Chapter Twelve
Poe
It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and it promised to be a huge sales day for Keto Kandies. I still hated every moment of getting ready to go into the shop. I knew seeing all of those people getting ready to surprise their valentine would be torture.
I’d tried calling and texting Blake a few times, but he never answered. After a while, I got the picture. What really hit it home was the photos of Blake in the gossip magazines with his famous actress girlfriend. I had no idea that Blake even liked women, but then again, Simal wasn’t just any woman.
Either way, he was gone, and I was alone. I was alone with my nausea. I’d never known that a broken heart could make you feel so physically ill, but I hadn’t been right for days. My appetite was gone, and I got sick to my stomach whenever I even tried to eat anything other than white bread.
I’d gotten into the shop before dawn that day to make more candy for the rush, but the smell of almonds and almond butter was turning my stomach so badly that I decided to make something else for the daily special.
Lemon melts weren’t exactly Valentine’s Day themed, but the scent of lemon was the only thing that didn’t make me feel like I was going to hurl all over the counter.
It wasn’t just my stomach either. My head hurt, and my chest was sore. If it wasn’t potentially the busiest sales day of the year, I would have gone to the doctor. As it was, I wasn’t leaving my shop unless they took me out in an ambulance.
I sucked it up, and once I opened the shop, the rush of customers distracted me from my misery. I don’t know how I made it through the morning, but I did.
A while later, Cady showed up with my favorite coffee drink. It was an extra-large almond mocha roca. Normally, that coffee transported me somewhere above the clouds. That shot of caffeine should have been exactly what I needed to make myself feel right again. I was a little worried because the almond butter had made me queasy earlier, but I figured it would be different since it was in coffee.
Boy, was I wrong.
One drink and I had to flee for the bathroom. I threw up what little I’d eaten and continued to dry heave for a good five minutes. I hoped that whatever it was wasn’t contagious because the last thing I needed was a food poison outbreak being traced back to my store.
I heard someone knocking softly on the door. “Poe, it’s Cady. Let me in.”
I got up to open the door and felt the world spin a little. Cady got some wet paper towels and wiped off my face. It helped cool me down, and once I was done puking, I felt a ton better.
“Wow, that made a huge difference,” I said with a smile.
“Whoa! Mood swing,” she said and looked at me like she knew something I didn’t.
“What? What are you going on about?”
“I don’t know how to ask this, but, Poe, do you think you could be pregnant? It happened in college to my brother, even though he was using condoms. I know you and Blake got pretty close there before the split,” she rambled on.
My mind stuck on the word pregnant. “I uh…” I wanted to deny it, but how could I? “Well, we weren’t exactly careful.”
I could have kicked myself. It’s not like I didn’t know that I could get pregnant, but in the heat of things, I hadn’t thought about it at all. I just figured that you had to try for a while before you got knocked up. It never occurred to me that you could get pregnant after a couple of times. That was stupid, and I knew better.
“Did you get a Plan B from the drug store?” she asked.
I could see in the bathroom mirror that I’d gone sheet white, and I started to shake. I splashed some more water on my face and took some slow, deep breaths.
“I’m done for the day at my shop,” Cady said. “I’ll go to the drug store and get a pregnancy test, okay. We’ll meet at your house when you close the shop, and I’ll stay with you while you take it if you want.”
“Okay,” I said and shook it off.
At least with a plan in place, I didn’t feel like my world was falling apart. I was able to get back to work, and the rest of the day I kept myself busy with customers and trying to get some extra stock banked away for last-minute shoppers the next day.
Every time I got upset thinking about the prospect of raising the baby alone, I told myself that I had Cady and my mom. Even if I didn’t have Blake, I wouldn’t be alone.
There was Puff Puff too. I had the money to keep my apartment, and I decided to go pick her up from the shelter as soon as I could. I was still waiting to hear back from my landlord about Brutus. He’d agreed that I could have a cat, with a deposit, but he needed a few days to mull over the dog thing. I assured him that Brutus was old, quiet, and arthritic, so he wouldn’t be a bother at all, but the landlord said he had to think.
Addie at the shelter had already approved my application for Puff Puff, and she said she’d do the same as soon as I let her know about Brutus for sure. I hoped that a new cat, dog, and baby wouldn’t be more than I could handle.
Before Cady arrived at my apartment with the test, I called a guy named Greg who I’d decided to hire for the shop. I had planned on waiting until after Valentine’s Day to train him, but I figured trial by fire would be fine. When he answered the call, I told him he could wait until after if he wasn’t comfortable starting on one of the busiest days of the year. He said he was eager to start and would be at the shop to meet me in the morning.
Cady let herself in a few minutes later. She knew where I hid the spare key and didn’t bother knocking when I was expecting her.
She had a bag with three pregnancy tests. “I knew you wouldn’t believe whatever the first one says, so I went ahead and got three,” she said as she took them out of the bag.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I can’t be pregnant. I must have gotten a virus or something.”
“It is possible, and you know that. You’re rationalizing it away because you’re afraid. Just take the test, Poe. In three minutes, we’ll know.”
“Fine,” I said and took the box. “I’ll take one.”
Three tests later, and I halfway wanted to ask Cady to go to the store for another one. I knew it was statistically impossible that I’d gotten three false positives, but maybe it wasn’t totally impossible, I thought.
“What am I going to do?” I asked as tears threatened to overwhelm me.
“Oh, Poe. Don’t cry. It will be okay, I promise. You’ve always got me. I love babies, and your mother is going to flip. I bet she thought she was never going to be a grandma. Your baby is going to be so loved and cared for, Poe. And I just know when Blake finds out, he’ll be there for you too. I know you think you screwed up so bad that he’ll never forgive you, but Blake isn’t like that. I promise. He’s a good man and a true Alpha. He’d never, ever abandon his pregnant Omega.”
“I’ve tried to call and text him, and he won’t answer, Cady.”
“There must be something wrong with his phone, Poe. I’ve tried to text him a couple of times too, and I’ve gotten no response. He’s got no reason to completely ignore me. And I know that even if he didn’t want to be in a relationship with you anymore, he’d at least answer your text. He wouldn’t just ghost you.”
I hoped she was right, but I doubted it.