Baby Lips [l.s mpreg] (boyxboy)

twenty weeks - april 19

hello (-: this is not edited so please let me know if i made any typos or mistakes or anything !!! i know i'm taking my sweet time with finishing this, but i promise you all that i will. slowly, but surely.

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Harry misses Louis. 

He's been gone for a day, but it feels like a lifetime. 

Everything feels harder without Louis, is the thing; hours feel longer, like time has temporarily slowed down. Perhaps it's the pregnancy hormones or Harry's extreme lack of ability to handle being separated from the love of his life talking, but he's pretty sure that the only reason he hasn't dropped out of school is that Louis won't let him. 

He wants a good life for his child - he does - but the idea of graduating and going to university and getting a degree so that he can settle into a mediocre, simple job just doesn't appeal to him. He struggles to find something that he feels motivated to want to pursue. He has the bakery, he supposes, but he's not really into the idea of running it by himself someday. That's more of Gemma's game, he thinks. 

He doodles a smiling star in his English notebook as he ponders the grandness of it all: the life growing inside of him, the future that waits, the fact that his boyfriend is hours away searching for apartments to live in without him... it's a lot, is the thing. Harry has never been able to easily handle a lot. 

The bell rings about five minutes later - which feels like thirty to Harry - and the students in his class files out the door quickly and loudly. He lingers behind for a moment, taking his time while gathering his things, and his eyes find their way to his teacher, Mrs. Jefferson. She's a nice, middle-aged woman who wears pencil skirts and knit sweaters almost every day. She's sat at her desk, eyes focused on the screen of her computer, and typing away. It's completely silent in the room aside from the sounds her fingers make on the keys and the low thrum of Harry's heartbeat in his ears.

"Mrs. Jefferson?" he asks quietly. 

She barely even looks over at him. "Yes, Harry?"

"When did you know you wanted to become a teacher?"

Her fingers freeze almost instantaneously. She peeks at Harry over her monitor, brows furrowed slightly and eyes suspicious. "Why do you ask?"

"I dunno," Harry grumbles, meandering around the room, "I was just. Thinking."

"I can't remember an exact moment, if that's what you mean."

"But when did you know?"

"Well, when I walked into the first day of school for my very first teaching job, I guess I knew."

"What about before then?"

"It was always a dream. An aspiration, rather," she hums, resuming her typing. Harry can faintly see the reflection of her screen in the lenses of her glasses. "Everyone has dreams, Harry. Some are more obtainable than others."

"Your dream was to be a teacher?" He doesn't seem to sound rude, but of all things to dream of being - a teacher? Here, in a little town, teaching teenagers?

She scoots her desk chair over so that, instead of facing her computer screen, she's facing Harry over the mounds of papers on her desk. She slides her glasses off with one hand, resting her chin on the fist of the other; she looks him up and down, once, twice. Then she smiles.

"Not particularly, no. I suppose a better way of putting it would be... hm. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted fulfilment in my life, in my career. I thought teaching would be a good way to do those things."