Page 36 of Use Me Up

“She took care of me,” he says. “No one else knew.”

“Nobody found out? No one scented you?”

“I think my dads might have known,” he says. “But they were motivated to keep it quiet. It was a shameful stain on everyone associated with me.”

“I’m so sorry, Ellis.” Looking at him, looking at how beautiful he is, I can hardly imagine anyone thinking that he was a shameful stain.

“Callie never treated me like that. She was, uh, she was like my sister, except she wasn’t. I was the only kid in the trailer whose mother was not the omega, Callie’s mom, and so I was treated… you know… differently. But she was good to me. Calliope was always really good to me.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you guys have a bond,” I say.

The waiter comes back with our coffees and the martinis, which are orange and have little triangles of toast as a garnish. I realize I have confused martinis and margaritas in my mind. Martinis are the ones in the cone-shaped glasses with stems, the ones that are basically just all liquor, I realize. I should not have agreed to drink this. Sure enough, I take a sip of it, and it’s strong.

I sputter and drink coffee instead.

He picks up his martini and takes a huge gulp. He’s looking at Calliope still. “But then she presented, and then we just kept tripping each other into heat. Either she’d go into heat, and I would go into heat after her, or the other way around, and it got… we were just trying to take care of each other, that’s all. We’d go and hide places, and it was… I don’t even know, is the thing. Do I love her, or did we just get forced into such intense intimacy so fast when we were so young that we thought we were in love? The first time she got pregnant, I thought I was going to—”

“Wait, the first time?” I say.

He looks at me, shaking his head. He picks up the martini and gulps at it, practically finishing it.

“You got her pregnant?” I say in a tiny voice. More than once?

“We were kids,” he says. “It was before.”

Fuck. I can hardly imagine being fifteen and pregnant, or fifteen and in heat, or anything like that. I can’t imagine his life.

He puts creamer into his coffee. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s been a while since I’ve shared this with anyone. I always forget the expressions people get on their faces.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s good for me to know. Maybe I don’t really understand, actually. Maybe Andrew doesn’t either.”

He puts sugar in his coffee and notices I have nothing in mine. He pushes the sugars and creamers at me.

“I like it black,” I say. It’s one of the only things that ever stuck from the numerous diets I have tried to go on. I can’t ever stick with any of them, but black coffee? I can do that. It’s zero calories, after all.

“I’m okay is all I’m saying. She’s okay, too. We’re okay. It was a long time ago.”

“I don’t think you are okay,” I say. “I don’t think either of you are.”

“No, no, that’s what I’m saying. I don’t need people treating me like I’m fragile or something—”

“I didn’t mean that,” I say.

He turns around to look at her again, bringing his coffee with him.

It’s quiet.

He stares at her, and she turns around again, sees that he’s staring at her, smiles like she’s won the lottery, and he turns around, chagrined. He finishes his martini. He looks at my full one.

I push it at him. “Here.”

“You sure?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Why’d you leave Calliope, then, Ellis? You said, this morning, that was why you left, but what did you even mean?”

He toys with the stem of my martini glass. “She wanted me to leave, that was why I left. She wanted me to go, but she won’t let me go. So, I had to do it for her. I had to make a clean break. I tossed my phone in the river and I drove and I told myself she’d be better off without me, and that I’d be better off without her.”

“Well, I think you were right,” I say.