Chapter Text
Harlem, New York
*
“I’m gonna get ya!” Chris exclaims, laughing until he trips over the end of the plastic slide.
The sun is just beginning to dip below their row of brownstones. It’s been a long summer - busy as hell - but Chris is grateful and content below the pink and blue sky.
“Daddy!” his son screams, surprised when Chris comes tearing around the side of the wooden playhouse.
Cackling like a maniac, Chris runs at his son with both arms out. They both crack each other up when Chris yanks him down off the top platform of the playhouse, and swings him over one shoulder.
The noise gets the dog barking, which immediately sets off a neighborhood chain reaction.
“Dodger,” Chris laughs, a little out of breath as he sets Austin down on his bare feet. “Shut up.”
Jazzed up on adrenaline and sugar, Austin screams and takes off towards the playhouse again, hat flipping backwards off his head as he goes. Chris bends down to snag it off the grass, and frisbees it in the general direction of the back door.
The hat landing against the stone makes Dodger stop barking; he goes to investigate that sound instead.
“Hey buddy,” Chris calls, making his way towards his son. “It’s almost time to go inside.”
Austin’s already back in the belly of the playhouse. He bangs on something and yells, “No!”
With a sigh, Chris wanders back a few steps, and drops down into one of the wooden deck chairs. He’s been meaning to move this set off the grass and onto the patio bricks for weeks.
His wife has asked him four times.
~
Chris has been working a lot lately, but it’s worth it.
All of these early mornings and late nights have been hard, but the extra hours have made it possible for him to have his cake and eat it, too.
It’s all because of Amy. His wife - god, his beautiful, intelligent wife, who has no business being with him at all - makes it easy for Chris to succeed. He knows that. He knows that she could do all of this without him; that, if he disappeared tomorrow, the house and the kids and the money and the dog would all be taken care of.
She is a good woman, and she is good to Chris.
When he doubts himself, Amy is the one who holds onto his face, and tells him how important he is. He isn’t - important - but god, he loves her for trying to change his mind.
Amy is the only reason the project Chris has been working on for the last two years is going anywhere at all.
It’s a business - now, recently, soon - and no longer constrained to exist only as a sloppy sketch on the back of a bar napkin. It has legs, suddenly, and Chris has an investor and a developer and a lawyer, just like a real boy. The only thing he’s missing is a business partner.
In Chris’s experience, there isn’t a single human being in all of Manhattan willing to involve themselves with a tech start-up on the ground level. Apparently people in New York still remember the Dot-com bubble burst, go figure.
As a direct result, Chris is dick deep in going over an investment proposal by himself.
In less than twelve hours, he’ll be taking part in a business meeting - one in a row of many that are already down - with the third largest tech investment firm in New York City. Rumor has it, they may have a million-plus dollars to invest in Chris’s little app that could.
But, that being said, depending on Chris’s performance tomorrow, they also may not.
Chris just… really doesn’t shine when it comes to the investment proposals. Every presentation stresses him out, and, in return, they never get any better. He just ends up sweaty and dizzy, left to compensate for his fading personality by babbling talking points and gripping his notecards.
Funny anecdote: three months ago, Chris locked himself in the women’s bathroom at Venture Capital. He sat on the toilet, sweating bullets and googling heart attack symptoms, and missed his meeting. That fumble cost him 1.5 million dollars in funding.
Twelve weeks of curdling flash memories from that day later, Chris is still looking to secure equivalent funding.
That is why he’s sitting here now, already stressed out over his presentation in the morning.
Chris squeezes his eyes tight, and tries to shake it off.
If any kind of business partner Cupid matchmaking service is listening right now, he would like someone to come along who can charm the pants off of anyone, please. With a wish and a sigh, Chris goes back to staring at the little notecard he’s written his main talking points on.
He’s zoned out and reading the same bullet point for the third time in a row when Amy interrupts him.
“You look busy,” she murmurs against one ear, arms going around his shoulders from behind.
“I’m not,” Chris promises, automatically turning towards her when she leans in and kisses his cheek. “I’m too riddled with insecurity to be busy.”
Laughing, Amy crosses her wrists over his chest, and rests her chin on one shoulder. Her eyelashes flicker over her cheeks as she reads Chris’s notes quietly.
When Even, his business idea, was in its infancy, Amy was the one who watched him run through his first pitch. Their daughter was a month old, Amy was still on bed rest, and Chris was only wearing his undies. Even though these talking points are nothing new - some even date all the way back to that night - she makes a soft sound of interest, anyways.
“Don’t be anxious,” she finally murmurs, thumbing his earlobe. “You’re going to be amazing.”
As a kneejerk reaction, Chris whispers back, “Shut up.”
“That is never gonna happen,” she replies, and they grin at each other until she knocks the sides of their heads together gently, and says, “It’s after midnight. Bed?”
Frowning down at the cards some more, Chris nods, and lets her tug him up from his chair.
~
Chris isn’t amazing.
He fumbles his notecards. He talks way, way too loud. He sweats through his shirt.
On the way back to the cab, he sits down on a curb in his good pants, and tries to stop himself from hyperventilating. And, somewhere in-between sitting down and getting yelled at by the cab driver, still idling a few feet away, Chris calls Amy because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“Hey, I can’t get to my phone right now, but you know what to do!” her familiar voice says, before a beep.
After Chris has ended the call, he looks down at his hands, and realizes they’re still shaking from fear and adrenaline.
He has no idea what anyone sees in him, and wonders, not for the first time in his life, how he’s going to make this work.
~
By the time Chris gets home an hour and a half later, he’s in a better mood.
Amy’s bent over the kitchen island, flipping through a cookbook when Chris shuffles into the doorway.
“How did it go?” she smiles, pushing a piece of fallen hair back behind one ear.
On the other side of the room, Chris lets his shoulders slump a little. He admits, “It could’ve gone better.”
With a frown, Amy crosses the room and holds both arms out, hands crossing over his back as she gives him a hug.
~
Chris does his best to forget about the meeting.
Every time that icepick of memory sticks deep in his brain, he squeezes his eyes closed, and tries to think of anything else.
He makes his kids pancakes. He drops Austin off at school in the morning, and gets there ten minutes early to pick him up in the afternoon. He chats with the other school moms, and makes them laugh when he tells a funny story. He watches movies with his wife after the kids go to bed, and they have sex on the couch.
When he’s alone, he shuts himself in his home office and rewrites the proposal, trying to get his head back on straight.
“I gotta find someone better at this than I am,” he rants to his brother, on speakerphone one afternoon.
Scott’s been doing all his legal work pro bono - one of the many advantages of having a lawyer for a brother. Today they’re trying to finish the paperwork they need to get the name ‘Even’ trademarked.
“Your bar is too high,” Scott tells him. “Did you get the stuff I faxed over for the logo?”
Frowning, Chris shuffles through the shit on his desk until he finds them, and then offers a belated, “Yeah.”
“I needed those back yesterday, dickbag,” Scott replies. “But, you know. It’s not important or anything.”
Chris actually did mean to sign them, but between everything else going on, they genuinely slipped his mind. He gives Scott a yeah yeah, and reaches for a pen. He needs a business partner, and then he needs a receptionist who will make sure he has his goddamn shit in order.
As if Scott is reading his mind, he says, “The realtor said you’ll be able to close on the office space next month.”
“Phenomenal,” Chris says, and means it. It’s been hell working from home. “Where am I faxing these forms back to?”
Scott rattles off the fax number to his office, sending Chris scrambling to find a post-it to write it down on.
“Teamwork,” Scott says, a few minutes later. On both sides of the line, their fax machines squeal and beep, chugging through the four sheets of paperwork Chris signed.
As the last one spits itself back out of the machine, Chris sighs, “There we go. Hey, are you coming to the barbeque this weekend? Amy sent out Facebook invites.”
“You guys are so old. Nobody uses Facebook invites anymore,” Scott scoffs, shuffling papers. “But yes, for the free food and the free booze, I will. I’ll be there with bells on, in fact.”
“Party,” Chris says, already distracted as an email from his developer arrives. The subject says RELEASE UPDATE NOTES, which means Chris is really gonna have to concentrate when he reads it. As he clicks the message open, he says to Scott, “See you Saturday, man.”
“I see how it is,” Scott replies, but then adds, “Bye, homeboy,” anyway.
~
“No bath,” his daughter says.
Sighing, Chris, half bent over the bathtub, turns the water off.
“Yes bath,” he replies, shuffling back to sit down on the closed toilet seat lid. “Come on. Look, we got toys.”
Peyton crosses her arms over her chest, and frowns deeply.
“Hey, here’s your - your bear guy,” Chris tries, willfully ignoring the terrifying expression on her face as he holds up the plastic animal instead. When she doesn’t crack, he arches his eyebrows and bounces the toy a few times. Her poker face is much better than his is. Chris ends up frowning back and saying, “C’mon, buddy. Move it.”
She does acquiesce, but that’s mostly because when she steps forward to get the toy out of Chris’s hand, he seizes the opportunity to lift her up with his free arm.
“Daddy always wins,” he tells her seriously, only joking a little bit.
~
The next morning, Chris wakes up with his son in bed with him instead of his wife.
“Ugh,” he grunts, rubbing his face with one hand. He stretches out, and looks at the alarm clock over his shoulder.
Barely 8:30.
“Hi daddy,” Austin says, without taking his eyes off the TV on the wall across from the bed. “I’m watching cartoons. Mommy took Peyton to gymnastics.”
That sounds right. Chris definitely forgot about it, but gymnastics is a reasonable explanation for their early Saturday morning exodus.
“Thanks, pal,” he yawns, rubbing at his eyes as he tries to wake himself up.
After a minute of laying there, Chris rolls over and reaches for his phone. Right away, he fumbles it off the side of the nightstand, and simultaneously loses one of Amy’s rogue paperback books to the black space behind it.
Unsurprisingly, nobody has texted him. All he has are a couple of Facebook notifications he’ll never open, and an email from Scott.
He fucks around on Reddit until Austin’s show ends, and then heaves himself out of bed.
“Are you hungry?” he asks, picking up his robe from the end of the bed.
Austin nods. He’s always hungry - it’s not really indicative of when he actually ate last.
After tying up his robe, Chris waits at the end of the bed, one arm out while Austin clumsily gets to his feet and staggers across the mattress, swaying against the give of the pillow top. When he gets to the foot of the bed, Chris heaves him up against one side.
He’s almost too big to carry, but that doesn’t stop Chris from hauling him across the room.
Downstairs, preparation for tonight’s barbeque is already underway. The kitchen counters are covered with bags full of hamburger buns, potato chips, and - thanks to Amy remembering them - paper plates with plastic utensils.
Chris sets Austin down butt first on the counter, and gets out a couple of bowls for cereal.
Austin talks the whole time Chris makes coffee, rattling off a story about school, and then a full recap of the show he watched upstairs. Chris doesn’t feel like cleaning up a literal bowl of spilled milk today, so he moves them over to the kitchen table, where they eat and watch a trailer for the newest superhero movie on Chris’s phone.
By the time Amy and Peyton get home at 10, Chris is trying to get a handle on what they need to do for the barbeque.
“Daddy!” Peyton yells, jacked up on post-gymnastics adrenaline and Starbucks.
Chris picks her up automatically, intercepting before she has a chance to violently wrap herself around his legs, and smacks a kiss to the side of her head. She looks so much like Amy sometimes, it makes his chest feel funny.
Amy pats him on the ass as she shuffles by, en route to the fridge, and just like that, the day is in full swing.