AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her hand slides onto my thigh. “You are my mate,” she says. “And I want to be ready to move back in, because I miss everything about that life we started together. But I’m scared. What if this happens again? What if something worse happens next time? What if we can’t come back from it?
“In the interest of being honest,” I start, “you should know that August’s apartment is currently being cleared out. If he’s joining our pack, he’s with us.” I stop her protest before it starts with a finger over her mouth, silently asking her to wait longer to hear me out.
“This is not us deciding for you or taking it out of your hands. This is not us manhandling you and moving you back with us. This is us getting our new pack together and making sure that we can protect everybody in it. We built something out back for August to stay in if he doesn’t want to live in the main house with us. We figured you’d probably want to stay with him there, instead of the main house, at least for now. Of course, we hope like hell he’ll move in with us in the main house permanently, but we’re under no illusions that we've earned to that.”
“When you say you built something…” she trails off, unsure.
I pull out my phone to get the pictures on the screen for her to look through. The tiny house is pretty dang cute. Denim blue with white shutters. Maybe not the manliest of houses, but the house has everything he needs. A small kitchen, a loft bed with a queen mattress, a bathroom, a couch, but most importantly, it has four walls that give him the space he needs if he's not ready to fully integrate with his new pack quite yet.
“We are also going to build him something to sleep in in the main house if he’s not comfortable sleeping in the bed with us. But that’s not quite ready yet. In the meantime, he can either squish in with us, or he has this. And it’s your choice wherever you stay. We are not offended if you choose to stay with him.”
Tears Gather in her eyes, but she doesn’t quite let them fall. “You did this all… for him?”
“Yes and no,” I say. “I did it for youandhim. When you jumped in front of him, to protect him from Gavin, we knew it would take something drastic to make you see how serious we were about bringing him into our pack. I’ve never seen an omega that protective of somebody before, and it made us rethink a lot of things. It showed us exactly how deep this connection between the two of you runs. That’s why we built it. We thought it would make you happy, and he seems like he needs somewhere to belong. We can be that for him, if he wants it.”
“Thank you,” she says with a shaky voice. “So, what happens next?”
“What do you want to happen next?”
“I think,” she starts, “I want to just take this one step at a time. This whole thing between us happened so fast and so hard, we never really got time to let things develop on their own. Right now, I would love to go for a walk with you, but I don’t want to injure your leg more. Is there something else we could go do? Something normal? I feel like I’ve missed out a lot of that in my life.”
“I'm not sure I'm the mate to go for when you want normal, because I'm a bit of a weirdo. For your sake, however, I’m willing to try.”
She rolls her eyes at me as I throw some cash on the table, then she lets me pull her to standing for a kiss. She seems slightly on edge, but I'm chalking that up to the fact that she has such little experience interacting with other people in a public setting. It's easy to forget this world I live in so easily is still so new to her, because she's way too good at hiding her discomfort.
So, I do what I can to ease that burden the shit hole she called home for too long left on her soul. I try to explain things as we go about town, keeping her firmly tucked into my side so she doesn't get too overwhelmed. And then, I manage to stretch my breakfast date into an all-day date, just like I had planned to do all along.
