More Than a One-Night Knot

Chapter 1

ESPER

That’s it—I’m cursed. Cursor cursed. It’s like death by a thousand cuts, except it’s a thousand blinks, and instead of a knife, it’s a pixelated cursor on my computer screen, spelling my doom.

I'm so annoyed I could cry. Scratch that—am crying. My own annoyance is bringing me to tears. Literally. The back of my throat burns with the unshed tears I’m holding back.

My eyes burn, tiny dams threatening to break and soak my cheeks.

Yet even with all this emotion, I can’t get the words down.

No matter how I try to flip the script, nothing comes to mind, to my fingers, my voice.

Nothing.

I’ve tried starting at the end, the middle, and nothing sparks my fingers to miraculously start chugging out this paper.

I run my hands through my hair. My long nails scraping against my scalp give me a bit of release. At this point, I literally don’t even care what words get written. Any words will do. Just pick some!

I look at the points listed on the rubric and try to calculate my grade if I didn’t turn it in. Except, as it turns out, I’m not good at math either.

Damn. I am sucking tonight.

Sighing, I roll my chair away from my desk and plop onto my dorm bed even though I have…

My gaze drags back to the clock above my desk.

…thirty minutes to get this essay done.

Muttering curses, I’m back in my chair and at my desk despite the ache in my legs from sitting for so long. The cursor stabs at me with menace, the white page as good as a white flag of defeat. My failing out of this class becomes more and more inevitable with every blink.

Why am I even doing this? Do interior designers really need a college degree?

No! They need opportunities. A foot in the door, a connection into the industry.

Which…I don’t have. Not yet anyways. Hence the detour to college.

Also because of the full ride and stipend. That definitely helped. But it also meant failing out is not an option.

I cannot surrender.

I am smart, capable. I earned my spot here. I can do this.

College is only going to make my resume look that much better to any design firm I want.

The soft fabric of my teddy bear pajama bottoms calms me as I trace my fingers over them. My recently done squared-tip nails make the perfect point to trace each bear’s cute round ears as I wrack my brain with fresh determination.

At least I get ten points for having the proper heading and my name on this essay. So there’s that.

No, Esper. You can’t afford to flunk. Get your shit together.

Grabbing my soft waffle-knit blanket off my bed, I wrap it around my shoulders. My nose wrinkles as my own cranberry scent swarms me.

I hate smelling my own scent. Or more like, my own scent isn’t enough. In fact it makes my problem worse. It makes me want, crave something different, more.

I don’t have access to more. I’ve never had access to more.

My first heat is coming.

It started weeks ago. The constant itch, the need for relief, the hot flashes—all of it. Getting progressively worse with each day.

Once I realized the changes happening to me were signs my heat was coming, I called my mom. Wanna know what she said…

“You have to get yourself out of your dorm honey, Prince Charming isn’t gonna find you in your dorm room.”

It was a stroke of luck that she found my dads at the diner she worked at. An eighteen-year-old omega stumbling across her scent-matched Pack over burgers and fries. She knew, instantly, and so did they.

Damn good luck.

She had heat partners. She had the perfect heat partners. The people created by the gods just for her plopped in her lap. Almost literally.

I had no one.

Not even a boyfriend. Ever.

Just me and my vibe.

And lately that hasn’t been enough. Lately, in fact, my impending heat was making day-to-day living about a million times more difficult. Case in point: my still mostly blank essay on the very important distinctions between various hues of the color blue.

Today I will…. My fingers hover over my keyboard, begging my mind to get going despite the terrible sentence starter. Today I will describe the differences between cyan, powder, and royal blue and why these differences matter.

My nails clack soothingly on the keyboard. A sound most folks find annoying but one that I love. The ASMR video playing on my phone annoys the shit out of my friends—well, friend—but I can’t relax without it.

As the clock ticks, I care less and less. My brain is finally moving and my fingers move as fast over the keyboard. The shittest essay of my life is born on this page.

With thirty seconds to spare, I turn in the essay, knowing I’m not getting an A but maybe a C minus.

It’s only the beginning of the year so it’s not the end of the world, despite how it feels right at this moment.

For today that’s gonna have to be enough.

I’ll cry over it once I get my actual grade back.

It’s a risky game, since I’m a scholarship student, but hey, we can’t win them all, right?

A class on color theory is fun… in theory, but writing essays is never fun. No matter what topic they are on. I can talk out loud ’til I'm cerulean in the face, but the moment it comes to writing on paper, or typing in my case, the words just vanish.

And it’s not just class papers either. My dating profile is a mess.

How the hell am I supposed to explain who I am in two hundred characters or less?

The prompts section is better, but still just as nerve-racking.

The icon of the Heat Seekers app mocks me, but I tap it anyway, as I know my time to prepare for my heat is running out.

My face appears on the screen as my profile loads.

My straight dark brown hair reaches to about my bra strap.

Dull brown eyes, and pouty pink lips, the only feature I truly like about myself.

My long bangs cover a lot of my face in my first picture, a candid my best friend-slash-ex-roommate Penny took of me when I first moved to Maine.

We got along well, but as an omega I couldn’t room with her once my heat signs started showing.

After that, the dorm admin put me in the last private room available for omegas. Allllll the way across campus.

I should be grateful they even had a heat-eligible room left, since I’d have to spend my heat here.

The soundproof, scent-containing room is small and doubles as my nest, so I stopped having people over.

Also conveniently stopped Penny from complaining about the ASMR I like to play out loud before I go to sleep.

She’s a hater to her core about it, and I can respect it, but even if I have headphones on it’s an issue.

But just seeing people wave their pretty nails and run their hands over comb bristles on my screen pissed her off.

Penny is a beta. She gets to have normal biology and isn’t controlled by the need to be comforted 24/7 or horny… 24/7. Lucky duck.

Two weeks in my new space, and I truly wish I’d lied about having symptoms way earlier.

My main light is never turned on, no more complaints from my lovely but persnickety BFF, and I get to decorate how I want.

I even have warm-bulb fairy lights on my ceiling, which I know violates code, but the Resident Advisor, RA, doesn’t mind as long as I don’t get caught.

And if I do get caught, I have no qualms about pulling the omega card. It’s the least I deserve for suffering through omega moods and debilitating heats.

I’ve got a dark gray comforter and more pillows than the bed can hold, some on the floor and some under the bed where my clothes are kept.

I didn’t hate the oak wood furniture either so it truly worked out for me.

With a sigh, I slide through potential matches on the app. I've swiped for a solid five minutes when the screen clears. A black background with colorful confetti appears on the screen. The picture of the man I just swiped right on shows up with the text “You’ve made a match.”

Holy crap. My first match!

I lurch forward in my seat, my phone heavy in my hand as a chat appears. For the second time tonight, a blinking cursor is yelling at me to write something. Like I hadn’t just cleared this damn hurdle.

Shit. What should I say?

Swallowing the nervous saliva accumulating in my mouth, I move from my desk chair to my bed. Barely fitting with all the pillows there but loving the squished feeling.

The empty chat stares back at me. Reed, my match's name, and his photo at the top of the screen stare at me as I think of what to say.

I honestly didn’t think I’d match with Reed.

His profile says he’s another omega. He appears to be of East Asian descent, though I’m not sure. He’s got honey blond dyed hair and black tattoo swirls licking up his neck and I assume the rest of his body. The kind of hot that makes you speechless.

I know he goes to school here at White Pine Crest University. He’s a business major and apparently loves motorcycles, as most of his pictures are him on his bike.

I should have made my profile exclusive to alphas, since the whole point was to find someone to see me through my heat then part ways. But my gut wouldn’t allow me.

Maybe because I was meant to meet Reed? My own meant to be, just like my mom’s?

Esper, stop it, oh my god.

Esper

Hi!

Pressing the little blue arrow sends an internal cringe down my spine, but my screen was trying to turn off on me as I stared at his picture.

The man was fine. Like, five syllables of fine. His muscles and tattoos threatened to send my pre-heat symptoms into overdrive from the safety of my phone screen. His love of burgers and motorcycles was hot too. But now that I’ve initiated contact, my stomach twists with nerves.

Could I even sleep with a stranger? Would my body care that I didn’t know this man?

My phone pings, my screen glowing with his reply.

Reed

Hey

I guess I was dry as hell with that first text. Curling into my pillows, I throw a blanket over me as I start typing a reply.

Esper

Sorry, I’m nervous.

The bubbles pop up and then disappear and I’m thinking maybe I ruined it. Maybe I was too honest. Maybe I was—Oh, he answered!

Reed