Page 90 of Use Me Up

“You still smell like bad decisions, though, I gotta say, Ellis.” He kisses my cheekbone again. “I like it, though,” he says in a gravelly voice.

I rub into him, whining a little.

He kisses me again, this time finding my mouth. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

“Okay,” I say in a small voice. I look down at the dishwasher. I kneel down, fix the rack, and slide it back into place.

“Let’s go back to bed,” he says to me.

I smile up at him. It’s so nice having people who just like me. I mean, Hannah likes me. But people who think of me as inferior and still like me, like me even if they don’t have any expectations of me. It’s a relief.

gatlin

We are eating breakfast, and Kane made it because we both insisted that an omega whose heat had just broken could not cook, even though Ellis is a dynamite cook, and I miss him in our kitchen, especially when he’d cook in nothing but a little apron that would leave the whole back of him deliciously bare.

We are eating in the living room, though, on the couch, because Ellis has no table in this house.

I am trying to figure out how to bring up the fact that I went to see Hannah last night, and that I’ve invited her over here so that we can all talk. I’m trying to figure out what I want from her, exactly.

Do I want us all to be in one big relationship, like a pack?

But how does that work? We couldn’t make it work with Ellis before, and we all really tried.

“You could have told us that Hannah wasn’t on birth control,” is what I say, and that’s entirely the wrong way to begin this conversation.

“Shit,” says Ellis, setting down his fork. “Shit, condoms, I forgot about condoms.”

I scratch the back of my head. “Sorry. Sorry, I don’t know what I—”

“I need to call her,” says Ellis, getting out his phone. He looks at his phone and makes a pained face and then he sets it down. “Shit,” he mutters again. “Shit, shit, shit. What do I say?”

“An apology, probably, since you told her to leave?” says Kane.

“That’s the tip of the fucking iceberg when it comes to things I need to apologize to her about,” says Ellis darkly.

“Yeah, I don’t really understand what happened,” I say. “Hannah told me that the other omega was here, and that you had sex with her and that probably caused your heat?”

“The other omega?” breaks in Kane. “Cassandra?”

“No, that’s the doomsayer of Troy,” I say. “Calliope was a muse.”

Kane shrugs. “I knew it was Greek.”

“Is that what happened, Ellis?”

He nods into his breakfast. “It was weird. There was this moment where I knew I could have stopped it, and I thought that I wanted to, and that Callie probably wanted me to, and then I just did it anyway. I knew it would be terrible. I knew there would be consequences. I could see all that, and… I didn’t care. Who does that?”

I’m quiet, because I don’t know how to answer that question. If asked, I would describe Ellis as impulsive, but what he did there wasn’t impulsive, I have to admit, it was self-destructive.

Admittedly, I’ve noticed tendencies like that within him before. The way he whipped Kane and me into a frenzy, begged for our bites, the way he sent us all into a tailspin, I think there were self-destructive elements in that. He knew it wouldn’t be good for him to be bonded by men he didn’t know very well, and he did it anyway.

This is why I tried to get him to go to therapy, but he barely went for three weeks before he claimed it was making everything worse and quit.

The weird thing was, I could kind of see why he was saying that. He was volatile during the three weeks in therapy. We’d get in fights, all three of us. He broke things in the house. He punched a hole in the wall. We ended up having rough sex that seemed less about making love and more about working something out.

He stopped going to therapy. He calmed down.

But I said at the time that I didn’t think it was therapy that was the problem. I thought he was digging up things that he hadn’t dealt with, and it was sort of a thing where it was going to get worse before it got better?