Love & Exorcisms | 18+ | COMPLETE |

- Chapter 32 -

Every now and then, I felt the sudden desperate longing to go home. Except...I didn't know what home was. I didn't know where it was, what it looked like, what it felt like. Because home was not my parents' house: there was too much pain there. Home was not Mary Jeffries' Doll House: I had only hidden there, found shelter there. Now the place to which I returned, exhausted and hungry, was Damian's house with its dark walls and dozens of unknown rooms.

Every time that feeling returned, I remembered that I was longing for a place that had never truly existed.

Alexander left us on the sidewalk outside the house, where moths fluttered in the orange glow of the streetlamp and all the curtained windows before us were lit within. The man left with the nasally promise to update Damian on their "client's" progress soon, before speeding off into the night much to the alarm of neighborhood dogs who were set into a chorus of barking at his roaring engine. 

As I stood there, tired and cold and aching to my very bones, I had a sudden recollection. My mother used to have a little hollow ceramic house painted to look as if it were snow-covered, and every December she would set it out on the kitchen table with a lit candle within. I used to stare at that little house for hours when I was younger. I could imagine a family living inside it, warm and happy. Somehow, the sight of Damian's house glowing in the dark made me recall it. Maybe it was merely my exhaustion, but there was a strange comfort in it.

Then I remembered Octavio. And Rachel. And Damian's thinly veiled and dangerously alluring threat to make me unable to sit. The coiling in my stomach as he withdrew his keys to unlock the door was not fear, but an odd mixture of shame and excitement. The admission of the nasty things I'd done in order to escape lingered on the tip of my tongue, an outpouring of guilt.

But it was too late for that. The door was already open, and Octavio was there pacing in the hall.

The moment the young man's eyes fell upon us, his expression moved from fear to utter terror. He gasped, backed himself into a doorway, gasped again and clutched at his heart, all the while pointing a shaking finger at me.

"She-she h-hit....ran-ran away...away...threatened...to...to...kill me," Octavio closed his eyes, and Damian was swiftly at his side, grasping the young man's shoulders. I felt my face grow hot with shame. What kind of apology was sufficient for threatening to kill someone?

As Octavio still could not manage to string his words together, despite Damian's encouragement, I gave the story for him. "I knocked him over the head and pinned him down," I announced, my voice caught halfway between regret and stubborn pride. "I strangled him and threatened to kill him if he tried to stop me from leaving." The words tumbled out. Just saying them aloud sounded painfully awful. I swallowed hard, and dug deep within myself, searching for an apology. "I'm sorry, Octavio. I thought I was saving Damian."

It sounded weak. Unrepentant. I hated apologies with a passion, and it showed. But that did not change the regret creeping up on me the longer I looked at Octavio's shaken, terrified face and remembered that same look on him as he lay beneath me earlier that day.

Meting out fear to an unwilling participant was not nearly as pleasurable as frightening the willing and eager.

Octavio's adam's apple bobbed nervously. Damian gave him a firm pat on the back. "Don't worry yourself," he said gently. "All is well and I can assure you that you aren't in danger, Octavio. I'm here. Samara won't be causing trouble. Take one of the pills from my office drawer and go to bed. Take your rest."

Still clutching at his chest, Octavio wandered away with a dazed expression of relief. Damian's expression, on the other hand, had grown so tight it made my stomach clench. He slowly turned back to me, leaning himself against the doorway that Octavio had attempted to barricade himself within, arms folded.