12
ellis
It’s a Tuesday afternoon when Calliope comes to my house.
She’s never been here, and I didn’t tell her where I lived, but Andrew has been here, so I guess that’s how she knows how to get here.
She’s alone, no Andrew anywhere.
She smells earthy, but in a kind of disruptive way, like a smoldering volcano or a fault line that is about to crack open.
I mean, I don’t know what that smells like.
Sometimes, I think, with designations, it’s like the smells are just signals that let you understand the other person’s emotional state, and you interpret them in ways that have associations with sights and sounds and things?
I read about this thing called synesthesia once. It’s when numbers have color or sound in your mind. Every time you think of ‘two’ you hear a certain note, or you see a shade of blue, something like that?
I think having a designation means your brain is wired in that way, somehow, only with scent.
She doesn’t act volatile, though, not as if she’s about to erupt. She’s not angry. She’s not even antsy or excitable. She’s sad.
I open the door to her, and her face crumples the minute she sees me. She moves slowly across the threshold, her shoulders slumped, her lips turned down and trembling.
It reaches inside me the way it always does with her.
When she hurts, I hurt. I open my arms to her, and she collapses into them, and we stand there, just inside the door, and her shoulders shake, but she’s entirely silent, and I scent her and I feel her, like she’s inside me, like she and I are the same fucking person, like her pain is my pain.
We end up on the couch in my living room, and she curls up on my lap like a cat, face pressed into my t-shirt, which gets wet and snotty as she sobs and sobs.
Growing up on the compound, there was a definite hierarchy.
Omegas at the top, their alphas below, and any betas below that.
At the very bottom were children. Children were not seen the way they’re seen out here in the secular world.
Out here, people see children as precious and fragile and in need of protection.
On the compound, children were serfs. We were labor.
We were there to serve the omega and the alphas, and we weren’t worth anything until we were old enough to present.
When Calliope presented as an omega, her worth skyrocketed, but before that, we were both nothing.
We’d get in trouble all the time. Our dads would scream at us if we didn’t do our chores or if we missed a spot cleaning the bathroom or if we fought with other kids or if we had emotional outbursts.
We were expected to conform to expectations, and when we did not, there were consequences, usually of the corporal punishment variety.
Not just spanking, oftentimes with implements and belts, but sometimes real beatings.
Everyone on the compound was stressed out.
They tell you, in the Polloi, that we are the chosen people, the special ones, the ones that the goddess designated as the heirs to rule the whole world.
Because someday, we are going to rise up and crush our enemies and take our rightful place at the right hand of the goddess and all of that.
The reason that we currently live such shitty lives, though, is because we are being tested by the goddess and we have to live up to a standard to earn her favor.
The fact we live in trailers and barely manage to eat and clothe ourselves is our own fault, because if we had done better, the goddess would reward us.
It’s a fairly typical narrative for a number of religious traditions, to be fair.
The Protestant work ethic is similar in a number of ways.
It’s a way to keep going in the face of suffering, I think.
If you tell yourself suffering has a purpose, that it’s honing you into something better, that it will improve you if you surrender to it, it’s easier to bear.
Anyway, the point is, back then, she and I lived under the same roof and we were the same age, and this thing started back then.
She’d get punished, and I’d take up for her, so then we’d both get punished.
We started being treated like a unit. If one of us did something wrong, we were both blamed by default.
So, maybe that’s when we got so in tune with each other, I don’t know.
I just hold her. My throat is tight. I want to cry, too, but I hold it in to stay strong for her.
I don’t ask her what’s wrong. I know that pestering her about it will only make her more stressed out. I just take her pain into me and share it with her, so that she doesn’t have to feel it all alone. It’s what we’ve always done for each other.
Eventually, she quiets. She’s exhausted, though, still curled up against me, her breath coming in shaky gusts. I stroke her back, up and down, up and down.
“I’m sick of it,” she says finally.
I rub her back. I don’t ask what she’s sick of. If she wants to tell me, I’ll listen, but I don’t need her to explain anything to me.
“I’m sick of being the problem. Andrew is perfect. Andrew never does anything wrong. Andrew is always taking care of me, and I’m always falling apart. And he’s not even angry about it. He’s patient with me. He never even complains.”
I’m pretty sure Andrew complains. I’ve heard Andrew complain. But I don’t say that either.
“I want to be better for him, but it feels like, no matter how hard I try, I can’t.
And I think of you all the time. It’s been over a week since I saw you, and we said things, and I meant them, and I do want us to find some way to move on from each other, Ellis, I really do, but…
but…” She lifts her face to look at me. Her nose is red. She’s adorable.
I cup her cheek. “You don’t need to be anything other than what you are for him. Anyone would be lucky to have you.”
She bites down on her lip. “Ever since you came back, every morning, I wake up, and it’s my first thought. I wake up, I stretch, and then I remember, ‘Ellis came back.’ And I feel it all through my body like joy, like something bright and sweet that smells like fresh laundry drying in the sun.”
I stroke her cheek. “I should never have left you.”
“But then I feel guilty for being so happy about it.”
“Because I don’t deserve it.”
“That,” she says. “And because he’s my fucking alpha. Why am I not that happy, every single day, that I have him?”
“Well, you see him all the time, and you’re used to him, and we keep trying to keep our distance, so you don’t see me and you’re not used to me.”
She thinks about that.
Of course, I doubt it if Andrew and Hannah would be pleased if Callie and I were spending time together regularly, either. On the other hand, maybe if we stopped making it such a big thing, it would be less of a thing.
“I just miss you,” she says. And then she kisses me.
So, see, this is why we can’t see each other, because when we see each other, we do this.
A thought surfaces out of my subconscious. You could stop this.
I know I could. I could be gentle and firm, and she would probably be really grateful, actually, that one of us was putting on the brakes.
It would be the right thing to do, and it would probably be the first time we end whatever destructive cycle she and I are caught up in.
It wouldn’t fix everything, but if I did this, now, it would be easier to do it again, and it’s exactly what I should do.
But fuck that.
No way am I stopping this.
So, I kiss her back, and she wriggles around in my lap, and then she’s got her hand in my shirt, or maybe I have my hand in her pants, or who knows, whatever.
Very soon, we’re naked and she smells like a volcano now. She smells like ash and smoke and like sparks are sizzling into me, burrowing hot into my skin, and I am on fire.
“Condom,” she says breathlessly. “I went off suppressants to try for a baby with Andrew. We have to have a condom.”
“I’ll pull out,” I say.
“No, you pre-come like crazy. You’re an omega.” She slips her hand over my cock to prove this to me, and I’m leaking like a sieve.
So, we go up to my bedroom, which is where the condoms are, and that’s when I notice I’m slicking. Which should be a sign, because I know what that means, but I don’t notice it with the thinking part of my brain. It’s noise.
I nail her on the bed, slamming in and out of her while her perfect little tits jiggle tantalizingly in time to my thrusts, and—
The door is opening downstairs.
I keep fucking her, because that’s noise, too, but alarm is blooming at the back of my skull, and I’m putting this together, and I know what’s happening, and I feel sick with dread and shame and regret.
But I’m still fucking her.
“Hannah,” I snarl, my voice loud enough to echo down the stairs where she has just come in, even though I don’t know why because she said she was going to go home because she can’t be productive enough here for her unpaid internship and that she needed to work there today, “do not come up here.”
Calliope lets out a cry of horror.
I’m still fucking her.
She slams her palm into my bare chest, trying to push me off.
I fuck her for five more thrusts before I retreat and stagger off the bed and stand there, in the doorway, condom stuck to my dick, slick pouring out of my asshole and trailing down the inside of my thighs, and Hannah is right there, in the doorway, looking at both of us.
hannah
For several interminable moments, no one moves or speaks. I look at Ellis, naked, facing me, and I look at Calliope, naked on the bed where he fucks me, and they look at me.
Moments tick on, long moments, one after the other, and I can hear sounds, like the distant hum of the refrigerator and a bird chirping outside of the window.
And then it’s an explosion of movement, both of them diving to cover themselves, both of them talking at the same time, saying things, apologies, making agonized noises, just too much sound, too much everything.
I back out of the room and collapse into the wall right next to the doorway.
“Go out there and talk to her,” Calliope is saying.
“This is your fucking fault, and I want you to own that.”
“Yeah, it’s all my fault.” She’s sarcastic.
I go down the steps, very carefully, taking deep breaths.
I go into the living room, which is where I’ve left a folder that I need, where I had printed out some pages that I’m doing a markup on.
It’s easier for me to do edits with a pen sometimes.
This is the reason I came back, so that I could get this.
I was thinking that it might be a lost cause, that I’d get distracted by Ellis and we’d end up messing around, and…
My stomach lurches.
I pick up the folder and open it up, as if I’m checking to make sure that there are things in it.
“Hannah.” Ellis’s voice is scoured.
I hold up the folder. “I left this.”
“Oh,” he says. He gathers up clothing, his and Calliope’s, which is strewn all over the couch and the floor. He disappears.
I hold the folder to my chest.
I start to leave the living room, because I have what I came for, and now I will go home.
Callie streaks down the stairs, half-dressed, and bangs through the front door.
Ellis is standing on the steps.
I smile at him. Why do I smile at him? “I’ll, um, just…” I point to the door.
He’s wearing jeans but no shirt. He smells like her. He sinks both of his hands into his curls and swears under his breath, all of it barely intelligible, but seemingly directed at himself, calling himself a whole lot of very creative names.
Weirdly, the first emotion I feel is sympathy for him. It’s very strange, because the first thing I want to do is go to him and comfort him. It tugs at me, a desire to soothe and care for him.
I’m puzzling that through as I notice that there are goosebumps all over his flesh, puckering his bare arms and his chest, and then a massive shiver goes all through him.
My eyes widen, as I take in a scent that is overpoweringly filling the room, like rain, like thunder, like summer. Ellis.
He shivers again.
Oh, shit.
I know it, and panic starts to rise in me. I go to him, tugging on him. “Okay, okay,” I say to him. “Let’s get you to your nest.”
He groans. “This is not supposed to happen. I’m on suppressants.”
His skin is hot, searing me.
I know about this, not a lot about it, but the broad strokes of it.
“Hannah, I’m sorry,” he says, agonized. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Shh,” I say. “Later.”
No point in any of that, because he’s in heat.