Page 11 of Use Me Up

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hannah

Obviously, we shouldn’t do it.

But I don’t want it to stop.

And I also don’t want to say that to him and show him how pathetic and needy I really am.

While I’m searching for a response, the smoke alarm goes off. I’m embarrassed. “Oh, it just does this,” I say to him. “I cooked a frozen pizza in there and cheese dripped off and now it smokes a lot when I’m cooking anything.” I dart over to get a towel out of a drawer and I wave it frantically in front of the smoke alarm until it stops beeping.

He comes into the kitchen, shaking his head at me. “If your oven gets dirty, you clean it, Hannah.”

I blink at him. Clean the oven? Really? Who does that?

To be fair, I grew up in a household with a mother who didn’t do a lot of hands-on cleaning of anything. We didn’t have full-time servants or something. We’re not that well off. But my mother did hire people to come in and clean the house twice a month. I don’t remember any of them cleaning the oven. Maybe I never paid much attention to whatever they were doing, however.

“If it’s just something burned on, you might be able to scrape it out,” he said. “With a knife or something.”

“Oh,” I say, going to the oven door.

“Not now,” he says. “When it’s, you know, not hot.”

“Oh,” I say again, nodding. I survey him. “You, uh, clean ovens?”

“On Polloi compounds, men sometimes end up doing a lot of the household labor,” he says. “So, yeah.”

I don’t know a lot about his time there, I have to admit, but he was sixteen when he and Calliope left, so he lived there for most of his life.

“Anyway, I had chores,” he says. “It was a big family. There were five kids, four dads, one mom. We lived in a three-bedroom trailer. That many people, not a lot of space, things constantly need cleaned.”

This is another thing about him and Calliope. They are stepbrother and stepsister. His father was an alpha to Calliope’s mom. They grew up in the same house. And part of why he and Calliope ran off, as I understand it, is because everyone thought it was an abomination that they were so into each other, both being omegas and everything. I don’t know if they also thought it was gross that they basically grew up together.

I do.

He’s still talking. “You, on the other hand, I guess you never cleaned anything in your life.”

“Hey, I live here,” I say, gesturing around. “It’s clean. I do this.”

“You live here and your parents pay your rent.”

“I have an internship,” I say. “It doesn’t pay anything. But once I get contacts in the industry—”

“Yeah, you’re going to be a literary agent,” he says. “I know.”

“I could just set myself up as an agent now,” I say. “Anyone can be an agent. But if I don’t have contacts in the industry, then I wouldn’t be able to get deals for my clients.”

He surveys me, and I can see exactly what he thinks of me, that I’m some spoiled, idiot rich girl who has a non-job, something to keep me busy, that I’m flighty and frivolous.

I look away, because I sometimes wonder why I decided to do this. Sometimes I wonder if I picked something that was impossible to succeed at so that—when I failed—I could say, Yeah, but it’s so rough out there. No one even reads anymore. Self-publishing has entirely changed the book market.

I don’t want to talk about this, I don’t think. “You said something about pictures on my socials,” I say. “We could take some while the quiches are cooking.”

He shrugs. “Okay. I want us to be on your bed.”

Oh. Of course he does. He wants me to announce to the whole world that he fucked me last night, and to everyone who knows that I’m a virgin that I’m not anymore, that I gave it up to him.

He sees my expression. “Look, I just got finished saying we shouldn’t do this, and you said you’re not okay, and it’s not about you, Hannah, so if this is too much for you—”