Chapter 34
Maya
I wake to the scent of bergamot surrounding me.
Behind me, Bash's arm is still loosely draped around my waist from last night, his warmth a solid line along my back.
On my other side, I can feel the familiar weight of Elias.
I know it's him before I open my eyes because of the cool mineral scent that always clings to him. Cedar and amber linger nearby as well.
I'm in my nest, surrounded by alphas.
All three of their breathing patterns are slow and even.
I don't move. I just lie there and soak in the moment. Through the haze of sleep, I'm aware that my body feels completely relaxed, and I feel content in a way I don't think I've ever experienced before.
It feels good.
I can't help wondering what it would be like to wake up like this every morning.
As I lie there, Elias shifts slightly and adjusts his arm, causing the blanket to rustle.
Adrian moves next from the foot of the nest, and I feel his hand brush briefly against my ankle, as though he's checking to make sure I'm still there.
Bash shifts last. His arm tightens around my waist for a moment before relaxing again, and then I hear him exhale deeply into his pillow and go still.
“Morning,” Adrian says to no one in particular.
“Not yet,” Bash replies into his pillow.
Adrian is silent for a second.
Then, in a dry tone, he says, “The call sheet says otherwise.”
Neither of them moves.
I open my eyes and find Elias staring at the ceiling beside me.
I push myself up onto one elbow and look around the room.
The nest has changed since I first found myself building it.
It's fuller now, more layered, and the arrangement feels less accidental.
The blankets are organized by weight. The lamp sits where I moved it because the light is better there.
The chair has both a cardigan and Adrian's hoodie draped over the back side by side because at some point that's where they ended up, and eventually it stopped looking strange.
The space carries all four of us now. Our scents have mixed into the fabric until I can't cleanly separate them anymore.
Bash opens one eye and looks at me. His hair is a disaster. “How do you feel?” he asks.
“Warm.”
He opens his other eye. “Warm like comfortable, or warm like—”
“Comfortable,” I say. “I'm okay.”
He nods once, his jaw slightly set, as though he's filing the information away and already planning to check again in twenty minutes.
Nobody moves with any urgency. Elias disappears into the bathroom.
Bash finds his shirt tangled somewhere in the blankets, pulls it over his head, and then just sits there on the edge of the nest like he’s forgotten what comes next.
Adrian is the same — upright, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing.
The fact that today is the last day of filming and all three of them are needed on set sits over the room.
It's Adrian who breaks the silence first, his gaze fixed on the floor, his hands clasped loosely. “Do you want one of us to stay home today?”
I shoot him a questioning look.
“I mean it,” he says. “If you’d rather have someone here, that’s more important than the last day of a shoot. We can figure out the logistics.” He finally looks at me. “The shoot will manage.”
“I can call out,” Bash says casually from his side of the bed. Like him doing so wouldn’t throw the entire production off track.
I look from Bash to the bathroom doorway. Elias is standing there listening to the conversation. He meets my gaze directly. He doesn't offer to stay, but he doesn't need to. I know he would if I asked.
None of them have made me feel like a burden.
They mean it.
All three of them are sitting here genuinely willing to miss the last day of a major production to stay home with me, and not one of them seems to view that as a sacrifice.
I sit with that for a moment.
Then I make a decision.
“I want to be alone today.”
The room goes silent.
“Not because anything is wrong,” I say before their expressions can shift too far.
“I just want to move through the house by myself for a little while. Without anyone watching.” I glance down at my hands.
“I've been nesting for two days while all of you watch me do it. I want to do it without an audience.”
Bash's mouth curves into something that almost qualifies as a smile. “The chair repositioning in the kitchen yesterday.”
“That was functional,” I say.
“You moved it six inches.”
“The light was wrong.” I meet his eyes, and a smile spreads across his expression.
“I want the house to feel right,” I say. “I need to focus without feeling like I'm being studied.”
Adrian is already nodding. He doesn't like it. I can see that in the tension still lingering in his jaw. But he's nodding anyway. “Okay,” he says.
Elias nods once.
“We'll have our phones,” Adrian says. “All three of us. If you text, one of us will come back immediately.”
“I know,” I say softly.
“The blocker supply in the bathroom is—”
“Adrian.” I cut him off before he can finish.
He stops.
“I know where everything is,” I say. “You showed me three times.”
A rueful expression crosses his face. He presses his mouth together, glances briefly at the floor, and then looks back up.
“Right,” he says. “Okay.”
They all scatter through the house to get ready for the day while I finish my own morning routine before making my way downstairs to the kitchen.
I settle onto one of the island stools. A few minutes later, Bash joins me and immediately starts measuring out coffee with the focus of a man performing a critical operation.
Adrian follows shortly after, crossing straight to the cabinet for a travel mug before claiming his own coffee.
When I glance toward the doorway again, I find Elias already there. He's leaning against the frame in his jacket, watching us move around the kitchen.
Bash passes me a coffee before making his own.
It has exactly the right amount of oat milk, and I wrap my hands around the mug as I think about how quickly that became routine.
Once he has his own coffee, he pauses beside me on his way to grab his keys.
“You can change anything,” he says casually.
“Furniture. Blankets. Rooms. The lamp in the hallway that I know you've been looking at. Whatever needs to be different, make it different.” He picks up his keys from the counter.
“You don't need to ask permission. The house is yours to move around in.”
I glance up at him.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say.
He holds my gaze for another second before turning toward the door.
Adrian's hand finds my shoulder as he passes. His thumb brushes once across the back of my neck, barely there, and then he's gone into the hallway.
Elias is last.
He steps into the kitchen and looks at me for a moment. “Call,” he says.
It's one word, but it carries an entire conversation with it. “I will,” I say.
The front door closes behind them. Suddenly, the house is silent enough that I feel like I could hear a pin drop.
I stand at the kitchen island and drink my coffee, enjoying the silence for a moment before setting my mug down and getting to work.
I start in the linen closet.
There's a blanket on the top shelf, thicker than the ones already in my nest. It's a heavy cream-colored knit that I've been looking at for three days.
I take it down and run my hands over the fabric.
It hasn't been used enough to carry a strong scent yet, but the texture is right and the weight is exactly what I've been wanting.
When I add it to the right side of the nest and step back to look at it, something in my chest settles.
Next comes the small candle from the bathroom shelf. I've been lighting it every evening because the vanilla scent is the closest thing in the house to something I recognize as mine. I place it on the side table beside the bed where I'll actually use it.
Bash's hoodie comes with me on the same trip. I fold it into the blankets near the center of the nest, and the spiced scent of him rises immediately from the fabric. My omega relaxes by another degree.
The lamp from the hallway is next.
I've been looking at it for two days. The light is warmer than the lamp already in the nest room, and I've been convinced it belongs in the corner by the window. It takes several attempts and more repositioning than I'd ever admit out loud before it finally looks right.
By the time I'm finished, my legs ache.
I stand in the middle of the nest and assess the results.
The room looks lived in now.
Really lived in.
It no longer looks like the temporary arrangement of someone staying in a borrowed space.
There are two hoodies draped over the chair now, mine and Adrian's.
My ChapStick sits on the side table beside the watch he left there last night.
My book rests on the shelf beside one of Elias's.
The heavy blanket at the center of the nest has been adjusted so many times that it now falls in a shape my hands recognize immediately, and I know exactly which side Bash sleeps on and which side belongs to Elias from the subtle differences in the blankets nearest each edge.
The decorative pillow from the living room couch has been bothering me for three days.
It's the wrong color in the living room and the right color in here, and I don't have a logical explanation for why.
My omega looked at it, decided it belonged near the nest, and I've been ignoring that impulse ever since because it felt ridiculous.
I go downstairs, get the pillow, and carry it back upstairs.
When I tuck it into the corner of the blanket pile, it immediately looks right.
Done.
I spend another hour moving through the house in the low-level sensory focus that the nesting instinct produces, not quite thought and not quite pure instinct, but something in between.
A hair tie goes on the bathroom counter beside the small dish where they keep change and keys.
My tea mug finds a place on the kitchen shelf alongside their coffee cups.
My gray cardigan ends up draped over the armchair in the living room.
My shoes sit by the front door beside three pairs of theirs.
Each small action leaves a trace of me in the space.
I notice that without any of the reflexive second-guessing that would have accompanied it a week ago. My legs ache, but for the first time since my presentation, I trust that some part of me knows what it's doing.
At some point I sit down on the bottom step of the stairs and notice that the light through the front windows has shifted toward noon. I realize I've been moving through this house for hours without stopping, and I'm exhausted.
A knock at the door startles me while I'm still sitting there. I open it to find a delivery driver holding a large paper bag with a receipt stapled to the top. I thank him, take the food, and close the door behind me.
The smell that escapes the bag is so familiar that I just stand there for a second. Then I look at the receipt.
It’s from my favorite restaurant.
A note is tucked beneath the receipt. It's a small square of paper folded once. I open it and immediately recognize the handwriting as Bash's, but the signature simply says your alphas, plural, which means they arranged it together.
Eat. Drink water. Rest. The lamp looks better in the nest room anyway. (Adrian noticed. Don't ask how.)
At the bottom, in different handwriting and smaller script, is a final addition:
We'll be home before dinner.
I stand in the kitchen doorway holding the bag while my chest does something I don't have clean language for.
It's not just that they ordered food.
They thought about me while they were spending their last day on set.
Somehow, they'd known exactly what I needed.
I set the note on the counter and try not to cry.
I almost fail.
Once I've composed myself, I eat on the couch with the throw from the armchair draped across my legs. The scent of my alphas settles something inside me as I happily work my way through the food I've been craving for days.
I read the note twice more before folding it carefully and slipping it into the pocket of Adrian's hoodie, which I'm currently wearing, because that's where it belongs.
The exhaustion catches up to me properly after I finish eating. It's not like last week's bone-deep depletion or the crash that follows a heat flare. This feels different.
My body is telling me it has done what it needed to do today. The restless energy that kept me moving through the house all morning is fading, replaced by a growing certainty that it's time to stop.
My eyelids feel heavy. The couch is comfortable, but the pull of my nest is stronger so I head upstairs.
Upstairs, my nest is perfect.
The new lamp in the corner casts a gentle glow across the nest. The blankets are arranged the way I want them.
The decorative pillow from the living room sits in exactly the right spot.
The candle on the side table is unlit but perfectly placed.
All four of our scents are layered throughout the room.
After taking a moment to appreciate it, I crawl into the center of the nest.
Bash's hoodie is already there where I folded it, and I pull it close, pressing my face into the fabric.
The spiced bergamot scent floods my senses.
Next, I reach for Adrian's blanket, the heavy one carrying cedar and amber, and pull it over my shoulder.
Elias's is the last thing I reach for. The cool mineral thread of his scent sits beneath everything else, grounding me as I pull the blanket closer.
The combination of all three scents settles over me, and my entire body relaxes.
I miss them.
The depth of the feeling catches me off guard.
The house is almost perfect. I've spent the entire day shaping it into exactly what I needed, and yet it still feels incomplete because they aren't here.
I thought I would feel relieved to have the space to myself today.
This morning, when the front door closed and the silence settled over the house, for one moment it felt good.
But only one.
Now I'm lying in the center of my nest with Bash's hoodie against my chest, Adrian's blanket over my shoulder, and Elias's pulled close at my side. All of it is mine. All of it is theirs. All of it belongs to us in a way I can no longer trace back to a beginning.
Somewhere along the way, while I was moving lamps, stealing decorative pillows, and eating food they ordered because they knew exactly what I wanted, this stopped being a place where I was staying until things settled down.
Without realizing when it happened, I started thinking of it as home.
I want them home.
I close my eyes.
My body is tired and pleasantly loose, continuing the slow climb toward the heat my omega has been preparing me for. The last thing I register before sleep takes me is the scent of all three of them surrounding me.