epilogue
ellis
Callie’s baby is five months older than ours, and we don’t live that close, not anymore, since we only use the house I bought to stay in when we come here to visit Hannah’s family.
But on one of those visits, Callie and I end up in a park together, pushing our strollers.
Her little boy is sitting up and babbling out at the surroundings, while our little girl is napping in her tiny little blue-green sundress.
You would not believe how many little sundresses that Kane has purchased for this baby.
He cannot leave the house without bringing something home for her.
He cannot make an order on without buying something for her.
She is going to have everything she wants, all of the time, I think.
I don’t worry about this, though.
I think we could all stand to be a little spoiled by those around us from time to time.
Callie lays her head on my shoulder as we walk, and I playfully nudge her off and say no touching, or we’ll never be able to hang out anymore.
“We have to make this work,” I say. “You’re my family. I’m yours. We need to be actually good to each other, and that means not hooking up.”
“I’m not trying to hook up with you,” she says.
“Good,” I say, giving her a teasing grin.
She shoves me, not hard, and goes back to pushing her stroller. “You’re the worst, Ellis Cirillo.”
“And don’t you forget it,” I say.
She thinks about this. “You really are the worst, actually.”
I laugh.
“No, I mean it, you are. You have been horrible to me. You have treated me abominably.”
“I treated you badly?” I glance at her.
“Whatever,” she says. “Only someone like Hannah would ever put up with you.”
“And my two alphas?” I say. “Besides, I’m not horrible anymore.” I show her my tattoo. “I have this.”
“Yeah, that’s really working for you, huh?” She looks up at me.
I’ve still never explained the significance of the peanut-butter tattoo to any of my mates.
But when Callie saw it, I told her straightaway, because I knew she’d understand.
She actually tried something similar. She got a bracelet that she could look down at, but she says it doesn’t work for her.
She overrides it and does the destructive thing anyway, at least some of the time.
“I mean, as much as anything works,” I say.
“There’s no getting around the fact that everything is mostly hard, most of the time.
I used to spend all my time trying to avoid feeling my tough emotions, and then I just made more problems for myself.
Now, I feel my emotions, and it’s really fucking bad.
I don’t go and make my life worse, or whatever, but the net amount of bad feelings? Basically the same.”
She laughs. “Yeah, I think I get that. It’s, um, there are no shortcuts.”
“None.”
“But this way is better because I’m not consumed with guilt over hurting people I love.
” Callie says that her little boy changed everything, that the moment they put him up on her chest after she gave birth that she was struck by some bolt of something terrible and stern.
She knew, she says, right in that moment, that she no longer belonged to herself, that she belonged to this little boy.
She doesn’t know why she didn’t feel this while she was pregnant.
She’s talked to other women, and they seem to have felt it earlier than she did.
Some felt it the minute they knew they were pregnant, others felt it when the baby began to move, others when their bellies began to protrude.
It takes me a while, sometimes, she says. But I get there eventually.
It takes me a while, too, I have to admit. “Maybe I am still horrible,” I say thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m always going to be horrible. But maybe the horrible part of me doesn’t have to, like, define me.”
“That’s nice,” says Callie. “I like that.”
We nod at each other over the strollers.
Callie’s always going to be important to me.
I can’t have a life without her in it. But it’s been good that we haven’t been actively bad for each other lately, I have to admit.
It’s been good that we’ve each got our own romantic relationships, our babies, our separate lives, and we don’t, I don’t know, contaminate each other.
After our walk in the park, I take our little girl home to her mother, who has not, much to my sadness, become a milkmaid as a profession.
For whatever reason, those pumps just don’t work on her.
The manual ones work marginally better, but the best way to get milk out of her breasts seems to be our daughter’s mouth. I guess that would make sense.
I also have been kind of monumentally disappointed in the fact that all the nursing seems to mean she has very little sensation in her nipples.
It’s way less hot to try to suck milk out of them if she’s getting nothing out of it.
So, all of that has been mostly relegated to fantasy world. That’s fine.
Fantasy is fine and all, but I’d take reality over that any other day.
And, as weird as this might sound, I’d rather have our baby than a lot of hot, kinky sex.
I like sex, obviously, but it’s temporary.
It’s this buildup, a crest and a release, and then it’s over.
The joy from being a pack, from having a child together, from our love and togetherness, it’s slow and enduring.
It’s nicer than a burst of gratification.
She’s texting Gatlin, as per usual. The two of them, I swear, they are both gifted with about forty percent more words than either Kane or I have in a day.
Luckily, they have each other to say them to, because if I have to listen to either of them, I end up out of words, and just staring slack-jawed, uttering mono-syllables.
They can talk a blue streak, though, and I’m happy they have each other.
“How’s Gatlin?”
“He’s good,” she says. “He says to say hi to our little squishikins.”
I kiss our baby on the forehead. “Hear that, squishikins?”
Our daughter gurgles, and then she hones in on Hannah and makes a little noise of distress.
“Do you miss Daddlins?” croons Hannah. “Daddlins misses you.”
We have a bunch of weird names for ourselves that all are diminutives of Dad. Gatlin is Daddlins, I’m Daddy-o, and Kane is actually Daddy, full stop, but I think this is mostly because Hannah enjoys calling him that.
Our daughter begins to fuss now, in earnest.
“I don’t think it’s about missing Gatlin,” I say to her.
“Oh, of course,” says Hannah, taking the baby from me. “Hello, sweetheart. It’s me, the milk lady.”
I snicker. “You know, she likes you because you’re her mom.”
“She likes me because I’m food,” Hannah counters.
“Not just because you’re food, though,” I say, and I kiss her temple.
We lounge on the couch and watch stand-up comedy while Hannah nurses the baby to sleep and the afternoon sun slants in out of the windows and it’s very much just calmness and comfort and nothing that exciting, and I love it.
Hannah rests her head on my shoulder, and I lean over and kiss her forehead. “How’s Callie? Did you fuck her?”
“Fine, and no,” I say.
“Someday, you’re going to.”
“Nah,” I say. “I think it’s really done. I do.” I look down at the peanut butter tattoo. I look over at my daughter. It’s funny how easily she feels like mine when I know she’s Gatlin’s.
Sometimes, I think about the compound, how our dads treated us differently if they knew that they weren’t biologically our dads, and I find it baffling.
They must have been that way because they were desperate, I think, or because they felt as if they were constantly competing for their omega’s attention, and they saw each of the babies that weren’t theirs as some threat?
“I know this,” Hannah says, her tone going impish, “has all just been an elaborate plan to make Calliope jealous.”
“Well, I’ve really shown her up,” I say. “I mean, she gets one alpha, and I get two, plus a beta. And she has a baby, but we’re going to have way more babies than she does.”
“Are we?” says Hannah. “Just volunteering me for that?”
“I thought this was your life’s mission, to be a tradmatewife or whatever and you were going to be part of something, and your contribution to everything was going to be to get bred constantly, and I was going to get to watch you take Kane’s knot, and I was going to get you pregnant with my kids.
I was planning on coming in you so much that I knocked you up with triplets. ”
She laughs. “You know how triplets happen, right?”
“You’re going to tell me it doesn’t have anything to do with how much sperm I put in you, aren’t you?”
“Well, it doesn’t. I know there are gaps in your education—”
“Hey, I went to a public school like everyone else,” I say. “I lived on a compound, but it wasn’t one of those places where they have their own schools. Anyway, whatever happens, I get to come in you a lot, don’t I?”
She snuggles into me. “Okay, I have barely recovered from giving birth to this one, so give me a little time before we start getting me pregnant again, Ellis.”
“Right,” I say. “We’re talking, what? A couple of months?”
“Yeah,” she says, snickering. “Couple of months.” She hums a little. “Truth is, I do want them to be close in age, I guess.”
“Yeah?” My voice is deeper as I tighten my grip on her. “I do like the idea of keeping you barefoot and pregnant, Hannah Wihlbilt. Maybe it’s awful of me, but it’s very appealing.”
“You just want to use me,” she says, teasing, a little grin playing on her lips.
“Yeah, that’s it,” I say in a guttural voice, covering her mouth with my own. “Use you until I use you up.”
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Thanks so much for reading!