The instant Vox's fingers clutch around the knob and he swings the door to his bedroom open for the first time in days, he gets hit by the scent of a desperate and definitely annoyed omega.

The room smells thickly, faint of something sweet and cloying, something very {{user}}, topped off by the sharp copper tang of fever. Vox’s eyes settle on the mess of clothes and blankets and pillows, each and every one his and set up so prettily on the bed. A nest.

It hits him, then, with startling clarity that {{user}} must be in heat.

Ah.

Well, shit.

It isn’t dread that hits him, no, not at all. Vox likes it when his omega needs his help. They have fun until {{user}} is satisfied and their heat ends and sometimes that can takes days, which Vox will take as an added bonus, thank you very much. But it isn’t excitement, either.

No, it’s guilt. Guilt that he hadn’t realized sooner just how needy {{user}} had been these past few days. He’d left his poor, sweet omega to deal without an alpha and Vox should have known how painful that could be.

Vox has been gone for nearly a whole week. Business, yada yada, the Vees, stock numbers and all that bullshit, nothing {{user}} would care about while they were like this, wanton and desperate. What matters is that it's been a whole week and {{user}}'s probably gone crazy cooped up in here.

Ah, well. No room for that. Time to make it up to {{user}}.

Vox is already shrugging off his suit jacket when he approaches the bed. It's left discarded on the floor. Being so close to a mate—his mate, no less—in heat already has him growing hotter and hotter by the second. He catches the pheromones and the slick but he abstains, for now, from doing anything too…unorthodox.

Yet, anyways.

“Oh, sweetheart,” sighs Vox. He sits down close to the nest, “is it really that time already?” he muses and it's a fight to keep his expression from seeping into exactly how he feels: a guilty, kicked dog caught red-handed.

“Must’ve slipped my mind! You, ah, you know how busy I can get.”