Page 62 of Use Me Up

“What if we’re addicted to each other?”

I suck in a noisy breath through my nose, looking down at my feet. It tracks, I guess. “Well, if so, we tried cold turkey. I don’t think it worked.”

She laughs. “No, it didn’t.”

“What do we try now?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should get pregnant,” I say, and this kind of kills me, but also saying it feels like an odd bit of relief, something fluttering out of my chest. Let Andrew really have her. If she had another man’s child growing in her, it might feel different. Maybe it would sink in that she wasn’t actually mine. “Maybe that would help to create distance.”

“I don’t know.” She comes to me. “What if it didn’t, though, and then I’m pregnant with his baby and still obsessed with you, but you’re disgusted because I’m pregnant—”

“I could never find you disgusting.”

“You find me disgusting constantly!” Her voice goes high-pitched.

Maybe I do.

She throws up her hands. “We’re not going to settle this. We’ve been trying for ages now, and we never get anywhere. I’m going to go get my husband and have him take me home. I miss him.”

Well, maybe I accomplished something. Maybe she’s letting Andrew come home, and maybe that’s because of me in some way?

She stalks off into the growing darkness towards the house.

I turn and stare at what remains of the sunset until I’m sure she’s got quite a head start on me. Then I head back, too.

11

hannah

I almost leave without him, but he comes back just as I’m heading out to my car, materializing out of the darkness, walking with his head down, his hands in his pockets, his t-shirt stretched tantalizingly against his perfect chest, his chiseled features solemn.

Calliope came back a while ago and she and Andrew left together.

I talked to my parents about all of this while Ellis and Calliope were gone.

My mother panicked over how she thought that I didn’t see my own worth, and my father tried to assure her that I was fine, that I’d always been the careful one. He told her that I was the kid who took my time and surveyed everything before jumping in. He made this metaphor about how I took my time learning to swim, doing a lot of observation, watching everyone in the water, and then—when I decided to get in the water—I learned to swim in two days.

I don’t think this is the same thing.

I try to explain that the metaphor would only work if I had actively been interested in water, but water had been utterly uninterested in me.

My father waves this away, saying I’m a beautiful and vibrant young woman.

I say that my father is biased and he doesn’t know anything. But it’s nice that my dad thinks I’m so great. It’s nice to have parents who think you’re amazing. I wonder what it does to Ellis and Callie to essentially have no parents at all.

Near as I know, since they left the Polloi, they are shunned or something. It’s kind of like the Amish. You leave the Polloi, you’re cut off or whatever? So, no one in their family is allowed to talk to them even if they wanted to.

Anyway, suffice it to say that my dad is strangely Team Ellis, which is not what I would have expected. I would have thought my dad would be more on the don’t-hurt-my-daughter-or-I-will-hurt-you train. But I think my dad realizes that would only alienate me from him. My dad has always been pretty attuned to me.

I call out to Ellis when I see him and he comes over.

“I should never have come with you,” he says. He looks sort of exhausted. What did he talk about with Callie?

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m sorry I said anything about your alphas. That was really shitty of me.”

“Nah, it was going to come out eventually.”