Page 10 of Torment Me Knot
Espie
Sweat soaks through my clothes and cools against my skin, hot and freezing at the same time. My joints grind like something's chewing through them, muscles locking and releasing. Wallace's cocktails are leaving my system, and my body punishes me for surviving them.
I curl into myself and fall back on the breathing technique that got me through everything else. Shallow. Quiet. Small. An omega whine escapes me. High and thin. The kind that means retribution. I lock my jaw shut, but the sound keeps rising in my throat, my instincts betraying me. Underneath it I smell myself. Sour and sharp, omega distress bleeding into the air with every exhale.
She's there instantly. “Hey.” The word cuts through the haze. “Sweetheart, can you hear me?”
My teeth chatter too hard to answer.
She moves closer, her scent flooding the space, cedar going sharp and edged. “I need to hold you. Keep you warm.” A pause, like she's swallowing something down. “Can I do that?”
She's asking. Even now, even watching me fall apart by degrees, she's asking.
“I know you don't want me near you.” The words come out stripped back, rough at the edges, and I smell the war in her. “You're shaking so hard you're going to hurt yourself. You’ll feel better if I hold you. Please. Let me help you.”
She's still purring. The sound is worn thin from hours of it, raspy at the edges, but she hasn't stopped. The vibration of it lodges below my sternum, loosening something I'm fighting hard to keep clenched. I should tell her to stop. I should hate the way it gets inside me. I don't tell her to stop. Neither yes nor no comes out of me, and she takes the silence as permission. Or maybe she runs out of road.
She climbs onto the bed and wraps around me, chest to back, her arm across my stomach, her face buried in my hair, and her warmth hits all at once. The weight of her arm. The heat through our clothes. Her breathing, slow against the back of my head, like she’s counting each exhale to keep herself steady.
“I’ve got you.” Low against my ear. Certain. “Breathe. Ride it out. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She’s still asking to touch me instead of taking. Not expecting I’ll be grateful for it.
Her body settling against mine registers all the way down my spine. The anxiety slowly bleeds out of me. Her cedar warms as her purr vibrates through me, holding me together while soothing something restless inside her at the same time.
The shaking turns too violent to fight. I feel like I’m splintering apart, and there’s nothing in this room except her holding me together, so my body decides for me. It softens. Goes still.
My omega understands her already.
The rest of me is still terrified.
Need an Alpha. Can't survive without one. You're nothing on your own.
The anger. The fear. The absolute certainty that warmth is a prelude to something worse. My body won't hear any of it. My omega won't hear any of it. She presses deeper into the cedar and the warmth and purrs like she's been given something she was starving for.
The sour note in my own scent thins enough that cedar comes through, filling my lungs instead of competing with the sharp reek of my own fear.
She holds me through it. Time stops making sense, measured now in fever spikes and breaks, in the quality of light shifting behind the curtains, in how many times a cool cloth presses to my forehead and disappears. My muscles cramp and release in waves. My skin goes from burning to ice and back. My throat hurts from sounds I don't remember making. Through all of it her purr never stops, her arm never leaves.
I surface, fighting my way back from oblivion: her voice somewhere to my left, low and worried, talking to someone I can't place; the chemical sting of something injected into my arm; the sour smell of myself saturating sheets, air, skin; cedar underneath it all, constant, like something that lives here now.Underneath the cedar, underneath everything, her purr still going.
Mine mine mine, some animal part of me keeps insisting, without my permission, without my wanting it, my omega straining toward the alpha.
One second I'm under and the next I'm thrashing, violent, uncoordinated, my elbow connecting hard with something solid, my legs kicking against sheets that wrap like restraints. My voice tears out of my throat before I know it's happening.
“Get off get off getoff—”
The room has no shape. No way to measure where I am in the dark. My chest pounds so hard my vision strobes with it, white-out pulses in the corners. The sheets. The smell. Someone's arms in the dark.
She releases me. The warmth goes. Cold air rushes into every place where her body was and the wail that tears out of me isn't the soft whining from before. It's rawer, scraped up from somewhere deeper, high and keening and not under my control. The sour reek of my distress floods the room.
I scramble backward until my spine hits the headboard. Breath comes in short pulls that don't reach my lungs, the room tilting, shadows bleeding into each other at the edges. The whining won't stop. It takes too long to understand it's coming from me, my omega howling for the Alpha who let go,come back come back why did you leave,while I press myself into the headboard hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
Shut up shut up shut up!
Her voice comes from somewhere to my left, rough with sleeplessness. “I don’t know what you need. I’m not touching you now. I’m not anywhere close.”
The room is still swimming. I stare at where I think she is.
