Only Him

Chapter 26

"This feels surreal," I commented as I thumbed through the maternity clothes in a mall near Lehigh, eying the baby clothes section above the racks.

Dimitri chuckled but didn't disagree. "I never thought I'd actually need to buy anything from a store like this unless it was for someone else," he agreed.

"Technically it is for someone else," I said as I pulled a long chevron skirt from the rack and held it up to myself in the mirror. I wrinkled my nose in distaste and put it back. Why did maternity clothes have to suck so much? I was going to be as big as a whale come summer time and it would be killer with the sticky Pennsylvania heat, yet most of the clothes here were made of thicker material that would definitely not breathe. If I wasn't already stretching my wardrobe to its limit—meaning that I'd surreptitiously bought the only passible maternity shirt at Court and was wearing my jeans unbuttoned—then I wouldn't bother at all.

Dimitri passed me a shirt and I mentally applauded myself for managing to pick a man with some sense of style as I approved it and added it to the cart.

"You know what I mean," he said, endlessly patient with me. "It's exciting to look at an outfit and think that our child will wear it one day."

"Yup. To spit up on and poop through!" I may have joked about it but I really did agree with him. I longed to go search through the baby clothes more than clothes for myself. "But I refuse to buy any clothes until I know the gender. I don't want to end up like Karolina," I reminded him.

Satisfied that I had enough clothes to get me through the next stretch of time Dimitri and I moved away from the clothes and towards the other necessities that a baby would need—which I was starting to realize—was a lot. Car seats of every color, pattern and safety rating, strollers that advertised the best storage capacity or size limit. Though I was pretty certain that if our baby was a girl I wouldn't buy a bright pink car seat, I wasn't ready to pick out one of those yet either.

We ended up in the bedding section, walking among rows of cribs, mattress sheets and bumpers. We'd been moved into our new apartment for a little over a week and while the rest of the place was settled the nursery remained completely empty. We seriously needed to start filling it and though I thought that stockpiling diapers might be a good place to start I couldn't help but run a reverent hand over a particularly cute espresso colored crib.

"It's nice," I said when Dimitri came up to my side. It would hide dirty little fingerprints and it had drawers for storage underneath.

Dimitri nodded in agreement and inspected the dresser that matched it. Like everything else in life, Dimitri was serious about everything related to the baby. He studied the furniture and I could practically see the mental list of pros and cons he constructed regarding it.

"I like it," he agreed. "It might be a good place to start by putting the basic furniture in the room."

"You don't think we should wait until we know what Kumquat is?" I asked. I'd fallen into using my old nickname for the baby in the days since my return. Dimitri had found it ridiculously funny the first time I let it slip but now he joined me in avoiding gender-neutral pronouns in favor of it. It also made it somewhat possible to make comments around Court without people knowing what we were saying.

"Unless it's a pink crib like that one," Dimitri nodded in the direction of a crib that was indeed very pink, "I don't think that a crib is very gender specific. Its fine."

We ended up buying the crib and dresser. As an employee loaded the boxes into our car I felt accomplished that we'd have the first things to add to the nursery. It felt real, finally buying stuff for the baby.