Page 14 of Use Me Up

He flinches.

I don’t know exactly what happened. They were all teenagers, and my mother was sort of appalled, and it was all three of them, and then Ellis left. But my understanding is that the whole thing was really prolonged because they couldn’t break Ellis’s heat, because he wouldn’t let Andrew, uh, alpha him. Or… have sex with him? Knot him?

I understand elements of the way that designations work, but I don’t really understand everything about that kind of thing.

“No, that’s not why,” he says. “It’s not about that.”

“Since you and I are so very intimate now, I think I should know. Has my brother fucked you?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, honestly, I haven’t had a lot of sexual partners. There’s her. A couple of male alphas while I was gone.” He waves this away. “They’re not important.”

“But she wanted the three of you together,” I say. “She told me that if you could have let Andrew be alpha to both of you—”

“Fuck that shit,” he says, shaking his head.

“Well, she said you were too straight or something, but you just said male alphas, so—”

“Why are we talking about this?” He gives me a look that I can only describe as a warning look.

I do not heed the warning. “Are you bisexual?”

“She’s my sexuality,” he says.

Right. I shake my head. “So, if she’s everything, why did you leave?”

His nostrils flare.

“She was, like, broken after that. They had to put her in a—”

“I know about this,” he mutters.

“And then she was on anti-depressants and she was a mess, and Andrew spent all his time taking care of her for months, just visiting her and bringing her—”

“I know about this.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” I say.

“We’re both omegas,” he says. “It was never going to… and then…”

“So, why did you come back, then?” I say.

He picks up his phone and sets it back down again. His face is a stony mask.

I come around the breakfast bar to get closer to him. My voice is quiet but insistent. “And how dare you blame her and want her to suffer when this was all your fault, because if you had just stayed, she would never have—”

“What? Married him?” He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “He’s an alpha. She was always going to marry him.”

“Okay, so then, why this?” I gesture at myself. “If it’s all hopeless—”

“I don’t fucking know.” He screams it, vaulting upright, the tendons in his neck all standing out against his skin, his face turning bright red.

I flinch from him, putting up my hands as if to ward off a blow.

He lets out a breath and sits back down, and he’s shaking.

My heart is beating wildly, and I’m ashamed of myself for pushing him like that. I shouldn’t have done that. What the fuck is wrong with me?

He rests his elbows on the breakfast bar, bows his head, and puts both of his hands against the back of his own skull. He breathes and breathes.