#p;jake

It started because of Em. The idea anyway. It’s mostly because of her, let’s get this straight right now, that Jazz was even able to do any of this. But really, it starts with a song. Jake’s words from their earlier conversation that week about their happiness ring in his head as he hears an unfamiliar song drifting from the slightly open door of Emerson’s office. Chandler’s struck with an idea.

Emerson does most of the talking, since Jazz’s stutter pisses him off enough to make it worse. Though it’s all Jazz’s plans. The venue was Emerson’s idea however. It took two whole days of “overtime” for them to get all the arrangements in place. There wasn’t much, it wasn’t anything extravagant, though Emerson had offered to make it so if that’s what Chandler wanted. It wasn’t, certainly not after he’d seen what the empty bar alone had looked like.

“Alright, arsehole. I’m coming,” he says with a yawn. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Waking me up in the middle of the night-” There’s no one there on the other side of the door. Jazz takes a step forward as he looks down the hall and hits his foot on something hard and plastic. His gaze falls to the ground only briefly as the sound of the stairwell door closing draws his attention. Chandler jumps over the car carrier holding the sleeping baby as he rushes to the stairs. “Hey!” he shouts as he shoves the door open. “Hey wait!” But the stairwell is seemingly empty, he even goes down a floor to see if he could find whomever it was that thought it was funny to drop a baby off at his flat. But there was no one.

Jazz goes back to his flat, door still wide open, baby blocking his entrance. He’s not sure what to do, but realizes he probably looks crazy, in nothing but slightly too big pants hanging low on his hips staring at a sleeping baby at four-something in the morning. So, he picks up the blue paisley bag and the carseat and takes both into the apartment. Shutting the door with his foot, he brings the car seat to the table and sets it and the bag on top.

There’s a Manila envelope in the front pocket of the diaper bag with Jake’s name scrawled over-elegantly in thick black sharpie. Inside, there’s three sheets of paper; a letter addressed to Jake, the birth certificate from the hospital, and the one from the state of New York, as well as his social security card. He looks at it all long enough to discover the baby’s name is Spencer, his mother’s name is Sarah, and at first glance Jake’s the baby daddy. The letter is crass and bitchy and at one point Chandler’s referred to as Jake’s “new toy”. Which makes him bristle. Mostly this Sarah chick just chews Jake out for knocking her up and repeatedly says he should have to deal with the consequences of his stupidity and try his hand as a single parent because “your new toy is bound to leave when he finds out.”

Chandler was going to be late. That was the bottom line. The mini fashion show/shopping spree went way past the time allotted, plus Em had somehow managed to convince him that shaving his legs was the greatest idea ever (which it was, just don’t tell her that). It actually made him feel more confident, Enough, that he’d finally bought that lingerie he’d been trying to convince himself to. Which is why he was late, because on top of the extra time it took to find his size in a set he liked, he still had to go back to their apartment and drop off all of his shopping bags. (So maybe he or Emerson bought more than he really needed...)

Ryder: