“Don’t apologize, Little Bit,” Theo moved my body so that I was sitting up on my own and could face the new people in the room. Matteo had followed Aria inside and Jacob hovered in the doorway, looking unsure of what he could do.
“Nightmares aren’t something that you can control,” Aria added and perched on the edge of the bed, “so, never apologize for them.”
“But Icancontrol it—at least—I usually can.” The sound of my voice was frustrated and it was mostly directed at myself. I knew that the bed was too comfortable to sleep in as soon as I laid down, and I should have slept on the floor, now I’d woken the entire house and embarrassed myself.
Matteo reached for me, and I let him pull me into his arms, comforted by his scent. I never had any nightmares during my heat, I wasn’t sure if it was because of my hormones or because I was too exhausted to dream, but I associated Matteo’s scent with deep, deep sleep. My eyes drooped a little bit and I had to blink a few times to wake up.
“Tibby, what do you mean that you can usually control it?” Theo asked and it was clear that he wasn’t going to let it go.
I heaved a sigh and snuggled in closer to Matteo’s scent before begrudgingly answering his question: “The nightmares happen when I get too comfortable and fall into deep sleep. So—no comfort equals no nightmares.” I shrugged, it probably sounded absolutely insane to the alphas around me, but it's what worked.
The four people around me sat in stunned silence for a few moments before Aria muttered something harshly in German. She knelt down in front of Matteo and I and slid her hands along the sides of my face like she had done this morning, turning my face so that I was looking at her.
“Sweetheart, that's not okay. No part of that is okay. You should be able to get a full night of sleep, even if you have nightmares.” Her amber eyes bore into mine until I had to look away. I felt embarrassed now because I had been hoping that they would just shrug and write it off as another one of my oddities. It was what everyone else did.
Theo looked around the room again, his eyes landing once again on the folded blankets in the basket, “Is that why you didn’t build a nest?”
I shook my head, that was a whole other story from my nightmares, “I don’t really get nesting. Never have... it’s not something the other omegas did in the compound and by the time I made it to the academy it just wasn’t really my thing. But,” I hurried to add, “I'm healthy and my heat cycles are normal—so the academy decided that it wasn’t really a priority for me to learn how to nest.”
Though that didn’t stop the older omegas who worked at the academy from looking down on me. They’d all decided that I was broken somehow because I couldn’t nest. Whenever they did apartment inspections they’d look at my neatly made bed with pity as they made sure that I wasn’t keeping any contraband in my room. They never even sent me fresh nesting materials like they did with all of the other omegas at the school. Eloise had offered me some of hers, but I honestly didn’t even know where to begin when it came to masking a nest, so I always rejected her offer.
Besides, a nest would be too comfortable and comfort brings nightmares, remember? So I just never learned and I’d done okay...at least I had been doing okay until three alphas and a beta were now staring at me with pity in their eyes. I absolutely hated pity, it was the most common look on the faces of the CPS workers, lawyers and academy officials when they spoke to me about my past. I was the poor little girl who had grown up in a cult and it had, apparently, broken something inside of me. So, I developed a snarky personality: people couldn’t look at me with sympathy if I irritated them and kept them at an arm’s length. Now, these people who I was coming to like—much faster than I was used to—were looking at me with expressions ranging from horror to pity. The looks grated against my insides like sandpaper.
“Well, if you’ve gotten your fill of the sideshow that is my life, you guys should go back to bed. I promise not to wake you up with my screams again tonight.” My voice was sharp and I untangled myself from Matteo and climbed out of the bed. My stomach was in knots as I stumbled away from them and into the bathroom, slamming the door to their protests.
“Tibby...” Theo’s gruff voice came from the other side of the door as he knocked, but I ignored him and sat on the floor and brought my knees up to my chest. “Tibby, open the door, you can’t just lock yourself away. It’s okay that you don’t know how to make a nest—I don’t know how to make one either.” He offered and I snorted derisively. He was an alpha, when would he have to ever make a nest? All he had to do was enjoy an omega’s nest. Omegas made nests, it was a part of our instinctual makeup.
If an omega couldn’t make a nest, society viewed them as broken. Like the older omegas at the academy. Like the pack that I’d been briefly courted by when I was younger and more hopeful. It was a shitty fact of life, but that was the way it is.
I curled more tightly into a ball and listened to the muffled conversation outside, I could tell when Aria left the room because her higher voice disappeared from the conversation. At this point, I was sure that they were all going to head back to bed having given up on getting me to open the door.
But a few minutes after Aria’s voice left, it returned and there was another knock on the door.
“Tibby? Can I come in?” Aria asked.
“If I say no, will you go away?” I volleyed back, wishing everyone would just let me wallow for a little bit. What was wrong with wallowing? It was a great way to pass time. People should wallow more often, maybe they’d be happier if they had time set aside every day to just be sad.
My mind bunnies distracted me for a moment, that was at least, until Matteo chimed in, “No, she won’t. You’re better off opening the door. I once had a cold war with her back in 2015 that ended with her proving that she could be self-sufficient without coffee for three weeks. She was cranky, and scary as hell, but she won that war. Trust me on this Tiberius the First.”
Okay, was it just me, or were Matteo’s nicknames actually getting worse? With a sigh, I unlocked the door to the bathroom from where I sat.
“Only Aria.” I said as the door handle began to turn and the handle stopped.
“No fair!” That was Matteo’s pouting voice, and I was sure that he was going to come in with her anyway, but when the door opened a few seconds later, only Aria stood in front of me. She was carrying a basket packed full with what looked like various bath products. She shut the door behind her with a soft click and looked down at me, with an apologetic smile.
Aria crouched down in front of me, putting the basket on the floor next to her, and gathered my hands into hers, her long fingers wrapping around mine. “For what it’s worth, Tibby, I’m sorry that you felt like we were pitying you.”
I began to pull my hands out of hers, ready to flee the bathroom and find another hidey-hole in the apartment, but she gripped my fingers tighter. “Don’t run away from me. Face me head-on. Being pitied is a shitty feeling, and I’m sorry we made you feel that way. I promise to try not to pity you in the future, you are way too vibrant of a person to be pitied.”
Well, shit, I was going to start crying if she kept it up, so I changed the subject. “You sound like you know what being pitied feels like, why?”
Aria smiled, the little lines around her eyes crinkling as she sat back on her heels, “How about I run you a bath and we can talk about it?”
“A bath?” I was pretty sure that I sounded like an idiot, but Aria just continued to smile.
“Yes, a bath. I can’t build you a nest because, quite frankly I don’t know how to do that either, but Icanrun the most comfortable bath you’ve ever had in your life, what do you say?” Aria stood up straight and held her hand out to me.
I should say no and send her outside so that I could continue wallowing in my own self-pity—if others were going to pity me anyways I might as well head them off, right? But I was curious about Aria’s past...and I was still sweaty from my nightmare. Like, really sweaty.
