Partners

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Andrea smiled as she heard the hammering stop and the swearing start. “You didn’t hit your finger again, did you?” she called, placing the magazine she’d been reading across the swell of her stomach and wriggling around to get in a more comfortable position. Meredith lifted his head from his paws to look at her, rolling his eyes over to watch as a piece of broken baby furniture came sailing out of the room they were setting up as a nursery.

“Damn thing split in half when I tried fixing it to the rail. Piece of crap,” Chad growled, sticking his head out to look at her. “We have a receipt for that?”

“Baby shower gift,” Andrea sighed ruefully, trying not to smile at the cranky look on her husband’s face. “And no, I’m not going to tell you who it was from so you can call them up and tell them what a horrible present it was.”

Chad picked up the mobile and glared at it. “It was probably Hopper anyway.”

She considered telling him that his own ex-wife had actually given it to her, but thought better of it as a contraction hit. “Why don’t you take a break, and start again once you’re not in the mood to shoot something?” Andrea took a deep breath and patted the cushion next to her - Chad came over to sit down, sliding his arms around her. “Now, isn’t holding your wife a lot more fun than terrorizing inanimate objects?”

“Well, they’re both satisfying in their own ways,” Chad teased, hooking some of her hair over her ear and kissing her cheek. As he was in the habit of doing lately, he slid a big hand down over her belly and they both laughed as their daughter took the opportunity to kick as hard as she could.

“She’ll be a black belt one day, that’s for sure,” Andrea smiled.

“Just like her mom.”

“I don’t have a black belt in Shotokan just yet,” she reminded him, snuggling back into his arms.

Chad rubbed his hand over her stomach lovingly. “You’ll probably earn it a few days after she’s born.”

Andrea sighed. “Not the way I’ve been eating lately. And speaking of eating, do we have any ice cream left?”

“You don’t want anything disgusting with it, do you?” he asked skeptically.

She glared at him and Chad immediately held up his hands in surrender, sliding out from under her and going into the kitchen. Meredith padded after him and sat watching hopefully as Chad rifled through the freezer. “How about bringing back a few Milkbones?” she called. Her husband immediately jerked his head out of the freezer and looked at her incredulously, so she clarified the request. “For Merry.”

“There’s only one spoonful of ice cream in here,” Chad announced after finding the last carton and peering into it. “Want me to get you some more?”

“You’d better not be saying that I was the one who left that little bit in there,” Andrea threatened, hiding a wince at another, stronger contraction.

Chad rolled his eyes and pulled the magnetized notepad from the side of the refrigerator before grabbing a pen. “What kind do you want?”

_ _ _ _ _

He’d survived falling off a building, Conrad Detweiler’s blackmail, and the bureaucracy involved with running Internal Affairs; he’d even survived being married to Rita, but the anticipation and dread he felt whenever he thought about Andrea giving birth made him realize his toughest challenge was still ahead of him.

It wasn’t just that Andrea’s mood swings put the fear of God into him, but just thinking that he was shortly going to be responsible for another small life scared the hell out of him. In the beginning, Chad been so excited at the thought of being a father that he’d neglected to think of exactly what could go wrong but the closer they got to Andrea’s due date, the more he was starting to panic. What if he did something wrong, and the kid turned out to be an axe murderer or something just because he’d told her that she wasn’t allowed to date until she was thirty? She was probably going to start hating him as soon as she hit adolescence. Andrea constantly told him that he was going to be a great father, but he wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t even put together a stupid mobile.

Chad dropped his armload of Ben & Jerry’s on the ledge right beside the scanner scale as he waited for the customer ahead of him to finish paying. “Dude. That’s a lot of ice cream,” the cashier remarked.

“Pregnancy craving,” he grunted, digging his fingers in his back pocket for his wallet. The kid looked at his stomach with raised eyebrows. “Not mine,” Chad said testily. Moron. What if his daughter turned out just like him, though? He wiped his hand across his face, wondering if he was sweating.

His phone rang when he was walking back out to the car, and Chad flipped it open as soon as he recognized Andrea’s ringtone. “Miss me already?” he asked, juggling the bags of ice cream so he could get his keys out to unlock the door.

“My water just broke,” Andrea informed him, her voice trembling like she was trying not to laugh or something.

“Very funny,” Chad sighed. “I told you I’d be back in twenty minutes, and I meant it.” He hung up and was just sliding the key into the ignition when the phone rang again. “Andy, I just told you-”

“My. Water. Just. Broke,” his wife screamed at him. “Where the hell are you?”

“Wait, you were serious? Why didn’t you say so? Just… just hang on, I’ll be home in a minute.” The ice cream went flying every which way as Chad gunned the engine and peeled out of the parking lot, flipping the switch that controlled the dash lights. He dimly remembered Lamaze class where they’d told him that there was usually no rush to get a pregnant woman to the hospital right after her water broke, that it was the contractions that really decided things, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

As luck would have it, her water had broken while she was in the kitchen looking for something; Chad knew better than to express his relief that they wouldn’t need to have the couch cleaned. She made him go back out to the car to get the ice cream while she called her OB/GYN, and Chad listened to the one-sided conversation anxiously as he shoved the melting cartons of cookies & cream into the freezer. “We should probably go get you checked in, right?” he asked nervously as soon as she hung up.

With an expression completely at odds with the frantic way she’d ordered him home, Andrea shook her head. “She said to wait until the contractions were five to ten minutes apart.”

“And you really want to wait that long?” Chad asked. “What if there’s a traffic accident on the freeway, and you have to give birth to her in the backseat of the Yukon?”

“Don’t be silly,” she told him.

“I don’t have any morphine in the First Aid kit. You know that, right?”

“Well, I guess it couldn’t hurt to be there just a little early,” Andrea decided a bit hastily.

With Andrea directing him, Chad got everything she needed into a bag and made a mental note to call Faith to stop by and walk Meredith while they were gone. The traffic wasn’t too bad but he was relieved to finally be there at the hospital since Andrea’s contractions were getting stronger, and he could tell that she was in pain. She gripped his arm as he filled out the admission paperwork as fast as he could and he helped her into the hospital gown and up into the bed to wait. “If you brought a video camera, I’m never speaking to you again,” she threatened.

Chad brushed her hair back from her forehead gently and reassured her that he had brought no such thing. “It’s not going to take very long, is it?” he asked, frowning as she groaned at another contraction. Excited as he was to be a father, he hated the thought of Andrea being in pain; when she’d gotten shot, he’d been nearly out of his mind with fear for her. Granted, this wasn’t exactly the same thing... but it was close enough, from the horror stories he’d heard from his sisters. “Can’t they give you something? Or maybe just knock you unconscious until she's born?”

“Well, it’s a little too late to pick a surrogate mother,” Andrea gasped. “Here’s the nurse; why don’t you go call my dad and your parents? They’ll want to know where we are so that they can fight over who gets to hold their granddaughter first.”

After getting the calls made Chad realized that he felt a lot calmer and smiled at the thought that, even during a time that was so painful and frightening for her, Andrea was thinking of his peace of mind. He stuck the phone in his back pocket and hurried back to her side, intent upon giving her his undivided attention and support.

Andrea’s eyes were narrowed against the pain of contractions when he came back in, and Chad took her hands in his. “Remember Lamaze class?”

“Waste of fucking time,” she panted back at him.

“Now, now – she might be able to hear you.” He demonstrated one of the breathing exercises, causing a passing nurse to grin down at her chart, and out of habit Andrea began to mimic him. She pressed down on his hands at the onset of another contraction, and he encouraged her to squeeze as hard as she needed to.

Four hours into her labor, she was crushing his fingers and he was regretting ever saying anything. To be honest, he was starting to regret ever sleeping with her to begin with as a result of the threats and epithets Andrea was slinging his way. Chad had thought the whole “You did this to me!” thing only ever happened on television, but there he was.


_ _ _ _ _ _


When the outraged squalls of their daughter finally split the air Andrea sagged back against the pillow in relief, looking up at Chad. He was watching, spellbound, as one of the nurses wrapped the irritated newborn in a blanket and brought her over. “Here she is,” the nurse said gently, placing little Jamilynn Iona Shelten in Andrea’s arms.

“She’s beautiful,” Andrea smiled, blinking away the tears in her eyes as she cradled the newest member of the Shelten family. "Hey there, little one," she said softly. Jamilynn waved her tiny fists and wailed a protest, and Chad’s hand stroked her hair as Andrea shifted her gown. When the little girl had stopped crying and drank her fill, Andrea glanced up at Chad to still see him watching with a look on his face that made her heart swell with love for him. “Do you want to hold her?” He nodded, still looking dazed, and she passed their daughter to him. “Here, Jamie, go to Daddy.”

Chad smiled at the use his new title, and accepted the sleepy baby carefully. “She’s so small,“ he said wonderingly, securely tucking the tiny bundle against his body as if he were afraid he’d drop her. “She’ll get cuter, right?“

“Chad!“

“I’m just kidding,“ he assured her.

“You’d better be,“ she yawned. After placing a gentle kiss on the top of Jamilynn’s head, Chad returned her to Andrea and sat on the side of the bed to put his arms around both of them. He bent to kiss her, and she smiled up at him. "How about getting the grandparents in here so they can see her? I think we'll be ready for visitors in a few minutes."

After getting cleaned up and combing her fingers through her tangled hair just in case somebody decided to get cute and bring a camera in, Andrea settled back and looked down at her daughter. Jamie's tiny little mouth stretched in a yawn and Andrea trailed her fingertips down her cheek, smiling. "You can't go to sleep yet, Daddy's going to get your Grandma and Grandpas." Between the three of them, they were going to spoil her rotten, she thought bemusedly.

Chad returned with her father in tow, and Andrea swallowed against the lump in her throat as she saw the tears in her father's eyes. Joe Battle came over to kiss her cheek and inspect his granddaughter, who was promptly proclaimed the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen (excepting Jamilynn's mother, of course), and Chad sat on the other side of the bed to watch the jaded retiree coo over a newborn baby. "Iona would've liked that you two named your little squirt after her," he said gruffly as he left to make room for James and Laurel.

Her in-laws were duly admiring of the new arrival who had decided that she had enough of being passed around like an hors d'oeuvre tray and was becoming so cranky, the only thing that would calm her down was to be settled back in her father's arms – a trait that both of them shared, Andrea thought with a smile.

The nurse returned with a bassinet for Jamie, and Chad unwillingly surrendered her after interrogating the poor woman to be sure that their daughter's wristband matched Andrea's and that no one would 'lose' her. Andrea managed to stop him from following the nurse and coaxed him back to his chair beside her bed. "They're not going to lose her," she reprimanded him.

"That stuff happens all the time in movies," Chad reminded her, but sat down with her anyway and kissed her neck. "How soon can I take my ladies home?"

Andrea leaned into the touch wearily, still hardly able to believe that they were now a family. The pain had certainly been real enough, but the wonder of them having created such a perfect little person seemed to make the pain worthwhile. "We might be able to come home either tomorrow or the day after," she said sleepily, relaxing against the pillows as Chad drew the lightweight blanket over her chest and stroked her hair.

"I can't wait until she's thirteen," Chad whispered in her ear.

Andrea giggled as she stopped fighting the heaviness of her eyelids. "Don't borrow trouble." She fell asleep listening to her husband muttering something about making sure none of the other newborn baby boys were giving their little girl 'the eye.'


fin

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