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O Hai! Surprise, I finally got through this #$%@ing chapter. It will hopefully serve as a course correction and get things back on track here, if only the characters will behave. Jenna, I'm looking at you. o_o
Fanfiction.net link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6910203/15/
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Wait. Your faculty advisor is a werewolf?" Elena repeated, pausing in the middle of pouring her morning coffee.
“Yep.” Jenna pushed scrambled eggs around her plate. They had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now her stomach seemed set to rebel against breakfast, perhaps just on principle.
“Was he the one who attacked Elijah’s friend?”
“Sophia, yeah. We’re not sure if he was the one or not. There were apparently a few of them. But she was bitten. Which is apparently a No Good, Very Bad thing for vampires.”
“Yeah, it is. I’ve seen what happens to a vampire who is dying of a werewolf bite. Not pretty.”
“Wait, when did you see… No, you know what? Nevermind. I probably don’t want to know.” Elena added some cream to her coffee and slid onto the stool next to Jenna. “Eggs?” Jenna said, sliding her plate toward her niece. “I thought I wanted breakfast, but junior vetoed the idea.”
Elena shook her head and gestured toward her coffee. “I’m good with this. I take it you slept here last night?” she asked, indicating the pajamas Jenna was still wearing.
“Elijah was going to be up all night grading papers.” Or so he had said. Jenna privately had her doubts that that was the only reason he hadn't wanted her to stay.
“You usually have an early start on Mondays. Are you staying home today?”
“Given the situation, Elijah thought it would be wise for me to stay here.” It didn’t sit entirely well with her to give in on that point; it reeked of running away, with an undertone of being told what to do. She had wanted to argue, but he had looked so wretched when they left the Salvatore house that she had capitulated and agreed to stay away from campus until he could “deal with” the professor.
“You mean the bombing… did he have something to do with that?”
“We don’t know for sure, but it seems like a good possibility. Elijah says that it’s not a tactic another vampire is likely to use.”
“Unless… what if the werewolves are working for one of them?”
Jenna frowned. “Don’t the two species hate each other? Why would they agree to work for a vampire?”
“They might not have had a choice.”
Great. Something else to worry about. “Whatever the case, if I’m stuck at home then I have no excuse not to be working on my abstract.”
“True.” Elena gave her a sidelong look as she sipped her coffee. “And you could always take a break, maybe give Alaric a call,” she suggested, oh-so-nonchalantly.
“Don’t start, Elena.”
“Look, I know it’s not really any of my business – ”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But don’t you think he deserves to know about the baby?”
“I don’t give a shit what he ‘deserves.’ I don’t want to tell him. I don’t even want to talk to him.”
“Because of Elijah?”
“No, because Ric is a lying son of a bitch who has zero respect for me.”
Elena set her mug down and turned so she was facing Jenna. “That’s not true, Aunt Jenna.”
“Yes, it is. And if you weren’t trying to assuage your own guilt with that ‘I was only trying to protect you’ crap, you would understand that.” Seeing Elena’s stricken expression, Jenna bit her lip and relented. “Sorry. I'm sorry. I’m super pissy this morning.”
"It’s okay. Can I just say, from the perspective of someone who didn’t know who her biological parents were until she was 17, that it sucks, and is exceedingly unfair to your kid to not know who its father is, especially when that father would be a totally awesome dad?”
“Just so we’re clear, you’re not saying you think John would have been an awesome dad, are you?”
“No! God, no. But Alaric? I think he’d be a great dad.”
Jenna shifted uncomfortably. “You think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Even if I don’t want to be with him?”
“I think you can still work something out about the baby, even if you aren’t together as a couple anymore.” Elena rose and rinsed her mug out in the sink, reaching into the fridge and tossing an orange and a carton of yogurt from the fridge into her backpack. “And for the record, I’m not thoroughly convinced that you don’t want to be with him,” she added, heading toward the door.
“I do not want to be with him!”
“The lady doth protest too much…”
“That will be enough Shakespeare, young lady! What are they teaching you in that school? When you bother to go, that is.”
“Ric’s number is in the address book on my desk,” Elena said, by way of a parting shot.
Annoyed, Jenna filled the teakettle and put it on the stove as Elena’s car pulled out of the driveway. Maybe some herbal tea would settle her stomach and calm her down enough to work on her abstract. She opened the cupboard to get the tea and pushed aside the sprig of wolfsbane Damon had given her before leaving the Salvatore House, ‘just in case.’
Was she protesting too much? God, she didn’t know. She had to admit that she did miss Alaric from time to time. It wasn’t as though there hadn’t been a time when she had thought it a possibility that she would marry him, have babies, the picket fence, etc. Being lied to, having secrets withheld… that hadn’t been a part of the plan.
Elijah hadn’t been part of the plan either. But if she hadn’t already fallen for him, she was dangerously close to doing so. He was so much more… mature than anyone else she had dated. Which only stood to reason, considering. Was it wrong to want to be with someone who treated her with respect, who told her the truth and trusted her to handle it? Not that it was all her choice to make. How could she possibly be more than a passing fancy to him? She was nothing special, certainly not to a guy who was over a thousand years old, who had been with thousands of women. Beautiful, sophisticated women. Women like Sophia. Jealous? Who, me?
Jenna sighed deeply. This train of thought was not helping her mood any. Once the kettle started whistling, she took it off the stove and poured water over the teabag, carrying the mug with her into the dining room, or, as she had come to refer to it, her war room. Books and papers were piled on the table, leaving just a small space for her laptop and a beverage. She poked through a pile of notes while she waited for her laptop to boot up and her tea to steep. Toward the bottom, she found the sheaf of papers where she had outlined what she knew of the supernatural.
This was all my fault, she thought suddenly. If she hadn’t been stupid and thought she could turn her humiliation at not having known what was going on under her own nose into some kind of workable thesis, then Mitchell would never have seen that she was onto something, would probably not have met Elijah, and would not have been tailed by Sophia, who had only been there at Elijah’s behest. If she’d just left well enough alone, everything would have been fine. But no, she just had to try to be clever, to justify her own cluelessness at having ignored everything going on around her. Maybe that was the real reason Elijah hadn’t wanted her to stay last night. Maybe he too had realized that she was to blame.
Disgusted, and angry with herself, Jenna took the stack of papers and, stomping into the next room, tossed them into the fireplace. Grabbing a few pieces of wood, and the box of long matches from the mantle, she lit the papers on fire and used them to kindle the wood. That’s about all they’re good for, she thought, bitter. She returned to the dining room, picking up her tea and sipping at it while she looked through the rest of her notes, discontent with them too.
A knock at the door pulled her attention away from the work she wasn’t doing. With a glance at the alarm keypad to make sure it wasn’t armed, she cracked the door open. “Suzanne?”
The normally bubbly redhead stood on the front porch, looking utterly dejected. She had clearly been crying; her eyes were red and had that glassy look. With her shoulders slumped forward, she looked like she had lost her last friend in the world, AND had her puppy run over. “Hey,” she mumbled, her voice sounding thick. She lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. And promptly burst into tears.
If she was putting on a performance, if she were some part of the Professor’s werewolf cult or something as she and Elijah had debated, she was a damned good actress. Jenna went back and forth with herself about asking her to come in or sending her on her way, then decided to compromise. Stepping out onto the porch, pj’s and all, Jenna pulled the door closed behind her and slid an arm around the girl’s shoulders. She steered her toward the porch swing and eased her down onto it. “Okay, Sweetie. What’s going on?” And why are you here?
Suzanne lifted her hands up, then sort of let them fall into her lap. “He dumped me. No, it’s actually worse than that. He didn’t even have the decency to tell me he was dumping me. He just stood me up and took off.” She knuckled tears off of her cheeks, looking a lot younger than she was.
Jenna felt a jolt in her stomach. “Are you talking about Richard Mitchell?”
“You knew?” Suzanne asked, sniffling.
“It was kind of obvious,” Jenna told her. She hoped to be able to leave it at that.
“We were supposed to spend the day together yesterday. We were going to go hiking around the lake, take a picnic… you know. And he never showed up. He didn’t even call. God, I’m so stupid!” she sobbed.
So Mitchell hadn’t been seen since the other night? Sophia had killed two werewolves. Could he have been one of them? “Are you sure you didn’t just get your signals crossed? Did you try calling him?”
“All day. Then I went by his office this morning, and there was an announcement on his door from Dr. Lee, saying that he had left to go overseas and would not be returning for the foreseeable future, and she would be taking on his advisees. Not even a phone call to say goodbye.”
“I’m going to make us some tea,” Jenna said, giving her shoulder a squeeze as she got up. She put the kettle on the stove again when she back inside, mulling things over. She didn’t think Suzanne was faking it – she wasn’t really discreet enough to be that good a liar. But if Mitchell were indeed dead, who had passed along the information about him going ‘overseas?’ Oh God, that means Professor Lee is my advisor now. She somehow found the idea of the tiny professor way scarier than a werewolf.
While she waited for the water, Jenna took out a package of cookies and put some on a plate, assembling everything onto a tray, including a box of tissues. When she got the tea, she grabbed the wolfsbane as well, figuring this counted as a ‘just in case.’ She crumpled some of the dried herb into one of the teacups. Once the water boiled, she poured it into the two teacups and went back out to the porch.
Suzanne was drying her eyes on the sleeves of her hooded sweatshirt. Jenna didn’t think she had seen her in anything so casual and shape-concealing before. “Here, I found some cookies too. I figured some chocolate therapy might be in order,” she said, handing Suzanne the cup with the wolfsbane in it.
Wrapping her hands around the cup for warmth, the redhead took a sip of the tea. “Mmm, this is good. What is it, blackberry?”
Jenna let out the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding when Suzanne took a bigger swallow of the tea. “Yeah, it’s herbal.”
Suzanne helped herself to a cookie. “I didn’t think you ever drank anything but coffee.”
“Usually, no. But my stomach has been touchy lately.”
“You weren’t feeling great last week either. Are you okay?” Surprisingly, she seemed genuinely concerned.
“Actually…” What the hell? She might as well get used to saying it. It would become obvious before too long anyhow. “I’m pregnant.”
The redhead choked on the cookie she was eating, coughing and sputtering as she stared at Jenna, wide-eyed. “Holy shit!” she croaked out at last.
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I said.”
“Wow, that’s… I… uh… Wow.”
“Yeah.”
Suzanne washed down the cookie with the rest of her tea. “Would it be really tacky and Maury Povich of me to ask who’s the baby daddy?”
“Kinda. But it’s Ric’s.”
“Oops.”
“Mm.”
“Does your current boyfriend know? He was hunky, by the way.”
“Yes, he knows.” Before I did. “I didn’t think you got much of a look at him, the way you took off the other night.”
Suzanne ducked her head down, looking sheepish, and maybe a little ashamed. “Richard and I were kind of in the middle of something before we got to the mixer. I was a little distracted. Then there was some kind of explosion in the parking lot or something, so I guess I’m glad I left early. Were you still there when that happened?”
“You could say that,” she answered, not wanting to derail the conversation with an explanation of that debacle. “I could tell you two had been, erm, a little busy before you showed up,” Jenna teased, making her blush. “So, how long were you two…” Fucking? “Seeing each other?”
“Since the first of the summer semester, when I was working that clinical trial with him.” She reached for another cookie. “Christ, I’m dumb. I should have realized, the first time he…” Suzanne broke off, obviously having said more than she intended to.
“The first time he what?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She brushed the back of her hand over her eyes when fresh tears threatened, and blew out a breath. “Anyway… I thought you were supposed to be at the lab this morning. I checked there first, but they said you didn’t show. Morning sickness?”
“Yeah,” she answered, leaving it at that. “I’m never sure if things are going to stay where I put them.”
“So what are you going to do? About your thesis and stuff? Can you get another extension?”
That was a goddamned good question, wasn’t it? “I don’t know. I’m not sure I even dare to ask Professor Lee,” she said, shuddering at the thought. “Besides, it’s got to be easier to work on a thesis while preggars than once I have an infant, right?” Oh God. She was going to have an infant. A tiny, helpless infant. A tiny, helpless infant who would be depending on her for literally everything…
“Are you okay?” Suzanne asked, looking concerned. “You just went really pale. Do you need to hurl?”
“No, I’m all right. Just had a little reality cramp, that’s all.”
The redhead stood, brushing cookie crumbs off of her ample chest. “I have a class in an hour; I should go. I’m sorry to just drop by out of the blue and have a freak-out on you.”
“No, it’s fine. Stop by any time,” Jenna assured her, feeling a pang of guilt that the girl was leaving there thinking her boyfriend had left her without a second glance when he was, in fact, almost certainly dead. But it wasn’t as though Jenna could tell her that.
“Are you coming to campus tomorrow?”
With Mitchell out of the way, there was no reason not to, was there? “Yeah. I should be there.”
“Great. I’ll see you then. Thanks for the tea and sympathy.”
“Anytime.”
Jenna watched her drive off, then carried the tray back inside. Retrieving her cell phone from the counter, she sent Elijah a text message: “MITCHELL ‘OUT OF COUNTRY,’ NOT COMING BACK. PROBABLY DEAD. SUZANNE NOT A WW, JUST SEEMINGLY JILTED GF.” She doubted he’d check his messages until at least lunch, but perhaps it would be some small consolation to him. She pressed send, and noticed that she had a voice message. She listened to it while she put the leftover cookies away.
“Shit!!” The message was from Carol, reminding her that they had a lunch meeting to go over last minute details for the shelter opening and dedication. Jenna glanced at the clock on the microwave. No time for a shower. She ran upstairs and threw on a blouse and the only clean pair of slacks she could find, noting as she strained to button them that they were suddenly a lot tighter than they had been. She went into Elena’s room and stood in front of her full-length mirror, side-to. With her stomach straining at the waistband of the fitted slacks, she could see the beginning of a baby bump.
Jenna drifted backward until her legs came up against Elena’s bed, and she folded herself down onto it as a second, harder reality cramp hit her. Jesus. This was real. She was pregnant. She was going to have a baby. Her baby. Hers – and Alaric’s. Right now, inside of her body, she and he together were making a human. A person. Whether she wanted it or not (and she was pretty sure she didn’t), he was, quite literally, a part of her now.
She didn’t even realize she was crying until she heard her breath hitch on a sob. Taking a few deep breaths and damning her hormones, she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand and stood, smoothing her blouse down over the slacks. She would have to leave it untucked. And do some laundry. And eventually go shopping for some – gulp – maternity clothes. Jenna turned to leave Elena's room, and spotted the address book on her desk. She picked it up, running her hand over the cover for a moment before she sighed, and opened it to the S's. Grabbing a pen and notepad, she scribbled down the number that Elena had written in for Alaric.
Just in case.
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