Five Minutes
A/N: Just a small one-parter that I needed to purge so I can start work on an insanely epic piece that follows Lucas and Peyton in the five years after high school.
Her focus slips back and forth between the white stick and the ticking watch on her wrist.
It's been thirty seconds, but it passes too slow, like the long summer days when they were kids and the sun just never seemed to want to fade away.
The gentle ticking of the watch seems to grow louder with her impatience, and she eventually pulls the watch from her wrist and slides it across the bathroom sink.
She drums her fingers over the tops of her thighs, flips though an old issue of his Sports Illustrated, and folds the end of the toilet paper into a perfect triangle before she grabs her watch and checks the time again.
Seconds feel like hours, minutes feel like days, and she still has three and a half minutes until she knows whether or not their comfortable little life is about to be turned on its head by one very small, very unplanned baby.
She turns the watch over in her hands and comes across the inscription on the back, the words I found my way home are etched into the back in small block letters, a gift from Lucas when he sold his first manuscript.
As the tips of her fingers trace over the engraved lettering she thinks back over the last seven years they've spent building a life together, from the day he kissed her in the middle of the basketball court, confetti swirling in clouds around her head, to this moment as she sits on the edge of their bathtub and waits for a hastily purchased pregnancy test to tell her that she is most definitely not about to become a mother.
It's not that she doesn't want a kid, or that they're too young/too immature/too selfish to raise a baby. She's twenty-five years old, she has a stable job, her own home, and she's gone to bed next to the same man every night since she was nineteen. She can't think of a time in her life when she was any more mature.
She just never really pictured it, being a mother, knowing how to be a mother when she lost her own at such a young age. She looks at Haley and the way she was with James, how her face would light up whenever he was in the room or even when someone mentioned his name. She remembers late nights when James had colic and Haley would call just to interact with someone who could actually speak, and she'd still sound completely calm and in love with her little boy even though he'd kept her up for three nights with his constant cough. Peyton would have booked it after two nights.
She remembers Jake and Jenny, and her sudden ease with a baby in her space but she knew it wasn't forever and that somehow made it better. And every other weekend when Lilly comes to spend the weekend with her big brother, and they all curl up on the couch together and watch Toy Story over and over until she falls asleep, Peyton knows that they get to have Lilly for the good times. They miss the scraped knees and the smart mouth and the general craziness that comes with raising a kid.
She thinks about their modern living room, with its sharp angles and hardwood floors, and what it would look like suddenly overrun with a playpen and a baby swing and toys strewn about. Dirty diapers overtaking every trash can in the house, baby bottles mixing on the shelves that house her prized record collection, a wailing baby strapped to her chest in one of those awful harness looking things while she tries to figure out a way to increase THUD's circulation. Then an image of her and Lucas in bed, a tiny baby nestled comfortably between them is playing over and over in her head, and something inside of her shifts just slightly.
She checks her watch and sees that five minutes and fifteen seconds have passed and she takes a deep breath and wonders what outcome she's hoping for. She doesn't have a clear answer for herself when she picks up the test and compares it to the picture on the back of the box.
Lucas comes home an hour later, she can hear him toss his keys on the table near the door and call her name while opening the doors to their bedroom and his office before finally walking into the bathroom where she's lying in the empty bathtub with her feet propped up on the rim of the tub.
He closes the lid on the toilet and takes a seat, stretching out his long legs in front of him. "I went by THUD today to take you to lunch but they said you weren't feeling well and that you went home early. I've been calling your cell for an hour, I was worried."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to worry you."
"Are you okay?"
Her eyes rim with tears and she shakes her head no. When the tears slip down her cheeks she wipes them away quickly with her fingertips.
When he sees her crying he slips down onto the floor and sits just outside the bathtub facing her, the backs of his fingers stroking the gentle slopes of her damp cheeks. "What's the matter Peyt?"
She wordlessly hands him the pregnancy test and when he just stares at it blankly she hands over the instructions and watches as his eyes shoot back and forth from the test to the pamphlet of instructions.
"So, you're not pregnant?"
"Nope."
"Did you want to be pregnant?"
"At first? No. I bought the test to calm my nerves, but sitting in here waiting for it to turn negative got me thinking and maybe a small part of me was hoping it would be positive."
"We've never even talked about kids." She can tell that he's still somewhat stunned by everything that's just happened, but she can't help but get defensive.
"Well the test was negative so you don't have to worry about it."
"Babe, that's not what I meant. What I'm saying is that maybe we should finally have that talk, about babies and about whether or not you are ever going to marry me."
"I don't want us thinking about getting married just because I might have been pregnant."
"Peyton Sawyer, I have had a diamond ring in a fancy velvet box tucked into the back corner of my sock drawer for almost a year. I've just been waiting for the right time to give it to you, when we're both ready and you're not sitting in an empty bathtub." She smiles at him through red, puffy eyes and he leans over the edge of the tub and kisses her forehead. He stands from his spot on the ground and leans over to help her out of the tub.
When she climbs out she wraps her arms around his neck and whispers that she loves him, and he tells her the same. Then she grabs his hand and leads him out of the bathroom and down the hallway towards their bedroom.
He asks, with a knowing smile, where they're headed and she turns to face him, a grin as equally wide on her own face.
"I thought we could start practicing making that baby."
"Whatever you want Ms. Sawyer."