Page 60 of Use Me Up

I drag a hand over my face, digging my fingers into the hollows under my cheekbones. “Maybe we could try to find closure or something.”

“How?” she says.

I shake my head. No fucking clue. “Maybe we could be—”

“If you say friends, I will hit you.” She’s fierce.

I laugh a low, mournful laugh. “Family?”

She moans. “Well, we are that, I guess, but it’s also so, so complicated.”

Another long silence.

She comes closer to me. “What the hell are you doing to poor Hannah?”

“I like Hannah,” I say, defensive. “I like her a lot.”

Calliope scoffs. “Can you not for just a minute? Drop it, because you have already succeeded at making me crazy jealous—”

“I didn’t do it to make you jealous.”

“You fuckwad!”

“Okay.” I clear my throat. “I started it in order to make you jealous, but she’s… I like her a lot.”

“She’s a beta.”

“I like that about her.”

“We can’t do that to this family, though. Not both of their children. We’ve already asked so much of Joni.”

“Well, then you divorce Andrew.”

Callie glares at me. “You make me crazy, and I could just strangle you.”

I blow out a huff of air, trying to calm down. “Hannah will get sick of me eventually. It’ll end mutually. I’m not going to just leave her, though. I think that would really hurt her, and she—”

“Everything you’re doing to her is going to hurt her!”

“Well, maybe it’s worth it,” I say. “Maybe she gets to decide. Everything you do to me hurts me, and I come back anyway.”

“Oh, I’m the one hurting you, is that it?”

“I wanted you, just you, always only you, and you wanted him.” I gesture in the direction of Andrew fucking Wihlbilt.

“Oh, no, you do not get to put this on me. Because the way you wanted me was very, very toxic, Ellis. You would get jealous when I talked to people who weren’t you. You would lose your mind about things that normal people do not lose their minds about. And you were violent.”

“Not to you,” I say.

She lets out a noise of utter disbelief that echoes against the sky.

“I mean, I broke things. I punched walls. I wrecked cars. But I didn’t put my hands on you like that.”

Her eyes widen. “Okay, do you remember the time that you grabbed me when I was at that movie theater when we were—”

“Okay,” I say. “But you said it hurt. I let go—”

“You did that a lot. You corrected, but I shouldn’t have had to correct you.”