Return to the Darkness - Ripley Proserpina Page 0,37
not supposed to be on anything.” After answering, Aaron strode away from us to his brother. He placed his hand on Oliver’s back, but his brother swiped his arm back, knocking him away.
“He’s really hurting.” Thorn took a step toward the brothers and then shook his head. “We should get him to a hospital.”
“No.” Oliver straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “I have a plan.
“You do?” Colton crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s that?”
“I’m going to, as Thorn said, get a fix. A small amount. And then we’re going to get on with this.”
I hated the thought of him using, but maybe that made sense. How did I know? I wasn’t a doctor and I had no experience with this whatsoever. The opioid crisis was alive and well right in front of my eyes, and I could honestly say I’d never seen it before. Wow. It wasn’t pretty.
My thoughts were clearly an understatement.
Aaron suddenly looked even more exhausted than he already was. “Okay. Well, let’s the rest of us go inside and, Oliver, when you’re up for it, come on in, too. See the baby. Try not to piss off our parents.”
He nodded once, and for a brief second, there was such an apology in his eyes as he gazed at his brother that it broke my heart in two. Oliver was so much more than the sum of his mistakes.
I watched him run away, or walk and sort of run. My heart pressed in my chest. Was I really going to leave him here like that? What if he didn’t just become my Oliver? What if they continued like this? What did I know about time and reality? Nothing. I was a PI from Alaska, not some kind of astrophysics expert. But the guy who did know, because in another reality he’d done this to us, was in that house. It was time for me to go in.
Stepping up the house was like going into a memory. The first time I’d come over was when Aaron invited me for dinner. That should be the same in every reality. Nothing had varied until after that.
I elbowed him. “I used to watch you on this porch staring at me.”
He smiled fast. “Can you blame me? Pretty girl we had come to help. I wanted your attention.”
I really wished he didn’t smell like cigarettes. It just wasn’t Aaron’s scent to me. It was wrong somehow. “Well, you got that.”
The door flung open. Kelly stood there, a cigarette in her hand and the baby on her hip. I gulped. I hadn’t seen Kelly in the other world. She’d wanted privacy to live her life separate from her family.
She stared at me. “Aren’t you dead?”
I swallowed. “Yep.”
Kelly threw her head back and laughed. “Well then, come in here and explain things. Only in my family is this not the weirdest thing that ever happened. Remember the vampire, Aaron?”
He made a sound in the back of his throat and took the baby from her. “How drunk are you right now?”
“Moderately. I could be a lot drunker. Where’s Oliver? He’s so much more fun than you.”
I stared at her baby. He looked an awful lot like Aaron, even more so than Kelly did. The same black hair, the same high cheekbones.
I found my voice, staring at the baby. “What’s your name?”
“He’s five months old. They don’t talk yet.” Kelly walked inside, grabbed a beer from the table, and took a long swig. “And his name is Robert. After his father. That asshole. I shouldn’t have named him after him. Took off while I was still in the hospital.”
“Ouch. What a dirtbag.” The words slipped from my lips before I could stop them.
“Yeah, well. It’s my own fault. Never fuck a man who lies.”
I nodded my head. Good advice actually. The baby was staring at me, his dark eyes way too serious for a baby his age.
“Can I hold him?” I asked, surprising the shit out of myself.
Kelly handed him right off, and I was left staring down at the baby who regarded me with Yoda-like wiseness. Never in my whole life had I come across a baby more world-weary than this one.
“Hi… you,” I said and cleared my throat. For some reason, I just couldn’t call this baby ‘Robert.’ Robert was a grown man, and a liar, apparently. It didn’t seem fair that this poor guy had to carry around the weight of that name. “Hi, Robby.”
At that, he opened