Where You Hang Your Hat
a/n - Takes place in June following the events of Blade of the Fury
James Timothy Possible was trying his best to get used to the situation, or 'sitch' like his oldest child used to say when she was a teenager. When she had gone to college he was overjoyed that she elected to live there at home and commute across town to class instead of living in a dorm or one of the shabby 'kiddie condos' adjacent to the campus. At first blush it seemed like a reprieve from the first steps toward having an 'empty nest.'
Now that Kim was twenty, he starting wondering if perhaps that attitude had been right after all. Still, he was the one uncomfortable, or at least he thought he was the only one feeling that way, or was he was simply being selfish?
It wasn't the thought that he was holding her back that made him uncomfortable, however. It was the turn the 'living arrangements' had taken over the last few months. He kept telling himself that the problem was his, and not anyone else's, but after a while he couldn't shake the nagging feeling that something was not quite right with it.
It wasn't that he didn't love his soon-to-be (relatively speaking) Son in law. Ron had been a lot like a son to him for longer than he could remember by that point. Early that fall he would have been with Kim for sixteen years, the last four of those as her boyfriend and in about a month and a half they would have been engaged for three. Ron was as much a part of the whole family's life as he was a part of Kim's.
What he couldn't get used to was regularly seeing him at the breakfast table, wearing old short and a tank top he normally slept in during the warm months, sitting beside a similarly attired Kim. It took him long enough to get accustomed to seeing just that on a rare occasion, especially after they were eighteen and officially (as in with his blessing) engaged, but it was no longer such. In fact, he could not remember a recent night when the two had not spent the night together. Sure, Ron still had a room in his parent's house, but, for all intents and purposes, the two of them were living together. Sometimes they would spend a string of nights at his house. By the time they started college his parents had squeezed a larger full size bed into his room so that Kim would be more comfortable there. At first he thought his slightly more permissive parents were simply providing a place for the two to 'shack up' without having to check into a hotel, but back then he could count on one hand the times they had done so over the course of several months.
Then, the previous winter, they both returned from an especially intense mission and something critical had changed. He was pretty sure what it was, but he chose not to think about it in too specific terms. For him it was one of the last few steps for Kim in becoming her own woman, one of the final remaining hurdles between her childhood in his house and becoming Ron's wife, ready to found her own family.
From that moment, save for the first couple nights where they tried to go back to their old routine, they had become inseparable once more, to a degree neither he nor his wife could have imagined before. The situation took a full one-eighty and now he could count on one hand the number of nights they had spent apart since then on one hand.
When it had started, he was somewhat shocked about it, and, as usual, it took Anne running interference for the kids to keep him from saying something foolish.
It was late February and even though they had only been gone for just about a week, they were having trouble getting back into their routine. Oh, they were trying their best, but something remained wrong. For one thing, Kim hadn't been able to sleep properly. It wasn't nightmares, it was just a simple case of not being able to get fully comfortable. She endured two nights like that before finally giving in on the third night, grabbing a pair of jeans and a jacket and driving over to Ron's house just after midnight. With only a quick polite word to his parents, she mounted the stairs, went into his room, doffed the pants and crawled into bed with him. That proved to be the cure both of them needed.
The very next night Kim wanted to return the favor, but somehow didn't want to confront her Dad over the whole deal. It wasn't so much to play him, as to simply avoid the conflict. Their plan was a simple one:
Kim pretended to doze against Ron as the movie droned on. This was perhaps the fifth time she had seen The Godfather Part III and it still didn't make a great deal of sense to her. She cracked an eye open long enough to watch Michael Corleone fall over dead from his chair, then stood up and stretched.
"Come on, Ron, time for bed." She grabbed his hand and pulled him up, leading him out of the family room.
James possible leaned forward, expecting to see the two of them heading toward the front door for their usual prolonged goodnight kiss. Instead he saw them turn right and head up the stairs. He sat there for a moment in confusion, then leaned toward his wife who had been camped out on the far end of the sofa enjoying the movie. Anne was actually a closet Godfather nut.
"Didn't I just hear Kim say she was ready for bed?" he looked over the reading glasses he recently started wearing, staring at the empty doorway the couple had disappeared through moments before.
"Yep." She replied simply, pulling her legs up on the couch.
"Isn't that her usual signal to Ron it's time for him to go home?"
"Yep."
"Then why did they just go upstairs together?"
"Well, unless Ron left something up there he needs to take home, I suspect they are probably getting ready to go to bed."
That confused him even more.
"He's going upstairs to go to bed…with my daughter?" It wasn't like that hadn't actually happened before, but it was usually something that was either asked for or just simply ended up being a practical necessity every now and again. They had just simply gone up there like it was something they did every single night.
Anne just gave him the hairy eyeball. "Yes, you're daughter's fiancé…your adult daughter's fiancé just went upstairs to go to bed with our daughter." She changed the possessive to make a point.
"You mean they are going to sleep together?"
Anne knew he was deliberately using the double meaning of the phrase. "James, what do you think the two of them did all that time alone on that one particular mission? They spent the better part of a week with just each other for company. I don't think they simply held hands and chatted the whole time."
"I…kind of didn't want to think along those lines." He suddenly looked sort of sad.
"James, they're both twenty. They have been together almost four years and when they finish school they are getting married. They are every bit in love as we were at that age and they managed to wait a whole lot longer than we did."
"And you're not concerned about this?" He looked at the ceiling, wondering exactly what was already going on up there. Not that they would hear anything down here anyway. The house was well built and practically soundproof (it had to be considering Anne's lung power.)
"What? That Kim is in a deeply committed relationship with the best guy in the world and they just happen to have finally developed a healthy sex life to boot?"
"Smart alec."
"Just where do you think she was this morning?"
He stopped and thought about that for a minute. He remembered her going to bed, yet she was already gone when he got up the next morning. "I just assumed she was on a mission."
"She was, in a manner of speaking, or have you not noticed she hasn't gotten any good sleep since she got home. I suspect she left sometime around midnight, while we were otherwise occupied, and she went over to his house and slept with him, by both definitions of the phrase." She paused, looking up at the ceiling herself. "Granted, I have to admit, I expected they would have started this a long time ago."
He sighed, realizing he really didn't have all that much say in the matter any longer. "I don't think I could have taken this back when they started dating. They were only sixteen then."
"They almost did, you know. I guess you just didn't notice what really almost happened during that one trip to Florida."
"What?"
She jerked her head toward the stairs. "Those two tried to do it three nights in a row, then on their third try, chickened out. I noticed a couple things and confronted her about it and she let me know the whole story, but given all the chances they've had, with all those weekend trips up the mountain, those summer vacations together and they still waited until a couple weeks ago?"
"I know, I know, Anne. I'm just…I'm having a hard time seeing Kimmie-cub as…just Kim. I keep thinking I need to say something or do something, but I keep coming back to the fact that the only other choices are to watch them go someplace that might not be as safe, or to watch her move out for good, all because I have this silly notion about what goes on in my house."
She nodded her assent. "This is far preferable than if they had, for instance, done this when they used to go parking. Really, I think it's a good thing. Sure, maybe they lost a little something by not waiting until they got married, but I don't think it's going to be as big a deal as they once thought."
"I still think I need to do something about this." He said, getting up.
Anne was genuinely shocked. Did nothing they had just discussed mean anything? "What? Are you going to barge in on them and throw Ron out of the house?"
"No, I'm going to take you upstairs and do to you what I think Ron is doing to Kim right now." He grinned evilly at her.
"Why James, I knew you were a smart man, but you are an absolute genius!"
He looked over the top of his paper at the two. They would occasionally look at each other and smile, looking all the world like a young married couple rather than two kids who were three quarters of their way through college. The more he thought about it, the more he came to realize he was wrong about one thing. Ever since that night in late February, there hadn't been a single solitary night they had spent apart. He only figured there had been nights like that since they sometimes spent a few nights at his house for whatever reason. Sometimes they were called on to care for his little sister overnight. Others that may have simply been where they were when it was time for bed. Still, they spent the lion's share of their nights in her room. It could have been as simple as who had the more comfortable bed. In all the years he had known him, James had never once set foot in Ron's room, so he had no idea what it was like up there.
Neither of them had any idea he was working up the courage to say something. For one, he didn't know exactly how they were going to take it. For another, he knew that once he did, there was probably no turning back. Even if they didn't do anything that very day, that week, or in the next month before they both turned twenty-one, it would sow the seed and eventually lead down a path he would have never considered even six months ago.
"Did the two of you sleep well last night?" He let the top of his paper tip down, though he didn't completely let it fall to the table.
"Sure, Mr. Dr. P."
He could tell their bare feet were dueling under the breakfast table. Things had 'quieted' down after a while between the two of them, but that didn't mean they would forego their fun from time to time. James had come within a hair's breadth of knocking on their door the night before until he heard the tell-tale sounds of what they were doing. Embarrassed that he might have disturbed them, he simply left them alone. The fact they had responded to their call to breakfast with 'We'll be down in a minute' instead of 'come in, we're decent' suggested they had either resumed their activities early in the morning or had simply slept in the buff (or both.)
"What Earth shattering plans did the two of you have for today?" He had given up suggesting the two of them actually get a job over the summer. Kim had tried that the year before, working alongside Monique at Club Banana while she was back for the break. That had…not turned out well, though somehow the friendship survived and recovered. This year was what the two of them were referring to as 'the last summer.' Next year, they were graduating, entering the real work force (well, Ron would be. Kim would likely be going to graduate school full time.) Mid-summer they were getting married and Ron was already working with an architect to build them a nice home. With his allowance from his trust fund, which had grown from modestly successful to rather healthy, he didn't actually have to work. In fact, he made enough for the both of them to be rather comfortable over their last extended vacation before the real world set in.
The look the two of them shared made him wonder if they were going to run right back upstairs the moment the elder Possibles left the house. Their final semester of their Junior year had ended just over a week earlier and so far they had taken full advantage of their time off. Even fair-skinned Ron was already getting a tan from their trips out to the lake. For the first time in her life, Kim could actually be described as having a 'robust' tan, though some of that may have come from a bottle. She was a red-head after all.
"I just thought Ronnie and I would just take it easy today. I know, I know, that probably means we're going to get called to a meeting at GJ or something, or even get called on a mission, but that's the plan. It's supposed to turn stormy this afternoon, so I don't really want to get caught out on the lake." She exchanged another look with Ron, confirming what at least part of their 'taking it easy' entailed, or so he imagined. He immediately mentally smacked himself for having a dirty mind. They may have been like that the first couple weeks…
…no, stop thinking about them like that. What you have to say to them is for their own good, not your old fashioned-ness.
"You're not thinking about us getting jobs for the summer, are you?"
"No, no, absolutely not. Unless you are getting bored." That brought another smile and glance. Was he that lost in Anne back then?
It was time to plunge ahead. He had already stalled long enough that Anne was already on her way to the medical center. In a few short minutes he would have to head out to his job as well. With the twins gone to a cyber-robotics camp for the next six weeks, that left the two of them alone in the house. To him it still felt like leaving two hormonally challenged teenagers alone.
"If it gets too boring we'll head to the mall, or I can get Ron to teach me how to play some of his video games."
"I think I might have an idea." This was it, just about to the point of no turning back.
Both of them gave him their rapt attention.
"Maybe it's time the two of you started looking for your own place to live."
There, he finally said it. It was out in the open. Yet why did the two of them look like they had been slapped across their faces?
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