Find Me Series (Book 4): Where Hope is Lost

by Dawson, Trish Marie

  With nowhere left to go, she stayed for another night. Around the same time at dusk, the man returned with another sack and dropped it next to her. She gave him a tight smile, offered him more water, and again, they sat quietly in front of the fire. Before she went to bed, when she was packing away the few food items she had, he snuck up behind her and pushed her forward over the picnic table. He ripped at the back of her jeans, tugging hard on the belt, and she could tell by the way he handled her, that it wouldn’t have mattered if she was a man, because he was going to take what he wanted anyway.

  She thought she was going to die on that picnic table with her pants shoved down her legs, in an indecent position her mother would die a second time over witnessing, so she tried to save her own life by relenting. With the first painful thrust inside her, she gripped onto the table to keep her hips from banging too forcefully into the concrete. By the third thrust, she forgot about her hips and imagined what he would do to her if she fought, so she reached behind her, and gripped the back of the thighs that were slapping roughly into her ass. The move startled the man, but he didn’t stop what he was doing, he regained his rhythm and moved faster. He finished a minute later, grunting and grinding his teeth near her ear. After she let her arms fall back to the table, he pushed himself free of her and pulled his pants up. She wanted him to leave, and was expecting him to, but he let her yank up her pants before he saw what was under her shirt, and dragged her back to her cabin, pushed her down on the sleeping bag, and then curled up beside her, an arm draped over her bruised and scraped hips. Her hat was loose, but still attached to her hair, and she couldn’t believe he hadn’t lifted her shirt, or noticed her lack of a penis. He went to sleep almost immediately, as if nothing had happened.

  She promised herself that night, if she happened to survive, that she would sleep with a knife every day for the rest of her life. Twice, she tried to roll away from him, but he shifted and kept her close. When he woke at dawn, and flipped her onto her stomach, she didn’t cry, she didn’t fight. She only wanted to live. He shoved her jeans down and pulled her up onto her knees and began to rape her again, but when his hand wandered around to her front, he realized then that she wasn’t a prepubescent boy, she was a woman. He tore her free of her shirts. He marveled at the bandage wrapped around her chest and pulled a small pocket knife out to cut it off. He yanked the hat free, and tangled his hand in her hair, pulling her head back till it was hard to breathe. He did all this while still inside her. It hurt more than Ashlyn thought possible, but she didn’t fight him. She told her body to relax, to wait it out. To let him have control until he was done with her. Then, she’d escape.

  When he pushed her flat and rolled her onto her back, touching her bare breasts and licking his lips while he did so, she stared up at him and studied his long, scruffy face. He wasn’t totally repulsive, so she told herself it was a date, a one night stand, and created an entire story in her mind to go with that. While he began biting at her skin, she imagined this fantasy date in detail. He’d taken her out to the new fancy Italian place down the street from work, and ordered an entire bottle of expensive wine. No, wait, she thought, he ordered two bottles. While he nudged her legs open with his pointy knees and pinned her arms above her head, Ashlyn didn’t think about the old briny sweat smell of his skin or the greasy feel of hands, instead she imagined what they talked about over her fettuccini alfredo and his eggplant parmesan. While he began to drive deep inside her, she pictured the dusty-purple fabric napkins on the dining table, and how she unfolded one over her lap to look proper.

  After the man finished, he tried to please Ashlyn with his fingers and his tongue, and she let him. He wasn’t successful, not at first, but she pretended he was. She moaned a few times, even bucked her hips up toward him, all the while imagining the cold chill of ice in a water glass, and picturing their Italian dinner date. This was the aftermath, the tiramisu, she told herself, as the man finally found her clitoris. After dinner, she’d taken him home, and it was all consensual. She told herself that she wanted everything he did, begged for it, even.

  With watery eyes, she glanced around the dark cabin and pretended to see curtains on the walls, shelves packed with books and trinkets, and whimpered with pleasure for him. While her body began to respond in a shockingly aroused way, she rotated her hips and pretended she was on her bed at home, plush pillows under her head, surrounded by her comforter and clean sheets. She grabbed his dirty hair, as he had done to hers, and guided his mouth, ignoring the searing pain he’d caused just moments before. When it was done, he collapsed beside her, out of breath and half-naked, but satiated. This was how she wanted him, because it would be the only way that she had a chance to flee.

  The sun was fully up when he began to snore, and she carefully pulled on her underwear, her jeans and two of the shirts. The wooden bed creaked once as she moved, and she froze, waiting for his heavy arms to grab her and throw her back down, but they didn’t. She climbed over his hairy and thick legs, and then crept across the cabin floor, slipping out the door and closing it without disturbing his sleep.

  Since neither had packed the food away, animals had ravaged through her pack and his during the night. There was nothing left that wasn’t in a can, and she spent only ten seconds gathering up what she could before securing her pack and hiking out of the campground. She couldn’t run, she could barely walk. She hobbled, not stopping until the sun came up the next day. She was only sore where she wasn’t used to having sex, but she kept to the fantasy that it had been a wild one-night stand, nothing more. Ashlyn never saw that man again, whoever he was, but she learned an important lesson from him. Sex had become more valuable than food, and if she was the one to offer it, she had the power. And with power, her chances for survival were greatly increased. Ashlyn didn’t want to die, she wanted to live.

  The next group she stumbled upon was a pair of young men barely old enough to vote, scavenging through a corner market. She initiated sex with them both, letting them take her however they wanted at first. In a way, she almost enjoyed herself, because she was alive, but also because she was in charge. She had something they both desperately wanted and in exchange, they provided her with security and safety from others. They even did the heavy lifting. She stayed with them for months, sometimes taking turns in their sleeping bags, sometimes letting them both into hers. She continued to learn about how men worked, and continued to adjust her agenda to fully entrap them. She did it with her body, yes, but her mind, too. A stupid and weaker woman would have died the night she was raped at the campground.

  Her plan backfired in the middle of a cold and wet night, when she and her boys were holed up in an abandoned house, sheltering from a rainstorm. She had full control of them by then, but they’d begun to fight over her, no longer willing to share. As she sat calmly in a chair, she watched them tear each other apart like rabid animals in the dim lighting of a battery-operated lamp, until both were dead. She went to sleep, woke the next morning, and packed her things. Once on the trail, it didn’t take her long to stumble upon another small group of survivors, mostly men. But there was a woman with them. She called herself Ellie. Ashlyn knew the moment she met Ellie, that they were alike, kindred spirits. And the slightly older woman embraced Ashlyn as part of the group, allowing her a secure place in each man’s bed. Most nights, she would stay up late with Ellie, talking about their lives, or silly things that didn’t matter like their favorite singers, or television shows. Often, Ashlyn and her new friend would touch each other. And sometimes, they would let the men watch. It went this way until their group fractured much like the pair of men she’d destroyed before them. But by then, California was on fire, and their survival was no longer at risk from other people, but from nature. They ran, they drove, they hid. And then Connor found them.

  He never knew that she’d seen him first, though, just before she’d met Ellie and her men, during a long and lonely week of solace. She’d been traveling south, deeper into the city for
supplies. Her first winter had destroyed all she had managed to grow, and smaller cities and towns meant that scavenging had become harder. She thought it would be easier to survive on the coast, but once she had her men, finding food became their job, not hers. With them gone, Ashlyn was forced to take care of herself once again. It wasn’t her strong suit.

  Ashlyn had watched a small pack of men pass by her building just before dusk one night, with a striking dark-haired man bringing up the rear. He looked broken, like she felt. But he also looked kind. With nothing else to do, she followed them for three days through the bowels of Los Angeles. Connor always stayed at the back of the group, watching the others carefully, giving out directions at intersections, and scanning the area to keep the others safe. He was the alpha male, though didn’t appear to know the others well. She took care to stay far enough away that they wouldn’t hear or see her, but the nights had begun to grow cold, and at the end of that first week, she struck up a small fire to heat a can of beans, and fell asleep from the warmth. When she woke, Connor and his group were no longer on the road. Days slowly passed, and then she found Ellie.

  Jacks had asked Connor many times about his burns. He didn’t like to talk about the fire, he’d say that he just wanted to forget and move on. But Ashlyn never would. It was horrible. She could remember the night she woke up to their tents on fire like it was yesterday: Ellie, running through their camp in the mountains, screaming for people to run, to leave everything and just run. They crashed through the brush and onto the very road Connor was using to escape the same fire. He saved them.

  Later, days after he’d first made love to her, the fire found them again while they slept. There wasn’t time to mourn the men they lost during that second escape, she couldn’t even mourn for Ellie. Through all the panic and pain, Ashlyn truly felt that they were falling in love. She realized that Connor was different from the others she’d met on the road. He would never take something from her she wasn’t willing to give. Without asking for anything in return, he comforted her, protected her, and kept her safe. He kept her alive. The first time they were together, they both wanted it, she believed that. And when he got hurt, when he almost died, Ashlyn was there for him. She knew how to heal him, because Connor was a man.

  Unlike what the others claimed, it had taken her only an hour in the sunlight on the second day she saw Connor’s face to realize who he was, or who he had been. Kevan O’Connor, the famous actor from across the pond. Everyone else called him by his last name, but it felt more intimate to call him by his first. This changed the moment he was reunited with his original group. His family, as he liked to call Riley’s people.

  Ashlyn didn’t understand his fixation with the other woman. She couldn’t comprehend how Connor could choose Riley over her. It was impossible. And when he came into her room and teased her, then told her those nasty and awful things, he had intentionally hurt her for the first time. He’d raped her heart.

  Drake proved tougher than she thought he’d be. For a hot minute, she knew he was interested, yet not quite willing. He would take time. Finesse. But Jacks was damaged goods. When the others left her alone with him, Ashlyn finally had an opportunity to show Jacks what he was missing, and to give him what he needed. If she could make him hers, it gave her leverage. It gave her the baby. And no one would hurt the baby.

  After Jacks left her room, she smoothed down her shirt and wiped herself clean with a towel. She climbed into her bed alone, but she would wake before dawn to give him a present. All she had was her body and the ability to use it well, and she fully intended on claiming Jacks as her own with it.

  JACKS

  His mind shifted some time before morning arrived, taking him out of a nightmare and into a much more pleasant wet dream. Ashlyn had crawled into his bed, and was between his legs, working him with her mouth. She knew what she was doing, and he enjoyed the feel of her without guilt. When he began to moan, one of her hands roamed up his chest and gently clamped over his mouth, and that’s when his eyes flew open and the dream morphed into reality.

  He snatched her hand off his face and pushed the covers back, exposing her. “What are you doing in here?” he hissed.

  “Sshh, you’ll wake the baby,” she whispered.

  She went back to pleasing him, and Jacks was struck momentarily dumb. He didn’t understand how she’d come to be in his bed, but he didn’t want her to stop, either. He grabbed at her hair, fully intending on gently pushing her away again, but instead, his body took over and he fell backwards into the pillow, covering his mouth with his other hand and praying the baby didn’t stir.

  When the pressure was close to exploding, she stopped and climbed onto his body, and he bit into his hand as she slid him inside her. He let her make love to him, slow at first, then with a sense of wild urgency that left his teeth impressions on his hand. She remained silent, but he couldn’t. He pushed her off him, then scooted to the edge of the bed, and she nearly crumpled into herself with disappointment. But then he stood and pulled her feet towards him and lifted her, wrapping her legs around his midsection. He stumbled out to the hall, with his mouth pressed to her breast, and somehow made it back to her room without screwing her against one of the walls. They fell onto her bed, and he began to finish what she’d started, hungry for the big finale that would take the pain away for a second. That’s all he wanted, was that blissful second. They came together, moaning and biting and sweating, and Jacks rolled off her, begging his body to hold onto the euphoria for as long as possible. But less than one minute later, Lily began to cry.

  She didn’t follow him back to his room, but he knew she was awake and wandering around the lodge, cleaning, boiling water, preparing breakfast. Ashlyn had assumed the duty of maid, cook and wife, and Jacks couldn’t for the life of himself figure out how any of that happened. He could have asked her, but for women, everything was so wrapped up in emotion, and he had no emotion for her. It was a physical thing only. What he’d done with her was stupid, he got that. But to tell Ashlyn that would have catastrophic events, he was sure. So, he said little, and asked nothing.

  She brought a tray upstairs to him, with a full bowl of instant oatmeal and stale brown sugar swirled on top, and a steaming mug of black coffee, and watched him eat in silence. She smiled often, as if purposefully withholding a secret. Jacks hated secrets. They were festering little splinters that were always annoying, and sometimes unbearable. As he sipped his hot coffee, and let Lily kick her tiny feet against this thigh from her makeshift play area in the middle of the bed, he wondered which kind of secret Ashlyn was keeping.

  “You’re quiet this morning,” she prompted, after he’d eaten most of the food and sipped his way through a third of the coffee.

  With a lazy shrug, he attempted to find something worth saying that wouldn’t betray his suspicions about her intentions. “It was a long night,” he stated.

  She smiled so wide that he could count most of her teeth. “Ah, but was it a good night?”

  He shrugged again. “Yeah.” Parts were, so it wasn’t a flat-out lie.

  Still smiling, she looked beyond him and settled her gaze on the window. It was a clear day, probably warm enough to melt more snow, he figured, and the air was fresh, even inside the lodge.

  “What do you think happened to them?” she asked suddenly, a frown on her face, the smile gone.

  He looked out the window and found a shadow to stare at in the trees. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think they ran into trouble up there?”

  He looked at Ashlyn, and watched as she fidgeted with the hem of her sweater. Aside from the typical bullshit that came with every relationship, Jacks couldn’t figure out why, exactly, Connor had warned him about Ashlyn. What had she done? What had he done to her, Jacks wondered.

  Slowly, he reached out and touched her hand. “I’m sure they’re okay, Ashlyn.”

  “Please,” she whispered. “My friends call me Ash.”

  She grabbed his hand and pull
ed it to her chest, and Jacks had a flashback of their last intimate moment. As he shook his head to clear his mind, she pulled his hand up to her neck and he touched her jaw with his thumb. Her skin was kissably soft, practically untouched by trauma or age, except for a splattering of freckles across her perky nose. Her brown eyes were larger than life, round and alert, and went well with her pouty mouth. He found her pleasant to look at in the morning sun, more pleasant than the ceiling or the walls that he’d been lost staring at for weeks.

  Before his eyes wandered lower than her mouth, he glanced back at the window, then flinched, pushing off the bed with so much force that it startled the baby into a cry. He’d seen him, he’d seen Win.

  He sprinted to the window and hit the glass with his hands, shaking the frame, staring hard into the trees. But he found only the branches and their shadows looking back at him. There was no man. No Win. With his forehead on the window pane, he closed his eyes and counted to ten, then opened them, hoping for a different view. The same trees that had been there since the first night he slept in his room, were still there, and nothing more.