Page 132 of Use Me Up

I watch them all crowded around her, their strong muscles and their huge bodies. She is just red and tiny and squalling, and they are ever so tender with her, all peering down on her with love on their faces.

Our daughter.

I know we have something special.

I know that I am neither plain nor vanilla. I am the extraordinary thing that holds these men together. I am the mother of our baby. I am the beta that makes this pack work.

And that is what we are. A pack. A family. Something that is bigger than all of us, but something that gives us all a place in the world.

EPILOGUE

ellis

Callie’s baby is five months older than ours, and we don’t live that close, not anymore, since we only use the house I bought to stay in when we come here to visit Hannah’s family.

But on one of those visits, Callie and I end up in a park together, pushing our strollers. Her little boy is sitting up and babbling out at the surroundings, while our little girl is napping in her tiny little blue-green sundress. You would not believe how many little sundresses that Kane has purchased for this baby. He cannot leave the house without bringing something home for her. He cannot make an order on Amazon without buying something for her. She is going to have everything she wants, all of the time, I think.

I don’t worry about this, though.

I think we could all stand to be a little spoiled by those around us from time to time.

Callie lays her head on my shoulder as we walk, and I playfully nudge her off and say no touching, or we’ll never be able to hang out anymore.

“We have to make this work,” I say. “You’re my family. I’m yours. We need to be actually good to each other, and that means not hooking up.”

“I’m not trying to hook up with you,” she says.

“Good,” I say, giving her a teasing grin.

She shoves me, not hard, and goes back to pushing her stroller. “You’re the worst, Ellis Cirillo.”

“And don’t you forget it,” I say.

She thinks about this. “You really are the worst, actually.”

I laugh.

“No, I mean it, you are. You have been horrible to me. You have treated me abominably.”

“I treated you badly?” I glance at her.

“Whatever,” she says. “Only someone like Hannah would ever put up with you.”

“And my two alphas?” I say. “Besides, I’m not horrible anymore.” I show her my tattoo. “I have this.”

“Yeah, that’s really working for you, huh?” She looks up at me.

I’ve still never explained the significance of the peanut-butter tattoo to any of my mates. But when Callie saw it, I told her straightaway, because I knew she’d understand. She actually tried something similar. She got a bracelet that she could look down at, but she says it doesn’t work for her. She overrides it and does the destructive thing anyway, at least some of the time.

“I mean, as much as anything works,” I say. “There’s no getting around the fact that everything is mostly hard, most of the time. I used to spend all my time trying to avoid feeling my tough emotions, and then I just made more problems for myself. Now, I feel my emotions, and it’s really fucking bad. I don’t go and make my life worse, or whatever, but the net amount of bad feelings? Basically the same.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I think I get that. It’s, um, there are no shortcuts.”

“None.”

“But this way is better because I’m not consumed with guilt over hurting people I love.” Callie says that her little boy changed everything, that the moment they put him up on her chest after she gave birth that she was struck by some bolt of something terrible and stern. She knew, she says, right in that moment, that she no longer belonged to herself, that she belonged to this little boy. She doesn’t know why she didn’t feel this while she was pregnant. She’s talked to other women, and they seem to have felt it earlier than she did. Some felt it the minute they knew they were pregnant, others felt it when the baby began to move, others when their bellies began to protrude. It takes me a while, sometimes, she says. But I get there eventually.

It takes me a while, too, I have to admit. “Maybe I am still horrible,” I say thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m always going to be horrible. But maybe the horrible part of me doesn’t have to, like, define me.”