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Maybe to leave.
Because that’s what Gunnar does…he makes me free.
“Hey,” he starts, the weight of an apology already in his voice. “I didn’t mean to—“
“Stop.” I raise my head, meet his blue eyes. They’re blue like the Pacific Ocean, flecked with sunlight. The ripples at the surface, the thing you’re swimming toward as you lose your breath. “It’s not about what you did or didn’t do.”
He walks over, stops a respectful distance away. He understands space—when to invade, when to retreat.
“Talk to me,” he says, simple and direct.
“Things are…complicated.” It feels like the most pathetic way to describe the mess of my life.
“I figured,” he says with a soft laugh. “Ais…does it have something to do with your memories? You don’t have to tell me—
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I say. “It’s that I don’t have much to tell. I’m getting flashes but nothing concrete. Nothing that can help us. It makes me feel useless.”
Gunnar’s hand reaches out to touch my chin, turning my face up to his. He’s always doing that—drawing me into his world, pulling me out of my own self-destructive cycle. I don’t know how he stays so good in a world that brings the worst out in people.
“You’re not useless,” he insists, his voice calm and steady. “We’ll find a way to put the pieces together, one memory at a time. We can’t give up on you, Aisling. And I won’t let you give up on yourself.”
I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not so sure about my own worth. The blackness in my past seems to grow darker with each passing day, swallowing up any semblance of a normal life.
I take a deep breath before answering him, wondering if it’ll be the truth or just another lie. “Everything I know about my past is a blur. I have to trust that those memories are out of reach for a reason…but more and more, I’m convinced that I’m tied up with all this stuff. Eros, the cult…it all has to do with the crash.”
“But you’ve been in another world for a long time,” Gunnar says. “And even if you’re a new Aisling, I still love you. Old and new.”
I take a long time to look at him, just staring into his eyes. He doesn’t look away, letting me stare.
I clear my throat. “For a long time, I didn’t get to choose, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…what I did. Who I was. My body wasn’t mine. Now, hell if I know what I want.”
Gunnar nods, his jaw tightens. “This alpha-omega crap, it screws with your head. Makes you think you’re no more than your biology.”
“Yeah.” My laugh has no humor. “Sometimes it feels like we’re just along for the ride.”
“Maybe,” he agrees, leaning against the wall by the window. “But we fight it, right? We don’t let it define us.”
“Easy to say,” I scoff, pushing up from the bed to stand close to him, close enough to share warmth without touching. “Harder to do.”
“Nothing worth doing is easy,” Gunnar returns, his voice low and steady like a drumbeat.
“Is that so?” I challenge, a half-smile playing on my lips despite the tension coiled within me.
“Damn right,” he replies, and there’s the ghost of a smile on his face too—a shared moment of understanding in the chaos that surrounds us.
We’ve resolved this for now.
The memories are coming back.
I have to trust that I’ll pull it together in time to save us all from damnation.
Chapter seventeen
Oberon
