Page 86 of Reclaiming Home

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

He shook his head.

“Okay. Well, know we all love you and you’re very important to us. Whatever’s going on, you’ll find someone to talk with.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, still not making eye contact.

I leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I love you, sweetness. You’re my best friend. My platonic as fuck soulmate, right?” That made the corner of his mouth curl up a little. “I mean sure, there’s now a definitely not at all platonic actual mate, but you and I? We’ll never change, right?”

He nodded rapidly, then kissed the back of my hand and closed his eyes.

“See you tomorrow, okay?”

He nodded again, and I left him be.

After dinner, we all retreated to our own corners of the house. Carys went to her room to read, Ben and Max went to theirs, and since I felt too lazy to go upstairs yet, I settled on the couch with Kye soon joining me.

He crawled on top of me and then settled against my side, so he wasn’t pressing against my pleasantly full stomach.

“Do you want kids?” he asked suddenly.

“What?” I turned my head to see his face, but he wasn’t looking at me.

He fiddled with the front of my T-shirt. “It just came to me, that wolf packs are supposed to have kids. Like the Ramirez pack has several, right?”

I hummed. “They do, but that’s probably because they’re mostly a straight pack. They have couples that can produce those kids themselves.”

“Yeah, but there are options. Like adoption and surrogates and hell, aren’t there even like people who volunteer to join packs temporarily for that?”

“There are. A friend back in Seattle had a guy join their pack for a few months. He was a good match genetics-wise, but it was a sperm donor kind of thing, because the mother-to-be was asexual and aromantic.”

“So down the line, do you think you want kids? Maybe if we find a suitable woman from a service like that?” His fingers were picking at a hole in my shirt, making it slightly bigger.

I gave his question some thought. Not in a way of “does he have an agenda” or “what is he really asking” because Kye wasn’t like that.

Eventually, I replied, “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it, because I never saw myself in a situation where I had a pack to lead. At best, I thought maybe I’d find a guy and we’d be happy together, but I wasn’t even expecting that, if I’m honest.” I took his hand off my shirt and threaded our fingers together. “What about you?”

“You know what kind of a family we come from. I don’t doubt my capacity to love at all, but I’m not sure I’m father material. If someone else in the pack had a kid or even more than one, I’d be all for that, but I don’t have any inherent need to be a parent.”

I smiled. “Yeah, I can understand that. Now that you said it, I’m pretty sure that’s how I think, too. Kids are cool, but I don’t think I necessarily need my own to be fulfilled.”

“Good. We can talk about this more if we change our minds at some point. We have a lot of time left together and on this earth now that I also age more slowly, so who knows.” He lifted his head and smiled at me. “I also think that we’re already parenting a band of misfit kids as it is so….”

Chuckling, I kissed him. “You’re not wrong about that.”

“Wanna have a shower with me?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows goofily.

“Yes, definitely.”

Getting under the streaming water with my gorgeous mate was a luxury I had never dreamed of before I had it. It was so outside of my experiences, that I wondered how I’d gotten this far without it.

“What’s got your thinky face on?” he asked as he pushed me to sit down on the shower bench.

I smiled as he rubbed shampoo into my scalp with his fingertips and closed my eyes. “The fact that I’ve never done this before you.”

“What? Shower with a lover?”

“Yeah. I mean I’ve showered with Rian a few times, once because we forgot we were supposed to go to a thing and time was of the essence”—Kye chuckled at that—“and twice after a heavy pain session and blood play where we wanted to use the shower to clean up and come down from the scene.”

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