Page 53 of Knot Your Basic B*tch
“I need to take care of them. It’s supposed to be like taking care of a pack, but this is too much.” I was blinking back tears, and one electronic poop away from having a complete mental breakdown. “Please. I just need to pass my final.”
“So, these things… are supposed to be us?” Brutus narrowed his eyes at the tamagotchis, clearly pissed at the little machines that haddaredto distress his scent match. But was that a good thing?Did this mean that he wasn’t going to leave me with all these electronic alpha egg-monsters?
“It’s alright, darling. We’ll help you.” Kain gently pulled the little machines from my tight grasp, handing one to each member of the pack.
Ithoughtthat handling a pack of men was easier than all ofthese tamagotchis, but the Fanny pack seemed hell bent on proving me wrong. Hypothetically, taking care of one egg-demon should have been easier than four—if I didn’t have to micromanage the care that they were receiving from my scent matches.
Kain was button mashing and looked on the verge of having a full-on panic attack. Brutus was suspiciously calm. Clicking buttons on one of the tamagotchis without a care in the world. I narrowed my eyes, watching exactly what he was doing with it.
“Brutus! Stop disciplining it! You can’t just discipline it five times in a row.”
“Well, it needs to learn its damn lesson somehow.” Brutus was snarling, and directing all of his big-dick dominant alpha energy on the tiny screen.
“It’s a fucking robot-egg, not a submissive!” I buried my face in my hands as if that would make this nightmare just go away.
After Brutus reluctantly started to actually provide care instead of whatever kinky-shit he’d been attempting, I rushed to clean my tamagotchi for what felt like the hundredth time in the past hour.
“Stop giving it treats! He needs water!” I said to Sabien, before moving to check on Kain.
I looked up sharply at Sabien when he muttered darkly, “I’ll give you water.”
Sabien was literally holding the tamagotchi by the frail little chain, and was slowly lowering it into his cup of water. He stopped a millimeter away from dunking it under, when he noticed my scorching glare. I was mentally screaming at him,don’t you dare.
Had he really been on the cusp of drowning one fourth of my final in his drink? What the hell? I swear to all the gods, old and new, if Sabien drowned my final, I wouldn’t break up with him. I would talk the rest of the pack into helpingmedrownhim.
Sabien sighed heavily, as he pulled the little robot out of the cup, acting as if asking him not to murder my final assignment wassucha big ask. “Wait, what happens if you bring back a dead tamagotchi?”
“Oh. I’d fail. I would have to take all of my classes at the Institute over again next year.” I didn’t even look at him, as I eyed the happiness meter on my tamagotchi in concentration.
“Wait, seriously?” Kain’s voice was so tight with tension, he sounded like he’d been strangled.
“Well, yeah. Why do you think I’ve been stressing out so hard?” I frowned.
Kain, Brutus and Sabien froze, before staring at one another in shock. They gave each other grim looks, as if they had all wordlessly agreed on something.
I guess that electronic pet sitting was a lot less funny, when failure could mean a whole year of being distanced from your scent match. Besides, if I had to spend another year redoing all of my coursework… just to face these little robotic demon pet spawn again, I’d lose my mind. If one of them died, I was going to lock myself straight into an insane asylum and get myself heavily medicated, because I wasnotgoing to deal with all that again.
The tamagotchi care didnotgo more smoothly now that my scent matches were actually taking the task seriously.
Tension and concentration was thick in the air. All three of my scent matches were each hunched over a gadget in silence in a way that was definitely going to end with them all having back and neck pain. I thought that we were past the worst of the drama, when the silence was broken by pure unadulterated panic.
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Google it! I don’t think the screen is supposed to look like that. What the fuck is this? Is the battery low? Are you fucking kidding me? After I playedwith you and fed you dozens of times, YOU DON’T GET TO DIE!” Kain clenched his jaw as a vein in his forehead bulged in panic.
“It’s okay! It’s okay.” I reassured Kain, brushing soothing patterns along his arm. If that didn’t work, I was not above scent marking him to calm his ass down. “Look there. It’s just sweat on the screen. The little alien thing is fine.”
I didn’t realize that the four of us, and our needy electronic charges made it through the night, until my concentration was broken by a familiar ringtone. I put my tamagotchi down, wiping the tiredness out of my eyes before bringing my phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hey, Chloe.” Rebel’s voice was hoarse and just a bit dreamy. She didn’t even sound like she was fully out of her heat yet. “You called me? Like six times?”
“Yeah, I was panicked.” I ignored a sound in the background that I wasnotsupposed to hear, as one of Rebel’s alphas whispered something that I immediately burned from my memory. “Rebel, how did you keep all of your tamagotchis alive?”
Rebel laughed. Straight up laughed in the face of the trauma that those egg shaped terrors caused. “You mean the final? I didn’t even try. I reset half of them the next morning.”
“You… reset them?”
“Yeah, my teacher Professor Davis was close to retiring. She barely graded anything. There was no way that she was going to manually click through hundreds of tamagotchis. She just looked at mine for like a second and saw that they were alive, before chucking them back into the box.”
I swallowed. Forcing myself to take deep breaths. There was no way something that simple would have worked for me. I hadn’t gone through all of that… fornothing?