Polaris || l.s.

chapter 12: sweet

They shared a nest one last time before the day Harry was to move into the Maliks' house to wait for his heat to commence. After a delicious dinner of sausages and beans prepared by Liam (along with a cake that Niall had brought for him specifically), the triad had taken their leave with a latent promise of arriving back here as soon as the sun of the next morning would rise. That night, Louis steered clear of him, avoiding him at all costs. The alpha didn't even offer to make tea for them before they were both supposed to retire to bed, rather Louis quietly slipped out of the house without so much as a word. Confused as he was, Harry eyed the alpha with concern but stayed in the cherished confines of his quilt.

He couldn't bring himself to step out of the nest to go and confront Louis about his unwonted behavior, and so he resigned to his pillow with a soft sigh, curling around another one of his pillows. He could already feel some of the effects of his heat kicking in, and with the unyielding urge to nest and the mortifying thought of burying his head in the pillow Louis used predominantly, he was left struggling with his inner omega vying for fulfilling his primal needs and his pragmatic side fighting for some semblance of his dignity.

Though his eyes remained shut, he couldn't sleep, tossing and turning in the sheets restlessly. Giving up, at last, he huffed, lying supine as he stared up at the thatched roof. His quilt had ended up by his waist, sweat starting to bead along his hairline. The nightshirt and the loose trousers he had had on seemed too constricting, too many layers that left his skin flushed and wet.

Heats, for him, were always unbearable. Without a partner to aid him through the rather tiresome procedure, he was always left in the solitude of his room and his hands. At eighteen, when his first heat had struck, he was far too unsettled and red-faced to even think about pleasuring himself. The two days he had spent writhing on his bed were testament to his horrifying experiences with heats. When his next heat arrived, shortly after three months, he had heard enough through the whispered talks of the maids in the hallways. As it had seemed, a maid had seen him combating against the intrinsic needs of his body, and since then, word about the beloved prince of the kingdom staying thoroughly pure had entered the venomous claws of town gossip.

Leon had been the one to teach him all about heats one night after he had confessed about his dissatisfying encounter with his first heat. It was that night when he discovered the delightful thing called penetration. It was congenial to the needs of his inner omega, exactly what he had been crying for during the whole period of his initial heat. And so, with his second heat, he explored his anatomy. He learned spots that made his toes curl, and ascertained techniques that exploded waves of pleasure in his tummy. Though heats turned slightly pleasurable for him as time went on, there was still a gaping void throbbing against his chest violently with each heat that passed through.

And now, at the ripe age of twenty-five, heats were his most loathsome days of the year, most of it spent in hazed agony. Which was why he was bemused by the barely-concealed excitement of his inner omega. It was after such a long time that he felt his omega thrashing in joyous anticipation for his heat to unfold. He couldn't quite pinpoint the cause for it, but whatever it was, it probably had to do something with him being in proximity to a potential alpha.

Puffing out a breath, he turned on his side, staring at the empty space where Louis would lay, probably in the next few hours. He envisioned Louis coming in, possibly drenched from the rain outside. If Louis was his alpha, he would have quietly watched the alpha undress in front of him, trading his saturated clothes for a pair of soft ones— they would work well for his befuddled brain, wouldn't they? If they were a bonded couple, he would have whined for Louis to get in their nest already, snuggling up to the alpha's chest the minute Louis would settle himself beside him. He would have started peppering light-weighted kisses along the sturdy line of Louis' jaw, and probably also would have sucked a few bites on the jutted column of his clavicle.