Todos los capítulos de THE CAMPUS ALPHA’S WOLFLESS MATE : Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

The first doctor’s appointment in our new house started with me sitting on the bathroom floor at six in the morning eating crackers over the sink.Not because I was sick. The morning sickness had mostly faded by now, showing up occasionally like an uninvited guest who had lost the memo that the party was over. I was on the floor because the cool tile felt good against my legs and because the house was quiet and I wasn’t ready to break the quiet yet.Sixteen weeks. Four months.I pressed both palms flat against my stomach. It was changing now in ways I could actually see. A small firm curve low beneath my navel that hadn’t been there a month ago. Not obvious under clothes yet, but undeniable under my hands. Real in a way that still caught me off guard sometimes, like turning a corner and finding something beautiful you weren’t expecting.Lycian found me there ten minutes later. He stood in the bathroom doorway in a grey shirt and bare feet, hair not yet sorted, taking in the scene with

The twenty-week scan fell on a Friday morning when the sky was the flat white of February clouds sitting too low to go anywhere.I had been awake since five. Not from discomfort. Not from the baby, who had been quiet all night in the particular settled stillness I had started to recognize as sleep. I was awake because twenty weeks felt like a door and I was standing in front of it not quite ready to knock.Halfway.I lay in the dark and counted things the way I used to count exits. The kicks I had felt this week. The times Lycian had pressed his ear against my stomach and claimed he could hear something, which was not medically possible, and which I did not point out because his face when he did it was something I wanted to keep. The mornings I had stood in the nursery doorway just looking at the room we had built for someone we hadn’t met.Lycian woke up twenty minutes after me. I knew the exact moment because his breathing changed and then his hand found my stomach in the dark witho

The baby was awake at two in the morning.Not a gentle awareness either. A full campaign of kicks in sets of three, a pause, then three more, with the focused persistence of someone who had decided that sleeping was not something they were interested in, and the inside of my ribs was a perfectly reasonable place to make that known.I lay in the dark and counted them.Three. Pause. Three. Pause. Then a longer rolling movement, slow and deliberate, turning from one side to the other with the unhurried ease of someone who had all the space in the world, which they did not, which seemed not to bother them at all.Twenty-six weeks. I had learned their rhythms the way I had learned everything about this pregnancy, through attention and repetition and the particular intimacy of carrying someone who could not yet speak but communicated constantly. They were quietest in the mornings. Most active in the late afternoons and then again at two in the morning, which Aunt Clara said was completely n

The nursery was finished on a Sunday in late April.Not finished the way a room was finished when the last box was unpacked and the furniture was in place. Finished the way a room was finished when it finally felt like itself. When you stood in the doorway and the whole of it settled into something complete and you knew without being able to explain exactly why that nothing needed moving and nothing needed adding and it was exactly right.Pale grey walls. Damien’s crib against the far wall, solid and smooth, the wood he had chosen warm in the afternoon. Cream curtains are moving slightly in the draft from the vent. The moon watercolor print we had found together at the weekend market, not planned, just seen and both of us stopped at the same moment in front of the same stall, which felt like enough of a reason.The rocking chair in the corner. The lamp that would not be harsh at night. The small bookshelf with Tessa’s books arranged by size because Lycian had arranged them that way an

Thirty-six weeks felt like standing at the edge of something with no railing.Not fear exactly. Something closer to the feeling before a very long-held breath was finally released. The particular suspended quality of the last stretch, when everything was ready and the waiting was the only thing left to do, and waiting had never been something I was naturally good at.The baby had dropped.I felt it the morning it happened, a shift downward, a new heaviness settling low in my pelvis, my lungs suddenly less crowded. I stood in the kitchen and took three long slow breaths just because I could, just because the space was there again, and felt tears come without warning at something so small as being able to breathe fully.Lycian came downstairs and found me standing at the kitchen window with my hands on my stomach and my eyes wet and said nothing, just came to stand beside me and put his arm around me and looked out at the garden with me until I was ready to speak.“She’s dropped,” I sai