Page 107 of Use Me Up

Just.

No baby.

ellis

My phone is ringing, but it’s downstairs, and we are all tangled together, all four of us, in my bed. I don’t want to leave, because it feels good here, all of us. It feels entirely right and perfect, the addition of Hannah exactly what has been missing all along.

I can see she’s exactly something that Kane has always wanted that I’ve never quite been able to be for him. She’s a ready receptacle for his attention and his adoration. I know omegas are supposed to be that for alphas, but I always feel a little like I can’t quite accept it. Maybe there’s some of that in Hannah, too, but she wants to accept it. She likes it, even if she’s a little shy about it.

It’s going to be good, everything about this is going to be good, and I want to stay here, because I can only think of one person who would be calling me in the middle of the night like this.

The phone stops ringing.

I sigh.

She’s going to give up.

It starts ringing again.

Gatlin lifts his head. “What is that?” His voice is sleep ravaged. He’s barely aware.

“I’ll take care of it,” I say, getting out of bed and padding down the stairs. I swear under my breath as I do so. I make myself five thousand different promises of things I will not do, things I will stay strong on, things I cannot allow to happen.

I answer the phone. “Callie.”

“I thought you weren’t going to pick up.” Her voice is panicked. “Ellis, please, I need you.”

I sigh heavily, all of the five thousand promises trickling out of me, because I just don’t have the wherewithal to fight her. We both know we need to stop this, and neither of us know how to stop this. “Where’s Andrew?” I say. “Are you still in heat?”

“No, no, not anymore,” she says. “Not in heat. And I guess Andrew is still at home, in bed, asleep, where I left him.”

I groan. “Callie, where the hell are you?”

“At a bar,” she says in a tiny voice. “I’ll send you the location?”

“Yeah, do that,” I say. “I’m on my way.”

“Thank you.” Her voice is insubstantial, very grateful, and I can hear that she’s ashamed of herself.

After I hang up, I think of going upstairs and asking Gatlin to come along. He’d do it, no questions. Kane would, but there would be questions and there would be grumbling and complaining and he might even give me one of his non-lectures, which aren’t really lectures because he doesn’t tell me what to do, but he spends them telling me how much I don’t make sense, so the implication is that I should try harder to be sensible.

Anyway, I think about it, and I even decide I’m going to do it, because I do have to go upstairs to get dressed and find some shoes.

But when I get up there, Gatlin is fast asleep, and I just… don’t.

I don’t even know about these things. It doesn’t feel like I decide. It feels like it’s inevitable and I just acquiesce to whatever is going to happen, as if I am caught up in high tide, and trying to do anything different would be like swimming against the current.

I drive out to find Calliope.

She’s in some bar that has one of those canopies that you walk under to the door, and there’s a buzzer there. You have to press it and then they check your ID and make you pay a cover charge. Finally, I get in.

I find her on the dance floor, dancing violently to whatever music is on the jukebox, shaking her wild mane of blond waves this way and that.

When she knows it’s me, she throws her arms around my neck and moans out my name again and again. “Oh, Ellis, Ellis, Ellis, it’s you.”

I wrap my arms around her waist. “Let’s get you home,” I say.

“No,” she moans into my neck.