Page 53 of Knot Your Pawn

I reach out, carefully stroking her messy hair, trying to help her get back to sleep.

The pheromone withdrawal is the main issue, once we solve that, the rest should go away too.

But that could take days, which, ehhh...

I’m not looking forward to being locked in here, in the bathroom, for days with nowhere else to go.

Once we were all upstairs and settled —in the bathroom, not the nest like planned, but we were as settled as we could be— life for the rest of the organisation and the general household started going again.

Which meant that Eli could bring us food, all of it pre-packed so there would be as few pheromones on it as possible, and that we could hear other people walking around downstairs, going about their days.

We spent the first two days in the bathroom, day and night, mostly sitting next to the bath as Mathew and Vera slept inside.

By the third day, our pheromones had settled enough in the bedroom that our Omegas could be there without any problems. Which was a welcome change for everyone as we were all sore from sleeping on hard surfaces.

The bed isn’t as comfortable as the nest, but we’re not going into the nest room yet. It’s still a mess, since none of us have had the opportunity to clean it.

And it’s going to require a lot of cleaning with all the pieces of fabric and pillow stuffing in there. None of which we want to accidentally blow into the bedroom or anywhere else where it would be even harder to clean up.

Mathew and Vera have been asleep most of the time, only waking up long enough to eat and get closer to us for some cuddles.

I’d been worried that getting them to really rest so that they could recover was going to be a struggle, was going to be tricky, since they’re usually pretty active. But, after the whole nest-destroying thing, they’ve only been sleeping.

Which has been a blessing, even if it’s worrying at times.

It has left the rest of us with a lot of free time on our hands —way more than is probably healthy— while we’re worrying about our mates and can’t do anything that might require us to leave this room for any length of time.

I’m getting restless, which is not good, at all.

“Does anyone need anything from the craft room?” I get up from the bed, making sure not to disturb it too much. I can leave the room for a minute or so, long enough to go to the bathroom, anyway, and a trip to the craft room shouldn’t take me much longer than that.

Riley looks up from her phone, thinking. “My knitting project is in my own room. I’ll go pick it up once you’ve returned.”

I look to Caleb and Luca.

Caleb shrugs and then shakes his head. “I’m good.”

“What have you got on offer?” Luca stands up from his place near the window, where a stream of fresh air from outside makes it slightly easier for him to breathe. “Because when I grabbed that paper to try and distract Vera, I wasn’t in there long enough to get a good sense of what you had.”

“Ehhh...” I try to come up with a list of things I know I can ‘grab and go’, so I’m not gone for too long. “Knitting and crochet, but you’re going to have to be able to come up with whatever just from what I manage to grab, I can’t dig around too long.”

He laughs, an easy sound that makes me smile too. It’s good to hear him laugh, it means he’s probably finally settling in a little. “Pass. What else?”

“Cross-stitch. I’ve got a couple of kits, so, easy to grab but limited options. Sewing, but you’re going to have to hand-sew as I’m not going to bring the machine over. And, again, it’s going to have to be improvised from what I manage to find. Ehh...”

What else did we get? We picked up a lot of things that day at the fabric and the yarn store, but then some of us also ordered things online after that, which I don’t remember as well.

“I think we got a few miniature kits. What I recall, they should be stored near the door...”

“They require more tools, which are not stored with the kits.” Riley sits up. “We’ve got paper crafts things, but those also have the issue of having to find various tools to do anything with them.”

Luca looks between us. “So, from what I understand, cross-stitch is probably my best option?”

“Right now? Yes.” I shrug. “Sorry.”

“If you’re into knitting or crochet, I can grab you what you need when I pick up my own project from my room, but only if you know what it is you’ll need, and if I remember where we stored it.” Riley looks excited about the idea of sharing her hobby with another one of her mates.

She loves her time knitting with Vera, so to get another mate on board is probably even more exciting.