Page 121 of Use Me Up

“I forgot about the Halloween costume!”

“It’s soon,” I say. “Halloween is soon.”

“But we’re boring,” she says. “We haven’t even been invited to a Halloween party.”

“I figured we’d hand out candy to kids here, and I’d mime biting your neck. I’m going to do an amazing fake blood makeup job on you.”

She grins. “Okay, that sounds fantastic.”

“So, we’ll make it. I mean, I hope so. But also, I’m not the easiest person to be in a relationship with, and I am aware of this.”

She touches my face. “You’re an adventure, Ellis. You excite me. I love you.”

I kiss her. “I love you, too.”

We look into each other’s eyes.

She strokes her thumb over my chin, smiling at me. “Gatlin says he wants to wait, but I think it’s because he thinks I’m not ready. But I’m starting to feel like maybe I am.”

I think about that. “You want to do it now? Babies now?”

“Well, I’m not that young,” she says. “I know it would be tough, and I know my mother will think I’m pathetic for being, like, what? A housewife? No, we won’t be married. A housemate? Like a pack member is a mate?”

I laugh. I kiss her again quickly. “You can’t be the housemate. I was going to do that.”

She laughs too. “I guess you don’t have a job, do you?”

“I don’t. I can totally stay home and watch the babies. You just stay attached to one of those milk pump things most of the time so that I have bottles and bottles of breast milk to feed them, and that’ll be your job. Milkmaid.”

She shakes her head at me. “You are totally turned on by the milk, aren’t you?”

I clear my throat. “No.” I don’t meet her gaze.

She laughs.

The truth is, the whole thing turns me on. Hannah being bred by Gatlin? Fuck.

“I just think it might be worth doing,” she says. “Like, instead of being part of the publishing industry, making sure there are good books for people to read, I could devote myself to… to us. I don’t know. It sounds like I’ve drunk the tradwife Kool-Aid or something, doesn’t it?”

“No,” I say. “No, it’s nice.”

“I just think maybe there are different sorts of people on earth,” she says. “Some people need people to look at them. They need to be singular and separate. They need to be leaders or they need to be objects of desire—”

“You’re saying alphas are leaders and omegas are objects of desire?” I say.

“I’m saying maybe we don’t choose these things about ourselves,” she says. “Maybe we all have certain needs and certain places we fit, and maybe trying to force yourself to be a thing you never were, just because everyone tells you you’re supposed to, is a dumb idea.”

“I absolutely agree with that,” I say.

“So, I’m not saying my deepest desire is to be subjugated to other people or something, ordered around, or whatever. I want choice. But maybe I also want to be, um, of service?”

“I think maybe we all do,” I say. “We all want to matter to other people, anyway.”

“It wouldn’t be like I served you or the alphas or even the children. It would be like I was an integral part of a whole. I would play an important role in a unit, our pack. I feel like it’s what I want to do.”

“Well, yeah,” I say, “I get that. What about me? Am I playing an integral part of the pack?”

“Obviously, Ellis,” she says to me witheringly. “You’re the omega.”