Page 2 of Knot Only For One Night

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.