Page 63 of Use Me Up

“If I hadn’t said that, everything would have gone differently tonight.”

“I’m glad she knows,” he says. “I’m glad she and I talked. Something shifted.”

I survey him. “What shifted?”

“I think both of us want to figure out how to move on,” he says. “I don’t think either of us knows how.”

I’m not sure how to take that. I turn my back to him and go towards my car.

He comes after me. “She thinks I should let you be. She says it’s not fair to your mother.”

“Yeah, well, I think you probably realize that there aren’t very many women who would stay with you while you figure out how to get over your ex-girlfriend. You really did find the one person who is willing to be your doormat, and that’s me.” I open the driver’s side door.

He opens the passenger side door. “She was never my girlfriend.”

I just laugh. That’s what he chooses to respond to in what I said? That? I get into the car. “I’ll take you home.”

He gets in, too. “You don’t have to.”

I just shrug. I put the keys in the ignition and start the car.

He shuts his door. “I don’t think you’re a doormat.”

“Don’t you?” I pull the car out. I’m in no mood for everyone to pretend that I’m something I’m not right now. It’s driving me a little bit insane. It’s nice that my dad thinks I’m great, but he’s being stupid. My mother at least acknowledges something is wrong with me, though it’s annoying that she feels the need to take all the responsibility for it, and to blame herself. But Ellis pretending that he doesn’t understand exactly what I am and that he didn’t pick me entirely because he knew he could target that about me, it’s too much.

“No,” he insists. “I really don’t.”

I wait for him to elaborate. He does not. I don’t push. I want to stop talking about all of this. I want to go back in time and tell him not to come along tonight. I want that future where he takes me home and fucks my pussy like he promised, where he wants to use me again, where—even if I’m a doormat—I’m the kind of doormat he still sees value in wiping his feet on.

But I also feel a deep hot ball of shame in my gut about wanting that. I know I should want more for myself. I know I should, but the thing is, I don’t even know how to do that.

He draws in a breath like he’s going to say something.

I wait.

He lets the breath back out and doesn’t say anything.

I turn on the radio in the car. I could have plugged in my phone, but I didn’t, and now I’m driving, so I just wave at the radio. “Find a station you like.”

He reaches over and starts fiddling with the tuner, flipping through jazz and hip-hop and classic rock and the 80s station. He settles on a station that is playing a Florence and the Machine song, “Hunger.” This song is really old, and I haven’t heard it in a long time, not since I was a kid. I wonder what radio station is playing some ten-year-old single.

“You keep saying stuff about how I’m using you,” he says. “But I think you’re using me, too.”

I glance at him. “You tell yourself whatever you want to make yourself not feel guilty, don’t you?”

“I mean, I do feel guilty,” he says. “I just don’t really let guilt stop me, I guess.”

I scoff. That’s like him.

“I think,” he says, “that you think I’m safe, because you don’t think I could ever have any real feelings for you or something, so you think this is a way for you to have some kind of practice relationship, and then you’ll have this experience when you meet someone who you think will actually want you.”

“No one is ever going to actually want me,” I say, really annoyed, reaching over to turn up the song. We all have a hunger, she sings. Is her name really Florence?

He turns the music back down. “That’s just something you tell yourself to keep yourself safe, though.”

“Fuck you, Ellis, you don’t know anything about me,” I say, reaching for the radio.

He stops my hand. “Are you on the apps, Hannah? Are you going out to meet people? Are you giving anyone the chance to want you?”