Page 81 of Selkie AU: Beyond the Storm

I scrambled to my feet, barely making it into the bathroom before I was throwing up. Then I was crying again. Why did the things I liked make me feel sick? And sometimes I’d be sick for no reason at all. I liked being pregnant. I liked watching my tummy grow and feeling the life inside me, but there were also parts of it that were just no good at all.

I was still sitting on the bathroom floor crying when I heard the front door close.

It didn’t take Rowan long to find me. Then he was kneeling on the ground beside me and rubbing my back, and I immediately felt better.

“I got you something,” he told me. “Want to go to our nest and see?”

I sniffed and nodded.

Rowan scooped me up and carried me back to our nest. I was going to tell him the shampoo was bad and make him throw it outside, but then I noticed what was new in our nest. There was a little seal, white and fluffy. It wasn’t alive, and it was much smaller than a real seal was, but it was so soft and it had such big eyes.

“Why is it so cute?” I sobbed, crying again for a whole new reason.

Rowan’s fingers combed through my hair. “Do you like it?”

I nodded and cuddled it to my chest. “It’s perfect.”

He placed a kiss on my temple, and I turned to snuggle into him, the little fake seal and my bump with our growing real baby seal between us.

Rowan held me until I was calm and sleepy, then his warmth moved as he shuffled to get up.

“No. Stay.”

“Do you want me to make cookies?”

I thought about that for a moment before nodding and wrapping my arms around his neck.

He understood what I wanted right away, and he grunted as he lifted me up and took me with him to the kitchen, to set me down on the counter so I could watch him bake.

When I was comfortably seated on a blanket he kept there just for this purpose, he went to unpack the shopping bags.

“You have to get rid of those,” I told him as I spotted several new bottles of shampoo. “They smell bad.”

He looked between me and the shampoo before sighing as he nodded, then put them back into the bag.

“I thought of some more names while I was out,” he told me as he handed me the marshmallows and seaweed.

I tore the packets open, taking a sheet of dried seaweed and wrapping it around one of the fluffy, soft marshmallows beforestuffing it into my mouth. The salty-sweet flavor made me kick my feet in delight. “Tell me.” I spoke with my mouthful.

We had some names already that we really liked, but I wasn’t happy enough with any of them to stop looking yet.

“Kai,” he told me.

I thought about it as I stuffed another seaweed-wrapped marshmallow into my mouth. “What does it mean?”

“It means different things in different places, including ocean, warrior, and king.”

I nodded. I liked it, though I still wasn’t sure it was the one.

“Nivi, if they’re a girl.”

I shook my head immediately. “We’re having a boy.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do!” I huffed.

“Well, maybe we can keep some girl names too, just in case.”