AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He walks past me and enters the cabin. His eyes dart around the room, looking everywhere as he takes in his surroundings. Pausing in the doorway, he stares at the worn wooden floorboards. The cabin contains only a single room that is very sparsely furnished. Not much beyond an old rocking chair, a woodstove, and a bed.
My mom did provide plenty of blankets, and several lanterns hang from strategically placed hooks, waiting to be lit when the light starts to fade. A small collection of cooking implements are on a small table near the woodstove. There's a cooler chest beneath the table and several jugs of water beside that.
"This is...more rustic than I thought it would be," Caleb admits with a grin.
"Yeah." I rub the back of my neck as I look at the spartan interior of the cabin. I could've chosen one of the more modern buildings. Most of the cabins have been updated with plumbing and electricity. But not this one. This one is still firmly rooted in the stone ages.
And for the life of me, I don't know why I didn't pick one of those.
"Well…" Caleb claps his hands together and turns back toward the door. "I guess we better get the truck unloaded."
"I’ll do that. You just settle in and make yourself at home."
"I've spent the last nine hours sitting on my ass." Caleb raises an eyebrow and rests a hand on his hip. "I need to move around. The last thing I want to do right now is sit."
"Fair enough." I chuckle. "Maybe later we can take a walk in the woods. Get some exercise and stretch our legs."
Caleb smiles at that. "Sounds great! I think I'd like that."
His smile fills me with an inexplicable warmth. But as we walk back to the truck and start unloading the bags and boxes he brought from home, I'm reminded of what this all means.
Caleb is supposed to become my mate. We're meant to spend our lives together. This cabin is our home now. Where we're expected to raise pups together and take our places in the pack.
But I've still got a business to run. One that I can't run from a tiny cabin that doesn't even have access to electricity.
"Look, there's something I need to discuss with you." Choosing to start this conversation while we carry the last of Caleb's things into the cabin probably isn’t the best timing, but it doesn’t seem like something I can put off. "Tomorrow is supposed to be the bonding ceremony with the rest of the pack."
Caleb is stacking boxes against the wall near the bed when he stops and gives me a nervous frown. "That's a lot sooner than I was expecting."
"Yeah, they don't waste any time with this stuff. But that's not really what I want to talk about."
"Oh?"
I lean against the wall as I watch Caleb sort through his boxes. "The thing is, I've put a lot of work into releasing a mobile app. It's just some dumb social game, but it's gone viral and has gotten millions of downloads now. I've got more active users than I ever dreamed of having, and therein lies the problem…" I exhale heavily. "I'm a one-man operation, and I've got to dedicate a lot of time to this thing if I want to keep it afloat."
"That sounds intense." Caleb looks at me with a curious expression. "I mean, it's awesome that your app is doing so well, but… Wait, you made a mobile app? I don't even have service out here." He fishes out his phone and double-checks the signal strength.
"No one does." I groan and shake my head. "It's frustrating as hell. I've been using the internet connection at my parents' place to keep up with stuff as much as possible, but it's not easy. Their connection isn't great, and it gets overloaded really easily. So all this last week, while I've been helping my dad get the cabin ready, I've had to work nights just trying to catch up on bug reports and urgent issues."
"Dude...I'm so sorry. That sounds awful."
"Yeah, but here's the real issue." I clench my jaw for a moment as I try to work out the best way to word this. "I've been renting some office space in Seattle, and I do most of my work from there. Which means I haven't been spending a lot of time at home. This last week is the most time I've spent here in months."
"So, what you're saying is...having a new mate is really inconvenient for you right now." Caleb doesn't seem at all surprised.
I wasn't expecting him to hit the nail so squarely, and I have no idea how to respond, so I say nothing.
"Obviously, you're gonna have to go to your office if you want to get any work done, and you should. It sounds like you've got something really special on your hands there. So my only question is, what do I do while you're gone?"
Wow. That’s not at all what I was expecting him to say. "You're being a lot more understanding than I thought you would be..."
"Let's be perfectly honest with each other here, okay?" Caleb folds his arms as he turns to face me fully. "We're complete strangers. We've been shoved together as mates, but we're not even friends. Not yet, anyway. I know everyone's expecting us to start pushing out puppies right away, but I don't think either of us is ready for that step. I mean, I’m nowhere near ready to try raising kids in a cabin that doesn't even have running water."
I chuckle. "I do plan on getting this place all hooked up eventually. I just ran out of time before you got here. But I agree. I'm not ready to be a dad and didn't want to rush into a relationship with an omega while I was still so distracted by my business. But I guess the pack elders had other plans."
"Glad we’re on the same page."
"I'm supposed to step up and take a more active role in the pack." I shrug, not even sure what that really means at this point in my life. "When that happens, I won’t be able to spend as much time at the office anyway. If I could get better internet service out here, then it wouldn't be such an issue. But, yeah..." I stop short. "Sorry, I shouldn’t just dump all my issues on your lap."
