2 #2
This doesn’t end well, and I know that.
I wake up and the storm is over. The sun is streaming brightly in around the blinds in my room. He’s asleep, sprawled out, taking up too much room on my bed. He’s the prettiest man in the history of the universe, especially asleep.
He looks so innocent and boyish, his dark curls splayed out against his finely drawn features. He has a face that looks somehow ruggedly masculine and also delicate and fey.
I sit up, bringing the covers with me, and I lean against the headboard of the bed. I hug my knees to my chest, and I decide I don’t care how absolutely screwed up that whole experience was, I feel glad to have lost my virginity to him.
Worth it, I think.
Let’s be honest, there’s no other way I could have ever had him, or anyone like him. This was one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that never happen to girls like me, and I would have been an idiot not to take him up on it.
Sure, I’ve fantasized about something better, something perfect, some wonderful man actually wanting me. But I’m twenty-four years old, and I’m old enough to realize that’s a fantasy that’s never going to come true.
This is real.
Maybe I can dream up something better, but real is always realer than a dream, and he is really in my bed right now, and he is really not wearing anything except his boxers, and he really put his actual cock in my body last night.
I sit there, looking down on him with this ridiculous smile spreading across my face, because, okay, holy shit, it happened! I lost my virginity. I am no longer the oldest and most pathetic virgin in the universe.
My phone beeps, and I feel over on my bedside table to grab it without taking my gaze away from him.
It’s a text from Calliope. Sorry to bother you, but I just want to make sure that Ellis isn’t there.
I blink at the phone. What do I say?
Little dots come up at the bottom of the screen. She’s typing.
I wait.
It comes in. I know that’s crazy. He was saying crazy things last night, though, and now I can’t find him. I’m starting to think I should worry. If you know he’s not dead, let me know.
I suck in a breath and I feel annoyed.
I never used to feel annoyed with Calliope. We were friends. I liked her. Even if she was a little bit selfish or bratty or whatever, I figured it was par for the course with omegas. Besides, she hasn’t had an easy life.
My mother is a senator, and she’s an alpha, and she has run her political career on the basis of reform for people with designations.
She was at the forefront of saying those knock-out facilities needed to be shut down even before the big scandals that came out about the side effects of those drugs they were using.
Basically, it used to be encouraged for alphas and omegas to check in to a facility when they went into heat or went into a rut, and they would be given drugs that wiped their memory of the entire experience.
While they were unaware, they’d be given “caregivers,” who had sex with them while they were entirely out of it, until the heat or the rut broke.
Then, those omegas and alphas would go back to their lives as if nothing had happened.
My mother lobbied against this, and she has successfully gotten legislation onto the senate floor to outlaw these drugs, which—it turns out—can cause brain damage.
The legislation hasn’t passed, admittedly, because a lot of people really don’t want to acknowledge that omegas and alphas need to live different sorts of lives than betas. And a lot of omegas and alphas want solutions that allow them to be normal, whatever that means.
But anyway, my mother, she’s the kind of alpha who wants to protect people who are being abused, who wants to change the world, and who is going to bulldoze her way through everything if she has to, in order to do that.
She’s the reason that we know Calliope and Ellis.
They grew up on a Polloi compound. The Polloi are supposedly the original alphas and omegas, and everyone who has a designation is descended from the Polloi.
They live their lives in traditional pack structures with one omega and a lot of alphas.
They’re backward, though, and a lot of the Polloi are poor, and there’s rampant abuse on those compounds.
Ellis is a male omega. The Polloi aren’t crazy about male omegas.
Calliope and Ellis escaped the compound where they grew up and my mother made it her business to help them. She didn’t adopt them or anything, but she got them into a good foster home, and they used to come to our house for holidays, sometimes. Sometimes, they just hung out with us after school.
I’ve known them since I was thirteen, since they were sixteen, since my brother Andrew was seventeen. It’s hard to feel annoyed with someone like Calliope when you know that she’s lived through hell, and that she doesn’t have anyone to look out for her.
But it’s not the same anymore. Callie is married to my brother, and he’s working for my dad’s business.
My dad is a successful businessman, and my mother uses his money to fund her political career.
She says capitalism is evil, and she’s washing that money clean, and my father agrees, or maybe he just likes having an excuse to make even more money, I’m not sure.
Calliope lives a charmed existence these days, that’s all I’m saying.
She’s blond, has a perfect figure, is an omega, and everyone says she smells like peaches or something, and she’s always smiling and so very, very sweet, and she can eat anything she wants and never gain a pound, and my brother would forgive her if she murdered someone, and…
But that’s not a reason to be annoyed with her.
Anyway, I type out, Yeah, he’s here. He slept here last night.
My phone rings.
Next to me, Ellis jerks awake, looking around, startled. There’s a little red mark on his face from where he’s been lying on the pillow, and I find that kind of cute. His hair’s mussed, too, and that’s endearing. Something swells inside me, and I have a jolt of alarm at that.
I can’t afford to feel the things I’m feeling for him, and I’m not sure how I’m going to turn them off.
I answer the phone. “Hello, Calliope,” I say for Ellis’s benefit.
His eyes widen and he sits up in the bed next to me, a little smile playing on his lips.
“What do you mean he slept there?” Calliope’s voice is high-pitched, almost panicked.
Ellis can hear it, and his smile widens. He relaxes into the headboard, crossing his impressively muscled arms over his chest.
I like it, too. I shouldn’t. It’s beneath me, and I know I’m just being used here, but… she is married to my brother, for fuck’s sake. She is not allowed to be like this about Ellis.
I raise my eyebrows at him, and he gives me a little nod. I say, “He came over. He seemed a little… upset. Things happened.”
“Things?” demands Calliope, her voice going even more high-pitched. “What kinds of things?”
I let out a giggle. “You want a play-by-play?” Ooh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
“You are not serious,” says Calliope. “Did he…? He did not.”
Ellis looks entirely too pleased with himself. He smiles up at the ceiling as if he’s just cured cancer or something.
I have another jolt, because I know that Ellis is—can be—kind of awful. They really both can, but they’re omegas, and they have a traumatized past, and they are both so disgustingly attractive, and they smell good, and… and… everyone lets them get by with it, that’s the thing.
“What happened?” says Calliope, and now her voice is shaking.
Ellis gestures for me to give him the phone.
I sigh. “He’s right here. He wants to talk to you.”
“Yes, let me talk to him right now,” she says, insistent.
I hand the phone over.
He puts the phone to his ear. “Hey.”
I can’t hear what she’s saying. I just hear her voice, and it’s very high-pitched and scoldy, and it goes on for a long time, and he listens and he’s still smiling.
Finally, he says, “Last night, you made it very clear that I needed to move on, so I did.” There’s more of Calliope talking on the other end, but I can’t hear what she’s saying.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, “I’m sure you’re so very worried about poor Hannah.
She is fine, by the way.” He gets out of the bed, tossing the covers aside, and saunters out of my bedroom, yawning and scratching his stomach.
Calliope is still talking. He’s rolling his eyes. He disappears from my sight.
I’m naked.
I find my yummy sushi pajamas, and then think better of them and open my dresser, looking for some pajamas that look even vaguely feminine or appealing or anything. There are just piles of comfy plaids and printed sleepy turtles and Sailor Moon and Rainbow Brite. Am I twelve? I think, frustrated.
I put on a sports bra. I slip into a pair of plaid pajama pants.
I look at myself in the mirror and try to convince myself to only wear that, but my stomach is just…
not flat. Wincing, I put on a pajama shirt that has flowers on it, and I run my hands through my hair.
It is as mussed as his, but it doesn’t make me look endearing, not at all.
I look like someone’s kid sister at a slumber party.
When I get out into the living room, Ellis is saying into the phone, “You can’t have it both ways, you know.
You can’t expect me to follow you around for the rest of our damned lives.
You picked him, and I don’t know what you want me to say.
” He listens for several minutes, and then takes the phone away from his ear and looks at the screen.
His jaw twitches. He tosses the phone on the breakfast bar that separates my living room from my kitchen. He looks like a thunder cloud.
I bite my lip.
“She hung up.” He isn’t looking at me.
I dart over to pick up my phone. So, now what? I have been used to make her jealous, mission accomplished. I guess he gets dressed and leaves now.
He sighs heavily, rubbing one of his big hands against his neck.