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“So, sweetie, when are you going to have your retirement party?” Geneva asked. She had come skipping into Piper’s office not long after the others had showed up for the weekly lunch that they had together.
When they were running Knickknack as young kids, the company had been doing well but not as well as it could have been. Now that they were adults with college degrees and some actual knowledge about how business worked under their belts, the company was thriving. It meant that they were all a lot more busy than they had been before as they lead teams of people that did the work that they used to do on their own. To combat the almost loss of their friendship that they’d had when the final person, Bowie, had graduated with their degree, they had set up having weekly lunches. Jarvis’ office was almost always packed with paperwork and boxes of new toys that he had yet to review, so they had settled for Piper’s instead. She was also scary enough that very few people would come to bother her unless it was an absolute emergency.
“What in the world are you talking about?” Piper asked. She stabbed the plastic fork in her hand directly into the center of her salad so that it was standing upright, which made Bowie jump. He had been doing something strange to the mayo on his sandwich moments before, and he cursed as his thumb slipped right past the first condiment and into the mustard.
“Your retirement party! You’re the VP, there’s no way that you can just leave the company without having one,” Geneva replied, as if that cleared anything up.
“Am I missing something here? I didn’t think that you were retiring,” Jarvis said, worry knitting his features. It would be a big deal to have to review all the high level employees that they have to find someone that could replace Piper. While the original staff was very good at their jobs, removing one of them to fill a job that had been taken for decades would make everything else topple down like a domino effect. Jarvis wanted to keep everyone exactly where they were.
“I’m not retiring!” Piper nearly shouted. She had been getting snappier again, almost as bad as she had been when she was a teenager.
Geneva cooed at her and placed a manicured hand down on her arm before laying her blond hair onto Piper’s shoulder. “Stress isn’t good for the baby, beloved. You have to remember what Dr. Ruby said and keep your angry outbursts to a minimum.”
“Shh, you’re going to make her cry again,” Aster said quickly as he kicked Geneva’s chair.
She shrieked and almost toppled down to the ground. She righted herself while clinging to the seat of the chair so that she didn’t fall again. For a girl that was so dedicated to dance when they were younger, she was surprisingly easy to make fall off balance. “I don’t make my wife cry by telling her things that are the truth, you all make her cry because you don’t know how to phrase things correctly,” she pouted.
They were referring to an incident earlier in Piper’s pregnancy when the doctor had told her that her blood pressure was too high. She had come and talked to her friends about it, as they shared most of their worries with one another, and Bowie had accidentally blurted something out that made her so upset that she had cried in her office for an hour. No one had been expecting it to be him that pointed out that her angry outbursts were the things that were making her blood pressure spike, but he was the only one of them that had been pregnant so in a way he had a right to speak on such matters.
“Baby, you have made me cry before. You’re the one that kept putting on sad Disney movies when I said that I wanted to watch something to fall asleep to,” Piper said.
“It’s not my fault that the mom dies in almost every single one of the classics,” Geneva pouted. She had released her hold on the chair beneath her so that she could cross her arms over her chest to accentuate how upset she was by those words.
“That’s besides the point!” Jarvis said, waving his arms above his head to get their attention back on him. “What is this about Piper retiring?”
“I’m not retiring. I have no plans to retire, at least not until this baby is of baby making age,” she replied. She placed her hands on her swollen stomach, which just so happened to move like there was an alien inside of it as she spoke. It seemed like the little one had somehow inherited the group’s sense of humor before they were even out of the womb.
“What are you talking about? Someone is going to have to stay home and watch the baby,” Geneva argued.
“I thought that you were going to do that,” Piper replied as she turned to face her wife.
“Why would I do that? We can’t both stay home and be moms,” she snorted.
“We wouldn’t. I would be working as the Vice President of Knickknack toys and you would be staying home with our kid,” Piper replied. “You barely even do any work while you’re here, so I thought that it would be obvious that you would take that on.”
“I’m Jarvis personal secretary! If I was going to retire then I would have had to start training someone as soon as we found out that you were pregnant. He’s so picky when it comes to his food and his calls and everything else. Do you know how long it would take to just train someone on the mirrors that they can and can’t have in their desk drawer?” Geneva rambled.
Bowie nervously rose his hand into the air, but was quickly overshadowed as Knox said, “Why do either of you have to stay home? The twins do just fine with our rotating schedule.”
“The twins are already in Kindergarten and there are three of you,” Geneva said.
“I also happen to remember a lot of breakdowns and them being here almost constantly,” Piper said indignantly. “I don’t want to have my kid at work all the time. It’s hard enough for a woman to get into this kind of position, I don’t want to give all female VPs the image of having to bring their kids to work.”
“We brought the twins to work because they were an accident that happened while we were working full time and going to college at the same time. Your baby was planned after you got tested in your twenties and you have plenty of time to plan. Piper, isn’t your mother retired and looking for some hobbies? You basically having a built in babysitter,” Aster pointed out.
Bowie cleared his throat loudly to say, “I think that having your kid here, at a toy company, would actually be better PR for you.”
The room lapsed into silence for a moment as they realized that, once again, the person that they had been more than willing to ignore in the conversation had been right. “I think that a crib would look pretty cute in here, and that means that we could give my mom babysitting duties later in the baby’s life when they’re less havoc to take care of,” Piper nodded.
The three parents currently sitting in the room shared a look with each other but didn’t say anything. Piper had been very high strung about parenting and pregnancy since she and Geneva had decided that it was time for them to start trying. None of them wanted to say something that would set her off again, and it seemed like she had settled on what she wanted to.