“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
My mate held his belly as he bent over and laughed. “Maybe you’re just bad at this.”
“Or perhaps you’re a basketball prodigy and you’ve been hiding it.”
He clapped. “That must be it. I should resign my job at the hospital and forge ahead with my new career.”
My mate’s joy at winning was infectious. I wished I had a medal I could present to him that he could wear around his neck all day.
“I get to choose where we go for dinner.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal. I pay, so maybe I should choose or at least I get a say where we go.”
We cashed in our remaining credits, not that we had many, and Stan put his fox on the dashboard. He had a crooked smile and it reminded me of my mate’s. It must have been fate that we came here today and I insisted on getting the fox for Stan.
“How about you pay for takeout because with the time we have left before you leave, I don’t want to share it with diners in a restaurant.”
I agreed and suggested we could eat in bed, naked.
“But if you drop any crumbs, that’s grounds for eviction.”
10
STAN
The first time I regularly started spending time in a hospital, it took a lot to get used to. I was still in nursing school at the time and was only there for observations. The sensory overload was intense, between all the noises of the machines and the people suffering, heightened thanks to my fox, and the scents, it was everything I could do to make it through those first few tours.
Over time, it got easier. I learned how to tune out the sounds, got desensitized to most of the chemicals and smells that filled the air, and recognized when I needed to get outside for fresh air before things got bad. It was still a lot to take in but was manageable most of the time.
But for the past few days, it had been rough, like those first times all over again rough. It wasn’t so much the noises, but the smells. They were all magnified, both good and bad. Even the coffee pot at the nursing station was doing a number on me.
And beyond that, I felt lightheaded numerous times and had to race to the bathroom twice. Because of my job, I couldn’t let anybody know that I’d been sick, because humans jumped to theconclusion that it had to be tied to something contagious. A lot of the time it was, but this wasn’t a stomach bug. If anything, it was the result of exhaustion thanks to some pretty intense shifts lately.
The first time I got sick today, it was the direct result of the cleaning crew opening a new bottle of disinfectant and my body saying no. The second time was when somebody came in an ambulance who should have gone straight to the morgue. That was all I wanted to say on that. At least for that one, I wasn’t the only one who struggled. Not that I wanted anybody to, but it made me feel a little better about my ability to handle my job for the rest of the shift knowing I wasn’t being set off by “nothing.”
As much as I knew I wasn’t sick, something was still off about my body, and I wasn’t here for it. If Ax was still gone with his team, I’d have assumed it was mate sickness. That didn’t happen often with fully mated pairs. It was far more common when a shifter had a half-bond, one marking their mate and the other rejecting them. But regardless of how rare it would be, Ax was here, with me, so it couldn’t be that.
There was an all-call for my team at the trauma bay. I begged the goddess to keep me from getting sick while I took care of whatever lay beyond those doors. And she did. I made it through the patient’s intake, a little dizzy when they had to use a disinfectant on some of the wounds, but aside from that I was fine, and I managed to do my job and do it well. The patient had already stepped down from trauma and would probably be home in the next day or so.
“Hey, you don’t look so good. You okay?” Dr. Kylie, a physician I’d never worked with before but who had been called down for this particular case, asked.
“I’m always like this,” I lied. He wouldn’t know. I’d seen him once at a hospital Christmas party. That was it.
“Okay. Are you sure? You look a little green.” He wasn’t letting up. A do-gooder was the last thing I needed.
“I’m good.”
He looked me up and down. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were pregnant.”
“I’m what?” I could not have heard him right. “Pregnant? What made you say that?”
He stepped in close, closer than I normally would have wanted anyone but my mate to, but then he whispered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you didn’t know.”
And that was when I realized he, too, was a shifter, an elephant shifter at that. How had I missed that with my sensory overload? They were known for their strong scenting abilities. He’d be able to scent a pregnancy days before my fox or my mate’s wolf ever could.
“You can tell? You’re not just guessing, right?”
“My nose doesn’t lie.” He tapped it as if that made his words somehow more true. “I apologize again. I didn’t mean to ruin the surprise.”
