84. Chapter 84

Waverly was a grown assed woman. The nicest woman in the whole of Purgatory, there had been a vote and she had a sash to prove it, for god’s sake! She was known far and wide for her smile and wave of greeting!

Right then though, Waverly was struggling to hold back a growl of frustration as she circled the drugstore for the fourth time!

It was stupid! There was no shame at all in looking at, or buying, a pregnancy test kit… or five of them ‘to be sure’ as Nicole had suggested. But Purgatory was a small town and she would prefer not to have speculation on her being pregnant being known far and wide before she’d managed to decide on which ones to buy! It didn’t seem like it was an unreasonable thing to want… right?

She swore to god though, their usually quiet town was buzzing with activity and everyone there was making it their mission in life to walk into the darned drugstore just to say hi every time her hand was reaching for a package off the shelf!

The tinkle of the bell above the door had her snatching her hand back again and had a growl vibrating up through her throat. “Shit-strumpets,” she muttered under her breath and resigned herself to another lap of the store.

Really, it would be easier to just give in and go to the city where she could get lost in the crowd a little more but she didn’t want for them to have to wait. Nicole had said she would get them while she was on shift but… well, Waverly was kind of ashamed of it now, but she had almost bitten Nicole’s head off in a hormonal rampage and told her Alpha in no uncertain terms that she ‘wanted them to find out first’, and she ‘was perfectly capable of going into a drugstore to buy a darned pregnancy test while her Alpha sat her fine ass down and tried to work out where Nedley had hidden the darn key, thank you very much!’

And Nicole, her ever-loving and patient Alpha had eased her into a gentle hug, kissed her so softly and sweetly and told her she knew she was perfectly capable.

Now if only everyone would leave the damn store so she could prove how capable she was!

“Need any help, Waverly?” Smoothing her hands over her uniform, Maggie looked at the girl she had known for many years. Usually, she was calm and gentle, always ready with a bright smile. She had been watching her since she had entered the store though and she looked more like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, as her grandma would have said.

Yelping, Waverly barely managed to hold on to the bottle of shampoo she had picked up off the shelf as a decoy. Spinning around, she checked the store for other customers and realised that while she had been gritting her teeth, the place had finally emptied.

“Hi, Maggie! It’s so nice to see you!” she smiled sweetly and tried to calm her jitters before she scared the woman away. “Help, yes! That would be lovely. Erm, I’m looking for pregnancy test kits?”

Figuring she was on a mission for a friend, Maggie gestured to her right. “Those are two aisles that way, dear.”

“Which… which are the best ones for testing a werewolf?”

“Ahh, right,” Maggie smiled softly. “The werewolf specific ones we keep behind the counter. We’re trying to make room on the shelves but… small store I’m afraid and they are unfortunately a little more expensive. Especially the more accurate ones,” she apologised.

It was all very silly really that there had to be different kits but apparently there was just enough of a difference between a normal human and a werewolf that many medicines didn’t really work as well as they would on a normal human. Pregnancy test kits fell into that area. The drug companies could do a better job, Maggie was sure, but werewolves were better at healing and didn’t suffer from many of the ailments that others did so they were low on the list of priorities. Only the amount of false readings from using standards kits had forced there to be a change with them. “I’ll go sort them out for you, dear. Are you just after the one?”

“Five if you’ve got enough in… just to check… you know?” Smiling gratefully, Waverly walked around the store again and actually checked out what was on the shelves while she waited.

Waverly glanced up, looking towards the front of the store to see who had entered as the bell tinkled again. Her smile dropped when she saw her sister walking towards her. “Heyyyy, sis! What are you doing in here?”

“Saw you come in thirty minutes ago. No Haught in tow. Thought I would just pop over and make sure you didn’t get kidnapped out the back or something,” looking at the empty basket in Waverly’s hand, Wynonna cocked an eyebrow at her nervous looking baby sister. “What are you doing here?”

“Waverly, dear! I’ve got the pregnancy test kits ready if you want to pick some out!?”

“What the…! What?!” Wynonna blinked, that was all, blinked and Waverly was off like a shot in a flurry of hair and red cheeks as she ran towards the counter. Wynonna stood there for two seconds, still blinking and trying to convince herself that she hadn’t heard Maggie say the words pregnancy, test and kit at the same time.

“Hello there, Wynonna! How are you today?” Maggie looked down at the packages Waverly was thrusting into her hands and wondered, not that she would ever say anything out loud, if they weren’t really for the eldest Earp? It would certainly make more sense for the former wild child and her two bond mates to be needing them than sweet little Waverly.

Ringing up the prices on the packages, Maggie took the money Waverly was thrusting in her direction. “Wynonna, do you need to sit down dear?” The poor woman looked like she’d forgotten how to breathe and was just staring at her little sister and the kits with her eyes and mouth wide open.

Waverly grabbed the brown paper bag off the counter, mumbled a thank you to Maggie and grabbed her sister’s hand. She could smell the building anger rolling off of Wynonna and see it in the tightly clenched lines of her jaw. “I can explain,” Waverly whispered in an attempt to defuse the explosion she could feel coming.

“Are those for you?”

“What?” The softly gritted out words when she had been expecting an explosion left Waverly confused for a moment.

“Are those,” she swatted at the bag in Waverly’s hand, “for you?”

“Yes… listen…”

“Oh my fucking god! Who?! I’ll kill them! Did someone rape you?! Oh, I’ll fucking kill them!”

Slapping a hand over Wynonna’s mouth, Waverly dragged her sister over to her Jeep and bundled her inside before she attracted any more attention than she already was. Leaping in the other side, Waverly quickly started the engine and floored it. “It’s not what you think! Okay? I wasn’t raped!”

Wynonna sagged in relief just long enough for another equally horrifying scenario to come to mind. “Oh my god… Waves… you cheated on Haught?”

“What? No!”

“I swear! If you cheated on her I’m disowning your ass and adopting Nicole!”

“Wynonna!!!! I did not cheat on her! Now, will you shut up for a minute so I can explain?”

“Okay…” sitting back in the seat, Wynonna turned and looked at Waverly doing a fine impression of a red-faced fish. “Not hearing any words, Baby Girl.”

Waverly tried again but the words got stuck. It wasn’t like she was ashamed but having any kind of a sex talk with her sister was pretty close to the top of her ‘nope don’t want to talk to my sister about that’ list. Yeah, they teased each other but there was teasing about the thinness of the Homestead wall and there was ‘hey, guess what… there’s a good chance I’m pregnant with my hot, studly, sexy as hell, and very much female, mates baby!’

She spluttered over the words. Sucking in a breath and over and over finding all that came out to be a spluttered desperate raspberry kind of sound.

Spotting salvation in the form of their pretty white house complete with Nicole’s cruiser still parked outside, Waverly quickly pulled up on the drive, grabbed the brown bag and ran for the door. Bursting in, she leaned against it to block Wynonna for a couple of much needed seconds as Nicole looked up from her paperwork.

“Waves?”

“Heyyy, sweetie pie… so, got the…” she shook the bag of kits.

“Okay…?”

“Guess who I bumped into in the drugstore though?” she pointed back over her shoulder and leaned against the door, trying to look all nonchalant as it opened a few inches before she managed to block her sister from getting in. “So… I’m gonna like, head up and… yeah, try one of these out while you and Wynonna chat!”

Nicole’s last sight of Waverly was a sheepish grin vanishing up the stairs before Wynonna finally managed to push the door in without Waverly’s weight on it and stumbled inside.

“Hi, Wynonna.” Nicole could hear the nervousness in her own voice as the Alpha stalked across the room towards her. A finger pointed up, gesturing violently in the direction Waverly had hightailed off in before it swivelled around and locked on to her.

“Right… you! Why was my sister buying pregnancy test kits? And why did she seem to think that you and I need to chat about it?”

“Would you like a drink?”

“What I would like… Nicole… are answers! Why is that suddenly such a hard thing to get around here?”

“Okay. Well… the simple answer is… Waverly might be pregnant.”

“I kind of got that, Haughtstuff. What I’m having trouble with is working out who the father is ‘cause, unless I’ve been reading you all wrong, you don’t seem the kind of woman that would let anyone get close enough to your mate to let them put their dick in her.” Satisfaction rose in Wynonna as Nicole’s eyes shot straight to solid wolf in less than a heartbeat.

“She would never do that and if anyone tried to hurt her that way I would gut them before they could pull it out of their pants!”

“Good to know… But still doesn’t explain how she could be pregnant. Who’s the father?”

“Me,” Nicole mumbled quietly.

“What?” Flopped down onto the bottom step of the staircase, Wynonna shook her head and wondered if she had really heard what she thought she had. Surely not?

“I am,” Nicole stated a bit more clearly. The words bringing about a rising tendril of pride at the thought even as the look on Wynonna’s face made her want to hide. “Shit, I hate talking about this! I can get women pregnant.”

“You’re intersex?”

“No! More of a… well I’m not sure. I haven’t got a penis, Wynonna!” she snapped as Wynonna gave her groin a pointed look as though she was trying to see through the fabric of her jeans. “Listen, what everyone seems to have forgotten was that there was a time when female werewolves, Alpha ones anyway, could get another female pregnant. It’s mostly missing now but… well, I guess I got the ability to do it with Bulshar being an old assed werewolf. Which… could be why Waves couldn’t cross on to the Blacksmith’s land the other day… she’s got my bloodline in her.”

The whole thing… trying to work out the logistics of it without picturing Waverly or her friend doing all that, was blowing Wynonna’s mind. “Did Waves know about it before you slept together?”

“Yeah. I told her that day when we were both being Alpha-dicks. She’s been taking contraceptives the whole time and… that part of me is only fertile when I’m in rut.” It was days like this… though frankly, Nicole had never had a day quite like it, when she wished that alcohol did pack more of a punch ‘cause, boy, she needed a drink and by the look of it, so did Wynonna. Nicole almost wondered which was worse, talking about her intimate bodily functions or hearing about them?

“Did she, erm- did she do it on purpose when she was in heat?” Wynonna didn’t want to believe it was possible but she also knew it had happened with other Omegas before. Horror stories now mostly. Cautionary tales designed to scare Alphas and Omegas into protecting themselves from being persuaded into doing something they didn’t really want because they were too damn horny to show restraint.

“Wynonna, this is Waverly, do you honestly think she would do something like that?”

“No… I had to ask though. So, what are you going to do about it?”

“Do? You mean…” Nicole felt like every drop of blood in her body rushed to her feet, the rest of her overflowing with pain at what she was suggesting even though it wasn’t her decision.

Wynonna shifted around on the step and resisted the urge to go comfort the suddenly heartbroken looking Alpha. She hated to play the heavy and ask all the painful questions but, if Waverly was pregnant, they were questions that needed asking and answering. “Are you keeping it? With how you feel about the whole being a Bulshar thing…”

“Wynonna. I never wanted kids, the thought of it scared me to death. Waverly though… I love your sister with all my heart and soul. She keeps telling me that I’m more than the DNA I got from him. I want to prove her right.”

“You’ve already proved that to all of us, kid.” Wynonna smiled as, despite everything, Nicole’s eyebrow quirked at the ‘kid’.

“Waverly…” she smiled just thinking about her and looked up towards where she could hear her moving around in the bedroom, pacing back and forth nervously. “She means everything in the world to me and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep her safe. Do I want a baby? With Waverly, and only with Waverly, that would be a million times yes. But if she keeps it or not is entirely up to her. Her body, her choice, each and every time and I will stand by her no matter what her decision is.”

“You big soft walking bumper sticker. I don’t suppose I could tempt you away from my little sister?” she winked.

“Still not my type,” Nicole chuckled at Wynonna’s teasing.

“Stop trying to seduce the mother of my baby, Aunty Wynonna.”