Page 31 of Use Me Up

“So, it would just be me,” she says. “Because that’s what you want, right? Me? That’s why you did this?” She gets out her phone and waves it at me. She pulls it in, and she starts the recording, and we listen to Hannah’s sex noises together. “Is it why? Because you want me?”

My voice is strangled. “You know it is.”

“So, then… you’ll have me.”

“You mean share you, and we’ve talked about this, too,” I say.

“You can’t be fucking serious, Ellis. I’m not leaving my alpha. I’m not running off with you. You’re an omega. What happens if I go into heat? If we both go into heat?”

“We fuck a lot,” I say, annoyed, even though I know the agony that is our double heat without anyone to soothe us. And I know what it is to be soothed now, by an alpha, to be taken care of, filled, knotted, claimed. “Anyway, we’re both on suppressants now, so it won’t happen.” The drugs have been released by prescription now, though—for years—they weren’t widely available because they would have threatened the business of the heat and rut facilities that take in alphas and omegas.

“Yeah, well, if I want a baby, I have to go off the suppressants and go into heat,” she says. “And you can’t give me that.”

Actually, I have knocked her up before. Twice. The first time, she lost it, just naturally, and it was real early on. The other time, it was the reason we left the compound, so that we could find some way to get an abortion. So, anyway, we know I could give her a baby, at least in a physical way, but she’s right, I’d be a shit father, and we’d be shit parents together, and I know she wants some life that I can’t give her, and I don’t—for the life of me—know why I can’t give her what she wants.

I’m an omega. I’m selfish. I want things for myself, and I want her.

“Ellis,” she says, “you can’t think things through. You and me together, we’d be miserable. We’re miserable now.”

“Why’d you ask me to come here if we were just going to have this same conversation again?” I say.

“I could hear her breathing. I knew you were with her,” she snaps. “So, I wanted to see if you’d leave her to come see me.”

“You know I will always drop everything for you,” I say.

She eyes me. She nods.

“But doesn’t everyone in your life do that for you, Callie?” My voice is a little nasty. “Doesn’t everyone just bend themselves into a pretzel to give you every little thing you want?”

“Not you,” she says, fierce.

She’s right about that. I’m devoted to her, but I don’t do her bidding, not like Andrew, who lives to please her.

“Show me your cock,” she says.

“I thought we were never doing this again,” I say.

“We’re not,” she says. “I’m not going to touch you.”

I let out a breath. Okay. But whatever, fine, sure. I undo my pants, and I pull everything aside, and I’m hard for her and she lets out a breath and bites down on her lip as she looks me over.

“Good boy,” she says. “Very good. I want you to play with yourself while you lick me.” She’s undoing her own clothes.

It’s not easy to get into a position in the back seat of my car where I can lick her pussy, but I figure it out. She tastes like forbidden fruit, something so good that you know it’s too good to be true, like sin and temptation and the sweetness of destruction. I lick her like I can’t get enough. I lick her and she grabs handfuls of my hair and pulls and shrieks and I don’t stop and I can’t stop and I won’t stop.

Eventually, it’s over. We’re sitting slumped against the back seat, staring up at the ceiling of my car.

“He says,” she whispers, “that he’s been very understanding thus far about this. He says he knows I’m an omega, and that maybe omegas can’t always be monogamous, but he’s monogamous to me, so… I have to stop this, and you know I do, and I don’t know why you’re such a dick about it.”

“You don’t have to tell him,” I say, sulky.

“That is the deal, though. He just wants me to be honest.”

“But it hurts him,” I say.

“Well, he feels inadequate. And what am I supposed to say to him? What is it about you, anyway?” She looks at me, as if she’s going to figure it out now, when we’ve never understood this about ourselves.

“I feel inadequate, too,” I say. “You need him, for whatever reason.”