19 #3
I answer the phone. “Callie.”
“I thought you weren’t going to pick up.” Her voice is panicked. “Ellis, please, I need you.”
I sigh heavily, all of the five thousand promises trickling out of me, because I just don’t have the wherewithal to fight her. We both know we need to stop this, and neither of us know how to stop this. “Where’s Andrew?” I say. “Are you still in heat?”
“No, no, not anymore,” she says. “Not in heat. And I guess Andrew is still at home, in bed, asleep, where I left him.”
I groan. “Callie, where the hell are you?”
“At a bar,” she says in a tiny voice. “I’ll send you the location?”
“Yeah, do that,” I say. “I’m on my way.”
“Thank you.” Her voice is insubstantial, very grateful, and I can hear that she’s ashamed of herself.
After I hang up, I think of going upstairs and asking Gatlin to come along.
He’d do it, no questions. Kane would, but there would be questions and there would be grumbling and complaining and he might even give me one of his non-lectures, which aren’t really lectures because he doesn’t tell me what to do, but he spends them telling me how much I don’t make sense, so the implication is that I should try harder to be sensible.
Anyway, I think about it, and I even decide I’m going to do it, because I do have to go upstairs to get dressed and find some shoes.
But when I get up there, Gatlin is fast asleep, and I just… don’t.
I don’t even know about these things. It doesn’t feel like I decide. It feels like it’s inevitable and I just acquiesce to whatever is going to happen, as if I am caught up in high tide, and trying to do anything different would be like swimming against the current.
I drive out to find Calliope.
She’s in some bar that has one of those canopies that you walk under to the door, and there’s a buzzer there. You have to press it and then they check your ID and make you pay a cover charge. Finally, I get in.
I find her on the dance floor, dancing violently to whatever music is on the jukebox, shaking her wild mane of blond waves this way and that.
When she knows it’s me, she throws her arms around my neck and moans out my name again and again. “Oh, Ellis, Ellis, Ellis, it’s you.”
I wrap my arms around her waist. “Let’s get you home,” I say.
“No,” she moans into my neck.
“Fine, fine,” I say. “You don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here.”
She laughs into my skin. She lets me pay her tab and take her out to my car.
“How’d you get here?” I say.
“Uber,” she says. “I told myself I would get one to go back home, but then…” She sags into me. “Then I realized I had just done it so that I would have an excuse to call you.”
“You don’t need an excuse to call me,” I say.
“We both know I do.”
I drive us off from here and I take us out to the spot by the river where we meet up sometimes. We crawl into the back seat and she climbs into my lap and she says she can smell my alphas on me, that they smell nice, and I say we shouldn’t do this, and she agrees that we shouldn’t.
But we do.
I fuck her while she straddles me, face-to-face, and we tangle our mouths together, and there’s desperation in every one of our movements, our omega scents getting mingled together in the close confines of the car, and everything is frantic and heightened and that same kind of inevitability that makes me feel so very fucking helpless.
Eventually, it’s over.
I’m still inside her.
She’s got her cheek against my chest, right under my clavicle.
I’m gently toying with her hair. “This is going to fuck everything up when they find out about this, and I just started to get things good, and I just got done groveling to Hannah.” Maybe Hannah’s right. Maybe I didn’t grovel. I don’t know. “I can’t keep doing this, Callie.”
What if Hannah does not take that pill?
She will. After this, she will. She would never have my baby after I did this to her.
Callie moans. “My therapist is going to tell me that I just have to accept that this happened and move on.”
That’s weird. That doesn’t sound like a thing a therapist would say.
“She’s going to say I can’t dwell, that it doesn’t do any good going over and over the thing in my head. But I feel so shitty every single time. But my therapist will probably say it’s dopamine. There’s good dopamine and bad dopamine, apparently, and your body releases dopamine no matter what.”
“Dopamine,” I say. “That’s, um, like, rewards? You get it when you accomplish things?” Do I have this right?
“You apparently get it even if you don’t accomplish things,” she says.
“Like, with gambling, when you place a bet, you get a hit of anticipatory dopamine. Then, if you lose, you get dopamine—that’s the bad kind.
If you win, you get dopamine—the good kind.
But you keep gambling, because it’s all dopamine, you know? ”
“Is this why you said that thing once? About how we were addicted to each other? Are we just getting the bad dopamine from each other? Like, it’s a punishment every time we do this, and we both know it, but it feels… good, somehow, too.”
“A bad good,” she says, lifting her face to look at me. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
She squares her shoulders. “Yeah, I told Andrew about it, and he acted like I was crazy, like there is no bad good, but the new therapist, she said that totally made sense.”
“What’s the new therapist?”
“Andrew’s mom recommended her. She does a kind of therapy that’s different than cognitive behavior therapy, which is what people usually do when they go to therapy.
That’s a therapy that posits that you do bad things because you have thought distortions, and once you clear up the thought distortions, you can correct your bad behavior.
” She wrinkles up her nose. “I mean, I think I’m getting that wrong. That’s probably not right.”
“It sounds like the therapy I did. We were always trying to get to the root cause of things. Where things began? What I was thinking about when I did things? I was always like, ‘Uh, when I do this shit, I am not thinking.’”
“So this is something different. It’s called dialectical behavioral therapy,” she says.
“How is it different?”
“You accept shit, like, you just accept a lot of shit,” she says. “It’s called, um, radical acceptance. The idea is that you don’t have to like it, but you accept it. You don’t try to change it. You don’t try to get out of it. You just endure it.”
I nod slowly, thinking that over. “Well, that sounds…”
“Awful, right?” she says. “It is, but I mean… I think I’ve known, deep down, that there was no way to change any of these things about myself.
I’m never going to not want you, Ellis. I will always want you in this bad-good way that we want each other.
But if I can learn to tolerate the feeling, the yearning, the ache… then I can stop calling you.”
This washes over me in a whoosh that seems to settle inside every part of my body. I see the difference immediately. No, I can’t control if I want Callie. I can’t ever turn that off. I want that to turn off, of course, I really want it to turn off, but it never does turn off.
I can refuse to fuck her even while I feel that, though.
And I think… if I refuse that often enough, I think the feeling will fade. Maybe it won’t go away entirely, but I think it will, because when I was away, when we weren’t near each other, we were both better.
I have had this backwards, all along. It’s not that my thoughts will change my behavior, it’s that my behavior will change my thoughts.
“As you can see, however,” says Callie, “the new therapy is not really working very well.”
“Well, you’ve been at it alone,” I say. “And if we’re both in this together, maybe it’s better. Where’d you find this therapist?”
“Andrew’s mom,” she says.
“But I’ll just look it up. I can find some therapist who does it if I look on my insurance’s site, probably. Can you text me what it’s called again? Dialectic what?”
“I’ll text you,” she says.
It’s quiet.
I’m still inside her.
She sighs, looking down at the places where our bodies are joined.
I used a condom, we can say that for me, anyway. I brought it along, though, like I planned to fuck her, so I feel guilty about that, but… whatever.
It’s done.
Radical acceptance? Not beating myself up forever about things that are already done that I can’t undo? Uh, I could get used to that, I think. Especially if it would mean I have a better chance to do something differently in the future.
“Maybe we don’t have to tell anyone,” she whispers.
“That’s not fair to them,” I say.
“Andrew is going to…” She pulls free of me. “I cannot keep doing this to Andrew. He is too good to me and he deserves better.”
“I know,” I say. “You deserve him, you deserve to be loved like that, not the way I love you, which is, uh, which is toxic.” I pull the condom off gently.
I toss it out of the window, and then I think about just tossing my DNA out like that.
Also, it’s litter. Also, it’s gross. What am I going to do, though, bring the used condom home with me in my pocket?
Fuck. I open the car door.
“What are you doing?” she says.
I grab an old fast food bag from the floor and I go find the fucking condom and stick it in there. I tie the bag off. “Cleaning up my mess,” I say, as I get back into the back of the car.
“We both need to do that, huh?” she mutters.
“We have made kind of a big mess,” I say.
She groans.
I groan, too.