Page 58 of Duke
Holy shit, I really am going to puke.
Lurching off the bed, I dash for the bathroom. I make it to the toilet just in time to lose the contents of my stomach with a pair of awful, heaving retches.
Tears prick my eyes. The acidic taste of bile fills my mouth. I retch again and again, my arms shaking as I prop them on the toilet seat.
What the actual fuck?
“Wheeler?” Mollie’s voice sounds from the bedroom.
I retch again.
She must hear me, because the next thing I know, she’s flying into the bathroom, her brown eyes going wide when she sees me hovering over the toilet.
“Wheeler, oh my God! Are you okay?”
“I have no idea what’s going on with me.” I fall to my knees in front of the toilet, one leg at a time. “I think I might’ve eaten something bad. Does anyone have the stomach bug? Maybe Ella brought it home from preschool.”
Mollie shakes her head. “No one is sick. Not that I know of anyway. And we’ve all been eating the same stuff…”
I notice the pair of deep furrows on her forehead.
Falling back onto my butt, I’m overwhelmed by just how miserable I feel. “This is so weird. And awful.”
Despite her growing bump, Mollie leans down to run a hand over my back. “Do you want some water? Maybe some crackers? I’m kind of an expert on what to eat when you feel like ass.”
Mollie’s in her second trimester now. But she was pretty sick during the first part of her pregnancy, the “morning” sickness they warned her about lasting all day and sometimes into the night too.
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep anything down.” I wince when I’m hit by another wave of what I can only describe as sea sickness.
The furrows in Mollie’s brow deepen. Her hand goes still. “Okay, I don’t mean to freak you out—”
“Oh God, what?”
“But your little weekend getaway with Duke was, what, three weeks ago?”
Mollie knows all about what went down in Aspen. She may be married to Duke’s brother, but she’s also my best friend. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say she knows everything about me.
Really, she’s comprised almost the entirety of the support system I’ve needed after losing the one I had in my family.
Pulse going haywire, I swallow a rush of bile that floods my mouth. “A little more than that, yeah.”
“Have you gotten your period?”
“I’m supposed to get it any minute.”
“Y’all were careful, right?”
“Of course we were careful. I’m on the—”
The words die in my throat.Wait a second.
Wait.
Did I accidentally miss taking a pill?
My brain scrambles to comb through the details of the sex-soaked forty-eight hours I spent in Aspen. I have an alarm seton my phone that goes off at the same time every morning as a reminder to take my birth control pill. I definitely took my pill the day we drove to Colorado; I remember popping it into my mouth during a restroom stop. But the next day…
My stomach takes a swan dive. I obviously stayed in Duke’s room that night. When I went to retrieve my phone up in my room the morning after we first hooked up, it was dead. The power had gone out, so my phone hadn’t charged.
