Chapter Twenty
Levi
Two months later…
The guest room was open again, as in not occupied. In the past few months, we had gotten a California King and Cory’s boxers were in his own drawer in our room. At night, I fell asleep with both of my males next to me.
Tobias had a big growth spurt and was now in the ninety-eighth percentile for height. He walked between furniture and between one of us to the other but was still wobbly on his own. He spoke in little short words like ball or yes.
The three of us had fallen into a stride in our daily life. Though Cory took on most of the baby care when we were at work, he was so much more than a manny. He was another husband, as far as I was concerned.
I sat at the table one morning with Tobias in his little chair that attached to the table and watched him stuff handfuls of scrambled eggs and blueberries into his mouth. The kid fascinated me. Little things he did amazed me time after time, and I was reminded that we weren’t just taking care of a baby who had been left to Benjamin, we were raising a man.
Ben came down and looked around the kitchen. He’d gotten up early and gone straight into his office, pajama-pants clad, and started work. He tended to do that at the end of the year and then again during the end of the quarter. Part of the job.
“Cory’s not up?” he asked, eyebrows bunched in what I recognized as his concerned face.
“Not yet. Let him sleep. He’s been tired lately. I think little T-man is giving him a run for his money.”
Tobias heard me refer to him and offered me a handful of squished blueberries that I pretended to bite.
“He looked a little pale yesterday. And when Tobias took a nap, he fell asleep in the rocking chair next to his crib.”
I rolled his observance over in my head. Now that I thought about it, Cory had been a lot more sleepy and mentioned some nausea.
“I wonder if he’s coming down with something. Should we take him to the doctor?”
Ben shrugged. “If he needed to go to the doctor, he would’ve said something to us, wouldn’t he?”
While the flow of our relationship was better, this was one of the things we still tripped over. Adding Cory to the insurance and bank accounts and the will. Cory still hesitated in those departments, but Ben and I were ready to fuse him to us fully, in all ways.
“Maybe we should check on him.”
After Tobias’s hands, face, and even his legs were cleaned up, we headed upstairs together, with the baby on my hip. Baby gates had been placed at the top and the bottom of the stairs to prevent our little guy from falling up or down. We’d even considered buying another house without stairs since imagining Tobias falling down the stairs sent us all into cardiac arrest.
We entered our shared bedroom and heard some noise coming from the bathroom. Cory wasn’t in bed, and if we wondered if he was sick before, the gagging and hurling sounds coming from him confirmed it. I handed Tobias to Ben and knocked on the door.
“Cory, are you okay?” I didn’t wait for him to answer but instead opened the door a crack and peeked inside. Cory was facedown, heaving over the toilet and, by the looks of it, it was simply noises. He wasn’t throwing up anything, just trying like hell to.
“Cory, how long has this been going on?” I put my palm on his forehead and felt for fever, of which there was none. “Do you have diarrhea? Stomach pain?”
In full firefighter mode, I made my assessment on my own. But if Cory had a stomach bug, the rest of us would, too.
I looked to the doorway where Ben stood with Tobias on his hip. His face had gone pale, and sweat beaded along his brow.
“Now, you? Is your stomach upset? Are we getting some kind of bug? I need to run to the store to get some things.”
Ben shook his head no.
“No? No to running to the store or no to stomach upset?”
Ben shook his head again, and his eyes widened.
“What is the matter?”
No one was answering my questions. Cory had stopped heaving and sat back against the bathroom wall, eyes closed and breathing shallow.
“Levi, I think this is a different kind of sick.”
I scrunched up my nose. Damn it, I was a firefighter and had medical training. I knew what a stomach bug looked like.
“Like what? Food poisoning? I’d be sick, too, Benjamin. We all would.”
Ben stared me down and cocked his head a little to the side.
I rattled through the reasons for throwing up in my head. Stomach virus. Flu. Food poisoning. Pregnancy. Bacterial infection. E-Coli. Gastritis. Stomach ulcers.
I’m an idiot.
Pregnancy.
Cory was having our baby.
“Cory, I need you to do something for me,” I said stroking his hair back from his sweaty face.
He lifted his eyebrows and then nodded.
“I need you to take a pregnancy test.”
Another nod, and before anyone could say anything, I had my keys in my hand and my wallet in my back pocket, headed for the drugstore. I picked up one of each brand of pregnancy test along with plain crackers and electrolytes, and headed back to the house.
The thought of Cory carrying our child inside his body made me thrilled and terrified and downright weepy with joy. In fact, if this test turned out negative, I would be sorely disappointed.
When I got home, Cory was on the couch with a washcloth on his head, lying back with his eyes closed.
“Have you peed yet today?”
A smile took over his face. “I barely made it in there to throw up.”
“Well, come on. Let’s find out.”
I helped him up, and the three of us, maybe the four of us, with Tobias in tow, marched back up the stairs, and Cory winked at us before going into the bathroom with one of the simpler-looking tests in his hand. Usually we would let T-Man try to negotiate the stairs, but we were in a hurry.
We listened to the sounds, and Ben reached over and took my hand in his. I tried like hell to contain my excitement. I didn’t know if Cory was ready to have a kid of his own, or if Ben and I were ready to have another one, but it might be happening to us whether we were ready or not, and I knew that together we would be okay, better than okay.
“It says I have to wait three minutes. We, we have to wait three minutes.” I turned my phone on and set a timer. Cory sat next to me, put his head on my shoulder, and sighed. He’d brushed his teeth, and his cinnamon-scented toothpaste filled my nose along with his scent.
“You smell different,” I said, not really knowing what it meant.
“You smell different to me, too. You, too, Ben.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Ben asked, leaning over to take his hand.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal. I certainly didn’t think…”
Yeah, none of us really planned for a pregnancy this quickly or even plan to get pregnant, but it seemed like fate.
We cuddled Tobias and each other while the seconds ticked away. Those three minutes seemed like an eternity, and I must’ve looked at my phone eleven dozen times before the blaring sound jarred us back into reality.
“I’m going to check,” Cory announced with a tone that made me think he wanted to check it alone.
Ben and I stared at each other while Cory went into the bathroom and emerged soon with the stick in his hand.
“Well?” I asked a little too loud.
“Looks like four will be five?” All of the sudden, our omega was back to his uneasy, anxious voice, the one he had with us in the beginning when we didn’t know where we all stood or what the future would hold.
I got up and took Cory into my embrace, holding him tight. Ben and Tobias joined us and for a while we all stood there, holding each other as I breathed reassuring things into our omega’s ear.
Everything would be okay.
We would all get through it together.
We loved him.
He’d made us the happiest males in the entire fucking world.