4
hannah
He doesn’t leave. He stays in my apartment, and we end up watching a whole bunch of stand-up comedy specials on Netflix. I take a shower. He takes a shower. We put more frozen food in the oven for lunch.
Before that, together, with knives, we scrape out the burnt-on cheese in the oven. He uses a scrub brush and soap and water to get the rest of it, and I can see that, yeah, duh, you can just clean an oven the way you’d clean anything.
I have notifications turned off on all my socials, except for direct messages, because if I get a notification, I tend to just start scrolling afterward, and I never finish whatever I was doing whenever the notification came in.
So, I manage to not check anything all day, and it’s not until it’s near dinnertime, when I’m thinking we should order Doordash or something, that I get back on my phone, and I open all the apps out of habit.
It’s almost worse than if I’d missed a lot of notifications.
There’s almost nothing.
Not even likes or emoji reactions to the pictures.
Two people have reacted “Wow,” on Facebook, which seems like a fucked-up reaction to someone being in a relationship, because the emoji looks shocked and horrified.
My stomach turns over and I don’t know what to even make of this.
I scroll over to Ellis’s profile on Instagram, but he has a ton of followers, I realize, and they’re all people who don’t know him. Maybe from when he was doing modeling, I don’t know. So, his reactions are all normal, people commenting how cute we are together, how happy they are for him.
Well, the further I scroll the more I start seeing comments from people who are saying that I’m not good enough for him, that he can do better, many of them complete with photos of girls who are way more attractive than me, with little kiss emojis, saying that he can get in touch anytime.
Ellis leans over to see what I’m looking at on my phone. “Nothing from either of them,” he says, by which I know he means Callie and Andrew.
A notification comes in. It’s from my friend Annica.
I used to think that Annica was my best friend, but I’m glad I never said that to her, because one time, we were hanging out with two of our other friends, Mona and Cherise, and she put her arms around them both and said, “So good to be out with my two besties.”
I felt like shit.
Annica grinned at me and said, “And you can hang with the three musketeers and be our fourth wheel any-fucking-time, Hannah!”
Anyway, I don’t have a best friend.
Her text says, Who’s that guy? Why is he posting on his Insta that he popped your cherry? He seems like a jackass.
Ellis sees it. He snorts. “Tell her that you don’t care what a jackass I am because you think I’m really hot.”
I give him a look. “Don’t read my messages.” But, uh, he’s right. That’s the exact proper response. I type, His best features are not his disposition, it’s true.
She sends back a laugh emoji. Oh, he *is* very fucking nice to look at. How did you meet him?
He’s an old family friend, I type. We recently reconnected.
She hearts this.
Then, nothing.
I debate whether I should say anything else but then decide that I don’t need to, because her emoji has effectively ended the exchange.
I find it unsettling that there are never any goodbyes with texting. I never know when a conversation is over, and it gives me low-level anxiety, not going to lie.
I turn to Ellis. “I got out my phone because I was thinking maybe we want to order dinner.”
“I should actually be getting home,” he says.
Oh, of course he should. “Okay,” I say. “Um, do we make plans to see each other, or, how does this fake relationship of ours work?”
“Actually, I don’t want us to spend a night apart from now on,” he says.
My stomach tightens. “What?”
“But I need to go home,” he says. “I don’t have clothes or anything. So, you pack up some clothes and things and you can stay with me.”
“I, um, where do you live?”
“I have a house,” he says.
“A house?”
“I bought it,” he says.
He bought a house? How does a Polloi orphan who barely graduated high school buy a house when he’s only twenty-seven?
“The modeling was lucrative.”
“If it was that lucrative, why didn’t I see you plastered on billboards or something?”
He snickers. “Maybe modeling is the wrong word.”
“What? Did you have an OnlyFans or something?”
He blushes, and he doesn’t meet my gaze.
“Oh, my God,” I say. “You sold your body online, didn’t you?”
“It was brief,” he said. “I didn’t show my face. It wasn’t OnlyFans, either, it was this alpha site, invite-only, very exclusive, very discreet.”
“Oh, my God,” I say.
“It’s not like it was porn,” he says. “And, I mean, no one touched me.”
“Was it pictures of your…” I look at his crotch.
He looks up at the ceiling. His voice dulls. “I was in a dark place.”
Shit. I feel bad for him. I mean, he was probably in a bad place because of Calliope, I guess, and I don’t know how much of that is his own damned fault, really. But I’d have to be made of stone not to feel sympathy for someone who was hurting. I reach out and rub his shoulder.
He glances at me.
I pull my hand back, and now I can feel that I’m the one blushing.
“You ashamed of what you let deflower you?” And now he’s grinning, teasing me.
“Oh, whatever. It’s very obvious that virginity is made up, because it’s not even a thing, clearly.”
He coughs. “I deserved that.”
“I didn’t mean it like an insult,” I say. I’m getting up off the couch.
“Where are you going?”
“To pack clothes, like you said I should,” I say.
“Oh, so you will come home with me?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But I’m driving my own car.”
“That’s good, because I didn’t bring my car here last night. Saves me having to get another Uber.”
His house is a twenty-minute drive out of town. It’s not exactly in the country, but he’s on a lot with big fences and lots of trees, and even though there are houses on either side and behind his, it feels really private out on his back porch.
The house is very respectable. It’s not a huge mansion or something, but I realize he’s done all right for himself. I certainly can’t buy anything like this. I’m still relying on my parents.
It’s two stories. The master bedroom and the bath take up pretty much the entire upstairs. There’s one other small bedroom up there, but he hasn’t made it into a bedroom. It’s an exercise room with weights and a treadmill.
Right, I guess if he wants to look like that, he must have to work for it.
Downstairs, there’s another bedroom, but it’s not set up like a bedroom either. It’s a den with couches and bean bag chairs and a big TV with some gaming console in there. I only can see it’s supposed to be a bedroom because of the closet.
“You don’t have a guest room,” I say, unsure of where to put my things.
“I don’t,” he says. “I didn’t think about that. Maybe I should have. Even just if someone needed to crash or something if I invited someone over and we drank too much.” He rubbed his chin. “But I want you in my bed, anyway, and you don’t mind.” A pause. “Do you? How not-okay are you?”
Why does he want me in his bed? Does that mean he’s going to… with me again tonight?
“Or, like, maybe you’re sore? I seem to remember with, um, with Callie—”
“Oh, my God, shut up.” I go upstairs and dump my duffel bag full of clothes in his bedroom. It’s a very typical guy bedroom. The bed is huge. The comforter is black and silky. There’s a dresser on one wall and literally no other furniture in the whole enormous room and also nothing on the walls.
He’s behind me. “Look, it goes without saying that you have the right to withdraw any and all consent at any time.”
“You’re an omega,” I say looking at all the empty space, all the bare walls. “Do you not nest?”
He laughs. “It’s downstairs. You want to see?”
“You have a nest in this house?”
“I’m an omega, and it’s my house, and fuck yes, I have a nest.” He grins, heading back down the stairs, motioning with his head for me to come with him.
“This is a lot of house for just you,” I call after him.
“Well, like I explained,” he throws over his shoulder. “I grew up with one tenth of a trailer to call my own, so if I can have space, it feels like luxury.”
The nest is very small, tucked behind the den room. It has low ceilings and twinkly lights and a bunch of throw pillows and all sorts of soft blankets. I also see that there’s lotion in there, and… are those magazines? “Is this, like, your jerk-off room?”
“It’s my nest,” he says. “And you have to scent your nest, you know?”
Do you? I don’t know about this. “Why don’t you look at porn on the internet like a normal person?”
“I don’t know. I like the way girls used to have hair on their pussies, I guess.”
I turn to look at him.
He grins at me. “The screen seems weird. I like the tangibleness. And I don’t like video. I think I might like more fantasy than some men do. Maybe it’s an omega thing.”
“You were very eager to show me your jerk-off room.”
“Because you’re my girlfriend,” he says. “We’re in a whirlwind romance of obsessive proportions and I’m very territorial about you, since I’m your one and only and all, and—”
“Stop,” I say, because I know this is just what he wants people to think, but I’m finding myself reacting to all these things he’s saying, feeling a tender feeling welling up in the center of me. Territorial about me? Obsessive? Fuck.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just kind of thought maybe you’d thought about it before.”
“Thought about what?”
“Me jerking off.”
I never have, but now I am, and I have better pictures in my head, because I have seen so much of his body. Of course, I realize I haven’t really looked at his dick. I swallow.
His fingers are tracing the outline of my cheek. “You can watch me sometime, if you want.” His voice is thick, low, rich. “You stand right here and be my magazine, and I’ll lay down and you can watch while I fist myself. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Hannah?”
My phone rings, and I’m glad to have the distraction.
Of course, I only ever get two kinds of calls, because everyone else texts first. Telemarketers and calls from my mom.
This is my mom.
I answer it. “Hi, Mom.”
Ellis winces. My mom is not entirely his biggest fan.
“Sweetie,” she says. “Andrew called me.”
“Oh?” I say. “Did he? About what?”
“Let’s not play games, Hannah, you know what he called about. What the heck is going on with you, sweetie? Do you know what Ellis posted on his Instagram? Did you see that?”
“Uh… I mean… yeah,” I say.
“Tell him to take that down,” she says. “That’s embarrassing and entirely inappropriate, and it’s disrespectful to you, and all I can think is that he’s trying to get under Andrew’s skin, and he’s getting you to play along with it.
But sweetie, pretending to have lost your virginity and having it announced online is probably worse than actually sleeping with that boy. ”
My mom is very plain-talking about sex, real sex-positive, all of that.
She’s an alpha. She’s proud of her designation.
She’s definitely less embarrassed about this stuff than I am.
Still, I don’t want to say, to my mom, that I did lose my virginity, that I actually had sex with him, that we’re standing outside his jerk-off room right now and he’s, like, coming onto me in this weird way that is confusing the fuck out of me.
Why is it that one minute, he’s all, Lie face down so I don’t have to look at you while I fuck you, and then next, he’s, I want you in my bed, are you sore?
I don’t get it. I don’t get him.
“Sweetie, you have to get him to take that down.”
“I told him to,” I say. “He didn’t listen.”
“Oh, geez,” she said. “Well, you post that he’s lying, then.”
“Um…”
“I know, he probably sweet-talked you into letting him say it, and I know he can be charming when he wants to be, and I know you thought he hung the moon when you were thirteen, but he’s different now.
Ever since he got back from wherever the hell he was, there’s something about him.
He’s not that innocent little boy from the Polloi compound anymore. ”
“I don’t know if he was really ever innocent.”
“This awful lie about you—”
“It’s not a lie.” Oh, fuck, I just said that to her, didn’t I?
My mother is quiet on the other end of the phone. When she speaks, she says, “I’m going to come over. I want to come over and see you. This is a big thing, a mother-daughter thing—”
“No, Mom, this is not a mother-daughter thing. No. It absolutely isn’t.”
She thinks about it. “Okay, you’re right. But this is worrying, actually, sweetie. This isn’t like you. So, I’m coming over.”
“I’m not there,” I say.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at his house.”
“Oh, hell,” says my mom. “Is he there right now?”
“Yeah?”
“Like, close? Is he listening to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Put me on speaker.”
I slowly take the phone away from my ear. I put the phone on speaker.
“Hannah?” comes my mom’s voice.
“Yeah, Mom, you’re on speaker,” I say.
“Ellis, can you hear me?” she says.
“Joni, this isn’t really about you,” he says. He calls my mom by her first name, because years ago, she told him to. I bet now she wishes he called her ma’am or senator or something, though.
“If it is about my daughter, it is about me,” says my mom.
“If it’s about my son, it’s about me. Now, I talked to Andrew, and he says that what he thinks you are trying to do is to take something of his, the way you feel he took something of yours.
And even though you know that he loves and cherishes Calliope, and that she has never belonged to you, or to anyone except herself, you are going to try to defile whatever it is of Andrew’s you have taken. ”
“Look, whatever it is he—”
“I’m talking,” interrupts my mother. “You will not do that to my daughter.”
Ellis smirks.
“What was that?” said my mother.
“Oh, are you done talking?” says Ellis. “Joni?”
My mother sighs heavily. “What happened to you, Ellis, really what happened?”
“You know, you have no idea all of the things that happened to me when I was growing up,” he says. “And as for your daughter, I think you’re too late.”
“What do you mean by that?” my mother says.
“I mean, I’ve already defiled her.” And he yanks the phone out of my hand and hangs up on her.