11 #2
“You won’t expect me to be what you deserve, or what you need. You’ll accept me even though I’m screwing everything up. So, I trust you. I know that’s fucked up. But I have real trouble trusting people. Especially, uh, good people.”
“Like your alphas,” I say, getting it.
“Not that you’re bad,” he says. “You’re pure, like I said before, but you’re also…”
“No, I know what you mean,” I say. I suck in a breath as I realize that Ellis, perfect Ellis, with his beautiful body and his flawless smile and his effortless sexiness, is flawed, and he knows he’s flawed. And that this, somehow, puts us on equal footing. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I think I have real trouble trusting people, too,” I say.
“But this, the fact that you’re… unstable or whatever?
It makes me trust you in a way, too.” He might settle for me, at least for a while, anyway.
Maybe it’s just going to be while he works her out of his system or figures his shit out or something, but it could be something prolonged.
And if we’re coming at this as equals, then it could be a real relationship. Maybe not a lasting one. Maybe not the relationship. But I just got done realizing that I have to fail at love in order to eventually have success, and maybe I can handle this.
He gives me a real, genuine smile.
I smile back, sort of shy, but I feel stripped open and bare now. I feel seen. I feel accepted. It’s good.
“I want to kiss you?” he says, and he sounds shy, too.
I close the distance between us, offering him my lips.
The kiss feels different, somehow, like it’s real and vulnerable in a way that things have never been with us. It wraps all around me, it penetrates any fortresses I’ve built inside me, it makes me feel warm and safe and good.
Ellis and I have sex but it’s different.
It’s slower and we’re kissing and gasping against each other, and I feel connected to him.
It’s like all the times before, I wasn’t really letting him in, but that I have this time, and there’s space for him here, and he fits here, and we’re tied to each other, almost fused or something.
I don’t really have words for it, but it’s achingly sweet and intense.
But I don’t come.
He tries to finish me after, his fingers on the pulse of me, kissing my chin and my cheekbone and whispering in my ear, mostly just things like, “Yeah,” and “Good,” and… I don’t know, I just can’t.
Eventually, he makes me touch myself, and I come in two seconds.
I would puzzle over it more. It bugs me.
I wonder if it’s something to do with what we talked about earlier, if I feel worthy of letting him make me come or something, if I think I don’t warrant it from him.
But I’m sleepy, and I fall asleep before I can follow any of my wonderings to any real conclusion.
The next day, I’m supposed to work from home, and Ellis says I could do it at his place, but I don’t have my laptop here or anything, so I go back to my apartment. We make plans to see each other later, though, and when I go to his place, I bring everything with me.
Things fall into a rhythm. I’m almost always with him.
I work from home for a few days, and then I go into the office on Friday.
That’s typically how it works, Monday and Friday I go in, and the rest of the time, I work at home.
As an unpaid intern, I don’t exactly have full-time hours’ worth of work, so there’s a lot of downtime.
This means that I observe Ellis’s workout routine, and he tells me all about lifting weights.
Unlike cardio-type workouts, which I’ve always done in the past, weight-lifting apparently is only effective if you take days off.
It’s two days on, one day off, or that’s how he does it, and he says you have to eat enough calories to be able to build muscle, and I have to say, a lot of this appeals to me more than running myself ragged.
So, I start doing some strength training along with him, and it just feels better than cardio ever did to me for some reason.
Cardio always made me feel exhausted and miserable and sweaty.
It’s not that I don’t sweat doing strength training, but it’s different.
It’s about concentrated bursts of energy release instead of sustained pressure.
Of course, Ellis says it’s a long game. You build muscle, but that doesn’t mean you lose fat, not like you would if you were in a calorie deficit or something.
It’s more that the muscle burns more calories just by existing, so your body very slowly begins to change shape.
My body does not change shape at all.
But maybe I’ve been too hard on my body and the way it looks.
Maybe.
We have a lot of sex.
I still have trouble coming.
I try to explain it at one point. I’m really frustrated and lying next to him in bed and we’re both naked, and I say that I feel like I don’t know how to communicate with him how and where exactly to touch and what pressure to use and that it’s really easy to lose the thread of my orgasm, that I’ll be climbing for it and then something will go wrong, and that also now it’s become this thing, and every time I get close, I think, Ooh, it’s going to finally happen, he’s going to make me come, and then inevitably, I lose it.
He hovers over me, smiling down on me, and he says that usually he’s controlling his movement when he comes. “I’m inside you, but to get there, I have to move myself the way I like it.”
Oh. I realize that’s maybe true. The way that it works for men is sort of different. He has it easier than me, anyway, because sex is better designed to facilitate his orgasm. “But you can come if I’m using my mouth on you,” I say.
“It takes a while,” he says.
“Not as long as me!”
“I don’t see why it matters, really,” he says. “You know, the next time you go home, you should get your vibrator. We should use that.”
I search his expression. “This doesn’t bother you at all?”
He flops down next to me. “Maybe it should, but I’m a self-centered asshole, as we’ve already established.”
I shove him. “You really are.”
He tells me that it seems like it’s really common for women to be able to come only when they’re on top, and that’s probably because they’re controlling the movement.
I wonder if I have made this into some thing that just isn’t real, some idea that someone else has to give me an orgasm. Maybe people mostly give themselves orgasms and they just do it with other people.
I do get my vibrator.
During all this, there’s very little communication from my family to me, and it’s radio silence between Callie and Ellis, which doesn’t seem good to me. It seems like the calm before a storm, like something very bad is brewing, and I don’t like it at all.
Ellis and I talk about things. Sometimes he tells me about his childhood or his past, but he doesn’t talk specifically about his relationship with Callie very much, and I strategically avoid bringing it up.
One day, when I’m home from work, he announces that he remembers that we have not yet dyed my hair, and that he wants to make me over into his perfect beta sex toy.
“Don’t even pretend like you don’t think that’s hot,” he says to me. “Because I can smell that you do.”
I’d be embarrassed, but… maybe I am embarrassed. Maybe I just do think it’s hot, though. Hot enough that I don’t care about being embarrassed.
So, we go to the store and he hems and haws over different colors, holding up the boxes to my skin tone, turning his head this way and that, and I giggle a lot.
“I don’t think men do this,” I tell him.
“Do what?”
“Get interested in hair dye to this degree. You’re a unicorn.”
“I’m an omega,” he counters and thrusts the strawberry blond box into my chest. “This. This is the color.”
I turn it over in my hands. It’s not the color of Callie’s hair, but it is lighter than my current shade, and her hair is lighter than my current shade.
“Hey,” he says, fingers under my chin, “if you’re worried I’m making you into her, don’t. This is not her hair color.”
“I know.” But he could tell I was worried about that.
“You want to please me, right, beta?” He waggles his eyebrows at me.
I bite down on my lower lip. I do.
We put the dye in together, and then he says we should leave it on longer than the box says to get the color even lighter, and we watch stand-up comedy while I try to make sure to keep my hair from getting on any of the furniture.
Both of us get in the shower together and he rinses me out and puts the conditioner that came in the box into my hair himself. He rubs some of it into my nipples, too, and we make out against the slick wall of the shower.
But then he abruptly turns off the shower and is businesslike about combing and blow-drying my hair. He won’t let me look in the mirror, touching my face and saying things like, “No, no, beta, this is for me. It only matters if I like it.”
And this makes my pussy pulse in this incredibly insane way.
When my hair is dry, he doesn’t let me get dressed. He makes me get on my knees while he sits on the bed and suck him, and he runs his hand through my hair the whole time.
“Good beta,” he breathes. “Suck me nice and deep, just how I like.”
I suck him and he toys with the ends of my hair.
“Fuck, Hannah,” he groans. “Fuck, your mouth.”
I keep sucking him, and I squeeze my legs together, and I am crazy, crazy turned on.
“You look so pretty with your mouth full of me. You look so pretty with your hair this color. You look so pretty because you’re mine.”
I am his. I know it.
But I still need my vibrator to come after he finishes in my mouth.