The Baby Shift- Nebraska

by Becca Fanning

  Sadie shook her head. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not going anywhere. I like you, Jack. What little I know about you, I like. I’m not pretending to be interested in you. You’re a good kisser and a cool person and for me, that’s been a rarity. And I care that you’re a werebear because it’s colored your life experience and it’s a part of you, but you being a werebear doesn’t scare me. Not one bit. In fact…” she said, leaning closer to him and taking his hand. She smiled when he didn’t back away or try and break off the touch.

  “It makes me feel like maybe, we could understand each other better because of it. I’ve spent a lot of my life being judged because of what people see when they look at me,” she said, pointing to her hair and skin, “and I bet you’ve spent a lot of your life worried that people would judge you for what they can’t see.

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. That’s partly why I moved out here. To get away from it all. It’s a lot easier to be me without people around. Present company excluded, of course,” he rushed to add.

  God, he was so fucking cute.

  “Look, why don’t we—” Sadie started to say, but she stopped, because right then, the door to the cabin swung open, and two figures appeared in the doorway. Two very translucent figures.

  Chapter 7

  Jack turned to find Cressida and Jeremiah in his doorway. The same Cressida and Jeremiah who had appeared in his dream a few months ago. The same ones that were currently mid-sentence on the document that had gone into autosave mode on his computer because he was a little busy trying to have a Very Difficult Conversation with his mate, who did not know she was his mate yet. But she would. Soon. Or she would have if what looked like two ghosts hadn’t come barging into his cabin.

  “What the…” Jack said, getting up and coming to the doorway.

  “Jack!” Cressida said, storming into the cabin with Jeremiah at her heels. “Whatever do you think you are doing, pausing me mid-sentence. It is the very height of rudeness, I will have you know.”

  “What are you…” he started, staring at Cressida with his eyes practically bulging out of his head.

  “You’re scaring him, Cressy. You cannot lead with that. You need to introduce yourself, and properly,” Jeremiah said, rolling his eyes as he came to stand next to his wife. He turned toward Sadie and held out his hand. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is Jeremiah. I am a ghost, and this is my paramour, Cressida White,” he said, gesturing toward Cressida, who was still staring daggers at Jack.

  Sadie continued to sit on the couch, now looking from Jeremiah’s outstretched hand to Jack and back.

  “Um. What exactly is going on?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Jack? Did you not tell her about us?” Jeremiah asked, turning to look at Jack.

  “What is there to tell! Up until about ten seconds ago, I thought you two were figments of my imagination, not ghosts!” he said, throwing his hands up in the air.

  “Oh dear. Well, that is obviously not the case, now is it?” Cressida said, crinkling her brow in sympathy. “We’re very much real, or rather, as real as ghosts can be. Which is very real, mind you,” she said, turning to Sadie and giving her a kind, warm smile that Jack noticed did little to calm the freak-out he could see brewing in his mate.

  Not that she knew she was his mate yet. He’d been about to bring that up when Cressida and Jeremiah came in, and now Jack had no idea how to 1. Get rid of them, 2. Explain their presence (especially since even he didn’t understand it) and 3. Steer the conversation back to his and Sadie’s mutual like of each other, which he could use as a jumping off point to a chat about how he would like to spend the rest of his life with her and make lots of little shifter babies with her as their mother. If she was so inclined, of course. He’d be okay if there were no offspring, as long as he had Sadie.

  “Okay. So, you’re ghosts. We got that. What are you doing here?” Jack asked, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to stand tall. He was still half-shifted— the high emotion of the past few minutes had destroyed any sense of calm he had started to cultivate while talking to Sadie, and with that calm went any chance of shifting back to his human self anytime soon.

  “Well, you stopped writing, of course,” Cressida stated, as though Jack was positively dense for not figuring out the reason for their presence the minute they entered his cabin. “And we were rather looking forward to the end of the chapter. This in-between life is quite dull, you know. We need you to hurry up so we can move on!” she said, emphasizing the last words with a stamp of her feet that echoed in the small space.

  “I…don’t understand. What do you mean? How does my book help you or not help you move on? And what in between life are you talking about?” Jack asked.

  Jeremiah gave him a patient smile. “Didn’t you realize there was a reason why we appeared to you? We needed someone to tell our story. The story of our love on the real Oregon Trail, or at the very least, a part of it. We can’t move on until you finish the book. And I have to say, your writer’s block has really “cramped our style” as you modern people are so fond of saying.”

  “Ohh, I get it,” Sadie said from the couch. Jack turned around to find her nodding her head enthusiastically and standing up. “You do?”

  She continued to nod and looked at Cressida and Jeremiah. “Neither of you can move on to the afterlife until Jack finishes writing your story. It’s your ‘unfinished business,’” she said, pointing at Jeremiah and Cressida. “You need to educate the masses about interracial love on the Oregon Trail, and you need Jack to do it through his writing since you can’t do it yourselves.”

  “Exactly!” Cressida said, clapping her hands excitedly. She turned to Jack. “She’s a smart one, Jack. You ought to listen to her.”

  “Hold up. How are you so okay with the fact that two ghosts telling me that my book is directly tied to their ability to settle into their posthumous lives?” Jack asked, looking at Sadie.

  At this, Sadie treated Jack to perhaps the best and most dramatic eye roll he had ever seen. “Jack,” she said. “The world is crazy and full of shifters and witches and wizards that we all never even knew existed up until a century or two ago. Compared to all that, the existence of ghosts seems like practically a foregone conclusion.”

  Jack contemplated this. He supposed that ghosts appearing in his cabin wasn’t all that weird when he considered it. Compared to him half turning into a wild animal while trying to execute some nipple play on a woman, anyway. And if he really thought about it, it had been pretty obvious when they appeared to him in that dream, fully formed and with a plot already to go. Jack had written six books before the current one, and that had never, ever happened to him before. The plot bunny usually hit him gradually, the characters revealing themselves over time. Had he just been super dense this whole time?

  It would seem so. He shrugged and turned to Jeremiah and Cressida. “Okay. So, you’re ghosts and I’m writing your happily ever after to educate the masses, correct?”

  Cressida and Jeremiah nodded their heads.

  “And you want me to stop messing around and get back to it?”

  Again, head nodding.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “There’s just one problem, though. Sadie and I were…” How was he going to put this without completely scandalizing their historical sensibilities? After all, Cressida and Jeremiah didn’t have sex until after they were married in the book, and even then, they did missionary the first three times because Cressida thought a woman on top was “uncouth.”

  “We were kissing,” Sadie cut in helpfully, grinning at Jack before turning to the ghosts in front of them. “We were kissing, and then he half-shifted because apparently that’s the effect I have on him, and we were just talking about the dynamics of our maybe-relationship when you two walked in. And we weren’t quite finished.”

  “Indeed?” Jeremiah said, turning to Jack with a raised eyebrow
and a mischievous grin on his face. “Well done, old boy.”

  Jack rolled his eyes, but also blushed, because yeah, well done for him. Sadie was one in a million. If that hadn’t been clear before, the way she was just rolling with all this insanity certainly made it so.

  “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do,” Sadie said, clapping her hands. “We’re going to finish the majority of the book, tonight. I’m going to cancel my flight, and we can work like dogs until we get this done. Jack, how much of the book do you have left?”

  “Um. Like seven chapters? 20,000 words, maybe?” he said, trying to remember what his outline said.

  Sadie nodded. “Okay. I once wrote 30,000 in one night when my advisor wanted me to redo a journal article the night before it was due.”

  She turned to Cressida and Jeremiah and filled them in on her Ph.D. subject. They were both understandably thrilled to have an expert in their midst. So thrilled that Cressida had started whooping and clapping her hands so loudly Jack couldn’t hear himself think. “Oh, this is fate!” she cried.

  Jack turned to Sadie and mouthed “sorry” as Jeremiah and Cressida took seats on his desk, being careful to avoid knocking over the device that held the key to their entrance to the afterlife, aka his old laptop.

  Sadie shrugged and smiled in response, looking like she wasn’t remotely freaked out by any of this.

  “Come on. Let’s get started. We can talk more once we’re done, yeah?” she said, and Jack nodded, breathing a sigh of relief.

  twenty-seven hours later

  “Done,” Jack said, hitting “send” on the email to this editor, who was no doubt going to spit her coffee out when she saw that not only had Jack submitted his chapter on time, he’d gone ahead and finished the whole damn book.

  “Woo!” Sadie said half-heartedly from where she was lying on the couch, a cup of coffee cuddled close to her chest. At some point in the night she had gone into Jack’s room to change and had come back out sporting one of his old t-shirts and a pair of flannel pajama pants so old there was a hole in the crotch.

  “Thank goodness. I feel better already,” Cressida said from where she was sitting at the kitchen table, resting her head on her hands. Jack looked over and found that both she and Jeremiah were a little more translucent and growing more so with every second that passed.

  “What’s happening to you both?” Sadie asked, sitting up suddenly and nearly spilling her coffee in the process.

  Jeremiah and Cressida looked at each other and laughed. “Oh! It’s happening! We’re going to the other side!” Cressida said, getting up and clapping her hands, which seemed to be what she did when anything remotely exciting or pleasing happened.

  “You’re right. And it’s all thanks to you, Jack,” Jeremiah said, getting up and coming to stand next to Cressida. They faded even more as they stood, and Jack and Sadie watched in awe as the two ghosts slowly became mere whispers of their former selves.

  “Thank you, Jack. You have no idea how grateful we are,” Jeremiah said, but his voice sounded like it was an ocean away.

  And then, they were gone, and it was just him and Sadie together again in the cabin, the quiet autumnal evening their only companions.

  “Well,” Sadie said, putting her cup of coffee down and coming toward where Jack was still sitting in his desk chair. “That was definitely the weirdest day of my life.”

  “Yup. Me too. And I’m a shifter, so that’s saying something.”

  Sadie put a hand on his shoulder and laughed. And she kept laughing, her body wracked with giggles that were born more of tiredness than Jack’s comedic quip (even he knew he wasn’t that funny).

  “So. What do you want to do now?” she asked, moving her hand down Jack’s shoulder in what he thought was a seductive move. He had been so tired he could have fallen asleep sitting up a moment ago, but now, he was wide awake.

  “I…” he said, but he was cut off by Sadie’s mouth, which had fastened itself to his. She tasted like coffee and honey and vanilla, and he pulled her soft form onto his lap and moaned when she sat down squarely on his suddenly hard cock.

  “Someone’s excited,” she whispered in his ear, and Jack nodded, but held her away. If they were going to do this, he needed to know they were doing it not as stress relief after a hectic day of writing and recounting two people’s personal history, but as mates.

  “Sadie, before we go any further, I need you to know something.”

  “Oh…kay,” she said, giving him a patient smile.

  “You’re my mate. I knew it the second you walked in my door, and I can’t go any further with you unless I know you’re willing to spend the rest of your life with me. We don’t have to live here,” he gestured to the cabin around them, “or even in Nebraska. I’ll follow you wherever you go because I know you’re the one for me. But if you don’t feel the same,” he said, shrugging with a nonchalance, “I’ll understand.”

  Sadie shrugged. “Okay.”

  “What do you mean, okay?” Jack asked. Could it really be that easy?

  “I mean okay, I’ll be your mate. I’ll be with you for the rest of eternity, or as long as we both shall live, or whatever. Can we have sex now?” she asked, leaning forward and starting to kiss up Jack’s neck. He could feel his cock twitch in excitement, but before he could give it what he wanted, he needed to be sure.

  “Are you sure? Like, absolutely positive?” he asked, trying not to moan as Sadie continued up toward his ear, biting the lobe and then sucking it into her delicious, warm mouth.

  “Yes, Jack. I will be your mate. Can we have sex now?” she giggled into his ear.

  Jack nodded, and let Sadie lead him to his bed in the corner of the room.

  Chapter 9

  Sadie had been waiting for this moment for over 24 hours. For 24 hours her body had hummed and sung to the tune of Jack’s, and now, after all that time, he was finally on her, his weight settling deliciously against her as he settled in between her thighs.

  “God, you have no idea how much I want you,” he whispered in her ear as he slowly slid her (his) sweatpants down her legs and over her toes, before throwing them onto his desk.

  “If it’s anywhere near as much as I want you, then…” she said, trailing off when she felt the touch of his lips on her skin. Jack kissed her knee first, the soft inner skin where the sun didn’t touch, and then went higher, up her inner thigh until he reached the apex of her thighs, where heat and want and desire was building to a wet, hot crescendo.

  His lips grazed the line of her panties before going inward, toward the gusset, which was slick with her arousal.

  “God, you’re wet,” Jack breathed against her, sending ripples of pleasure up Sadie’s spine as he crooked his finger around the fabric of her panties and drew it aside, making room for his mouth as he leaned in and licked her all the way up and down her slit.

  Sadie groaned and flattened herself onto the bed, trying to keep in the squeal that was threatening to burst out of her as Jack’s tongue began to explore her, inside and out.

  As Jack licked her better than anyone ever had before, she had time to think about what he’d asked her. She’d never imagined herself tied to anyone before. She’d always thought she’d be a lone wolf, so to speak, letting academia be her one true love. She’d heard so many horror stories of women in her position having to give up their careers for their men, and Sadie didn’t want to be one of those women. She had too much to do, too much to show people, to let a man occupy her body and soul.

  But if Jack was willing to follow her, to put her first? And if he was as good a kisser, bottom and top, as he seemed to be…well then, maybe she could make it work.

  She became even more sure of that five minutes later when Jack had nearly brought her to the edge and back at least five times before finally slipping on a condom and sliding home, into her, filling her up more completely than any vibrator ever could.

  “Oh god,” she whispered as he began to move in her, seating in betwee
n her thighs, his hands exploring every inch of her he could reach—her waist, her breasts, her neck, her belly, and, most importantly, her clit.

  “This is where I belong,” he whispered, his eyes fixed on hers as he began to pick up the pace, and Sadie couldn’t help but agree, especially when his hand once again went to her clit, and the circles he drew there, combined with the rhythm of his cock as it moved inside her, sent her into ecstasy.

  It was an orgasm unlike any she had ever known. She was tingling from head to toe, could feel Jack in every molecule of her body, every inch of her soul, as she cried out from release. She felt…so much. She felt like she was a part of him, and vice versa. She felt like she could feel the pleasure beginning to build in him, too, and a moment later, when he came, she cried out at the same time he did and opened her arms to catch him when he collapsed, spent from the effort of pleasuring them both.

  She had come to his cabin looking only for shelter, and she had found her one true love. How about that?

  Eleven months later

  “Sadie!” Jack yelled from his office. Sadie was sitting at their kitchen counter in Portland, Oregon, editing her article for the journal she had founded four months ago entitled Racial Politics and Geography. In addition to her own articles, she had eighteen new submissions for the newest edition, and it was set to be the best yet. She was so freaking proud of it.

  But she was at a good stopping point, so she heaved her pregnant body off the stool and waddled into the office in their apartment in downtown Oregon, where they spent part of each year. Jack was still a part-time ranger, taking care of the tourists of Scottsbluff each winter, but it was summer now, and they were both firmly ensconced in their respective writing caves.