Chapter 19
GABE
I spent my second trimester making up for lost time. Most of the second and third month of my pregnancy had me bent over a toilet. The fourth, fifth, and sixth months were a virtual delicatessen of all the foods I'd never tried before.
My Omega dad was not the best cook. Growing up, most meals contained pasta topped with cheese, Alfredo sauce, or red sauce. Variety? Who's she?
The Mears family introduced me to rice pilaf, beef stroganoff, couscous, quinoa, and a host of spices and flavor varieties I had never tried.
When before my most adventurous meal had been the Korean barbecue at Becca and Bruce's rehearsal dinner, I now could say I had tried dishes from all over the world, from Bangladesh to deep south Creole, and from France to French Guiana.
I had my wonderful partner's influence to thank for my diversifying palate. Mika wanted to learn a recipe from every country in the world. He and Talia spent their evenings after dinner searching for lesser-known internet chefs.
Though I didn't participate in the search, I sat nearby, either at the kitchen island's bar stools or the breakfast nook overlooking the patio. My pencils flew as I sketched new meerkat art. When the muse ignored me, I worked on my new online gallery.
According to Mika, and the entire Mears family, who had cornered me at one Sunday dinner or another to make their opinions known, I didn't have to work.
I could quit my job at the courthouse when the baby came, but I wasn't ready to leave just yet.
My omega dad had drilled into me the importance of supporting my family at all costs, including my own personal desires.
I'd rebelled against him by becoming an artist, but now I felt like I had to work twice as hard to make the kind of money my dad found acceptable.
Granted, he always did say I would need to marry a wealthy alpha to support my art.
And I did … ish. Mika's family probably had about the same amount of money as Bruce's, but they also had twice as many people for whom they were responsible.
Talia and her family had money, but their family was large and came first.
Here I was, adding to the number of mouths to feed, and the thought of doing so without contributing spiked my anxiety. Talia had said I was worthy to bear her son's child, but I couldn't accept it. I was still the loser omega my dad swore would never amount to anything, even now.
While Mika and his mom dug through new recipes, I wrote rebellious messages to my baby and drew cute meerkats beside them. It was too radical to be a children's book, but one day, when they were old enough, I would flip through it with them.
"I am a successful artist," I wrote across the top of the page. Then, I sketched a meerkat holding a color palette and sticking his tongue out the side of his mouth as he mixed red and white paint into pink.
"I can't possibly buy another thing," I said to Talia.
She had already dragged me to every baby store in the Costa Diablo area.
Today, she had driven us even farther south to the northern suburbs of San Francisco.
Though we were far from the trendy parts, like Fisherman's Wharf and other touristy places, everything was still fucking expensive.
As in San Francisco proper, the store overheads were high and everything was twice as expensive as it was online.
"We're not shopping," Talia said. "We're looking."
I heaved a sigh and followed her into the furniture store. Thank goodness the doctor had confirmed only one baby. At seven months pregnant, I had more than made up for my weight loss during the first trimester. Now, I waddled.
The bigger I got, the more Mika fawned over me and claimed I was the sexiest man he'd ever seen. At first, I thought he was either full of shit or trying to curry favor with the unhappy man in his bed, but no. He couldn't fake the way his pupils dilated whenever he saw me naked.
"You have a pregnancy fetish," I said one night when he got down on his knees and sucked my cock into his mouth while staring up at me around the curve of my baby bump. Instead of answering me, he angled his head to the side and took my cock to the back of his throat.
"What do you think of this one?" Talia asked, pulling me to a walnut bassinet arranged in a corner display case.
Heat rushed to my cheeks. "Um, it's fine?" I stammered. She didn't need to know I was thinking inappropriate thoughts about her son, who had sent us off with cheek kisses and told us to, "Have fun," not two hours ago.
"Fine isn't good enough." Talia huffed and pulled me down an aisle loaded with cardboard boxes.
Without the furniture on display, we studied the pictures on the boxes and tried to imagine what they would look like in the nursery.
After a few minutes of staring at dimensions, I gave up and wandered to the aisle's end cap, where a wire bench waited for me with open armrests.
Talia found me a few minutes later. "Stay here," she said. "I found more displays. I'll bring back pictures, and you can tell me what you like."
That sounded better than her hauling my pregnant ass all over the store. While I would have liked to see some of the rocking chairs, dressers, and changing tables in person, I believed her when she said she only took pictures of the sturdiest ones.
She handed me her phone, and something caught my eye in the corner of a picture before I flipped past. A paint palette dangled into the shot she'd taken of a combination dresser and changing table. "What's this?" I zoomed in on her photo.
"A mobile, I think. Want me to get another picture?"
I shook my head. "I'll come with you."
She helped me off the bench. I'd pinched a nerve in my lower back by sitting, which only grew worse as we walked.
Finally, we reached our destination, the hideous table from the picture, but above it, perfection.
The mobile was of a baby sea otter wearing a yellow raincoat and carrying a blue umbrella.
From the umbrella's rib tips hung hand-painted whimsical ornaments on clear plastic string.
Talia waved to a salesperson. "Where can we find this?"
She smiled. "Isn't it adorable? The artist is local, and we're running low on stock. If I can't find a box in the back, do you want the floor model?"
"Anything, yes, please." As she walked away, I whispered, "I want the artist's address. That's the cutest fucking thing I've ever seen! If he could turn my meerkat designs into three-dimensional art, we would rule the world."
Talia pulled me into a side hug, resting her head on my arm. "I'm so proud of you."
"Me?"
She gazed up at me with her no-nonsense mom look. "You never let anyone tell you that art was frivolous. You lived your dream, no matter what. That takes guts."
"Mika must have liked science when he was a kid," I ventured, not wanting to be brave all by myself.
She barked a laugh. "Baseball. He was going to play for the Giants. We took him to games, coached him in little league, and he even won some trophies. Then some asshole told him shifters can't play professional sports, so he gave it up when he started high school."
"Shifters don't have their own teams?" I asked.
"Rec leagues, no humans allowed. We can't let them know of our existence, though a good portion of the world already knows about us from their relatives.
We are the worst-kept secret, but if we went public, we would be hunted by the same people who think two alphas, betas, or omegas shouldn't be together. "
That reminded me of my alpha dad. I'd left a message for him a week ago, but he hadn't called me back. Couldn't say I blamed him after the way I left things ten years ago.
The salesperson returned with a box. "You're in luck!
This was the last one in back." She handed us the box and a slip of paper with a business name and address.
"I might have overheard you on my way back there.
He's not as local as I thought, since the business address is in Costa Diablo, but he and his husband are both artists.
" She pointed to my tattoo. "That looks like Keith's work. "
I stared down at my meerkat. "It is. He's the husband?"
She nodded, and Talia's gaze drifted between us as though we spoke another language.
"If you talk to them, tell them I said hi!" the salesperson gushed. "When I turn eighteen, I'm getting one of the flash pieces from the machine."
"This was a flash piece," I said. "Lucky number thirteen." She told me the number she wanted. I smiled politely, but while my eye for detail was sharp, I didn't have a photographic memory, and besides, I hadn't recognized half the animals on the wall.
"Keith is a friend, I take it?" Talia asked when we were back in the SUV and on our way home.
"He's a tattoo artist," I said. "I barely know him, but if his husband makes baby mobiles, it would be really cool to work with him."
Talia grinned at the road. Unlike Mika, she never took her eyes off it when we were moving down the highway. "See? That's what I love about you. You never stop searching for the next level."
Tears stung the corners of my eyes. "You love something about me?"
She held her hand up over the center console, and I took it, sliding my warm palm across hers. "I love all of you, Gabe. Not one thing, or a few things. All of you. You're the perfect fit for my son and for our family."
Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, or maybe it was the lack of parental acceptance in the first twenty-seven years of my life. Whichever it was sent tears coursing down my cheeks, darkening my loose faded black t-shirt where they fell.
"I love you, too, Talia. All of you. Nico, Rachel, Faria, Franco, and Nathan."
"And Mika?" Her tone was sharp, but I caught her smirk in the corner of my eye.
"Mika first," I said.
"Have you told him?"
The tears fell harder, and I was glad she kept her eyes on the road so she wouldn't see me ugly cry. She heard it, though. Disgusting, snot-filled sobs. Full-body shakes that left me breathless and gasping. "No," I finally managed to say. "What if he doesn't love me?"
The words peeled back the layers over the giant hole in my chest created by my dads' breakup and subsequent years of blaming myself.
I hadn't been enough to keep my parents together.
How could I bet half my stuff that one man would love me for the rest of my life?
I didn't have that much stuff to begin with, and Mika had everything to lose by choosing me.
"Of course he loves you," Talia said. "You're fated."
"You keep saying that." All fated meant to me was compatible. Was that all it really took for two people to stay together forever? Similar interests and libidos that wouldn't quit?
"Fate brought you to him," she said. "Now, all you need to do is believe in her."
I couldn't see through my tears, but I heard the smile in her voice. She tapped the lid of the center compartment. "There are tissues in here. Clean yourself up, or Mika will blame me for making you cry."
"You kinda did," I reminded her.
"Nope, uh-uh," she said. "You made yourself cry. It's time for you to see yourself as worthy of love because you are, Gabe. Your dad … " she waved her hand from side to side, "eh. Not so easy, but he's lived with the same burden, and longer than you have. He also thinks he's unworthy of love."
That was my fault, I realized as I wiped my face with a wad of tissues.
I didn't know which had come first, his ultimatums or my emotionless responses.
I'd gone numb to his chastisement long before I left.
"I thought he wanted me to move out," I whispered.
"But all he really wanted me to do was prove that my alpha dad was right, that he was unlovable. "
"People say a lot of shit they don't mean when they're hiding something," Talia said. "Do you ever talk to your alpha dad?"
"Not since Dad told me about him. I left him a message, but he hasn't called back."
"Try him again," she said. "He'll be more likely to think you were serious. Otherwise, it could have been a drunken moment of weakness or something."
We both laughed at the thought of me having a drunken moment of anything. I was such a lightweight, one beer with dinner was enough to send me to bed for the night, and that was before the pregnancy knocked my tolerance down to zero.
"I'll call him tonight," I promised. "Right after I call the artist."