10 #3
I grip Callie tighter and steer her out of the dining room.
She comes along with me, and we leave the house, leave the entire family behind, and I remember the first time we met these people, how perfect and poised they seemed, how grateful we both were that they accepted us and were kind to us. What have we done to these people?
Callie is crying as we walk outside in the growing twilight of the evening. She wipes at her tears and tucks her face into my chest, and I hold onto her, clutch her against me, and we walk.
Eventually, I start talking. “Right after I left, nothing mattered, and I did some things. Mostly just drugs and things, really, not a lot of risky sex, but things happened sometimes, and I usually could keep it from being, uh, penetrative. Mostly just my mouth. I told myself it didn’t matter, because you had him, and I wasn’t—I didn’t need—we’re omegas, anyway, right?
Omegas always need more than one partner to be satisfied, that’s the way we grew up. ”
“Ellis,” she whispers, “did this alpha hurt you?”
“No,” I say. “No, it wasn’t like that. I’m just trying to explain. That part was easier somehow.”
“What part?” she says.
“The part where it was all meaningless blow jobs I gave to people who didn’t give a fucking shit about me. That part was bad, but in some ways, it was easier.”
“You want me to feel sorry for you, Ellis? Because of course I—”
“No,” I say. “Look, when I left you, I told myself it was for you.”
She wriggles out of my arms, and I can scent her fury, rising brightly, and it scents like acrid smoke, and her voice comes out lethal. “How dare you say that?”
“I know,” I say, reaching for her. “I see why you’re saying that. But look at us, baby, look at us. If I hadn’t gone completely away, it wouldn’t have worked. You had to think I was unreachable, don’t you see? If you had known where I was, you would have come after me.”
“Yes, obviously, I would have!”
“Well, you wanted free of me,” I say. “You told me that was what you wanted.”
“Oh, God, Ellis, I say shit all the time. You say shit. We tell each other we hate each other, and—”
“So, you didn’t mean it?” I spread my hands. “Wasn’t it better without me?”
She sinks her hands into her hair and doesn’t answer me.
“The way I made myself do it was to tell myself that it was for you. That it was better for you this way. And if it was for you, I could handle anything. But one thing I couldn’t do is… move on. Replace you. Because then I wouldn’t have the motivation anymore to stay away.”
“So, you’re saying you replaced me with the alphas and then you came back?”
I don’t know how to explain this. It doesn’t even make any sense. I walk away from her, over the dark blades of grass. The tennis court looms in the distance, the sky still purple in the west.
“Ellis!” She comes after me.
“Lots of alphas are, uh, really obvious?” I say. “They push and they ask and they’re very aggressive.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Alphas can be shitheads.”
“They weren’t like that at all,” I say. “They were real steady and real secure and they made me feel safe. And they were so, you know, patient.” I swallow. “I never had anyone—”
“That’s what Andrew is like,” she says to me.
“Bullshit,” I mutter.
“Well, so why did you leave them, then?” She falls into step with me, taking my hand. “How many?”
“Two,” I say.
She squeezes my hand. “Two.”
“They’re together. Like, they’re in a relationship with each other. The idea was sort of that they were fine on their own, and they didn’t need anything, but they both like omegas, obviously, because they’re alphas, so it was supposed to be… casual.”
Another squeeze. “Casual’s hard for people like us.”
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.
I drag a hand over my face, digging my fingers into the hollows under my cheekbones. “Maybe we could try to find closure or something.”
“How?” she says.
I shake my head. No fucking clue. “Maybe we could be—”
“If you say friends, I will hit you.” She’s fierce.
I laugh a low, mournful laugh. “Family?”
She moans. “Well, we are that, I guess, but it’s also so, so complicated.”
Another long silence.
She comes closer to me. “What the hell are you doing to poor Hannah?”
“I like Hannah,” I say, defensive. “I like her a lot.”
Calliope scoffs. “Can you not for just a minute? Drop it, because you have already succeeded at making me crazy jealous—”
“I didn’t do it to make you jealous.”
“You fuckwad!”
“Okay.” I clear my throat. “I started it in order to make you jealous, but she’s… I like her a lot.”
“She’s a beta.”
“I like that about her.”
“We can’t do that to this family, though. Not both of their children. We’ve already asked so much of Joni.”
“Well, then you divorce Andrew.”
Callie glares at me. “You make me crazy, and I could just strangle you.”
I blow out a huff of air, trying to calm down. “Hannah will get sick of me eventually. It’ll end mutually. I’m not going to just leave her, though. I think that would really hurt her, and she—”
“Everything you’re doing to her is going to hurt her!”
“Well, maybe it’s worth it,” I say. “Maybe she gets to decide. Everything you do to me hurts me, and I come back anyway.”
“Oh, I’m the one hurting you, is that it?”
“I wanted you, just you, always only you, and you wanted him.” I gesture in the direction of Andrew fucking Wihlbilt.
“Oh, no, you do not get to put this on me. Because the way you wanted me was very, very toxic, Ellis. You would get jealous when I talked to people who weren’t you. You would lose your mind about things that normal people do not lose their minds about. And you were violent.”
“Not to you,” I say.
She lets out a noise of utter disbelief that echoes against the sky.
“I mean, I broke things. I punched walls. I wrecked cars. But I didn’t put my hands on you like that.”
Her eyes widen. “Okay, do you remember the time that you grabbed me when I was at that movie theater when we were—”
“Okay,” I say. “But you said it hurt. I let go—”
“You did that a lot. You corrected, but I shouldn’t have had to correct you.”
I look down at my feet. I nod. “You’re right.
I’m sorry.” I was a teenager, an omega, and I was volatile.
Sometimes, everything that is churning inside me feels far too much for my body, but it was worse, somehow, when I was skinnier and weaker.
I think just the practice of doing exercise regularly, lifting weights, the discipline of it, it’s given me an ability to center myself in my body.
Before I started doing that, the only time my heart pounded was when I was terrified.
The only time I exerted myself was when I was in danger.
Finding that space to be safe in my body while I was sweating and out of breath, it changed things. I don’t panic in the same way anymore.
“There were bruises,” she says.
“No, I know.” I swallow, looking away.
“If you do that to Hannah—”