Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dexter and I panicked as Sage went slack, his consciousness and presence in the bond dimming suddenly. He was still breathing, which was a good sign, but the fact that I was locked inside him and he was no longer conscious was…well, it was not ideal.
“We should have waited,” I lamented, struggling to catch my breath and feeling as though the current situation was entirely my fault.
“I can feel your guilt,” Dexter murmured, carefully rubbing my back.
I grimaced as I tried to hold still, not in the most comfortable position to hold a prolonged knot.
I was too old to be braced over the top of one of my young lovers for too long.
“And you have nothing to feel guilty for. It was the intensity of the bonding; I think it would have happened whenever we finally bonded. Hell, I almost blacked out, and I didn’t have your knot in me.
” He cocked his head. “Maybe because he was literally in the middle of it, he felt it all the strongest?”
“Hmm,” I wasn’t convinced, but there was no changing what had happened at that point. What was done was done. “Be that as it may, this is awkward. He’s unconscious and I’m…oh, gods.” I moved, trying to alleviate some of the pressure on my straining muscles, and the motion stimulated my knot.
Dexter gasped, clutching at his cum-covered cock, spurting weakly onto the sheets.
“That’s going to take some getting used to,” he marveled, while I did everything in my power to avoid the reflective wave of his most recent orgasm through our magical connection, lest I also pass out from coming too much.
Grimacing, and ignoring Dex’s awe, I said, “Help me roll us back onto our sides. I don’t want to crush him.”
“Shit, yes, of course.”
We both gasped and moaned and grimaced at the sensations the jostling caused, and I yelped when Sage woke up midway through the process, arching his back as he rode out the nearly painful pleasure looping through the bond, his own mild orgasms only adding to the feelings which had already been pinging between me and Dexter.
“Fuck,” Dexter panted, collapsing against Sage’s back once we were back in the position we’d originally started in. He kissed the overlapping bite marks on Sage’s neck, “that was incredible. How are you feeling, baby?”
“Did…did I pass out?” Giving up on trying to turn his head to face Dexter, Sage looked at me for confirmation. When I nodded, he cringed. “That’s embarrassing. Neither of you…?”
“No, beautiful,” I shook my head. “Dexter believes because you were in the middle of us all, literally, you bore the brunt of the intensity of the bond snapping into place.”
“Maybe Eric might have something to add to that theory,” Sage yawned, and I shuddered through more clenching around my knot. He moaned, his eyes fluttering shut. “This feels so much better than I ever dreamed.”
“Told you,” Dex muttered, still pressing kisses to whatever parts of Sage’s skin he could reach without moving us all too much. “His knot is exquisite.”
“Like you’ve had any other knots to compare it to,” Sage teased, and I bristled.
“He hasn’t and he won’t.”
Both of my omegas lifted their heads to face me, their amusement pulsing through the bond.
“Possessive alpha,” Dexter accused playfully. “Tsk tsk. We’re not your property, darling.”
I rolled my eyes. “Those bite marks say otherwise.”
“Well, in that case, you are our property in kind,” he shrugged.
I grinned. “I like the sound of that.”
The next time we saw Eric, I understood Sage’s initial reticence to tell his younger brother about our connection. We spent hours answering questions about our bonding — questions that almost seemed invasive, though I understood their relevance for shifterkind as a whole.
When I raised my concerns over Sage’s health following his moment of unconsciousness, particularly considering his condition, Eric leaned back in his seat and nodded in Dexter’s direction.
“I believe, as Dex has suggested, that by being in the middle of the bond as it initiated, for lack of a better description, he would have acted like a magical conduit of some kind. Physically, he seems fine now—”
“Sitting right here,” Sage interrupted with a grumble.
Eric rolled his eyes as only a sibling could, continuing as though Sage hadn’t spoken, “But if you’d like, I can do another ultrasound to ease your minds.”
“I’d rather wait another couple of weeks,” Sage answered before either Dexter or I could.
He placed his hand over his flat abdomen and explained, “It makes more sense to wait until we can be sure there should be a heartbeat. If there isn’t one…
” he trailed off, and I felt the wave of melancholy sweep through the bond.
Dexter and I reached for his hands in unison. “There will be,” Dexter assured him with confidence, while I still cringed away from making promises we couldn’t uphold. “My dragon insists there will. And I’ve learned my lesson about not listening to him.”
Sage nuzzled his face against our omega mate’s, filling my heart with affection and pride. My mates were so beautiful together; even more so now that they were communicating openly and honestly with each other, and with me.
“Then we will wait,” I agreed with them. “As long as you’re still feeling alright.”
Cheek still pressed to Dexter’s, Sage tilted his face my way. “I promise, I’ve never felt better.”
“I feel like shit, and I hate you both,” Sage complained, slumped as he was over the toilet bowl.
“I know you do, and no you don’t,” I soothed, rubbing his back as he heaved again.
It had been almost two weeks since we’d bonded, and this particular routine had been going for just as long, with his morning sickness usually striking in the early evening, or —as it was on this occasion— just as we were waking up in the morning.
Though we all preferred having Sage snuggled in the middle of our bed between myself and Dexter, we’d taken to me and Dex swapping the middle spot between us, with Sage sleeping on the side of the bed nearest to the bathroom door.
On mornings like this one, Sage’s mad scramble out of bed proved why.
“I do,” he moaned, resting his forehead on the cool porcelain, which made me scrunch my nose in disgust, “you did this to me.”
“He did,” Dex corrected, passing our mate a glass of water and a damp washcloth, “biologically, I did nothing.”
I leveled my other mate with a flat stare. “Really?”
He shrugged and smirked back at me. “Omegas are azoospermic,” he reminded me in a smug tone, as if I had forgotten the fact. “This,” he waved his hand over our vomiting mate, “is all your little swimmers, darling.”
“Stop stirring him up,” Sage sighed, rinsing his mouth and spitting into the bowl. “I still hold you accountable for this, anyway.”
“Me?” Dex pouted. “But—”
Sage huffed, “I swear, Dex, if you say ‘azoospermic’ one more time…”
I hoped I was concealing my humor from the bond, because I didn’t think Sage would appreciate it.
In a bid to further distract him, I interjected, “Be that as it may, we were all involved, and I am sorry you’re not feeling well.
However, today we will get to hear the baby’s heartbeat.
That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it? ”
The corners of Sage’s lips lifted, and hope tinged with excitement flickered through our bond.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged aloud, “I am looking forward to that.” He pushed to his feet and flushed the toilet, washing his face in the sink.
After brushing his teeth, he turned and burrowed his face into the crook of my neck, mumbling, “I don’t hate you. ”
“I know, beautiful,” I stroked his back and kissed the top of his head. “I don’t understand why you won’t allow me to make you a nausea remedy. The ingredients are all pregnancy safe.”
It was an argument we’d been having since we’d brought him home.
He sighed. “None of the others needed to take anything special when they were pregnant.”
Oh.
“Well, they didn’t have a shaman at their beck and call, for one thing,” Dexter spoke while I processed the multiple layers of Sage’s admission, “and, for another, every pregnancy is different. Nobody has the same symptoms to the same degree as the next person.” When Sage lifted his head to blink at him, our other mate lifted his hands in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture. “I’ve been Googling.”
“Of course you have,” Sage’s reply was fond.
“But he’s correct,” I added softly. “And when we speak to Eric later, I am certain he will also agree. It doesn’t make you lesser or weak to take something that will help ease the symptoms.”
Sage’s shoulders slumped. “But Bran had multiples and he didn’t need meds or whatever.”
“He also kept his first pregnancy a secret for the first trimester,” Dexter muttered, “so he couldn’t ask for help. And his second one was easier, by all accounts.” He paused as Sage stared at him incredulously. “What?”
Sage pulled away from me entirely, heading towards the bedroom now that his nausea seemed to have abated. Over his shoulder he said, “I didn’t realize you’d gotten so close with my brother.”
“We bonded over trying to rescue you, actually,” Dexter followed him out the door. “It’s a fun story.”
I snorted, but I was sure Sage would be just as pleased by those developments as I was.
After all, Dexter had struggled with fitting in with the pack, and with convincing Sage’s family that he was a changed dragon.
Though it had taken a particularly stressful event to force the issue, it was good for him to have befriended someone other than just the two of us, and Sage would come to see things that way, too.
“Move your sexy arse, Alpha,” Dex’s teasing cut into my musings, “unless you’re not coming to the clinic with us.”
I didn’t need to be told twice, even if I did have two mates.