Page 52 of Fur-Ever Home

He looked like he wanted to protest more, but then his face crumpled and he leaned against my shoulder. "You're right."

"If it makes you feel better, you can tell them they have to convince me first."

His warm breath puffed against my chest. "That won't be a problem. You're a pushover."

He wasn't wrong. Still, it gave him a way out. He could blame his family's horrible ideas, like the house and the minivan, on me when the time came.

Except when his dad took him to the dealership to trade in his hatchback, Ben loved the van for its convenient self-opening doors and extra seating. He also loved the house when we walked through it. The laundry appliances had their own little room inside the garage, with a folding table and bench. The main and smallest bedrooms were next to each other, perfect for a nursery, and the third was opposite the kitchen, for when our child wanted more independence.

My favorite part about the house, though, was the eight-foot privacy fence in the backyard. It contained only a stone patio surrounded by a few succulents and a rock garden, but it was a safe place for my wolf.

"It's your fur-ever home," Ben teased once we were back in the van.

The words punched a hole in my chest and squeezed my heart. I turned to him as he snapped his seatbelt into place. "You're my fur-ever home."

His smile was like sunshine peaking from behind a rain cloud. "I am?"

"Remember how my wolf reacted to you after the plane crash? And when we played with the kids?"

"And when you marked me." He quaked with a full-body tremor. "So good."

"You'll always be my home."

When Mattand Jake threw us an impromptu baby shower the day after we moved in, Ben agreed his family wasn't all bad. They'd overheard us talking about going shopping for all the furniture and equipment we needed and pitched in. First, they filled our baby's room with furniture from their garage. Then, they gave us an entire closet's worth of clothes in sizes up to one year.

"We've been waiting to unload this shit, um, stuff on you!" Jake said.

Josie gave Ben a milk pump and a bottle washer. Our little kitchen didn't have much counter space, but Pops said I could trade my coffee machine for the bottle washer once the baby came. "I'll buy you coffee at work!"

Alex and Shelly gave us a stroller, the seat piled high with pregnancy books. Once I had everything put away in the kitchen, I rolled the stroller to the garage, unpacked the books, and took them to our bedroom. We started reading them that night.

I kept a notepad by my bed to jot down all the things we would need. The books surprised me with the level of contradictory information. Each night, I reviewed my list and crossed off items I'd listed earlier.

The book on the bottom of the stack was the most practical. After reading it, I realized I didn't need anything on my list. Ben's family had already supplied us with the essentials, and even some luxuries like the stroller and bottle cleaner.

"We're going to be fine." Ben sounded overtired as he drifted off to sleep. He'd given up reading fifteen minutes before I did.

Still, I worried as I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. I worried my parenting skills would suck because of my strict upbringing. I'd tried to be the exact opposite of what my pack expected an alpha wolf to be, but what if I reverted to the old ways when raising my children? The silly thought kept me awake long into the night.

21

BENJAMIN

Connor was a big ol'tattletale. I loved my alpha, but he was supposed to be on my side. I helped him with two little work projects, and then I got a visit from Pops, carrying a laptop and paperwork for me to sign.

"If you want to work for my bank," he said, "You'll be paid." He didn't say the rest, but I heard it loud and clear in my mind."And you'll be grateful."

"Thank you," I mumbled. At the bottom of the contract, where it listed my generous salary and benefits elections, it said,"To be renegotiated in six months,"with a date that coincided with my return to work after the bank's three-month paternity leave.

"This is too much already," I said. "Why do we need to renegotiate?"

"You'll see," was all Pops said.

My new job was simple enough. I compiled all the bank's vast resource manuals into one source document, and Connor added the information to the bank's applications and websites page by page. Some of the information was customer-facing, and some for customer service, but most of the information detailed the bank's back-end systems. While Connor reviewed the currentguidelines, he even found new ways to tweak the processes, and in some cases, rewrite the programs to make the bank run more efficiently.

I loved working with Connor, but I found myself bored with the project. The foreign finance department's processes intrigued me more than the rest because they dealt with money conversion and foreign markets, my fields of study in college.

We finished the department's pages in late August, so I was filled with job apathy when we went to Jake's house for Labor Day. The work talk at family cookouts had always annoyed me, but after a few minutes of venting to my family, I realized how cathartic it was to share with people who understood.

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