Page 108 of Use Me Up

“Fine, fine,” I say. “You don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here.”

She laughs into my skin. She lets me pay her tab and take her out to my car.

“How’d you get here?” I say.

“Uber,” she says. “I told myself I would get one to go back home, but then…” She sags into me. “Then I realized I had just done it so that I would have an excuse to call you.”

“You don’t need an excuse to call me,” I say.

“We both know I do.”

I drive us off from here and I take us out to the spot by the river where we meet up sometimes. We crawl into the back seat and she climbs into my lap and she says she can smell my alphas on me, that they smell nice, and I say we shouldn’t do this, and she agrees that we shouldn’t.

But we do.

I fuck her while she straddles me, face-to-face, and we tangle our mouths together, and there’s desperation in every one of our movements, our omega scents getting mingled together in the close confines of the car, and everything is frantic and heightened and that same kind of inevitability that makes me feel so very fucking helpless.

Eventually, it’s over.

I’m still inside her.

She’s got her cheek against my chest, right under my clavicle.

I’m gently toying with her hair. “This is going to fuck everything up when they find out about this, and I just started to get things good, and I just got done groveling to Hannah.” Maybe Hannah’s right. Maybe I didn’t grovel. I don’t know. “I can’t keep doing this, Callie.”

What if Hannah does not take that pill?

She will. After this, she will. She would never have my baby after I did this to her.

Callie moans. “My therapist is going to tell me that I just have to accept that this happened and move on.”

That’s weird. That doesn’t sound like a thing a therapist would say.

“She’s going to say I can’t dwell, that it doesn’t do any good going over and over the thing in my head. But I feel so shitty every single time. But my therapist will probably say it’s dopamine. There’s good dopamine and bad dopamine, apparently, and your body releases dopamine no matter what.”

“Dopamine,” I say. “That’s, um, like, rewards? You get it when you accomplish things?” Do I have this right?

“You apparently get it even if you don’t accomplish things,” she says. “Like, with gambling, when you place a bet, you get a hit of anticipatory dopamine. Then, if you lose, you get dopamine—that’s the bad kind. If you win, you get dopamine—the good kind. But you keep gambling, because it’s all dopamine, you know?”

“Is this why you said that thing once? About how we were addicted to each other? Are we just getting the bad dopamine from each other? Like, it’s a punishment every time we do this, and we both know it, but it feels… good, somehow, too.”

“A bad good,” she says, lifting her face to look at me. “You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

She squares her shoulders. “Yeah, I told Andrew about it, and he acted like I was crazy, like there is no bad good, but the new therapist, she said that totally made sense.”

“What’s the new therapist?”

“Andrew’s mom recommended her. She does a kind of therapy that’s different than cognitive behavior therapy, which is what people usually do when they go to therapy. That’s a therapy that posits that you do bad things because you have thought distortions, and once you clear up the thought distortions, you can correct your bad behavior.” She wrinkles up her nose. “I mean, I think I’m getting that wrong. That’s probably not right.”

“It sounds like the therapy I did. We were always trying to get to the root cause of things. Where things began? What I was thinking about when I did things? I was always like, ‘Uh, when I do this shit, I am not thinking.’”

“So this is something different. It’s called dialectical behavioral therapy,” she says.

“How is it different?”

“You accept shit, like, you just accept a lot of shit,” she says. “It’s called, um, radical acceptance. The idea is that you don’t have to like it, but you accept it. You don’t try to change it. You don’t try to get out of it. You just endure it.”