Page 73 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

“I don’t leave, Indy.”

You do.

That was the implication. The same revelation I’d had at the community center.

I died. I left. I came back.

He stayed.

The ice cream kept melting, coating my hand. I didn’t want it anymore, and Loren appeared to have similarly lost his appetite. I motioned toward his cup.

“You done?”

He nodded and pushed it toward me so I could turn my cone upside down on top of his Butter Pecan. Grabbing a few napkins from the tabletop dispenser, I wiped my hands clean, then sat and picked at the hem of my dress while that bubble of silence refilled.

I hated it. I hated this. And talking hadn’t fixed it.

Maybe the talking was the problem. Maybe I needed to listen for once.

“You had a question, didn’t you?” I asked.

Loren peered at me past a lock of hair that had fallen across his face.

“At Sully’s,” I explained. “You said you wanted the truth. What about?”

Loren braced his hands on the tabletop with his palms flat, fingers splayed. When he looked at me, his eyes were round and guileless.

“Do you love me?” he whispered.

“What?” The word whooshed out of me like I’d been gut-punched. I was glad to be sitting because otherwise the genuine uncertainty on his face would have taken my legs out from under me.

I recovered myself enough to say, “Why would you ask that?”

Loren squirmed in his seat, and his gaze fell into his lap. “You haven’t said it. Not since I’ve been back. Not in this lifetime.”

I gawked, shocked and stammering, “That can’t be true…”

My head was full of too many thoughts, but I searched for that one. The assurance that of course I’d told him I loved him. I said it all the time. Couldn’t keep it to myself.

But, somehow, in the days since he’d returned, I couldn’t recall it. In the weeks before that when I hadn’t yet known him, I’d felt it. I even swore to myself I would tell him as soon as I saw him again but, for as often as I thought it, dwelled on it, obsessed over it, I hadn’t spoken it aloud.

Before I could apologize or attempt to explain—there was no explanation, certainly no excuse—Loren continued.

“You remember me, you call me baby, you’ve slept with me, but you haven’t told me you actually love me.”

I let out a breath that could have been a word if I’d known what to say as he carried on.

“Maybe you don’t,” he said, and it sounded so final. “Maybe you keep me around because I take care of you, and I look nice on your arm, and that’s it. Just your fuck buddy guard dog.”

A hundred years of history had brought us tothis? How? What had gone so wrong to make him doubt me? He was right to question a lot of things, but my love for him should never have been up for debate.

Reaching across the table, I grabbed his hands, and his eyes snapped up.

These moments of transparency were rare and brutally honest. They came as passing comments about the man who came before me or mentions of Moira and the way she treated him. Feelings that had become part of his identity. Like he was an object. A status symbol. A pet.

My fingers tightened around his, and I shook my head vigorously. “Lore, it’s not like that.I’mnot like that.”

The wrinkles in his forehead deepened. “I thought if you remembered, things would change, but?—”

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