Chapter 15
Fifteen
Wren
I put off going to see Dot for one more day, which is exactly one more day than I’ve got.
She doesn’t make me come to her. That’s the first kindness.
I’m elbow-deep in dough the next morning, running on no sleep and a body that feels like a struck bell, when she lets herself in the back, flips my sign to CLOSED without asking, and sets two cups of tea on the counter like she owns the place.
In fairness, she owns most of the town, so.
I haven’t slept more than an hour at a stretch in days.
Everything’s too loud, too bright, and too much.
I snapped at a customer yesterday over nothing, apologized, very nearly cried about it.
My skin runs hot, then cold. I keep coming to in the middle of a task with no memory of starting it, just a low hum in my blood pulling me toward the wall I share with the firehouse.
If this is stress, it’s a kind I have never once met.
“Sit,” she says. “You look like a woman who’s been arguing with her own body for a week and losing.”
I sit. I don’t touch the tea. “Eli told me to come see you.”
“Eli’s a good boy.” She settles across from me, hands folded, and for once there’s no scheme in her face, just a plainer thing, older and gentler.
“He’s also right. So let’s you and me have the talk nobody had with you, because your aunt would skin me if I let her girl walk into her first heat blind. ”
There’s the word. Out loud. Heat. I’ve been circling it for days like it might not be true if I never said it.
“I don’t,” I start, and stop. “I thought maybe it was stress.”
“It’s not stress, sweetheart.” Not unkind.
“You’re a late-presented omega a month past turning, and you’ve had three unbonded alphas underfoot for most of it.
Your body’s done the math and decided it’s time.
First heat usually comes on fast once the pre-heat sets in. Couple of days. Three at the outside.”
Two or three days. The number lands in me like a dropped tray.
“And what,” I ask, “exactly, happens?”
So she tells me. Plainly, like you’d explain a storm to someone who grew up where it doesn’t snow.
The fever. The need, deep and physical and relentless, a want that won’t be reasoned with or waited out.
Days of it. How an alpha’s rut answers a heat, how the knot goes from that small everyday thing to the full one, built to see an omega all the way through.
She doesn’t make it sound scary. She makes it sound like weather.
Big. Natural. Survivable, and a whole lot more survivable with somebody who cares about you than without.
“It won’t hurt you,” she says. “It’ll just take everything you’ve got. And it goes a great deal easier if you’re warm and safe and not alone. That’s not weakness talking. That’s just how we’re built.”
“How long have I got, before it comes?” I ask, though I already dread the answer.
“Days. Two, three. You’ll know, it won’t be subtle.
” She says it gently. “The morning it lands, you won’t be able to think about anything else.
You won’t want to. Your good sense takes a holiday, and your body takes the wheel, and it steers straight at the nearest alpha it trusts.
That’s the part nobody warns the new ones about.
It isn’t only needing a body through the fever.
It’s your own instincts picking who’s safe, and pointing you at them whether your pride cares for it or not. ”
I nod. I’m holding it together. And then she says the thing that takes the floor out from under me completely.
“Now. You’ll have started nesting by now. Have you noticed?”
“Nesting,” I repeat.
“Building your nest. Gathering things. Soft things, warm things, things that smell right, dragging them somewhere safe to burrow into.” She watches my face. “Most omegas do it without noticing they’re doing it. It’s the body getting the den ready.”
And the bottom falls out, because I know exactly what she’s describing. I’ve been doing it all week.
I thought I was going mad. I thought it was the not-sleeping.
For six days I’ve been carrying things up to my flat and building them into the corner of my bed and telling myself it’s nothing, I’m cold, I’m tired, I’m just tidying.
Every soft thing I own. The good quilt. Three pillows I don’t need.
And, God help me, other things. A flannel shirt Cal left slung over a chair one afternoon that I fully intended to give back and somehow never did.
A pair of Eli’s work gloves off the counter.
The tea towels. So many damn tea towels, all of them ones the guys touched, all of them pressed into a corner of my bed because when I put my face in them I sleep, finally, for an hour, like a woman drugged.
I told myself I was doing laundry wrong.
I told myself I’d give the shirt back. I told myself the gloves were there by accident, that I hadn’t gone down to the shop at midnight on purpose to fetch them off the counter where Eli left them, which I had, and had then lied about to no one at all, because there was nobody to lie to but me, and I bought it whole.
I’ve built a nest. I’ve built a nest out of them.
“Oh no,” I say, very quietly.
Dot bites back a smile, but she has the grace not to laugh. “Whose things are in it?”
I don’t answer. My scalding face answers for me.
“Ah,” she says, warm as anything. “All three. Well. There’s your answer, then, isn’t it, and it came out of your own two hands before your head would say it. The body doesn’t lie, Wren. You can argue with it all you like. It’ll just keep building the truth in the corner of your bed while you do.”
And that’s the thing I can’t stand. Not the heat.
Not even the mortification, though I could die of that alone.
It’s that my traitor body has already chosen, already decided, already gathered those three men up into a nest and made itself a home out of the smell of them, while my mouth has been telling anyone who’ll listen that I want nothing from anyone.
“They’d help you through it,” Dot says gently. “You know that. Any of them, all of them. You wouldn’t even have to ask twice. You wouldn’t have to ask once. That whole firehouse has been holding its breath over you for weeks.”
“I know.”
“So.”
“So I’m going to do it alone.”
It comes out flat and certain. Dot’s face falls, just a little, because she’s been at this thirty years and she knows a wall when she hits one.
“Wren.”
“I can’t.” And it’s the truth, the real one, the one under all the others.
“Dot, I can’t. You’re asking me to spend three days needing three men more than I’ve ever needed anything, wide open, no dignity, nothing held back.
And then it ends, and I have to look at them across the pancake breakfast for the rest of my life knowing they saw all of that.
Knowing I let them. And if I read it wrong, if it turns out I was a nice way to spend a heat and nothing past it, that’s going to leave a mark I haven’t got the room for right now.
I’ve only just gotten the hang of being wanted a little.
I’m not brave enough to bet the whole farm on being wanted a lot. ”
Dot is quiet for a long moment. She doesn’t argue. That’s the worst part. A good matchmaker knows the difference between a woman who needs a push and a woman who needs to lose an argument with herself first.
She sees it, whatever it is, the thing that’s kept me careful my whole life, kept my heart in a drawer where nobody can knock it off a shelf.
She’s probably seen it in a hundred stubborn women before me.
Doesn’t make it budge an inch. Knowing exactly why you flinch has never once, in the whole history of the world, been the same as being able to quit flinching.
“All right,” she says at last, and covers my hand with hers.
“It’s your heat, love. It’s your call, all the way down.
Nobody in this town will lay a hand on that door you don’t open yourself.
” She stands, squeezes once, and picks up her tea.
“But you do me one thing. You keep your phone charged and by the bed. Because being brave and being alone aren’t the same thing, and I’ve watched a lot of stubborn omegas learn that the hard way. ”
Then she flips my sign back to OPEN, lets herself out into the morning, and leaves me alone in my quiet shop with a cooling cup of tea, a nest upstairs full of three men I can’t have, and two days, maybe three, before my own body stops taking no for an answer.
I go up at lunch and look at it. The nest. Really look.
It’s the softest, safest, most honest thing I’ve made since I got here. It smells like cedar and coffee and smoke, like home, like the answer to a question I keep refusing to ask.
The pillows still hold the warm shape of the last time I lay here.
The flannel still smells of Cal, sun, and hay.
Eli’s gloves, coffee and leather. And threaded through all of it, faint and stubborn, that sweet burnt-sugar note I keep chasing on Rhett and never catch, except here, in the nest, where nobody can see me looking for it.
My body has built me the one honest room in my whole life and filled it with the three of them.
I should take it apart.
I lie down in the middle of it instead, just for a minute.
I don’t take it apart. I don’t cry. I don’t call anyone.
I just breathe them in, let the one honest room hold me, and promise myself that when the heat comes I’ll face it alone and prove to nobody but me that I don’t need what I’ve so obviously already gathered up in both arms.
Two days. Maybe three.
I’ll be fine.