Page 71 of Use Me Up

“I feel like it intensifies everything. Like, we spend so much time digging into everything, and that’s supposed to make me not think about it? But it only makes me think about it more, all the time? It makes the problems even bigger and the more we try to fix them, the more they seem impossible to fix. Sometimes I feel like if I just ignored the issues and didn’t dig into them for hours in therapy, they’d just be blips that faded out. I stopped going, because I felt like it was making me worse.”

I don’t say anything to that. I’m not going to be able to convince him he needs therapy, I don’t think. “When were you in therapy?”

“Gatlin and Kane talked me into it,” he says.

“Those were your alphas.” I realize he’s never referred to them by name before.

“Yeah,” he says. “But it didn’t work.”

I wonder about that. He has bite marks, a bond with both of these men. He can have left them, as in, not be sharing the same physical space with them, but he can’t ever really leave them, not if they have bitten him. “Do you ever feel them through the bond?”

“Yeah.” His voice cracks.

I lift up to look at him, resting my hand on his chest. I search his gaze, and I start to wonder if I am a stop on a journey for him, a journey that leads back to the men he’s meant to be with, the alphas who have claimed him. Maybe he’s trying to figure out how to be with them, and whatever he’s doing with me, it’s in service of that.

That will hurt.

But maybe it’s all right, because maybe I’m only with him as a stop on my own journey, a journey that is going to lead me to finding someone who I can be with. Maybe it’s like my dad said, and I’ve been surveying the pool, and this, with Ellis, it’s me learning to swim.

I’d love it if we were together all the way until Halloween, and I know I would. But if we’re not, I’ll be okay.

I lay my head back down. “I think you’ve been through way too much, Ellis,” I whisper. “I think maybe you can’t expect a few therapy sessions to make it better. Maybe it gets worse because you haven’t scratched the surface of how bad it all was.”

His arms come around me. “No, it’s not that bad, Hannah, really. I got off the compound. I’m one of the lucky ones.”

Yeah, maybe. But just because there are people out there who have it worse than you, it doesn’t mean things have been easy for you. I don’t say this, though.

Anyway, we have a very good weekend.

The next week continues just like the week before. I am starting to get used to coming home to him, to spending all my nights at his house, just using my place as a glorified closet, where I come to change my clothes and pack up bags.

We go out to buy makeup together. He gets me concealer.

We go out to dinner three or four times.

We have a lot of sex.

He makes me come again with his finger and his little secretary fantasy.

Everything is really good, in other words.

And then, when I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, the storm hits.

PART II

12

ellis

It’s a Tuesday afternoon when Calliope comes to my house.

She’s never been here, and I didn’t tell her where I lived, but Andrew has been here, so I guess that’s how she knows how to get here.

She’s alone, no Andrew anywhere.

She smells earthy, but in a kind of disruptive way, like a smoldering volcano or a fault line that is about to crack open. I mean, I don’t know what that smells like. Sometimes, I think, with designations, it’s like the smells are just signals that let you understand the other person’s emotional state, and you interpret them in ways that have associations with sights and sounds and things?

I read about this thing called synesthesia once. It’s when numbers have color or sound in your mind. Every time you think of ‘two’ you hear a certain note, or you see a shade of blue, something like that?