Page 59 of Use Me Up

I chuckle mirthlessly. “Yeah. Good point.”

“So? Why did you come back?”

“They wanted me to let them in, and I didn’t want to,” I say. “They wanted me to be vulnerable with them, and I didn’t want that. They wanted to know about you, and I wanted to keep you locked away inside. You were the reason I was doing everything, do you understand that? It was all for you.”

“I never asked you to—”

“Yeah, I realized this,” I say, and now I’m a little annoyed, thinking about it. “I realized that all of it was this house of cards, and when I let them in, it collapsed.”

She squeezes my hand again. “I think I get that.”

“You don’t,” I say. “Because it should have been enough. They should have been enough. There it was, everything that anyone could ever want. This healthy and sweet and supportive relationship, and they… they were into me.”

“Ellis,” she says, leaning in close. “Of course they were. Do you even understand how amazing you are?”

I look down at her, feeling that wash into me in a way that it hasn’t before. I know that she’s special to me because of what we share together, but that I also see that she’s objectively alluring, a beautiful omega, that anyone would see that if they didn’t know her. I realize this could be true about me, too. I squeeze her hand back. “But it wasn’t enough, Callie. They weren’t enough. I couldn’t be happy with them.”

She grimaces. “Well, maybe you just didn’t try hard enough.”

“Some part of me wanted to be happy,” I say. “I didn’t want that before. I wanted you to be happy, and if I was miserable in order to achieve that, it was fine.”

“That’s so shitty of you,” she says. “Because I was not happy while you were gone.”

“Everyone says you were.”

“Well, you know how it is after something happens that shatters you,” she says. “Eventually, you get yourself together enough to keep going, but it never goes away, not really. You still have all those cracks.”

I grimace. “Damn it, Callie.”

“People get sick of you being hurt and sad is the thing,” she says. “So, you start hiding it, just because you don’t want to bother them.”

“You were pretending to be okay?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess some part of me had accepted you were gone, and I had made peace with it. But I never wanted you to be gone. I never wanted to live a life without you.”

My throat is tight. “Well, me either. And I missed you, Callie, I missed you every day, like I was missing a fucking limb—”

“Yes.” Her voice is a sob. She presses into my chest.

I wrap my arms around her.

We cling to each other and we are both sobbing now, crying as we hold onto each other, and then we’re kissing, our mouths moving in a frenzy and I can’t get her close enough, never close enough, even when I’m literally inside her, and I just want… I don’t know, but closer.

She breaks the kiss and backs away, letting out a little cry.

I stay where I am. “I only wanted… I don’t know how to be without you.”

“Me either,” she whispers.

We regard each other.

“But, Ellis,” she says, “we might be bad for each other.”

“We’re definitely bad for each other,” I say.

It’s quiet.

She wraps her arms around her own waist.