Page 5 of A Surprise Baby for the Wolf Shifter

Drink water? It was coming right back up.

Nibble on a saltine? I might as well have eaten an entire meal with how much I was retching. Seriously, it wasn’t pretty. And I couldn’t understand what was going on. I could barely walk across my apartment much less make it out the door to a doctor’s office.

Maybe I caught the flu. Or the oysters I had last night were horribly off.

Considering the oysters weren’t likely, because I’ve only ever eaten them there with no issues ever. I chalked my illness up to the flu.

Yeah. That had to be it. The flu.

The problem was, I didn’t normally get sick. In fact, in the past several years, I barely caught a sniffle. Not to mention I hadn’t been around anyone who was sick, and I was pretty sure I had the flu shot. A couple of months ago, in fact.

I would call to find out, if only to double-check, but… my body hated me, and movements or anything that didn’t require remaining bent over the toilet bowl was simply out of the question. If I moved wrong, or too fast—or at all sometimes—I would be forced to pray to the porcelain gods all over again.

It was enough to make me wonder if I was going to be forced to camp out in my bathroom.

The term “wicked” only barely started to describe what I was going through. Evil was closer.

And the dizziness? Don’t get me started.

To say I was miserable was an understatement. The sensation in my torso was as though something was twisting my stomach around and flipping it upside down with every breath I took. I barely managed to call into work. Jessabelle, my boss, wasn’t thrilled. We had a major event coming up in the next couple of days and being sick was something considered unacceptable, albeit unavoidable.

And I was in charge of the whole thing.

“You don’t get sick,” she said. “You can’t get sick. Not now!”

“I know,” I said over the phone. “I don’t like this any more than you do.”

“Well, figure it out and come back to work. Pronto,” Jessabelle said. “I need you, Gemma.”

“I’m already on that,” I said. “But I can’t make it out of the bathroom for longer than two minutes.”

“Please make sure you get this figured out soon. I can’t pull this weekend off without you,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. Yes, she could. But I was already treading on thin ice with calling in and my nausea was coming back. I had to end this call quickly. “You’ll be the first to know. I need to go unless you want to hear me throwing up.”

“Ew. No. Bye,” she said and quickly ended the call.

Once I finished with my latest purge, I texted Jessabelle promising I would work my normal shift the next day. She sent back a thumbs-up emoji and went into radio silence.

I crawled my way across the hall and back to my bedroom. I needed extra rest in hopes I could sleep off whatever this thing was. But the second I started to pull myself back up to my mattress, I had to run to the bathroom all over again.

For hours, my situation was the same routine. I was dangerously close to being dehydrated and I had to find a way to keep down liquids at the very least. I was also exhausted. I needed relief, and fast. So, I started rummaging through my cabinets for some sort of aid. It was then, while searching the bowels beneath my sink, that I discovered how low I was on tampons and pads. I had forgotten all about that.

Then it hit me. I missed a period.

It had been a while since I had my period. Because I was spot on with my cycles, and the foretelling cramps that came a couple of days before, I didn’t think about it. I was pretty certain I should have had my period by now. But just in case, I carefully stood from the bathroom floor, fought through the bout of nausea and dizziness, and then ever so gently inched my way toward the calendar I had up on the wall in my kitchen. I even leaned against the wall for support as I moved.

My first couple of steps went great. No nausea. I was growing more confident.

But my next couple of steps, nausea clenched me, and I was forced to stop and breathe through it. I even did a little mental pep talk.

“Okay, Gemma. You can do this. Breath through it. Fight it. Don’t let the nausea win.”

Each additional step forward forced me to close my eyes and breathe through the urge to run back to the toilet. I clutched my stomach and hoped that would help keep things settled until I got to where I needed to go.

I tried desperately to keep my anxiety back. Because if what I believed was happening was really happening, there had to be a cosmic reason. One that would make perfect sense and not lead up to what I was fearing. Because that wasn’t an option.

There had to be a better explanation for what I was going through, and it couldn’t possibly be what had my anxieties heightened. I was careful each time I had sex. Extremely careful.

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