Corinne

 

I don't like the term 'emotional rollercoaster.’ I think it gets over-used and so loses any meaning it might once have had. People have a bit of a bad day at work and, suddenly, it's an emotional rollercoaster; someone spills their coffee, but finds a penny while mopping it up, and it's an emotional rollercoaster. Give me a break. But I think when you've gone from being hunted by the Mafia, to hoping that you've found a way to be with the love of your life, to learning that that love may be on his way to prison, to that previous hope being rekindled, all within the space of a day, then I think it's fair to break out the phrase 'emotional rollercoaster.’ Certainly, by the end of it, I felt as if I'd been on some sort of nausea-inducing fairground ride, but at least it had all worked out.

 

Porter Crucero very kindly invited us to stay the night.

 

"I've got a spare room, and we can order in take-out."

 

Asa and I gratefully accepted. It was nice to be reminded that there were people who were on our side, and I actually took some comfort from the fact that he hadn't initially been on our side, until he learned how much we cared for each other. If that was enough to change Porter's mind, might it be enough to change my father's as well? The problem was that I had spent years giving my father a bad opinion of me, making him think that I hung around (and, in fact, screwed around) with bad guys, as a matter of course. So why would he now believe that Asa was any different? Of course, if I had just let him know the real me, then none of this would have been an issue. He probably would have respected my choice because he knew I was trustworthy and made good decisions. But there was no sense in wishing that things were different. I had to deal with the situation as it was and the mess that I had made of it.

 

"Have you called your dad?" Porter asked, as we ate our evening meal together.

 

"No," I admitted. "I wouldn't know what to tell him, and I don't want to get into an argument. I did text him to let him know I'm all right."

 

"But, of course, anyone could be sending a text from your phone," Porter said, a little cagily. He didn't want to get into an argument either, but my dad was his mentor.

 

"If I call, then he'll want to know where I am," I pointed out. "Do you want me to tell him?"

 

"I guess not," Porter sighed. He had agreed to help us, and I was sure he would stick to it, but he was still a little conflicted, feeling as if he was going behind the back of the man he looked up to so much. He knew that Dad would be out of his mind with worry about me, and it was, theoretically, in Porter's power to alleviate that concern. But to do so would be to betray Asa and me. It was a tough spot for him, and I didn't want to underestimate what Porter was doing for us.

 

"You could give him a quick call," suggested Asa, joining Team Dugas. "Just so he could hear your voice. Like Porter said, anyone could be sending a text. He probably thinks it's from me. It would set his mind at rest, and he might hate me slightly less. Not much, but slightly."

 

"How about everybody stops telling me how to deal with my own father?" I suggested in a pointed tone, and the two men got back to eating.

 

It wasn't that I didn't recognize the good sense in what they were saying, particularly Asa's point about making my dad feel slightly less burning hatred towards the man I hoped to spend the rest of my life with. But neither of them had had to grow up with Brian Dugas. Neither of them grew up with the judgment and constant disapproval. They didn't know what it was like to have been in the wrong every day of their adult life. Nothing I did ever pleased my dad, and there was nothing I could say in a short phone call that was going to please him now. I had run off with his arch nemesis. It was an ultimate betrayal. I didn't want to hear the disappointment and the hurt in his voice. Maybe I was being selfish, but it was my decision.

 

"We go to the station tomorrow morning," said Porter, changing the subject. "I don't see any other way forward. We need to get the proper paperwork done to ensure you have proper informant status, otherwise some people may still object. I don't think this is going to be an easy sell, so you need to think about what information you can give me. I need something that's going to nail these guys, with no way out. Anything less than that, and I'm going to struggle to get this done."

 

Asa nodded. He said nothing, and I didn't either, but we both knew that tomorrow could well be another rollercoaster of a day.

 

# # #

 

The spare room was up under the eaves of Porter Crucero's little house. It was not used often and had become a store room for stuff that was in the way elsewhere, the kind of stuff that everyone keeps from their childhood, but will probably never look at again. Still, I found myself rather happy there. It was nice to be in a proper room, rather than a motel. It felt homey. And, while I was trying to keep my eagerness for domestic bliss as subtle as possible around Asa, I couldn't help wondering what it might be like when, and if, Asa and I made a home of our own. And yet, it seemed Asa's own thoughts might not be a million miles away from mine.

 

"This is cozy," he mused, looking around. "I never really had a home you could call a home. When I was a kid, home was never a home. Then, in War Cry, we moved around so much that home was wherever you wound up, or wherever your friends were. Come to think of it, the longest I've spent consistently in one bed might be when I did six months in jail. I think that's the only time I've ever had a chance to personalize a place and make it mine."

 

I grinned. "I'm guessing there were vases of flowers and some lacey throw pillows?"

 

"Mostly it was girlie pictures on the walls and a shiv under my mattress, just in case, but still."

 

"It was your own."

 

"Exactly." He looked a little embarrassed. "It would be nice to do that properly. To own a space. Sorry."

 

I frowned. "What are you apologizing for?"

 

"It's hardly the bad boy that you signed up for, is it? Dreaming of interior design."

 

Suddenly, I felt a bit embarrassed myself. "I didn't go for you just because you were an outlaw biker."

 

"Yes, you did," Asa cut in. "That's what you want in your life. A little excitement, a thrill, or something forbidden."

 

I wanted to deny it, of course, but just hearing him say the word 'forbidden' made my knees weaken. He wasn't one hundred percent wrong. "It worked out though. No matter how it started—look what happened."

 

"Yeah, but for how long?" Asa stood, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the low ceiling. "Let's say this all goes to plan."

 

"It will."

 

"Well, okay. What then? We settle down in a place together in the city? You paint, and I get a job? Is that what you're thinking?"

 

"Maybe."

 

Asa half-smiled. "And then, on the streets of the big city, you meet a mugger, or a drug dealer, or someone else who awakens that thrill-seeker inside you, and I never see you again."

 

"That won't happen!"

 

"You don't know that." Asa shrugged. "You're encouraging me to stop being the thing that you found attractive in the first place."

 

"That was bad Corinne,'" I argued. "You told me that she's not real anyway."

 

"There may be no such thing as bad Corinne," agreed Asa. "But good Corinne has a thing for bad Asa, and bad boys in general. Are you going to tell me that's not the case?"

 

I pouted a bit and kicked at the carpet. "I don't know."

 

"That's because you won't look inside yourself. You don't want to examine yourself too closely because you're afraid of what you might find."

 

"Well, listen who's talking!" I wasn't just going accept that level of hypocrisy. "How many years have you been on the wrong side of the law? Are you going to tell me that was because you were happier, or because you weren't willing to take a good look at yourself?"

 

"My childhood ..." Asa began, but I interrupted.

 

"Ended like fifteen years ago. You've got to stop using that as an excuse."

 

Now it was Asa's turn to hit back at me. "I use my childhood as an excuse? At least my parents deserve to be blamed. You blame a man who loved you, looked after you, and gave you everything you wanted."

 

"I'm so sorry my childhood wasn't as bad as yours, but everyone has an equal right to be screwed up by their parents, even if those parents were good. And I still had a bad mom. You can't take that away from me."

 

"You don't want to end up like her," said Asa firmly, saying something that my dad must have said to me a hundred times.

 

"I should end up like my dad?"

 

"Not necessarily. You should end up like Corinne. And the only way to do that is to stop running, and look at yourself. You run away from your dad, toward this memory of your mom, toward danger, toward bad influences, like me. You're always running, when you should be settling down. Stop flying by the seat of your pants. The right thing won't just bump into you. You've got to look for it."

 

"Didn't you just bump into me?"

 

Asa paused. "Okay, maybe that was a bad example. But I was just a lucky chance. Generally speaking, the good things in life don't just fall into your lap. You've got to make them happen."

 

I gave him a hard look. "I take it this is 'do as I say and not as I do' type of advice?"

 

"I learned the hard way," Asa said. "I don't want you to have to."

 

I shook my head. "Are you reading this stuff from The Big Book of Brian Dugas Quotes?"

 

"Is that your way of telling me that I sound like your dad?"

 

He really did. Except that I was listening to him. "I'm just saying that you're being pretty damn judgmental about the decisions I've made in my life, given that you're turning yourself into the police tomorrow, and there's still a fifty percent chance of you going to jail for crimes you did commit. How about understanding rather than judging?"

 

Asa sat back down on the bed. "That's a totally fair comment."

 

I went and sat beside him. "I bet there were times when you enjoyed being a part of War Cry. Times when it was a thrill, like nothing else you've ever felt, and when it was good to be part of something. Hell, I'll bet there were times when it felt good to be bad."

 

Asa couldn't suppress a smile that spread across his face. "Okay, while I'm not saying it's a good thing, or endorsing criminality as a lifestyle—hell, yeah! There were times when I loved it."

 

"But you're happy to step away from it?"

 

He turned to look at me tenderly. "Of course. The good times with War Cry were fleeting, a surface thrill. Deep down, there was always an emptiness. Even when you're surrounded by people, you can still be pretty lonely. I could have quit years ago, but I guess I didn't know what I would have left if I did. Now I've found something better."

 

"If you can accept all that about yourself, why can't you accept it in me?" I asked, fervently. "I know I have ... let's call it a 'thing' for bad boys. I get a thrill when I'm doing something that I know I shouldn't be. But, like you said, it's fleeting. And it's nothing compared to the thrill I get when I'm with you. You, Asa. The real you. Not just some bad boy with a cool bike and an attitude, but a man who I ..." I shied away from finishing the sentence. I wasn't cagey about how I felt for Asa. I knew what I felt, but I wasn't sure yet how he felt, and I knew that if I said the word, then he would feel pressured to say it back, and that wasn't how I wanted it to happen.

 

He kissed me, which was almost as good.

 

"I'm glad we talked about this."

 

I nodded. "Me too."

 

Why could I speak to him and not to my father? I might have had a very similar conversation with Dad, but, with him, it always degenerated into shouting, accusations, and door-slamming pretty early on, so we never reached the important bit. I found myself really hoping that I would get to say these things to him one day soon. With Dad and me, it was always a war, both of us fighting to win, and, as a result, we both walked away losers. We needed to break that cycle.

 

"You miss him, don't you?" Asa could damn near read my mind sometimes.

 

"Yeah," I said simply. "He's the only parent I have. And he's been a great one, I guess. A bit judgy. But if that's the worst you can say, then ... It's always so hard between dad and me. I guess because we're such different people."

 

"Perhaps because you're such similar people."

 

I almost choked on my own shock. "Are you insane? We're nothing alike. Dad is all about the law. I'm ..."

 

"Whose idea was it that I hand myself into the police?" Asa asked mildly.

 

"Hey!" I wasn't standing for this. "In my bad girl days there were plenty of times I broke the law."

 

"Were there, though?" asked Asa. "I'm guessing there were plenty of times you skirted around the edges of the law, but never actually broke it."

 

"Me and my friends used to get drunk, go out, and raise hell!" I said, hotly.

 

"Drinking, huh?" said Asa. "I'm guessing this was after you turned twenty-one?"

 

"Shut up." Of course it was after I turned twenty-one.

 

"What sort of hell were you raising specifically?"

 

"It was ... It was ..." I racked my brains for a believable lie, but, in the end, just gave up. "I'm the worst bad girl in the world."

 

"I prefer the good one anyway."

 

I looked up at Asa. "Am I really like my dad?"

 

"Well, you don't look like him."

 

"A relief for both of us."

 

Asa put an arm around me. "You know what your dad and you really have in common? You're both struggling to come to terms with who Corinne Dugas is."

 

"Does War Cry also do Psych 101?" I asked sarcastically.

 

"Every Tuesday," Asa replied. "Your dad hasn't had a handle on you for years. But I'm guessing the time he lost that sense of who you were, was around about the time you started pretending to be someone else. You lost a sense of yourself and reached out for your mother as someone to be. Which, maybe, wasn't the best choice. It confused him and probably scared him, I think it's fair to say that he didn't deal with the changes you were going through in the best way, but he keeps trying."

 

"You should really take that psych class. You're a natural."

 

"Well, while I'm on a roll, here's another insight. I think you lost a sense of yourself, because you lost a sense of your dad. Maybe he was busy with work, or maybe he favored Risa a bit. I don't know. But you got that thing in your mind that told you that if you couldn’t be him, then you had to be your mom."

 

"You're saying Dad and I could both do a better job of trying to understand each other?"

 

Asa nodded, and I was again struck by how easy it was to talk to him. What had started off as lust and a desire for the forbidden, had turned into something honest, loving, and with surprising depth. That Asa would be a good bedmate, someone exciting to lose my virginity to, had never been in doubt. But to find that he understood me and wanted to help me—that was surprising, wonderful, and special. I supposed, by the law of averages, there must have been other men out there who could make my toes curl in bed the way Asa did, but I had a hunch there were none who would understand me as he did, and none who would care so much. I almost felt like crying at how lucky I was.

 

"I'm going to give my dad a call. Just to let him know I'm okay. And that I'm happy."