Page 18 of Use Me Up

“It’s my nest,” he says. “And you have to scent your nest, you know?”

Do you? I don’t know about this. “Why don’t you look at porn on the internet like a normal person?”

“I don’t know. I like the way girls used to have hair on their pussies, I guess.”

I turn to look at him.

He grins at me. “The screen seems weird. I like the tangibleness. And I don’t like video. I think I might like more fantasy than some men do. Maybe it’s an omega thing.”

“You were very eager to show me your jerk-off room.”

“Because you’re my girlfriend,” he says. “We’re in a whirlwind romance of obsessive proportions and I’m very territorial about you, since I’m your one and only and all, and—”

“Stop,” I say, because I know this is just what he wants people to think, but I’m finding myself reacting to all these things he’s saying, feeling a tender feeling welling up in the center of me. Territorial about me? Obsessive? Fuck.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just kind of thought maybe you’d thought about it before.”

“Thought about what?”

“Me jerking off.”

I never have, but now I am, and I have better pictures in my head, because I have seen so much of his body. Of course, I realize I haven’t really looked at his dick. I swallow.

His fingers are tracing the outline of my cheek. “You can watch me sometime, if you want.” His voice is thick, low, rich. “You stand right here and be my magazine, and I’ll lay down and you can watch while I fist myself. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Hannah?”

My phone rings, and I’m glad to have the distraction.

Of course, I only ever get two kinds of calls, because everyone else texts first. Telemarketers and calls from my mom.

This is my mom.

I answer it. “Hi, Mom.”

Ellis winces. My mom is not entirely his biggest fan.

“Sweetie,” she says. “Andrew called me.”

“Oh?” I say. “Did he? About what?”

“Let’s not play games, Hannah, you know what he called about. What the heck is going on with you, sweetie? Do you know what Ellis posted on his Instagram? Did you see that?”

“Uh… I mean… yeah,” I say.

“Tell him to take that down,” she says. “That’s embarrassing and entirely inappropriate, and it’s disrespectful to you, and all I can think is that he’s trying to get under Andrew’s skin, and he’s getting you to play along with it. But sweetie, pretending to have lost your virginity and having it announced online is probably worse than actually sleeping with that boy.”

My mom is very plain-talking about sex, real sex-positive, all of that. She’s an alpha. She’s proud of her designation. She’s definitely less embarrassed about this stuff than I am. Still, I don’t want to say, to my mom, that I did lose my virginity, that I actually had sex with him, that we’re standing outside his jerk-off room right now and he’s, like, coming onto me in this weird way that is confusing the fuck out of me.

Why is it that one minute, he’s all, Lie face down so I don’t have to look at you while I fuck you, and then next, he’s, I want you in my bed, are you sore?

I don’t get it. I don’t get him.

“Sweetie, you have to get him to take that down.”

“I told him to,” I say. “He didn’t listen.”

“Oh, geez,” she said. “Well, you post that he’s lying, then.”

“Um…”