7. Lorraine

Chapter Seven

Lorraine

I was in trouble. Big trouble. I was starting to fall for Ash. Not the head-over-heels infatuated kind of falling for someone, either. This was the real deal, the kind of falling for someone that ended in love. Except that couldn’t be right. I couldn’t afford to fall for Ash. Logically, I knew it wasn’t going to work. He was some kind of magical being, and I was human. He lived in a different realm than I did, never mind a different city, state, country…

Not to mention the fact that once all this was over, I wanted to go back home to the life I’d left behind. To Cat. She was all I had left now. I would have lost my job, I was sure about that, but I could get a new job. I would no longer have a man in my life. I’d lost Oscar, but something told me I’d lost him long before he’d done this shit to me. I just hadn’t known it then. My parents were gone, and now Ash would be, too. That left a hollow feeling in my chest, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. This just wasn’t a world where I belonged, and I couldn’t imagine Ash fitting into the life I had with Cat. He was a magical being, and it just didn’t work that way. I would go home to my sister, and Ash wouldn’t be in my life at all. That was why I was in such big trouble. When I’d let Ash fuck me the first time, I’d been convinced it was a rebound. Hell, the first couple of times had been to get Oscar out of my system, to forget about him and what he’d done to me, to move on. After that, it was all about Ash. It became all about us—together. That was where I was starting to go wrong. I crawled onto the couch in my new living room and stared at the hearth. There wasn’t a fire crackling in it, but it was still nice to look at. Everything about the cabin was so tasteful—Ash had really outdone himself. It was another reason I was falling for him. He knew what I needed. He knew what I wanted without asking. It was like we were on the same page, the same channel, completely in sync. Was it because of the bond we shared? What would happen to that bond once All Hallows’ Eve was over, the magic died down, and I went home? Would the bond break, allowing me to easily forget him? My eyes grew heavier. My mind was exhausted trying to figure it all out, and my body checked out. In no time, I was asleep. My mind didn’t check out and let me rest, though. “Babe?” Oscar’s voice woke me up and I blinked in the harsh light. “It’s time to wake up.” Had he opened the curtains? I rubbed my eyes and tried to sit up. “What time is it?”

“Time to get out of bed.”

I blinked at Oscar. If he was here, waking me up instead of my mom, then it was all true. It hadn’t been a nightmare—my parents really were gone. “I don’t want to get up,” I said and sank back against the pillows. “I can’t do this.”

“You can,” Oscar said. “I know it’s tough, but you can’t lie down and die. You have to keep pushing, keep living.”

They would have wanted that.”

I covered my face with the sheets. “You can’t know what they would have wanted.”

That wasn’t true. Oscar had been in my life long enough that he’d known my parents. They might not have liked him; they might have suggested I dump him, but they’d been nice to him because he was important to me, and he’d known them well enough to be able to tell me what they would have wanted. He was right. They wouldn’t have wanted me to lie in bed and be depressed for the rest of my life. What parents would? “Come on, I made us breakfast and coffee,” Oscar said. “Cat is in the shower, and if you hurry, there will be some hot water left for you. We’ll kick her out, and I’ll help you forget for a little while.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. I smiled at him. I wasn’t in the mood for sex, but he was trying to draw me out of my shell, and that meant everything. Oscar was such a good guy. Sure, he had his flaws, but he was here for us after everything. It had been a week now, and every morning I woke up thinking it might all have been a nightmare, my parents would be back when I opened my eyes, and everything would be back to normal. Oscar was helping us assimilate to this new normal—this fucked-up normal. He was here to help us through the mess. He’d stayed over the first night to be with us. He’d stayed over the second night. He’d stayed over every night after that, and he just hadn’t left. “Are you going home today?” I asked. Oscar shook his head. “I won’t leave until you want me to go.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Then I’ll stay,” he said and leaned down, dropping a kiss on my forehead. I smiled, drinking in his warmth. It felt like everything about me had frozen over, and Oscar was the only person who prevented my heart from stopping altogether. My parents hadn’t liked him, but they were gone, and I had nothing else left. Even if he had flaws, even if he wasn’t the best person out there, he was still here, and that was everything. My eyes suddenly stung with tears. “It’s all my fault,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

“They went because I was full of shit.”

“It was an accident.”

“It should have been me.”

Oscar peeled back the sheets so he could see my face. “Stop it. I’m glad it wasn’t you—I would have missed you too much. Shit happens, Lorraine. That doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s fault. It just means we have to do something else to deal with it, to get through this shitty part until it becomes a good part again.”

I nodded. I understood what he was saying, but he was wrong. It was my fault my parents were gone. He would figure that out eventually, and I hoped that after he did, he would still want to stay the way he did now. “Come on, the water just turned off,” Oscar said. “Let’s get you showered and fed before we tackle this day.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can,” Oscar said. “It’s just one day. You figured it out yesterday, right?”

I nodded. “Just one day.”

“One day,” he said. He’d been getting me through it all one day at a time, and so far, it had been the only thing that worked well enough that I actually had the courage to make it happen. One day wasn’t too much to deal with, but we’d already had a week of “one days.”

“Okay,” I said and pushed myself up. “That’s my girl,” Oscar said and planted a kiss on my lips before he took my hand and led me to the bathroom. I jerked awake on the couch, and for a moment, I had no idea where I was.

The cabin was unfamiliar, the furniture wasn’t the furniture I’d grown up with, and it was far too quiet. It took me a while to realize where I was, to get out of the dream completely. I pressed the palm of my hand against my forehead. My head ached wildly. I stood and walked to the kitchen. I went through the motions of making myself a cup of coffee, but when it was done and I lifted the cup to my lips to sip it, my appetite for it was gone. I poured the cup down the drain. I opened the fridge—just as new as everything else—and studied the contents. It wasn’t going to make a difference what I ate or whether I ate at all. Food wasn’t going to change anything, and it sure as shit wasn’t going to wipe away the feeling of pure dread that swirled in my stomach. Oscar had been such a great guy when I’d met him. He hadn’t been the most handsome, but he’d had goodness in him. He hadn’t been the most driven, but he’d been there for me, and when my parents had died, he’d helped me and Cat through. Then he’d gambled away almost all our money and sold me to settle his gambling debts. As it turned out, Oscar hadn’t been a great guy at all. I just hadn’t been able to see it. He’d lived with us for several years after my parents died, and we’d dated quite some time before, and I hadn’t known his true colors. My stomach twisted, and I felt sick. How could I know what Ash was like when I hadn’t known what Oscar was capable of after spending so much time with him? Other than keeping a few truths from me, Ash had done nothing to show me he wasn’t the best of men. On the contrary, he’d come to my rescue more than once, and he’d been determined to save me from the hell Oscar had created for me. Still, being in love with him was dangerous. Being in love with anyone was dangerous—look where it had gotten me. It was thanks to loving Oscar that I was here in the first place, tied to a man I hadn’t meant to be tied to, hunted by human traffickers… Thanks to Oscar, I had nearly lost my life, even after he’d told me time and again how much he loved me. What was love? How could I know what it was and how it was meant to be when I didn’t know what it should look like? “It doesn’t matter if you love him or not,” I told myself out loud. “It doesn’t matter if he loves you back, because this isn’t the same thing. He’s not going to be around forever, and you’re going home to pick up the pieces of the life you left behind.”

The life Oscar fucked up for us all over again. God, as if losing our parents hadn’t been enough, we had to deal with this shit because I’d been too blind to push away someone who had brought destruction into our lives. My eyes stung with tears, and I covered my face with my hands. “I failed you,” I whispered. I didn’t know if my parents could hear me. I didn’t know if there was any kind of afterlife, but saying it out loud made me feel better. “I failed you, and I didn’t look after Cat right. I brought danger into our lives, and now…” My voice broke, and tears rolled over my cheeks. I allowed myself a minute to fall apart before I forced myself to get it together again. The biggest difference between Oscar and Ash was that Oscar had been set on ruining my life, and Ash was set on saving it. That was a big contrast already, but no matter what love meant and if I was good at figuring out what was good for me… at least this thing with Ash, whatever it was, whatever it was trying to be, wouldn’t last.

That had to help alleviate the fear that coiled inside me like a viper ready to strike, right? How could I fear something that was temporary, something that technically just didn’t exist? The problem was that despite the facts, the fear didn’t go away. Oscar was everywhere I looked thanks to my dream, and I was stuck in a place with a man who wanted to love me and whom I was starting to love back. At least for another two weeks. It sounded like nothing, but around here, two weeks was a very long time, and so much could go wrong. I’d seen it before, and I was terrified it would happen again.