Not to be ~ that ~ person but cryptic pregnancy Jack got me thinking another thought™️ 😌
I just know Jack Abbot (x younger reader) would be so in tune with his girl and her body, that he’d just KNOW that she’s pregnant even before she does? 🙂↕️🙂↕️🙂↕️
He notices the fatigue first.
And not in the way you notice it, not the brushing-past-it, attributing-it-to-the-job way that you've perfected over years of residency. He notices it the way Jack notices everything, which is quietly and completely and without making a sound about it. He knows you're tired. He has spent long enough beside you to have memorised the different specific textures of it — shift-tired, study-tired, the particular hollowed-out quality of a hard case that followed you home. And one morning he watches you move through the kitchen and thinks, with the calm certainty of a man who trusts his own assessments: that's none of those. He doesn't say anything. He just watches, and he starts doing the math.
He starts making you breakfast without being asked.
Doesn't comment on it. Doesn't make it a thing. Just eggs on the counter when you come downstairs, coffee already made, something warm pushed toward you before you've fully woken up. You assume he's being nice, which he is, but that is not the primary reason. The primary reason is that he is a doctor who has noticed that you are not eating enough in the mornings and has decided to do something about it in the most practical and least discussable way possible. This is, you will later reflect, extremely Jack.
He notices you've gone off your coffee.
You don't notice. You keep making it and leaving it half finished because you're busy and there's always somewhere to be, and there's been this weird smell coming off of it that you think could be the new milk you've been buying. But Jack notices the mugs. The way you've started reaching for water without thinking about it. The face you made last Tuesday — just for a second, barely a flicker — at the smell of the fresh grind. He doesn't say anything about it. He just quietly switches to making you tea in the mornings, and when you tell him you didn't ask for tea, he tells you to drink it anyway, and something about the particular certainty of him makes you drink it without further argument, which is not something you do easily and which he knows.
He goes very still one evening when you fall asleep on the couch at eight thirty.
Not because you're tired. You're always tired, tired is a baseline condition of being a resident, but because of the quality of it. The way you were mid-sentence and then simply weren't, your whole body just surrendering to it without negotiation. He sits there for a long time afterward. Not moving. Coffee going cold in his hand. Just thinking, the way Jack thinks. Quietly, thoroughly, turning the accumulation of small things over and looking at them from every angle until the picture they make is undeniable.
He does the research anyway.
Not because he doesn't already know. He has been a doctor for a long time and the pattern is not subtle, not to him, not with his particular quality of attention. But he sits with it for a few days, making sure he's not seeing something he wants to see rather than something that's actually there. Making sure this is real. It is real. He knows it's real. He closes his laptop and goes and makes you tea and says nothing, and the knowing sits in him like something he's decided to hold carefully until the right moment.
He struggles with whether to say something.
Because on one hand, he's a doctor, and the responsible thing — the practical thing — is to simply say: Hey, I've noticed some things. You should take a test. Straightforward. Done. But on the other hand, this is yours. The finding out belongs to you, and he knows it, and the part of him that is not a doctor but is the person who loves you does not want to take that moment from you before you're ready to have it. So he waits. He makes the tea. He wakes up five minutes before you to make sure there's something warm waiting. He watches you with that quiet, steady attention and thinks, privately: Come on. Come to it.
He is in the kitchen when you find out.
Not because he planned it. Just because that's where he is on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, when you come downstairs holding the test with an expression he has never seen on your face before — wide and stunned and completely unguarded — and you say his name. Just his name. Just Jack. And he looks up, and his face does something. Not surprise. Something quieter and considerably larger, the specific expression of a man who has been holding something carefully for several weeks and has just been given permission to set it down.
He crosses the kitchen in about three steps.
No preamble. No speech. Just the practical, unhurried movement of a man who has decided what he's doing. And then his hands are on your face and he's looking at you — really looking, the full open quality of it, the rare version of him — and you say: Did you know? And he says, very quietly: I had a feeling. And you stare at him. For how long? And his mouth does the thing it does, the small tucked-away almost-smile. A little while. You should be annoyed about that. You are a little annoyed about that. But he's looking at you like that, with that expression, and his thumbs are at your cheekbones, and the Sunday morning light is doing what it does, and you find, somewhat against your will, that you cannot sustain the annoyance.
He says very little in the first moment.
Because he's Jack, and Jack does not fill silences with noise just because the silence is big. He holds your face and he lets the size of it be the size it actually is, without rushing either of you through it. And then, low and certain, just for you: You okay? And you think about it, really think about it, the way the moment deserves. I don't know yet, you say, honestly. And he nods, like that is exactly the right answer. That's okay, he says. We don't have to know yet.
And eat something. And drink the tea. And then he sits across from you at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning and talks to you, really talks, the kind he doesn't always find easy about what he noticed. What he's been thinking. What shifted in him over the few weeks of watching and waiting and making breakfast without explanation. And at some point you look at him across the table and understand, with complete and slightly overwhelming clarity, that this man has been quietly, privately, carefully ready. Not announced or performed. Just ready, in the way Jack Abbott is ready for things, which is to say: completely, and without making a fuss about it.
He is, in the end, the steadiest thing in the room.
While you're still finding your footing in the enormity of it — still turning it over, still figuring out the shape of how it feels — he's already there. Already solid. Already the still point. Not because he isn't feeling it. Not because the size of it hasn't reached him. But because someone has to hold the shape of the moment together, and he has always, without fail, been that person for you. He has been that person since before you knew you needed it. He will be that person for considerably longer than either of you can currently see.
And — though he will never in his life admit this —
He had thought of a name.
Weeks ago. In the quiet of a Tuesday night when you were asleep and he was lying there doing the math in the dark.
He will take this to his grave.
You will find out anyway, eventually, the way you always find out everything about him, slowly, and then all at once, and with a look on your face that makes him feel like the most known person in any room.
