The sour taste her conversations with Terry and Brian had left in Charlotte's mouth were quickly forgotten as she approached the gate area. She was breathing heavily, not from exhaustion, as her fit she-wolf's body had hardly been challenged by her morning walk, but with nervousness. The course of her life was going to depend on whether or not Naomi was there.
If Charlotte was scared, Naomi was terrified. The husky, who had barely batted an eye standing up to enraged bear-morphs, was now facing leaving the park, her only home for nearly a decade, to go into the outside world which had no doubt immeasurably changed since she had left it for the last time. And she would not be accompanied by the pack she trusted, but by only one partner, who wasn't even a husky. Was it worth it? She knew it was too late to turn back--if she chickened out now, after publicly telling the huskies she was leaving, she would never be able to restore her authority over the pack.
Her musings, in the scrum of departing guests, their friends who had come to see them off, and the huskies doing the processing, were interrupted by a howl of pure joy. She knew that howl. She knew that she-wolf.
Charlotte came bounding over, just as she had the first day they met, and knocked the husky to the ground again. She licked Naomi's face as the husky blushed under her fur. The two canines rolled around on the ground, oblivious to the stares coming from guest and husky alike.
Charlotte got up. "Ready to go, sweetness?"
Naomi braced herself, and looked into her lover's face. "Ready as I'll ever be, wolf-girl!" She followed Charlotte into the "non-change back" lane.