3
hannah
Obviously, we shouldn’t do it.
But I don’t want it to stop.
And I also don’t want to say that to him and show him how pathetic and needy I really am.
While I’m searching for a response, the smoke alarm goes off.
I’m embarrassed. “Oh, it just does this,” I say to him.
“I cooked a frozen pizza in there and cheese dripped off and now it smokes a lot when I’m cooking anything.
” I dart over to get a towel out of a drawer and I wave it frantically in front of the smoke alarm until it stops beeping.
He comes into the kitchen, shaking his head at me. “If your oven gets dirty, you clean it, Hannah.”
I blink at him. Clean the oven? Really? Who does that?
To be fair, I grew up in a household with a mother who didn’t do a lot of hands-on cleaning of anything.
We didn’t have full-time servants or something.
We’re not that well off. But my mother did hire people to come in and clean the house twice a month.
I don’t remember any of them cleaning the oven.
Maybe I never paid much attention to whatever they were doing, however.
“If it’s just something burned on, you might be able to scrape it out,” he said. “With a knife or something.”
“Oh,” I say, going to the oven door.
“Not now,” he says. “When it’s, you know, not hot.”
“Oh,” I say again, nodding. I survey him. “You, uh, clean ovens?”
“On Polloi compounds, men sometimes end up doing a lot of the household labor,” he says. “So, yeah.”
I don’t know a lot about his time there, I have to admit, but he was sixteen when he and Calliope left, so he lived there for most of his life.
“Anyway, I had chores,” he says. “It was a big family. There were five kids, four dads, one mom. We lived in a three-bedroom trailer. That many people, not a lot of space, things constantly need cleaned.”
This is another thing about him and Calliope.
They are stepbrother and stepsister. His father was an alpha to Calliope’s mom.
They grew up in the same house. And part of why he and Calliope ran off, as I understand it, is because everyone thought it was an abomination that they were so into each other, both being omegas and everything.
I don’t know if they also thought it was gross that they basically grew up together.
I do.
He’s still talking. “You, on the other hand, I guess you never cleaned anything in your life.”
“Hey, I live here,” I say, gesturing around. “It’s clean. I do this.”
“You live here and your parents pay your rent.”
“I have an internship,” I say. “It doesn’t pay anything. But once I get contacts in the industry—”
“Yeah, you’re going to be a literary agent,” he says. “I know.”
“I could just set myself up as an agent now,” I say. “Anyone can be an agent. But if I don’t have contacts in the industry, then I wouldn’t be able to get deals for my clients.”
He surveys me, and I can see exactly what he thinks of me, that I’m some spoiled, idiot rich girl who has a non-job, something to keep me busy, that I’m flighty and frivolous.
I look away, because I sometimes wonder why I decided to do this. Sometimes I wonder if I picked something that was impossible to succeed at so that—when I failed—I could say, Yeah, but it’s so rough out there. No one even reads anymore. Self-publishing has entirely changed the book market.
I don’t want to talk about this, I don’t think. “You said something about pictures on my socials,” I say. “We could take some while the quiches are cooking.”
He shrugs. “Okay. I want us to be on your bed.”
Oh. Of course he does. He wants me to announce to the whole world that he fucked me last night, and to everyone who knows that I’m a virgin that I’m not anymore, that I gave it up to him.
He sees my expression. “Look, I just got finished saying we shouldn’t do this, and you said you’re not okay, and it’s not about you, Hannah, so if this is too much for you—”
“I didn’t say that,” I say, annoyed. “I’m not fragile. I’m fine.” Anyway, it’s true, I did give it up to him, and I knew when I did it that it was because he wanted to use that as ammunition against Callie and my brother. I already made my bed. Time to lie in it.
I push past him to get out of the kitchen and go towards my bedroom. “I need to do something about my hair first, though, maybe put on makeup.”
“Okay,” he says, coming after me, “but not too much, because it needs to look authentic. Maybe just understated eyeliner. Concealer, maybe, on that zit on your chin.”
I turn around and gape at him. First, because he saw the zit and he wants me to cover it up, and it’s so unlike the way I want a man to talk to me, so unlike any of the fantasies I’ve ever had about a man who I’ve been naked with, and it stings. But also, “How do you know about makeup?”
“I did some modeling,” he said. “When I was gone.”
“Of course you did,” I say.
“Plus, I’m a fucking omega,” he says, giving me a grin that sort of looks, well, coquette-ish. He can do that, turn on an omega presence, be alluring. It’s not feminine—he could never be feminine—but there’s something just pretty about him.
“Yeah,” I say. “You are a fucking omega.”
Which is how I end up in the bathroom with Ellis sorting through all of the makeup I have and tossing things into one pile and selecting very few items and saying things like, “How old is this? Hannah, you should throw this out,” and “Are you kidding? This color palette is all wrong for you. No, just no.”
At first, I try to do something with my hair, but he tells me I look better that way. “No, it’s kind of disheveled-sexy.”
“I’m not sexy,” I say, like a knee-jerk response.
He surveys me, furrowing his brow. “Sure you are,” he decides.
This goes through me like a cold winter wind, making my breath stop and my heart stutter.
It’s so casual, and also, he never looked at me before and ever assessed me.
That was the first time he ever thought about it.
And I let him take my virginity. I can’t get that back.
And he was right, it was not the way it should have been for my first time, not at all.
It ends up with him between me and the mirror, as he applies makeup to my face with his fingers.
“Close your eyes,” he tells me and smears eye shadow over my eyelids.
“Look up,” he says as he lines my eyes using an eye shadow brush and one of my light brow shadows.
“You need better concealer,” he says, sorting through all of the stuff I have.
I draw the line at him touching my zit, or I try, but he won’t listen to me and ends up blending two of them together to better match my skin tone.
“Get one of the green tinted ones. Cuts out the red,” he tells me.
And then he moves away from me and I can see myself in the mirror. I just look like me, not any better not any worse. Still average and nothing.
“You look great,” he says. He tugs on my pajama shirt. “Take this off?”
I’m stunned at that. “You want us naked?”
“No.” He reaches out and snaps at the strap of my sports bra, which is visible at the collar of my shirt.
“Right,” I say. He’s just staring at me. I toy with the hem of my shirt. “You didn’t want to watch me undress last night.”
“Yeah, well, that was different,” he says. “Now, we’ve, you know… it’s…” He lifts a shoulder. “You trying to be modest? You think I can’t control myself? Because, let me assure you—”
“No, I definitely don’t think that.” I yank the shirt over my head, and there’s my very not-flat stomach. My shoulders slump and I don’t look at him. “There. I know no one would be driven to lose control by looking at me.”
“Oh,” he says. “You’re self-conscious.” He strips off his own shirt like it’s nothing, but then I guess it is to him.
I flip him off and leave the bathroom.
He comes after me and his hand slides over my hip, grazing the bare skin of my waist. It makes me think of the way he lifted me last night to put himself inside me, and I feel a current go through me at the memory.
He pulls me in against him, and when I look up at him, he is grinning one of his self-satisfied grins.
“I get it,” he says to me. “I’m an omega. ”
What the hell? He does not get it. Look at him.
His hand migrates to squeeze the curve of my ass. “You look great.” And then he swats me there and gives me a little shove at the bed.
I stumble forward and shoot him a look over my shoulder.
He just smirks. Jerk.
I climb into the bed and he comes after me, and he asks for my phone, and he gets his too.
He arranges us, checking us in the phone to see how it looks. He sits behind me and I rest against his chest, and he holds out the phone to take selfies of us.
He takes a lot of them, using both of our phones, from all sorts of angles. He wants pictures of us kissing, lips on lips. And then he wants pictures of him kissing my cheek, my neck, my temple. Of me kissing his jaw, his cheekbone, his clavicle.
We get interrupted by the quiche being done, and I go out to get them out of the oven, but he makes me come back for more pictures.
Eventually, I tell him the quiche are getting cold, and he relents.
We sit at the breakfast bar eating the lukewarm mini-quiche while he scrolls through both of our phones.
“This one,” he says. “Make this your profile picture.”
“My profile picture?” I say. “We fuck one time and you’re my profile?”
“Yes,” he says. “This needs to feel intense and very fast. It should make people feel uncomfortable. That’s the point.”
“Okay,” I say. “Well, should I change my relationship status on Facebook?”
He lifts his head and gives me an odd look. “You have a Facebook? You’re younger than me.”
“Well, it’s good to keep in touch with people I met through my parents, I guess,” I say. “I won’t bother.”
“Definitely do it,” he says. “I think I signed up for Facebook at one point.” He flips through his apps.
“Oh, look. There it is.” He opens it. He scrolls around a minute and then I get a notification.
Ellis Cirillo wants you to confirm your relationship.
That was fast. I click on the button to confirm it.