“Look at you, Faby. You’re not just a beeping demon-baby,” she said, then instantly felt like an idiot when the pregnant woman next to her gasped at her demon-baby description.
“I’m being silly,” she said as the woman gave her a curt, we’re-done-here nod.
“Play nice,” Jordan teased.
“Is the app doing anything?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s tracking your heart rate. You’re clocking in at a respectable eighty-two,” he answered, showing her the heart icon blinking with an eight and a two next to it.
“Is that good?”
He nodded. “A resting heart rate should be between sixty and one hundred. You’re doing great.”
She nestled into him. “We’ve got this challenge in the bag.”
Lenny strummed his guitar to get everyone’s attention.
“We’ve got every contestants’ heart rate readouts on our laptop,” Lenny said as Stu held up the device.
“This challenge is about meditation and staying calm under pressure,” Stu explained, then gestured to a woman who looked like she came straight out of a yoga apparel advertisement.
“Dawn is a meditation specialist,” the man continued. “She’s here to lead you in some breathing exercises you can utilize during your child’s birth.”
Lenny held up several white envelopes. “Here’s the catch. We’re going to hand you the envelope with your baby’s gender information inside. It would be easy to get excited and send your heart rate through the roof. We know that you’re all eager to learn if you’re having a boy or a girl.”
“The challenge is to maintain a resting heart rate for the entire forty-minute meditation. Then, we’ll head outdoors—after Nadine’s group is safely off the premises—and open our envelopes as a group.”
She felt her husband shift behind her as he raised his hand.
“Yes, Jordan,” Lenny said, calling on him.
“How do we know who wins?”
Georgie tried not to cringe.
No, no, no, no!
He was not about to go all asshat competitive—not when this challenge was about being chill. She dug her elbow into his belly, but he didn’t flinch. The man had rock-hard abs. Something she usually reveled in, but not today.
“All you have to do is get through the meditation, and everyone wins,” Stu answered.
Jordan raised his hand again.
“Yes, Jordan,” Lenny replied.
“That’s great about everyone winning, but what if one wanted to earn some extra points? Would there be an opportunity for some extra credit? Like if Georgie went all Zen-master meditator, could that help our rank?”
And hello, Emperor of Asshattery! So nice of you to show up—not!
“There’s no extra credit, but there is one more challenge—a secret challenge we’re keeping close to the vest,” Stu added.
She sighed with relief when her husband’s hand didn’t rocket back up for another question.
“Without further ado, we’ll let Dawn start the meditation practice,” Lenny said with another strum as the cameramen continued rolling.
Miss Yoga USA pressed her hands into a prayer position. “We usually like to do our meditations outdoors with our animal friends. But we’re double-booked today, so we’re bringing a few of our goats in here to join us in the barn,” she said as a farmhand opened one of the stall doors and a troop of baby goats bleated and pranced toward the group.
“It’s baby goat meditation, Jordan,” she whispered.
“We’ve totally got this, babe,” he replied as Stu handed her the envelope with their baby’s gender.
She pressed the paper to her heart. “This is it. We’ll know if we’ve got a Georgie junior or a Jordan junior on the way,” she said as a curious baby goat sniffed her shoes.
“Babe, take a breath. Your heart rate jumped into the nineties,” he replied, gaze on the phone.
“Aren’t you excited?” she pressed.
He kissed the crown of her head. “Let’s just say that if I were holding Faby’s heart rate monitor arm, it would be off the charts. And not because I’m scared of the goats, but because I can’t wait to be a father. Boy or girl, this is going to be one special kid.”
This man! One minute, he’s a competitive douche canoe, the next, he’s melting her heart.
“Couples, I have a few announcements before we begin. As you can see, we’re in a barn, and barns have their share of creepy-crawly friends,” the woman said, causing the breath to catch in Georgie’s throat.
Creepy-crawly things were definitely not anyone’s friend.
“If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you,” the meditation guru added.
“Georgie, take a breath,” Jordan coaxed as Lenny and Stu glanced over their iPad at her.
Let’s get real. Spiders weren’t just creepy and crawly—which was bad enough. No, they were eight-legged harbingers of hell.
She shifted her body, scanning the hay for the little buggers as the yogi instructed the group to close their eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Jordan whispered.
She swallowed hard. “I’m not a fan of spiders.”
“I can tell. Your heart rate shot up.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I checked the hay. I didn’t see any. I should be okay.”
Should be—but she couldn’t make any promises.
Jordan moved from side to side.
“I don’t see anything. We’re in the clear. But…”
“But what? Did you see a spider?” she whisper-shouted.
“But…you have a ridiculous phobia,” he said, and she could hear the cocky grin in his voice.
“It’s not silly,” she hissed when someone in the room hushed her.
The nerve!
“There’s nothing on the ground but hay,” he said gently.
She nodded, then worked to slow her breathing.
Only hay. No spiders.
This would be her mantra.
She closed her eyes, listening as the baby goats padded around as the yogi instructed the participants to picture a serene place.
That was easier said than done.
All she could conjure up were rows of people seated in a darkened ballroom as bright lights cast her in an unearthly glow. She stood there, shoulder to shoulder, with the other teen pageant contestants, smiling into the void like animated Barbie dolls until the tiny beast descended from its hair-thin silk rope.
A spider, going about its spider life, crashed the Miss Drumstick Pageant.
She hadn’t wanted to compete in a Thanksgiving-themed pageant, but her mother had signed her up, nevertheless. And there she was, smiling so hard she thought her lips would snap while a spider hung, suspended a breath away from her nose.
Legs wiggling, she’d hope the pageant-crasher would continue its creepy descent without touching her. And it might have. But at the very moment the spider stilled, the contestant next to her flipped her hair, sending a whoosh of air strong enough to carry Mr. Spider right onto her cheek.
If ever she could sympathize with Miss Muffet, it was that moment.
And that’s when it happened. At this exact moment, in this very barn, she sensed a bevy of tiny arachnid eyeballs staring at her.
“Georgie, are you okay? Your heart rate is through the roof,” Stu said from somewhere in the barn.
Slowly, she opened her eyes and…
There it was.
Suspended in the air and lit by a shard of light, a spider descended from above.
And he was headed straight for Faby!
Oh, hell no!
She lunged forward, slicing at the eight-legged micro-monster with the envelope. Back and forth, she wielded the rectangular paper like a pregnant Lancelot brandishing a sword, intent on fending off an evil attacker—or multi-legged bug.
But her actions were in vain. She sliced through the thread of silk, and the spider landed right on Faby’s leg. She shot to her feet, dropping the envelope and sw
inging the fake baby like a tiny sack of potatoes.
“You will not touch my Faby!” she called as the spider seemed to hang on for dear life.
“Georgie!” Jordan cried, but she had to get that damned creature off of her fake baby.
She dragged Faby’s legs across the floor, praying the friction would knock the wicked arachnid off. After making a few circles in the hay, she lifted the doll, checked its fake baby body, then blew out a relieved breath. The spider was nowhere to be found, but Faby was covered in slivers of golden hay.
She gently dusted off the doll, then glanced around the barn. Shock and dismay graced every expression as the cameras recorded what must have looked like an insane outburst from an unstable pregnant woman. Even her trusty trifecta was left speechless.
She parted her lips to say…
Say what?
Sorry for that freak-out, but spiders are real asshats.
She wracked her brain, searching for the appropriate thing to say after a near homicidal outburst, when the smack and chomp of a goat chewing caught her attention. She glanced at the animal to find the last bit of their reveal envelope dangling from its mouth.
The room remained dead quiet, with only the thumps of the goats padding around and munching on her child’s gender. She hugged Faby to her chest, then felt a warm hand press against her back.
Without even looking, she knew it was Jordan. But she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at anyone. She’d hung all her hopes on this day. For weeks, she’d thought of it as not only the day she’d learn her child’s gender but also the day when she could come clean to her mother.
Why was this difficult? What was she frightened of? People got pregnant every day.
People announced their pregnancies in a myriad of ways.
Why was she making this so hard?
Her eyes burned as angry, humiliated tears threatened to spill.
“Georgie, babe,” Jordan said as if he were addressing a wounded bird.
She handed the fake baby to her husband, tried not to see the worry in his eyes, then ran out of the barn like a pregnant bat out of hell.
Because, as much as she teased her husband about his competitive streak and always wanting to win, she was the one who needed a win today.
And she’d needed it badly.
Instead, just like with the VR simulator challenge, they’d failed.
Again.
15
Jordan
Jordan stood in the center of the pregnancy meditation circle turned spider-freak-out crime scene as the clap of Georgie’s footsteps, booking it out of the barn, echoed through the cavernous space.
Not counting the baby goats, who hadn’t been bothered by the crazy lady dragging a doll in circles across the creaky hay-covered planks of wood, the room remained stock still. Lenny and Stu stood with their heads cocked to the side while the meditation specialist’s eyes looked ready to pop out of her skull. He glanced around the room as the three CityBeat cameramen pointed their cameras straight at him. Even Barry, who’d been with them through the majority of their bizarro moments, stared slack-jawed at the goat eating the envelope containing their baby’s gender.
He did one last scan of the stunned group, then tucked Faby in the crook of his arm.
“That was something, wasn’t it, folks?” he said, going for breezy-casual, but, from the gaping silence, he’d only managed to appear run-of-the-mill cuckoo.
He sucked in a tight breath through his teeth. “It looks like Georgie and I are cutting this one short. Enjoy the rest of your day. Namaste and all that bullshit,” he finished, giving the yogi a quick bow before following in his wife’s footsteps and hightailing it out of the barn.
Was this one of their best moments?
Oh, for Christ’s sake, no!
But was it one of the worst?
He let that sink in.
Yeah, maybe it was.
A non-spider phobic person might have simply brushed the creepy-crawly away and left it at that. But that is not how it went down today. And to add insult to injury, the cameras had caught Georgie losing her ever-loving mind over an arachnid, then dragging her infant simulation doll across the ground. An activity he would bet every dollar he had was a big no-no with a real infant.
Out of the barn and away from the gaping mouths and bugged-out eyes, he patted Faby’s head.
“You’re okay, aren’t you, Faby?”
The fake baby stared up at him. Streaks of dirt ran down its plastic cheeks.
He rubbed out a smudge with his thumb. “You look okay to me. Do you want to guess who’s not doing okay?”
He glanced around the half-empty parking area and spied his wife pulling on the locked passenger side door handle like a common pregnant car thief.
He jogged across the lot and came to her side. “It’s easier when you have these,” he said, pulling his keys from his pocket, then pressed the fob as the click of the locks disengaging cut through the air.
He rubbed her shoulder. “Do you want to take a minute and then go back into the barn?”
She rested her forehead against the car. “Is Faby all right?”
He looked at the lifeless doll. “Never better. Don’t forget, Faby survived being kidnapped by wild dogs. Faby is a badass fake baby.”
“It wasn’t wild dogs. It was a dog,” she replied against the car window, her breath making little puffs of condensation.
“A pack of wild dogs sounds better,” he countered.
She sighed, then met his gaze. “I can’t go back in there, Jordan.”
He nodded. “Then, we’ll leave.”
“You’re not upset about the Battle of the Births score? We’re probably still dead last.”
“They said there was another secret challenge. We’ll aim for a Hail Mary finish,” he replied.
Did it stink to lose?
Yeah.
But he wasn’t about to make his wife feel bad about her spider phobia.
As far as he was concerned, after alpacas, spiders were the next asshole creatures on the asshole creatures list.
He opened the passenger side door and helped her in. He wanted to keep this light. But the slump of Georgie’s shoulders and the tremble of her bottom lip spoke volumes. This was more than a failed challenge. It was even more than an unfortunate interaction with an arachnid.
He got in the car, handed Faby to his wife, and started the engine.
“Where to, Spider-man?”
“Oh, stop!” she huffed, staring out the window.
“You never mentioned that you had an irrational phobia,” he teased.
“Let’s just say, I totally understand why Little Miss Muffet took off when the spider intruded on her tuffet,” she replied, but there wasn’t any sass or sarcasm in his wife’s reply.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye. From her pinched expression, he knew not to take it any further.
She shook her head as if trying to push something from her mind. “Let’s hit the grocery store first and then head home. I’m warning you now. We’re buying every can of pineapple juice, every pineapple fritter, every pineapple yogurt, and I may even throw in a few Hawaiian pizzas.”
Holy pineapple bender! This was not good.
“You may be blowing this up in your head, babe. It didn’t look as bad as you probably think it did,” he said as they started down the gravel drive back toward the interstate.
She turned in her seat and pinned him with her gaze. “Did it look like a screaming pregnant woman attacking a bug the size of a nickel followed by said pregnant woman dragging an infant simulation doll across a dusty, hay-covered floor?”
She had him there.
“Technically, yes.”
She sank into the seat and pressed her fingertips to her eyelids. “It’s a sign.”
“What’s a sign?”
“All of it. All the relief I felt after we picked the gender reveal as the date to tell my mom about the baby. It was a facade, hiding what
we both know is true.”
He frowned. She was being damned hard on herself.
“What are you talking about, Georgie? What do we know is true?”
She waved him off. “And we don’t even know the baby’s gender.”
That was an easy fix.
“We can call Dr. Beaver’s office,” he replied.
“And say what?” she asked, her voice going up an octave. “They know this was supposed to be the big reveal for the Battle of the Births. We signed a waiver saying the office could share the information with Lenny and Stu. How do we tell them that I obliterated a spider to defend a fake baby and dropped the envelope with the gender information only to have it get eaten by an asshole goat! Do things like this happen to other people? Is there something wrong with us?”
“There’s nothing wrong with us. We can pull over and call the doctor’s office now. We’ll know the gender of our pineapple surprise in minutes,” he said, doing his best to ease her anguish.
“No, this is the universe telling us something. We’re not supposed to know the baby’s gender. I don’t even know if we’re supposed to be parents,” she added, back to shaking her head.
“Georgiana, you’re upset, and you’re low on pineapple. That’s all. In a day or two, we’ll probably be laughing about this.”
He swallowed hard, feeling her gaze bore into him.
Yep, probably not a good time to throw out the whole laugh-about-it-later comment.
“We don’t know the gender, so we can’t tell my mom,” she said, biting out the words.
“We don’t have to know the gender to tell your mom,” he countered, trying to make sense of what was going on with his wife and the crushing anxiety around telling her mother.
Georgie threw up her hands. “Then why did I want to wait? What am I supposed to say now? In my head, it made sense. We waited to tell them because then, not only were we telling them that a baby was on the way, we were also sharing the exciting news of it being a boy or a girl. And now, we’re not supposed to know the gender. A goat and a spider made sure of that. It’s like the asshat version of Charlotte’s Web, except the spider is a psychopath, and the pig was replaced by an envelope gobbling goat.”
Own the Eights Maybe Baby Page 20
