Mary came home from the supermarket on a miserably rainy day which was the one-year anniversary of the first time she'd been out with John, though she didn't actually realize that until later. For whatever reason, she had some sort of block on recalling important dates. She'd actually forgotten her own thirty-second birthday until she'd gotten all the facebook messages. She ran into John, also arriving home, on the doorstep. He kissed her hello, plucked the bags out of her hands, and carried them into the kitchen to start putting them away.
She watched him fondly while she dried her hair with a hand towel. Mary wasn't sure whether she had the British Army or Sherlock Holmes to thank for it, but somewhere along the line somebody had housetrained him well. Apart from the invisible dirty dishes thing, which was actually starting to get just... weird.
"I talked to Sherlock this morning," he said, putting potatoes into the bin, "He's in, so we are go for wedding party."
"I know," she replied, "He's been texting me centerpiece concepts all day. He's sort of inclined to peonies, floating in wide, flat bowls."
John looked up at her, a potato in each hand, and said, "Seriously?"
"Yeah, I know. I told him this isn't 2005, so we're not doing floating bowls. He's going to get on Pinterest and see what else he can come up with."
John brushed dust off his hands and shook his head. "I really don't know if I like what weddings do to people."
"Tell me about it. Last week I actually found myself telling Janine 'And the best part about this dress is that you can wear it again!'"
He looked at her with blank incomprehension, so she continued, "You can never wear a bridesmaid's dress again. Unless being a personal assistant presents her with a lot of occasions to wear strapless, full-length purple satin."
"Why not... just... choose something that she can wear again?"
"But this one's so pretty."
John chuckled, said "Okay, bridezilla," and reached into the grocery bag again, "Um, was there anything you wanted to tell me?"
Mary looked at the box of Trojan Ultra Thins in his hands and said, "Oh, yeah, that. So I had my checkup with Carole today? And it turns out that I'm actually at the age where I should stop taking the pill, even as a nonsmoker. Thus… those. It's just for a few weeks. I've made an appointment to get the coil in."
John stared at her.
"Since when are you on the pill?"
"Since… nineteen ninety… two? I think?" She was feeling a bit sensitive about her age and so she was more snappish than she'd probably intended when she said, "Really, John, when your eighteen illegitimate children turn up at our door I'm not going to be best pleased. What did you think we were doing for birth control? Prayer?"
Because in a sexual history that spanned four continents, she had never, not once, met a man who said, "Well, I suppose I should put on a condom without being asked, because preventing unwanted pregnancy is not entirely the woman's job and I have some vague sense of responsibility for what happens to my semen."
John set the condoms down on the table, folded his arms over his chest, and with that, they were having a quarrel.
"I have always been careful. I had just been under the impression that the point of not using birth control was not to control birth."
"What?!" Mary said, "We weren't even living together when we stopped using condoms. Why would I try to get pregnant?"
"Well at the time I thought it was actually a very encouraging sign you were planning to stick with me!"
"That's… literally insane. What made you think that would be a smart thing to do?"
They both realized they were sort of yelling, and toned their voices down.
John sighed.
"Look, I knew, obviously, that if you wanted children we'd have to get on that pretty quickly, given your age- Not a judgement, just a fact," he said, throwing up his hands in self-defense when she frowned, "And when you said you wanted to get tested and stop using them I thought- well, I thought, if that was what you wanted, that was something I could do, for you."
"We'd barely been together any time at all. And you were willing to commit to eighteen years of raising a child with me?"
He shrugged.
"It was already a forever thing, for me. So if you weren't fussed about the order of operations why would I be?"
And that, Mary thought, was cheating.
"Stop being sweet, you ass, we are trying to fight," she said, and he smiled back at her, and then frowned when she continued, "So you... want kids?"
"I mean," John said, scratching his head, "I'm not broody or anything. But, I mean, yeah, I always sort of thought I would, someday. But you… don't?"
The answer to that question contained a whole lot of baggage that she was absolutely never going to unpack in front of him, but the short version was that she had given up on having children of her own the first time someone aimed a loaded gun at her head and pulled the trigger. There were people who did her job and had families, but they were inevitably men and she considered them to be selfish, irresponsible assholes. And, really, it had always been fine. Yes, she'd had some twinges of sadness… 2004, year of the fifteen baby showers, when it seemed like every single person she'd ever met was reproducing themselves, had been a rough one.
But twinges aside, Mary had been on the receiving end of single motherhood, and was quite certain that she never wanted to try out the performance part for herself. None of the men she'd been with in her old life had been anywhere near father material. Then she'd gotten out of that life and into a new one and she'd sort of carried that mindset along without really giving it any more consideration.
"Ohhh, this is a conversation we probably should have had earlier," Mary said, sitting down at the little two-person kitchen table, "We are so bad at this."
"In my defense," John said, joining her, "I did think that we had. It just turns out that your side of it was less 'baby' and more 'is this man going to give me the clap?'"
"I- wouldn't say that I don't want children," she said, carefully, twisting the hand towel into knots, "It's just. I had sort of written it off. I'm forty-one."
Or thirty-nine. But who's counting?
"Too old to take the pill, apparently. I don't know exactly what the odds are that I can get pregnant at my age but they're not all that good. Or if I did, if the… the baby, if it would be healthy."
John got sort of a thousand yard stare at the dish rack.
"It's not like advanced paternal age does any favors for a kid either. Autism. Schizophrenia."
"I think," Mary said delicately, thinking of their favorite so-called high-functioning sociopath, "That we could probably do quite well with a child on the spectrum."
"Yeah," John said, clearly thinking of the same thing, "And by the time they got old enough to develop their schizophrenia we might be senile and then we wouldn't have to worry about it."
Mary chuckled and looked across at him, and thought about the sort of child she might have with John Watson. Probably blond, probably blue eyed. Probably quite clever. Probably sort of impulsive and aggressive and almost certainly not very tall, but… probably a very nice baby, actually.
"There's not any guarantees," she mused.
"No," John agreed.
Which was true, but the future, all of a sudden, seemed painted in pink and gold. How, Mary wondered, had she managed to stumble upon a life where she could have everything she'd ever wanted?
"You know what? We'll see what happens. Let's make a baby."
John's response to this was to stand up, fling the condoms into the bin with a flourish, and immediately begin unbuttoning her blouse. Mary laughed and said, "I didn't actually mean right now."
And then five minutes later, when he'd got to that sensitive bit just at the base of her spine, "Fine, but at least let me put away the frozen things."