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“Oh God, Zach, what are you eating now? Are you insane?” Tate stared at him, his jaw practically hitting the floor.
“What? I like it.”
“You like that? Are you sure? It looks disgusting to me.”
“I’m hungry,” Zach mumbled around a mouthful. “Mind your own business.”
“You have to stop eating like this, Zach.”
“I know. I’m too fat.” Zach sighed, his eyes burning. “And no alpha wants me. Val doesn’t...” He sniffled. “Doesn’t want me.”
Oh God, what’s happening to me?
“Aw, buddy, that’s not what I meant.” Tate sat down beside him, looking contrite. “I meant... Good god, how can you eat lemons and chocolate? And is that hot sauce? Ugh...”
“I just needed to eat something sour.” Zach looked down at his plate, his face heating up. “It tastes good.”
“Yeah, it’s full of vitamin C and what have you.” Tate waved a hand, still looking like he wanted to throw up. “But with chocolate and sauce? Why?”
Zach shrugged. “I also wanted sweet. And hot.”
“I thought only pregnant omegas got such crazy cravings—”
Zach got up in sudden panic. “I got to go.”
“Zach! Wait. What’s going on?” Tate got up, too, following him. “I was only saying—”
“Rehearsal. Need to rehearse my part. On the tambourine. You know, the rhythm thing.”
“But we just rehearsed that this morning!”
“Need to rehearse again. Can never rehearse enough, can you?”
“What the heck...? Zach!”
Shit, shit. Still licking chocolate and hot sauce off his fingers, he hurried out of the cafeteria and toward the school building. This was getting out of hand way too fast. If just by his way of eating—his pregnancy cravings, damn it—he gave himself away, what would happen once his belly got bigger? As it was, it barely fit inside his robes, pushing the elastic of his loose pants down, and giving him a weird gait that was hard to avoid.
Like a duck. He walked like a duck. Not a sexy gait on an omega looking to seduce an alpha. Nope, no sir. And then—
He gasped, pressing a hand to his swollen belly, coming to a sudden stop. A movement inside. A pinprick of pressure. A twitch and quiver, a tickle and pop.
Oh wow. It couldn’t be...
But of course it was. The baby. They’d learned about the baby flutters in class. He just didn’t think he’d feel them so soon.
He’d also not thought he’d be swollen so big so quickly, but there you go. Unless it wasn’t just one baby... He was a shifter, after all. Single baby pregnancies often happened the first time around but just as often you had multiples all the way.
Shit.
He cupped his hands over his belly. This wasn’t funny. If he was already feeling baby movements, he had to speed up everything, he had to...
Who was he kidding? He looked pregnant. He was pregnant. Not something you could hide from an alpha interested in you.
If anyone was interested.
Besides, he needed to tell the nurse, get prenatal vitamins, be checked.
Time was running out for good, and Valerian hadn’t sent a word. Should Zach tell him? Should he make up his mind that Valerian had no interest in him at all? Would he, should he crawl at the feet of a guy who fooled him twice, pretended to want him only to get him pregnant and walk away without a word?
He’d spent his childhood wishing for a future with a man who’d want him, really want him, for whom he wouldn’t be a burden but a joy.
So Valerian was out of the picture, even if it broke Zach’s heart... even if he wasn’t sure that future was still in the cards for him, but one thing was for sure: he had to fight for that future. Nothing ever came for free, that was for sure.
***
This had to be what hell was like: having to dance while trying to hide a quickly growing baby bump, alone, because Sim had come down sick with a bug and nobody knew the dance to accompany him, and with Jimson as his assistant, of all possible Blossom Boys trying to see and be seen in the alpha world.
Talk about stress going through the roof.
And he had a pimple! Zach did, not Jimson. A blistering pimple on his chin and despite his best efforts to cover it up with make-up, it kept poking its white frigging head through as if to mock him. As if things weren’t bad enough already.
God, he didn’t want to cry. Frigging hormones. He was an emotional mess.
“Come on, Zach, let’s go!” Noah, the omega who’d play the lute was beckoning at him, a dark frown on his face. “It’s time to start!”
The crowd was thick inside the bar-club, the chink of glasses and the din of the voices talking and laughing deafening.
He wasn’t feeling so good. It was too warm. There was no fresh air. Cold sweat was running down his back.
God, he wanted Valerian there beside him so badly, those strong arms around him, that spicy scent wrapped like an embrace around his senses.
“Zach!” Noah called out again, and Zach could see Jas, the omega playing the tambourine, shooting him curious looks. His face was kinda blurry.
So was the crowd.
“Zach!”
“Stop yelling at him,” Jas was saying. “He looks pale. Zach, you okay?”
Oh, crap. No, he wasn’t okay by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how often he told himself that he was, had to be, and now he felt claustrophobic and faint.
Oh, and nauseous.
How mortifying.
“I’m okay,” he said, patting his robe over his swollen belly, willing the contents of his stomach to stay down. “I’m ready.”
“Good.” Noah glared at Jas. “And you? You ready or do we need to talk about it some more while everyone is waiting for us to begin?”
“Don’t be an ass, Noah.” Jas shook his head and tapped a little ta-dan on his tambourine. “Maybe you’re having your best hair day and spent the night having wet dream after wet dream, but someone can be sick or tired, you know. Even on a show day.”
“Screw you, Jas. Zach’s the one on the stage, the one everyone is looking at. So he’d better get his ass moving or he’ll be losing admirers right and left. Fame is fickle. And so are rich alphas looking for a boy toy to Claim.”
Noah wasn’t wrong. Zach had to get his ass into gear and suck it up. Show business was a tough business, whether you were in it for the fame or to find a Mate. You didn’t really get sick days off. Well, not unless you were sick like a dog and dying a slow death in bed.
Drawing another long, steadying breath, Zach lifted his chin and walked to stand in front of Noah and Jas, facing the crowd. Pimple or not, nausea or not, he had to do this, and he looked good. Tate was right, the pregnancy had given his face a glow. He’d seen it in the mirror.
Too bad Valerian wasn’t there to see it.
Damn. He missed the opening of the dance and did his best to jerk his thoughts away from the handsome, asshole of an alpha.
Focus.
Good thing was he’d practiced this dance long enough to be able to go through the paces in his sleep. He snapped his decorated silk-and-precious-wood fans, turned and slid, and did his best to bow a little when he absolutely had to, covering that up with wider movements of his arms, allowing his long sleeves to trail in the air as he turned and advanced.
You didn’t spend years at Lotus Academy without learning ways to look beautiful even when sick and incapacitated for various reasons.
Granted, a pregnant belly wasn’t usually one of those reasons, but you improvised.
You had to. Even if bowing over wouldn’t be possible for much longer, from the looks of things, and God, knowing he carried a part of Valerian inside him...
The memory of being with Valerian hit him like a kick in the guts and in the middle of a turn he found himself on the floor, disoriented, his knees smarting, and his stomach roiling.
Crap, no...
Everything came up. He heaved and coughed, the sourness burning his throat, the stink of his sick triggering another round of heaves.
The music stopped. A shocked silence spread around him.
Through it, he heard Noah whisper a heartfelt, “Oh no...”
That summed it up nicely.
***
The drive back to the academy was a blur. He was a bit shaky and sat bundled up in a blanket in the car, trying to block out the world, the hushed discussions of the other Lotus Boys, and the general air of disappointment and shock.
He felt vaguely guilty even though he didn’t know what he could have done differently. After the staff of the bar had cleaned up his sick and helped him to the back, he’d sort of lost contact with reality for a while.
So damn tired.
Probably he’d have stayed in the car after everyone climbed out and spent the night there if his friends didn’t arrive to drag him out.
Sim and Tate looked worried as they helped him out of the car.
“They told us you were sick,” Tate murmured, maneuvering him through the parking lot. “Shit, Zach, you’re shivering. What’s wrong?”
“We heard you threw up,” Sim said, opening the dormitory doors for them to enter. “Did you eat something that’d gone off?”
“You saw what he eats,” Tate grumbled. “Maybe it’s the combination of hot sauce with pickles that did the trick.”
Zach groaned weakly as he was ushered into the elevator. “Now you’re making me hungry...”
“No way.” Tate’s look of horror was quite funny. “Don’t tell me that after being sick you want that weird food again.”
“He’s been sick a lot lately,” Sim mused. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“That’s true...” Tate’s pretty eyes narrowed. “Zach...”
“Can the interrogation wait until we’re in the room, and preferably sitting down?” Zach whispered. “Feeling kind of faint.”
“Yeah, of course! You should have said something.”
“I’ve said it now.” Zach let his friends haul him to his room. It hadn’t been a lie. He was dizzy and exhausted. Nothing new there.
Tate pushed him down on the bed and untied his sash, opening his robe. Then he froze. “Zach... your belly.”
“Yeah,” Zach muttered, too tired to care if his friends saw it and found out his secret.
“It’s so big!”
“I know. I’ve noticed, trust me.” He could almost hear the exchange of wide-eyed looks between his friends over his head.
“Wait a sec...” Tate’s voice was breathy with shock. “Is this what I think it is?”
“And what do you think it is?” Zach asked wearily.
“Let me see.” Tate started counting off his fingers. “The strange food cravings, the nausea, the moodiness—”
“Oh, come on.” Zach rolled his eyes. “What moodiness?”
“Zach,” Sim said. “You need to take a pregnancy test.”
“Do I really? Is there any doubt about what this”—he rubbed the top of his belly—“is?”
“Does the Dean know about this?” Tate asked. “Does he—?”
“No. And don’t you think about telling him.”
“But—”
“Valerian won’t Claim me, Tate. If the Dean finds out about the baby...” Zach smoothed both hands over the roundness of his belly, his heart pounding. “I don’t know what will happen. What happens to Lotus Boys who got pregnant from the random alpha who fucked them after winning their V-card auction?”
“Valerian isn’t a random alpha—”
“Yes, he is. He was. Now it’s all over.”
“It will be okay,” Tate whispered, though his cheeks were pale. “You’ll be okay, Zach. The Dean will probably find you an alpha. There are alphas out there who want their omega to be knocked up, as proof of fertility, you know?”
“There are? Are you sure?”
“Yeah. You’ll be fine.”
God, Zach sure hoped so, too...