"I cannot get your son out of that damn soccer uniform."
She growls while putting up the clean dishes from the dishwasher the moment he walks through the door and he's a little taken off guard by the abrasiveness in her voice. He stills in the doorway of the kitchen and tucks his hands into his pockets. She's typically rather calm and level headed, slow to anger with an even tone, but today she's nearly taking his head off and he wonders when the time comes if he'll be able to dodge her impeccable aim at his head.
"I don't really see anything wrong with it. He's six."
"It's dirty, Mark, so very dirty. He played 2 games today in which he ran his little ass off and he stinks. If that uniform doesn't come off then he will not get into the bath and if he doesn't bathe then he's sleeping in the doghouse because there isn't a chance in hell he's getting my sheets all dirty. Either way, he needs to be in bed about an hour ago because Sloan's flight gets here early in the morning."
"Calm down, woman. He's just a little kid."
"I am very aware of that, but his sister is flying in for his birthday and the last thing we want is for him to be cranky all day from lack of sleep."
He crosses his arms in front of his chest and cocks an eyebrow at her, wondering what the hell happened to the patient and assertive woman that he married. He understands a lot of things that she's gone through even though he's never personally experienced them and he acknowledges that she's truly amazing at a lot of things even though he probably doesn't say it enough, but 7 years of playing the much needed parental role to Sloan and she still doesn't feel like she has approval from her somewhat rebellious step daughter. That's one thing that he thinks he'll never understand.
"Okay, crazy person, what have you done with my wife?"
"Don't be an ass. This is serious."
"I am being serious, Teddy. You've abandoned all sanity somewhere on the front porch and I'm about to send a search party out for some of it back. You get like this every time that Sloan comes to stay with us and it's quite worrisome, to be honest. You go crazy over some girl's approval and you don't have to – hell, she likes you better than she likes me most of the time."
She stares at him blankly, stack of clean plates clutched in her grasp, and he thinks that this is probably the moment that he needs to become light on his feet because she's going to break those dishes against his head and that just doesn't sound like a fair deal. He shuffles in his stance a little bit as her jaw loosens and he hopes that he's mastered the tuck and roll; he just doesn't have her military training and he hasn't done his crunches lately, surely she'll beam him. It isn't fair that she looks like she's about to go ballistic over Sloan, the girl he has to bribe just to make some aspirations for herself.
"She's your daughter, Mark. Of course I'm going a little crazy over her approval."
"I think you've more than proven yourself to our daughter. It isn't necessary to go crazy over her approval – I mean, hell, she barely appreciates all of the money we paid for her to go to college."
He pushes his heels from the floor and steps towards her, like he can actually do damage control at this point and she isn't a lost cause. The woman spent years in the desert under gun fire to save lives and he has to console her over a grown woman who still acts like a damn child; these are the times that being a husband becomes the hardest role to play because she can be so damn hard headed that he just can't get through to her no matter what he says to her. He swears that if he ever sees this woman cry he's going to ring someone's neck.
"When you love someone more than they love you, you go a little crazy sometimes."
With that, she sighs and returns to stacking the dishes into the cabinets so he can alternatively put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher – a system that she proposed because her hands hadn't touched a dish since he'd moved into the cottage. He takes the hint that she's done talking and demands finality in her words, and he lightly shakes his head as he turns on his heel to leave the kitchen. Arguments with her characteristically fall on deaf ears, but when the subject is love, he tries to fight harder for her than he's fought for any other woman.