17
hannah
Gatlin and I did not set a time for me to come over. I could have texted him or texted Ellis or something, but I don’t do that. I come over around nine in the morning, and as I’m walking out of my apartment, I look at the Plan B sitting on the counter, the one that I have not taken.
And then I walk out the door.
I don’t knock when I get there. I’m used to simply walking in, so that’s what I do.
They’re all three in the living room. There are breakfast plates sitting out, though it looks like they’re in the middle of being cleared.
Ellis gets up and comes running over to me. “Hannah.” His voice is rough. He reaches for me.
I evade him. “Your heat broke awfully fast.”
“I took an extra dose of my suppressants, which sometimes can shorten a heat,” he says.
“Oh,” I say.
We simply stare at each other.
He swallows. “I’m sorry. Obviously. About Callie.”
“Yeah, well, that was a big fucking mess,” I say to him. “She did not get home. She was in heat in a furniture store, presenting in the middle of the afternoon on some bed until my mom found her, and near as I know she is still in heat with Andrew.”
“Shit, seriously?” He moans. “I didn’t even follow up with her. Of course she wouldn’t have been able to drive. Fuck. What the hell is wrong with me, anyway?”
“You and Callie can keep fucking each other over,” I say. But you can leave me out of it from now on.
But I don’t say it.
Why not?
I don’t know.
He still has some stupid effect on me, like a magic spell or something.
“No,” he says. “No, we really can’t.”
I sigh. I look around Ellis at Gatlin, who’s hovering over the coffee table with dirty silverware in one hand and an empty glass that looks like it had orange juice in it in the other.
Gatlin shakes his head meaningfully at me, trying to send me some message, but I have no idea what it is.
I turn back to Ellis. “I’m sorry I fucked someone who wasn’t you. ”
“Oh,” says Ellis. “Oh, fuck.” He rubs his forehead. He looks at the carpet. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I did it because I wanted to hurt your feelings,” I say. “I didn’t actually understand that’s why I was doing it at the time. At the time, I thought that I just wanted to come. So, I’m sorry, because that’s not a nice thing to do to someone. I guess it wasn’t nice to Gatlin either—”
“I’m fine,” breaks in Gatlin.
Ellis looks at the alpha.
The other one, Kane, seems to have pointedly disappeared into the kitchen.
Ellis clears his throat. “I have so many things I need to apologize to you about, Hannah. I shouldn’t have told you to leave. I shouldn’t have been jealous, because I have no leg to stand on, not with the Callie stuff, and I should have remembered condoms.”
“She took a Plan B,” says Gatlin.
“Actually, I haven’t taken it,” I say.
“How do you know that?” says Ellis to Gatlin.
“He came to see me last night,” I say.
Gatlin winces. “Okay, I was going to tell you. And nothing happened—well, we kissed, but I stopped it, and if you don’t want anything to happen again, we need to—”
“You didn’t take it?” says Ellis, turning to look at me. “Seriously?”
“I still can,” I say. “The insert says within seventy-two hours of unprotected sex. Obviously, the longer I wait, the less effective it is… well, I don’t know.
I guess it would depend on how close I am to ovulation, really, because what it does is that it delays your ovulation so that the sperm can die so that—never mind. ”
“Why?” says Ellis. “Why haven’t you taken it?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You don’t want to have my baby,” he says, and he is certain of this.
“Well, you don’t want me to either,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I don’t. I wouldn’t do that to you. After everything I’ve done, that’s the last thing you need from me. I’ve done enough to you, Hannah.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s only that Gatlin told me not to take it—”
“I took that back,” says Gatlin. “I said I didn’t mean it.”
Ellis turns to look at him.
Gatlin sets down the silverware and glass. “Look, she’s very young, and this entire situation is fucked up, but obviously, omega, I would want your baby.”
Ellis’s lower lip trembles for a second and he turns and looks back at me, and then back at Gatlin.
He tangles a hand in his hair. “Callie said I was a monster. She said I needed to get a vasectomy. She acted like, if a baby came from me, it would be…” He sits down heavily on the couch and never finishes the sentence.
Gatlin sits down next to him and tentatively touches his shoulder. “Hey,” he says in a low, soothing voice.
I fold my arms over my chest. “So, this is why, Gatlin? This is why I’m the thing that’s missing? You want a baby?”
Gatlin looks up at me. “No.”
“We’re not having a fucking baby.” Kane is standing in the doorway, leaning against the door jamb, his nostrils flaring. “For fuck’s sake, Gatlin, we can’t take care of our omega. How could we possibly be parents?”
gatlin
Kane is probably gayer than I am, in a way.
He likes pussy, insomuch as he likes to fuck it, and he likes the look of women, and the curve of their bodies and the idea of high heels. Hell, Kane likes wearing high heels sometimes.
Kane’s homosexuality is more in the way he prefers an all-male romantic existence, and this perhaps could be a kind of misogyny.
If I push him, he’ll take everything back, of course, but he makes offhand comments, like the thing he said about omegas and puppies, for instance?
He says similar things about women. Women are too needy, too clingy, too interested in settling down.
Back in the beginning of our relationship, when I was younger and more unsure of myself, I never said anything back to him when he said this kind of stuff, primarily because I felt all of his comments in this direction as a loaded barb towards me.
Back then, I was frightened that Kane would be done with me at any time. I thought if I was too clingy, he would call things off.
He’s three years older than me, and I was extremely insecure when I was twenty-five.
Anyway, we’ve been together a long time now, and I’ve come to understand our dynamic, which is one in which he runs and I chase.
He likes to remain aloof, but when I come after him, he’s quite happy to be chased and tied down and butt-fucked and told that he will accept just how clingy I am of him, and he does.
So, anyway, I think these things he says, the idea that he doesn’t want an omega, that he doesn’t want a clingy partner, that he doesn’t want to settle down, I think they’re all part of some elaborate game that he’s playing, and that if I pin him down and say, “Look, here it is, our omega, our woman, and let’s have babies,” then he’ll…
Oh, fuck, I’m probably kidding myself.
Maybe I just want him to be that way?
I glare at him across the room from us, sexily lounging in the doorway like he is, saying we can’t be parents, and I feel it sinking down into my stomach like a stone.
I’m definitely kidding myself.
“Beta,” he says to Hannah, “take the Plan B.”
“Don’t tell her what to do,” mutters Ellis.
Hannah is not wearing any makeup and she’s got on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, and she looks incredibly young. She’s far too young to be used in this way, and Ellis is not ready to be a father. Maybe Ellis will never be ready to be a father.
I groan. “He’s right, Ellis.” I look up at Hannah. “Go take the Plan B.”
“Well,” she says, lifting her chin, “as it happens, it’s not actually up to any of you, is it? It’s up to me, because it’s my body.”
“True,” I say. “That’s true.” I feel a little leap of hope inside me.
“What would it be like?” She’s looking at me.
I let out a breath, and my body floods with something warm and liquid and pleasant. “If you had a baby with us, you mean?” I breathe.
“She’s not doing that, and there’s no us,” says Kane.
“You said I could come back with you,” says Ellis. “Are you taking that back?”
“You,” says Kane, pointing at him. “I said you, our omega, not…” He looks at Hannah. “Sweetheart, you’re adorable and I was sad that we didn’t get a chance to pass you around during Ellis’s heat, sure. I liked watching you get yourself off on Gatlin’s knot as much as anyone would.”
I think of that, feeling the warm feeling turn hot, remembering the way her wet little pussy squeezed my cock when she was coming, and I’m a little lightheaded.
“But,” Kane continues, “that’s no reason for us to play house together.”
Hannah nods. “Yeah, I know.”
“But what would it be like?” says Ellis. He turns to me. “Do you want her?”
“Obviously,” I say. “Obviously, I want her. Obviously, there’s something about her.”
Ellis grins at me. “Yeah. Yeah, there is. She’s sweet and funny and so damned cute and I think about her constantly when she’s not around. I’m in love with her. If you got to know her, you’d love her too—”
“What?” interrupts Hannah. “You do not love me.”
Ellis turns around to look at her. “Of course I do.”
Hannah turns on her heel and stalks out of the house.
I go after her. Probably Ellis should go after her, but I’m up and moving before he is. I grab her on the front steps before she gets any further. “Don’t go,” I say. “Just… wait.”
She stops, turning to look at me, and I have the urge to kiss her again, but I squelch it.
I speak again. “It would look however you want it to look. If you wanted to have a baby and be mostly on your own, and we just supported you, we’d do that. Or we could move in, find a way to all be together, and we could all—”
“You want that?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, stuffing my hands into my pockets.
“The thing with Ellis, it happened out of nowhere. We weren’t ready, and it didn’t actually go very well, so there’s every chance this would blow up in our fucking faces.
This is not the way to start a pack, but…
” I gesture back and forth between us. “You feel it, too, right?”
She bites down on her lower lip, and her eyes glimmer, and she nods. “I feel something.”
I reach out and seize her hand. “It’s not about babies. It’s about you. I want you.”
She lets out a very noisy breath. “Okay, I…” She tugs her hand out of mine. “I need some space for a minute.”
“That’s fine,” I say, backing up, making a hands-off gesture. “You need space, you take it.”
She wavers. “But say I wanted to wait to make a decision about the Plan B, then, I’d have… two more nights, maybe?”
“You should not wait,” I say. “But if you’re going to, then, um, maybe… let’s go on a date.”
“A date?”
“To, uh, to see how it feels?” I say. “I’ll text you. And it goes without saying that if you feel sure you want to take that Plan B, you take it. It is your decision, like you said.”
“A date,” she repeats. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I smile at her.
She smiles back.
Man, I really want to fucking kiss her.
I don’t.
kane
“So, I don’t get it,” I’m saying to Gatlin. “You asked her on a date?” We’re in the living room of Ellis’s house, and Ellis is currently coming in with laundry.
After Hannah ran off, Ellis started doing chores.
Gatlin has been trying to get him to engage in conversation, and I’ve been trying to do Ellis’s chores, and Ellis is shutting both of us down, which he’s very good at doing.
“I did,” says Gatlin.
I gesture at our omega, the omega that Gatlin is usually better with than me. “What the fuck, Gatlin? You know how upset he got because you had sex with her, and now you’re moving in on her?”
“I’m not trying to take her from Ellis,” says Gatlin to Ellis.
“I’m not territorial about her,” mutters Ellis.
“I think you are,” I say. “I heard you when you kicked her the fuck out in the middle of your heat. You were all wounded because she’d never had any other dick besides yours in her. Now, Gatlin wants to be daddy to your baby—”
“That’s not what I want to do,” says Gatlin.
“Well,” says Ellis, “maybe that would be good. I’d be bad at it, but you, Gatlin, you would be an amazing dad. So, if she’s going to have that baby, I want you part of it.”
“Do you want Hannah to give birth to your child, omega?” I demand. “Is that what you actually want?”
Ellis folds t-shirts and shakes his head. “Uh…”
“You don’t want that,” I say. “You can’t want that.”
Ellis looks at me, and then he looks at Gatlin. “When Callie told me I should get snipped to be with her, so that I could never knock her up, I felt resistance to it. I’m not saying I’m ready, but someday, I think...”
“Okay, well, that’s not a good reason to do it now,” I say.
“You heard Hannah,” says Gatlin. “It’s her decision. If she wants to stay pregnant—”
“She’s not pregnant,” I say. “That’s not how Plan B works.”
“You know what I mean,” says Gatlin. “If she’s pregnant with our omega’s child, we will be involved.”
I feel a strange, tight feeling in my chest, and I vaguely recognize it as terror.
But Gatlin’s right. Ellis is our responsibility, and he can’t take care of himself, let alone a woman and a child, so if he knocked this woman up, and she wants to have the baby, we’ll be involved.
I rub my neck, contemplating the future.
How can this be happening?
“Ellis,” I say in a strangled voice, “go see that girl, right now, apologize to her, and convince her to take the fucking pill.”
“You should go see her,” says Gatlin to Ellis.
Ellis eyes me. “You’re coming on the date, right, Kane?”
“If we have to go on a date, I’ll come,” I say. “But I want it clear that I don’t think she should have your baby.”
“You think I’d be a terrible dad,” says Ellis to me.
“You just said you’d be a terrible dad,” I say.
Ellis folds more t-shirts, sighing. “She’s mad at me. But maybe she’ll forgive me if I grovel properly. Maybe I should go grovel now?” He thinks about it. “I’m good at groveling.” He gestures to both of us. “You guys have witnessed some grovels from me. You always forgive me.”
I roll my eyes. Obviously, we forgive him. Look at that boy. He’s tall and pretty, he smells good and we’ve bitten him. I don’t know if he’s actually, um, great at apologizing now that I think about it, however.
But he is pretty.
“Definitely go see her,” I say. “Grovel, apologize, fuck her, whatever. I don’t care. Just get her to take the Plan B.”