Page 120 of Use Me Up

22

ellis

It’s weird how much things have changed in the past few months. It’s weird because, in a lot of ways, I am exactly the same.

Case in point, when I walk into the living room and Hannah is painting her toenails and talking to Kane in that little breathy voice she uses with him, the first thing I feel is a huge burst of jealousy that blooms right in the back of my skull, another ink spill in water, the kind of intense emotion that contaminates everything.

I don’t always feel jealous of my alphas and Hannah. It’s not even what I would consider often. But it happens sometimes.

And when it does, I used to try to wrestle the emotion into submission and make it go away. Or, sometimes, it would just take me over, and I’d be fueled by its intensity while I wreaked destruction until I eventually got tired and came back to myself in the fucked-up world I’d created on the other side of it.

Now, I just accept the feeling.

There it is. I watch it, the ink spill flooding all through me. I feel it in my body. I note where the jealousy is settling inside my skin. I accept that I feel jealous. I don’t want to feel jealous, but I do, and that is just the reality of me. I don’t have to like my emotional reactions, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to happen anyway, because they are.

Emotions aren’t actions. I can’t help how I feel, but I do have control over what I do.

By the time she’s hanging up with him, the jealousy is less, seeping out of the cracks in me, moving off already.

That’s the other thing about emotions. When you stop trying to control them and just feel them, they don’t last that long. The more you try to stop having them, the longer you have to deal with them. If you just accept you’re going to have to go through something uncomfortable and let it happen, it’s usually not as bad as you think it’s going to be.

I move into the room, and the jealousy ebbs out, like the tide, moving out of me. I sit down next to her on the couch. “Kane’s good?”

“Kane’s Kane,” she says lightly.

Sometimes I’m envious of Hannah because she doesn’t seem to get jealous the way I get jealous. Some of it’s some kind of idiocy on her part where she sells herself short. I think she never got properly jealous of Callie because she never thought she could measure up to Callie. When I think that, it makes me livid on her behalf. I am in love with Hannah. I wish she understood how I see her, how Kane sees her, how Gatlin sees her, what she is to us.

On the other hand, maybe she does.

She says she doesn’t see the point in punishing me for the bad things I’ve done because I punish myself fine. Furthermore, the punishment doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent for me, and she’s right about that.

It ends up more like bulimia, binging and purging, trying to get the punishment level enough to balance everything out, and never getting it right.

Hannah’s talking. “Kane is freaking out about Gatlin and the future, basically. I had to talk him down.”

“Oh, because you and Gatlin are scheming about babies, I guess?”

She turns to me. “I thought you were cool with it.”

We’ve talked about it. Like I said before, I think it would make better sense if she has Gatlin’s baby. Of the three of us, Gatlin is the one who is unequivocally sure he wants to be a father. Kane does not, and I go back and forth.

Sometimes I think it would be cruel to pass on this brain architecture to a kid, that they might inherit my volatility. But then I think that I’m probably mostly so screwed up because of all the past trauma in my life, and that we would give a kid a much better environment. But then, I think that the wide world is not actually constructed for people with designations, and the odds are that we will have little omegas and alphas. Hannah is a beta, but her mother is an alpha. It tends to be genetic. So, no matter what a great home we give our children, they’ll still struggle. But then I think that I would rather have a chance to live, even if it’s a struggle, than never be born.

Let’s just say I have yet to feel certain about it. Gatlin, however, he’s certain, so it makes better sense to start there.

“I am,” I say. “I’m cool with it.”

“Gatlin wants to move up here with us,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, thinking about that.

“But you know that I’ve been talking about buying a house with money from my trust fund, so I’m thinking I’ll buy down there, close to them.”

I nod. “That makes sense. We’d have this place for when we want to be close to your family, and then we could be down there. Plus, if you and I end up wanting to strangle each other, we each have our own houses, in our own names. That’s clean.”

She smirks at me. “You don’t think we’re going to make it, Ellis?”

“Me?” I say. “I am slowly buying all the pieces for my vampire Halloween costume, because I am all in.”