Page 117 of Use Me Up

“I don’t even know how to get into it,” says Gatlin. “I guess I’ll just tell you that I wanted to convince him that we should move closer to you and Ellis. And he got all freaked out and said all I do is complain, that I’m never happy, and that he doesn’t want to change our life because he likes it the way it is.”

“Oh,” I say. “I know we had mentioned that a few times, you and me, you moving closer here, but I also mentioned maybe it made better sense for Ellis and me to relocate. Gatlin, what about your studio?”

“I’ll just open a new one,” he says. “I can do that, and it’s no big deal for Kane—”

“Meanwhile,” I say, “Ellis has no job at all, and is just living off the profits he made from selling pictures of his penis, and you know how I’m feeling about the internship lately.”

I had a realization. It’s sort of complicated, but it has to do with the fact that I don’t have ambition in the same way that some people do.

I think, growing up with a mother who was an alpha, seeing her have such a drive to do something, it made me feel like I should have that same kind of alpha drive. But the truth is I’ve never really wanted to achieve something for myself.

Maybe that sounds insane.

I know you’re supposed to want to do that, you’re supposed to want to change the world or be a rock star or a baseball player or something.

I’ve tried to want it, but if I’m really honest with myself, I don’t think I do. It sounds like a lot of work, and it doesn’t seem worth it. My mother is constantly struggling, all the time, for instance. I feel like Ellis has struggled with this intense desire to be something unique and special as long as I’ve known him. Maybe Callie and Andrew, too.

Gatlin is the first person I’ve met who’s more like me. His ambition is to make other people feel happy and good. It’s not for himself. Well, it is. It’s only that he recognizes that he’s happier when the people around him are happier. He’s happier when he’s in a happier environment. And so, he works to make things better for everyone, and he also benefits from that.

I’m the same way. I wanted to be a literary agent to preserve the elements of the publishing industry that preserved quality in books. But I didn’t want to do this single-handedly. It wasn’t for glory or anything. It wasn’t an ambition for me. I wanted to be part of something. I wanted to work with others to make things better.

And lately, I’ve been thinking that there are better ways to be part of something, better ways to make things better for other people, and I’ve been getting less and less attached to the idea of being a literary agent.

“Ellis and I have only barely talked about selling this house,” I say. “But I think he’d be open to it. Of course, the other thing is that I have access to my, um—” I giggle about this, embarrassed. “My trust fund, because I’m twenty-five now. And I think buying a house is a good idea. It’s a good asset.” I’m not totally sure about buying a house with Ellis, of course. Maybe what I want to do is buy a house in my name only, and then we all have our own freaking houses.

It’s not that I don’t trust Ellis—

Hmm. Maybe it is that.

Things with Ellis have been good lately, however, very good. It’s kind of like that poem by T. S. Eliot about the world ending with a whimper not a bang, except nothing’s ending, and our relationship is chugging along.

It’s been sort of anti-climactic. He was hooking up with another woman regularly, and we never even once got into a yelling match about it. I made it clear that I didn’t like it, though, and he said he would stop.

So, he did.

And everything went on, tentatively at first, and then less tentatively, and then even less tentatively. Things with us are still very new, and they’ve only been good for a short period of time. He’s doing so much better lately, and we are settled and boring and he and Callie even can talk on the phone with each other without going to go have sex with each other.

Of course, Callie is pregnant.

They got one of those tests you can do for DNA, and it’s definitely Andrew’s baby, not Ellis’s, so that’s good, because if my brother was the stepdad to my boyfriend’s baby, like, I cannot handle that kind of drama. There is enough drama in my life.

I would not say that pregnancy has mellowed Calliope, because I’m not sure Calliope is mellowable. But she has shifted her obsession from Ellis entirely to the baby and being pregnant. She goes around wearing little shirts with arrows to her (totally flat, by the way) belly saying, Bump and Baby on Board. All she talks about now is baby stuff and pregnancy stuff and how she is going to have a home birth with no medical interventions, because she has watched three documentaries about home births. If you want to get an earful, ask Calliope about the evils of pitocin.

Obviously, she has stopped drinking any and all alcohol.

Andrew, being an alpha, has latched entirely on to her obsession, so they are, wow, can I tell you, just a sheer joy to be around, and I mean that sarcastically. All they want to do is infodump you on why breastfeeding is best for the baby, how co-sleeping is dangerous, and how they have already decided to do baby-led weaning.

On the other hand, it’s possible that I’m reacting badly to all this baby stuff from them for another reason, because of that Plan B I took. But I don’t know if I want to think too much about that, so I always push the thought aside.

“I’m not asking you two to uproot your lives for us,” says Gatlin.

“But you want to uproot your life for us?”

“For me,” says Gatlin. “It’s mostly selfish.”

“It would be better for us to be closer if this relationship is going to progress,” I say.

“Kane said a bunch of other weird shit,” says Gatlin, sounding sulky. “He said that you and I aren’t romantic, that we’re just besties.”