Page 67 of Use Me Up

I tell him I was going to read some submissions.

He looks over my shoulder and asks me if I ever wanted to be a writer myself.

“Me?” I look at him like he’s crazy. “Oh, I could never write a book.”

“But your life’s ambition is to help other people publish books?”

“I want to preserve the publishing industry!” I say, very serious about this. “People call agents gatekeepers, but I think everyone vastly underestimates how nice it was to have a gate to keep out all of that crap. Right now, everyone is publishing their manuscripts that were drafted by ChatGPT and then run through Grammarly and then barely edited and they’re just uploading them to Amazon, and idiot people are reading them and saying they’re good, and that’s because people don’t even know what good is.”

“But you do? Agents do?”

“Obviously.”

“What makes you better at deciding what’s good than anyone else?”

“It’s experience,” I say. “After you read lots of terrible books, you get better at spotting good ones.”

“But if you’re good at spotting a book, you couldn’t write one?”

“Why do you think I want to write books?” I say.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like you want much of anything for yourself, that’s all. I was having this conversation with Callie about how betas need to stop settling. She said omegas needed to settle, however, and I’m still thinking that over.”

I gape at him. Is this the storm? “So, that’s what you’re doing with me? Settling?”

He clears his throat. “Wow, I walked into that, didn’t I?”

“Don’t deflect,” I say.

“No,” he says. “No, I’m not settling.”

I do not believe him.

“I don’t know, this is nice, though,” he says. “You don’t think this is nice? We’re just… comfortable.”

“And she’s not ‘comfortable’?”

“Well, no, she’s—”

“Exciting?” I say.

He groans. “I don’t care if you write books. I don’t care what you do. I could not give less of a shit about your job that doesn’t pay and is all about making yourself feel superior because you get to decide who’s bad and who’s good.”

“That’s not my job.”

He grins at me. “Are we having our first fight?”

“Oh, we have had a lot of fights,” I say, slamming my laptop closed.

“No,” he says. “I’ve never seen you angry, I don’t think.” His grin widens. “I kind of like it, I have to say.”

I point at him. “If you think you’re going to distract me from all of the very, very infuriating things you just said to me—”

He cuts me off with a blistering kiss.

I feel dazed when he breaks it. “Not going to be distracted,” I manage, breathless. “Definitely not going to be distracted.” Except, of course, I am. Very distracted.

We’re sitting on his couch in his living room and he drops down to the floor and starts unbuttoning my pants, saying, “Show me this. Show me your pussy, Hannah.”