Face Your Fears

Chapter 25

Hadley and I were locked in a furious glare, so intense I was surprised we hadn't burned a hole in each other's foreheads yet. We'd narrowed our eyes at each other plenty of time - we got into far too many spats for that to simply be avoided. Yet this glare had to top all glares.

"This is all your fault."

"No. No way. Don't you try and put this one on me, Archer. We agreed we - "

"No, you agreed we should - "

"Okay, so maybe I did, but still, this is not that big of a deal. We can work through it, right?"

"Uh, no, obviously we can't, if we can't even pick out damn socks, Hadley."

We were starting to get looks from all of the expectant mothers with their men walking round the stupid baby store whose name I couldn't even pronounce - Baby Whatsit? - but the clerks looked as if they could hardly care less. They'd probably seen this a thousand times over, if pregnancy hormones were anything but predictable.

In retrospect, though, this whole thing could've been avoided if, at her last checkup, Hadley had just agreed to let the ultrasound tech tell us the damn sex of the baby after weeks of waiting. She was adamant that it was a girl and that there was no need to have it confirmed.

I had aptly disagreed, more under the impression that genetics hadn't entirely decided on the baby being a girl before it'd even happened.

But I digress.

"They're just socks!" Hadley picked up a pair of white socks with pink stripes on them and gave them a shake. "What's so bad about these ones?"

"Nothing is wrong with the stupid socks, Hadley, but my point is, what if the baby is a boy?" I told her for what felt like the thousandth time. "I don't think our son will thank us in the long run if he's wearing pink socks for the first year of his life."

"But it's not going to be a boy. That's my point."

"And how do you know that?"

"I just do. Can't you just accept that?"

"Well...no."

"Excuse me, is there anything I can help you with?"

A blonde, middle-aged clerk had wandered over to us in the girls' newborn section and was giving us a sympathetic, almost embarrassed look.

Hadley shot me a disgusted look before saying, "Sorry about that. Do you have a gender neutral section?"

The clerk smiled and said, "Of course we do. This way."

I stared at Hadley in astonishment. Gender neutral section? We could've saved ourselves a whole lot of trouble if we'd just gone straight to the gender neutral section as soon as we walked in.

"Why are you looking at me like that, Archer?" Hadley said in confusion. "I don't - oh."

Then she got it.

"Ah. Right. My bad." She tapped a finger to her forehead. "Scatterbrained lately."

"Scatterbrained," I repeated. "Uh huh."

Scatterbrained probably wasn't the right word for it, not since the time she had put her purse in the freezer.

The clerk happily lead us over to the aisle containing a whole slew of gender neutral baby things, everything from shoes, jumpers, bottles, rattles, stuffed animals, and - crap, did I have to elaborate on all of the things on the shelves?

At least with all of the things here we'd actually be able to purchase things that the baby needed - like clothes, for instance. I would be a little concerned for our kid's welfare if they left the hospital without clothes, God forbid.