want."
"Babe, I really don't care."
"You do, too. It's imbued in your DNA to care."
"What?"
"Sperm determines sex."
He sighs and lifts his head, looking her square in the eye, and for a second, he forgets what he was going to say.
Being with Quinn has given him a particular appreciation for hazel eyes—the way they range from chocolate to honey to a mossy green, and sometimes he swears the colors change based on her mood, even though she told him one time that it's just something about light and reflection. He obviously believes that hers are especially beautiful, which for some reason is a compliment guaranteed to bring color to her cheeks.
"I wanted blue eyes when I was growing up," she told him, on maybe their fourth or fifth date. "I've always thought they were so pretty."
She'd leaned forward across the table. Sam remembers his hands beginning to tremble as she got closer, how the only scent he could breathe in was the vanilla that clung to her skin. Balancing on her elbows, she brought her face very close to his, until the tips of their noses touched, at which point Sam hadn't been able to breathe at all.
"Yep," she'd husked. "Absolutely gorgeous."
Sam clears his throat as his words finally come back to him. "All I want," he says, pausing to kiss her gently but fully, "is for them to look just like their mom."
/
Week 6
Quinn
Scene One, Act Two
(A hospital room, lit dimly by the moonlight falling through the rain-washed window. MELISSA, a tall, athletic young woman in her early twenties is sitting in a chair by the bedside of her younger sister, ALICE, who is hooked up to several machines and an IV.)
MELISSA
(takes ALICE'S hand)
Hey, you. I know you can hear me. And I know you're hanging on for me, but you don't have to anymore.
MELISSA stands up and paces to the window, turning her back to ALICE'S bed as if she's trying to hide the tears that are beginning to form.
Quinn chews her lip and rereads what she's just written, her fingers dancing restlessly just above the keyboard. She isn't crazy about it, but then, this is the most she's written for days. Act one was a slow process, setting up characters and their relationships to each other. She had hoped act two would be easier, would flow better, but so far, it's been a constant dance between the cursor and "Scene One, Act One" as the backspace key brings them together and Quinn's attempts at writing pulls them apart again.
She's been acting in the New Haven theater circuit since she graduated, mostly landing lead roles for the past few years. She just wrapped up a spot as Abigail Williams in the production of The Crucible, and when she mentioned to Sam over dinner how she always dreaded the upcoming audition process, he shoved around on his plate and peeked up at her.
"Why don't you take a break?" he'd said tentatively. "I—I mean, we have enough money, between the comic book store and, uh, savings, so—and I—remember that accident you had on A Glass Menagerie? When you sprained your wrist? You have to be careful now, Quinn."
"Okay," she said, surprising him; and then, surprising herself, "I think I'll try writing a play."
A part of her has always wanted to be a writer, the part that loved the shelter books offered, the part that had been loved the lyrics of a song first and the melody later. So she sat down at her computer, a green 17" monster she'd had since college, and so far had…
A whole act.
Now, a little over a month into her pregnancy, she hasn't started to show yet, but other symptoms have begun to show themselves—a persistent ache in her lower back, a slight swelling of her ankles, ridiculously tender breasts, and, of course, the god awful morning sickness.
Sam, the angel that he is, is always there to hold back her hair and then carry her back to bed, to bring her ginger ale and crackers or hot tea, to rub her back or her feet. He goes into work late almost every day.
"Sam," she croaked earlier. "You're going to be late."
He delivered that devastating half-smile, the one that was a huge contributing factor to her being pregnant in the first place, the one that has always sent a current of heat up her spine. "Babe," he says, "I'm the owner. If anybody can be late, it's me."
She rolls her chair away from the desk and moves herself along by dragging her heels on the carpet, rolling down the hall toward the kitchen. Quinn stands up at the threshold, wincing when her knees pop, which is something that happened so often when she was pregnant with Beth that it sometimes sounded like she was walking on bubble wrap.
Beth.
Quinn smiles faintly at the thought of her firstborn daughter, who almost shattered her eardrum when she told her over the phone a few weeks before. She'd been able to hear Shelby laughing in the background, telling her to use her inside voice.
She grabs a pint of Ben and Jerry's Phish Food out of the freezer and plops back down in the desk chair to eat it. So far, she hasn't had a specific craving for anything; eight years ago, carrying Beth, she'd eaten pickles and barbecue chips together, as often as she could, making a sandwich out of two chips and a slice of pickle.
When she's dug through half the pint, she puts it back and pads up the stairs to her room, intending to curl up in bed with the Dean Koontz novel that Sam checked out from the library for her. It's something he does that she especially loves—the library is across the street from his store, and on his lunch break, he'll walk over and pick out a few books that he thinks she'll like. He knows her so well that he has rarely been wrong.
Quinn is under the covers, propped up on the extra pillows that Sam insists she sleep on now, and is in the process of sinking into Life Expectancy—which she thinks is a little ironic—when her cell phone rings. She reaches over and presses the button to pick up the call, without bothering to check the caller ID.
"Hi, Sam," she says, and she hears his chuckle, hushed and crackly over the phone line.
"Hi, baby. How'd you know it was me?"
He must step outside, because the static fades and his voice comes through better. Quinn smiles faintly and closes her eyes, leaning her head back against the headboard.
"Wifely instinct," she says, when the real reason is that for the past six weeks, he's called every hour on the hour to check up on her, although he pretends like he has a reason to call each time to keep from injuring her pride.
She figured out what he was doing by the third call on the first day, but instead of feeling coddled, she just feels comforted.
Sam hums in response, and then says, "There was this girl in here that reminded me of you today."
Quinn grins. "What, was she divinely beautiful, too?"
Her husband laughs. "No," he says. "But then, no one is as beautiful as you."
Even alone, heat creeps up her cheeks, and she giggles like a schoolgirl. "So what was it then?"
"She does the same thing you do when you're reading—the way you chew on a lock of your hair when you get to a really good part, you know? She had this totally choice copy The Amazing Spiderman."
"You watch me read?" she asks, and she thinks of all those times where she'd sworn his eyes were on her, but whenever she looked up at him, he would always be absorbed in something else with the barest hint of a smile on his face.
"Yeah," he answers, and she can hear that smile now. "It's how I know what books you like. I watch your face to see whether you're into it or not."
She snuggles down into the pillows, a smile of her own curling across her lips, her eyes slowly sliding shut again at the soothing rhythms of his voice. "And here I thought you were psychic."
"Sorry to disappoint you, babe."
"You could never," Quinn says quietly, almost slurring, turning her cheek into the pillow.
"I know. Go to sleep Quinn."
"I'm not…"
"Yeah, you are. I'll see you when I get home. I love you."
"Love you, too."
When she's asleep a few minutes later, she dreams a simple dream about Sam curled up beside her, his hand resting gently on her stomach, and when she wakes up, her dream has come true.