Page 74 of Use Me Up

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.

13

gatlin

I’m in the middle of leading a group of mostly women in their fifties and sixties in a tai chi sequence when I feel it.

My omega is in heat.

The bond flares like a supernova, whiting me out, and I lose my balance in the middle of The Dragon Stretches Its Tail.

Immediately, I center myself.

I allow the sensation to be and do not try to change it, do not try to end it, just exist with it, which is the basis of all tai chi, anyway, flowing movement through mindfulness, feeling the body and accepting it, accepting each sensation as it comes and experiencing it, not controlling it.

I get through the sequence, but I do cut it short. I had planned to take them through Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane and Repulsing the Monkey Mind, and I don’t.