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Warren

I was clearly the only one of my pack who hadn’t fallen head over heels for the female in the pictures. It was all two dimensional in my mind. She was pictures and answered questions and a name on a screen.

My wolf was as wary as I was. In our minds, the mating should be more…natural. Meet a female. Her scent would feel like home. An easy progression of the mating.

The apps and messages and everything happening on my phone before I had even seen her in the flesh felt removed, cold, and empty.

None of my packmates shared the same notions. There was one way to find out, I supposed and now that one way was headed to us on a bus .

“I’m going to head up to the firehouse for a while.” I didn’t. They knew it. I knew it.

This man needed a chance to breathe and settle himself about potentially meeting our mate.

Our desperate but beautiful mate. She was willing to come across the country on a bus to see us after no phone call, no video chat, no nothing? I’d done a bit of research that afternoon after Lark found her match. There was a way these things happened. Days and weeks of getting to know us and her. Phone calls. Texts. Video chats.

Maybe it would all click once I saw her. I was a more tactile person than Lark or Rain. Rain relied on his instinct. Lark relied on his feelings and changes in our bond to guide him. His wolf.

I trusted what I saw and heard and smelled and could touch with my hands. Right now, I had none of those to rely on.

Not one.

I felt guilty as hell about leaving. Lark was on a one-man mission to make the guest quarters suitable, which they already were. Rain was taking orders and making lists while Lark paced and stopped every once in a while, making his own list of things to cook and have prepared.

That left me nowhere. Rain was the brawn. Lark was the caregiver and the glue that held us together. I was the naysayer. The devil’s advocate.

I had a place in this. The levelheaded one. Those two were acting like they hadn’t seen a female in years.

Maybe this woman wasn’t ours at all.

I hadn’t fully shared with the pack that my hopes and dreams about finding a mate were overshadowed by my only experience with matings. My parents’. Everything was fine when I was little. They were the shining example of a loving, mated pair.

They taught me what it was to love.

Until they also taught me about loss and grief and the depths of mourning.

My mother died in a car accident. Even her shifter healing couldn’t get her out of a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler.

My father was never the same. He existed. Breathed. Ate when I forced food on him. Didn’t shower or clean the house. Never came to another school function of mine.

That would mean knowing I existed. And after she died, nothing existed but his sadness. Sometimes I thought it would’ve been better if they’d both died in the accident because, on most levels, they did.

On my way to work, I stopped and picked up groceries to make the crew lunch. Those boys always needed food, and while Lark was the main chef in our house, I did love to cook and had taught myself after my father went rogue in his own way.

YouTube had been a lifesaver for a teenaged boy who had never scrambled his own eggs.

We didn’t live in a pack, so there were no packmates or brothers to lift my father out of his funk, and I had enough trouble taking care of myself and making my mother’s life insurance stretch to keep a roof over our heads and the lights on as long as possible.

When I moved out, he had just begun working again. Eating again.

It had been six years since my mom passed.

I was afraid of that same scenario replaying itself in our pack. Shifters didn’t bounce back from losing a mate like humans did–some humans. I’d seen human males get married or start dating before their wife’s coffin hit the dirt in the hole.

Some of them had side pieces already waiting.

Shifters weren’t like that, especially with a fated mate. Yes, I wanted my mate but this was all happening too fast and my fears jumped at the chance to make themselves known. Being with our fated mate, and losing her was scarier than never finding her at all. ,

What if my pack brothers fell into the same situation and we had to survive losing a mate.