3 #2
I dutifully change my Facebook profile picture to the one he has said should be my new profile picture.
Then I go to do the same on Instagram, and when I do, I see that he’s posted one of the pictures of us on his Instagram and tagged me.
He wrote a caption, and it makes my stomach twist. It just says, Pop.
I look up at him and my hands feel cold and my inner core feels hot. “Change that.”
He doesn’t look up. “What?”
“I don’t want that word on there. I don’t want you to announce… I don’t want to be your conquest. It makes me look like I’m just this thing you’re using for you own amusement.”
“That’s the idea,” he says. He’s still not looking at me. “If you want out, Hannah, say the word.”
“My brother will lose his mind,” I say.
“I know.” He sounds very pleased at the prospect.
I get up from the stool where I’m perched. “What do you have against Andrew, anyway?”
He looks up at me in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”
“I mean, I know you’re desperately in love with Calliope or whatever, and she picked him, not you, but you ran off and left her, so, I don’t get that.”
He goes back to his phone and doesn’t say anything at all.
He scrolls through the pictures and holds one up.
“What do you think of this one for my profile?” He’s looking lazily at the camera with hooded eyes while my lips are pressed into his chin.
My eyes are closed. I look devoted. He looks like he’s pleased to be getting away with something.
My nostrils flare. “Is it because of the thing that happened before you left? The time you and Calliope were both in heat?”
His jaw twitches.
“With my brother,” I say.
He flinches.
I don’t know exactly what happened. They were all teenagers, and my mother was sort of appalled, and it was all three of them, and then Ellis left.
But my understanding is that the whole thing was really prolonged because they couldn’t break Ellis’s heat, because he wouldn’t let Andrew, uh, alpha him. Or… have sex with him? Knot him?
I understand elements of the way that designations work, but I don’t really understand everything about that kind of thing.
“No, that’s not why,” he says. “It’s not about that.”
“Since you and I are so very intimate now, I think I should know. Has my brother fucked you?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, honestly, I haven’t had a lot of sexual partners. There’s her. A couple of male alphas while I was gone.” He waves this away. “They’re not important.”
“But she wanted the three of you together,” I say. “She told me that if you could have let Andrew be alpha to both of you—”
“Fuck that shit,” he says, shaking his head.
“Well, she said you were too straight or something, but you just said male alphas, so—”
“Why are we talking about this?” He gives me a look that I can only describe as a warning look.
I do not heed the warning. “Are you bisexual?”
“She’s my sexuality,” he says.
Right. I shake my head. “So, if she’s everything, why did you leave?”
His nostrils flare.
“She was, like, broken after that. They had to put her in a—”
“I know about this,” he mutters.
“And then she was on anti-depressants and she was a mess, and Andrew spent all his time taking care of her for months, just visiting her and bringing her—”
“I know about this.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” I say.
“We’re both omegas,” he says. “It was never going to… and then…”
“So, why did you come back, then?” I say.
He picks up his phone and sets it back down again. His face is a stony mask.
I come around the breakfast bar to get closer to him. My voice is quiet but insistent. “And how dare you blame her and want her to suffer when this was all your fault, because if you had just stayed, she would never have—”
“What? Married him?” He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “He’s an alpha. She was always going to marry him.”
“Okay, so then, why this?” I gesture at myself. “If it’s all hopeless—”
“I don’t fucking know.” He screams it, vaulting upright, the tendons in his neck all standing out against his skin, his face turning bright red.
I flinch from him, putting up my hands as if to ward off a blow.
He lets out a breath and sits back down, and he’s shaking.
My heart is beating wildly, and I’m ashamed of myself for pushing him like that. I shouldn’t have done that. What the fuck is wrong with me?
He rests his elbows on the breakfast bar, bows his head, and puts both of his hands against the back of his own skull. He breathes and breathes.
I just stand there.
“You want me to leave now,” he mutters.
“We haven’t picked your profile picture yet,” I say in a tiny voice.
He barks out something like a laugh. “Right.” He lifts his face. “Sorry.”
“I baited you.”
“Not an excuse,” he says.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“No, that was all me.” He swallows. “I’m not, um, I’m not probably, uh, what you might call stable?” A long pause. “Getting into this with me, it would be bad for you.”
“Yeah, probably,” I say.
His face twists. “But I don’t have to leave?”
“No,” I say. “You don’t have to leave.” I decide, then, for some very stupid reason, that he never has to leave. And I know that I’m going to regret that decision.