Fic: Valentine Sins, ensemble cast
WRATH & PRIDE
“Oh calm down already.” Sam sighed, trying to count to ten in five different languages. She’d read that was helpful, but not so much when she only had one language to work with and selected bits of Spanish. She frowned at Jason, who could yell like no one else on godforsaken planet Earth.
Jason stewed, pointing out his right to be upset: their child was scarfing chocolate wrappers up off the ground because it was in his crawling space.
“He’s not a Dirt Buster, he’s an eight-month-old,” he snapped. He shifted the kid to his other arm, tugging the empty, crinkled and now very wet wrappings out of his mouth and tiny fist.
“Well I don’t know why you brought him to work anyway,” Sam said flippantly.
“Because you said it would be helpful!”
“Now why would I say that?”
“Maybe because you fired the nanny?”
“Excuse me for being a good judge of character. That psycho bitch would have been giving him lead to teeth on.”
“Sam, I think my mother knows how to raise children.”
“Well her son didn’t turn out too well.”
“I’m the one who noticed our kid was eating trash.” Jason followed the cookie-crumb trail of chocolate wrappers to the box itself, which lay empty and sloppily discarded on the ground. Jason frowned, picking it up and crushing it to the bottom of the nearest trash can.
In his arms, the baby gurgled and cooed.
“Well, excuse me again for not being the pillar of nineteenth-century consummate motherhood,” Sam fired back. “Here, let me climb back into my gilded cage.”
Jason smirked, laughed, rolled his eyes with contempt.
“Sam, you know what, fucking stop. Just shut up.”
“I’m an important person, too,” Sam railed. “Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I have to be babysitting and breastfeeding twenty-four seven. In case you haven’t noticed, hubby-bunch, I have a career and a pantsuit. And if you’re expecting me to give all that up for something as petty as this child we have together, then, well, maybe you’re with the wrong woman.”
Jason stared at her. Sam’s eyebrows arched.
He moved towards her, but by then she was already yanking him by the hair and kissing him with furious abandon. Nestled between them, their child busied himself by discovering he could wiggle his toes just like he could his fingers.
Sam waited until Jason could barely breathe before moving her lips away from his. Smiling, she pecked the kid’s forehead and pinched Jason’s cheek.
“Valentine’s Day dinner this weekend,” she said. “My special treat.”
“How about we split it?”
Sam considered, batting her eyes. “Um, how about your treat?”
“Sure. Wait, what?"
ENVY