I dont even know what this is, I was bored. So read it? :)
7 AM:
She slaps him upside the head on Monday morning, shaking him out of his weekend slumber, preparing him for the trials and tribulations of the workweek to come.
"Ow, Jesus, Santana. You could have just yelled or something," he says, sitting up in their king-sized bed, the first thing they bought for their humble abode. When they had bought the house, the realtor had told them this was the neighborhood to watch, the perfect place for a family, and handed them a flyer full of hyphenated adjectives. Three-bedroom. Bungalow-styled. Old-style charm. Walking-distance to Lima. Well, it was enough to captivate her dipshit of a husband, who signed the deed immediately. And now she's stuck in the suburbs. Fuck her life.
"Yeah, like that would have worked," she retorts. Seven A.M. in the Puckerman house sees a lot of yelling, rushing, panicking. She's hopped off her side of the bed now, and turned her back to him as she pulls her satin slip over her head to change into her day clothes.
He doesn't know why she bothers. "I don't know why you've turned around, Santana. I've seen you naked a million times." They are married, after all. And have a kid. And Puck and Santana, for God's sake.
"Well, it's not going to be a million and one, not today," she says, reaching for a pristine white shirt that's sure to be ruined later on. He gets up on his hand and knees and crawls across the bed and gets up to stand behind her. He wraps his arms around her slender body, and of course his hands are already roaming up to her bra, searching for the front clasp. She tenses, out of habit, and stiffens in his hold.
"You know, you don't need to suck in your stomach, babe. You look hot."
Jackass. She really wants to throw her Tummy-Tuck Spanx at him. But instead, she pushes him away.
"What?" he asks. He thought he was being sweet. So she's not as skinny as she used to be, but compared to normal women, and women who haven't even been pregnant, she's tiny.
"When you tell me I look good when I obviously look like shit, it makes you a liar. And then that makes me think of all the other times you've lied to me."
"Like what?"
She's putting her legs into a pair of jeans, and shimmies so that the denim covers her hips. "I don't know, how about, 'I'll be home by seven tonight, promise' or 'Of course I picked up diapers at the store' or, oh, my personal favorite, "Don't worry, I'll pull out in time'." He chuckles and cocoons her now fully-clothed body again in his bare arms.
"Someone's in a bad mood today," he whispers into her ear, his fingers tracing the scar on her lower abdomen that despite every expensive cream she's bought, won't fade. Fucking C-sections. Well, she sure as hell wasn't going to push a fucking baby out of her vagina, thank you very much.
"It's not fair," she whines, leaning into him.
"What?"
"You get to leave, and I have to stay here all day."
"No, Santana. I have to go to work and sit in a cubicle for ten hours, and you get to spend the whole day with Kerry. That's not fair."
"Stretch marks aren't fair. Don't you dare think you have it worse than me."
"So you don't like spending quality time with our baby?"
She doesn't respond the question he's asked her. "I'd rather it be you," she pouts, looking up. He chuckles again, gives her a kiss, before jumping into the shower.
10 AM:
She's ready to rip her hair out. Not that there's that much to rip out. She can hardly remember having long hair. These days, it's a shoulder-length bob that usually ends up looking like a bird's nest by three o' clock.
"Kerry, baby, please just eat a bite, for Mommy. You're hungry," she coos, doing the one thing she promised she'd never do, not even to real babies-baby talk. But hey, she's getting desperate.
"No!" her daughter yells. Kerry is in the middle of the "Terrible Twos," and every day, she chooses to only eat food of a certain color. Mondays are blue. Where the fuck is she going to find blue food to feed her daughter? She can't eat blueberries all day long. "I don't want carrots!" Then Kerry decides to pound on the table, flipping the entire bowl of carefully strained and star-shaped carrot bits onto the floor.
God, she really cannot wait for naptime.
1 PM:
"What do you want, Kerry?" Santana sighs exasperatedly. She's tried everything, and nothing will spell Kerry for a minute so that she will fall asleep. She's tried rocking, bribery, singing, all the things that usually work. Before, she never really understood those crazy women criminals that got stuck in jail for smothering their children. Now? It's an entirely different story.
"Daddy! Daddy!" Kerry screams.
"Me too, Kerry. Me, too," she sighs.
"Daddy!" Kerry repeats.
"Okay, Kerry. You win. I will call Daddy," she sighs, picking up the phone. She's not really supposed to call him at work anymore, not after what happened last time. Let's just say, phone sex and shared work lines don't mix.
"Hello?" he grumbles.
"Please talk to your daughter, who refuses to do anything I say, because all she wants is Daddy," she snaps without a greeting. He likes the way she completely disregards that this demon child is her daughter too.
"Hi Kerry," he says, his deep voice projecting all around the nursery via speakerphone. She can hear his floozy of a secretary "Aww"-ing the background and she's mad all over again.
"Daddy!" Kerry laughs. Kerry doesn't have a limited vocabulary, honestly, but she does like certain words more than others. For example, "Daddy." The same way she likes certain people over others. Again, Daddy.
"Kerry, can you take a nap please? Mommy's very grouchy and Daddy doesn't like it when she's grouchy," he reasons. He can practically see Santana rolling her eyes.
"Okay, daddy," Kerry blips.
Okay?That's it? What does that mohawked jackass have that she doesn't, other than magic baby whispering powers?
"Night, night, Mommy," Kerry says, curling up into the nook of Santana's neck so that her mother can inhale that sweet baby smell. Twenty minutes later, she's out.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
4 PM:
She really doesn't know how those women on television do it, the ones with eight or fourteen or twenty children. She's only got one, and she still busts her ass everyday just to get dinner on the table at seven. Where's her TV show?
It's not like she's a single parent. They're financially secure, and both of them are committed to Kerry, and to each other. But when Puck helps, he ends up doing more harm than benefit. Like last Friday, when they went over to Mama Puckerman's for shabbat. All she needed him to do was dress Kerry, and she was going to load the car, get the snacks, fill the diaper bag.
Instead, as she was locking the carseat into the sedan, the father-and-daughter pair emerged from the house, eliciting a gasp from her.
"What in the world is our daughter wearing?" she cried, her eyes scanning the toddler in her husband's arms. Kerry donned a pair of pink leggings with the purple Stars of David on them (a gift from his mother, gag) and a purple sweater with kittens on them (a gift from Rachel Berry, even more gags). Kerry had never worn either, Santana had forbidden it.
"What? Matching colors, right? Purple and purple!" he said in defense. Obviously, she made him go upstairs and change Kerry again, this time into a fur-lined Juicy Couture sweatsuit that she had conned him into buying.
So she and Puck have their roles. He's the fun one who plays with their daughter on the floor and tickles her until she falls into a mess of giggles. She's the one who makes sure their daughter isn't dead and teaches her the important shit. They complement each other, and that's part of the reason this whole arrangement, this happy family thing, has worked so well so long.
She pours herself another cup of coffee, relishes in the temporary freedom she has, and waits for her daughter to wake up. It'll happen soon enough.
7 PM
She can hear the car rumbling in the driveway. He's home.
Hallelujah.
It's possibly been the worst day ever as a stay-at-home mom. Even the word sounds ugly. Stay-at-home mom. God.
She's standing in front of the stove, stirring the pot of pasta sauce. She hears the familiar drop of his keys on the windowsill, the kick of his shoes against the foyer wall. He comes to the kitchen and gives her a kiss on the cheek from behind her. She spins around, and when she sees what he has in his arms, she nearly drops the ladle in the pot.
"What the fuck?" she spits out. His eyes bulge out temporarily and gesture to the teary-eyed child he's carrying. It's not that she's unaware that she's cursed in front of their daughter. Oh she knows, she just doesn't care. Not today, at least.
"What? She was crying!" he says.
"Yeah! Cause she was being naughty. It's called a time-out corner for a reason, Puck. How am I supposed to discipline our daughter when you're there to rescue her from punishment every time?" she says indignantly, putting her hands on her hips. She pries Kerry from his arms (which is harder than you'd think, since the girl is holding on for dear life to "daddy, daddy").
"Go play, honey," she says softer this time, and gently pushes their daughter out the kitchen. Kerry looks glad to be off the hook, and dashes out.
"What did she do?" he says. He's never here for Kerry's tantrums and lash-outs, but he can imagine, since Santana never fails to alert him in excruciating detail about what she has to deal with.
"She was being sassy. And she hit me because I wouldn't let her have a cookie before dinner. No daughter of mine is going to talk back," Santana complains.
He laughs again. "She's just like you."
She glares at him momentarily, but revels in the thought that even if Kerry likes Puck better in every aspect, at least she will have something in common with her daughter.
10 PM:
At last, silence. There is no crying, no screaming, no desperate sighs. Kerry is in bed, sleeping soundly and well fed.
She is exhausted. But of course, she can't go to bed because she has a huge stack of preschool applications to fill out. Quinn practically ripped out the phone book the last time she came over and found out Santana hadn't put Kerry on a waiting list yet. Her husband walks over and starts massaging her shoulders, and she is so glad she married the bastard.
"I appreciate you, you know. I know it's tough for you to be inside all day being a mom. And I get that you want to strangle everyone every once in a while. But just know, I am so glad you're still here, still Kerry's mom, and still my wife," he says. It's true. She could have left at any time, and she has thought about it before, but then Kerry always does something adorable or Puck always brings home some type of jewelry that makes her glad to be a suburban housewife, at least for the time being.
"Thanks, baby," she replies quietly, pulling out the chair next to her. He obliges and sits beside her.
"Put those away, you need a break. It's not Harvard, Santana. We have a Jewish Latina daughter. She's going to get into preschool, even that pretentious boarding one in Canada."
"We are not sending our daughter to Canada," she says gravely. He laughs, and she relents to his request. She pushes the stack away, leaning back into the chair. He gets up and comes back with a bottle of wine and some glasses.
"You don't even like red wine," she comments.
"Yeah, but you do."
"I love you," she says.
"Love you too."
For some mad reason, he finds the conversation to be permission to pick her up and throw her onto bed. The thing she never expected about motherhood was the decline in her sex life. People told her to kiss it goodbye, but she had laughed it off, as if it would never happen to the two of them. But now, she occasionally just lays there out of exhaustion as he rides her. She's apologized for it a couple of times, but he waved it off. He said it was kind of hot, in a necrophiliac fetish sort of way. So they've all made sacrifices. The difference is, she complains and he doesn't. So for that reason, she actually lets him make love to her tonight.
1 AM:
She can't sleep, despite the fact that her body is screaming at her to. She looks over and her husband is snoring lightly next to her. She slips out of bed and and tiptoes down the hall to purple room on the left.
She lets herself in and spends the next ten minutes staring at her beautiful baby girl, kneeling by the bed. Santana studies the long lashes that line her eyes, the delicate little fingers, the luscious pink bow lips that nobody knows who she got from. When did her daughter get so big? Where has all the time gone? Then suddenly, Santana realizes that one day, Kerry is going to be gone for good. There won't be anymore yelling, anymore running around the house. Nothing. It is the first time this thought has ever dawned on her, and it's fucking terrifying.
A loose brown tendril falls into her face, tickling her chubby cheeks. Santana carefully plucks the curl and tucks it behind her ear, careful not to wake up the sleeping beauty.
No luck.
Kerry stirs and yawns. "Mommy?" she asks, blinking.
"Yeah, it's me, baby. Go back to sleep," Santana whispers, kissing her on the forehead.
"Okay, mommy," she grumbles before mumbling something that's along the lines of "Aiwuboo."
Santana leaves the nursery, before giving it a last look. Everything looks the same, and it's as if she never intruded. The fort that Kerry and Puck built out of sofa cushions last weekend is still intact in one corner, the mural of the saints her own mother painted on the wall is still overlooking the bed, and the frog-shaped humidifier is still quietly humming by the bookshelf. And even though she wants to stay in here forever, to watch over her daughter forever and protect her, she closes the door quietly and crawls back into her own bed, where her sleeping husband is waiting for her.
4 AM:
It's only at 4 in the morning, three hours later that she realizes what Kerry was trying to tell her.
Aiwuboo
"I love you too, Kerry."
7 AM:
She awakes the next morning refreshed, like a heavy weight has been lifted over her. She looks over at her husband, who has evidently been watching her sleep.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi," he says, giving her a kiss on the lips, "Last night was fun."
For a moment, she thinks he is referring to her secret midnight visit to Kerry, but as an afterthought, she remembers they had sex last night.
"Yeah. I've been thinking…." she starts, then trails off again. Is this really what she wants? Because when she says this, there will be no going back. She did only decide this this morning, after all.
"Yeah?"
"I want another baby," she affirms. Her husband looks at her like she's turned into a madwoman, searching her eyes for any trace of doubt or facetious humor. It is a long while before he says anything.
"Shit. Are you serious, Lo?" He only uses that nickname whenever he's being casual and wants to mitigate the gravity of a situation with remnants of high school.
"Yeah," she says quietly. She repeats it, louder this time.
Her husband? She can't really hear what he's saying because as of right now, he's already on top of her, ripping her clothes off.
This might not have been the life she envisioned for herself, or would wish on anyone else, but she loves her husband and loves her daughter like she's never loved anything before. A lot of days, she just wants to go back to her crazy sexaholic, noncommittal twenties self, when she didn't have to care about anyone but herself, but she knows that will never happen. But to be perfectly honest, she would do it all over again wholeheartedly.
So yeah, she's pretty serious.
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