Page 20 of Use Me Up

5

hannah

It should feel bad.

That word.

Defile.

I guess it does, actually, but it feels another way, too, a way that I don’t entirely know how to describe. Not good, not at all good, but it’s, um, it’s a feeling of being possessed and desired and useful, I guess.

For whatever reason, thinking of being defiled by him makes things twitch between my thighs.

We don’t talk about the conversation with my mother.

She calls back, and he tells me not to answer, and I don’t, but not because he told me what to do. Just because I don’t know what to say to her. I text her that I’m okay.

She texts that Ellis doesn’t seem stable, and that I shouldn’t let him disrespect me and that she will send a car for me if I text her the address.

I obviously don’t text the address.

We eat dinner in his living room. It’s stuff from his refrigerator, which is full of containers, and they have different things in them—pasta and chicken sausage, rice and salmon, ground turkey low carb lasagna with zucchini noodles. He tells me he batch cooks, that he made all this himself and keeps it in a freezer and thaws out what he needs for the week. I’m impressed, even if the low carb lasagna is really just tomato flavored cheesy mush at this point, since the freezing and thawing has been hell on the zucchini. It tastes really good, though.

He puts on more stand-up comedy but I end up not paying a lot of attention to the TV, watching TikTok videos instead.

After we’re done eating, and we take our dishes out to put them in his dishwasher, which he pronounces not full enough to run yet, he says, “So, you didn’t give me an answer on the soreness or on whether you were withdrawing your consent.”

“To defile me?” I say. It’s barbed, but it makes an odd, dark thrill go through me.

“Sorry,” he says. “But it’s getting late. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I want to get to sleep at a good time tonight, so if you were up for it…?” He shrugs.

“For you having sex with me again,” I say.

“Just say no if you don’t want to,” he says, walking out of the kitchen, very matter-of-fact. “I will not be mad, I promise. I don’t need it from you.”

I come after him. “Well, I don’t understand why you want to do it at all. Did you even enjoy yourself?”

“Probably more than you did,” he says, and he’s heading up the stairs to his bedroom. “I mean, you didn’t come, and we should try to fix that, I think, because it’s not fair.”

I follow him. “But you don’t want me, so why are you asking?”

“I want your noises,” he says. “I want to record them.”

I stop at the top of the steps, clutching the wall. I can’t speak.

He turns and sees the expression on my face. “Not video. Just audio. We could fake it, but it’ll be better if it’s real, so if you don’t mind…?”

I’m still unable to say anything.

“Are you sore?” he says. “That might make it better, actually, if you’re not really, really sore. I have lube, too, so we can try to make it more comfortable.”

I am sore, but not there. It’s muscles in my stomach, in my arms and legs, and I don’t even understand how I was using them, but I guess I’m very, very out of shape, because they ache a little today. “What are you going to do with the recording?” I say. “Are you going to put it online?”

“No,” he says immediately. “No, just on my phone.”

“You want to play it for my brother,” I say.

“Maybe for her,” he says.