Page 7 of Use Me Up

I wait.

It comes in. I know that’s crazy. He was saying crazy things last night, though, and now I can’t find him. I’m starting to think I should worry. If you know he’s not dead, let me know.

I suck in a breath and I feel annoyed.

I never used to feel annoyed with Calliope. We were friends. I liked her. Even if she was a little bit selfish or bratty or whatever, I figured it was par for the course with omegas. Besides, she hasn’t had an easy life.

My mother is a senator, and she’s an alpha, and she has run her political career on the basis of reform for people with designations. She was at the forefront of saying those knock-out facilities needed to be shut down even before the big scandals that came out about the side effects of those drugs they were using.

Basically, it used to be encouraged for alphas and omegas to check in to a facility when they went into heat or went into a rut, and they would be given drugs that wiped their memory of the entire experience. While they were unaware, they’d be given “caregivers,” who had sex with them while they were entirely out of it, until the heat or the rut broke. Then, those omegas and alphas would go back to their lives as if nothing had happened.

My mother lobbied against this, and she has successfully gotten legislation onto the senate floor to outlaw these drugs, which—it turns out—can cause brain damage.

The legislation hasn’t passed, admittedly, because a lot of people really don’t want to acknowledge that omegas and alphas need to live different sorts of lives than betas. And a lot of omegas and alphas want solutions that allow them to be normal, whatever that means.

But anyway, my mother, she’s the kind of alpha who wants to protect people who are being abused, who wants to change the world, and who is going to bulldoze her way through everything if she has to, in order to do that.

She’s the reason that we know Calliope and Ellis.

They grew up on a Polloi compound. The Polloi are supposedly the original alphas and omegas, and everyone who has a designation is descended from the Polloi. They live their lives in traditional pack structures with one omega and a lot of alphas. They’re backward, though, and a lot of the Polloi are poor, and there’s rampant abuse on those compounds.

Ellis is a male omega. The Polloi aren’t crazy about male omegas.

Calliope and Ellis escaped the compound where they grew up and my mother made it her business to help them. She didn’t adopt them or anything, but she got them into a good foster home, and they used to come to our house for holidays, sometimes. Sometimes, they just hung out with us after school.

I’ve known them since I was thirteen, since they were sixteen, since my brother Andrew was seventeen. It’s hard to feel annoyed with someone like Calliope when you know that she’s lived through hell, and that she doesn’t have anyone to look out for her.

But it’s not the same anymore. Callie is married to my brother, and he’s working for my dad’s business. My dad is a successful businessman, and my mother uses his money to fund her political career. She says capitalism is evil, and she’s washing that money clean, and my father agrees, or maybe he just likes having an excuse to make even more money, I’m not sure.

Calliope lives a charmed existence these days, that’s all I’m saying. She’s blond, has a perfect figure, is an omega, and everyone says she smells like peaches or something, and she’s always smiling and so very, very sweet, and she can eat anything she wants and never gain a pound, and my brother would forgive her if she murdered someone, and…

But that’s not a reason to be annoyed with her.

Anyway, I type out, Yeah, he’s here. He slept here last night.

My phone rings.

Next to me, Ellis jerks awake, looking around, startled. There’s a little red mark on his face from where he’s been lying on the pillow, and I find that kind of cute. His hair’s mussed, too, and that’s endearing. Something swells inside me, and I have a jolt of alarm at that.

I can’t afford to feel the things I’m feeling for him, and I’m not sure how I’m going to turn them off.

I answer the phone. “Hello, Calliope,” I say for Ellis’s benefit.

His eyes widen and he sits up in the bed next to me, a little smile playing on his lips.

“What do you mean he slept there?” Calliope’s voice is high-pitched, almost panicked.

Ellis can hear it, and his smile widens. He relaxes into the headboard, crossing his impressively muscled arms over his chest.

I like it, too. I shouldn’t. It’s beneath me, and I know I’m just being used here, but… she is married to my brother, for fuck’s sake. She is not allowed to be like this about Ellis.

I raise my eyebrows at him, and he gives me a little nod. I say, “He came over. He seemed a little… upset. Things happened.”

“Things?” demands Calliope, her voice going even more high-pitched. “What kinds of things?”

I let out a giggle. “You want a play-by-play?” Ooh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

“You are not serious,” says Calliope. “Did he…? He did not.”