Thank you to: Guest- I don't think you're a hater, I'm a Clace fan too :), Lockwheres theKey, rcs17, MilliniumLint (x5), Jadiee, and immortalprincess45.
Clary woke in a gradual wave of consciousness, roused by the screams of her plastic child. Her world spun for a moment, her head a jumble of quiet murmurings as she glanced around the dimly lit room.
Where in the hell was she?
Recognition hit her with a jolt, and she was quick to throw an over-fluffed pillow at her sleeping partner's head.
"Jace!" she whispered loudly, mindful of whomever occupied the house during the late hour. "Jace Wayland!"
She heaved herself up against the headboard and threw yet another pillow, recklessly hitting the swaddled infant in his arms in the process.
He stirred, shifting a heavy hand to cover the baby's small lips and then stilled again. With one final pillow to the head he jolted awake, and sent his helpless child tumbling to the floor.
"You're unbelievable!" Clary accused as she tugged the duvet up to her chin. "You said you would take the graveyard shift and you fell asleep!"
She watched as he retrieved the baby, his drooping lids fluttering lazily.
"Sorry," he mumbled casually, "but mentally unstable girls really exhaust the crap out of me."
"I'm not. . ." With a sigh, Clary covered her face with her hands. Arguing was pointless; the house was dead quiet, it was still too obviously dark out, and a sleep deprived, defensive Jace was not someone she wanted to meet. Recollecting her thoughts, she blinked heavily, and peeked over at Jace through her hands. "Can you just deal with the thing, please?"
A shadow of a smirk graced his face for the minutest second.
"The thing," he repeated, cradling the baby to his side. "Charming, Clary."
"I told you he needed a name," she said, as she shimmied back under the covers.
She watched from warmth of Jace's bed as he burped the baby for some god-awful reason (what baby needed burping at three a.m?), quietly observing his precious gentleness toward the child. She wouldn't have ever pinned Jace as the caring and soothing boy he was with their stiff, nameless infant on his chest. And like his home, this nice Jace had sucker punched some sort of emotion out of her. Whereas his garden and hallway and lamp-lit bedroom had emitted wonder, Jace himself had pulled something forth that Clary hadn't quite identified.
He patted the baby's back gently, his chin resting on the child's head. He shushed it quietly, as he had Clary earlier that night amidst her mothering breakdown. And as Clary stumbled back over how gentle he'd been to her and how calmly and smoothly he'd handled the whole situation, that foreign emotion arose once more, clearer than it had been before.
Respect.
She respected Jace, a boy she hardly knew. She respected him because he'd taken care of her and their fake baby so selflessly and easily, something she doubted any other male partner would have done.
With the hidden emotion off of her chest, she turned away from Jace and rolled onto her side.
"You don't make an effort," Clary said, as she arranged his pillows neatly against the headboard. He tried not to watch her as leaned over the bed, her tank top riding up just the slightest bit- but God, was it ever difficult.
"I do make an effort," he argued, eyeing the teeny patch of skin peeking out from beneath the hem of her shirt. "Yesterday was proof."
She paused to throw a glare over her shoulder.
"Sleeping with common whores while your child is in the room is not making an effort. It's disgusting."
"Common whores happen to be people too," he teased. "And I did happen to say more than two words to her, so therefore it was social interaction, meaning I did make an effort."
"I highly doubt you said much of anything," she grumbled, as she returned to her task. Jace merely smirked and returned to his Clary-observing.
He was basically physically attracted to her, that much he would admit. It was the same brand of attraction applied to all women with even bodily proportions and a decent face, and stemmed purely from his Y chromosome. And while there was no more than a minor attraction on his part, the odds of him acting on it were higher than he'd have liked. If three more weeks of nights like the last were anything to go by, he'd be screwed.
Potentially literally.
"I mean with people at our school," Clary said, tearing him from his thoughts. "You never talk to anyone and you never try to talk to anyone. It's like you don't care you have no friends."
"You're certainly not shy, are you?" Jace grumbled, arching a brow.
"I just don't understand it. Why you choose to sit alone every day. Is no one in our school good enough to get to know?"
"No," he answered truthfully. "No one is. Look, I have friends, Clary. I talk to people. Just not your people."
She spun around, a pillow still in hand, and leaned against his headboard. "But why? What's wrong with them?"
"Nothing," Jace said. "They're just not interesting."
"You don't make sense," Clary grumbled, picking at one of his mother's more expensive décor pillows.
"So I've been told."
The conversation ended, Clary returning to her bed-making and Jace returning to their baby, dressing him in one of Celine's knitted cardigans Clary had insisted on. The baby cooed each time Jace's hand swiped past it's back, seemingly content despite the unnatural angles he had to bend it's little plastic arms to get them in the pink woollen sleeves. When he'd finally manhandled the infant into its little button-up, he started on the pants; grey sweatpants with red stripes up the side, also provided by Jace's mother, who had gone baby-doll mad.
It was only after the kid was fully dressed that Clary pointed out the romper he still had on beneath his clothes, claiming that it had to be removed it they didn't want their son to overheat in the summer sun. Jace, partially sweating, groaned and started over again.
"Done," Clary declared, as she stepped back from the bed she'd spent the morning fussing over. Wiping her hands on her dark sweatpants, she turned to smile triumphantly at Jace. "I could really get used to this whole mothering house-wife thing. Making beds is kind of fun."
"Good," he replied, handing her their immaculately dressed child. "You've got three more weeks of it. The kid will need changing in about three more minutes, I'm going to go shower."
"Oh, OK."
He started out the door, but Clary was quick to stop him.
"Hey," she said as she caught his arm, a strange grin on her face. "Do you have any plans today? I'm going to go home and change, but I was thinking we could take the baby to the park or something."
"Um, OK," Jace agreed hesitantly, eyeing her hopeful pixie-like features. "The park. Cool."
"Great!" She said, the hint of a sly smirk curving at her mouth. "I'll pick you up in an hour."
Unsurprisingly, the baby carrier was still unsecured and the baby unstrapped when she arrived an hour and a half later.
"Our kid is rubber, Jace," she said as he fiddled around with the carseat. "Short of melting his face off with a flamethrower, he's pretty indestructible."
Jace glared, bending the baby's arms backward once more.
When he finally slid into the passenger seat- Clary wouldn't let him drive, much to his dismay, he found her propped up against the steering wheel in shorts that left her surprisingly unblemished legs on show the entire trip.
"So," she said, shifting to smirk at him once she'd squeezed into a car park much too narrow for her car, "here's the plan. We're at least an hour's walk from your house, and see that boy standing over there?"
Jace followed her gaze to a giant gazebo, squinting through the harsh sunlight. Two figures stood inside of it, one of which pointing toward the car.
"That's Simon," Clary explained as his gut twisted. "And the girl with him, Maia, is his partner. They brought their baby."
"Clary," Jace murmured, glaring out the windscreen. "What are we doing here?"
"We're here to have a picnic playdate," she said. "And you're here to get to know someone from our school."
I didn't plan the chapter this way, but Clary wouldn't shut up about the park, so.
Review (: