Page 30 of Use Me Up

“It sounded like she was.” Calliope’s voice rises.

Holy shit, he did not send that to her. My lips part, and I feel the knowledge rushing into me, as I flood with embarrassment.

He immediately breaks eye contact with me. “Obviously, she was.”

“I want to see you.”

“Fine,” he says. “Where?” He takes the phone off speaker and puts it to his ear.

I sit down shakily on the bed.

“Yeah,” he says into the phone. “No, I know… I don’t know, he’s your husband, you can fucking call him yourself… Yeah… Love you.” He hangs up.

Love you? I look at him with disgust and surprise and… and…

He points at me. “Don’t go anywhere. Just, um, watch whatever you want.” He gestures to the TV hanging on the wall across from his bed. “The remote is by the bed on the bedside table. Eat anything you want in the house. Do whatever. I’ll be back.”

He’s going to her. And he says he loves her at the end of every conversation with her like they are just some old couple, which I guess, in a way, they are, I guess, no matter that she married my brother, Ellis has the prior claim, Ellis is her childhood sweetheart, but—

How did it even happen, the two of them, growing up in the same fucking house?

“Do not look at me like that, Hannah,” he says quietly. “You knew what this was when you agreed to it.”

“Are you trying to get her back?” I say. “Is that what this is?”

He runs a hand through his hair. “We can’t be together. It’s impossible,” he says, but in a way that lets me know that he wants her back more than anything on earth. “So, just… stay. Please?”

I shouldn’t stay.

I should get the hell out of here before this gets even worse.

ellis

Calliope and I have a place where we meet up, sometimes. It’s out near the river, and there’s a little dirt parking lot where we can park our cars and no one else is there. When I get there, her car is already there.

She gets out of her car as I pull in. She gets into my back seat.

I turn off the car and climb back there with her.

She shakes her head at me. “How could you?”

“You told me it was over,” I say. She seemed really serious, too. She said that she and Andrew want to try to get pregnant, and clearly, having me in the mix with that is not doable. Not only because she does not want there to be any confusion over who the baby’s father is, but because I can’t even picture myself as a father. I need to be far out of her life if she’s going to be a mother, and I guess I get it.

“So, two minutes later you go and fuck my husband’s sister?” Her voice cracks. “That is a goddess-damned overreaction, and you know it is.”

She’s very upset because she swears by the goddess, just like we’re back on the compound. And so I don’t say anything, because what is there to say? I overreact. We already know this about me.

“Look,” she says, “I’ve been thinking about it, and if you’re serious that you can’t let me go, then maybe we can try, like, a pack thing.”

“No,” I say.

“But if you’re—”

“We’ve talked about this,” I say. “And we’ve tried this. Andrew is not my alpha, and that’s very obvious—”

“You don’t have an alpha,” she says. “You can’t handle any alpha at all.”

I can’t look at her. She’s right. I can’t handle any alpha at all, but there are things she doesn’t know, also, things that I could explain to her, that Andrew and I don’t click on a visceral level, but that I can… I have… there’s a certain amount of clicking I’m capable of with the right alpha, anyway.