Page 16 of Dreaming of His Omega
Traviel was gone.
Chapter Five
Elarian
“That was absolutely delicious.” I rose slowly and grabbed my empty salad bowl to bring to the sink.
“I'm afraid we're out of strawberries now though,” Traviel said.
We shared a small laugh. Regrowing our strawberries would be an easy task. They wouldn't taste as good if we forced them to go from bud to full berry in one sitting, but with a few magical nudges along the way, in a day or two we'd have another full crop of delicious berries. Which was good, because ever since getting pregnant I had become obsessed with fresh strawberries.
I leaned back against the counter with a sigh, and surveyed remains of the ingredients that had gone into the fruit salad.
“I'll clean up,” Traviel said.
“Thank you, my love.”
“What shall we do when I’m done?”
“I don't know.” I grinned playfully at him. “I'm getting hungry.”
He laughed and crossed the kitchen to give me a kiss. “With the way you've been eating, my mate, I don't doubt it.”
I punched him gently in the shoulder. “I'm actually going to go to the bathroom,” I told him. I was halfway across the kitchen when my phone buzzed. I pulled it out and saw the number for Dr. Evans’ office. I shot an embarrassed look at Traviel and slid it back into my pocket. “It’s Dr. Evans…”
He chuckled and took out his own. “I’ll call them back.”
“Thank you. Do you have their number?” I asked.
“It's in my phone,” Traviel said as he winked at me. “Besides, I've called them so many times. I've got it memorized.”
I laughed at my own expense. It was something of a bad habit I was developing; every time the doctor called me I was too worried that something that would be wrong to answer. And I invariably made Traviel call them back on my behalf.
I made my way into the bathroom and awkwardly sat down on the toilet. My stomach was so large I found that it was a little hard to see where I was aiming when standing, so sitting had become my best option. Unfortunately, it was also hard to get up again after I was down. After my business was complete, I headed back into the kitchen, just as Traviel was hanging up the phone.
“What did Dr. Evans want?” I asked, trying not to be nervous.
I could tell immediately from his smile that everything was okay. “Just checking up on you.” His smile faltered a little bit. “I guess word has spread that I'm not always around... so, they wanted to know how you're doing.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“Yeah.”
I crossed the kitchen as quickly as I could and put my arms around him. “It's not your fault. I know you'd be here every moment with me if you could. And one way or another we're going to figure things out. We'll find out why you keep disappearing. And we'll find out how to stop it. And in the meantime,” I said, backing up a couple steps. “I've become quite the independent omega.”
“That you have,” he agreed.
“Besides, I know you'll always come back to me.” I forced myself to smile at that. Ididn'tknow that. In truth, even though I was used to the idea of Traviel vanishing at random, it still terrified me every time. I never knew how long he'd be gone or when,if,he’d come back. It was a very unsettling existence. Nevertheless, I was doing my best to overcome it. There were, in fact, a lot of things that I was becoming quite confident in relying on myself to get done, in spite of being massively pregnant.
We ended up cleaning the kitchen together, before heading into the living room.
“I was thinking,” I said, “It's time to get everything in place for the nursery.”
He grinned. “That's a fabulous idea. We really need to get that set up, don't we?”
With all the things going on, good and bad, the nursery had fallen to the bottom of our to-do list. But now that I had officially reached full term, I knew the baby could come any day, even though my due date was still a little way out. With the way I was feeling it felt like any day could easily be today.
“Do we want a theme?” Traviel asked, looking at his laptop. “They've got a lot of really cute woodland critters things on this site.”
