20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Robert
Groaning, I rested my head on my arm, across the toilet seat. Not exactly sanitary, but I gave no fucks at this point. I could not stop throwing up. This was the worst case of the flu I had ever experienced.
I woke up yesterday morning, Monday, with it. Since there was currently a tummy bug making its rounds through the daycare, I hadn’t been all that surprised it had hit me. Towards late afternoon, I had actually been able to keep a piece of toast down and thought I was on the mend. But this morning, upon the alarm clock going off, I had immediately been hit with another wave of nausea.
I was on my third round of puking and would need to drag myself to my phone to text Wyatt that I couldn’t make it in again today .
A noise had me jerking awake. I must have dozed off, because I was lying on the bathroom floor in a heap. The last thing I remembered was thinking I needed to text Wyatt. Before I could get my head around what had woken me, a key scraped in the lock and Wyatt’s voice called out to me.
“Pops! I’m coming in.”
Groaning against the throbbing pain in my head, and the vile taste in my mouth, I heaved myself up from the floor. Well, I tried anyway. The room spun so fast around me, I ended up slamming back down on my butt, panting harshly, and trying not to vomit on my son’s shoes that were now directly in front of me. He’d kill me if I hurled on his vans.
“Well, that answers the question of how you’re feeling.” He knelt down in front of me, his hand covering my forehead. “No fever, but you look like hell. I figured when I saw your car still here you were still sick.”
Peering at him through narrowed eyes, I realized there was sunlight streaming into the bathroom from behind the closed blind over the one window. “Time is it?”
“Nearly nine,” he told me, wetting a cloth with cool water and wiping my face like I was a child.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, trying to take a deep breath. “I was going to text. I think I fell asleep.”
He frowned at me, “Or passed out. Come on, back to bed. ”
It might have been better to just camp out in the bathroom with the way my stomach was heaving, but the comfort of my bed sounded amazing. Wyatt helped me as I got unsteadily to my feet, and we made the trek slowly to my bedroom. “Where’s the baby?”
“She’d yell at you if she heard you call her that,” he warned me, tugging the bedspread up to my chin. “She’s almost two, as she reminds me daily.”
The smile I tried felt shaky, and my throat hurt when I croaked, “Oh, I’m aware.”
“Becks has a later shift, so he’s going to drop her off later at the daycare,” Wyatt looked around the room. “You need water and ibuprofen. I thought you were feeling better last night?”
My stomach flipped and I shook my head, one hand resting on my stomach. “Just water. I don’t think I can handle anything else right now.
Since I didn’t have a fever, I would be fine without the medicine. It might help the aches and pains, but it did little good if I just threw it up. “And I thought I was better too. Guess not.”
“Hmmm,” Wyatt hummed, leaving and returning with a glass of water a few minutes later. He sat the bottle of medicine next to it. “Just in case you need it later. And here’s a bucket, to be on the safe side.”
He sat my giant mixing bowl on the floor, and I grimaced. It wasn’t a true bucket, but it would work if I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Though I really hoped I was done being sick.
My eyelids were drifting closed on their own, exhaustion washing over me in a tidal wave. “Thank you.” My voice sounded like sandpaper from my puking.
“Welcome, Pops,” Wyatt whispered. “I’ll have Becks check on you before he goes in, but text him if you need anything. I mean it, he’s right next door.”
I gave a slight nod of my head, because not moving at all seemed to be keeping the nausea at bay, and I wanted to keep it that way. I hated being sick, but I hated throwing up more than anything.
Sleep claimed me for a few hours more, before I finally woke up and stayed awake for more than a few minutes at a time. The sun was low in the sky, and when I reached for my phone, after taking stock that my stomach had settled down, I saw it was almost five in the afternoon.
Squinting at my phone, I saw several text messages and a few missed calls. The calls were from Jackson, but he hadn’t left any voicemails, so I scrolled through my texts. One was from Becks, a few from Wyatt. and the rest were from Jackson, who was worried and wanted me to call him as soon as I felt up to it.
He’d been worried about me yesterday, having heard from one of the daycare workers I was ill when he dropped Aiden off. He’d wanted to come over, but I had told him it wasn’t necessary. I was used to being on my own when I was ill, and I really didn’t want him seeing me looking like death warmed over. And I certainly didn’t need him figuratively holding my hair back for me.
It was such a strange feeling having people worry about me when I was ill, but it also gave me a warm feeling inside my chest. Bringing the phone up to my ear after hitting Jackson’s contact information, I listened to it ring. While my stomach felt better, I was achy, exhausted, and still a little brain fogged. I didn’t think I had the mental bandwidth or coordination to text at the moment, even though I really didn’t feel like talking.
“Robert,” Jackson’s deep, smooth voice answered on the third ring, his voice sounding anxious and relieved all at the same time. “I was starting to worry, especially when I didn’t hear from you. Wyatt said Becks had checked on you before he left for his shift and you were sleeping, but it took everything I had to not come over there and check on you myself.”
“I’m okay.” Licking my dry lips, my throat hurt, and I reached a shaky hand out for the glass of water Wyatt had left this morning. Taking a small sip, the tepid water relieved some of the dryness in my mouth. “I’m alive. I just woke up.”
“What do you need? What can I bring you?” he asked hurriedly, and I could hear rustling papers and the creaking of his chair as he moved. “I’m leaving now. Soup? Gatorade? Medicine? ”
A smile tugged at my lips. “You don’t need to come over. I don’t want you to catch what I have. Aiden has been lucky, and this bug has missed him so far, so let’s try to keep it that way. I’m okay, I don’t need anything, I promise.”
“Soup from the diner it is,” he replied, not listening to a word I said. I could hear the echo of his footsteps through the phone, and his quiet murmur to someone that he was leaving for the day. “Chicken noodle cures everything.”
Rolling my eyes, I sighed. Stubborn alpha. “You’re coming over, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Nothing I can say to stop this?”
“Nope.”
Blowing out a breath, I heaved myself up and sat sideways on my bed. Dizziness swarmed my head, and I clung to the side of the bed. Maybe some soup was needed. I hadn’t kept anything in my stomach for a whole day. “Fine but just leave it on the porch. I’m gross. And germs. And do not bring Aiden in here because germs. I mean it.”
“I can do that,” he assured me, a bit too easily.
Hearing something in his voice, I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’re not going to leave it on the porch, are you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why are you being so stubborn?” The dizziness abated, I stood on unsteady legs, and made myself walk slowly to my ensuite, holding onto the wall with one hand the entire time. My limbs felt weighed down with concrete, and I was exhausted. It felt like I could sleep a week and still be tired.
“Because I…” Catching himself before he said whatever he was going to say, he finished with, “because I’m your alpha and I need to take care of you. So, please just let me do this.”
“Fine, but I’m warning you now,” I grimaced at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, “I look like death warmed over. Are you coming before you pick up Aiden or after, because seriously, he doesn’t need to be in here with my germs.”
My hair was matted to one side of my head, while the other side stood up in every direction. I hadn’t shaved in almost three days, and my five o’clock shadow was thick and showing all the white and gray hairs in it. My face was a pasty white, with a hint of green, and dark circles were like two black bruises under my red rimmed eyes.
Pulling my t-shirt away from my neck, I took an experimental sniff. “And I stink.”
Jackson laughed! The man honest to Goddess threw his head back and laughed heartily into my ear. “I don’t care about any of that.”
“You will when you get a whiff of me,” I warned, turning on the water in the tub so it could heat up. I needed to at least shower before he descended on me.
“Robert Cooper, turn that water off this instant,” Jackson growled in my ear, and for some reason, I did exactly as he had ordered. “I will help you clean up when I get there. Do not get in that shower by yourself. Libby, our floor manager, just got over this bug and she said she has never been as dizzy as she was the last few days. Her wife had to help her shower.”
“Fine,” I huffed, very aware I sounded like a petulant child, but also weirdly warm inside by the growl of his voice, followed by the gentle caring of him saying he would help me.
“I mean it,” he warned, and there was something in his tone, in the unspoken words he left hanging in the air, that caused heat to flush through me. A heat that had nothing to do with being sick.
I wouldn’t say I liked Jackson giving me orders, but…I liked Jackson giving me orders. Fanning my face, I decided I’d put that away until I could examine it fully when I was completely lucid. Because…yeah, that definitely needed to be examined.
“I’ll see you in a half an hour,” Jackson warned me, as I picked up my toothbrush. The least I could do was try to brush some of the funk in my mouth away before he got here.
A part of me wanted to say something snarky, or petulant, but all I managed was a heartfelt, “Thank you.”
Jackson arrived about forty-five minutes later, the gravel crunchy under his tires as he pulled in behind my car. I was cocooned on the couch, my blanket thrown over my legs, flipping through the Netflix screens. My legs were cold, but the rest of me was hot, and I couldn’t seem to concentrate on any show or movie for more than five minutes.
Thankfully, I hadn’t thrown up anymore since I had been awake and was even feeling a bit hungry. Though I knew better to put anything too heavy in my stomach.
The muffled sound of voices in the yard had my ears perking up, and I did something I normally wouldn’t ever do. I used my shifter hearing to listen. In my shifted form, my gazelle had excellent eyesight and hearing, but it was considered poor etiquette to use shifter senses to listen in to conversations .
Not even a bit repentant, I sat up straighter and turned my head towards my front door.
Thanks so much for watching Aiden for me. I really appreciate it.
Not a problem. That was Wyatt.
Do you have Disney Plus, Mister Wyatt? My lips quirked at Aiden’s question.
We do. Julianna is currently obsessed with Frozen, but we can absolutely watch something else.
The way Wyatt stressed that last part sounded like a parent that shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions if he heard Let It Go one more time.
I like Frozen.
Jackson’s laugh had me closing my eyes as warmth spread across my chest at the sound.
Wyatt sighed loudly. Well, I tried.
Let go! Let go! That was Julianna’s version of Let It Go.
Yes, yes, we’ll turn on Elsa in a minute. Don’t get all growly with me, little wolf.
I won’t be too long, but I’m going to help your dad get cleaned up and I want to get some of this soup into him.
Take your time, Jackson. We’re just right here, and we’ll be fine. Won’t we Aiden?
Yep, just fine. Go on, Daddy. You always make me feel better when I’m sick, so make Mister Robert feel better. I like Miss Amy, but I want Mister Robert back.
Thanks for looking after Pops, Jackson. I’m really happy you two found each other.
Me too. Your dad means…well, he means the world to me, Wyatt, and I’m going to do my very best to take care of him. Always.
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes, and my heart swelled nearly out of my chest. Swallowing the emotion down, I blinked rapidly.
And it was at that moment that I realized what was happening to me.
I was falling in love with Jackson and Aiden. Because they were a package deal, and I loved them differently, but just as equally.
I didn’t know when exactly it had happened, but it had.
I was in love with Jackson Sobek.