Casablanca Sucked Anyway [Kait]

Chloe drank some of her beer. She remembered a time when she would have cared that drinking this was against the law.

The name ‘Cecilia’ didn’t ring any bells.

“I don’t think my dad hires other demons, actually,” Chloe said. “He does grant wishes and shapeshift though. So you still could have met my dad, disguised as a woman. To be fair his man form is a disguise too, so…” She took another sip of her drink, then stopped, panicked, nearly choking on her beer. There was only one reason Loch could have known about the wish-granting her dad could do.

“…You didn’t get him to grant a wish for you, did you?” There was a trembling quality to her voice that Lochlann would never have heard before.

“Why are you sorry, Loch?” she was sounding even more worried now. “What do you think you did?” She wasn’t connecting the dots. She couldn’t get her mind away from the possibility that Loch had given his soul away – a fate worse than death, as far as she was concerned. “I mean, if you just slept with him, I don’t care about that. He has weird sex with a lot of people. It’s not like he’s married to my mom or anything. That’s his business, you know? I mean it’s kinda weird that he’s screwing kids my age but…”

Chloe realized that she was rambling. She took a long sip of beer, then slammed it back down on the table and sighed. Loch had just finished saying that he’d never seen her stressed out, too. That may have been true before today.

“Okay.” She sounded calmer, now. No reason to get stressed out before she even knew what had happened. It might not even be a big deal. She didn't know. “What do you remember?”

“I…”

Chloe didn’t know what to say.

This was the moment she had been secretly expecting, but had hoped would never come. She told herself that if Lochlann wasn’t able to keep himself together, she would need to kill him. If he was going to keep killing people, if she couldn’t stop him from killing people, it would be for the greater good if she took him out.

“Lochlann, I…”

Her guilt was a large worm that slithered in her gut, eating her from the inside. This was her fault. Lochlann was her fault. She could have done something better – she didn’t know what she could have done better, but it must have been something. But she didn’t do it, and Lochlann had killed someone.

She had already killed Lochlann before. It had happened in her mind, in her daydreams and her nightmares. She had slit his throat. She had strangled him. She had smothered him. She had beaten him to death, too. Sometimes he was a good fighter, or he was armed, and it would take everything she had to take him down. Sometimes he didn’t fight back at all, and when the deed was nearly done she would be kneeling over him, watching him.

And they would be in school. It was always in school, in a second floor classroom. And he was bleeding too much, and she could see him looking up at her. He wanted to say something – he wanted to tell her, I don’t want to die, but there was too much of his blood in his lungs, too much of his blood oozing out onto the floor, and all she could do was watch his life sink through her fingers like blood through a soaked paper towel on a gunshot wound.

The windows were exploding now, shattering as bullets flew through, as other students – as people she knew were screaming, and they were surely making their way into the school by now, and everyone was going to die in this stupid boarding school.

And she wanted to go back in time, and she wanted to tell Trevor that it was a stupid idea, and that if she left that prison of a school up in the mountains it would only mean trouble for everyone, and she didn’t really want to see the outside world again that badly, really, the town probably wasn’t that cool anyway, we don’t have to go please don’t go it isn’t worth it don’t go please don’t go please—

Chloe wasn’t saying anything. She was just sitting there, staring at the wall behind Lochlann. She was staring past the wall, past Lochlann, past any hands that may be waving in front of her face at the time. She wasn’t even in Lochlann’s apartment anymore. She was just sitting there.

Chloe felt Lochlann’s hands on her shoulders. She shook as though waking up from a dream: a single full-body tremble, then stillness.

Lochlann was behind her now, rubbing her shoulders. There was a glass of whiskey in front of her. When did that all happen? Why was he apologizing to her?

“I’m sorry, Loch, I… I think I just sort of… blacked out for a minute there.” She chuckled. “That happens sometimes.” She thought it had stopped happening months ago. She needed to focus on Lochlann. This was important.

She leaned back and looked up at him, seeing his face upside-down with his hands on her shoulders. Her horns rested against his bare abdomen. She could feel the warmth radiating off of him. Getting up to rub her shoulders like that was a sweet gesture. For all his flaws, Lochlann could be so sweet, sometimes.

Her voice softened. “We were talking about how you went to Gomorrah and met my dad. What do you think you did to me, again?”

”Have you been sleeping okay?”

“Well enough,” she said. Honestly, she still had bad nightmares from her visit to hell, and she hadn’t been sleeping nearly enough. But she didn’t want to make this about herself. She kept the conversation focused on what Lochlann had done. Even now, she didn’t mind him having his hands on her; they had done a lot more than this in their earlier sessions.

He pulled away, and she turned in her chair to face him.

"Chloe, I don't know how to tell you this, but I think I ate your dad."

Several seconds passed by in silence. Chloe stared at him, processing what he said.

“Well… that’s not so bad, I guess…” she shrugged. “Eating his body would probably just make him mad. Nothing permanent.” She started laughing, relieved. “Hey, he might even like being eaten for all I know. I read on the internet once that's a fetish some people have.”

When she'd finished her giggle, she turned back around and took another sip of her beer. "I think I'll call him later and make sure everything's okay."