9. Mary
Mary
Two weeks later, I was in the lecture hall which still smelled of coffee, too much cologne, and some students who really needed a stronger deodorant.
The professor clicked through slides with the joyless stamina of a man determined to make market analysis sound appealing.
The girl in front of me twisted her hair around her pen until I worried for both the hair and the pen.
I sat in the third row with my notebook open.
I’d written three words in forty minutes.
Competitive advantage is...
I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth and stared hard at the slide until the letters stopped swimming.
My stomach rolled, slow and vicious. Not heat.
I knew the symptoms of my heat very well now.
This was different. Lower. Sourer. Like a sick, soon-to-be lurch.
And the brightness of the fluorescent lights felt like they were burning my eyelids.
The professor said something about customer retention.
I wrote: Don’t vomit.
My phone buzzed against my thigh.
I’d ignored Damien since my heat, blocked him permanently, but he had found several routes to get to me.
Email. Campus messages. One deeply tragic handwritten note pushed under my dorm room door, as if he read a Victorian novel and thought it romantic, and expected me to swoon over his poor penmanship.
I looked.
Unknown number: Please. We need to talk.
We didn’t. We needed several lawyers, a therapist, and I was still contemplating bathing in holy water.
I turned the phone face down.
The nausea eased by one degree, then surged again when the room door opened and Damien walked in.
He stood at the door of the lecture hall wearing a navy university hoodie, sandy hair damp from the cold, hockey bag slung over one shoulder. He looked unfairly good.
His eyes found me.
My body braced, not with longing. That was the part I kept checking for, as if heartbreak might have been delayed. But every time I saw him, all I felt was tired. Tired and faintly embarrassed that I’d once mistaken his attention for love.
Damien moved down the aisle.
I closed my notebook.
The girl in front of me glanced over her shoulder, sensing drama, and immediately began pretending not to listen while planning to report everything to at least three friends.
Damien stopped beside my row. “Marli.”
The name irritated me now too. That was inconvenient, given that I’d built an entire life around it.
“I’m in class,” I said.
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Astute.”
“Can we talk?”
“No.”
The professor paused at the front, marker in hand. He looked at Damien, then at me, then made the very wise decision that he didn’t want to be involved in whatever this was and returned to the slide.
Damien lowered his voice. “We need to talk.”
My stomach twisted.
Two days with his dads. Hotel sheets. Violet. Lincoln’s hands holding me through the pain. Hudson’s phone ringing with Damien’s name on it. Their clothes in a nest I’d denied building.
Oh my God.
I gripped the edge of my notebook.
“We’ve talked, and...” I said.
“Where did you go for two days? I called every clinic and the only one that had your name, said you never turned up.”
“How many cheerleaders have you fucked behind my back?” I whisper-hissed.
He glared at me. “You left without telling anyone. Anything could have happened to you.”
“I wasn’t aware you were entitled to my location under the terms of our imaginary non-relationship. What is it again… oh yes, non-exclusive.”
His jaw tightened. “Don’t do that.”
“Be precise?”
“Make everything a joke.”
That cooled me right through. I looked up at him properly. “But that’s it, Damien, I’m not joking.”
He shifted, glancing toward the professor, toward the students pretending not to watch. “I was worried about you.”
“You were angry that I caught you.”
“I was both.”
“Very convenient. In fact, it’s a full emotional buffet.”
“Marli.”
“Don’t.” It came out quietly enough that his expression changed. Good.
“You told me we weren’t exclusive,” I said. “You said it in public, in front of another girl, while I was going into heat. Then you called me a bitch because you thought I might be with alphas.”
His face flushed. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No.”
“I was scared.”
“No,” I said again. “You were ashamed, and jealous, and you tried to hand it to me.”
“I went looking for you,” he said.
“You watched me leave. But chose to stay with what’s her name?”
He stared at me. I saw the boy under the pretty jock performance. The beta who wanted so badly to be bigger than old wounds. The son of an omega who’d left him. The child who’d learned too early that alphas with money could rearrange a family.
I felt sorry for him. But that wasn’t the same as taking him back.
“We’re over,” I said.
His mouth opened.
“No,” I said. “Not on a break. And it’s not complicated. I’m not waiting for you to decide which version of faithful you prefer. I’m one and done. Over. So there you go. You got what you wanted. Non-exclusivity.”
The lecture hall had gone very quiet around us. Even the professor coughed into his fist and turned to the board with heroic cowardice.
Damien’s eyes flashed. “Is this because of them?”
My blood went cold.
“Them?”
“Whoever you were with. Because you had to be with someone, or more.”
“This is because of you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Oh my God, listen to yourself. You cheated. How else will you accept that this was on you? You failed me.”
“Was it more than one of them?”
The question landed so casually that it took me a moment to feel it. “Go back to your class, Damien.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not an answer at all. That’s what you get now. Nothing. I owe you nothing.”
The girl in front of me made a tiny sound that might have been a laugh or a cough. Damien heard it. His face changed, pride bruising under his skin.
“Fine,” he said.
“It is.”
“Don’t come crying to me when they get bored.” His voice almost sounded growly. But the words landed less like pain and more like confirmation.
I stood, grabbed my bag. “I came to class with nausea, a headache, and four hours of sleep,” I said, shoving my notebook into my bag. “And somehow you’ve still managed to become the least pleasant part of my morning. That’s almost impressive.”
I picked my bag up, pushed past him and walked out.
The door closed behind me and I made it halfway across campus. Boston had thawed slightly since the hotel, which meant the sidewalks were now wet instead of icy and the air smelled of coffee and dampness. Students moved past in groups, laughing, carrying coffee.
“Fuck!” I threw up in a bin.
A skateboarder swerved around me and said, “Whoa, are you good?”
“Living the dream,” I managed.
He looked alarmed and escaped.
I wiped my mouth with a tissue I found in my pocket and stood there breathing through the cold and willed another bout of nausea to disappear.
Before, I’d wanted an education and a boyfriend. Now I was nauseous at eleven in the morning, and two alphas in London had said they’d come back in a month.
A month. It was supposed to be enough time to let them talk to Damien and me to know what I wanted.
Hudson had said it carefully when they took me back to my room. Lincoln had looked like leaving me in that room was the worst idea anyone had ever had.
I’d told them four weeks was fine. I even said it with a smile. I’d lied so convincingly I should’ve been awarded course credit.
My stomach rolled again.
“Don’t,” I told it as I rushed to my dorm. “We just did this.”
My stomach ignored me. I got back to my room in five minutes flat.
The room was small and overheated. My bed was unmade. My sketchbook lay open on the desk, half-covered by business notes. On the page was a drawing I didn’t remember finishing. The cuff of a dress shirt rolled to a corded forearm.
I closed the sketchbook so quickly the cover slapped.
Then I ran to the bathroom and was sick again.
By the time I came back, my eyes watered and my throat burned, and all I could do was sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the floor.
There were several reasonable explanations for the nausea, including stress, bad cafeteria chicken, mainly the aftereffects of an omega heat, omega sickness otherwise known and an omega drop, and the universe punishing me for fucking my ex’s dads.
I reached for my phone and searched nausea after heat omega.
The results weren’t helpful.
Or perhaps they were too helpful, which was worse.
“Hormonal crash. Dehydration. Stress response. Pregnancy.”
I closed the search, opened it again, then closed it.
“No,” I said as the sound of an alpha played like a record in my mind.
“We’re going to put a baby in you.” My eyes popped out of my skull. Please no, I did not beg him to do it.
“A baby.” My voice sounded small in the room as I fell flat on my back and stared at the ceiling.
A pharmacy sat three blocks away.
I put on my coat, grabbed my wallet, and walked there with the determination of an omega going to purchase nausea medication and absolutely nothing else.
I am not pregnant. I can’t be. I could hear my sister’s voice in my head telling me, “You need to go to a heat clinic, they manage everything. Give you medication to prevent a pregnancy.” Not that she heeded her own advice.
The pharmacy smelled of lavender. I wanted to be sick again. A bell chimed over the door as it closed. An older man in a puffer jacket argued with the cashier about coupons that were out of date.
I went straight to the stomach aisle.
Antacids. Motion sickness tablets. Ginger chews. Electrolytes.
I picked up a box of nausea medication and read the label three times without absorbing a word.
Then I saw the pregnancy tests across the aisle. They were arranged in cheerful pink and blue boxes as if they contained birthday candles rather than existential threats.
“I’m not pregnant.” My hand tightened around the nausea medication.
I walked away for two steps, then three. Then I turned back.
“This is just in case the antacids don’t work,” I told the box as I picked it up.
A woman comparing vitamins glanced at me.
And in case the first test said positive, I bought a second and made my way to the counter.
“Do you have a rewards number?” the cashier asked.
“No.”
“Want one? It’s free. I just need your email address.”
“I’m all right, thank you.”
“It’s a five percent discount.” She glanced at the pregnancy tests. “You might need it.”
“Today isn’t really a five percent sort of day. It’s a ‘I need a miracle day.’”
Back in the dorm bathroom, I took the first test.
Then I sat on the closed toilet lid and stared at the sink for three minutes. The sink had a crack near the tap. I’d never noticed it before. It became, briefly, the most important crack in the world. At least until the timer went off.
I picked up the test and stared at the positive result.
Positive.
“No… I can’t look after myself, never mind a baby.” I peed on the second test with all the strain I had left in me.
Positive.
The room tilted. I slid to the floor when my legs betrayed me. And strangely, for a while, I didn’t cry. Instead, I stared at the two tests on the edge of the sink and felt a furious, impossible heat rise behind my ribs.
“I’m having a baby,” I whispered. That was terrifying because the more I thought about it, I did.
But the timing was dreadful. Damien was still hanging around. Hudson and Lincoln said they’d be back in one month as though a month were a reasonable distance to put between a woman and two men whose scents still woke her at night.
It was also because of my father. If he knew, he would turn it into a strategy inside an hour. And Maeve, who had survived quite enough already without me turning up with this scandal.
And for myself, because I’d been trying so hard to build a life that couldn’t be taken apart by men. Yet here I was, taken apart by the best ones I’d ever met.
Before I told anyone, I should go to the clinic and get it confirmed properly. Behave like a sensible person with a future she couldn’t sketch her way out of.
My stomach lurched.
I turned and vomited into the toilet until there was nothing left but a shaking body, and the sour burn of fear in my throat.
When it passed, I stayed on the floor with my forehead against my arm, not looking at the tests that sat beside the sink. The two lines that were my future.
I laughed once, cracked and wet and furious.
“What the hell have I done?”
Then I finally cried.