Page 40 of Rogue If You Want To
My mate didn’t mind. If anything, he liked being there for me.
We walked hand in hand into the coffee shop and were greeted by Marina’s bright smile. All I knew about her was that her name was Marina, as indicated on her name tag, and that she was the human employee who always remembered I liked cinnamon rolls.
“So, cinnamon rolls.” She gave a knowing smile. “How many today?”
“Ummm… we’re gonna eat here today?” I looked at my mate, and he held up one finger for himself. “Three, please.”
She gave a nod and went and plated them up, dividing them accurately, three on mine, one on his.
“Anything to drink?”
I’d gotten to the point where even tea was not for me, and opted for water, and my mate had his coffee.
We sat in the back, eating our delicious snack and talking about the nursery and the changes we’d made to it and what still needed doing.
What I hadn’t realized at the time was that my mate had planned this afternoon together time. It felt like it was my idea, and maybe I mentioned it first, but the cinnamon rolls, or at least the trip to town, was going to happen regardless of me bringing it up. He and our pack had gotten together to surprise me in a way I never expected.
When we drove back home and walked toward our house, there by the fire pit was a table full of baby presents.
“This feels very human,” I said to my mate.
“That’s because I used to pretend to be one. Not really, but I lived among them.” He half shrugged.
That made so much sense. This was a human celebration that he'd have been accustomed to. It was touching, seeing everybody get together for us like this, especially with it being so foreign a concept to the majority of us.
A couple of people gave us books. There was a crocheted blanket, a stuffie that represented each of us, diapers… all the typical things you’d see at a human baby shower, according to my mate.
And that was great. Having our child spoiled before they were even here gave me a sense of what was to come, and how they would be treasured by this pack just the way Oak and the other children were.
But what really hit home… truly hit my feels in a way I wasn’t expecting, was that they had changed what they were doing to fit my mate’s background. This was one more reminder of how I needed to let go of past expectations for a pack and embrace this beautiful family that was now ours.
We played some games that I didn’t really understand. One about candy bars that sounded like names, I guess? My mate won that one. Another game had to do with listing as many names for certain letters of the alphabet, which at least I understood. There were more and all were silly little human games that had us laughing.
The cake was delightful, but my favorite part of the entire shower was sitting with my packmates as they told us stories about their favorite childhood memories or their favorite thing that their moms and dads did with them.
The idea was that it might help me and my mate decide what kind of parents we wanted to be, I think. I wasn’t clear on that. But to me, it had nothing to do with any of that. It was so much more.
I was getting to know my packmates on a different level, and the more I learned about each of them, the more I wanted tobe a member of this pack that could help make everyone feel as welcome and as loved as I currently did.
23
TORIN
“Can you put that blanket over there?”
My mate was sitting on a folding chair I’d brought into the root cellar that he’d designated his birthing den. Knowing little to nothing about freshwater otters before I met him, I’d assumed they gave birth in the water. But that was their salt water cousins.
“Okay.” I moved said blanket from one side of the root cellar to the other.
My mate had been nesting for weeks, and he’d been agitated about finding a place to give birth until we’d discovered the old root cellar. Auden had no knowledge of it, so it must have been dug by a homesteader years ago before the area became part of pack land.
“That’s better. Thanks.”
He was almost nine months along, so the baby could arrive any day. His belly was so huge I had to help him into the cellar that we’d been cleaning and organizing since we came upon it.
My mate studied the space and instructed me to move a stack of towels to a stone shelf on the other side of the space.
I hadn’t mentioned to Otto that I disliked small, confined spaces, especially ones that smelled stale, as the cellar had the first time we came in. But my mate’s intuition guided him on how to make the space welcoming. Or rather it spoke to him and he told me what to do to make it how he wanted it.
