11
hannah
I almost leave without him, but he comes back just as I’m heading out to my car, materializing out of the darkness, walking with his head down, his hands in his pockets, his t-shirt stretched tantalizingly against his perfect chest, his chiseled features solemn.
Calliope came back a while ago and she and Andrew left together.
I talked to my parents about all of this while Ellis and Calliope were gone.
My mother panicked over how she thought that I didn’t see my own worth, and my father tried to assure her that I was fine, that I’d always been the careful one.
He told her that I was the kid who took my time and surveyed everything before jumping in.
He made this metaphor about how I took my time learning to swim, doing a lot of observation, watching everyone in the water, and then—when I decided to get in the water—I learned to swim in two days.
I don’t think this is the same thing.
I try to explain that the metaphor would only work if I had actively been interested in water, but water had been utterly uninterested in me.
My father waves this away, saying I’m a beautiful and vibrant young woman.
I say that my father is biased and he doesn’t know anything. But it’s nice that my dad thinks I’m so great. It’s nice to have parents who think you’re amazing. I wonder what it does to Ellis and Callie to essentially have no parents at all.
Near as I know, since they left the Polloi, they are shunned or something. It’s kind of like the Amish. You leave the Polloi, you’re cut off or whatever? So, no one in their family is allowed to talk to them even if they wanted to.
Anyway, suffice it to say that my dad is strangely Team Ellis, which is not what I would have expected.
I would have thought my dad would be more on the don’t-hurt-my-daughter-or-I-will-hurt-you train.
But I think my dad realizes that would only alienate me from him.
My dad has always been pretty attuned to me.
I call out to Ellis when I see him and he comes over.
“I should never have come with you,” he says. He looks sort of exhausted. What did he talk about with Callie?
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m sorry I said anything about your alphas. That was really shitty of me.”
“Nah, it was going to come out eventually.”
“If I hadn’t said that, everything would have gone differently tonight.”
“I’m glad she knows,” he says. “I’m glad she and I talked. Something shifted.”
I survey him. “What shifted?”
“I think both of us want to figure out how to move on,” he says. “I don’t think either of us knows how.”
I’m not sure how to take that. I turn my back to him and go towards my car.
He comes after me. “She thinks I should let you be. She says it’s not fair to your mother.”
“Yeah, well, I think you probably realize that there aren’t very many women who would stay with you while you figure out how to get over your ex-girlfriend. You really did find the one person who is willing to be your doormat, and that’s me.” I open the driver’s side door.
He opens the passenger side door. “She was never my girlfriend.”
I just laugh. That’s what he chooses to respond to in what I said? That? I get into the car. “I’ll take you home.”
He gets in, too. “You don’t have to.”
I just shrug. I put the keys in the ignition and start the car.
He shuts his door. “I don’t think you’re a doormat.”
“Don’t you?” I pull the car out. I’m in no mood for everyone to pretend that I’m something I’m not right now.
It’s driving me a little bit insane. It’s nice that my dad thinks I’m great, but he’s being stupid.
My mother at least acknowledges something is wrong with me, though it’s annoying that she feels the need to take all the responsibility for it, and to blame herself.
But Ellis pretending that he doesn’t understand exactly what I am and that he didn’t pick me entirely because he knew he could target that about me, it’s too much.
“No,” he insists. “I really don’t.”
I wait for him to elaborate. He does not.
I don’t push. I want to stop talking about all of this.
I want to go back in time and tell him not to come along tonight.
I want that future where he takes me home and fucks my pussy like he promised, where he wants to use me again, where—even if I’m a doormat—I’m the kind of doormat he still sees value in wiping his feet on.
But I also feel a deep hot ball of shame in my gut about wanting that. I know I should want more for myself. I know I should, but the thing is, I don’t even know how to do that.
He draws in a breath like he’s going to say something.
I wait.
He lets the breath back out and doesn’t say anything.
I turn on the radio in the car. I could have plugged in my phone, but I didn’t, and now I’m driving, so I just wave at the radio. “Find a station you like.”
He reaches over and starts fiddling with the tuner, flipping through jazz and hip-hop and classic rock and the 80s station.
He settles on a station that is playing a Florence and the Machine song, “Hunger.” This song is really old, and I haven’t heard it in a long time, not since I was a kid.
I wonder what radio station is playing some ten-year-old single.
“You keep saying stuff about how I’m using you,” he says. “But I think you’re using me, too.”
I glance at him. “You tell yourself whatever you want to make yourself not feel guilty, don’t you?”
“I mean, I do feel guilty,” he says. “I just don’t really let guilt stop me, I guess.”
I scoff. That’s like him.
“I think,” he says, “that you think I’m safe, because you don’t think I could ever have any real feelings for you or something, so you think this is a way for you to have some kind of practice relationship, and then you’ll have this experience when you meet someone who you think will actually want you. ”
“No one is ever going to actually want me,” I say, really annoyed, reaching over to turn up the song. We all have a hunger, she sings. Is her name really Florence?
He turns the music back down. “That’s just something you tell yourself to keep yourself safe, though.”
“Fuck you, Ellis, you don’t know anything about me,” I say, reaching for the radio.
He stops my hand. “Are you on the apps, Hannah? Are you going out to meet people? Are you giving anyone the chance to want you?”
I sputter, because… because…
“I didn’t think so. You stay home and hide and tell yourself you’re boring and unwantable and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and then you wear it like armor, and you hide inside your little fortress, and then, here I am, expressing interest, and you refuse to see that.
You go way inside, and you don’t even try to fight for me. ”
I gasp. “Fight for you? How would I do that? You want me to go pull Callie’s hair or something?”
He doesn’t respond to that.
I turn the music up.
He doesn’t stop me.
We don’t say anything for the rest of the drive back to his place, but I think about what he’s said, and it burrows into me and bothers me.
Maybe because I’ve had this thought before, not about romantic relationships or anything, but about how I’ve chosen to pursue this stupid, impossible job of being a literary agent, and how I think I’ve done it so that I can say it was too hard, that I tried really hard, but it was just too hard to be successful, and it’s not my fault that I failed.
I think about my dad talking about me and swimming, and it’s true, I did wait a long time to try to swim.
I did spend a lot of time trying to figure it out before I ever tried.
I wonder if it was because I didn’t want to commit to it unless I was sure I could do it, if I can’t bear the idea of failing at anything.
Do I not have a boyfriend because I’m afraid to fail at it?
And if so, that’s stupid, because everyone fails at relationships. People usually date around and have a few heartbreaks before they meet the one. Am I too afraid of heartbreak to risk it, so I’m never going to meet anyone?
When I park in his driveway, he doesn’t get out right away. He toys with the door handle and won’t make eye contact.
I stare at him, and I think about telling him I want him to invite me in, and I wonder what he’d say if I did.
I think that the worst thing he could say would be to refuse me, and I think that I have been so rejected for so long that I’d actually probably handle it fine. “Invite me in.” It’s a challenge.
He looks up at me, a smile playing on his lips. “Okay.” And then he does not. He just gets out of the car and shuts the door.
My heart slams painfully into my rib cage for several minutes before I open the door and get out after him.
He waits for me, and we walk up to the door together.
Inside, we look each other over for several minutes, not saying anything.
He rubs the back of his neck, sheepish. “I can’t be what you need.”
“You are so fucking confusing,” I say to him, and I’m a little breathless.
“I was thinking about it,” he says, and he starts up the stairs.
“I was thinking about what it takes to be with someone, how you have to make the person the center, and I was thinking about how I tried it already with the alphas, and she was still the center, and I obviously got involved with you because of her, so… it’s tainted. ”
I follow him up the stairs. “I can’t fight for you, Ellis, not if it means competing with her. I can’t compete with her.”
He glances at me over his shoulder. “I think that’s why I like it with you.”
I stop moving, so confused. That should hurt. Maybe it does hurt. Maybe it just flabbergasts me.
He’s still climbing the steps, and now he’s not looking at me. “It’s the same with me, what I said to you in the car. I make little safe fortresses, too. Maybe everyone does? But you’re safe because you’re not… because it’s tainted.”
I catch up to him. “What?” I don’t get it.